228 HEAVEN and HELL §399
399 We may gather the magnitude of heaven’s pleasure simply from the
fact that for everyone there it is delightful to share their pleasure and bliss
with someone else; and since everyone in the heavens is like this, we can
see how immense heaven’s pleasure is. For as I explained above (§ 268 ),
there is in heaven a sharing by everyone with each individual, and by
each individual with everyone.
This kind of sharing fl ows from the two loves of heaven, which as
noted are love for the Lord and love for our neighbor. These loves by
nature want to share their pleasures. The reason love for the Lord is like
this is that because the Lord’s love is a love of sharing everything it has
with everyone, it intends the happiness of everyone. Much the same love
exists in individuals who love him, because the Lord is in them. So there
is a mutual sharing of angels’ pleasures with each other. We shall see later
that love for our neighbor is like this as well. We may gather from all this
that these loves by nature want to share their pleasures.
It is different for love for oneself and love for the world. Love for
oneself takes away and carries off all the pleasure of others and diverts
them to itself because it has only its own welfare in mind. Love of the
world wants the possessions of the neighbor to be its own. So these loves
by nature want to destroy pleasures for other people. If they have any
tendency to share, it is for their own interests and not for others; so in
relation to others (except insofar as they can appropriate and embody the
pleasures of those others) they do not tend to share but to destroy.
I have very often been shown by vivid experience that this is what
love for oneself and love for the world are like when they are in control.
Whenever spirits who were engrossed in these loves when they lived as
people in the world have come up to me, my own pleasure has waned
and vanished. I have also been told that if people like these so much as
move toward any heavenly community, the pleasure of the members of
that community decreases in direct proportion to their presence.
Remarkably, too, the evil people are then delighted. I could see from this
what the state of the human spirit in the body is like, for it is much the
same as it is after separation from the body. Specifi cally, they crave and
covet the pleasures or assets of others, and to the extent that they acquire
them they themselves are pleased. We can see from this that love for one-
self and love for the world are destructive of heavenly joy and are there-
fore diametrically opposed to heavenly loves, whose nature is to share.400 However, we do need to realize that if people are engrossed in love
for themselves and love for the world, the pleasure they are feeling when
they move toward some heavenly community is the pleasure of their own