40 HEAVEN and HELL §74
f. Unless we are raised above the sensory faculties of the outer person, we have little wisdom:
5089. A wise person thinks on a higher level than that of these sensory faculties: 5089 , 5094.
When we are raised above these sensory faculties, we are in a clearer light and ultimately in a
heavenly light: 6183 , 6313 , 6315 , 9407 , 9730 , 9922. Being raised above and freed from these sensory
faculties was a familiar experience for the ancients: 6313.
g. As to our inner levels, we are spirits: 1594. The spirit is the essential person, and it is from the
spirit that the body lives: 447 , 4622 , 6054.and not on the basis of a more inward light and the common idea native
to everyone, they cannot help constructing images like this, because the
sensory faculties of the external person grasp only matters that are within
the bounds of nature and not things that are higher. So they do not grasp
anything at all about the spiritual world.f From these eminent people as
leaders, false thoughts about angels spread to people who did not think
independently but relied on others; and people who let their thinking
rely primarily on others and then form their faith, and later look into
these matters with their minds, have a hard time giving these ideas up. As
a result, many of them cooperate in confi rming these false notions.
[ 3 ] Angels have also told me that people of simple faith and heart are
not caught up in this concept of angels, but have an image of them as
people in heaven. This is because they have not let erudition snuff out
the image implanted in them from heaven and because they do not grasp
anything unless it has some form. This is why the angels we see sculpted
and painted in churches are invariably represented as human. As for this
“image implanted in them from heaven,” angels tell me that it is some-
thing divine that fl ows into people who are intent on goodness of faith
and life.75 On the grounds of all my experience, which has lasted for several
years now, I can say with full confi dence that in their form, angels are
completely human. They have faces, eyes, ears, chests, arms, hands, and
feet. They see each other, hear each other, and talk to each other. In
short, they lack nothing that belongs to humans except that they are not
clothed with a material body. I have seen them in their own light, which
is far, far greater than noonday on our earth, and in that light I have seen
all the details of their faces more crisply and clearly than I have seen the
faces of people here in the world.
I have also been allowed to see an angel of the central heaven. His face
was more glorious, more radiant, than that of angels of the lower heavens.
I looked at him very closely, and he had a human form in full perfection.76 It does need to be realized, though, that we cannot see angels with
our bodily eyes, only with the eyes of our spirit,g because they are in the