§102 we correspond to heaven 55
were not beautiful, the inner form was graceful, radiant, and angelic.
After death, our spirit looks the way it actually did within the body while
we were living in it in this world.
Correspondence, though, extends to much more than human beings. 100
There is a correspondence of the heavens with each other. The second or
intermediate heaven is responsive to the third or central one, the fi rst or
outmost heaven is responsive to the second or intermediate one, and this
is responsive to the physical forms in us, the forms that are referred to as
our members, organs, and viscera. So it is our bodily nature in which
heaven fi nally comes to rest, on which it stands like a foundation. But
this mystery will be explored further elsewhere.
It is absolutely necessary to realize, though, that all correspondence 101
with heaven is correspondence with the Lord’s divine human, because
heaven is from him and because he is heaven, as has been explained in
the preceding chapters. For unless the divine human fl owed into every
bit of heaven and, in accord with correspondences, into every bit of our
world, there would be no angels and none of us.
Again then, we can see from this why the Lord became an individual
on earth and clothed his divine nature with a human nature from fi rst to
last. This happened because the divine human on which heaven
depended before the Coming of the Lord was no longer adequate to sus-
tain everything, since we, the foundation of heaven, had undermined
and destroyed the design.
In the passages referred to at the close of the preceding chapter you
may see what the divine human before the Coming of the Lord was and
what its nature was, as well as the quality of the state of heaven then.
Angels are stunned when they hear that there are people who credit 102
everything to nature and nothing to the Divine, as well as people who
believe that their bodies, in which so many wonders of heaven are gath-
ered, are fashioned out of nature, and even that this is the source of our
rational capacity. On the contrary, if people would just raise their minds
a little, they could see that things like this come from the Divine and not
from nature, and that nature was created simply to clothe the spiritual
and responsively represent it on the lowest level of the design. They com-
pare such people to owls, which see in darkness, but see nothing in the
light.