§126 light & warmth 69
i. The Lord is the common center toward which everything in heaven turns: 3633.
The reason people turn in this way is that in the other life we all look
toward what rules in our deeper natures—toward our own loves, then;
and these deeper natures form the faces of angels and spirits. Further, in
a spiritual world the cardinal points are not fi xed the way they are in a
natural world. Instead, they are determined by the way people face.
We ourselves, in spirit, are also turning in the same fashion—away
from the Lord if we are caught up in self-love and love of the world, and
toward him if we are in a love for him and for our neighbor. We are
unaware of this, though, because we are in a natural world where the car-
dinal points are determined by the sun’s rising and setting. Since it is
hard for people to grasp this, examples will be given below where we deal
with the cardinal points and with space and time in heaven.
Since the Lord is the sun of heaven, and since everything that comes 124
from him looks toward him, the Lord is the common center, the basis of
all direction and orientation.i So too everything beneath is in his presence
and under his control, everything in the heavens and everything on earth.
This enables us to see in clearer light the things that have been pre- 125
sented in the earlier chapters about the Lord, namely, that he is the God
of heaven (§§ 2 – 6 ), that his divine nature makes heaven (§§ 7 – 12 ), that
the divine nature of the Lord in heaven is love for him and thoughtful-
ness toward our neighbor (§§ 13 – 19 ), that there is a correspondence of
everything in our world with heaven, and through heaven with the Lord
(§§ 87 – 115 ), and that the sun of our world and its moon are correspon-
dent entities (§ 105 ).
Light and Warmth in Heaven
126
P
EOPLE who think solely on the basis of nature cannot grasp the fact
that there is light in the heavens; yet in the heavens there is so muchlight that it is vastly greater than noonday light on earth. I have seen it
often, even during our evenings and nights. At fi rst I was amazed when I
heard angels saying that our world’s light was nothing but shadow in