and to another level higher still. Then again the mind can be brought
down to a lower level and to another level lower still. As our minds are
raised to the higher levels, we come into wisdom, because we come into
the light of heaven. The mind cannot be raised except by God. The more
our minds are raised to heaven, the more human we are. The more our
minds are brought down to the lower levels, the more we come into the
faint, deceptive light of hell. There we are not human, we are animals.
(This is why people stand upright on their feet and look with their faces
toward the sky, and are even capable of looking directly overhead. Ani-
mals, however, stand on their feet with their bodies parallel to the
ground, looking down to the ground with their whole head, and only
with difficulty can they raise their heads toward the sky.)
[ 2 ] If we lift our minds to God and acknowledge that all true wisdom
comes from him, and we also follow the divine design in the way we live,
we are like someone standing at the top of a tall building, who looks out
on a crowded city below and watches what is happening in the streets. If,
however, we are utterly convinced that all true wisdom comes from our-
selves, from our own earthly light, we are like someone at the bottom of
that same tall building who lurks in a room below ground looking at the
same city through little holes in the wall, able to see the wall of only one
of the houses in the city and to examine how its bricks are mortared.
When God is the source we draw on for wisdom, we are like a bird
flying high, looking around at everything in the gardens, forests, and vil-
lages, and flying toward whatever we need. When we ourselves are the
source we draw on for things related to wisdom without believing that
those things actually come from God, we are like a hornet that flies near
the ground and, on seeing a dunghill, lands there and enjoys the stench.
As long as we are living in the world, we all walk midway between
heaven and hell. Therefore we are in an equilibrium. We can freely
choose to look either upward to God or downward to hell. If we look
upward to God, we recognize that all wisdom is from God and that in
our spirits we are actually with angels in heaven. If we look downward (as
we inevitably do if we have false thinking from an evil heart), in our spir-
its we are actually with devils in hell.70 The more we follow the divine design in the way we live, the more
fully we are in God because of God’s omnipresence. Because God is
omnipresent he is intrinsically present, so to speak, everywhere in his
divine design, in the sense that he is the divine design, as we showed
above [§§ 52 – 53 ]. Now, because we have been created as forms of the