§269 angels’ wisdom 139
c. The sensory level is the outmost level of our life, associated with and resident in our bodies:
5077 , 5767 , 9212 , 9216 , 9331 , 9730. We call people sense-oriented if they base all their judgments
and conclusions on their physical senses and believe nothing unless they see it with their eyes and
touch it with their hands: 5094 , 7693. People like this think on their outward level and not deeply
within themselves: 5089 , 5094 , 6564 , 7693. Their deeper levels are closed, so that they do not see
any element of spiritual truth there: 6564 , 6844 , 6845. In short, they are people who live in the
gross light of nature and therefore do not perceive anything that arises from heaven’s light: 6201 ,
6310 , 6564 , 6844 , 6845 , 6598 , 6612 , 6614 , 6622 , 6624. Inwardly, they are opposed to the principles
of heaven and the church: 6201 , 6316 , 6844 , 6845 , 6948 , 6949. Scholars who have made up their
minds against the truths of the church are like this: 6316. Sense-oriented people are especially wily
and malicious: 7693 , 10236. They reason acutely and skillfully, but on the basis of their physical
memory, which for them is the location of all intelligence: 195 , 196 , 5700 , 10236. However, this is
based on sensory illusions: 5084 , 6948 , 6949 , 7693.
and these physical sensory faculties are on the lowest level of all. This fact
enables us to see the nature of the wisdom of people who base their
thinking on sensory information—that is, the ones we call sense-oriented
people. Specifi cally, they have no access to wisdom, only to information.c
It is different, though, for people whose thoughts are raised above sen-
sory matters, and even more for people whose deeper levels have been
opened all the way into heaven’s light.
We may gather how great angels’ wisdom is from the fact that in 268
heaven there is a communication that involves everyone. The intelligence
and wisdom of one individual is shared with another: heaven is where
everyone shares everything of value. This is because the very nature of
heavenly love is to want what is one’s own to belong to another; so no
one in heaven regards his or her good as authentically good unless it is
someone else’s as well. This is also the basis of heaven’s happiness. Angels
are led into it by the Lord, whose divine love has this same quality.
I have also been granted knowledge, by experience, of this kind of
communication in the heavens. Once some simple people were taken up
into heaven, and after they had arrived, they arrived also at an angelic
wisdom. They understood things they could not grasp before and said
things they could not express in their former state.
Words are not adequate to describe the quality of angels’ wisdom—it 269
can be suggested only by some generalizations. Angels can express in a sin-
gle word what we cannot express in a thousand words. Further, in a single
angelic word there are countless things that are beyond the capacity of
human words to convey. In the details of angelic speech there are actually
treasures of wisdom in unbroken connection, utterly beyond the reach of
human knowledge. Then too, what angels cannot evoke with the words of
their language they fi ll in with the sound, which embodies their sensitivity