Arcana Coelestia (Elliott) n. 10159

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10159. THE SECOND PLANET OUT IN SPACE - continued

Seeing that I talked about God the invisible and the visible to them, I must mention here that almost everyone in the universe worships God under the visible form and indeed visualizes Him in a human form, and that their doing so is instinctive. What makes their doing so instinctive is the influence from heaven, for - and this is remarkable - angels who are raised all the way up into the sphere of the third heaven come to have a clear perception of this matter. The reason why they do so is that all in that heaven dwell in the love of the Lord and therefore so to speak in the Lord, and that the kind of perception enjoyed by the angels there is all a product of the order and flow of heaven. For heaven as a complete whole resembles a single human being, as may be seen from what has been shown at the ends of a number of chapters regarding heaven as the Grand Man, see the places referred to in 10030(end). The resemblance of heaven as a complete whole to a single human being has its origin in the Lord's Divine Human, for with His Human the Lord flows into heaven, creates it, and fashions it into a likeness of Himself. But this arcanum is scarcely intelligible to those who through their self-intelligence have rooted out that instinctive impulse.


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