Divine Love and Divine Wisdom

...into human beings and affect them in proportion to how they become recipients. They become recipients according to their love for the Lord and their love for their neighbor. This sun, or divine love, cannot create anyone directly from itself through its heat and light; if it did, that person would be love in its very essence—they would be the Lord Himself. Instead, it creates beings from substances and materials formed to receive its heat and light. This is similar to how the sun of our world cannot produce growth in the earth directly with its heat and light; it produces growth from earthly materials where its heat and light can be present to provide life. The fact that the Lord’s divine love appears as a sun in the spiritual world, and that spiritual heat and light proceed from it (giving angels their love and wisdom), can be seen in the work On Heaven and Hell, sections 116 to 140.

6. Since a human being is not life itself but only a recipient of life, it follows that a father's role in conception is not the conception of life itself. Instead, it is the conception of the first and purest form capable of receiving life. This serves as a foundation original: "stamen"; Latin for a thread or the warp of a fabric, here referring to a fundamental starting point to which substances and materials are gradually added in the womb. These are organized into forms designed to receive life in their proper order and degree.

7. That the Divine is not in space. Although the Divine, or God, is omnipresent—present with every person in the world, every angel in heaven, and every spirit under heaven—this cannot be understood by a purely natural way of thinking. It can, however, be understood by spiritual thought. The reason it cannot be understood by a natural idea is that space is always part of such an idea. Natural thought is formed by things in the material world; in everything we see with our eyes, space is present. Everything in that world, whether large or small, relates to space. Anything with length, breadth, and height has that same connection; in short, space is linked to every measurement, shape, and form in the world of matter. This is why it is said that a purely natural idea cannot grasp that the Divine is not in space, even when we say that the Divine is everywhere.

Nevertheless, a person can understand this through natural thought if they will only allow some spiritual light into their thinking. Therefore, we should first say something about spiritual ideas and the thinking that comes from them. A spiritual idea does not take anything from space; instead, it draws everything from "state." In this context, "state" refers to the internal quality or condition of a person's mind and heart (their "state of being") rather than a physical location. State is attributed to love, life, wisdom, affections, and the resulting joys—generally speaking, to everything good and true. A truly spiritual idea of these things has nothing in common with space; it is superior to it and sees ideas of space beneath it, just as heaven looks down upon the earth. However, because angels and spirits see with their eyes just as humans do...