About the Lord's Prayer

When the Lord's prayer is being said, which embraces all heavenly and spiritual things within it, so much can be poured into every least detail that heaven itself is not great enough to contain it all, and this of course depending on the capacity and use of each individual. As one penetrates more and more inwardly, the more plentiful and abundant is the content, and things that are understood in the heavens, are not grasped in the regions below, but are like secrets to them, some only comprehensible by a kind of mental faith, and some ineffable. The more that heavenly mental images, which all come from the Lord, descend lower, or into people of a lower character, the more closed up they appear, so that finally it is as if there were something hard, in which there is little or nothing else but the literal meaning or mental images of the words. As a result I was allowed to find out through the Lord's prayer what souls had been like in their bodily life in regard to religious doctrine, while they were allowed their meaning as it was prayed. 1748, 1 April. A mental image therefore grows, going from bodily elements upwards and inwards, and in fact to an incalculable extent at each level, thus in the inward regions by countless numbers multiplied together; and again in the very inward regions, then likewise in the innermost.