771. In the chapter on the Sacred Scripture I showed that the literal sense of the Word is written by appearances and correspondences. Each of its details therefore contains a spiritual sense in which truth is illuminated by its own light, and the literal sense is in shadow. So to prevent the people of the new church, like those of the old church, going astray in the shadows obscuring the literal sense of the Word, especially as regards heaven and hell, how they will live after death, and on the present occasion about the Lord's coming, the Lord has been pleased to open the sight of my spirit, thus admitting me to the spiritual world. I have been allowed not only to talk with spirits and angels, with relations and friends, even with kings and princes, who have met their end in the natural world, but also to see the astonishing sights of heaven, and the pitiful sights of hell. So I have seen how people do not pass their time in some pu deep in the earth, nor flit around blind and dumb in the air or in empty space, but live as human beings in a substantial body, in a much more perfect state, if they come among the blessed, than they experienced previously when living in material bodies.
[2] So to prevent people from plunging yet deeper into erroneous ideas about the destruction of the sky we see and the earth we live on, and consequently about the spiritual world, as the result of ignorance, which leads to worshipping nature and this automatically to atheism - something which at the present time has begun to take root in the inner rational minds of the learned - to prevent then atheism from spreading more widely, like necrosis in the flesh, so as to affect as well the outer mind which controls speech, I have been commanded by the Lord to make known various things which I have seen and heard. These include heaven and hell, the Last Judgment, and the explanation of Revelation, which deals with the Lord's coming, the former heaven and the new heaven, and the holy Jerusalem. If my books on these subjects are read and understood, anyone can see what is meant there by the Lord's coming, a new heaven and the New Jerusalem.
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