2288. That 'Abraham returned to his place' means that the Lord returned to the state which had been His before He perceived these matters is clear from the representation of 'Abraham' in this chapter as the Lord when the human state existed with Him, and from the meaning of 'place' as state, dealt with in Volume One, in 1273, 1378. Thus here 'returning to his place' in the internal sense means returning to the state which had been His previously. The fact that the Lord had two kinds of states when He lived in the world - the state of humiliation and the state of glorification - has been stated and shown already. His state of humiliation occurred when He was in the human, which He had derived by heredity from the mother, His state of glorification when He was in the Divine, which He possessed from Jehovah His Father. The former state, namely that of the human derived from the mother, the Lord cast off completely and He took on a Divine Human when He passed out of the world and returned to the Divine itself which had been His from eternity, John 17: 5, together with the Human that had been made Divine, from both of which the Holy proceeding exists that fills the whole heaven. Thus from the Divine itself and the Divine Human through the Holy that proceeds from these He governs the universe.