man is only a recipient of life.  From this cause it is that man, by reason of his hereditary evil, reacts against God.  But so far as man believes that all his life is from God, and that all good of life is from the action of God, and all evil of life from the reaction of man, so far his reaction comes to be from [God’s] action, and man acts with God as if from himself.  The equilibrium of all things is from action and simultaneous reaction, and in equilibrium everything must be.  These things have been said lest man should believe that he himself ascends toward God from himself, and not from the Lord.

69.  The Divine, apart from space, fills all spaces of the universe.

There are two things proper to nature — space and time.  From these man in the natural world forms the ideas of his thought, and thereby his understanding.  If he remains in these ideas, and does not raise his mind above them, he is in no wise able to perceive things spiritual and Divine, for these he involves in ideas drawn from space and time; and so far as that is done the light [lumen] of his understanding becomes merely natural.  To think from this lumen in reasoning about spiritual and Divine things, is like thinking from the thick darkness of night about those things that appear only in the light of day.  From this comes naturalism.  But he who knows how to raise his mind above ideas of thought drawn from space and time, passes from thick darkness into light, and has discernment in things spiritual and Divine, and finally sees the things which are in and from what is spiritual and Divine; and then from that light he dispels the thick darkness of the natural lumen, and banishes its fallacies from the middle to the sides.  Every man who has understanding is able to transcend in thought these properties of nature, and actually does so; and he then affirms and sees that the Divine, because omnipresent, is not in space.  He is also able to affirm and to see the things that have been adduced above.  But if he denies the Divine Omnipresence, and ascribes all things to nature, then he has no wish to be elevated, though he can be.

70.  All who die and become angels put off the two above- mentioned properties of nature, namely, space and time; for they then enter into spiritual light, in which objects of thought are truths, and objects of sight are like those in the natural world, but are correspondent to their thoughts.  The objects of their thought which, as just said, are truths, derive nothing at all from space and time; and though the objects of their sight appear as if in space and in time, still the angels do not think from space and time.  The reason is, that spaces and times there are not fixed, as in the natural world, but are changeable according to the states of their life.  In the ideas of their thought, therefore, instead of space and time there are states of life, instead