to the lusts of evil and falsity.

36. Wisdom that comes to perception is perception of truth from being
affected by it, especially perception of spiritual truth. For there is
civil, moral, and spiritual truth. Those who have some perception of
spiritual truth from affection by it also have perceptions of moral and
civil truth, for the affection of spiritual truth is the soul of those
perceptions. I have spoken with angels at times about wisdom who said
that wisdom is conjunction with the Lord because He is wisdom itself, and
that the man who rejects hell comes into this conjunction and comes into
it so far as he rejects hell. They said that they picture wisdom to
themselves as a magnificent and highly ornate palace into which one
mounts by twelve steps. No one arrives at even the first step, they said,
except from the Lord by conjunction with Him; and according to the
measure of conjunction one ascends; also as one ascends, one perceives
that no man is wise from himself but from the Lord. Furthermore, they
said that the things in which one is wise are to those in which one is
not wise like a few drops of water to a large lake. By the twelve steps
into the palace of wisdom are meant goods united to truths and truths
united to goods.

37. (iv) _The more closely one is conjoined to the Lord the happier one
becomes._ The like can be said of degrees of happiness as was said (nn.
32 and 34) of degrees of life and of wisdom according to conjunction with
the Lord. Happiness, that is, blessedness and joy, also are heightened as
the higher degrees of the mind, called spiritual and celestial, are
opened with man. After his life in the world these degrees grow to
eternity.

38. No one who is in the pleasures of the lusts of evil can know anything
of the joys of the affections of good in which the angelic heaven is.
These pleasures and joys are opposites in internals and hence inwardly in
externals, though superficially they may differ little. Every love has
its enjoyments; the love of evil with those in lusts also has, such as
the love of committing adultery, of taking revenge, of defrauding, of
stealing, of acting cruelly, indeed, in the worst men, of blaspheming the
holy things of the church and of inveighing against God. The fountainhead
of those enjoyments is the love of ruling from self-love. They come of
lusts which obsess the interiors of the mind, from these flow into the
body, and excite uncleannesses there which titil