The good spirits are in communication
with heaven, and they carry what is good and true; the evil
spirits are in communication with hell, and they carry what is
evil and false. Between these opposed and reacting agencies man is
in an equilibrium whose essence is freedom. Deciding for himself,
if he turns with embracing welcome to the good spirits, he is
thereby placed and lives in conjunction with heaven; but if he
turns, on the contrary, with predominant love to the bad spirits,
he is placed in conjunction with hell and draws his life thence.
From heaven, therefore, through the good spirits, all the elements
of saving goodness flow sweetly down and are appropriated by the
freedom of the good man; while from hell, through the bad spirits,
all the elements of damning evil flow foully up and are
appropriated by the freedom of the bad man.

The other kind of influx is called immediate. This is when the
Lord himself, the pure substance of truth and good, flows into
every organ and faculty of man. This influx is perpetual, but is
received as truth and good only by the true and good. It is
rejected, suffocated, or perverted by those who are in love with
falsities and evils. So the light of the sun produces colors
varying with the substances it falls on, and water takes forms
corresponding to the vessels it is poured into.

The whole invisible world heaven, hell, and the middle state is
peopled solely from the different families of the human race
occupying the numerous material globes of the universe. The good,
on leaving the fleshly body, are angels, the bad, demons. There is
no angel nor demon who was created such at first. Satan is not a
personality, but is a figurative term standing for the whole
complex of hell. In the invisible world, time and space in one
sense cease to be; in another sense they remain unchanged. They
virtually cease because all our present measures of them are
annihilated;11 they virtually remain because exact correspondences
to them are left. To spirits, time is no longer measured by the
revolution of planets, but by the succession of inward states;
space is measured not by way marks and the traversing of
distances, but by inward similitudes and dissimilitudes. Those who
are unlike are sundered by gulfs of difference. Those who are
alike are together in their interiors. Thought and love,
forgetfulness and hate, are not hampered by temporal and spatial
boundaries. Spiritual forces and beings spurn