Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named Carl McGuire:
What’s the difference between time in heaven and time on earth?
Here on earth, the events of our lives unfold against a background of regular cyclical events. For as long as humans have lived on this planet, our lives have been arranged by:
- years, determined by the earth’s orbit around the sun,
- months, originally determined by the moon’s orbit around the earth, and
- days, determined by the earth’s rotation on its axis.
These have been our basic units of time stretching back to the beginnings of human consciousness. All of them are based on regular cycles that never change and never cease—at least, not on our human time scales.
In the spiritual world, none of these cycles exist. There are no planets orbiting stars and rotating on their own axes. There are no moons orbiting planets. In the spiritual world the land is arranged in expanses one above the other, and the spiritual sun is above them all. None of them move in relation to each other. This means that in the spiritual world, there is no basis for time as we know it. There aren’t any regular, unchanging cycles to measure it by.
Does this mean that everything is just frozen in place? No. People still experience one thing after another, going through periods that feel like days, weeks, months, and years. But instead of these being determined by fixed external events, they flow longer or shorter based on the mental and emotional states of the angels and spirits and their communities.
In heaven, psychological time is the only time that exists. And one person’s time is not the same as another person’s. Even in the same community, it might be morning for one person, and evening for another.
Let’s take a closer look.
Time on earth
Today, most of our clocks are digital. They are convenient and easy to read. One glance and we know exactly what time it is. But reducing time to numbers on a screen obscures the original meaning and origin of time.
In earlier centuries, analog clocks, their hands moving around and around the circle in a regular pattern, kept us a little closer to the meaning of time: regular cycles unfolding one after another. Before that, there were sundials. These used the motion of the sun in the sky to trace out the daytime hours, keeping us even closer to the natural, cyclical basis of our days and times.
Before sundials, people simply looked up to see where the sun was in the sky. They followed the phases of the moon to measure out their months. The very word “month” comes from earlier words for “moon.” And people lived their lives within the seasonal changes brought about by the sun getting higher and lower in the sky as the earth traced out its years. Time was the cycles of day and night, the phases of the moon, and the seasons of the year. In the immortal words of the Bible:
As long as the earth endures, seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, day and night will never cease. (Genesis 8:22)
Yes, it’s a clock!
Now that we have digital watches and atomic clocks, we may think we’ve gotten away from measuring time by regular natural cycles. Not so! It’s just that due to our increasing need for more and more accurate timekeeping in this technological age, our clocks are based on the regular cycles of atoms and their electrons instead of on the much longer cycles of the orbits and rotations of Earth and Moon.
Yet even today, we still live by the age-old cycles of days, weeks (based on the four phases of the moon), months, and years.
As long as we are living in the physical universe, we can’t get away from measuring our lives against regular naturally occurring cyclical events.
Time in heaven
When we move on to the spiritual universe after the death of our physical body, it’s different.
There, the world around us does not have a separate existence of its own. Instead, everything around us is an expression of what’s within us, and of what’s within the minds and hearts of the community of people in which we live.
Freed from the constraints of external time, the human mind creates its own analog of time. In heaven, time does not just fly when you’re having fun. It disappears altogether! Instead, there is the experience of relationships, events, experiences, and so on, each one a seamless expression of our own thoughts and feelings, and of the thoughts and feelings of the people around us.
There is no lifeless mechanical clock butting in and interrupting the flow of our life. The morning comes when our mind brightens up and we’re ready to start a new day. The evening comes when we’ve tired ourselves out, our mind dims, and it’s time to rest. And though whole communities are generally in sync with one another, if a particular individual gets out of phase because he or she is on a roll and doesn’t want to stop, a day could last a week for that person, and nobody will be the wiser. There are no planetary rotations or orbits to measure against. Everything moves forward based on the flow of the human psyche.
Here is how Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) puts it at the beginning of his chapter on “Time in Heaven” in Heaven and Hell:
Even though things keep happening in sequence and progressing in heaven the way they do in the world, still angels have no notion or concept of time and space. The lack is so complete that they simply do not know what time and space are. . . .
The reason angels do not know what time is (even though everything for them moves along in sequence just the way it does in our world, so much so that there is no difference) is that in heaven there are no years or days, but only changes of state. Where there are years and days there are times, and where there are changes of state, there are states. (Heaven and Hell #162–163)
(If you’re curious and want to read the whole chapter, click on the link and start reading from there.)
What are “states”? They are states of mind. Being happy is a state of mind. Being sad is a state of mind. Learning something new creates its own state of mind. And so on.
Angels go through a never-ending series of states of mind, and of the experiences connected with them, just as we do. And so, as Swedenborg says, things keep happening in sequence for them just as they do for us on earth. It’s just that instead of unfolding against a background of fixed minutes, hours, days, and years, their “times” flow seamlessly from their own thoughts and feelings, and from the things they do as prompted by their thoughts and feelings.
These aren’t just dreamy hypothetical scenarios. Let’s say you wake up one morning and the first thing you want to do is go for a swim. As soon as you get into that swimming state of mind, a river or lake or pool, or whatever is your preferred swimmable body of water, will show up for you, and in you’ll dive! You’ll swim as long as you want to, whether long or short. Then at some point you’ll think, “Now I want to get back to that project I was working on.” And your workday will begin.
When you’ve used up your working energy for the day—which may just be the spiritual equivalent of the morning, or may be longer, depending on just how absorbed you are in you work—you’ll realize that you’ve accomplished what you’re going to accomplish for the day, and move on to an afternoon or evening of your favorite R&R activities.
All of this, of course, will be in the context of your marriage relationship, your friends, and your community. Your worst days in heaven will feel a lot like your best days on earth, without anything extraneous getting in the way.
This is how “time” unfolds for people in heaven. In heaven, “time” is simply the expression of our changing states of mind, and of the things we do in our home and community with our friends and loved ones as we express our loves, desires, thoughts, and feelings in action.
The arrow of spiritual time
Here in the physical world, there is an “arrow of time.” Time always keeps going forward. It never goes backward.
Yes, I know, some scientists, and science fiction authors, conceptualize or play with the idea of reversible time, traveling backwards in time, and so on. But all evidence points to time moving inexorably from the past to the future. If that weren’t the case, we would expect time travelers from the future to be visiting us right now and monkeying around with our lives. But that isn’t happening.
This makes it very clear to me, anyway, that in this earthly life, time always moves forward, never backward.
The same is true of the spiritual analog of time.
The technical reason this is true is that spiritual time has to do with the “understanding” dimension of life, whereas spiritual space has to do with the “love” dimension of life.
“Space,” in the spiritual world, is an expression of love and emotion. Here on earth, we feel close to the people we love, and distant from the people we don’t love, regardless of how close or far away they are in physical space. In the spiritual world we are quite literally close to the people we love, and far away from the people we don’t love, or who are very different from us in emotions and desires.
“Time,” in the spiritual world, is an expression of knowledge and understanding. As we progress through the experiences of our life, we learn new things and understand new things. These new things are added to the things we already knew and understood, so that we are constantly growing in knowledge and understanding to all eternity.
The “arrow of spiritual time” is an expression of the reality that we experience and learn things, and we don’t unexperience and unlearn them. In heaven, once we learn something it doesn’t go only into our memory, but also into our life. It becomes a part of us. Because we are always growing in knowledge, understanding, and wisdom, “time” is always moving forward for us there, just as it is always moving forward for us here. Since we don’t unlearn and ungrow, time never moves backwards.
Earthly vs. heavenly time
To sum it all up, here is the difference between time in heaven and time on earth:
- Time on earth is based on the regular, fixed cycles of natural processes such as planetary orbits and rotations and the energy cycles of electrons.
- Time in heaven is based on our thoughts and desires, the things they prompt us to do in our day-to-day lives, and the new experiences and learning we gain from them.
Heavenly “time” never stops because there is no end to the new experiences we can have and the new ways we can learn and grow from them.
Consider that everyone in heaven is traveling on a path that leads toward God. And since God is infinite and eternal, this means we will never run out of new things to experience, new things to learn, and new ways to grow in love and wisdom in the community of beloved people who surround us and share their lives with us just as we share ours with them.
This article is a response to a spiritual conundrum submitted by a reader.
For further reading:
- Seasons of Life
- Who Are the Angels and How Do They Live?
- The Afterlife: It’s Not as Different as you Think!
- Is Heaven Physical? Can Angels Play Tennis?
- Can we Keep our Friends in the Afterlife?
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
Hi Lee,
I remember reading how some people who have spiritual experiences like OBErs or NDErs experience the phenomena of voids or tunnels which can take the form of a white light, blackness, a kaleidoscope of colors/geometric shapes even nothingness which the experiencers report it being scary or enlightening since you only have your thoughts. There are plenty of mediums who say it’s this and that of course.
“Voids: On some occasions other travellers, and I myself, have experienced traveling through voids or blackness. Whether these are actual environments or a product of our inability to tune into the new super-dimensional environment is not clear. Some people may argue that we create all the experience on the hoof so to speak and there could simply be an inability of our brains to generate the information quickly enough, (because of the unusual state it is in) to do so. I, personally, have experienced environments which were no more than empty spaces, with, for example, lights floating by or bands of colour until, when deepening my awareness or wakefulness, I have found some kind of environment emerging.”
And
“The fact that some who have entered it report white light, a blank space perhaps or even a sparkling void referred to in your talk it is in my opinion our initial inability to make sense or adjust to a completely alien environment and sensory input. It takes time to adjust, but befor we can do so many are already swept away by a sense of euphoria because we become cognisant that we are on our way home, to our true home. Emotion overtakes us. If we allow a bit more time to adjust to the sensory threshold (focus as we do in deep meditation), and take into account the fact that we are now in a state of egoless awareness, we can witness an unfolding drama. To many this may feel like a process of annihilation of what makes us us.”
Would experiencing this state of consciousness be because the person experiencing it is lacking love therefore there is nothing there? And since they are not experiencing any time it is expressing that there is no knowledge in the current state they are in until they change their inner love and understanding does the environment change forward in the arrow of timearound them taking them out of that void?
And another quick side question would atomic clocks have a different correspondence in the spiritual world since they are slightly different than using the sun and moon with the rotation of earth as time?
Thank you Lee
Hi Sam,
I agree to some extent with what this writer is saying. The “dark tunnel” or “dark void” is described by many people who have near-death experiences. It happens after they lose consciousness in this world, but before they become conscious in the spiritual world. Swedenborg doesn’t describe going through a dark tunnel. But he does say that people who die don’t have the use of their (spiritual) eyes at first, so at first they can’t see anything in the spiritual world. Only when their spiritual eyes are “uncovered” are they first able to see the spiritual environment around them.
Swedenborg’s description of this event, by the way, is where the “Off The Left Eye” channel gets its name. You can read it in Heaven and Hell #450. I don’t take Swedenborg’s description there too literally. I.e., I don’t think that’s what every person who dies experiences. I think it’s more of a correspondential representation of going from not having any sight in the spiritual world to having sight in the spiritual world. At any rate, I haven’t heard of any NDEer describing having a covering rolled off their left eye as Swedenborg does.
More in line with the statements you quoted, I do think that many people who die are disoriented, and do feel like they are losing their sense of self, partly just because dying is, let’s just say, a rather final type of experience for people living on this earth, 😀 but also because most people think mostly materially throughout their lifetime on earth. For such people, making the transition to the spiritual world, and into spiritual sight and thinking, can be disorienting. This, I believe, is why God sends the highest, heavenly angels to meet people as they first arrive in the spiritual world. Their loving and calming presence helps ease the fear and disorientation people would otherwise be feeling.
The “darkness” or “void” or even “whiteness” that people experience in the transition is a representation of everything they have known and been familiar with fading away, resulting in a state in which it feels to them like nothing at all exists, except perhaps some faint glimmers and a sense of motion because they are “moving” from the material world to the spiritual world. If they have been very focused on material things, it might indeed feel like “a process of annihilation,” but that’s not really what it is. It’s just that their outer physical body and their external earth-focused mind is being stripped away. From now on only their spiritual mind will be active—though that does include the “natural” part of their spiritual mind that is focused on sensing and interacting with the spiritual environment around them.
So this “darkness” or “void” is just a temporary phase of leaving behind earthly things before the person’s mind is ready for his or her spiritual eyes to be opened so that s/he can begin a new life in the spiritual world. Though this experience could be from lacking love, more likely it’s just the initial feeling of emptiness as the person leaves behind all the people and places and things of the earthly realm that have been his or her whole life up until this point.
But yes, the arrow of time is still operational. People don’t stay in that void forever. They move through it and past it, wake up in the spiritual world, and their life continues forward from there.
About the correspondence of atomic clocks in the spiritual world, obviously Swedenborg didn’t say anything about that because atomic clocks didn’t exist in the 18th century. What he did talk about, though, was that every thought or feeling we have that seems like just one thought or one feeling actually contains thousands and millions of smaller thoughts and feelings that compose it. And every moment of time that we go through actually involves thousands and millions of tiny changes in our mind or spirit taking place so rapidly that we are completely unaware just how complex each thought, each feeling, and each moment of our life is.
Having a “spiritual atomic clock” would be like having a “device” that could keep track of every one of those tiny little changes that we don’t even notice in our ordinary states of consciousness, and laying them all out for us to see, one after another.
It would be like watching a video of a high-speed camera capturing a bullet as it rips through a playing card edgewise, cutting the card in half. Our eyes just see a flash and the card flying apart. But the high-speed camera captures each millisecond as the bullet approaches, makes contact, rips its way through the card from one side to the other, and then continues traveling off the edge of the frame.
I can imagine that some very analytical angels might enjoy being able to “dissect” a single thought or feeling, so to speak, in order to learn just how complex the human psyche is, and exactly how it works. After all, angels think spiritually, and analytical angels will analyze spiritual things, not physical things.
Gaining some awareness of all the incredible detail that is going on in our mind and heart every second can also give us a greater appreciation of the reality that we ourselves could not possibly take care of everything even in our own mind, let alone in the universe. Only the infinite God can do that. Only the infinite God can be fully present and fully aware of every tiniest detail in every split millisecond of our lives, preserving us and arranging everything down to the smallest details to make sure we have a pathway toward heaven starting at every moment of our life.
I’m reminded of the old poster wisdom: “Today is the first day of the rest of your life.” For God, it’s not just today, but every split second, that is the beginning of our life. God pays attention to every split second of our life, working to turn every tiniest thing that happens to us or within us, whether good or bad, toward heaven instead of toward hell. This is how God’s providence leads us. Divine providence is not just a general supervision. It is present and active right down to the “subatomic level” spiritually.
That is very true!
Hi Lee:
Great article! I am writing a book which talks difference of time/space between our physical world and spiritual world. I like the picture of three layers heavens in your article. Where did you get it? Or you made it by yourself? Can I use it in my book?
Thanks.
Hi Pengpeng,
Thanks! Glad you enjoyed the article.
For this article, for the first time I used AI, specifically Google Gemini, to create some of the images, including that one. That particular image isn’t exactly what I was picturing in my mind. Even so, it took a dozen or more tries to get to it. Both Annette and I liked it, so I used it. It was far and the way the best of the dozen or more images Gemini produced in response to increasingly detailed and specific prompts from me. (AI really isn’t very intelligent at all!)
At the moment I don’t have any plans to use the image for anything but illustrating this article. Annette and I don’t have any objection to your using it for your book, assuming the subject matter is thoughtful and uplifting, which I’m sure it will be. Also, if you could give some sort of credit or source for the image, that would be appreciated, if only so that your readers won’t think that we filched the image from you. 😀 Thanks.
Just to be clear, I don’t think that’s what the lands of heaven actually look like. It’s a “conceptual” piece, more like a diagram than an actual image of the lands of heaven. Still, it’s very pretty, isn’t it? 🙂
Incidentally, the original image is twice the resolution of the one you get if you click on the image in the above article. If you do decide to use it, and you need higher resolution, let me know.
Thank you so much! Definitely I will give you credit by mentioning the picture created by you and Annette also the link of this article in my book.
I am working on a book about the garden of Eden based on Swendenborg’s explanation. I am very excited to do it. I just got to know his books a couple of years ago. Writing a book is same way to wind up my thoughts and understanding when reading his book.
I like the picture of three heavens. Beautiful! Very appreciated.
Hi Lee,
Thank you for all the great clarity on these subjects! Very interesting to learn! That makes a lot of sense regarding these reports are the way they are because of the representation of transitioning to the spiritual world and because a lot of people are materialistic and not opened their spiritual senses it makes a lot of sense that they would experience that or those types of feelings. Plus I’m sure Swedenborg’s experience of seeing something rolling off his left eye was unique in that sense because God allowed him to be conscious of the experience so he can see the correspondence more clearly rather than someone with no spiritual eyesight open and having no prior footing of what’s going on.And not to mention how every split second God can see what is happening in our lives. I’m sure to some angels that would be very fascinating but even they can even remotely come close to Gods which puts it into perspective regarding time!
Thank you again Lee
Hi Sam,
You’re welcome, as always.
And yes, I’ve often thought that Swedenborg’s experience of dying was different from anyone else’s because, as he says in the previous section:
99.99% of people who are dying aren’t intellectually analyzing the experience! 😀
“In the spiritual world the land is arranged in expanses one above the other, and the spiritual sun is above them all.”
Well that’s sorta disturbing somehow. I thought the so-called spiritual realm was a combination of different realms, sort of like an internet uniting different virtual reality simulations (in which there can be normal universes of suns and worlds, flat earths, etc).
Hi K,
The spiritual world might look like a virtual reality to people who go there from our era, precisely because it doesn’t conform to our laws of physics such as gravity. But it is not a virtual reality. It is real and solid. It’s just that it abides by spiritual laws, not physical laws, and therefore is arranged differently than the physical world.
Yes, the spiritual realm is a “combination of different realms,” but not in the sense of virtual realities. It’s more like different cultures spread out over a very large three-dimensional space. Still, as in the physical universe, all areas of the spiritual universe obey the same laws. There are not different “universes” there, each with its own set of laws.
Can there still be realms in the spiritual that are different from the overall arrangement, like a space full of galaxies, suns, and worlds? Or maybe even a realm with something else entirely (like some lattice of spacetime with more spatial dimensions)?
Hi K,
There can certainly be areas of the spiritual world that are different from the usual. But they would be within the “universal human” of heaven, not outside of it. As an example:
About the rainbow heaven, see also Secrets of Heaven #1623.
Given this, I wouldn’t want to say that the ones you speculate about would be impossible. There is certainly plenty of “space” to fit such things. But once again, they would be within the overall structure of the spiritual world, not outside of it.
So within the overall form or arrangement of the spiritual world, there could be a special realm that could be a universe that appears to be billions of light years across, with galaxies thousands or millions of light years across, and countless solar systems with worlds? If everything appearing in the natural world has a spiritual counterpart, I think that could be the case in New Church afterlife.
Hi K,
Again, I wouldn’t want to say that there couldn’t be. There is plenty of “space” in the spiritual world, just as there is in the physical world. However, it’s a bit of a trick question. Space as we know it doesn’t exist in the spiritual world. That vast section of the spiritual universe that has galaxies and such would represent realms of human love and thought rather than being something that exists semi-autonomously on its own, as galaxies in the material universe do.
How, exactly, that would work itself out in the spiritual world I don’t claim to know. But the bottom line is that there is only one spiritual universe, just as there is only one physical universe, and it forms a unified whole rather than a series of separate and disjointed universes.
This would suggest that if some part of the spiritual universe could be seen as galaxies stretching over billions of light years, the entire spiritual universe could be seen that way as well, just as our entire physical universe consists of galaxies stretching over billions of light years.
In ancient Hebrew cosmology, it seems there’s a flat earth, the underworld, the great deep beneath that, the skies above, a firmament above the skies, waters above the firmament that connect to the waters of the great deep, and then outside this ball with the flat earth in it is where God is, above it all. Is the spiritual realm arranged like that according to Swedenborg?
Hi K,
There are elements of the old Hebrew flat earth in Swedenborg’s spiritual cosmology. For example, he says that the planetary regions in the spiritual world are flattened out into planes rather than being spheres. And there do seem to be oceans around the edges. However, there are also apparently expanses of land one above the other forming the three heavens, though other times this seems to be more a matter of topography, in which the lowest heaven is in the valleys, the middle heaven is in the hills, and the highest heaven is in the mountains.
Meanwhile, unlike the old geocentric models, in the spiritual world, God is the center, dwelling within the spiritual sun, which is what all of heaven looks towards, and all of hell looks away from. Swedenborg’s spiritual realm is definitely heliocentric, not geocentric.
For my part, I don’t take any of this too literally. According to Swedenborg, space and time don’t exist in the spiritual world. The appearance of space there is based on people’s state in terms of love, and the appearance of time is based on people’s state in terms of truth. So when you’re looking out and seeing a flat expanse of land, or mountains rising above hills rising above valleys, it’s not literal topography as on earth. It’s representations of the spiritual states of the people living in the various parts of heaven with regard to their various ruling loves.
This is why I don’t get to literalistic about Swedenborg’s descriptions of how the spiritual world is laid out. It could be that he saw it that way because much of the old cosmology was still a big influence on people’s minds back then. Maybe people actually do live on spherical planets in the spiritual world, but they’re not absolute and fixed, so if you want to travel overland to get to them, you can. Space and time there just don’t work the way they do here.
Overall, it would seem to me that the spiritual world should be “spherical” in the sense that God is at the center, and everything else is arrayed around God. Sort of like hollow earth theory, but with multiple shells around the central sun where God dwells.
Really, I suspect there is not any one defined topography of heaven. Where space and time don’t exist, things are not arranged in space, and they don’t form spatial structures as we think of them here on earth. But how exactly this works is probably just beyond our ability to really comprehend as long as we’re still living on earth, in the physical world, with our material-level mind active, embedded in time and space.
What if that flattened out plane thing is somehow curved into a giant inverse hollow earth sphere?
And can there be so-called local realms where one can see a normal universe of multiple suns, spherical planets, asteroids, nebulae, etc. If not, I think I would miss that. Maybe spirits can somehow look into the physical universe, like a living person can during an alleged OBE (although the physical universe may be only temporary, so if it is the year 1E100 there may not be that much to see).
PS: By [giant inverse hollow earth sphere], I meant like a hollow earth: the there is a ball of sky surrounded by earth, instead of a ball of earth surrounded by sky. And on the inner surface could be that vast plane or planes, and there could be the sun in the center.
I personally hope the afterlife is more like so-called virtual reality: there is no overall fixed shape, and there can be different realms with different shapes. Although maybe a spiritual sun is a constant in all the heavenly ones.
Hi K,
I tend to think that there is no fixed shape for the spiritual world. That it varies based on the changing states of the angels and spirits there.
Hi K,
Yes, I’ve thought of the inverse sphere thing. That’s basically what I was referring to. But again, I wouldn’t want to get to literalistic about it. Space as we know it doesn’t exist in the spiritual world.
I also have a hard time believing that there isn’t something like planets, stars, and galaxies in the spiritual universe. Otherwise, why do we have them in the physical universe? They must correspond to something in the spiritual universe, or they wouldn’t exist here.
However, in Swedenborg’s day, and for well over a century afterwards, what we now know to be galaxies were considered some sort of cloud. I.e., Swedenborg did not have today’s concept of galaxies available to him. He did, however, have the concept of stars as suns, and of what we now call exoplanets orbiting them. So it’s a little curious that he pictured a spiritual universe in which these things don’t exist.
For one thing, if stars are suns, and there is only one sun in the spiritual world, which is the one in which God dwells, that doesn’t leave space for other stars/suns elsewhere. Spiritual stars become angels instead, and in that way they are fundamentally different from the spiritual sun, which is God’s dwelling place.
The whole thing suggests that Swedenborg’s mental sense of the cosmos was not much bigger than the solar system, even though he was aware that there are other stars and solar systems out there. It’s a strange tension or contradiction in his cosmology. This is another reason I don’t take his spiritual cosmology too literally. I suspect that he was limited in what he could see in the spiritual world because he was still dwelling in the material world, and couldn’t see things that would go beyond the scientific conception of his day.
This doesn’t mean that the spiritual world is completely different from what he saw. But it might mean that he saw only a small corner of the spiritual world. Other parts would likely be similar, parallel to the cosmological principle in modern cosmology, which states that basically, the universe will be about the same everywhere. So I think Swedenborg’s experiences of the spiritual world were real and accurate, but perhaps only covered the equivalent of one quadrant of our galaxy, if we take his descriptions of people from other planets in Earths in the Universe into account.
As a result of all this, I am waiting until I move on to the spiritual world to get any real answers to this sort of question. I would also very much like there to be galaxies, stars, and planets in the spiritual universe. But if there are, Swedenborg’s writings are not the place to go to determine or confirm that, because the cosmology of his day wasn’t sufficiently advanced to fully incorporate these things into it. And this, once again, I think likely limited his conception of the spiritual universe as well.
If, as Swedenborg says in one place, there are at least 100,000 other inhabited planets in the physical universe—”inhabited” as in, inhabited by human life—where do all the people from all those planets live? Are they really all arranged on some vast planar surface? Or even some vast hollow earth style sphere centered on the spiritual sun? Perhaps. But that doesn’t accord with how God arranged them in the physical universe, where they each literally have their own sphere to live on.
Does any of this affect Swedenborg’s spiritual principles? Not in any way that I can see. But the limitations of the science of Swedenborg’s day does put real limitations on the correlation of those spiritual principles with the known science of our day. For this, we have to go beyond where Swedenborg was in material science.
Hi K,
About angels and spirits looking into the physical universe, that seems to be possible, but out of the ordinary. It’s only mentioned or perhaps suggested once or twice in Swedenborg’s writings that I’m aware of. Usually he says that it’s only possibly by an angel or spirit looking through the eyes of a person still living in the physical world.
Hopefully there is some way one could do something like what is shown in this video in the afterlife.
PS: vid is:
Exploring planets in Orion Nebula – Space Engine Gameplay HD
(and vid code is W3QDuEnVqew BTW)
Hi K,
I think it will be possible. Again, I have a hard time thinking that there won’t be the spiritual equivalent of planets, stars, and galaxies. But it also won’t work spatially the way it does here in the material world. Swedenborg talks about traveling to the planetary regions of other planets in the spiritual world, and taking anywhere from two hours to two days of change in his spiritual state to make the journey. Apparently, in the spiritual world that’s a long journey, compared to the usual instantaneous or near-instantaneous travel there.
He also speaks of vast uninhabited spaces in the spiritual world, such that the inhabited areas are not even one hundred millionth the size of the inhabited area. The significance of that number is that it’s basically the largest possible number to express in Latin. Even then, Latin had to borrow the Greek word for “ten thousand” and multiply it by itself to get that big. In other words, the uninhabited space in the spiritual world is unimaginably large compared to the inhabited space.
Swedenborg doesn’t speak of traveling through space. He gives the impression that it is overland travel. But he does talk about a vast smoky chasm at the edge of our solar system. It’s all a bit vague. But for him, interstellar travel probably would not be very conceivable, so perhaps overland travel was all he could muster. And in the spiritual world, our surroundings reflect our thoughts and feelings. If someone from today were to travel to the region of the spirits from another planet, it wouldn’t surprise me at all if it were the spiritual equivalent of a FTL journey through space in a spaceship.
Hopefully despite that one landscape over another thing, a person in a lower heaven does not always see this odd sky of the underside of land above, but can see a clear sky like one can here.
Hi K,
I get the impression that the scenery in heaven is very similar to the scenery on earth, consisting of land and sky. When Swedenborg speaks of angels of the lower heaven looking toward higher heavens, it’s generally pictured as mountainous areas that they’re looking up to, although sometimes it is pictured as seeing stars in the sky.
If there is stars in the sky sometimes, then that suggests that the NC afterlife not being so fixed or rigid, like this planet is.
Hi K,
The spiritual world isn’t fixed and rigid like the material world. Yes, there are some constants, because our ruling love is constant. But even with this, the ruling love is continually expressing itself in different ways, so even if an angel’s house never changes spiritual location, it may undergo periodic “renovations,” get new furniture and drapes, even change a wall or two. And the surrounding countryside will change in accordance with the changes in the thoughts and feelings of the angels in the vicinity.
Even here on earth, things change over time. There is day and night, seasons, and longer cycles such as the sunspot cycle that affects things here on earth. So it’s not as though the physical world is some fixed, rigid thing either. But compared to the spiritual world, it is fixed and rigid. The spiritual world is much more “plastic” in the original sense of the word, meaning able to easily take on many different forms in response to the changing states of mind of the people in the area.