Selection from Conjugial Love ~ Emanuel Swedenborg
The state of a man's life is its quality. And as there are two faculties in every one, which make life, called understanding and will -a man's state of life is its quality as to understanding and will.It is plain, then, that by changes in the state of life are meant changes of quality in what is of the understanding and of the will.
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One's state of life continually changes from infancy to the very close of life and afterwards to eternity. The states of one's life in general are called infancy, boyhood, adolescence, manhood, and old age. Every one who continues to live in the world passes in turn from one state to the next, so from the first to the last. The transitions are not apparent until an interval of time has elapsed, but reason sees that there is development from moment to moment and so continually. For in this respect the human being is like a tree, which grows and develops in every least fraction of time from the moment the seed is cast into the earth. This unintermitted progress also involves change of state — for what ensues contributes something to what precedes — perfecting the state.
Changes, moreover, which take place in man's internals also have a more perfect continuity than those which take place in his externals. For man's internals (by which are meant the things of his mind or spirit) are a degree higher, elevated above the externals; and in what is of the higher degree a thousand things take place in the same instant in which only one takes place in externals. The changes which occur in internals, are changes of state in the will as to affections, and changes of state in the understanding as to thoughts....
Changes of state in these two lives or faculties continue with man from infancy to the close of life and afterward to eternity, for the reason that there is no end to knowledge, still less to intelligence, and least of all to wisdom. In the inexhaustibleness of these there is infinity and eternity from the Infinite and Eternal, from whom all things are. Hence that ancient piece of philosophy that everything is divisible to infinity, to which is to be added that it may be multiplied similarly. The angels declare that they are perfected in wisdom by the Lord to eternity, which is also to infinity, eternity being an infinity of time.
(Conjugial Love 184, 185)