Selection from Divine Providence ~ Emanuel Swedenborg
Everything confirmed by the will and also by the understanding remains to eternity, because everyone is his own love, and his love belongs to his will; also because every man is his own good or his own evil, for everything that is called good, and likewise evil, belongs to the love.As man is his own love he is also a form of his love, and may be called the organ of his life's love.
The affections of the love and consequent thoughts of man are changes and variations of the state and form of the organic substances of his mind. What these changes and variations are and their nature shall now be explained.
Some idea of them may be gathered from the heart and lungs, where there are alternate expansions and compressions or dilations and contractions, which in the heart are called systole and diastole and in the lungs respirations; these are a reciprocal distension and retraction or reciprocal stretching apart and closing together of their lobes. Such are the changes and variations of the state of the heart and lungs. There are like changes in the other viscera of the body, and changes more similar in their parts, by which the blood and the animal juice are received and carried onward.
Like things are to be found in the organic forms of the mind, which are the subjects of man's affections and thoughts, ... with the difference that their expansions and compressions, or reciprocations, are relatively in such higher perfection as cannot be expressed in the words of natural language, but only in those of spiritual language, and these can be defined in no other way than that they are vortex-like circlings inward and outward, after the manner of perpetual and incurving spirals wonderfully bundled together into forms receptive of life.
The nature of these purely organic substances and forms in the evil and in the good shall now be stated.
In the good these spiral forms are turned forward, but in the evil backward; and the spiral forms turning forward are turned towards the Lord and receive influx from Him, while those turning backward are turned towards hell and receive influx therefrom. It is to be known that so far as they are turned backward they are open behind and closed in front; and on the other hand, so far as they are turned forward they are opened in front and closed behind.
From all this it is evident what kind of a form or organ an evil man is, and what kind of a form or organ a good man is, namely, that they are turned in contrary directions; and as the turning when once fixed cannot be reversed it is clear that such as man is when he dies such he remains to eternity. It is the love of man's will that makes the turning, that is, that converts and inverts, ... every man is his own love. It is from this that every man after death goes the way of his own love - he that is in a good love to heaven, and he that is in an evil love to hell, and he finds rest only in that society where his reigning love is; and what is wonderful, everyone knows the way; it is like following a scent with the nose.
(Divine Providence 319)