Selection from Conjugial Love ~ Emanuel Swedenborg
And I heard a voice from heaven saying unto me, Write, Blessed are the dead which die in the Lord from henceforth: Yea, saith the Spirit, that they may rest from their labours; and their works do follow them. Revelation 14:13Eternal rest is not inactivity. From inactivity come only languor, torpidity, stupor, and drowsiness of the mind and thence of the whole body. These are death, not life, still less the eternal life in which the angels of heaven are.
Eternal rest is of a kind to dispel languor and drowsiness, and quicken men; it must be something which uplifts the mind. It is in some study or work that the mind is aroused, enlivened and delighted; and this takes place according to the use from, in, and toward which it is working. Hence all heaven in the Lord's sight is a theater of uses; every angel is an angel according to his use. His pleasure in his use bears an angel along as a favoring current does a ship. It causes him to be in eternal peace, and in the rest of peace. This is what is meant by eternal rest from labor.
That an angel is alive according to the zeal of his mind in a use, is attested by the fact that every angel has marital love, with its vigor, potency and delights, according to the zeal with which he pursues the genuine use in which he is.
(from Conjugial Love 207)