Selection from Conjugial Love ~ Emanuel Swedenborg
Man knows that love is, but does not know what it is. He knows that love is, from common speech, such as the expressions, he loves me; a king loves his subjects, and the subjects love their king; a husband loves his wife, and a mother her children, and vice versa; also this or that man loves his country, his fellow-citizens, his neighbor. Love is likewise said of things apart from person, as that one loves this thing or that.But although love is so universal in speech, yet scarcely any one knows what love is. When he reflects upon it, being unable to form any idea of thought about it, and so to set it in the light of the understanding (for the reason that it is not a thing of light but of heat), he says either that it is not anything or that it is merely something flowing in from sight, hearing, and conversation, and thus affecting. It is entirely unknown to him that it is his very life, not only the general life of his whole body and the general life of all his thoughts, but also the life of all the single parts thereof. A wise man can perceive this from the following:
If you take away the affection of love, can you think anything? can you do anything? Is it not a fact that, so far as affection, which is of the love, grows cold, the thought, speech, and action also grow cold? and that, so far as it grows warm, these grow warm?Love then, is the heat of man's life, that is, his vital heat; the heat of the blood and its redness are from no other source. What makes all this, is the fire of the angelic sun, which is pure love.
That every one has his own love, or a love distinct from another's love, that is, that the love of one man is not the same as that of another, is evident from the infinite variety of faces. Faces are the types of loves; for it is well known that countenances change and vary according to the affections of the love. Moreover, desires, which are desires of the love, and also the love's joys and sorrows, shine forth from the face. It is clear from this that a man is his love, yea, the form of his love. But it should be known that the form of man's love is the inner man, being the same as his spirit which lives after death, and not in the same way the outer man [which lives] in the world; for the latter has learned from infancy to conceal the desires of his love, yea, to simulate and make a show of desires other than his own.
The reason why his own love remains with every man after death is because, love is man's life, and hence is the man himself.A man is also his own thought, and so his own intelligence and wisdom, but these make one with his love; for man thinks from his love and according to it, yea, if in freedom, he speaks and acts from it and according to it. From this it can be seen, that love is the esse or essence of a man's life, and that thought is the existere or existence of his life therefrom. Therefore the speech and action, which flow forth from thought, flow not from the thought but from the love by means of the thought. It has been given me to know from much experience, that after death man is not his thought but his affection and the thought therefrom, or that he is his love and his intelligence therefrom; and that after death he puts off everything that is not concordant with his love; yea, that he successively puts on the face, tone, speech, gestures, and manners of his life's love. Hence it is that the entire heaven is ordinated according to all the varieties of the affections of the love of good; and the entire hell according to all the [varieties of the] affections of the love of evil.
(from Conjugial Love 34-36)