Heavenly Marriages Induce Forms on the Souls and Minds of their Partner

Selection from Conjugial Love ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

In the natural world it is not so apparent that marriages induce other forms on souls and minds, for here souls and minds are enclosed in a material body, through which the mind rarely shines. Today, moreover, far more than of old, men learn from infancy onward to induce expressions on the face by which they profoundly conceal the mind's affections. For this reason forms of the mind before and after marriage are not known apart. In the spiritual world, however, it is manifest (even in such men) that the forms of soul and mind after marriage differ from what they were before marriage. For spirits and angels, who are nothing but minds and souls in human form, are then stripped of the coverings which were composed of elements from water and earth and of exhalations thence spread on the air. With these removed, the forms of the minds, such as they were within the body, are seen, and it is clearly observable then that the married have certain forms, and the unmarried other forms.

In general, married partners have an inner beauty of countenance, the man receiving from the wife the agreeable glow of her love, and the wife from the man the shining brightness of his wisdom. For the two partners are united in soul. In each appears also a human fullness. This is in heaven, for there are no marriages anywhere else; below heaven [not from heavenly order] there are only matings, which are formed and severed.

(Conjugial Love 192)

Love and Charity

Selection from Arcana Cœlestia ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

The Divine with those who have faith in the Lord is love and charity. By Love is meant love to the Lord; by Charity," love toward the neighbor. Love to the Lord cannot possibly be separated from love toward the neighbor; for the Lord's love is toward the universal human race, which He wills to save eternally and to adjoin wholly to Himself, so that not one of them may perish. He therefore who has love to the Lord, has the Lord's love, and thereby can do no otherwise than love his neighbor.

(from Arcana Cœlestia 2023)

How to React with God

Selection from Divine Love and Wisdom ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

In everything created by God there is reaction.

In Life alone there is action; reaction is caused by the action of Life.

Because reaction takes place when any created thing is acted upon, it appears as if it belonged to what is created. Thus in man it appears as if the reaction were his, because he has no other feeling than that life is his, when yet man is only a recipient of life.

From this cause it is that man, by reason of his hereditary evil, reacts against God. But so far as man believes that all his life is from God, and that all good of life is from the action of God, and all evil of life from the reaction of man, so far his reaction comes to be from [God's] action, and man acts with God as if from himself.

The equilibrium of all things is from action and simultaneous reaction, and in equilibrium everything must be.

These things have been said lest man should believe that he himself ascends toward God from himself, and not from the Lord.

(Divine Love and Wisdom 68)