This proposition needs to be proved, not from the lips of any dweller on earth, but from those who dwell in heaven, because truly conjugial love does not exist among people on earth today. In addition, these are enveloped by a gross body, which blunts and absorbs the feeling that a married couple are one person and, so to speak, one flesh. Moreover, those in the world, who love their partners only outwardly and not inwardly, are unwilling to listen to this statement. Their thoughts on this subject are lewd, deriving from the flesh. But it is different for the angels in heaven, since they enjoy celestial and spiritual forms of conjugial love, and they are not enveloped in such a gross body as people on earth. I have heard evidence from those who have lived for ages with their partners in heaven, that they feel themselves thus united, the husband with his wife, the wife with her husband, and are each present in the other, as if they were in the other's flesh, although they are separate persons.

[2] They reported as the reason for this phenomenon, so rare on earth, the fact that the uniting of their souls and minds is felt in their flesh, because the soul is not just the innermost part of the head, but of the whole body; and likewise the mind, which stands midway between the soul and the body. It seems as if the mind were in the head, but it is actually in the whole body. This, they said, is why the actions devised by the soul and mind proceed instantly from the body. It is also why the angels, after casting off their bodies in their former world, are complete persons. Now because the soul and mind are so closely attached to the flesh of the body as to be able to carry out and produce the effects they wish, it follows that the uniting of one's soul and mind with one's partner's is felt also in the body, as if it were one flesh. When these statements were made by angels, I heard spirits standing by say that these are matters of transcendent angelic wisdom; but they were natural rational spirits, not spiritual rational ones.