This is introduced as a reason which serves to confirm the previous propositions. It is well known that arrangements can be successive or simultaneous, but not that a simultaneous arrangement is derived from and depends upon a successive one. The process by which successive stages collapse into simultaneous ones, and the kind of arrangement they then adopt, is very difficult to present in a way that can be perceived, because learned men have so far no notion which might serve to elucidate it. Since the basic notion of this secret cannot be imparted in a few words, and a long treatment would divert people's minds from a more open view of conjugial love, it may be enough for an illustration, if I quote briefly from what was said on the subject of the two arrangements, successive and simultaneous, and the influence of the former on the latter, in my TEACHING OF THE NEW JERUSALEM ABOUT THE SACRED SCRIPTURE:

[2] "In heaven and in the world arrangements may be successive or simultaneous. In a successive arrangement one stage follows another from highest to lowest; but in a simultaneous arrangement one is alongside another from inmost to outermost. A successive arrangement is like a column with steps from top to bottom, but a simultaneous arrangement is like a structure extending from the centre to the outside. At the last stage a successive arrangement becomes a simultaneous one in this way: the highest stages of a successive arrangement become the innermost of a simultaneous arrangement; and the lowest stages of a successive arrangement become the outermost of a simultaneous arrangement. This may be compared with a stepped column subsiding to become a coherent body on one level. This is how a simultaneous arrangement is formed from a successive one; and this applies to every single detail of the spiritual world, and every single detail of the natural world."

See 38 and 65 in that book, and the lengthy treatment of the subject in THE WISDOM OF THE ANGELS ABOUT THE DIVINE LOVE AND WISDOM, 205-229.

[3] It is much the same with the successive arrangement leading to marriage, and the simultaneous arrangement in marriage; the latter arises from and depends upon the former. Anyone who knows how the successive arrangement influences the simultaneous can understand why it is that angels can see on a person's hand all he thinks and intends in his mind; and also that wives feel their husbands' affections by placing their hands on their husbands' chests, a fact several times mentioned in the accounts of experiences. The reason is that the hands are the final level of a person, and what he debates and concludes in his mind reaches its last stage in his hands, and there they make a simultaneous arrangement. That is why in the Word the expression 'written on the hands' occurs.* * Isa. 49:16.

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