4805. There are also communities of interior friendship which remove from another and channel to themselves not his external delight but his internal delight, that is, the bliss which his affection for spiritual things gives him. The position of those spirits is out in front, on the right immediately above the lower earth, though some of them are positioned somewhat higher up than the rest. I have spoken on several occasions to those in the lower position, and whenever I did so a general influx from those above took place. During their lifetime they were the kind of people who had a heartfelt love for others in their common fellowship and with brotherly feelings embraced one another. They had believed that they alone were living and in the light, and that compared with themselves those outside their community were neither living nor in the light. Being of this frame of mind they also imagined that the Lord's heaven was made up of their own few.
[2] But I was allowed to tell them that the Lord's heaven is boundless and that it consisted of those from every people and language, and that all are in heaven in whom the good of love and faith has existed. I also showed them that those in heaven correlate with all the provinces of the body, both its exterior and its interior parts. But if their minds were set on anything beyond and out of keeping with their life, in particular if they were to condemn others outside their community, they could not receive heaven. For in this case their community is a community of interior friendship which, as has been stated, is such that when they get near others they dispossess them of the bliss which their spiritual affection gives them. They see these people as the ones who are not the elect and as those who are not living; and this thought, when it is communicated, leads to sadness. But in keeping with the law of order in the next life this sadness comes back to themselves.
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