Page:The Other Life.djvu/93

 after death, by a spontaneous process, because we have it here. When we are thinking intently to ourselves, our spiritual body is talking earnestly in the spiritual language, of which we are unconscious. If the Lord were to open the door between the two worlds, and let some angel friend look in upon us as we sit in profound reverie, our tacit thoughts would come to him as rich and beautiful words spoken aloud.

This language has three discrete degrees, and we come into that degree of it which is opened in us by our life upon earth. The angels in the first heaven cannot understand the speech of the angels in the second heaven, nor can those in the second heaven comprehend the celestial speech of the third heaven. This depends upon their different degrees of affection and thought, from successively more interior grounds, and a corresponding difference in ideas and, words. The celestial, spiritual and natural degrees of life differ so fundamentally in the forms of their affections and thoughts, that each is a distinct world, cosmos or universe of its own, without any necessary consciousness of the existence of any other.

Still they communicate; for there is a steady stream of influent life all the way from the Divine