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 it has left. It has receded from our earthly speech, and cannot reproduce a word of it in the new sphere into which it has risen. The higher it ascends the more it leaves behind, until the celestial angel stands on the serenest summits in the light of God, with thoughts, feelings, language differing from everything beneath him.

How can a celestial angel communicate with a spiritual angel, or an angel of the lower heaven communicate with a man upon earth? By a descent during which the higher being leaves his own interior spheres behind him, and enters into the sphere of the lower degree. When a celestial angel appears and speaks to a spiritual angel, he descends to his level, assumes the form of his affection and thought which exists in his interior memory, and speaks to him in his own language. So when a spiritual angel descends to a lower degree, he takes on the mental states and interior memory of that degree and speaks in a lower and feebler language.

Angels and spirits, however, cannot descend into the natural degree of our life, so as to see our natural forms and speak to us externally in our earthly tongues. Why? Because they have dropped the natural body for ever. They can approach our