For those who enjoy studying the Word so that its not just understood according to what some else has said here is a study of the basic New Church doctrine. Each session will cover a part of a New Church doctrine explaining the various essentials of the truth in detail. The text used for the study will be included and will be from God's Word - the Old and the New Testaments and the Word of the Divine Human (the Lord glorified) sometimes called the Third Testament from where the doctrine being taught is supported. The beginning doctrine of the Lord is first taught since the Lord is the primary study of the Word. Through this study it is hoped that you will come to understand the Word in a new light - the Light of the glorified Lord - and will come to understand the things in the Word - the truths and goods - that have eluded you. Eventually you should be able to understand the Word's spiritual meaning. The Word teaches that everything in it has relation with the Lord. He is the primary subject in the Word. One comes to understand that the Lord is God from eternity and is God Himself that came into and was born here in this world. It is then that one sees that the Word was with Him and that He was the Word. Because the Word signifies Divine Truth or Divine Wisdom, we come to understand why the Lord is called the Word.
That it is love which angels have their life is also manifest from this, that every one in the other life turns himself according to his love. They, who are in love to the Lord and in love towards the neighbor, turn themselves constantly toward the Lord; but they who are in the love of self, turn themselves constantly backwards from the Lord. The reason of this that they loved good and truth, and implanted them in there lives, and thereby became capacities for receiving heaven with its ineffable perfections. But they who are in love of self and the world, are not capable of receiving these things, they turn away from them, reject them, and at their first touch and influx flee away, and associate themselves with those in hell who are in loves like their own.
(Heaven and its Wonders and Hell 17, 18)
In the Word of the Third Testament in the book called 'Heaven and Hell' there is a section titled "The World of Spirits and Man's State after Death". We will begin our study there because that is where we enter the spiritual world after our physical death. However, before we start our study of man's state after he dies and comes into this immediate place called the 'world of spirits' I bring your attention to number 1 of the preface of Heaven and Hell. There you learn that there is a clear difference between the literal or external sense of the Word and the internal or spiritual sense of the Word. In this particular case it is made clear the fact that the Judgment described in the Word means not the end of the world, but the end of the old Church and a beginning of the New Church. At the end of this number, Swedenborg makes a most revealing statement. He says that from the things he saw and heard in the spiritual world and that he was permitted to write down was for the hope that a person will be enlightened, that ignorance and the unbelief would be dispelled. Then he said that this revelation through him is the Coming of the Lord. He states this at the beginning of the book because it is so important in accepting what was written through him from the Lord.