Featured quotations from Emanuel Swedenborg's Secrets of Heaven:

3200 

These two verses depict the condition of goodness on the rational plane when it is waiting for the truth that is to unite with it as a bride with her husband. The next two depict the condition of truth when it comes close and perceives the goodness with which it is to unite.

It is important to know, however, that these stages did not arrive just once but constantly throughout the Lord’s life in the world, up until he was glorified. The same is true in people who are regenerating, because they are not reborn once but constantly throughout their life and even in the other life. After all, we can never become perfect.

3308

Goodness and truth resemble babies, in that they are conceived, grow in the womb, are born, grow up, and increase in age until they reach full maturity. Conception, gestation, and birth belong to their rise; growing up and aging till they reach full maturity belong to their progress. The stage of progress, in which goodness and truth unite, follows birth, and its start is what growing up symbolizes here. This stage begins right after birth and continues all the way to the end of life, and in people devoted to goodness, it continues beyond bodily life to eternity. In other words, angels are always developing.

3296:2

. . . A person’s rebirth mirrors the Lord’s glorification . . . ; in other words, regeneration offers an image of the process by which the Lord glorified his human side, or made it divine. Just as the Lord changed his human condition into an entirely divine one, he completely changes our condition when he regenerates us, since he makes our old self new.