36. The wisdom that comes to our consciousness is a sense of what is true prompted by a desire for it. This is the case particularly for spiritual truth: for there is civic truth, there is moral truth, and there is spiritual truth. When we are conscious of spiritual truth because we are drawn to it we are conscious of moral and civic truth as well, because a desire for spiritual truth is their soul.

I have talked with angels about wisdom on occasion, and they have told me that wisdom is union with the Lord because the Lord is wisdom itself. They have told me that they attain this union when they banish hell from themselves, and that the union is in direct proportion to the banishment.

They picture wisdom, they said, as a wonderfully elegant palace with twelve steps leading up to it. No one gets to the first step except with the Lord's help and by union with him, and for all of us, the ascent depends on that union. The higher we climb, the more clearly we realize that no one is wise on her or his own, but only from the Lord. We also realize that relative to what we do not know, what we do know is like a droplet compared to a vast lake. The twelve steps to the palace of wisdom mean whatever is good united to what is true and whatever is true united to what is good.

299. Now because these three elements - love, wisdom and useful endeavor - are in the Lord and are the Lord, and because the Lord is everywhere, seeing that He is omnipresent, and because He cannot manifest Himself in person to any angel or person as He is in Himself and as He is in His sun, therefore He manifests Himself by such things as can be received, manifesting Himself as to love by warmth, as to wisdom by light, and as to useful endeavor by the atmosphere.

The reason the Lord manifests Himself as to useful endeavor by the atmosphere is that the atmosphere is the containing medium of heat and light, as useful endeavor is the containing medium of love and wisdom. For the light and heat which emanate from the Divine sun cannot emanate in nothing, that is, in a vacuum, but must do so in a containing medium as their vessel; and we call this containing medium the atmosphere which encompasses the sun, which takes that sun in its bosom and conveys it to the heaven where angels dwell and so to the world where people dwell, thus manifesting the Lord's presence everywhere.