e Persian says:--

Heaven is the vision of fulfilled Desire
And Hell the shadow of a Soul on fire.

Behmen says, Heaven _is_ fulfilled desire; Hell _is_ a Soul on fire, no
mere vision or shadow.

Heaven and Hell are within us, since our souls are portions of the
universe of things, in every part of which Heaven and Hell are
commingled. The gates of Heaven within us were shut in Adam, but the
Power of God, Christ in Jesus, broke open by his passion "the closed
gates of Paradise," that is, the gates of our "inward heavenly
humanity," and now the wayfarer can, if he will, pass through. We do not
spiritually live by a reasoning process, or acceptance of doctrines by
the understanding, but by the action of the Desire in feeding upon the
Spirit of Love, a process of laying hold, drawing in, and assimilating.
True prayer is like feeding, or still more, perhaps, like the
unconscious drawing in of the air: it should be as constant. By it is
introduced the heavenly life from without to nourish the like heavenly
life contained in the seed within. If a man thus rightly feeds, then, in
him, the hellish life and passions, portions of the powers of darkness,
"our creatures" as Behmen says, will be killed by starvation, wanting
their appropriate food. On the other hand, a man can feed these also
from without with their appropriate food by misdirected desire, thereby
starving the heavenly life in the Soul.

Thus the essence of Behmen's teaching as to the Soul incarnate in Man
and revealed by his body, is that it is an eternal Being, and that it is
a source of joy or anguish according as it is, or is not, purified or
tranquillised by communion with the Centre of Light, or the Fountain of
Life. He does not contemplate, as some Eastern teachers perhaps do, the
annihilation of the Will of the Soul by a kind of higher spiritual
suicide; its existence is to him the very condition of good no less than
of evil; he contemplates its liberation from the dark, contracted,
self-prison, its purification, and entrance into the full heaven-life.
This magical soul-fire, like visible fire, can rage and destroy, or it
can serve as the means and ground of all good. Here is the foundation
both of good and evil, in man as in all things.

To understand this better, one must consider the cosmic teaching lying
behind the rich profusion of images, often inconsistent and clashing, in
which Jacob Behmen embodies his Vision.

Man has fallen into Natu