All of our freedom has our life at its center, because it has
our love at its center. Whatever we do out of love seems
free to us. Heavenly love is present within that freedom
when we force ourselves to resist evil and falsity and to
do good. At such a time, heavenly love is what the Lord
introduces into us and uses to create a sense of autonomy
in us. As a result, the Lord wants it to appear to us as if
we have true self-determination, even though we do not.
In the other world, the Lord takes this autonomy that we
have acquired through apparent self-compulsion during
the life of the body and fills it full of pleasure and happiness without limit. We also receive greater and greater
enlightenment. In fact, we come to believe firmly in the
truth of the idea that we have not really compelled ourselves at all, but that even the very smallest efforts of our
will came from the Lord. It becomes clear to us that the
purpose of our apparent independence was to enable us
to receive a new will from the Lord as our own and in this
way adopt a life of heavenly love. The Lord wants to share
what is his—and therefore what is heavenly—with every
single person. He wants it to feel as if it belongs to us and
resides in us, even though it does not. Angels have this
sense of ownership. The more sure they are of the truth
that everything good and true comes from the Lord, the
more pleasure and happiness they gain from this sense of
ownership.
—Secrets of Heaven 1937:6
