[2] First: _It is an error of the age to believe that evils are separated and in fact cast out when they are remitted._ It has been granted me to learn from heaven that no evil into which man is born and which he has made actual in him is separated from him, but is removed so as not to appear. Earlier I shared the belief of most persons in the world that when evils are remitted they are cast out and are washed and wiped away as dirt is from the face by water. It is not like this with evils or sins. They all remain. When they are remitted on repentance, they are thrust from the center to the sides. What is in the center, being directly under view, appears as in the light of day, and what is to one side is in shadow and at times in the darkness of night. Inasmuch as evils are not separated but only removed, that is, thrust to one side, and as man can go from The center to the periphery, he can return, as it may happen, to his evils, which he supposed had been cast out. For the human being is such that he can go from one affection to another and sometimes to the opposite, and thus from one center into another; the affection in which he is at the time makes the center, for he is then in the enjoyment and light of it. [3] Some who are raised after death into heaven by the Lord, for they have lived well, have carried with them, however, the belief that they are clean and rid of sins, therefore are not in a state of guilt. In accord with their belief they are clothed at first in white garments, for white garments signify a state purified from evils. But after a time they begin to think, as they did in the world, that they are washed, as it were, from all evil, and to glory that they are no longer sinners like other men. This can hardly be kept from being an elation of mind and a contempt of others in comparison with oneself. In order, therefore, that they may be delivered from their imaginary belief, they are sent down from heaven and let back into the evils which they pursued in the world; they are also shown that they are in hereditary evils of which they had not known. When they have been led in this way to realize that their evils have not been separated from them but only put aside, thus that in themselves they are impure, indeed nothing but evil, and that they are withheld from evils and held in goods by the Lord, and that this only seems to be their doing, they are raised again into heaven by the Lord.