Heaven and its Wonders and HellSwedenborg, Emanuel
Religion
Heaven and its Wonders and Hell
Swedenborg, Emanuel
Future life -- Christianity -- Early work to 1800; Heaven -- Christianity; Hell -- Christianity
465. A certain spirit was indignant because he was unable to remember
many things that he knew in the life of the body, grieving over the
lost pleasure which he had so much enjoyed, but he was told that he
had lost nothing at all, that he still knew each and everything that
he had known, although in the world where he now was no one was
permitted to call forth such things from the memory, and that he
ought to be satisfied that he could now think and speak much better
and more perfectly than before, and that his rational was not now
immersed as before in gross, obscure, material and corporeal things,
which are of no use in the kingdom into which he had now come; also
that he now possessed everything conducive to the uses of eternal
life, and that this is the only way of becoming blessed and happy;
and therefore it is the part of ignorance to believe that in this
kingdom intelligence perishes with the removal or quiescence of the
material things in the memory; for the real fact is that so far as
the mind can be withdrawn from things of sense pertaining to the
external man or the body, so far it is elevated to things spiritual
and heavenly.
466. What these two memories are is sometimes presented to view in
the other life in forms not elsewhere seen; for many things which in
man take the form of ideas are there presented as objects of sight.
The external memory there presents the appearance of a callus, the
internal the appearance of a medullary substance like that in the
human brain; and from this what they are can be known. With those
that have devoted themselves in the life of the body to the
cultivation of the memory alone, and have not cultivated their
rational faculty, the callosity appears hard and streaked within as
with tendons. With those that have filled the memory with falsities
it appears hairy and rough, because of the confused mass of things in
it. With those that have cultivated the memory with the love of self
and the world as an end it appears glued together and ossified. With
those that have wished to penetrate into Divine arcana by means of
learning, especially of a philosophical kind, with an unwillingness
to believe until convinced by such proofs, the memory appears like a
dark substance, of such a nature as to absorb the rays of light and
turn them into darkness. With those that have practiced deceit and
hypocrisy it appears hard and bony like ebony, which reflects the
rays of light. But with those that have been in the good of love and
the truths of faith there is no such callous appearance, because
their inner memory transmits the rays of light into the outer; and in
its objects or ideas as in their basis or their ground, the rays
terminate and find delightful receptacles; for the outer memory is
the out most of order in which, when goods and truths are there, the
spiritual and heavenly things are gently terminated and find their
seat.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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