§355 the wise & the simple 197
The ones who at heart denied the Deity, whether or not they acknowl-
edged the Deity out loud, had become so stupid that they could scarcely
understand any civic truth, let alone any spiritual truth. I could both
comprehend and see that the inner levels of their minds were so shut off
that they looked inky black (things like this are made visible in the spiri-
tual world), and that this meant they could not bear any heavenly light or
let in any infl ow from heaven. The blackness that enveloped their deeper
levels was greater and more extensive for people who had convinced
themselves of their opposition to the Divine by means of their secular
scholarship.
In the other life, people like this gladly accept anything false. They
soak it up like a sponge soaking up water; and they repel anything true
the way something bony and springy repels anything that falls on it. It is
also said that if people convince themselves of their opposition to the
Divine and their advocacy of nature, their deeper levels actually become
bony. Their heads even look callused, as though they were made of
ebony, and this reaches all the way to their noses, a sign that they no lon-
ger have any perception.
People like this are sunk in quagmires that look like swamps, where
they are pestered by the hallucinations that their falsities turn into. Their
hellfi re is their craving for glory and fame, which leads them to denounce
each other and to torment with hellish zeal anyone who does not wor-
ship them as gods. They do this to each other by turns.
This is what becomes of all earthly learning that does not accept light
from heaven into itself by our acknowledgment of the Divine.
We might gather that they are like this when they arrive in the 355
spiritual world after death simply from the fact that at that point every-
thing in their natural memory becomes dormant, everything that is
directly united to their physical senses, like the academic disciplines we
listed just above. All that remain are the rational abilities that now
serve as a basis for thinking and talking. We actually take with us our
entire natural memory, but its contents are not open to our inspection
and do not enter into our thought as when we were living in this world.
We cannot retrieve anything from it and present it to spiritual light
because the contents are not matters of that light. However, the ratio-
nal or cognitive abilities we acquired through the arts and sciences
while living in the fl esh do square with the light of the spiritual world.
So to the extent that our spirit has become rational by means of our
insights and learning in this world, we are rational after our departure