are false. Therefore, when they hear truths and see them in their own way
they are able to embrace those truths and be led away from false notions.
This is not true of people who have become adamant about false teachings
in their religion. A false teaching that is adamantly believed is permanent.
It cannot be uprooted. A false concept that people have reinforced in them-
selves is like something they have sworn allegiance to, especially if it ties in
with their love for themselves or their pride in their own intelligence.
In the spiritual world I have spoken with people who lived hundreds 255
of years ago who had become adamantly devoted to false ideas in their
religion. I learned that these people still consistently maintain these
ideas. I have also spoken with people in the spiritual world who had
belonged to the same religion and had had the same thoughts as these
others but who had not become adamant about these false ideas inside
themselves. I learned that when the latter people were taught by angels
they rejected these false ideas and embraced true ones. They were saved,
but the others were not.
After we die we are all taught by angels. If we can see truths, and can
see falsities in contrast to truths, we are accepted [into heaven]. The only
people who are able to see truths, however, are those who have not rein-
forced false ideas in themselves. Those who have reinforced false ideas are
unwilling to see truths. If they see truths, they turn away and either
laugh at what they have seen or falsify it. The real reason for this is that
becoming adamant enters the will, and the will is the real person. The
will controls the intellect as it wishes. Merely knowing something enters
only the intellect, and the intellect has no jurisdiction over the will.
Knowledge, therefore, is not really inside us, just as someone who is
standing on a porch or in an entrance is not really inside the house.
Let me illustrate this with an example. Many passages in the Word 256
attribute anger, wrath, and revenge to God; many passages say that
God punishes people, throws them into hell, tempts them, and many
other things like that. People who believe this in a simple, childlike way,
and who therefore fear God and take care not to sin against him, are not
condemned for having this simple belief. People are condemned, how-
ever, if they reinforce this idea in themselves to the point of believing that
God has anger, wrath, and revenge, and therefore has evil traits, and that
God angrily, wrathfully, and vengefully punishes us and throws us into
hell. The reason these people are condemned is that they have done away
with the real truth, which is that God is absolute love, absolute mercy,
and absolute goodness, and someone who is all these things cannot be
§256 sacred scripture 323