§466 we leave only the body behind 271
unless heaven’s light, which is divine truth, and heaven’s warmth, which
is divine love, are let in. They are the only source of rationality.
Angels are profoundly grieved that scholars for the most part keep
attributing everything to nature and therefore close the deeper levels of
their minds so that they can see no trace of truth from the light of truth,
the light of heaven. As a result, in the other life they are deprived of their
ability to reason so that they will not use reason to spread false notions
among simple and good people and mislead them. They are dismissed to
desert areas.
One particular spirit resented the fact that he could not remember 465
much of what he had known during his physical life. He was grieving
over the pleasure he had lost because it had been his chief delight. He
was told, though, that he had not lost anything at all and that he knew
absolutely everything. In the world where he was now living he was not
allowed to retrieve things like that. It should satisfy him that he could
now think and talk much better and more perfectly without immersing
his rational functioning in dense clouds, in material and physical con-
cerns, the way he had before, in concerns that were useless in the kingdom
he had now reached. Now he had whatever he needed for his functioning
in eternal life, and there was no other way he could become blessed and
happy. So it was the counsel of ignorance to believe that in this kingdom
the removal and dormancy of material concerns in the memory led to
the disappearance of intelligence, when in fact the more the mind can be
led out of the sensory concerns that are proper to the outer person or the
body, the more it is raised up to spiritual and heavenly concerns.
Sometimes in the other life a demonstration is made, using forms that 466
are there only appearances, to show what the two kinds of memory are like
(many things are presented visually there that for us here are strictly con-
ceptual). In these demonstrations, the outer memory is shown as a callus,
while the inner looks like the medullary substance found in the human
brain. These objects also tell us something about the two kinds of memory.
For people who have focused solely on memorization during their
physical lives, without developing their rational ability, their memory has
a callused quality that looks hard and streaked with tendons inside. For
people who have fi lled their memories with false notions it looks shaggy
because of the random mass of disorganized stuff. For people who have
focused on memorization with themselves and the world fi rst in mind, it
looks stuck together and bony. For people who have tried to probe divine
secrets through acquired information, especially philosophical information,