Again and again they went back home, wrote, and came back, until
eventually they realized that their writing involves and contains countless
things that no earthly writing could ever express. Someone said that this
was the case because a spiritual person thinks things that are beyond an
earthly person’s words or comprehension; those things cannot be trans-
lated into any written or spoken language.
[ 5 ] At that point some of the people there were unwilling to compre-
hend that spiritual thinking goes so far beyond earthly thinking that it is
inexpressible in comparison. For this reason I said to them, “Do an
experiment. Go to your spiritual community and think about something,
keep it fixed in your memory, and come back and express it to me.”
They went home, had a thought, kept it fixed in their memory, and
came back. When they tried to express what they had been thinking
about, they could not do it. They could not find any idea in earthly
thought that fit any idea in their purely spiritual thought; and because
the ideas of thought become the words of language, they could find no
words to express it.
By going home again and coming back again several times, they
became convinced that spiritual ideas are supernatural, inexpressible,
indescribable, and incomprehensible to an earthly person. Because spiri-
tual ideas are this transcendent, the people said that spiritual ideas or
thoughts, relative to earthly ones, are ideas beyond ideas and thoughts
beyond thoughts, and they express qualities beyond qualities and feel-
ings beyond feelings. Therefore spiritual thoughts are the initiation and
origin of earthly thoughts. This made it clear that spiritual wisdom is
wisdom beyond wisdom—it is inexpressible to any wise person in the
physical world.
[ 6 ] Then a voice from a higher heaven said that there is a wisdom
that is deeper or higher still, which is called heavenly wisdom. Its quality
relative to spiritual wisdom is the same as spiritual wisdom’s quality rela-
tive to earthly wisdom. These wisdoms flow in, heaven by heaven, from
the Lord’s divine wisdom, which is infinite.
At this the man who had been speaking to me said, “I now see that
one earthly idea contains many spiritual ideas, and one spiritual idea
contains many heavenly ideas. Another outcome of this is that some-
thing that is divided does not become simpler and simpler but instead
more and more complex, because it comes closer and closer to the Infi-
nite, in whom all things exist in an infinite way.”
[ 7 ] Then I said to the people there, “On the basis of these three
experimental proofs, you see the type of difference that exists between
§280 sacred scripture 345