without goodness is not spiritually true, and goodness without truth is
not spiritually good; and that therefore the two shape each other.461 The third memorable occurrence.Once I was carried in spirit to a para-
dise in the southern part of the spiritual world. I observed that this paradise
was more magnificent than all the rest I had seen up to that point. The
reason for its magnificence was that a garden means intelligence, and all
the people who are exceptionally intelligent are moved to the south.
The Garden of Eden of Adam and his wife has exactly this meaning.
Their expulsion from the garden means being taken away from intelli-
gence and therefore from wholeness of life as well.
As I was walking around in this southern paradise I noticed some
people sitting under a laurel tree eating figs. I went over to them and
asked if I could have some figs. They gave me some. In my hand, how-
ever, the figs turned into grapes! Since I was astounded by this, an angelic
spirit who was standing next to me told me, “The figs became grapes in
your hand because figs correspondentially mean good actions related to
goodwill, and therefore to faith, in our earthly or outer self. Grapes, how-
ever, mean good qualities related to goodwill, and therefore to faith, in
our spiritual or inner self. This happened to you because you love spiri-
tual things. In our world everything happens, takes shape, and also
changes according to correspondences.”
[ 2 ] At that point an avid desire suddenly came over me to know how
people can do what is good from God and yet do it completely as if they
were on their own, so I asked the people eating figs how they understood
this. They said, “We have no other way to understand this except to
think that God produces this effect inside us and through us when we are
unaware of it; because if we knew about it and did it, the good we did
would be only something seemingly good that was actually evil inwardly.
Everything that comes from ourselves comes from our self-interest,
which is evil from the day we are born. How could goodness from God
and evil from ourselves become united and move together into action?
When it comes to salvation, our self-interest is constantly seeking to earn
merit. The more merit our self-interest seeks, the more merit it takes
away from the Lord; this theft is the ultimate injustice and ungodliness.
Briefly put, if the goodness that God produces in us were to flow into
something we wanted and did, we would pollute and desecrate that
goodness in every way, which God would never allow. We can of course
think that the goodness we do comes from God and call it God’s good-
ness acting through us, but we don’t actually understand that.”