157. Internal Meaning of Ezekiel, Chapter 34

1-4 Respecting teachers who regard their own good only, and not the good of the church. (2)

5-6 In consequence those who are of the church come into an evil life. (2)

7-10 Being such, everything of the church is taken from them. (3)

11-16 When the Lord comes into the world He will gather the church together, and will teach it Divine truths. (11, 11)

16-17 The evil among them He will separate. (3, 11)

18-20 Evil shepherds destroy everything of the church, (3)

21 and destroy the simple. (3, 6)

22-25 When the Lord comes He will teach and save these. (1, 11)

26-31 He will both teach them and protect them from falsities, and they will acknowledge Him. (11)

6622. In talking to spirits about what flows into ideas constituting thought I have said that men cannot by any means believe how countless the details are that an idea holds within it, for men have no conception of thought except as something simple and singular. Thus their judgement of the matter is based on quite external evidence. The spirits to whom I was talking at that time subscribed to the belief that ideas did not have anything inwardly present in them, a belief of which they had become convinced during their lifetime. But to enable them to understand that they perceived countless things as a single whole, I was led to tell them that the movements of millions of motor fibres combine to produce a single action. At the same time all things in the body work together and adjust themselves both collectively and individually to produce that action. Yet for all this that small action is seen as one that is simple and singular, as though it possessed no such complexity. It is similar with the countless things which combine to produce a single spoken word, such as the bending of the lips, and of all the muscles and fibres there; also the movements of the tongue, throat, larynx, trachea, lungs, and diaphragm, together with all their muscles collectively and individually. Since a person discerns the single utterance they make merely as a simple sound without anything more to it, one may see how crude is perception that relies on the senses. What then of perception that relies on sensory evidence regarding ideas constituting thought which exist in a purer world and are accordingly quite remote from the sensory level?