494. It is essential, however, to understand that what stays with us are the spiritual matters related to the Word and the church that we drink in with love and support with our intellect. This does not happen to the same extent with civil and political matters. Spiritual matters ascend into the highest region of the mind and take shape there, because that is the level where the Lord enters us, bringing divine forms of truth and goodness. That level is like a temple that he inhabits. Civil and political matters, because they have to do with the world, occupy lower areas of the mind. Some of them are like smaller buildings outside the temple, and some are like points of entry into it.

The reason why spiritual matters related to the church dwell in the highest region of the mind is that they belong to our soul and exist to serve our eternal life. Our soul exists on the highest level and its nourishment comes exclusively from spiritual food. This is why the Lord refers to himself as bread. He says, "I am the living bread that comes down from heaven. Anyone who eats this bread will live forever" (John 6:51). Our love, which is the source of our blessedness after death, also dwells on that level; and our free choice in spiritual matters principally resides there.

All the freedom we enjoy in earthly matters comes down from this higher freedom; and because freedom originates there, it has a share in all the free choices we make in earthly matters. From among our earthly options, the love that is dominant in us on the highest level selects everything that is well suited to itself. That higher freedom is present the way a spring is present in all the water that flows from it, or the way the fertility of a seed is present in each and every part of the tree that results from it - especially the fruit, in which the seed renews itself.

All those who deny and reject free choice in spiritual matters, however, tap into another water source and give it an outlet in themselves. They turn spiritual freedom first into a freedom that is merely earthly, and finally into a freedom that is hellish. This freedom too is like the fertility of a seed, and it too passes freely through trunk and branches into fruits, but those fruits are rotten inside because of the source from which they sprang.