8210. 'All Pharaoh's horses, his chariots, and his horsemen - into the middle of the sea' means factual knowledge belonging to a perverted understanding, doctrinal teachings upholding falsity, and reasonings - that they filled hell. This is clear from the meaning of 'Pharaoh's horses' as factual knowledge belonging to a perverted understanding, from the meaning of 'Pharaoh's chariots' as doctrinal teachings upholding falsity, and from the meaning of 'Pharaoh's horsemen' as reasonings based on these, all dealt with above in 8146, 8148; and from the meaning of 'into the middle of the sea' as filling hell.

[2] The reason why these three that were constituents of Pharaoh's army - horses, chariots, and horsemen - are now mentioned again here is that the final state in the vastation of those belonging to the Church who have championed faith separated from charity and led a life of evil is now at hand. This state is one of being cast into hell; and being cast into hell is being crowded around by falsities arising from evil. For when all the truth and goodness residing with the evil have been laid waste and those people have been abandoned to the evil and the falsity arising from it that have ruled their lives, the hells with which they have been in contact through the evils ruling their lives are opened. From there all the evils which they have made their own rapidly converge on them, and the falsities which well out of the evils constitute then the sphere surrounding them, a sphere which looks like a thick cloud, or like water. Once all this has taken place they are in hell, for now they have been shut off from all contact with heaven, and also have been separated from other hells.

[3] The expression 'being cast into hell' is used to mean this. This is the reason why the horses, chariots, and horsemen are mentioned now, when they went into the middle of the sea; for as has been stated, 'the Sea Suph' means hell, and 'horses, chariots, and horsemen' all the falsities and everything constituting falsity arising from evil which were loosed onto those people, in order that the falsity arising from evil, by its very nature, might separate them from all other hells. These are the matters which are dealt with specifically in verses 24-28 that immediately follow.

5173. In the next life very many ways of harrying people are employed, and also very many methods that involve introducing them into a kind of spiralling. Harryings are represented in the body by the purifications of the blood, also the serum or lymph as well as the chyle, which too are accomplished by various refining processes, while introductions into spiralling are represented by the subsequent assignment of those refined fluids to particular services. It is very common in the next life for spirits to be brought, after they have been harried, into a state of tranquillity and delight, and then to be brought to those communities which they are to be introduced into and become attached to.

[2] The idea that the refining processes and purifications of the blood, serum, and chyle, and also of the food in the stomach, correspond to such processes in the spiritual world is bound to seem strange to those who presume that natural things hold no more than what is natural within them, and even stranger to those who are quite convinced that this is so and accordingly deny that anything spiritual, active or reactive, does or can lie within natural things. Yet the reality is that every single thing in the natural world and its three kingdoms possesses something acting into it from the spiritual world. If this were not so, nothing whatever in the natural world could accomplish any cause and effect, and therefore nothing would be brought forth. That which natural things hold within them from the spiritual world is described as a force implanted since creation began; but in fact it is an endeavour, and when that endeavour ceases, action or motion ceases. All this demonstrates that the whole visible world is a theatre representative of the spiritual world.

[3] The case is the same with the movement of the muscles and consequent action. Unless the movement of them held within it an endeavour originating in the person's thought and will, it would instantly cease; for laws well known to the learned world state that when the endeavour ceases so does the movement, and also that the person's entire direction of mind is present within the endeavour, as well as that nothing real other than the endeavour expresses itself within the movement. The force or endeavour within the action or movement is, it is plain, something spiritual within something natural; for thought and will are spiritual activities, whereas action and movement are natural ones. People whose thought does not extend beyond the natural world have no grasp of this at all; yet they are not able to deny it. Nevertheless what exists in the will, and from there in the thought, is the producer of the action, though it is not similar in form to the action which it produces. For the action merely represents what the mind wills and thinks.