5883. Come ye near to me I pray. That this signifies interior communication, is evident from the signification of “coming near,” as being to communicate more closely, which when predicated of the external relatively to the internal is to communicate more interiorly. A man knows not that communication with the natural or exterior man is interior and exterior, for the reason that he has not formed for himself any idea of the internal man, and of its life being distinct from the life of the external man. Of the internal man he has no other idea than that it is within, not at all distinct from the external, when yet they are so distinct that the internal can be separated from the external, and can live the life which it lived before, but purer, which also actually takes place when the man dies, for then the internal is separated from the external, and the internal which lives after the separation is what is then called the spirit. But this is the very man himself who lived in the body, and also appears to himself and to others in the other life like a man in this world, having his whole form, from the head to the heel. And he is also endowed with the same faculties with which a man in the world is endowed, namely, of feeling when he is touched, of smelling, of seeing, of hearing, of speaking, and of thinking; insomuch that when he does not reflect upon the fact that he is in the other life, he supposes that he is in his body in the world, as I have sometimes heard said by spirits. From these things it is plain what man’s internal and external are. If an idea be thus formed concerning them, the things which have so often been said in the explications about the internal and the external man will become somewhat clearer, as well as what is meant by the interior communication which is here signified by “Come ye near to me I pray.”