354. I have been allowed to talk with many scholars after their departure from our world, with some who were quite renowned and celebrated throughout the learned world for their publications, as well as with some who were not so well known but who still had within themselves a hidden wisdom.

The ones who at heart denied the Deity, whether or not they acknowledged the Deity out loud, had become so stupid that they could scarcely understand any civic truth, let alone any spiritual truth. I could both comprehend and see that the inner levels of their minds were so shut off that they looked inky black (things like this are made visible in the spiritual world), and that this meant they could not bear any heavenly light or let in any inflow from heaven. The blackness that enveloped their deeper levels was greater and more extensive for people who had convinced themselves of their opposition to the Divine by means of their secular scholarship.

In the other life, people like this gladly accept anything false. They soak it up like a sponge soaking up water; and they repel anything true the way something bony and springy repels anything that falls on it. It is also said that if people convince themselves of their opposition to the Divine and their advocacy of nature, their deeper levels actually become bony. Their heads even look callused, as though they were made of ebony, and this reaches all the way to their noses, a sign that they no longer have any perception.

People like this are sunk in quagmires that look like swamps, where they are pestered by the hallucinations that their falsities turn into. Their hellfire is their craving for glory and fame, which leads them to denounce each other and to torment with hellish zeal anyone who does not worship them as gods. They do this to each other by turns.

This is what becomes of all earthly learning that does not accept light from heaven into itself by our acknowledgment of the Divine.

6624. Since man thinks on the level of the senses such things are obscure to him, so obscure indeed that he does not know what an idea is, in particular that thought is distinguished into separate ideas as speech is into words. For to man thought seems to be continuous, without separate parts; but in actual fact ideas constituting thought are the words that spirits use, and ideas constituting more internal thought are the words that angels use. And because ideas are the words they use to speak with, they are audible among spirits and angels. This explains why man's silent thought can be heard by spirits and angels, when it pleases the Lord that it should be. How perfect the ideas constituting thought are in comparison with the words composing speech may be recognized from the fact that a person can think more in a minute than he can speak or write in an hour. I have also recognized it from conversations with spirits and angels; for at such times I have in a single moment filled in the broad outlines of a subject with specific details, while my affection was engaged. The angels and spirits grasped every distinct detail, and many more that manifested themselves around that subject like a cloud.