Plants in the Bible generally represent facts, knowledge that can be gleaned from the world. Plants that can serve animals as food represent facts that have the potential to be put to use, ones that can lead to something good. A pasture, then, is an area that offers a great deal of this sort of useful, life-building knowledge. "Pasture" is often used as a verb in the Bible as well; to pasture animals means teaching people facts that can help them do what is good in life.

6317. Once there were present with me some spirits who had been called learned when they had been people living in the world. They were taken back to their state of thought when they had been in the body; and what they had thought then was communicated to me, in particular their thought about spirits. The nature of their thought was such that they could never have been led to believe that a spirit was endowed with any sensory power; and all else they had thought about spirits or souls after death was devoid of any real quality. The reason for this was that they had considered the body to be the place where life resides and by the use of factual evidence and philosophical arguments had set themselves firmly against any idea that their spirit or soul would have life after death. As a consequence they had closed the interior parts of their minds, to which they then could not possibly have been raised. If, after they had set themselves against ideas about what belongs to life after death, they had then been told absolute truths, they would in their response to those truths have been like blind people with no sight and deaf ones with no hearing. Some of those people are also scornful, increasingly so the more they think they are wiser than others. But uneducated people who have been governed by the good of faith are not like them, for they have not used factual evidence or philosophical arguments to set themselves firmly against things of the Church, and on account of that they enjoy broader and clearer perception. And because they have not closed the interior parts of their minds they have the ability to accept what is good and true.