2288. That 'Abraham returned to his place' means that the Lord returned to the state which had been His before He perceived these matters is clear from the representation of 'Abraham' in this chapter as the Lord when the human state existed with Him, and from the meaning of 'place' as state, dealt with in Volume One, in 1273, 1378. Thus here 'returning to his place' in the internal sense means returning to the state which had been His previously. The fact that the Lord had two kinds of states when He lived in the world - the state of humiliation and the state of glorification - has been stated and shown already. His state of humiliation occurred when He was in the human, which He had derived by heredity from the mother, His state of glorification when He was in the Divine, which He possessed from Jehovah His Father. The former state, namely that of the human derived from the mother, the Lord cast off completely and He took on a Divine Human when He passed out of the world and returned to the Divine itself which had been His from eternity, John 17:5, together with the Human that had been made Divine, from both of which the Holy proceeding exists that fills the whole heaven. Thus from the Divine itself and the Divine Human through the Holy that proceeds from these He governs the universe.

1378. I have learned both through talking to angels and through actual experience that spirits, as spirits, are not, so far as the organic substances which constitute their bodies are concerned, in the place where they seem to be, but are possibly far away, and yet they still appear there. I know that people who allow themselves to be swayed by illusions will not believe it, but this is nevertheless the truth. This has been illustrated to spirits who have believed nothing to be true which they did not see with their eyes, even though this were sheer illusion, by means of something comparable to that found with men in the world. Take for example the sound of someone's voice in another person's ear. Unless that person knew how to distinguish sounds - something he has learned from experience to do since infancy - and unless he saw him at a distance, he would inevitably believe the speaker to be right next to his ear. The same applies in the case of someone beholding objects remote from himself. Unless he saw at the same time other objects in between and so knew from these, or inferred the distance from what he already knew, he would imagine a distant object to be right next to his eye. This is all the more true of the speech of spirits, which is interior speech, and also of their sight, which is interior sight.

[2] The spirits were also told that when plain experience suggested something they ought not therefore to doubt it, even less to deny it, because it did not appear to be so to the senses and they were unable to perceive it. Even in the world of nature many things exist which are contrary to the illusions of the senses, but which people believe because of what visible experience teaches them. Take for example sailing round the world. People who allow themselves to be swayed by illusions would believe that a boat and its crew would fall off the edge when they got to the other side, and that people in the antipodes could never stand on their feet. The same applies to this and many other things in the next life which are contrary to the illusions of the senses but are nevertheless true - for example, the fact that man does not possess life of himself but from the Lord, and many other things. These and other considerations have enabled disbelieving spirits to be brought to believe that it is indeed so.