204. "'So then, because you are lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, it shall come to pass that I vomit you out of My mouth.'" (3:16) This symbolizes their profanation and consequent separation from the Lord.

To be vomited out of My mouth means, symbolically, to be separated from the Lord, and to be separated from the Lord is consequently to be in neither heaven nor hell, but in a place apart, bereft of human life, surrounded by nothing but hallucinations. The reason is that they have mixed truths with falsities, and goods with evils, thus holy things with profane ones, to the point that these cannot be separated in them. And because a person cannot be prepared then to be in either heaven or hell, every bit of his rational life is eradicated, with only the lowest capacities of his life remaining, and when these have been separated from his life's interior capacities, they are nothing but hallucinations.

For more on the state and lot of such people, see Angelic Wisdom Regarding Divine Providence, nos. 226-228 231, which should suffice to give a concept of them.

They are said to be vomited out because after death everyone comes first into the world of spirits, which is midway between heaven and hell, and is there prepared; and this world corresponds to the stomach, in which everything ingested is prepared, either to become blood and flesh or to become excrement and urine. The first have a correspondence with heaven, the latter with hell. But whatever is vomited out of the stomach is matter not separated, but mixed together.

Because of this correspondence we find vomiting out and vomit mentioned in the following passages:

(Drink and make drunk) that your uncircumcised foreskin may be exposed. The cup... of Jehovah will come around to you, so that a disgraceful vomit is upon your glory. (Habakkuk 2:15-16)

Make (Moab) drunk..., that (he) may applaud in his vomit... (Jeremiah 48:26)

...all tables are full of vomit thrown up... To whom will he teach knowledge? (Isaiah 28:8-9)

So, too, elsewhere, as in Jeremiah 25:27, Leviticus 18:24-25, 28.

The reason lukewarm water induces vomiting is owing also to the correspondence.