7648. 'And your houses will be filled, and the houses of all your servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians' means that falsity will reign in every single thing in the natural from the inner part of it to the outermost. This is clear from the meaning of 'being filled' as reigning, dealt with below; and from the meaning of 'Pharaoh's houses, the houses of all his servants, and the houses of all the Egyptians' as every single thing in the natural, dealt with in 7753, 7355, at this point from the inner part of it to the outermost, in keeping with the explanation above in 7645. The reason why 'being filled' means reigning is that when a person's mind is filled with falsities arising from evils, filled so completely that leading others astray by means of falsities and doing evil give him delight, he is said to be ruled by this delight; and the actual affection that controls him is called his reigning affection. That which fills a person's entire mind, that is, both his thought and his will, is said to reign everywhere; what a person loves above all else and has as his end in view reigns in that universal way. It is present within every smallest part of his will and thought. What it is exactly that reigns everywhere may be recognized from the person's pleasure when he attains his ends, or his disappointment when he does not. That which reigns everywhere in a person shapes the contours of his spirit; the face of his spirit is in exact accord with it. If evil and falsity reign, his spirit is clothed with a devilish form; but if goodness and truth reign the form is angelic. For regarded in itself the spirit is affection embodied in a form; and the dominant affection is the essential form itself, while all its other affections adapt themselves to this.

7645. 'And one will not be able to see the land' means a darkening of the whole natural mind as a result. This is clear from the meaning of 'not being able to see as a darkening, that is, the failure to perceive truth; and from the meaning of 'the land of Egypt' as the natural mind, as above in 7644. But a brief statement must be made to explain why, when the outermost contents of the natural are laid waste, the whole natural mind is darkened as a result. The interior parts of a person's mind reach down into and are based on its lowest and outermost levels, where all its consecutive parts reside together. When there is nothing on the lowest levels but falsity and evil, truths and forms of good flowing from the interior parts into those lowest levels are flowing into evils and falsities there, as a consequence of which they are themselves turned into evils and falsities there. Therefore nothing but falsity and evil is apparent in the whole of the natural. This is what a darkening of the whole natural mind as a result, meant by 'not being able to see the land', describes. Here also is the reason why, when they have undergone vastation, hellish spirits are limited to the outermost parts of the natural. The inferior light they have, which is called the light of understanding, is not unlike the inferior light of this world, which in the next life becomes utterly thick darkness at the presence of the superior light of heaven. Since the outermost part of the natural, called the level of the senses, is filled with illusions and resulting falsities, and with self-indulgence and resulting evils, 6844, 6845, and since the hells are lit by that inferior light, the Lord provides a person when he is being regenerated with the ability to be raised above that level of the senses to more internal levels, see 6187, 6317, 7442.