8909. Verse 17 You shall not covet your neighbour's house; you shall not covet your neighbour's wife, nor his male slave nor his female slave, nor his ox nor his ass, nor anything that is your neighbour's means that one must be on one's guard against self-love and love of the world, and so one must take care to prevent the evils contained in the preceding commandments from becoming present in the will and consequently going out of it.

7542. 'Onto your heart' means into what is inmost. This is clear from the meaning of 'heart' as that which belongs to a person's will, thus to his love, dealt with in 2930, 3317, 3888, 3889, consequently what is central to the actual life within him; for his love, belonging intrinsically to his will, constitutes that life within him. This is why 'heart' means what is inmost. What is inmost in the case of the good is love to the Lord and love towards the neighbour, whereas what is inmost in the case of the evil is self-love and love of the world. The latter is what is meant here; and what is around it, constituting so to speak the surrounding parts, are the evils and falsities that lend support, arranged into order according to the ways in which they support it. In the next life they are brought out into the open in the order in which they have been arranged. First to come forth are those that occupy the outermost surrounding parts, then those that lie further in; and finally what is inmost is revealed. So it is that a person in the next life passes through a large number of states, and that the evil are afflicted in successive stages by scourges or plagues before they are cast into hell, as accords with what has been stated immediately above. What is inmost, which they come to last of all, is hell itself residing with them, for it is the evil that had been central to their love, and so the end which they held in view in everything they did and which in the world they had kept deeply hidden within them.

1387. I have spoken on several occasions about perception to those in the next life who, while they lived in the world, imagined that they had the ability to see into and understand all things. I told them that angels perceive that they think and speak, will and act, from the Lord; but they were still unable to envisage what perception was, for they imagined that if all things flowed in from Him in that way they would be bereft of all life. They would be bereft of it because they would not think anything from themselves or from their proprium - in which activity they made life consist - and so it would be another who did the thinking and not they themselves, so that they would be organs without any life in them. They were told however that so far as life is concerned the difference between having perception and not having it is like the difference between darkness and light, and that people first begin to feel alive when they are receiving such perception, for in that case they live from the Lord yet also have a proprium, which is imparted to them together with every happiness and delight. They were also shown from much experience what perception really was, during which time they acknowledged the existence of it. But after a while they again had no knowledge of it, and doubted and denied its existence. This made clear how difficult it is for man to grasp what perception is.