215. The fact that our selfhood is nothing but evil and falsity has become clear to me from experience with spirits. Everything they have said to me on their own authority has been so consistently evil and false that I have only had to know they were speaking on their own in order to realize immediately that what they were saying was false. Yet the spirits themselves were so sure of the truth of their assertions that they never doubted them. People on earth who resemble them do the same.

Similarly there have been people who take to debating what constitutes spiritual and heavenly life, or faith, and they always succumb to doubt and even denial, as I have been allowed to see. To cavil about faith is to doubt and deny. Because such people reason from themselves or from a self-centered point of view, they stumble into undiluted falsity and so into an abyss of darkness — that is, of falsity. While they are in this abyss, the slightest objection overpowers a thousand truths, like a speck of dirt sitting on the pupil of the eye that prevents a viewer from seeing the universe and everything in it.

Of these people the Lord says in Isaiah:

Doom to those who are wise in their own eyes and discerning in their own sight! (Isaiah 5:21)

In the same author:

Your wisdom and your knowledge turned you away, and you said in your heart, "I am, and there is no one else besides me." But evil whose origin you do not know will come upon you; and a catastrophe that you will not be able to atone for will fall upon you; and a devastation that you do not know will come upon you speedily. (Isaiah 47:10-11)

In Jeremiah:

All people have been made stupid by their knowledge, all metalsmiths have been put to shame by their carved images, because their cast images are a lie and have no breath in them. (Jeremiah 51:17)

Carved images stand for the falsity we adopt as our own, and cast images, for the evil we adopt as our own.