761. I have already said [§§741, 751] that spiritual struggle is a battle inside us between the evil spirits and angels present with us, and that we sense this conflict indistinctly in our conscience.

Further vital information about this combat is that angels constantly defend us and deflect the evil that the evil spirits intend against us. They even defend the falsity and evil we have in us, because they know very well where we obtained the falsity and evil: from evil spirits and demons. We never produce anything misguided or wicked out of ourselves. It is the evil spirits with us who produce it and at the same time cause us to believe that it comes from us. Such is their malevolence. What is more, at the same instant that they are filling us with these things and making us believe this way, they are also accusing and condemning us. I can back this claim with many different experiences.

Those lacking faith in the Lord cannot receive light dispelling this belief that they are the source of evil, so they adopt the evil as their own and become just like the evil spirits who accompany them. That is the human condition.

As angels are aware of this, during the trials of regeneration they even defend our falsity and evil. Otherwise we would suffer defeat, since we have nothing in us that is not evil and therefore false and are accordingly nothing more than a heap and conglomeration of evils and resulting falsities.

751. The subject under discussion here is the trials of the people in the new church called Noah, but few if any know what goes on in times of trial because few today experience them. Those who do are wholly convinced that it is something inherent in themselves that causes them to suffer. In consequence, let me offer a brief explanation of the matter here.

During such times it is evil spirits who stir up our falsities and evil, as mentioned [§§653, 705:3, 711, 741]. From our memory they stir up everything we have ever considered or committed since childhood. Evil spirits are able to do this with such consummate skill and malice that words cannot describe it. The angels who accompany us, though, bring out the goodness and truth that we have and use it to defend us. The conflict between the parties is what we sense and feel, and it causes our conscience to gnaw at us and torment us.

[2] There are two kinds of trial, one testing the intellect, and the other the will. In struggles involving our intellectual processes, evil spirits stir up only the following: the wrong we have done (symbolized here by the unclean animals), for which they accuse and condemn us; our good deeds (symbolized by the clean animals), which they twist in a thousand ways; our thoughts (symbolized by the birds); and the things symbolized by the animals creeping on the ground. A struggle of this kind is mild, and we perceive it only as the memory of such things, along with a kind of resulting anxiety.

[3] A struggle involving the urges of our will, on the other hand, does not stimulate the memory of our thoughts and deeds in this way. Rather, wicked demons (a name for evil spirits of this type) kindle in us the cravings and vile kinds of love that already permeate us, and so they attack us with our own longings. This they manage so malevolently and covertly that no one could ever believe it was their doing. It takes them only a moment to infiltrate the vital energy that lies behind our longings. In almost no time they change and redirect our desire for goodness and truth into a desire for evil and falsity. We end up totally unaware that this event did not happen on its own, that it did not unfold spontaneously. This kind of trial is very severe, and we perceive it as an excruciating, burning pain inside. It will be discussed below [§§755-757, 760, 845].

The truth of all this I was privileged to see and recognize from repeated experience. I also learned when it was that evil spirits and demons poured and flooded in, where they came from, who they were, and what their methods were. These experiences too will later be described individually, by the Lord's divine mercy. ¹

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