918. The fact that going out of the ark also involves a condition of freedom can be seen from remarks just above at verse 16 about going out of the ark [§905].

The nature of a spiritual person's freedom is indicated by the fact that the Lord governs such people through conscience. Those whose conscience governs them, or who act in accord with their conscience, act freely. Nothing repels them more than violating their conscience. Acting against conscience is hell to them; obeying conscience is heaven. From this anyone can see that the latter is freeing.

The Lord governs spiritual people through a conscience that shows them what is good and true. This conscience, as noted [§§310:2, 393, 875:3], is formed in the intellectual part of their mind and so is separate from the contents of their will. Since conscience is totally separate from the urges of our will, we obviously can never do anything good on our own. And since all religious truth comes from religious good, we obviously never think anything true on our own, only under the Lord's power. The appearance that we do it on our own is only an appearance. Moreover, as this is how things work, a person who is truly spiritual also acknowledges and believes it.

From this it stands to reason that the spiritual person's conscience is a gift from the Lord, that it is like a new will, and therefore that the person who has been created anew is supplied with a new will and from this a new intellect.

875. The meaning of the dove did not find a resting place for the sole of its foot as the fact that none of faith's goodness or truth could root itself can be seen from this: a dove symbolizes religious truth, and a resting place for the sole of the foot means becoming rooted. The reason it could not root itself comes up later: falsity was still overflowing. But no one can understand how the situation stands without learning how a spiritual person is reborn.

[2] Spiritual people have to have seeds of knowledge planted in their memory — knowledge of what faith is, drawn from the Lord's Word or from doctrinal precepts distilled out of it. (The ancient church acquired this knowledge from what had been revealed to the earliest church.) From the memory, their minds then need to be supplied with material for the intellect; but as long as they are awash in falsity, religious truth cannot take root, no matter how densely it has been sown. Such truth clings only to the surface, or memory, and the soil does not become suitable until falsity has been driven away so that it no longer appears, as noted before [§§842:4-5, 868:2].

[3] For spiritual people, the ground itself is prepared in the intellectual part of the mind. When preparation is complete, the Lord instills the goodness of charity and then a conscience. Conscience becomes the basis for the person's actions, or in other words, the channel through which the Lord puts into effect the goodness and truth connected with faith.

In this way, the Lord divides the workings of the intellect in a spiritual person from those of the will so that they never coalesce. If they did, it would necessarily destroy the person forever.

[4] In the people of the earliest church the two did converge, as they also do in heavenly angels; but in the people of this church they did not, nor do they in spiritual people generally.

It does look as though the neighborly good that they do comes from their will, but this is just an appearance and an illusion. All the neighborly good they do is the Lord's alone and comes through conscience rather than will. If the Lord allowed us to act from our own will one tiny bit, we would do evil instead of good, and we would do it out of hatred, vengefulness, and cruelty.

[5] The situation is similar in regard to the truth that spiritual people think and talk about. If they did not think and speak from conscience, and so from some good quality belonging to the Lord, they could never think or speak truth, except the way the Devil's horde does when impersonating angels of light.

These things are quite obvious in the other life.

This explanation shows how regeneration proceeds and what it means for spiritual people: a separation of the intellectual part of the mind from the volitional part by means of conscience. The Lord forms the conscience in their intellectual part, and the deeds that come out of it seem to come from their will, although they really come from the Lord.