977. Inner Meaning

BECAUSE the subject under discussion here is people who have been reborn, a brief statement needs to be made explaining what they are like compared to unregenerate people. From this comparison the character of the one kind and of the other can be recognized.

Regenerate people have a conscience for what is good and true; conscience moves them to do good, and conscience moves them to think truly. The good they do is the good associated with charity, and the truth they think is the truth embraced by faith. People who are not regenerate do not have a conscience. If they do, it is not a conscience that requires them to do what is good out of kindness, or to think what is true because they believe it, but to do so out of some form of love for themselves or the material world. They have either a false conscience or a distorted one.

Regenerate people feel joy when they do what conscience bids, and distress when forced to act or think against conscience. With the unregenerate, on the other hand, this is not so. Most do not know what conscience is, much less what obeying conscience or violating it is. They only know how to live by principles that advance their own interests, which gives them joy. Going against these principles creates distress for them.

[2] Regenerate people have a new will and a new intellect. The new will and intellect are their conscience, or rather exist in their conscience, through which the Lord puts neighborly kindness and religious truth to work. People who have not been reborn do not have a will but appetite instead, and are therefore attracted to every kind of evil. They do not have true intellect but shallow logic, and therefore sink into every kind of falsity.

Regenerate people have heavenly and spiritual life, but unregenerate people have only bodily ¹ and worldly life. Any ability the unregenerate have to think about and understand what is good and true derives from the Lord's life force. This force comes by way of the remnant [of truth and goodness] described earlier [§§561, 661:2], which gives them the capacity to reflect.

[3] In regenerate people, the inner self is in charge and the outer self obeys. In people who have not been reborn, the outer self is in charge, while the inner self retires and seems to disappear.

Regenerate people recognize what the inner self is and what the outer self is, or at least they can recognize it if they ponder. People who are not regenerate have no idea at all what the inner and outer self are. They cannot tell even if they think about it, because they have no idea what the goodness and truth of a faith based on kindness is.

All this evidence shows what the regenerate person is like and what the unregenerate one is like — that they are as different as summer and winter, or light and darkness. So the regenerate person is a living individual, while the unregenerate one is a dead individual.

Footnotes:

49. 5. If it is possible for married partners to live together, they remain partners. But if it is not possible, they separate, the husband sometimes separating from the wife, the wife sometimes from the husband, and both of them sometimes from each other. The reason separations occur after death is that unions formed on earth are seldom formed on the basis of any internal perception of love, but as the result of an external perception which conceals the internal one.

An external perception of love takes its cause and origin from such things as have to do with love of the world and love of one's own person. Love of the world is concerned primarily with wealth and possessions, and love of one's own person with positions of rank and honor. In addition to these, there are also various other attractions that entice into marriage, such as good looks and a pretended elegance of manners. Sometimes even a lack of chastity attracts.

Furthermore, marriages are also contracted in the area, city or town of one's birth or residence, where the only choice possible is confined and limited to the households one knows, and there only with people of a station matching one's own.

As a result, marriages entered into in the world are for the most part external marriages, and not at the same time internal, even though it is the internal union or union of souls that makes a real marriage. And that internal union is not discernible until a person has put off his external character and taken on his internal character, which happens after death.

That, now, is why separations then occur, followed by new unions formed with partners of a similar and compatible nature - unless unions like this were provided on earth, which happens in the case of people who from their youth had loved, desired and sought from the Lord a lawful and lovely partnership with one, and who spurn and reject roving lusts as an offense to the nostrils.