946. I have spoken to spirits about the fact that few people probably are going to believe that so many things such as these exist in the next life, the reason for that unbelief being that man has no more than a very general and hazy concept, amounting to none at all, about his life after death, a concept which people have confirmed for themselves from the fact that they do not see the soul or spirit with their eyes. This applies to the learned too. Though they refer to the existence of the soul or spirit, their belief in these is even less than that of sensory-minded people because they cling to artificial words and terms which do more to obscure and even extinguish the understanding of things, and also because they study only themselves and the world, and rarely the common good and heaven. Spirits whom I have spoken to have been amazed that man should be like this, even though he knows that nature itself and each of its kingdoms contain so many wonderful and varied things of which he is ignorant. Take just the human ear, for example. A whole book could be written about the remarkable and unheard of aspects of it, in whose existence everybody has faith. But if anything is said about the spiritual world, the source of every single thing in the realms of nature, scarcely anyone believes it, on account, as has been stated, of the preconceived and confirmed opinion that it has no existence because it is invisible.

937. All this evidence shows the nature of the Word of the Lord in the internal sense. What appears in the sense of the letter is so gross that nothing more can be recognized than statements about seedtime and harvest, cold and heat, summer and winter, and day and night. Yet these phrases embody the arcana of the Ancient or spiritual Church. Such is the nature of the actual words in the sense of the letter, so that they are like very general vessels, every single one of which contains so many and such vast heavenly arcana that not even one ten-thousandth can possibly be brought to the surface. For while man can see scarcely anything, angels are enabled from the Lord to see with unending variety, in those very general words based on earthly images, the whole process of regeneration, and the state both of those who have yet to be regenerated and of those who are regenerated.