2163. 'Recline under the tree' means towards the perception of the state through which He was passing. This is clear from the meaning of 'a tree' as perception, dealt with in 103. The whole train of thought shows that this is the real meaning here. 'Trees' means perceptions, and the reason for this was that the celestial man was compared and likened to the paradise or garden in Eden, and therefore the perceptions of celestial things with that man to the trees that were there.

1385. There are spirits who belong to the province of the skin, especially its scaly area, who wish to reason about everything, but who have no perception of what good or truth is. Indeed, the more they go on reasoning the less they perceive. They identify reasoning with wisdom; and they do this so that they may appear wise. They have been told that angelic wisdom involves perceiving whether a thing is good or true without reasoning about it, but they have no conception of the possibility of a perception such as this. They are people who during their lifetime had thrown truth and good into confusion by means of scientific and philosophical arguments, and in so doing had seemed to themselves to be more learned than everybody else; but they had not in the first place grasped from the Word any basic ideas of truth, as a result of which they possess less common sense than anybody else