Verses 1-7. Hereditary good nature will not avail for regeneration.

Verses 8-15. The character is not made spiritual by external worship.

Verses 14-15. The loss of self-confidence.

Verses 16-23. The soul must not remain in a state of falsified truths, but pass beyond them.

Verses 24-37. The destruction of the domination of self-love in the external mind.

27. Verse 9 And God said, Let the waters under heaven be gathered together to one place, and let the dry land appear; and it was so.

Once a person knows of the existence of the internal man and of the external man, and knows that, contrary to appearance, truths and goods flow in from the internal man, or from the Lord by way of the internal into the external, then the things residing in him as cognitions of truth and good are stored away in his memory and registered among the facts there. For anything that finds its way into the memory or the external man, whether natural, spiritual, or celestial, lodges there as known fact, and from that place it is brought out by the Lord. These cognitions are 'the waters gathered together to one place' and are called 'seas'. But the external man itself is called 'the dry land' and immediately afterwards 'earth', as in the verses that follow.