2548. The faculties of spirits surpassing the faculties of earthly humans
Besides the fact that spirits put on everything pertaining to the human memory, are skilled in human languages, and discern human thoughts, there are also those who discern the inward thoughts. They see at once whatever is portrayed to them and understand in a moment things that would require a long period of time to express, and yet could never be seen and understood like those seen in the world. These are matters abstract from bodily elements and things of the world, and when portrayed by a spiritual idea together with their symbolic ideographs-conveying only imaginatively what they symbolize, what is faintly or secretly within them-they at once quite fully understand, thus instantaneously, things that cannot be expressed in an hour of speaking.