Today, as often before, evil spirits and demons with their sharp darts, so to speak, of thoughts-which no human being [can] know about, consequently [cannot] believe possible, or that such spirits exist-were continually provoking me, while in fact holding me in my more pleasant [states]. Thus it was the kind of spirits that act with forethought [2848-9, 2855-7]-but spirits, not demons, which are worse. They act on nothing but things that do not come into a person's conscious thought, only on the mental imagery as a detail, so that one cannot be aware that such spirits have put their own things into one's mental imagery. For from the detail, while intent on it, one cannot judge unless one is aware. Such are the deceitful and evil in the inward world of spirits, namely that they take the smallest mental images, which people consider and call simple, as their effects, as I have been allowed to learn from much live experience. Human beings, while they are earthly humans, although they are of this nature still do not know that such inward earthly thinking exists. When they become spirits in the other life, they then know whether in such a detail there are indeed evil and deceitful spirits, for they then come into the conscious exercise of such thinking, and are aware.