Very often I have been prompted to tell spirits on whom evil had been afflicted that they are the cause of the evil [see 2438, 2776, 2905], and that vice or evil has this with it, or inherent in the evil is the property that it twists back upon him in a remarkable manner, this being precisely the law of retaliation. For such as the evil is, and such as he is who commits the evil, such is the evil twisted back upon him, or which returns to him. Let there be this one example of how it works, though it happens in an infinite number of ways: certain ones wanted to annoy me in sleep and take away all my sleep, so there were others who were annoying them the whole night, and I was sleeping. Thus they were the cause of this evil, and it was being twisted back upon them as an evil of retaliation. It is different in other cases, depending on the evil and him to whom the evil belongs. 1748, 25 Aug.