353. Man has use of a double memory, and how the double memory passes away

The memory people actually call memory is a memory at the level of nature, because it belongs to the earthly mind and is a memory of personal matters or material mental imagery corresponding with words. This memory passes away when a person dies. His soul retains the ability to reason and understand due to a certain spiritual memory, or a memory of rational or immaterial ideas, as it is called. It is this latter memory that causes the illusion that one is still in the life of the body. But because this memory was born from the earthly memory, it is filled with fallacies and continues to trouble, to obscure, and if left to itself, to distort truths, so that also this memory gradually disappears to the point where the reasoning power born from it passes away. Nevertheless, this memory is still retained and the person is instructed in the higher knowledge of truth, until the time when it can be erased. Finally, the human being remains, insofar as it is a human being, which means the remaining part together with the acquired part. This is the soil wherein new or heavenly seed is sown, and out of it arises the new human being, or in the human being the heavenly paradise, with all heavenly happiness, peace and innocence. 1747, 15 December.