Souls and spirits can never understand that a person can see and be convinced from the Lord, what should be thought, spoken and done; for they do not believe any other insights are possible than those which spring from themselves or from what is their own. Thus they never wanted to acknowledge that such inner sight exists - even those who were quite sharp, or clever, in the life of the body, and in the afterlife, and seem to themselves able to penetrate and to understand every single subject.

Whenever this sight and conviction came under discussion, they could not conceive otherwise than that if their own or proper self were absent, then they would no longer exist, but that it would be someone else who was thinking, speaking, doing, so that one would be like a kind of implement, in which there was nothing living, like a wooden machine or something of that kind. For they cannot conceive of any life other than the life that is their own, thinking that if this were taken away, they would either not be alive at all, or, as one is now saying, be too stupid ever to be a soul or spirit.