Heaven and Hell (Harley) n. 355

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355. That these are such in the spiritual world when they come into it after death may be inferred from this alone, that all things that are in the natural memory and are in immediate conjunction with the things of corporeal sense (which is true of such knowledges as are mentioned above) then become quiescent; and only such rational principles as are drawn from these then serve for thought and speech. For man carries with him his entire natural memory, but its contents are not then under his view, and do not come into his thought as when he lived in the world. He can take nothing from that memory and bring it forth into spiritual light, because its contents are not objects of that light. But the rational intellectual things that man has acquired from knowledges while living in the body are in exact accord with the light of the spiritual world; consequently, so far as the spirit of man has been made rational in the world through cognitions and facts of knowledge it is to the same extent rational after being loosed from the body; for man is then a spirit, and it is the spirit that thinks in the body.# # Knowledges belong to the natural memory that man has while he is in the body (n. 5212, 9922). Man carries with him after death his whole natural memory (n. 2475) from experience (n. 2481-2486). But he is not able, as he was in the world, to draw anything out of that memory, for several reasons (n. 2476, 2477, 2479).


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