328. After this we went apart and had another conversation on this subject. I said that these distinctions arise solely 'because you, being in the spiritual world and therefore spiritual yourselves, are at the substantial,* but not the material level, and substantial things are the starting points of material things. You are at the level of beginnings and therefore singulars, but we are at the level of derivatives and compounds. You are at the level of particulars, but we are at the level of general ideas. Just as general ideas cannot enter into particulars, so natural things, which are material, cannot enter into spiritual things, which are substantial. It is exactly as a ship's rope cannot enter into or be pulled through the eye of a sewing needle, or as a nerve cannot enter or be inserted into one of the fibres of which it is composed, nor can a fibre enter into one of the fibrils of which it is composed. This fact is also well known in the world, and it is therefore agreed by learned men that the natural cannot influence the spiritual, but the spiritual can the natural. This then is the reason why the natural man cannot think the thoughts of the spiritual man, and so neither can he express them. Paul therefore calls what he was told from the third heaven "beyond description" [2 Cor. 12:4].
[2] 'A further point is that thinking spiritually means thinking without using time and space; thinking naturally involves time and space. For every idea of natural thought has something of time and space clinging to it, but no spiritual idea has this. This is because the spiritual world is not in space and time, as the natural world is, though it has the appearance of both of them. Thoughts and perceptions there also differ in this respect. You are therefore able to think about God's essence and omnipresence from eternity, that is, about God before the creation of the world, because you think about God's essence from eternity with no idea of time, and about His omnipresence with no idea of space. Thus you can grasp ideas which are far beyond the ideas of the natural man.'
[3] I went on to relate how I had once thought about God's essence and omnipresence from eternity, that is, about God before the creation of the world, and because I could not yet banish time and space from the ideas I thought about, I became worried, since the idea of nature came up in place of God. But I was told, 'Banish the ideas of space and time, and you will see.' Then I was granted the power to banish them, and I did see. From that time on I have been able to think about God from eternity without any notion of nature from eternity, because God is non-temporally in all time and non-spatially in all space. Nature with its time and space must inevitably have a beginning and origin, but not so God, who is not in time and space. Nature therefore is from God, not from eternity, but exists in time, that is, together with its properties of time and space taken together. * i.e. composed of substance, believed to underlie all forms of matter.
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