3347. I have heard angels talking about human minds, and about their thought and the speech that flows from it. They compared them to a person's external form which nevertheless derives its being and is kept in being from countless forms that are within, such as the brains, medullary areas, lungs, heart, liver, pancreas, spleen, stomach, and intestines, in addition to many others, such as those devoted in both sexes to begetting offspring; and around these countless muscles, and at last the outer coverings. All of these in turn are composed of vessels and fibres, and indeed of vessels and fibres within vessels and fibres, from which ducts and smaller forms are derived. Thus a person's external form is derived from countless parts, all of which nevertheless contribute, each in its own way, to the composition of the external form in which nothing of the things that are within shows itself.
[2] It was to this form - the external form - that the angels were comparing human minds, and their thoughts and speech flowing from these. But angelic minds they compared to the things that are within, which in comparison with those that make up the human mind are unlimited and also beyond comprehension. They also compared the ability to think to the ability which organs have to act according to the form which the fibres take. They said that this ability belonged not to the fibres but to the life within the fibres, just as the ability to think does not belong to the mind but to the life from the Lord that is flowing into it When they are being made by angels such comparisons also at the same time manifest themselves in representatives, by means of which the interior forms referred to are presented both visually and mentally, and within an instant, even as to the smallest incomprehensible parts. But the comparisons which are made by means of spiritual and celestial things, such as those made among celestial angels, are immensely superior in the beauty of wisdom to those comparisons which are made by means of natural things.
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