5511. 'Hard words to us' means that no joining together with this took place because no agreement existed. This is clear from the meaning of 'speaking hard words', when used to refer to the internal in relation to the external separated from it, as no joining together because no agreement existed, dealt with above in 5422, 5423. For if no agreement of the external with the internal exists, everything in the internal and coming from the internal seems 'hard' to the external, because the two are not joined together. Take for example a situation in which the internal, that is, someone living in his internal, declares that nothing at all of a person's thought begins in himself, but that his thought comes to him either from heaven (that is, from the Lord by way of heaven) or else from hell: he declares that any thought he has of good comes from the Lord by way of heaven, while any thought of evil comes from hell. Such an idea seems to be a thoroughly 'hard' one to anyone who wants what he thinks to come from himself and who believes that if that 'hard' idea is true, he is nothing. Yet that idea is absolutely true, and all in heaven perceive it to be so.
[2] It is similarly the case when the internal, or those living in their internal, declare that the joy experienced by the angels originates in love to the Lord and charity towards the neighbour, that is to say, when they are actually engaged in performing deeds of love and charity, and that those deeds hold within them so much joy and happiness that these are beyond description. This will come as a 'hard' idea to those whose joy springs solely from self-love and love of the world and who take no interest in their neighbour other than for their own selfish reasons. Yet heaven and heavenly joy start to exist in a person when self-regard vanishes from the useful deeds he performs.
[3] Take as yet another example the situation in which the internal declares that a person's soul is nothing else than the internal man and that after death the internal man appears to be exactly the same person as lived in the world, having a similar face, similar body, similar sensory powers, and a similar power of thought. People who have entertained the idea that the soul exists only on the level where thought does and is for that reason something ethereal lacking any outward form, and that the soul is to be reclothed with its body, imagine that what is declared by the internal about the soul is very far from the truth. Indeed those who believe that there is nothing more than the body to a human being will find the idea 'hard' when they hear that the soul is the real person and that the body which is buried serves no use at all in the next life. I know this is true because I have in the Lord's Divine mercy gone among such people, not among just some but among many, not just once but often, and I have talked to them on this matter. The same may also be said about countless other matters.
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