6319. As regards what flows into a person from the angels present with him, it is not of the same nature as the objects of his thought but is that which involves correspondences; for the angels think on a spiritual level, but the person perceives their thought on a natural one. Thus spiritual realities come down into images that correspond to them, consequently into images which represent them and are known to the person. When for example the person speaks about bread, sowing, harvest, fatness, and the like, the angels' thought is about aspects of the good of love and charity, and so on. I once had a quite ordinary dream, and having woken up I related it all from start to finish. The angels said that it coincided exactly with what they had been discussing. Not that the contents of my dream were the same things but ones that corresponded to and represented what they discussed; this was true of every detail. I spoke to them after that about influx.
[2] Objects are not visible to the spirits present with a person in the same way as they are to the person seeing them with his eyes, nor are words apprehended in the same way as they are by a person hearing them with his ears; rather they see and apprehend things as they appear in his thought. Thought is altogether different from speech, as is clear from the fact that a person thinks more in a moment of time than he can express in half an hour, since his thought does not involve any use of spoken words. From this one may gain some idea of what the interaction between soul and body is like - that it resembles the influx of the spiritual world into the natural world, since a person's soul or spirit is in the spiritual world, and his body is in the natural world. Thus influx takes place in accord with correspondences.
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