3474. OF THE PROPRIUM OF MAN, SPIRIT, AND ANGEL, AND A CLEARING UP OF TRUTH RESPECTING IT. When engaged in writing and saying that the proprium of man, spirit, and angel was in itself nothing but pure evil, certain spirits of an interior quality insinuated that they had a proprium which was not evil, namely, an inward and still inmost mind; and that the inmost gave to the inward the power of becoming celestial and spiritual. I had never heretofore supposed any otherwise than that there was an inmost mind in man which does not exist in brute animals; but they insisted that these minds, the inward and inmost, are their proprium, and because they are receptive of celestial and spiritual things from the Lord, and give its faculty to the proper mind of man, that thus they had not evil, but good. But it was answered them that these inward and innermost minds were not their's but the Lord's; and that theirs was a natural mind, which was altogether perverted; and that if a spirit or angel were deprived of his proprium, which pertains to his natural mind, the interior [or higher], as well as the lower, he would be utterly deprived of life, which was also shown to the spirit by a slight experience, and he confessed that if the experiment should proceed farther he would become nothing. But that the propriate and natural mind may be obsequious to the truly spiritual and celestial mind, the matter is so ordered that it shall not be effaced and nullified, and thus made, as it were, obsequious, for in that case one would feel nothing of himself or of his own, but his propria are disposed into a form that may be compared to a rainbow, in which the colors derive their origin from black and white, answering to the propria of man, to wit, his evils; these are disposed by the Lord that the man may live, as it were, from his own life; and the less of remains there are, the less has he of life from his proprium. Therefore, for one to claim to himself an interior and inmost mind, by which the Lord gives power to the natural mind to become what it is, is to claim for himself what is not his proprium, for neither man, spirit, nor angel knows anything of these minds.