Spiritual Experiences Minor (Buss) n. 4645

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4645. HOW IT IS TO BE UNDERSTOOD THAT AS A TREE FAILS, IT REMAINS: MEMORY. So long as a man is alive [in the world], he is in the ultimate of order. He possesses a corporeal memory, which grows, and in which are to be rooted things which are of the interior memory; hence the more harmonies and correspondences of good and truth there are in them and among them, the more he has of life from the Lord, and the more he can be perfected in the other life. But that memory in which interior things are rooted, is exterior or corporeal. Man, after death, has, indeed, all his own exterior or corporeal memory, or the whole and every one of its belongings; but it can no longer grow; and, where it is not, new harmonies and correspondences cannot be formed. And, hence, all things of his interior memory are there, and they are terminated in his exterior memory, although it is not allowed to use this. From these things it may be manifest, what means [the statement] that as the tree falls it remains. Not that he who is in good cannot be perfected: he is perfected, immensely, even to angelic wisdom-but, according to the harmony and correspondence which existed between internals and externals, whilst he was alive in the world. After the life of the body, no one receives external things, but things interior and internal.


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