2603. There are some gentiles from those regions where the people are black who bring with them from life in the world the desire to be treated harshly, for they believe that nobody can enter heaven except through punishment and affliction, and that only after that will they receive more gladsome things which they call paradise-like. Since they have with them such ideas derived from their religion, they are in the next life treated harshly at first by some whom they call devils, and are after that taken to the paradise gardens described in 1622. But they are taught by the angels that those punishments and afflictions are converted by the Lord into that which for those gentiles is good, as He does for those undergoing temptations. They are also told that the paradise gardens are not heaven but the affection for celestial and spiritual things that are within them, and that they have been in a certain way of truth, yet in the shadow cast by ignorance. They talked to me for a long time. While they were going through the state of afflictions their speech involved a sort of click,^a and so was a different kind of speech from that used by others. But once the afflictions were over and they had been brought to those paradise gardens, their speech was no longer such but almost angelic. Also derived from their religion, in which they believe, they have the wish to possess interior things. They said that when they are being treated harshly they are black but that afterwards they cast away their blackness and take on a whiteness, for they know that their souls are white even though their bodies are black.

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