839. Finally we talked about the interior and the exterior man. I said that people who have an inward perception of matters are in the light of truth, which is the light of heaven; people who have an outward perception of matters lack the light of truth, since they have only the world's light. So interior men possess intelligence and wisdom, whereas exterior men have madness and reversed vision. Interior people are spiritual, because their thinking comes from the spirit, which is raised above the body, so that they see truths in light. But exterior people are natural - sensual, because their thinking is based on the fallacies of the bodily senses, so that they see truths as if in a fog, and, when they turn them over in their minds, see falsities as truths. Internal people are like those who stand on a mountain in a plain, or on a tower in a city, or on a look-out position at sea; but external people are like those who stand in the valley below a mountain, or in a basement beneath the tower, or in a boat below the look-out position, and they can only see what is close at hand.
[2] Further, I said, internal people are like those who live on the second or third floors of a house or a palace, which has an unbroken series of windows made of crystalline glass for walls; they have a full view in all directions and can recognise any building in the city. But external people are like those who live on the ground floor, with windows of sheets of paper pasted together, so they cannot even see any street outside the house, but only what is inside it, and that only by candle or firelight. Internal people are also like eagles soaring aloft, with a wide view of everything beneath them; on the other hand external people are like cocks standing on a pedestal and crowing loudly at the hens walking on the ground. Moreover internal people perceive that what they know compared with what they do not is like the water in a bucket compared with the water in a lake; but external people are quite convinced that they know everything. These remarks delighted the Africans, because their interior vision, in which they are particularly strong, enabled them to acknowledge that this is how it is.
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