495. (15) Purposeful adulteries arising from the will, and deliberate adulteries arising from a persuasion of the intellect, render a person natural, sensual and carnal. A person is human and distinguished from an animal by the fact that his mind is divided into three planes, into as many planes as there are heavens, and by the fact that he can be elevated from the lowest plane to the next higher one, and also from this to the highest one, and so become an angel of one heaven or the other, including as well of the third. To this end the human being has been granted the capability of elevating his understanding even to that point. However, if the love of his will is not elevated at the same time, he does not become spiritual, but remains natural. Nevertheless he retains the ability to elevate his understanding. The reason he retains it is to enable him to be reformed; for he is reformed by means of his understanding, which is accomplished through concepts of good and truth and through a rational insight gained in consequence of them. If he examines these concepts rationally and lives in accordance with them, then the love of his will is elevated too, and in the degree that it is his humanity is perfected and the person becomes more and more human. [2] The outcome is different if he does not live in accordance with concepts of good and truth. In that case the love of his will remains natural, and his understanding becomes only intermittently spiritual. For it periodically rises like an eagle and looks down on what below has to do with his love, and when it sees it, it flies down to it and unites itself with it. Consequently, if lusts of the flesh are connected with his love, it descends from its height to these and in union with them entertains itself with their delights - only to rise on high again, motivated by a desire for acclaim in order to be deemed wise; and doing this in cycles intermittently, in the manner just described. [3] Adulterers of the third and fourth degree are those who have made themselves adulterers from a purpose of the will or from a persuasion of the intellect; and they are utterly natural and become progressively sensual and carnal for the reason that they have immersed the love of their will and together with it then their intellect in the unclean perversions of licentious love, and taken delight in them, as unclean birds and beasts do in putrid and fecal matters as though they were exquisite and desirable treats. For vaporous exhalations rising up from the flesh in them fill the habitation of the mind with their impurities and cause the will not to perceive anything more exquisite and desirable. (Such people after death become carnal spirits, and it is they from whom spring the unclean things of hell and in the church spoken of above in nos. 430, 431.)