6200. As I have been now continuously for nine years in company with spirits and angels, I have carefully observed how the case is with regard to influx. While I have been thinking, the material ideas of my thought appeared as it were In the middle of a kind of undulation,* and I noticed that this undulation was nothing else than such things as had been adjoined to that subject in the memory, and that the full thought appears in this way to the spirits; but that nothing else then comes to the man's apprehension than that which is In the middle and which had appeared as material. I have likened that surrounding undulation to spiritual wings, by which the thing thought of is elevated out of the memory. From this the man has perception of a subject. That in that surrounding undulation there were innumerable things which agreed with the subject thought of, was made evident to me from the fact that the spirits who were in a more subtle sphere thereby knew all those things which I had ever known on that subject; and thus that they fully imbibe and put on all things which belong to the man; and genii, who attend solely to the cupidities and affections, imbibe and put on those things which are of the loves. To illustrate this by an example: When I thought of a man whom I know, then the idea of him, such as it appears when his name is mentioned before a man, was presented in the midst; but round about, like an undulating volatile something (undans volatile), was everything that I had known and thought about him from childhood; whereby the whole of him, such as he was in my thought and affection, appeared among the spirits In an instant. Moreover when I have been thinking about any city, then from that undulating sphere that was round about, the spirits instantly knew all that I had seen and known about it. The case was the same with matters of science. * Thought represented by an undulating sphere with a solid in the middle. When a stone is thrown into clam water it produces a concentric undulation. This however is only in a plane. But imagine a sphere or globe of some fluid medium with such an exciting object in the middle, and undulations going away from it in all directions. This may give some idea of the "material ideas in the middle" and the "volatile undulating sphere" all around it.