5858. Much experience has taught me that anything spirits think or say by drawing on a person's memory they regard as their own, existing within themselves. If told that their idea is not true they are highly indignant; for that kind of sensory illusion holds sway among them. I have asked them - to convince them that their idea is not true - how it is that they can talk to me in my own mother tongue, having had absolutely no knowledge at all of it during their lifetime. How do they know the other languages that I have mastered without learning a single one for themselves? Do they really think those languages are theirs? I have read even the Hebrew language to them which they, including young children, understood to the same extent as I understood it, but not beyond. They have also been shown that all the knowledge present with me is present with them. This has convinced them that when they come to a person they enter into possession of everything he knows, and that in believing it is their own they are holding to a false idea. They do have knowledge that is their own, but they are not allowed to draw on it, to the end that they may serve a person through the knowledge he has; and there are many other reasons for this as well, dealt with in 2476, 2477, 2479. Indeed very great confusion would result if spirits were to flow in with what came from their own memory, 2478.