5859. Some spirits moving upwards once came to me, saying that they had been with me right from the start; they knew nothing different. But because I showed them the opposite was so, they at length confessed they had arrived only just then; and because they instantly took to themselves everything in my memory, they could not have known anything different. This also proved to them that the moment spirits arrive they take to themselves all the knowledge a person has, as if it were their own; and also that when many spirits are present each one takes it to himself and imagines it to be his own. This ability is one that a person comes to possess immediately after death. This also explains why within a heavenly community into which they come good spirits take to themselves and come to possess the entire wisdom that everyone possesses in that community. This is what the sharing that takes place among them is like even though during their lifetime they had no knowledge at all of the kinds of matters they talk about in that heavenly community. This happens to them if in the world they had led charitable lives filled with goodness. This goodness holds within itself the ability to embrace the whole of wisdom as its own, for real goodness has wisdom concealed within it. Consequently they have a kind of innate knowledge of things which during their lifetime were beyond understanding, indeed beyond description.