6929. When spirits belonging to Mercury have been present with me and I have been writing about and explaining the internal sense of the Word, and they have perceived what I wrote, they have said that the things I wrote were very broad generalities and that almost all the expressions seemed to be material. But I was allowed to reply that people belonging to our planet nevertheless see these things I have written as fine and exalted subjects, very many of which they cannot grasp. I added that the majority on our planet do not know that the internal man is what acts on the external man and makes it living; under the influence of sensory illusions they are convinced that the body lives of itself, consequently that the entire person will die when his body dies, and so they cause themselves to be in doubt about life after death. Nor, I went on, do they speak of the spirit but of the soul when they talk about that entity in the person which will be living after the death of the body, arguing over what the soul is and where it is seated, and believing that it has to be joined again to the material body if the person is to go on living, besides many more ideas like these. When the spirits belonging to Mercury heard all this they asked whether that kind of people could become angels. To this I was allowed to reply that those people become angels who have displayed the good of faith and charity in their lives, and that when they lead a life like that they are no longer interested in external and material values, only in internal and spiritual ones; and that when they attain this state they are in light superior to that which the spirits from Mercury see by. To enable them to know that this was true an angel who had arrived in heaven from our planet and who had been such when he lived in the world was allowed to talk to them. This angel will be spoken about later on.^a

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