4295. HOW THE CASE IS WITH REPRESENTATIVES AND CORRESPONDENCES IN HEAVEN, ILLUSTRATED BY THE CORRESPONDENCE OF KNOWLEDGE WITH EATING. While walking in the street I thought for some time of eating, or of what I should eat, and I perceived that the angels thought of nothing of the kind, but of knowledges and intelligence, and that thence there existed in my mind, in common with those of the world of spirits, the thought of eating, and on speaking with them was informed that it was so. I thus learnt that discourse concerning knowledges falls with man into the idea of what he eats, and that the cause of such a correspondence is, that knowledges are spiritual food by which the life of spirits is sustained. In like manner correspondences are given in other things which man would never know unless instructed, and these are so many that they cannot be enumerated even as to their genera and species. Such is the influx of heaven, as it was given to me to know from [this and] a multitude of other proofs. - 1749, June 4.