AC 3108 - The Initiation of Truth Into Good

AC 3108

Those who are not in good,
and the consequent faith,
have no other ideas of thought
than those which have been formed
from objects of the light of the world.
They do not know that there is anything spiritual,
nor indeed what the rational is in the genuine sense,
but only the natural to which they attribute all things;
and this is the reason why
the things which are said in the internal sense
concerning the initiation of truth into good,
are to them too remote to appear to amount to anything;
when yet to those who are in the light of heaven
these are among their precious things.
As regards the initiation of truth into good
the case is this:
Before truth has been initiated and rightly conjoined,
it is indeed with a person,
but it has not been made as it were of him, or as his own;
but as soon as it is being initiated into his good,
it is appropriated to him;
and it then vanishes from his external memory,
and passes into the internal memory;
or what is the same,
it vanishes from the natural or external person,
and passes into the rational or internal person,
and puts on the very person,
and makes his human, that is,
his quality as to the human.
Such is the case with all truth
that is being conjoined with a person's good;
such also is the case with the falsity
that is being conjoined with evil
which he calls good;
but the difference is
that the former opens the rational,
and so makes the man rational;
whereas the latter closes the rational
and makes the person irrational;
although he seems to himself,
in the darkness in which he then is,
to be pre-eminently rational.