AC 7693 - What Is the Sensuous Person?

AC 7693

The sensuous person,
or he who thinks and acts from the sensuous,
is he who believes nothing
except what is obvious to the outward senses,
and who is led solely by the bodily appetites,
by pleasures, and by concupiscences,
and not by reasons,
believing those to be reasons which favor such things.
Such being the sensuous person,
he therefore rejects everything internal,
until at last he is not willing even to hear it mentioned;
consequently at heart he denies whatever is of heaven;
the life after death he certainly does not believe in,
because he makes life to consist solely in the body,
and therefore he supposes
that he himself will die like a beast.
He thinks as it were in the surface,
that is, in the ultimates or in the extremes,
and is quite ignorant of the existence of an interior thought
according to the perception of truth and good.
The reason why he does not know this,
nor even that there is an internal person,
is because his interiors look downward
to the things of the world, of the body, and of the earth,
with which they make a one;
consequently they have been removed
from looking upward, or to heaven,
because they look in the opposite direction.
To look upward, or to heaven,
is not to think about the things that belong to heaven,
but it is to have these things as the end,
that is, to love them more than all other things;
for a person's interiors turn to where his love turns,
and consequently so does his thought.
From all this it can be seen
what is the nature of a person's sensuous,
that is, of his natural in the extremes;
for that person is called sensuous
who thinks from what is sensuous.