World of Spirits which Swedenborg calls "the lower earth," and when a spirit in the second stage does "evil from an evil heart" he "discards all protection from the Lord," and the infernal crew falls on him, induces him to believe he has a real physical body, and then they mangle or change it in various startling ways. Hieronymus Bosch would be needed to paint the somber horrors that Swedenborg relates in his cool way.
Good spirits also, or ordinary human mixtures, have their troubles in this second stage, which has aspects of purgatory. They are not, Swedenborg insists, punished for any evil they have done out of a badness of heart inherited from their parents. But those who are not altogether good, with blots on their character due to "falsities," are not immune to attacks by evil spirits—the latter seeming to be like moths that go for the grease spot on the garment. They "infest" those who have falsities to get rid of before they can leave the second stage; and sometimes they "vastate" them—a specifically Swedenborgian expression which might be translated "purify" or "purge." He sometimes speaks of the evil being vastated of all pretense of good in them, and the good of their "falsities."
When the good have shed their worse selves they enter the third stage, that of preparation for heaven. This, Swedenborg says, is a period of instruction. Angels from the heavenly societies, for which the good souls have begun to qualify by their life in the world, come to instruct them about their new state; "those [souls] that have been brought up from childhood in heaven, not having imbibed falsities from the falsities of religion or defiled their spiritual life with the dregs pertaining to honors and riches in the world, receive instruction from the angels of the interior heavens"; those who have died adult "mainly from angels of the lowest heaven."
For the evil souls who have been made to give up the pretense that they had better selves, there is no third stage. They are as it were magnetically attracted to the societies of infernal spirits, from which no instruction is needed to proceed into hell, the reservoir of rampant egoism.
As Swedenborg describes the process of evolution in the other world, it seems to be a succession of states in each of which the "person" who is in it finds it hard to imagine or to believe that there
