man, for, as was said, he turns good, which is from the Lord, into
evil. He leads himself more and more deeply into evil for the reason,
essentially, that as he wills and commits evil, he enters more and more
interiorly and also more and more deeply into infernal societies. Hence
the enjoyment of evil increases, too, and occupies his thoughts until he
feels nothing more agreeable. One who has entered more interiorly and
deeply into infernal societies becomes like one bound by chains. So long
as he lives in the world, however, he does not feel his chains; they seem
to be made of soft wool or smooth silken threads. He loves them, for they
titillate; but after death, from being soft, those chains become hard,
and from being pleasant become galling.

[4] That the enjoyment of evil grows is known from thefts, robberies,
plunderings, revenge, tyranny, lucre, and other evils. Who does not feel
a heightening of enjoyment in them as he succeeds in them and practices
them uninhibited? A thief, we know, feels such enjoyment in thefts that
he cannot desist from them, and, a wonder, he loves one stolen coin more
than ten that are given him. It would be similar with adultery, had it
not been provided that the power to commit this evil decreases with the
abuse, but with many there still remains the enjoyment of thinking and
talking about it, and if nothing more, there is still the lust of touch.

[5] It is not known, however, that this heightening of enjoyment comes
from a man's entering into infernal societies more and more interiorly
and deeply as he perpetrates evils from the will as well as from thought.
If the evils are only in the thoughts, and not in the will, he is not yet
in an infernal society having that evil; he enters it when the evils are
also in the will. Then, if he also thinks the evil is contrary to the
precepts of the Decalog and regards these precepts as divine, he commits
the evil of set purpose and by so doing plunges to a depth from which he
can be brought out only by active repentance. It is to be understood that
everyone as to his spirit is in the spiritual world, in one of its
societies, an evil man in an infernal society and a good man in a
heavenly society; sometimes, when in deep meditation one also appears
there. Moreover, as sound and, along with it, speech spread on the air in
the natural world, affection and thought with it spread among societies
in the spiritual world; there is correspondence, too, aff