When Man is Being Reformed

Selection from Arcana Coelestia ~ Emanuel Swedenborg

How the case is with this conjunction of the external or natural man with the internal or spiritual

The external or natural man reigns from life's earliest age, and knows not that there is an internal or spiritual man. When therefore the man is being reformed and from being natural or external is beginning to become spiritual or internal, the natural at first rebels, for it is taught that the natural man is to be subjugated, that is, that all its concupiscences together with the things that confirm them are to be rooted out. Hence when the natural man is left to itself, it thinks that in this way it would utterly perish; for it knows no otherwise than that the natural is everything, and it is wholly ignorant that in the spiritual there are things immeasurable and unutterable; and when the natural man so thinks, it draws back and is not willing to be subjected to the spiritual.

(from Arcana Coelestia 5647)