461. After Death, We Enjoy Every Sense, Memory, Thought, and Affection We Had in the World: We Leave Nothing Behind except Our Earthly Body

Repeated experience has witnessed to me that when we move from the natural world into the spiritual, which happens when we die, we take with us everything that pertains to our character except our earthly body. In fact, when we enter the spiritual world or our life after death, we are in a body as we were in this world. There seems to be no difference, since we do not feel or see any difference. This body is spiritual, though, so it has been separated or purified from earthly matter. Further, when anything spiritual touches and sees something spiritual, it is just like something natural touching and seeing something natural. So when we have become a spirit, we have no sense that we are not in the body we inhabited in the world, and therefore do not realize that we have died.

[2] As "spirit-people," we enjoy every outer and inner sense we enjoyed in the world. We see the way we used to, we hear and talk the way we used to; we smell and taste and feel things when we touch them the way we used to; we want, wish, crave, think, ponder, are moved, love, and intend the way we used to. Studious types still read and write as before. In a word, when we move from the one life into the other, or from the one world into the other, it is like moving from one [physical] place to another; and we take with us everything we owned as persons to the point that it would be unfair to say that we have lost anything of our own after death, which is only a death of the earthly body.

[3] We even take with us our natural memory, since we retain everything we have heard, seen, read, learned, or thought in the world from earliest infancy to the very end of life. However, since the natural objects that reside in our memory cannot be reproduced in a spiritual world, they become dormant the way they do when we are not thinking about them. Even so, they can be reproduced when it so pleases the Lord. I will have more to say soon, though, about this memory and its condition after death.

Sense-centered people are quite incapable of believing that our state after death is like this because they do not grasp it. Sense-centered people can think only on the natural level, even about spiritual matters. This means that anything they do not sense - that is, see with their physical eyes and touch with their hands - they say does not exist, as we read of Thomas in John 20:25, 27, 29. The quality of sense-centered people has been described above in 267, and in notes there.

30. It is because the Divine essence itself is love and wisdom that a person has two faculties of life, one of which is the origin of his intellect, and the other the origin of his will. The faculty from which the intellect originates draws all its properties from an influx of wisdom from God, and the faculty from which the will originates draws all its properties from an influx of love from God. A person's failure to become rightly wise and to love rightly does not take away these faculties but only closes them up, and as long as they remain closed, the intellect is indeed called intellect, and the will likewise will, but still they are essentially nonexistent. Consequently if the aforesaid two faculties were to be taken away, everything human would perish, which is to think and from thinking speak, and to will and from willing act.

It is apparent from this that the Divine resides in a person in these two faculties, in the faculty for becoming wise and in the faculty for loving - or rather, that He is able to do so.

That everyone has in him the ability to become wise and the ability to love, even if he is not as wise and loving as he might be, is something that has become well known to me from a good deal of experience, experience which you will see amply presented elsewhere.