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.

6991. 'Is it not I, Jehovah?' means that these different conditions exist as a result of the influx of life from the Divine. This becomes clear from the fact that the kinds of conditions that are meant by 'the dumb', 'the deaf', and 'the blind', as well as by 'mouth' and 'the seeing', arise with a person as a result of the influx of life from Jehovah or the Lord. For from it arise both the ill things and the good that exist with every single person. Yet the ill arise from man, the good from the Lord. The reason why the ill things arise from man is that the life, that is, goodness and truth, which flows in from the Lord is turned by man into evil and falsity, thus into the opposite of life, which is called spiritual death. It is like light from the sun, which is converted into particular colours by the objects receiving it. In some objects it is converted into vivid and lively colours, in others into so to speak dead and dreary ones. Now since it appears as though the Lord, being the One who gives life, is also responsible for what is ill, that which is ill is attributed in the Word - owing to that appearance - to Jehovah or the Lord, as may be recognized from a large number of places. The same applies here to His making the dumb, the deaf, and the blind; because these conditions arise from the influx of life from the Divine it is said that Jehovah brings them about. But the internal sense presents and teaches the true nature of the matter, not the apparent nature of it.