493. Our first state after death is like our state in this world, since we are then similarly involved in outward concerns. We have similar faces, voices, and character; we lead similar moral and civil lives. This is why it still seems to us as though we were in this world unless we notice things that are out of the ordinary and remember that angels told us we were spirits when we were awakened (450). So the one life carries on into the other, and death is only a passage.

43. From the foregoing it can now for the first time be seen that Divine love and wisdom in themselves are substance and form, for they are being and expression itself; and that if they were not such a being and expression as to be substance and form, they would be only a figment of the imagination, which in itself is not anything.