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.

598. Man cannot be reformed unless he has freedom, for the reason that he is born into evils of every kind, and these must be removed in order that he may be saved; and they cannot be removed unless he sees them in himself and acknowledges them, and then does not will them, and finally holds them in aversion. Then for the first time they are removed. This cannot be done unless man is in good as well as in evil, since it is from good that he is able to see evils, while from evil he cannot see good. The spiritual goods that man is capable of thinking, be learns from childhood as a result of the reading of the Word and of preaching; and he learns moral and civil good from his life in the world. This is the first reason why man ought to be in freedom.

[2] Another reason is that nothing is appropriated to man except what is done from the affection that is of his love. The other things may gain entrance, but no farther than the thought, not reaching the will; and whatever does not enter in as far as to the will of man does not become his, for thought derives what pertains to it from memory, while the will derives what pertains to it from the life itself. Nothing is ever free unless it is from the will, or what is the same, from the affection that is of love, for whatever a man wills or loves, that he does freely; consequently, man's freedom and the affection that is of his love or of his will are a one. It is for this reason that man has freedom, in order that he may be affected by truth and good or may love them, and that they may thus become as if they were his own.

[3] In a word, whatever does not enter in freedom with a man does not remain, because it does not belong to his love or will, and the things that do not belong to man's love or will do not belong to his spirit; for the very being (esse) of the spirit of man is love or will. It is said love or will, since a man wills what he loves. This, then, is why man can be reformed only in freedom. But more on the subject of man's freedom may be seen in the ARCANA CAELESTIA in the passages referred to below.