456. Years and years of daily experience have witnessed to me that after separation from the body the human spirit is a person and is in a similar form. I have seen this thousands of times, I have heard such spirits, and I have talked with them even about the fact that people in the world do not believe that they are what they are, and that scholars think people who do believe are simpletons. Spirits are heartsick over the fact that this kind of ignorance is still common in the world and especially in the church.
[2] They say, however, that this belief stems especially from academics who have thought about the soul on the basis of physical sensory reality. The only concept this can yield is one of pure thought, and when this lacks any medium in which and on the basis of which it is examined, it is like some volatile form of pure ether that can only dissipate when the body dies. Since the church believes in the immortality of the soul on the basis of the Word, though, they cannot help but attribute something vital to it, something thoughtlike. However, they do not attribute to it any sensory capacity like ours until it is reunited with its body. Their doctrine of the resurrection is based on this notion, as is their belief that there will be a reunion [of soul and body] when the Last Judgment comes. The result is that when people think about the soul on the basis of both doctrine and speculation, they do not at all grasp the fact that it is the spirit and that it is in human form. There is also the fact that hardly anyone nowadays knows what the spiritual is, let alone that people who are spiritual, as all spirits and angels are, have a human form.
[3] This is why almost all the people who arrive from this world are as astonished as they can be to find that they are alive and that they are just as human as ever, that they are seeing and hearing and talking, that their bodies are still endowed with the sense of touch, and that nothing at all has changed (see 74 above). Once they get over their amazement, though, then they are amazed that the church does not know anything about this state of ours after death and therefore does not know anything about heaven or hell, even though all the people who have lived in this world are in the other life and are living people. Since they do keep wondering why this has not been made plain to people on earth through visions, inasmuch as it is essential to the faith of the church, they have been told from heaven that such visions could happen whenever it pleased the Lord - nothing could be easier. However, people would not believe even if they were to see, because they have convinced themselves of the opposing false notions. Further, it is dangerous to use visions to convince people of anything if they are immersed in false opinions, because they will believe at first and then deny. In this way they will desecrate the truth itself, since desecration is believing and then denying. People who desecrate truths are forced down into the lowest and direst hell of all. 1
[4] This is the danger meant by the Lord's words, "He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts lest they see with their eyes and understand with their heart and turn themselves and I might heal them" (John 12:40); and the fact that people immersed in false opinions still would not believe is meant when it says, "Abraham said to the rich man in hell, They have Moses and the prophets, let them heed them. But he said, No, Father Abraham, but if someone from the dead were to come to them, they would change. But Abraham said, If they do not heed Moses and the prophets, then even if someone were raised from the dead, they would not believe" (Luke 16:29-31).
Footnotes:
1. [Swedenborg's footnote] Desecration is the mingling of the good and the evil and of the true and the false within us: 6348. The only people who can desecrate what is true and good, or the holy things of the Word and the church, are people who have first acknowledged them, all the more if they have lived by them, and later fall away from their faith, deny them, and live for themselves and the world: 593, 1008, 1010, 1059, 3398-3399, 3898, 4289, 4601, 10284, 10287. If we fall back into prior evils after heartfelt repentance, we commit desecration; and then our later state is worse than our former one: 8394. People cannot desecrate holy things if they have not acknowledged them, and still less if they have not even known about them: 1008, 1010, 1059, 9188, 10284. Non-Christians who are outside the church and do not have the Word are incapable of desecration: 1327-1328, 2051, 2081. This is why deeper truths were not disclosed to the Jews, because if they had been disclosed and acknowledged, they would have desecrated them: 3398, 3489, 6963. The fate of desecrators in the other life is the worst of all because the good and truth they acknowledged is still there and so is what is evil and false; and since these coexist, there is a wrenching of their very life: 571, 582, 6348. So the Lord takes the greatest care to prevent desecration: 2426, 10384.
