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.

56. Everything created is from its origin of such a nature as to be a recipient of God, not by a continuous connection with Him but by a discontinuous one. The second and not the first is the way through which it is capable of conjunction; for everything created is an accordant form, having been created in God from God; and because it has been so created, it is an analogue, and by that conjunction it is as though the image of God in a mirror.