443. Several Examples from Spirits of Opinions They Adopted during Their Physical Lives Concerning the Soul or Spirit

IN the other life it is easy to tell what opinions others held during bodily life concerning the soul, the spirit, and life after death. When people are kept in a state like the one they had in the body, they think the same way they did then, and their thinking is communicated as clearly as if they were talking out loud.

In the case of one spirit ¹ who had departed this world not long before, I perceived — and he admitted — that although he believed he would live on as a spirit, he expected to live a vague kind of life. His thinking, since he located life in the body, was that if physical life were withdrawn, only a vague something-or-other would remain. So his picture of the spirit was like that of a ghost. The observation that brute animals too had life, almost as people do, had confirmed him in his opinion. But now he was amazed to see that spirits and angels live in the greatest possible light and in the greatest possible intelligence, wisdom, and happiness, with such keen perception that it can hardly be described. Far from living a dim kind of life, he discovered, they live a clear and intensely vivid life.

Footnotes:

938. The Hells (Continued): Misers' Hells, the Foul Jerusalem and Outlaws in the Wilderness, and the Feces-Laden Hells of Those Who Have Pursued Sensual Pleasure Alone

OF all people, misers are the vilest and think the least about life after death, the soul, and the inner being. They do not even know what heaven is. This is because of all people they do the least to elevate their thinking, which they completely saturate and drench with bodily and earthly preoccupations. The result is that when they enter the other world, for a long time they fail to realize that they are spirits, remaining firmly convinced instead that they are still in the body.

Their thoughts, dragged down to the bodily and earthly level by their greed, turn into dreadful hallucinations. Strange to say, but true, in the next life the grossly avaricious seem to themselves to live in cellars where their money is stored and where they are overrun with rats. Despite the rats, they do not leave until they grow unbearably tired of the situation, at which point they finally emerge from these tombs of theirs.