165. Finally I talked with the spirits of that world about the belief of the inhabitants of our world concerning their resurrection. I said they were unable to conceive of people coming into the next life immediately after death, and then looking like people in face, body, arms and feet, having all their outward and inward senses. Even less could they believe that they would then wear clothes and have houses and places to live. This was entirely due to the fact that most people here base their thinking on bodily sense-impressions, so that they do not believe in the existence of what they cannot see and touch. Few of them can be withdrawn from outward sense-impressions towards inward ones, and so be lifted into the light of heaven in which inward impressions can be received. It is for this reason that they cannot have any concept of their soul or spirit as being a person, but think of it as wind, air or some formless breath, which yet contains some vitality. This is the reason that they believe they will only be resurrected at the end of the world, which they call the Last Judgment, thinking that their body, though collapsed into dust and scattered to all the winds, must then be brought back and reunited with their soul or spirit.
[2] I added that they are allowed to hold this belief, because there is no other way that those who, as I said, base their thinking on outward sense-impressions, could think of their soul or spirit living as a person in human form, except by re-entering the body they carried around with them in the world. Unless therefore the body were said to be resurrected, they would at heart reject the teaching on resurrection and everlasting life as incomprehensible.
Yet thinking like this about resurrection has this advantage, that they do believe in a life after death. The consequence of this belief is that, when they lie sick in bed and cease to base their thinking, as previously, on worldly and bodily matters, that is, on sense-impressions, they then believe that they will live again immediately after dying.
[3] At this time they also talk about heaven, and how they hope to live there as soon as they die, putting aside all they have been taught about the Last Judgment. I told them how I have several times been surprised how it is that, when those who have faith talk about life after death and their friends who are dying or have died, without at the same time thinking about the Last Judgment, they believe their friends will live or are living as people immediately after death. The moment they start thinking about the Last Judgment, this idea is changed into a material idea of their earthly body, which has to be reunited with their soul.
[4] For they are unaware that each person is inwardly a spirit, and the life of the body and all its parts comes from the spirit, not from the body by itself. They do not know that it is the spirit which is the real person, sharing its form, but invisible to the body's eyes, being visible only to the eyes of spirits. Hence it is too that, when a person's spirit has its sight opened, which is the result of the withdrawal of the body's sight, angels can be seen as people. So it was that angels appeared to the ancients, as related in the Word.
I have had several conversations with spirits whom I knew when they were people living in the world, and asked whether they wanted to be clothed again with their earthly bodies, as they had previously imagined. On hearing this they ran off to a distance at the mere idea of being reunited, in astonishment at having been led in the world to think so by blind faith without any understanding.
This page is part of 
© 2000-2001 The Academy of the New Church