17. Daily experience over many years allows me to bear witness that a person's spirit after being released from the body is a person and looks like one. For I have seen them, heard them and talked to them thousands of times. I have also discussed the fact that people in the world do not share this belief, and those who do are considered by learned people to be simple. The spirits were deeply grieved at the persistence of such ignorance on earth, especially within the church. But they said that this belief had spread particularly from the learned people, whose idea of the soul was based upon bodily sense-impressions. These had made them form an idea of the soul as nothing but mere thought, which taken without some object on which to concentrate or from which to be derived, is like a volatile puff of pure ether, which cannot fail to be dispersed on the death of the body. But because the church has learned from the Word to believe in the immortality of the soul, they were obliged to ascribe to it some vital function, such as that of thought, yet they denied it a person's power of sensation, until it was again united with a body.
This view is the foundation of the teaching about resurrection, and the belief that soul and body will be united on the coming of the Last Judgment. For granting that hypothesis about the soul, this is the inescapable conclusion when combined with the church's belief in man's everlasting life. This is why, if anyone's idea of the soul is based upon the teaching and that hypothesis together, he is quite unable to grasp that the soul is a spirit, and a spirit has a human form. Another reason is the fact that hardly anyone to-day knows what spiritual means, much less that spiritual beings, such as all spirits and angels, have a human form.
This is why almost all who come from the world are extremely surprised to find themselves alive and just as much human beings as before, so that they experience no difference at all. When they get over their surprise at their own state, they go on to be surprised that the church knows nothing about this being the state of people after death, though all the people who have ever lived in the world are in the other life, and alive as human beings. Because they have also wondered that people have not had this made plain to them by visions, they were told from heaven that this might have happened, since nothing is easier if it is the Lord's good pleasure; but they still would not have believed, even if they saw it for themselves, if they had convinced themselves of false counter-arguments. They were also told that it is dangerous for anything from heaven to be plainly displayed to those who are sunk in worldly and bodily concerns; for this would make them believe at first, and later deny it, so profaning that very truth. Profaning is believing and later denying; and those who do this are plunged into the lowest and worst of all hells. This is the danger meant by what the Lord said:
He has blinded their eyes and hardened their hearts, to prevent them seeing with their eyes and understanding with their hearts, so that they might turn themselves and I should heal them. John 12:40.
The disbelief of those sunk in the love of worldly and bodily things is meant by these words:
Abraham said to the rich man in hell, They have Moses and the Prophets; let them listen to them. But he said, No, father Abraham; but if someone comes to them from the dead, they will repent. But Abraham said to him, If they do not listen to Moses and the Prophets, neither will they believe if someone rises from the dead. Luke 16:29-31.
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