Five Mem. Relations (Whitehead) n. 5

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5. That such a similarity of all things appears to the recently deceased is because their mind remains the same as it was in the world; and, because the mind is not only in the head, but also in the whole body, therefore a man has a similar body; for the body is the organ of the mind, and is continued from the head; wherefore the mind is the man himself, but then no longer a material man, but a spiritual man; and, because he is the same man after death, there are given to him things similar to those which he had possessed at home in the world, according to the ideas of his mind; but this lasts only some days. That the mind is in the whole body, and is the very man who lives after death, appears manifestly from the speech of the mouth and the action of the body being instantaneous with the will and thought of the mind; for the mouth speaks in an instant what the mind thinks, and the body executes in an instant what the mind wills. The erroneous belief that man lives after death a soul or mind, and this not under the appearance of a man, but under the appearance of a breath, as it were, of respiration, or as a bubble as it were, of air, is because men do not know that the mind makes the interior form of the whole body.


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