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9a. The Death Process
By Kurt Simons | June 8, 2007
“…death, the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveler returns.”
(Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 1)
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When we die, we don’t leave and go somewhere else because our mind and spirit - the real us - is in the spiritual world already. That world is all around us even though we are not conscious of it. For now, our body drives around in this physical world like a person drives a car. However, our body is not our mind or spirit - is not us - any more than a car is its driver. Our mind can look out at the physical world through the body’s senses, but our mind is never a part of that world. Our mind and spirit live in the spiritual world, which is a discrete degree above physical existence.
To help understand how different the world of the mind and spirit is from the world of the body, think of how free the world of our mind is from the rules of time and space that limit our body. In our mind, we can travel instantaneously in our imagination to anywhere, in this world or far beyond it. In memory we can travel back in time to our childhood, or venture far into the future. We can think of things too small for our eye to see or things as big as the universe. We can even think of abstract things like truth and love that exist only in our mind and can’t be detected by our body’s senses at all.
Once we come to see that our mind and spirit are different from our body even while they “drive around” in the physical world, death is quite simple to understand, and not at all frightening. For all that death involves is a simple transition, in which our spirit becomes directly aware of the realm in which it has lived all along. Instead of looking out through the dim and limited senses of a physical body into the physical world, our spirit can then look out from the senses of our spiritual body into the wide and beautiful expanses of its own world, a world surpassing the physical world in every respect. And, far from being the sort of ghostlike experience that people often associate with the word “spirit,” life in the spiritual world is far more real and vivid than life here.
The death transition itself is a beautiful and peaceful experience, closely guarded by high angels and conducted with the utmost gentleness, however abrupt or painful the beginning of the process may be for the body. Indeed,
“For…some days after death [a person is]… totally unaware that he or she is no longer living in the same world as formerly. The time that has passed is like a sleep, and when anyone wakes from it, they feel they are exactly where they were†(True Christian Religion 160).
So similar to the natural world does the spiritual world look when we first wake up there that some people do not believe they have died and have to be convinced! There follows a very happy time as we meet friends and family who have gone on before and, if our spouse has gone on before us, we have a reunion with him or her.
Where we first awake after death is neither Heaven nor Hell but a place intermediate between these two known as the World of Spirits. That world serves as a sort of reception center. It is there that we initially adjust to spiritual existence and then go through the discovery process that spiritually clarifies what kind of person we really are, good or evil. This clarification takes place over a period of time and is based on the fundamental fact of the spiritual world that we can no longer hide anything about our moral and spiritual character from anybody, including, especially, ourselves.
“Beware of the yeast of the Pharisees, beware of their hypocrisy. The time is coming when everything will be revealed; all that is secret will be made public. Whatever you have said in the dark will be heard in the light, and what you have whispered behind closed doors will be shouted from the housetops for all to hear” (Luke 12: 2, 3).
Angels can tell the most minute details of our character simply by looking at our face.
As our real person emerges during this transition period, we change in appearance in accordance with what our true motives are, so that those motives appear as they really are - a change that may make us unrecognizable to those who did not know us well before. This change is part of the main business at hand, which is to make final preparations for going to Heaven or Hell.
Once we are in the spiritual world, our free will is finished. “In the place where the tree falls, there it shall lie” (Ecclesiastes 11: 3). We have decided by the way we lived our life in the physical world who we are, morally and spiritually speaking, and this can no longer be changed. But since no one is all good or all bad, even a fundamentally good person typically has some evil traits left and those on the way to hell may have some good qualities. This inconsistency, in the nothing-hidden setting of the spiritual world, is painful. So the next step in the process is to have those inconsistencies in effect put to sleep so that we mercifully are no longer troubled by thoughts and feelings contrary to our main spiritual inclination. If we are going to heaven, we are also taught any basic spiritual truths we didn’t have a chance to learn in the physical world so we will feel comfortable as we enter heaven. This process is what Jesus was referring to, correspondentially, in the parable of the talents, when He taught that
“To those who use well what they are given, even more will be given, and they will have an abundance. But from those who are unfaithful, even what little they have will be taken away” (Matthew 25: 29, 30).
An interesting side-note is that, when we look back over our life as we go through our preparation for going to Heaven or Hell, we may not be able to - or may not want to - remember or acknowledge something about our life that is needed to help our spiritual self-discovery. In that case, the angels helping us sort things out can play back a mental recording of any part of our life. This is possible since every smallest thing that we think or experience while we’re in the physical world, including things we weren’t even directly aware of at the time, is recorded in what is known as a person’s “interior memory.” The playback of that memory is similar to the experience of their life flashing before a person’s eyes that some people who have come close to death report, but much more detailed. This playback is another aspect of the teaching in Luke 12 quoted above, about “when everything will be revealed.” There are no secrets in the spiritual world!
As many a love story has dreamed, those in true marriage love, with its fundamental orientation toward lasting till eternity,
“are not separated by the death of the one, since the spirit of the deceased partner dwells continually with the spirit of the one not yet deceased, and this until the death of the latter, when they meet again and reunite and love each other more tenderly than before.” (Married Love 321)
When we are finished the preparation process in the World of Spirits, we set off on a path that will take us to our final home in Heaven or Hell. The important point here is that there is no judgment chair, no fierce judgmental God, just each of us finishing the destiny that we chose - in free will - by our life in the external physical world. In other words, there is no punishment for past deeds involved in this process. Jesus is ever-merciful and ready to forgive us for any evil we may have committed, however horrendous, if we truly want to do better. There is also, by the same logic, no reward for past good deeds. We go to Heaven or Hell, not for what we did in the past, but for what we want to keep doing right then and into the future forever.
It may seem hard to accept that people spend eternity in Hell. However, as pointed out in The First Coming of Jesus Christ, if there is to be meaningful spiritual free will, there has to be a real option to choose evil, right now and into eternity. If God were to force evil people to go to Heaven, He would rob them of their choice and either make them more far more miserable than they were in Hell - since being in Heaven is very painful for evil spirits - or outright destroy the personality they’ve freely chosen.
Finally, on a more cheerful note, if we have chosen to love the good and the true, we wend our way up the path into Heaven, where we will seek and find a society of people with whom we feel in harmony beyond any friendship we have known before. Those people are in effect our spiritual relatives, but with that relationship based on a free will-chosen commonality of outlook, not an accident of birth. In that society they will find a home that we immediately recognize as ours since it perfectly fits us, and there we will live forever. As Jesus promised,
“In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also” (John 14:2, 3).
For Further Reading
Pertinent books of the Second Coming
Arcana Coelestia. The heavenly arcana contained in the Holy Scripture or Word of the Lord unfolded, beginning with the book of Genesis together with wonderful things seen in the World of Spirits and in the heaven of angels - Contains many teachings about life after death, interspersed with many other topics.
Heaven and its Wonders and Hell From Things Heard and Seen - Largely drawn from the Arcana, with the teachings in more compact form.
Other Titles
C. Giles. The Nature of Spirit and Man as a Spiritual Being – another of Giles’ uplifting and carefully thought-out reviews, this time on what spiritual reality is like.
To Chapter 10:Â Religion and Science: No Contradiction
January 13th, 2008 at 1:23 am
The text speaks to my sensibilities of truth and I trust that it is line with the teachings of Swedenborg and The Christ. I am new to his work but so far feel as if I have come home. “We are all born for heaven; it is what we love that determines our fate, not what we profess to believe.”
March 13th, 2008 at 12:07 am
Alot of interesting text, thanks.