Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named Patty:
I know this may seem silly but I struggle with my weight and I’m extremely self-conscious about it. Will my body be the right weight and appearance in the afterlife?
Thanks for the good question, Patty!
You are certainly not alone either in your struggle with your weight or in your self-consciousness about the appearance of your body. Many people have ongoing battles with their weight, whether with being overweight or underweight. And many people—even people whose bodies are a healthy weight—have major body image issues.
The anxiety people feel about their bodies is commonly attributed to the widespread use of idealized and sexualized male and especially female bodies in advertising and mass media. And that certainly does have a major effect.
But there’s more to it than that.
Jacob’s Dream, by William Blake, 1805
It is through our body that we communicate and interact with the world. Not only our words, but our facial expressions, our gestures, our actions, and the general appearance of our body communicates—or conceals—what is in our mind and heart. Our body is an integral part of who we are and how we relate to our family, friends, and everyone else we see each day. It is only natural to have some concern about the appearance of our body and the messages it sends to the people around us.
Unfortunately—or sometimes fortunately—while we are living here on earth our body doesn’t always reflect the reality of the person inside.
However, in the spiritual world our body will become a perfect reflection of the person we truly are. So the short answer to your question is: Yes, your body will be the right weight and appearance in the afterlife, in the sense that it will fully and accurately express your true self to everyone around you.
Do you find that idea reassuring? Or scary?
Either way, it is a call to action.
Our physical body
Here on earth, many things affect the appearance of our physical body. Our genetics, our upbringing, our environment, the values of our community, and yes, our own choices and our own emotional state. Some of these things are under our own control. Others are not.
This means that as long as we are living here in the material world, the appearance of our body only partially reflects our own thoughts, feelings, and values.
We can do things that will make our body more or less healthy. For example, we can eat good food and get regular exercise or we can eat junk food and be couch potatoes. And our choices and lifestyle will have a major effect on the health and appearance of our body.
On the other hand, we have no control over the genes we were born with, and there’s nothing we can do about the diet and lifestyle our parents or guardians raised us with. Both of these can cause health problems for us that we may not be able to fully overcome. We also may not have a choice about where we live—and if we happen to live in a polluted area, that can also have a major impact on our health.
Further, we can’t always control our emotional environment. Sometimes we are stuck in very painful and conflicted human situations that we can’t just walk away from. And our emotional state and environment, too, have a profound effect on our body and our physical health.
So yes, we do have some control over our physical health and the appearance of our body. And it is good for us to use the choice and control that we do have to take care of our body as best we can.
But there are also many things that affect our body that are beyond our choice and control. Understanding this can help us not to be too hard on ourselves if we don’t have the body we wish we had.
And finally, society can be very hard on people whose bodies don’t conform to ideals of physical beauty that are unrealistic and unattainable for the vast majority of people. Achieving peace with our physical appearance also requires us to pay less and less attention to the often superficial values and messages of society, and pay more and more attention to developing our own internal values for our own life and our place, purpose, and mission in the world.
As we gain a sense of our own value, integrity, and unique contribution to society, what society thinks of us and of the appearance of our body will matter less and less to us. And as we develop a healthier sense of self, we will tend to become more physically healthy too, and more comfortable with the particular body that we have.
Our spiritual body
Angels Ministering to Christ, by William Blake, 1820
What does this have to do with the weight and appearance of our body in the afterlife?
Quite simply, unlike in the physical world, in the afterlife our internal sense of self will be fully expressed in the appearance and actions of our spiritual body.
Yes, as the apostle Paul says:
If there is a physical body, there is also a spiritual body. (1 Corinthians 15:44)
In the afterlife, we are not wispy, ethereal beings. We have a body that is exactly like our body here on earth, only instead of being made of physical matter, it is made of spiritual substance. And because it’s made of spiritual substance, it is much more responsive to the ongoing state of our mind and heart.
People who arrive in the spiritual world are often surprised to find out that they still have a body. In his most popular book, Heaven and Hell, Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) wrote:
People in the Christian world are in such blind ignorance about angels and spirits that they think of them as minds without form, as mere thoughts, and can conceive of them only as something airy with something alive within it. Further, since they attribute to them nothing human except a capacity for thought, they believe angels cannot see because they have no eyes, cannot hear because they have no ears, and cannot talk because they have no mouths or tongues. (Heaven and Hell #74)
But based on his own extensive experience in the spiritual world, he reported that it is quite the contrary:
Angels are completely human. They have faces, eyes, ears, chests, arms, hands, and feet. They see each other, hear each other, and talk to each other. In short, they lack nothing that belongs to humans except that they are not clothed with a material body. I have seen them in their own light, which is far, far greater than noonday on our earth, and in that light I have seen all the details of their faces more crisply and clearly than I have seen the faces of people here in the world.
In other words, Swedenborg reported exactly what everyone who encountered angels in the Bible reported: that they are people in every way, who look, sound, and feel just like people here on earth. (And no, they don’t really have wings.) Here is just one example, from the scene of the empty tomb after Jesus’ resurrection:
When they looked up, they saw that the stone, which was very large, had already been rolled back. As they entered the tomb, they saw a young man, dressed in a white robe, sitting on the right side; and they were alarmed. (Mark 16:4–5, italics added)
If you read through the Bible, you will find that every time angels are described, they are described as people, with hands, feet, chests, mouths, eyes, ears, hair, and every other part of the human body.
Men are still men, and women are still women
The Angels Appearing to the Shepherds, by William Blake, 1809
And according to Swedenborg, this includes our specifically male and female body parts. Here is part of a story he tells about some newcomers to the spiritual world:
Once I saw three spirits fresh from the world wandering around, exploring, and asking questions. They were surprised that they were living people just as before and that the things they saw were the same. They knew that they had left the former or natural world, where they had thought that they would not live as people again until the day of the Last Judgment, when they would be clothed with the flesh and bones that had been laid in their graves.
To remove all doubt that they really were people, they kept examining and touching themselves and others and feeling objects, and by a thousand ways assured themselves that they were still people the same as in the world before, except that they saw each other in a brighter light and objects in more brilliance and therefore much more perfectly.
At this point they were joined by some regular inhabitants of the spiritual world. And since two of the three newcomers were young men, the conversation naturally turned to sexual subjects. In the course of their explorations of this new world they had seen some rather beautiful women—which for some reason had gotten the ol’ libido going. But being in the presence of angels, they beat around the bush:
“Are human figures in heaven exactly like the ones in the natural world?”
The answer was: “Exactly the same. Nothing is taken away from a man and nothing from a woman. In a word, a man is a man and a woman is a woman in total perfection of the form that they were created in. Step aside and look at yourself if you want, and see if anything is missing—whether you are just as male as you were before.” (from Marriage Love #44)
The message is clear: If you are a woman, in the afterlife you will still be a woman, and your body will be fully female. If you are a man, in the afterlife you will still be a man, and your body will be fully male.
In heaven, old people grow young and beautiful
Further, in heaven, Swedenborg says, however old we may have been when we died, our spiritual body will progress back to the peak of young adulthood:
People in heaven are continually progressing toward the springtime of life. The more thousands of years they live, the more pleasant and happy is their springtime. This continues forever, increasing according to the growth and level of their love, thoughtfulness, and faith.
As the years pass, elderly women who have died of old age—women who have lived in faith in the Lord, thoughtfulness toward their neighbor, and in contented marriage love with their husbands—come more and more into the flower of youth and into a beauty that surpasses any notion of beauty accessible to our sight. Their goodness and thoughtfulness is what gives them their form and gives them its own likeness, making the pleasure and beauty of thoughtfulness radiate from every least corner of their faces so that they become actual forms of thoughtfulness. Some people have seen them and have been stunned.
The form of thoughtfulness that is open to view in heaven is like this because it is thoughtfulness itself that both gives and is given visible form. In fact, it does this in such a way that the whole angel, especially her face, is virtually thoughtfulness itself appearing to open perception. When people look at this form, its beauty is unutterable, affecting the very inmost life of the mind with thoughtfulness.
In a word, to grow old in heaven is to grow young. People who have lived in love for the Lord and in thoughtfulness toward their neighbor are forms like this, or beauties like this, in the other life. All angels are forms like this, in infinite variety. This is what makes heaven. (Heaven and Hell #414)
Similarly, those who die as children or teenagers will grow up to young adulthood:
Many people think that children remain children in heaven and are like children among the angels. People who do not know what an angel is can corroborate this opinion because of the images here and there in churches, where angels are represented as children.
However, things are actually very different. Intelligence and wisdom make an angel, qualities that they do not have as long as they are children. Children are with the angels, but they themselves are not angels yet. Once they are intelligent and wise they are angels for the first time. In fact—something that has surprised me—then they no longer look like children but like adults, because they no longer have a childlike nature but a more grown-up angelic nature. This goes with intelligence and wisdom. . . .
It does need to be known that children in heaven do not grow up beyond the prime of youth, but remain at that age forever. To assure me of this, I have been allowed to talk with some who had been raised as children in heaven and had grown up there, with some while they were still children, and then later with the same ones when they had become youths; and I have heard from them about the course of their life from one age level to another. (Heaven and Hell #340)
By “the prime of youth” here Swedenborg means young adulthood.
The Angel of Revelation, by William Blake, 1803
No matter what age you may be now, and no matter what age you may be when you die, you can imagine yourself as an angel being a young man or woman at the peak of your physical power and health.
That is why, in the Bible, angels are commonly described as powerful young men, and even as radiant in their appearance. Here are two examples:
Then the Lord opened Balaam’s eyes, and he saw the angel of the Lord standing in the road with his sword drawn. So he bowed low and fell facedown.
The angel of the Lord asked him, “Why have you beaten your donkey these three times? I have come here to oppose you because your path is a reckless one before me. The donkey saw me and turned away from me these three times. If it had not turned away, I would certainly have killed you by now, but I would have spared it.” (Numbers 22:31–33)
And again at the time of Jesus’ resurrection:
And suddenly there was a great earthquake; for an angel of the Lord, descending from heaven, came and rolled back the stone and sat on it. His appearance was like lightning, and his clothing white as snow. (Matthew 28:2–3)
Because of these and other descriptions of angels in the Bible, they are commonly pictured in Christian art as young, powerful, and beautiful.
The take-away is that in heaven your body will be young and beautiful.
A call to action
That is, if you choose to go to heaven, and not to hell.
Without going into the gory details, just as angels are young, powerful, and beautiful in body, so the evil spirits in hell are ugly, misshapen, and repulsive in body—especially when seen from a distance.
That’s because as I said at the beginning of the article, in the afterlife our spiritual body will perfectly reflect and express our true self to everyone around us.
- If our true, inner self is beautiful, loving, thoughtful, and wise, then in the afterlife we will be beautiful angels in heaven.
- If our true, inner self is ugly, selfish, thoughtless, greedy, and foolish, then in the afterlife we will be ugly demons in hell.
The choice is 100% ours. And it is a choice that we make during our lifetime on earth.
The appearance of our physical body here in the material world is only partially under our control. Though we can live healthfully in body and mind, that may or may not be enough to overcome genetic and environmental factors that can take their toll on our physical body and health.
But the appearance of our spiritual body is well within our control. That’s because our spiritual body will be beautiful or ugly depending on whether we choose to turn our mind and heart toward love and kindness for others or toward self-centeredness and greed.
In the afterlife, we don’t have to worry about genetic diseases and environmental pollution that can damage and destroy our physical health and wellbeing. All of those external influences on the appearance of our body will be taken away.
What’s left will be the inner influences of our own choices, in our own mind and heart, about what kind of person we want to be.
Do you want to have a body that is young, powerful, and beautiful in the afterlife?
Then choose every day to be powerful in loving and serving the people around you, and beautiful in expressing compassion and care for your fellow human beings in need.
If in your everyday life you choose to love God and love your fellow human beings, as Jesus commanded us to do, then in the afterlife you will soon find yourself living in a body more beautiful than you could have imagined during your lifetime here on earth.
But even better, you will lose any self-consciousness about your body. In fact, you won’t spend a lot of time thinking about your body. You’ll be too busy sharing a happy life of love, learning, and kindness with your spiritual family and friends in heaven.
This article is a response to a spiritual conundrum submitted by a reader.
For further reading:
- Will Sick or Disabled People Return to Good Health in the Spiritual World?
- It’s not fair that God made some people incredibly beautiful, and others just average!
- Dani Mathers, Body-Shaming, and How to Develop Beauty
- What Happens To Us When We Die?
- How does Marriage Fit In with a Spiritual Life? Is There Marriage in Heaven?
- Money Can’t Buy Happiness . . . But Service Can
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Lee Woofenden is an ordained minister, writer, editor, translator, and teacher. He enjoys taking spiritual insights from the Bible and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg and putting them into plain English as guides for everyday life.
Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life 
I am enjoying your site more fully for the first time and my comprehension is expanding accordingly. Thank you, Dru
Hi Dru,
Nice to hear from you again. I’m glad you’re enjoying the site! I hope all is going well with you and yours.
It astonishes me that helping animals as well as fellow humans is not mentioned. If we are compassionate, loving, ethical beings, that includes helping every fellow being on earth. Luckily, there are animal angels making positive changes for the voiceless!
Hi Julia,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment. If Annette had written this article, helping animals certainly would have been mentioned! 🙂 She’s the pet person in our household.
Hi Lee, this has always bothered me and makes me very depressed. Some NDEers say they where “just energy orbs” or “all knowing-consciousness” or what they saw on the other side was like other “orbs of people” in space or just being in state of “light”. Other NDEers said they went to a real spiritual world / heaven with bodies like ours. Some “mediums” say where are just “energy floating around” other say that there is a real world. Ever since my best friend died it will be a year coming this December 16th. I’ve feel I’m going through this spiritual journey. I feel confident to say that there is an afterlife but what gets me depressed is of what type of state. I read so many NDE accounts and I still feel very lost. I can never imagine just being “energy” or just “consciousness”. I love my life, my home, my earth, my body, the faces of my loved ones, what we do here on earth, just everything about this life it’s what makes us human. I am fairly newly acquainted to Swedenborg and I find his writing to be extremely comforting about the afterlife and his teachings about the Lord. So I guess my question is why are there so many variations about the afterlife?
I just pray my best friend is doing what they used to love doing here and is perfectly ok. I just want to give them a big hug and a kiss when my time comes to see them again.
P.S your website has been a blessing to me. I still fight with depression but your words about the Bible and Swedenborg have been heaven sent.
Hi Sam,
Thanks for stopping by, and for you comment and questions. I’m sorry to hear about your best friend’s death. I’m glad our website has given you some hope and something solid to hang onto about the afterlife.
The thing is, NDEers visit the spiritual world only briefly. And because the spiritual world is far more responsive to people’s state of mind than this physical earth is, people see all different things depending upon their particular state of mind, their beliefs, and so on. It’s very complicated. Depending only on the brief experiences of NDEers for our understanding of the spiritual world is not very reliable.
Swedenborg was different than anyone else in history (that I am aware of) in that he spent, not just a few minutes or even a few days in the spiritual world, but a period of nearly three decades from his mid-fifties to the time of his death in his eighties. This gave him the time to get fully acclimated to the spiritual world, and get a more detailed and realistic picture of it. For more on this, please see:
Do the Teachings of Emanuel Swedenborg take Precedence over the Bible?
Reading the experiences of NDEers is good because it offers many spiritual experiences by many different people, which increases our assurance that the spiritual world is indeed real, and that our life does not end with physical death.
However, to get a real and solid understanding of what the spiritual world is like, I recommend that you get a copy of Swedenborg’s book Heaven and Hell, which is the most extensive tour of the spiritual world ever written. The link is to my book notice here on this website, which provides links where you can purchase it or download a free e-book version.
About people being “orbs of light” in the spiritual world, Swedenborg does describe some spirits who are so averse to physical and bodily things that they prefer to think of themselves as orbs of light, and even present themselves to others in that way. But this, he says, is more wishful thinking than the reality. Even these spirits do have spiritual bodies just like every other spirit. New Age types here on earth who have woo-woo ideas about “spirituality” may gravitate toward such spirits in the spiritual world because New Agers often like to think of spiritual life as “pure energy” without a specific form and structure. Just for fun, here’s the Star Trek version:
But the reality is that nothing exists without a definite structure and form. And though in the spiritual world we no longer have a physical body made of physical matter, we do have a spiritual body made of spiritual substance. That body is just as real, touchable, and huggable as our physical body here. It also has all of the same parts and internal organs as our body here, all of which are just as functional as those of our physical body. That’s why we can eat, sleep, run, play, talk, and do everything else there that we can do here. For more on this, please see:
Is Heaven Physical? Can Angels Play Tennis?
I can assure you that when it comes your time to leave this world for the next, you will be able to give your friend that big hug and kiss!
Thank Thank thank you Lee! I can give you a big hug! Thank you for clearing up my very confused mind! There is so much wrong information out there it can make you really depressed. I will definitely read the books you recommended and I really appreciate you responding to my message. You really turned my whole perspective around and it really makes sense now on why there are so many different NDEs out there. Now I can rest easy, now that I know the truth. Thank you so much again and God Bless! You are changing peoples lives by spreading the true meaning of the Word and of the afterlife.
Hi Sam,
You are very welcome. It’s my pleasure. If you have further questions as you read, or while you’re just thinking about things, feel free to ask.
Hi Lee. I figured this post would be a good place to ask this question, and given it’s relevance to so many people, I’m surprised I haven’t heard it addressed in detail by any Swedenborgian yet! My question relating to our appearance in the afterlife is: how, if at all, does gender identity factor into it? If a person felt genuine gender dysphoria and a strong desire in their heart and soul to be the opposite sex, would that be fulfilled in heaven, either through the Lord’s love and wisdom or the principle of correspondences? Or would they cease to feel gender dysphoria in heaven and “adapt” to their biological (human birth) sex? I’m curious about your thoughts on this matter.
Chad
Hi Chad,
Thanks for stopping by, and for your comment and question. It is an excellent and very tricky one.
Most likely the reason you haven’t heard it addressed in detail by any Swedenborgian is that in Swedenborg’s day and age, multiple permutations of gender identity was not a cultural “thing.” People thought in binary terms: there was male, and there was female. A biological male was male; a biological female was female. There was some awareness of people born hermaphroditic, but such births were considered “monsters,” and they did not shake the binary view of sex and gender that prevailed in society. Swedenborg therefore never addressed the issue of people whose sense of gender identity is different than their biological sex. Such a possibility probably never occurred to him.
This is also the reason I can’t give you a definitive answer to the question of what gender people who experience gender dysphoria will be in the afterlife. (There may be some information about this in the near-death experience literature, however.)
I presume that conservative Swedenborgians would say, in your words, that “they [will] cease to feel gender dysphoria in heaven and ‘adapt’ to their biological (human birth) sex.” However, though that certainly is possible, I find it a less than entirely convincing answer.
Here, in at least minimal detail, are some of the issues involved:
When we die, we leave behind our physical body, and live in our spiritual body instead.
However, there is a caveat in that Swedenborg says we take with us a “border” (Latin: limbus) of “the finest [meaning subtlest] substances in nature.” (See True Christianity #103—but I do not agree with some of what Swedenborg says here; also “sperm” is a mistranslation, slated for correction in future printings of this translation.) This “border” provides fixity to our life in the spiritual world. This could be used to argue that we will return to identifying with our biological sex in the afterlife, because (as the argument would go), our biological sex would be stamped on that limbus.
The other, and greater, argument for that position would be that our gender is an indelible part of our inmost soul, which cannot be changed.
However, this argument raises the question of what gender is “stamped upon our soul.” After all, our sense of identity, which is an inner and spiritual thing, is closer to our inmost soul than our biological sex, which is an external and physical thing.
Conservative Swedenborgians would likely hold that it is impossible for our biological sex not to match the gender of our soul, since, as Swedenborg says in various places, the soul builds the body in its own image. But then we have to ask the question of why our physical body does indeed get out of phase with our spirit, such that Swedenborg says that in the spiritual world our appearance changes, and is not the same as our physical appearance here on earth. If our physical body perfectly reflected our soul, this would not be the case.
The argument then might be that because of the Fall of Humankind, for some of us our gender identity got out of sync with our biological sex, and gender dysphoria is therefore a result of the damage done by the Fall. Still, it is mere assumption that therefore our biological sex is the standard, and our gender identity must yield to our biological sex. Perhaps one of the effects of the Fall was that like other physical characteristics, our biological sex no longer always corresponds to the gender of our soul. (And I do continue to believe that the human soul is not neuter, but gendered at its core, as Swedenborg says.)
These are some of the issues and arguments that would have to be worked through in order to answer your question.
To get back to the basics, though, when we die we leave our physical body behind, and live in our spiritual body to eternity. And according to Swedenborg, our spiritual body and its appearance perfectly correspond to our character as a person, especially as determined by our “ruling love,” or dominant motivation. In this our spiritual body is unlike our physical body, which, as discussed above, may diverge to a greater or lesser extent from accurately representing the true content of our heart and mind.
For this reason, without having any certainty on the question, I lean toward thinking that it will be our inner sense of gender identity, not our biological sex (if they are different), that will prevail in the spiritual world.
To put it plainly, I tend to think that people who think of themselves as female will have a female spiritual body, people who think of themselves as male will have a male spiritual body, and those few people who think of themselves as something else will have . . . something else for the form of their spiritual body.
These are my thoughts on this matter.
On the practical, legal, and societal level, Annette and I believe that as uncomfortable as it may be for many people who have a more traditional outlook on sex and gender, people must be allowed to express their own gender identity, sexual orientation, and so on. If doing so involves surgery, other than the socially charged nature of sex reassignment surgery due to those traditional views of sex and gender that still prevail in much of society, this is not much different than repairing a cleft palate or separating conjoined twins.
This, in our view, is not only a matter of human rights and non-discrimination, but also a matter of going with the flow of the new spiritual freedom, and the resulting new political and social freedom, that has entered into human society here on earth in the past few centuries as a result of the Lord’s second coming and the beginning of the descent of the New Jerusalem out of heaven from God. (See: “Is the World Coming to an End? What about the Second Coming?”)
Thank you for such an insightful answer, Lee! Swedenborg’s insights into the spiritual world, and the teachings about living and conduct that stem from them, have helped me grow as both a Christian and person, and have helped explain the thorny questions that gave me a crisis of faith earlier in life. I cannot thank you enough for the work you and Annette (and countless other Swedenborgians and faithful Christians) do to help people draw closer to God and understand the teachings of the Bible. You’ll probably be hearing more questions from me in the future, if you don’t mind. God bless you and everyone on our wonderful earth!
Hi Chad,
You are most welcome. Thank you for your kind words. I’m glad you’ve found light to guide you along your way. And yes, please feel free to ask any other questions that may come to mind if you don’t find an article here that already addresses them. God bless.
Im sorry, if Im asking quite a dumb question, but will my body look exactly the same in heaven? It makes me depressed when i think about looking different than Im looking right now:( I love my body and I dont want to look any different than Im looking now.
Thank you for your answer:)
Hi Jozef,
It’s a good question, not a dumb one. What your body looks like in the spiritual world will depend upon what sort of life you live here on earth.
The appearance of our physical body here on earth depends upon genetics, environment, lifestyle, and so on. But in the spiritual world, the appearance of our body depends upon our inner character. If we have built up a good character by living a life of care and useful service for our fellow human beings, then we will have a good-looking body that reflects our good spirit. But if we have built up a bad character by living a life of caring only for ourselves and our own friends and family, and treating other people badly, then we will have an ugly body that reflects our ugly spirit.
After you die, at first your spiritual body will look exactly like your physical body did here on earth. But over time, it will change depending on what sort of person you are inwardly. If you have been a criminal or a jerk, your body will, over time, become ugly and deformed. But if you have been a good and thoughtful person, your body will come to look even better than it did here—even if that doesn’t seem possible to you right now! 😛
As for whether it will be exactly the same as your body here, that is a good question. But it will certainly reflect the person you are inside. That means you will have a body that you enjoy, and that feels like “you.” If the one you have right now is one you enjoy and that fits you, I don’t see why it would have to change. Except that if you die when you are old, your body will grow younger until it is at the peak of its youthful vigor.
I hope my body will not change so my close friends and family could recognize me and also for my own joy, because as I said earlier I love my body and i wouldnt change anything about it even if I could, because this is me… and I dont want to be anyone else, I just want to be ME:)
Also I want to thank you very much, I appreciate your response:)
Hi Jozef,
You are very welcome.
And yes, you will be YOU, and your family and friends will recognize you in the afterlife. 🙂
Hi Lee. When you say our spiritual body and appearance reflects the person we truly are, to what extent does the appearance of our spiritual body also correspond with “how we see ourselves”? Let’s say, for example, someone has dyed their hair a certain color for most of their life, such that having that hair color becomes a part of how that person conceives of themselves (maybe not a major part, but still a part nonetheless). Would their spiritual body then have that hair color that the person sees as “part of them”, or their natural hair color? What about other factors, like physical age? Is every adult in heaven in their early 30s as their “prime” (as some of the early church fathers infer based on Jesus’ age when He was crucified), or is there some variance? What about people who see the prime of their life as middle age or later adulthood, when they have attained more life experience and wisdom; will their spiritual bodies appear “as they see and think of themselves”?
God Bless,
Chad
Hi Chad,
It’s an interesting question.
In heaven, how we see ourselves will likely be very close to, if not identical with, who we truly are. That’s because in heaven especially, there are no outward masks that don’t match the inner self, as there are here on earth. Everything we are inwardly is perfectly expressed in who we are outwardly. There will therefore not likely be any disconnect between who we truly are and how we see ourselves.
In hell it’s a little more complicated. Falsehood and deception are integral to hellish life, such that evil spirits in hell commonly create fantasies for themselves and others that don’t represent how things actually are. These fantasies are not stable, but they can deceive people in hell for a shorter or longer time. Also, to each other evil spirits look like normal people, but to outsiders, especially to angels looking in from a distance, they look deformed and monstrous according to their deformed and monstrous ruling love and character.
For the sake of simplicity, let’s stick with heaven. 🙂
About hair color or other external appearances of the body, keep in mind that there is no “natural” hair color in the sense of a genetically determined hair color. Our material genetics no longer exist in the spiritual world, because we have left our physical body and its DNA behind. Rather, our ruling love, and the other subordinate loves that serve it, will form our spiritual DNA that determines our appearance.
Meanwhile, in heaven there is also a great deal of freedom to express ourselves according to our own loves and character. We aren’t locked in to some specific way of being because of some impersonal ruling love beyond our control. Rather, our ruling love and its supporting loves are us, and we express them freely. If that involves having green hair, or even green hair one day and pink hair the next day, there would be nothing particular to prevent that. Angels do wear different clothes different days. I don’t see why they couldn’t also “dye” their hair different colors if they so choose, according to the day’s, or month’s, mood.
Having said that, I think that the average angel will have more of a steady, stable character that will not involve ever-changing unusual hair colors. But if a person is artistic and mercurial here on earth, that character will be carried into the spiritual world, and will be expressed just as freely there as here, if not more so. We are the same people there as we are here, only without social constraints on outwardly expressing fully and exactly who we are inwardly.
This, at any rate, is how I expect things will be in heaven when it comes to our bodily dress, grooming, and appearance.
As for “physical age,” Swedenborg seems to go more for early twenties as the time of peak physical health. Just because Jesus died in his early thirties, that doesn’t make early thirties the time of our physical peak.
However, I presume this is a generalization also. Individual variations are certainly possible. Once again, it’s not as though we’re locked into some appearance that’s beyond our control. Our physical appearance will perfectly express our true inner self. In heaven there will be no gender dysphoria, age dysphoria, weight dysphoria, or any other dysphoria. Whatever body we have, we will have it because that’s the body that perfectly expresses who we are.
One thing Swedenborg is clear about is that even though the angels he saw appeared very youthful, they have all the wisdom of age that they had developed both during their earthly life and in their ongoing life in heaven.
Here on earth we think of gray hair as connoting wisdom because our physical bodies tend to go gray by the time we have developed wisdom. In the spiritual world, that won’t necessarily be so. Based on Swedenborg’s descriptions, it seems that in heaven wisdom is communicated more by the eyes and the face generally, and by a light that may surround the wisest of the angels. So it seems that in heaven wisdom creates different signs and signals than here on earth.
The key idea is that in heaven, our outward appearance will perfectly reflect our true inner self. There will be no false inner self either, as in people completely misconstruing their own character so that their self-image doesn’t match their actual character. And when we are expressing our true inner self, we are completely free. There is nothing saying that we have to appear a certain way. Rather, our appearance reflects the person we love to be. If that happens to be different from the average angel, then we are still free to express our odd and unusual self in odd and unusual ways.
I don’t see how it could be any other way.
Thanks for your response, Lee! It’s very comforting and reassuring to know that in Heaven, our appearance will reflect, as you say, “the person we love to be”, and that we will be free to express ourselves in that way. To know that my spiritual body will perfectly reflect my soul and ruling loves is a very happy thought.
Wait so in Hell, evil spirits look attractive to each other but those in Heaven see their true appearance? Also, where do fantasies come into play if everything in Hell is as real as to the evil spirits as it is during their time on Earth?
Hi Ray,
I would say rather than “attractive,” evil spirits look ordinary to one another. I.e., to one another they look fully human. Only from the outside do they look like monsters of one sort or another.
Fantasies come in because evil spirits are not seeing the reality of who they are and what their surroundings look like. Their surroundings also look ordinary to them, but in the light of heaven they look like blasted landscapes of one sort or another. Also, evil spirits can induce various fantasies upon themselves and one another based on their evil desires and false ideas. One example Swedenborg gives is misers imagining themselves counting huge piles of gold when in reality all they have in front of them on the table is a few grains of fool’s gold.
Well, I figured evil spirits would have to be physically attracts to each other to f commit adultery. So, if a miser believed he has tons of gold or wealth, he can manipulate others into thinking he has it if he flaunts it. Are evil spirits ever snapped out of their fantasy and see if their surroundings for what they truly are!m?
Hi Ray,
Yes, evil spirits can induce a fantasy of attractiveness around themselves. They do this by appealing to whatever sexual fantasies may be in the minds of those looking at them. Prostitutes in hell can make themselves look very beautiful to potential “customers.” This fantasy generally dissipates when the “john” actually goes into the room to engage in sex with them, or if not then, afterwards.
As for the misers, yes, they can maintain the fantasy of piles of gold only so long. Then they wake up to the reality that it’s just fools gold. But they enjoy the fantasy so much that they don’t really care, so they go right back into it next chance they have.
And they still sleep with them after seeing how ugly they really are?
Hi Ray,
Apparently. It seems that by that time they’ve already been roped in, and they can’t back out. These prostitutes are, after all, evil spirits, and not innocent at all. They have their ways . . . .
So any woman that is an evil spirit that likes sex is considered a prostitute? If they are deformed and misshapen, would they still have their parts in the right place?
From what I’ve read of Swedenborg writings, both angels and devils can appear in forms that are not their true forms – maybe even non-human forms – but I take it the true form is “the easiest to be”, and that’s the spiritual body that perfectly reflects one’s nature?
Hi K,
Most often, angels and devils appear in correspondential form from a distance, but in their own form up close.
For example, a group of angels of the highest heaven may look like a flock of sheep from a distance, because sheep correspond to innocence, and the highest heaven is the heaven of innocence. But once a visitor gets close to them, they look like people.
Meanwhile evil spirits of a particular kind may look like satyrs from a distance, but like themselves close up, as in a story that Swedenborg tells in Marriage Love #521.
And yes, sometimes individual spirits and angels or groups of spirits or angels intentionally appear in a non-human form, or in a modified human form, representing some aspect of their thinking or their self-image. Swedenborg descried one group of spirits that preferred to present themselves visually as an orb of light, even though they were actually regular human beings.
Where in the writings does Swedenborg mention this orb of light thing?
Hi K,
I was afraid you were going to ask me that! 😛 But I found it. It’s in Other Planets #19. The wording used is “crystal balls” rather than “orbs of light” as I misremembered it. It is about spirits that Swedenborg said were from the planet Mercury.
Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) can cause intrusive thoughts to be associated with various and even ordinary stimuli. It can become ingrained in the thinking, which can be mental torment. Do such associations get severed if and when OCD is cured, or can such associations remain for eternity, becoming part of the character?
Hi K,
As you know, after we die most of us do not go directly to heaven or to hell, but rather spend a shorter or longer time in the intermediate state between heaven and hell, which Swedenborg calls the world of spirits. There, anything that does not accord with our “ruling love,” which is our heart of hearts, falls away into the background, so that it is no longer part of our active daily life.
Swedenborg lived before modern psychology existed, with all of its various diagnoses of mental illnesses. He therefore couldn’t talk about this or that mental condition that today we classify as mental illnesses. Instead, he generally accepted the traditional Christian view that what we today call mental illnesses involve the presence and activity of evil spirits. He believed that evil spirits played a role in physical illnesses as well, while also accepting that external factors such as diet and lifestyle played a role as well.
Further, he said that when people enter the spiritual world, they begin growing bodily young again, until they are in the prime of their life in terms of physique—probably representing our physical state in our twenties. Being physically or mentally ill would not be compatible with that. And in fact, whenever Swedenborg met and spoke with angels in heaven, he always described them as physically beautiful and healthy.
Based on all this, I think we can say with some confidence that both physical and mental illnesses and afflictions will fall away during our time in the world of spirits, before we move on to our final home in heaven. Physically, we will “grow young” toward the prime of youth. And if Swedenborg is right, and evil spirits are associated with mental illness (which is not necessarily incompatible with physical and biological causes of mental illness), then those evil spirits will fall away as well, since they cannot bear the atmosphere of heaven.
In short, I believe that mentally handicapping conditions such as OCD will fall away during our time in the world of spirits. Will it have had some effect upon our personality? Probably. But any negative effects of it will fall away, I believe, and we will be left with any positive developments of character that happened in us as a result of our struggle with that condition during our lifetime here on earth.
Hi Lee,
I’ve loved reading all your posts since my discovery of this website, and after finding this post, I have yet to find an answer to a question of mine: Do facial features change according to our inner self as well? I find that this is likely lumped into “spiritual bodies” but I have tried to figure out if our facial features, along with our bodies, resemble who we really are. And, if so, how can I keep my current body when I enter heaven?
Thanks,
Josiah
Hi Josiah,
It’s a good question, and a tricky one to answer definitively. Swedenborg does say that our body and face change during our second stage after death to perfectly correspond to our inner character. But I get the sense that this means we become more beautiful or more ugly based on whether we are good or evil people inside. We also do grow young in face and body if we died when old.
The real question is whether our physical face and body during our earthly lifetime reflects our inner character. My general thought is that it does tend to reflect our inner character, but not perfectly. So I tend to think that our eventual spiritual face and body will bear some resemblance to our physical face and body, but may be morphed in a more beautiful or more ugly direction based on our true inner character.
One of the reasons I lean in this direction is that Swedenborg also says that our spirit directs the formation of our body. This would suggest that even our physical body is a reflection of our spirit. However, we know scientifically that our physical development is also shaped by many external environmental factors, which might pull our physical face and body away from a perfect expression of our inner character.
These are some of my thoughts on your good and fascinating question.
Hi Lee,
The descriptions of the Afterlife sometimes sounds like a cool fantasy world with fantastic beasts, I think even Swedenborg described that he saw a talking turtle with two heads playing with kids on the beach.🐢
Since those things are linked with feelings, thoughts and culture, do you think there are themed communities of fantasy fans / sci-fi fans since it’s an essential part of their own? I’m pretty sure I would be a member of one of them! 😁
Also, would we be able to change / modify minor details about our appearance? Like an eye color, hair length, facial hair, etc…? What if I want to be an angel with some Vulcan ears! 😂
Blessings!
Hi Caio,
Since we can do all of these things here, I’m sure we’ll be able to do them there as well, only probably much better. Here we have virtual reality and holodecks in our science fiction. There, I have no doubt that we’ll have the real thing.
Hi Caio,
Swedenborg did say that he could have reported a lot more than he did from the spiritual world. I suspect he saw many things that would be so strange and unbelievable to people on earth that he never even wrote them down. I’m sure he was well aware of the likelihood that anything he put in writing, whether he himself published it or not, would eventually get published. Even so, what he did publish was a curated version of what he wrote and didn’t publish, especially in Spiritual Experiences. He did not want to scare people away from the teachings by publishing things that many if not most just couldn’t accept.
In short, there’s plenty of room in the spiritual world for all sorts of things that Swedenborg didn’t say anything about. Not to mention that humanity has continued on for two or three more centuries, coming up with all sorts of ideas and inventions that didn’t even exist in the 18th century.
Hi Lee,
That’s so cool! 😃
I’m definitely not saying I want to die now, Haha, but I can’t wait to explore and discover all the marvelous and magic places that wait for me in Heaven with my soulmate and, as well, with my community!
Death feels more like a celestial ticket to an incredible journey now!
Hi Caio,
If you think about what it would have been like to live in the womb for nine months, in a space that was getting smaller and smaller for your body, having less and less room to move, and then being born into the wide open space of the world outside the womb, that’s how big the difference will be once you leave the womb of this world behind to begin your life in the wide open spaces of the spiritual world.
Hi Lee,
The Swedenborg Subreddit got deleted? I can’t access or even find it anymore 😦
Hi Caio,
Apparently it had no moderators, and got banned as a result.
Hi Lee,
Well, that’s unfortunately 😦
But I remember that the community as not so active anyway aside some rare discussions…
Lee, are you a member of the Swedenborg Foundation community?
They send a few emails to me sometimes, and I’m really interested, but it’s just immensely expensive to me because of the conversion to of my country currency.
Hi Caio,
What Swedenborg Foundation community are you talking about? What platform is it on?
Hi Lee,
Here: Become an Annual Member – Swedenborg Foundation
Hi Caio,
This one is to become a member of the Swedenborg Foundation. I’ve been a lifetime member for many years now.
Hi Lee,
Also, the link for the community page: Join Our Community Today
Hi Caio,
This seems to be something beyond the traditional Swedenborg Foundation membership. I’m not a part of it, so I can’t give any more information than what is on the page and in the video.
The way I hope it is is that one can appear in any form, but one’s default form reflects the inner nature. That way I do not have to be stuck in a mammalian humanoid body all the time, and I could appear as a glowing “energy being” if I wanted to.
Hi K,
This sort of thing does seem to be possible in the spiritual world. But for the most part, in heaven people are happy to be who they are, and aren’t trying to be someone or something else.
If someone has a mental disorder that is such an integral part of their personality, can such really be removed after death? For example, can someone who endured decades of being autistic and struggling to empathize with others (if they can even do that) be magically cured of autism if it has become such a deep-seated part of their identity over the decades?
PS: I know that mental disorders are supposedly healed in the spiritual, but some can be very deep-seated and integral in someone’s personality.
Hi K,
It’s a hard question. On the one hand, I do believe that the disabling part of the autism is likely physically based, and would therefore no longer exist in the spiritual world. On the other hand, as you say, the experience of being autistic does become part of a person’s character and personality. I don’t really know exactly how it works. Perhaps someone who is mildly autistic, but can still live a good life, will not change all that much. But I do not believe that someone who is severely autistic will have to live that way for the rest of eternity. I believe they will be freed from it, and will be able to live a fully functional human life, even if they may be more on the introverted side.
It wouldn’t be exactly good if negative influences on the mind by any mental disorders became a permanent part of someone’s mind in any afterlife. Like hostility towards others from oppositional defiant disorder, lack of being able to read people or empathize from autism, or the association of some everyday thing with intrusive thoughts from OCD or schizophrenia.
Such things could make a hell of Heaven.
Hi K,
In general, only things people choose in a state of freedom become part of their permanent character. Of course, people do have something of a natural inborn character, but that is not a negative thing. It’s just variations on the theme of humanity. Mental disorders, despite their name, generally have physical causes in the environment and in biological genetics. These are not something people chose to have, so in the spiritual world they will not be stuck with any negative character traits that came from the disorder.
I think that even _if_ form in the spiritual is not merely a manifestation of the so-called abstract, but form there _is_ what is so-called abstract in the physical, at least form can change more freely there. Like those spirits Swedenborg claimed were from Mercury appearing as orbs of light or something like that.
Hi K,
Yes, form in the spiritual world is more malleable than it is here on earth. Most people want to remain in their ordinary human form even in heaven. But for those who don’t, other possibilities do seem to be possible.
If one is stuck in human form in the afterlife, will evolutionary flaws from the physical be fixed?
a list of examples: https://youtu.be/bmf1znpMjbI?si=BycBJtpAIm-3s7L1 (YouTube)
(title: “Evolution FAILS in the Human Body”)
Also, what would happen if one’s spirit body were damaged in the equivalent of an accident? If a spirit body can feel pain (enhanced pain which is BS BTW), that seems to mean it can be injured as well. Would that mean spirit death is possible, or would the injury either somehow not happen, or miraculously go away?
Finally, could a spirit turn their senses off at will to block unpleasant stimuli? Or is one forced to endure every unpleasant stimuli that comes his or her way in the afterlife? One can block at least the sense of smell in this life (by breathing through the mouth instead).
Hi K,
If, as Swedenborg says, everything tends toward the human form, then the best the physical universe can do is to tend toward the human form as best it can based on the inherent limitations of physical matter. Unlike in the spiritual world, physical things, especially biological things, must develop over billion-year time scales. And they must develop by slow and error-prone processes such as the ones that operate in biological evolution.
Consider what happens when people build a Lego space shuttle. It looks a lot like a space shuttle, but it’s not an actual, operational space shuttle. You just can’t build one of those out of Legos. At best, you can make something that looks a lot like a space shuttle, and is good for putting on display as a model.
The material universe is much finer-grained and diversified than Legos. This means it can produce a better approximation of the spiritual body than Legos can produce of a space shuttle. But there are still inherent limitations in the physical universe compared to the greater resolution, diversification, and responsiveness of the spiritual universe to the tendency toward the human form that flows in from God.
It’s not that evolutionary flaws will be fixed in our spiritual body. It’s that our physical body can only approximate the level of perfection of the spiritual body because of the inherent limitations of the physical universe when it comes to producing complex living organisms such as the human body.
BTW, I fixed the link to the YouTube video so that people can click on it and watch it if thy want. While interesting, I think it vastly underestimates how much our faulty diet and lifestyle contributes to all of these supposed evolutionary flaws. We have enough knowledge and understanding of healthful living that we could be largely without all the sicknesses mentioned in the video. But we commonly choose to ignore that knowledge for our own reasons, and we suffer the consequences. That’s not the fault of evolution.
And about the blind spots in our eyes: Our brain doesn’t “lie” to us. It uses the images produced by both eyes to give us a complete picture, without blank spots, of the world around us. I found that objection particularly silly. When in real life do we close one eye and carefully move a card with two different symbols on it until one of them disappears?
Hi K,
To follow up on my previous reply, our spiritual body is far more perfect than our physical body. It is not perfectly perfect. Only God is perfect. But our spiritual body is far lighter and more responsive than our physical body, and does not have many of the limitations of the physical body that arise from the nature of physical reality.
For example, in the spiritual world we can fly without needing wings. The heavy gravity that prevents this in the physical world does not operate in the spiritual world. Yes, we can still walk on the ground, and we usually do. But we can also float up above the ground, as in this humorous anecdote from Swedenborg:
Many of the things you object to about your physical humanoid body will not be a problem when you are living permanently in your spiritual body.
For example, the physical body is limited in its ability to heal itself. Minor injuries can be healed completely, but major injuries, such as the loss of a finger, or of an entire limb, cannot be healed. People who sustain such injuries will have to live with the results for the rest of their life on earth.
That’s not the case with the spiritual body. The spiritual body is not produced by biological processes as the physical body is. It is produced through correspondence with our spirit, and therefore continually expresses our thoughts and feelings. Injury is not necessarily impossible in the spiritual world. But it will persist only as long as our mind dwells on it. Once we have moved on mentally, the physical injury will go away because it no longer corresponds to our thoughts and feelings.
And no, we can’t die in the spiritual world. That’s because, once again, we are not alive because of our spiritual body, but because of our inmost soul, which receives life directly from God, and which is above our conscious awareness and beyond our ability to injure or affect in any way.
Next comes our ruling love, which is set by our choices and by how we live pursuant to those choices during our lifetime in the material world. That, also, is indestructible because it is continually and eternally maintained in its integrity by God. Whatever vicissitudes we may go through in the spiritual world, including any short-term injury or pain, our ruling love will reassert itself and bring everything in our spiritual body into correspondence with it. That’s why our spiritual body cannot sustain any life-threatening or permanent injury.
But for the most part, angels don’t do things that would lead to physical injury, so they don’t get injured. Still, I think some angels may like adventure and risk just as they do here, which is why I think injury is still possible. What would be the adventure of conquering a particularly fiendish mountain biking trail if there weren’t some “penalties” along the way? But once again, any injuries would be temporary, not permanent, and would heal much more quickly than injuries do here on earth.
As for unpleasant stimuli, keep in mind that in the spiritual world, our surroundings are a reflection of our thoughts and feelings. Everything we love and enjoy comes into existence around us. And presuming we’re not masochists, that means the stimuli around us will not be unpleasant, but pleasant. Even evil spirits find the horrible stenches that surround them most pleasurable.
Of course, if angels have jobs guarding or dealing with evil spirits, then they will have to deal with the unpleasant odors that come from evil spirits and their pleasures. But God can surround them with a protective sphere that blocks that sort of thing so that they don’t have to suffer through it. The good aura that surrounds angels is far more powerful than the evil aura that surrounds evil spirits, and can easily drive away the influences that come from the evil spirits.
Thanks for the reply. What about the turning off senses thing and the injury thing?
Hi K,
I responded to those separately, just above.
PPS: wait I saw you already replied
No offense intended, but the New Church afterlife is sounding increasingly unattractive.
A human god (that’s still somehow omnipotent and omnipresent), humans everywhere, an afterlife that’s like a giant human with communities that are like body parts (ew), and one is possibly stuck in human form outside of any simulation or vision experiences. Any animals in the afterlife are just projections of human thought, even if they are somehow more real than animals in the physical (who have minds of their own).
Human this, human that. Way too human.
Then there’s all the weird stuff like not being able to look at the back of someone’s head, and the spiritual sun staying 45 degrees overhead in front of one all the time (or always behind if one is trapped in hell).
And speaking of hell, of course there’s hell being eternal as well: the denizens of hell suffer an eternity of tyranny and torture from eachother with no hope and no escape for a horrific and incomprehensible eternity, because God allows the ability of evil spirits to change their ruling love after death to be disabled.
And on the side, God in New Church thinking allows this world to be a dystopia full of endless suffering. Even if this world is getting better, there is still too much suffering in this world, and evil still has way too much power. God in New Church thinking will never personally intervene to fix the monstrous corruption of this world because people here are supposed to fix it, but that will probably never happen at the pace this world is going at now.
Oh yeah, and on top of all that, evils can never be truly cleansed. Only pushed to the side at best.
Hi K,
Back when I was ten or eleven years old, at the church camp my family attended each summer, one day I joined the cool kids in my age group in their bullying of one of the younger and less cool boys. Afterwards, I felt bad about it. I went to that boy and made a quasi-apology: “I’m sorry I did that, but if I didn’t, they would do it to me.” Thinking back on that day embarrasses me to this day, over fifty years later.
In the aftermath, I made a decision: I was never going to do that sort of thing again. I stuck with that decision right into my adult life, with the result that I never was part of any of the reigning cool-kid cliques, and occasionally had to fend off bullying attempts myself.
Do I wish I had never joined in the bullying, and then made excuses for it? Yes. Would I like it to be erased from my history and memory? Of course! But if that incident were erased, all the changes that came in my character in the wake of it would also be erased, and I would not be the person I am today.
Of course, that was just one incident in many years of incidents, experiences, and choices that directed my life and character to where it is now. That process is still ongoing. But it illustrates why nothing we have ever said and done, or even thought and desired, can ever be entirely erased. To do so would be to erase the events that made us the person we are. It would be to erase us as a person.
Even today, that incident serves as a cautionary tale for me, warning me not to fall back into what I was about to get sucked into on that day way back in the late 1960s. The many incidents that I don’t remember also shaped my character. None of them can be erased. Only pushed more and more to the side as I confirm by my choices, life, and actions that I don’t want to be the person I would have been if I’d continued onward in that direction.
As Swedenborg said, “All the moments of life have a series of consequences to eternity” (Arcana Coelestia #6490). Not a single one of them can be erased without erasing the person we are, and are becoming.
As a postscript, decades later, when the same boy returned to camp as an adult, I brought up that incident and offered him a real apology. He had forgotten all about it. He didn’t remember it even when I recounted the incident to him. He had moved on long ago. That was a relief to me. But it still can’t be erased from my character. Only pushed more and more to the side.
Hi K,
Of course, you’ll have to make up your own mind what to believe and what not to believe. But I think once you get to the spiritual world, it will be a lot better than you now imagine. Many of the limitations and objections about the physical body will no longer be true in the spiritual world.
I should mention that angelic communities don’t literally look like body parts. They look just the same as earthly communities, except without all the bad parts, such as crime, poverty, bad government, and inflation. They are functionally like body parts, but on a spiritual level, not a literal level. Heaven is not a re-enactment of Fantastic Voyage.
I wouldn’t say that animals here have minds of their own. Yes, people like to anthropomorphize their animals and pets. But animals run on instinct and external stimuli. They do have individual personalities, but they are not self-reflective as humans are. They do not have our higher level capabilities of rational and spiritual thought. They are driven by basic physical needs and desires. They won’t be any different in the spiritual world.
As for the different way things operate “spatially” in heaven, such as not being able to look at the back of someone’s head, the sun being at a constant 45 degree angle in the sky, and so on, these things will likely not feel weird at all once we arrive there. Even though the guy in that anecdote was floating above Swedenborg’s head, he didn’t even notice it until Swedenborg pointed it out to him. He thought he was still living on this earth. Whatever may seem weird to us now will quickly feel completely normal in the different environment of the spiritual world.
I remember reading once about an anthropology teacher who described the typical breakfast of a certain culture in exacting scientific detail: which exact part of the animal was used, how it was prepared, what other foodstuffs were involved, how they were prepared, and so on. The whole time, the students were going, “Weird!” “Gross!” The punch line was, “Of course, this is the typical American breakfast of bacon and eggs.” To people who are used to something, it seems totally normal even if it looks very weird to people from another place and culture.
It will be the same once we arrive in the spiritual world. Nothing there will feel weird to us, no matter how weird it sounds to us now, living as we do in the material world.
More in my next reply.
Hi K,
About this:
This, I think is infected by the old Christian “eternal conscious torment” idea of hell.
Hell is not “suffering an eternity of tyranny and torture with no hope of escape.” It is people who enjoy doing evil being allowed to do as much of that evil as is possible, and suffering the inevitable consequences.
Evil is evil because it causes damage. People who enjoy doing evil enjoy causing damage. And they are not immune from the damage caused by their evil. It’s the same here on earth: violent criminals tend to die a violent death. Alcoholics and drug addicts destroy their bodies and minds. Sooner or later, people’s evil desires and actions catch up with them—if not here on earth (as they usually do), then in the afterlife.
No one is forced to be in hell. They are in hell because that’s where they want to be. God doesn’t throw anyone into hell. Everyone in hell went there of their own accord, in complete freedom. They’re even allowed to go up to heaven if they want to, and they can’t stand it there. They quickly scurry back to their own home in hell.
As for the idea that God “allows the ability of evil spirits to change their ruling love after death to be disabled,” what would the alternative be? It would mean God never respecting our choices, but continually, to all eternity, saying to us, “Yes, that’s what you chose to be, but I’m not going to accept that.” It would mean no one ever being able to live securely the life that he or she has chosen.
Not only would it mean that evil people couldn’t just relax and enjoy the evil life they have chosen, but that good people couldn’t just relax and enjoy the good life they have chosen. Everyone would always have to fear that the life he or she has built up over hundreds or even thousands of years will suddenly be gone. No relationship would be secure, because the people we love, and the one we’re married to, could always change their mind and decide to be someone else. Then everything we have built up over hundreds or thousands of years would suddenly be gone. All of the fear of pain and loss that we suffer here on earth would continue to eternity.
You can’t have one and not the other. You can’t say, “Well, good ruling loves are permanent, but not evil ruling loves.” That would mean nullifying our freedom of choice. It would be God saying, “I will accept your choice only if it’s the one I agree with.” That’s not freedom. That’s tyranny.
Making our chosen ruling love permanent at death is not a bug. It’s a feature. It’s the only way we can live securely to eternity. And it’s the only way we can be truly human, and not just some robot programmed by God to be good.
Under a system where only good is accepted permanently, and not evil, it’s like one of those old ratchet seat belts where every time you shift, it tightens your seat belt, but never loosens it, until you’re being squeezed so tight you can hardly breathe. (Probably most readers of this blog aren’t old enough to remember those torture devices.) Every time evil spirits took a step toward good, that would be accepted, and they wouldn’t be able to return back to the old evil that they enjoyed, until their own chosen life would be snuffed out because it was gradually taken away from them, ratchet cog by ratchet cog. They would never be able to breathe freely because their chosen life would always be under siege.
Again, that’s not freedom. That’s tyranny. Freedom means being able to choose what kind of person we want to be, and what kind of live we want to live, and then being free to live that life.
Evil spirits in hell have the freedom to live the kind of life they want to live. Unfortunately, it is a self-defeating life, so they end out hemming themselves in. But they can still enjoy at least some of the disgusting pleasures they enjoy. And to them, that’s worth more than anything they might get in heaven. To eternity, they are in hell because they have chosen to be in hell and they want to be in hell.
Maybe you and I (and God) think that evil spirits made the wrong choice. They disagree. And it is their choice, not ours. God respects that. We must respect it also.
Hi K,
About this:
Again, what’s the alternative? Is it to reject the existence of God altogether? Because obviously God is not fixing everything. We’ve been waiting 2,000 years for the Second Coming to happen, and for God to fix everything up, and it hasn’t happened yet. This even though Paul thought it would happen within his own lifetime.
How long will we have to wait until we realize that in reality either that’s just not how God operates, or there is no God at all, and the universe is an uncaring, violent place devoid of all meaning? Do we have to wait two million years? Do we have to wait two billion years? How many years will it take for us to accept reality?
Above all, Swedenborg’s view of God’s Providence is a realistic view. It doesn’t engage in pie-in-the-sky ideas that at some time very soon, God is going to descend as a Deus ex machina and magically fix everything we’ve screwed up.
Further, thinking that way just gives an excuse not to bother doing the hard work of fixing what we’ve screwed up. There are evangelical “Christians” hoping for nuclear war because they think that’s when the Second Coming of Christ will happen. But all that would happen is that a large percentage of the world’s population would die very horrifically.
It’s our job to fix up the mess we have made. And we’re doing it, prompted and inspired by God and the angels. See:
How can we have Faith when So Many Bad Things happen to So Many Good People? Part 1
Besides, as you say, things actually are getting better, despite all the doomsday thinking that is so popular in the media because it gets so many clicks and earns so many advertiser dollars. The reality is that poverty is way down, hunger is way down, disease is way down, infant mortality is way down, and every other old evil is way down all around the world. Yes, there are parts of the world where bad government has caused whole countries and regions to remain mired in poverty. But over time, those governments will fall, and people will replace them with better governments.
Sure, we could destroy ourselves. But it hasn’t happened yet. And despite all the doomsday predictions, things just keep getting better. Most people on the planet today do not live in a “dystopia full of endless suffering.” Most people today live reasonably comfortable lives that may involve struggle, but they have a roof over their heads, clothing on their bodies, food to eat, and time left over for some fun and recreation.
Unfortunately, if the media outlets reported on all the contented people living out their lives in fairly comfortable fashion, they would quickly lose their clicks and their advertisers. So the media presents a false picture by selectively reporting all the calamities and disasters in the world, and not reporting the far greater occurrences of no disasters happening to most people. It’s a completely unrealistic picture of human life on this earth. And it has infected a large number of people with an entirely unnecessary sense of gloom and doom about life on earth.
Ironically, even though we are living in the best of all times in the entire history and prehistory of humankind, there are millions of pampered middle class and rich kids in the developed world walking around with a dark storm cloud over their heads thinking we’re living in the worst of all possible times, and that the world is about to come to an end.
Don’t believe it. It’s not true.
We are not living in a dystopian hellscape. We are living the best and most comfortable and prosperous lives that any humans have ever lived in since we first became humans rather than animals. Yes, this hasn’t yet reached all people on earth. But it will. And I believe it will happen sooner than many people think. Probably within a couple generations.
Even if things have improved since preindustrial times, and even if the MSM news likes to focus on bad stuff, the evil and suffering in this world is still excessive. Starvation, disease, predation, crime stats, problems inherent in modern life, decaying morals in the West, etc.
Hopefully it does get better.
Hi K,
All of this evil and suffering is anthropogenic. In other words, we are causing it ourselves. All we have to do is change our ways, and 99.9% of it will go away. No divine intervention required. All we have to do is listen to God, and live the way God has told us to live.
Thanks again for the replies.
Another issue: I have seen that it is possible for one to see the Homo sapiens look – the face in particular – as inherently repulsive. What happens to such a person after death, if they make it to Heaven?
Do people in Heaven have a look that is better than the Homo sapiens look? Or would such a person with such an aversion lose that aversion?
If neither is the case, then it is possible that such an aversion could build up to a torment over time. Can you imagine living forever in a realm where everyone has the head of a housefly, even if that realm happens to be Heaven? This may be an exaggeration of course, but you can get the idea of what it could be like to someone who has an aversion to the look of people of this world – and who goes to a place where people have that exact same look, and yet his or her sense of aesthetics is not changed by death.
Hi K,
Presumably, such a person had some highly negative experiences at the hands of homo sapiens that caused such an aversion to the homo sapiens look. There would need to be some healing from those experiences if they hadn’t been healed here on earth.
Didn’t Swedenborg claim that angels above the lower Heaven have incomprehensible beauty, and those of the lower Heaven have barely comprehendable beauty though? Also even if not wildly different physiology, former ETs could have different looks?
(And what if said revulsion is not from trauma?)
Hi K,
Yes, he said that the angels are more beautiful than any artist could capture in paint, especially in the higher heavens.
About the revulsion, is this a hypothetical, or are you thinking of someone specific?
There really are people who think the facial look of people of this world IRL is repulsive. I doubt they always had trauma to think that way. So hopefully for them, people in Heaven either look better, or they lose said aversion, or both.
(Or maybe they identify more with a formerly ET community and the former ETs look different from Earthlings, even if that is an unlikely outcome.)
Hi K,
It might not be outright trauma. It might be something more subtle, such as feeling hemmed in by the culture in which they grew up, so that they cannot be free, and therefore develop an aversion to humanity as they have experienced it. Heaven is not restrictive, but free, and allows people to fully express their own loves, desires, thoughts, and character, assuming their intentions toward other are good. (Otherwise they would not be in heaven anyway.) So I think they would lose their aversion to humanity and human faces and bodies.
In any case, I think there can be a variety of ways humanity is expressed in Heaven: it is a very big universe out there: maybe over 1*10^22 planets in the observable universe along, so if only 1% are inhabited, that it still over 1*10^20.
And at least if everyone has the same physiology, then if Swedenborg is right, they are more handsome or beautiful in Heaven than people of this world anyway.
Finally, I still think there can be a way for spirits to shapeshift into other forms, even if only temporary. Swedenborg writings seem to support this.
PS: of course outer looks are not as important as character
PPS: thanks again for replies
Hi K,
You are most welcome.
So if I understand New Church teaching right, if a spirit somehow had his spirit body injured, it could heal completely (not even scars), and if a spirit somehow had his spirit body destroyed, God could restore and revive? Even if such is not really possible in the spiritual, this is assuming such could happen, for the sake of this question.
Hi K,
Yes, in the spiritual world the body can heal completely, without scars. Unlike the physical body, the spiritual body is fully alive and highly responsive to people’s mental states. Once an injury is healed and forgotten, no further signs of it will appear on the person’s body. It’s the ultimate case of “out of mind, out of sight,” to reverse the old saying.
And yes, in the hypothetical case that someone had his hypothetical spiritual body destroyed, then hypothetical God could hypothetically re-create it. It’s just that that doesn’t happen, so it’s a pure hypothetical. In reality, it is not possible to destroy anyone’s spiritual body.
Is this impossibility because of correspondences, with a person corresponding to a certain kind of ruling love, and such a ruling love can’t be snuffed out any more than 1+1=2 being true can?
In other words, stuff that happens in the spiritual corresponds to spiritual subjects, so a spirit body being destroyed would correspond to a spiritual impossibility?
Hi K,
Yes. Since God has made the human soul eternal, the spiritual body is also eternal, and cannot be destroyed, because it is the expression of the person’s eternal soul. Only if the soul itself were destroyed, which is not possible, could the spiritual body be destroyed, because the spiritual body is in direct and fully responsive correspondence with the soul. (By “soul” here I mean the inner and inmost parts of a person, where the ruling love resides.)
The physical body can be destroyed because, although it is inhabited by the soul, it is not fully responsive to the soul, but exists semi-independently on the physical and biological level. It is subject to physical law, under which physical bodies can be destroyed by external events, and if they aren’t, they grow old and die. The cycle of life and death is an indelible part of the material realm.
The spiritual body is not subject to physical laws. It does not grow old and die. And it cannot be destroyed by external events, because it is in constant correspondence with the person’s inner being, or soul, which remains alive and itself to eternity, as a constant gift from God.
Even people’s surroundings, where any potentially destructive “external events” would came from, correspond to their inner self—their thoughts and feelings. This means that nothing can exist external to angels and spirits that would destroy them because unlike in the physical world, everything around them is an expression of their own character and personality, which has an intrinsic will to live.
Hi Lee,
I have a question on a new OTLE video entitled “Gregg Braden’s Last Stand: Preserve Our Humanity Before Big Tech Corrupts Our DNA In 2030” – Gregg Braden is a five-time New York Times best-selling author, scientist and a pioneer in the emerging paradigm bridging science, social policy and human potential. He and Curtis met through the TCCHE events, where they have both been speakers for a number of years. We hope you enjoy the discussion! With the thumbnail saying “Time is running out!” with an image of DNA looking “tech” in the background.
At first I thought it was Youtube recommending some new age channel but I took at double take and saw it was OTLE. Which I’m really surprised because it’s not like that channel doing these fear based videos of “we’re doomed” or “we’re at the mercy of big tech mind control” like just before that they were doing a series of the Bible and Swedenborg. I never heard of this guy but just because he’s a “five-time New York Times best-selling author, scientist and a pioneer in the emerging paradigm bridging science, social policy and human potential” doesn’t mean what he says has more weight or is more credible just like Tom Campbell being an Ex NASA physicist espousing falsities about being in a hologram. Just like Swedenborg says how the learned come up with all kinds of falsifies than a simple minded person. Besides our Humanity is spiritual not physical, it’s only expressed in our body because of our spirit and any “human potential” should be helping and being kind to our fellow neighbors.
Even the opening quote “We’re so much
MORE than we have probably even allowed ourselves to imagine is possible.” Sounds like the typical motto that the Transhumanist say about transforming us into tech.
But this same exact topic is really popular in other spiritual communities like these quotes saying how:
“For me, I no longer subscribe to the belief that physical spacecraft, occupied by nonhuman intelligence’s from other star systems, are visiting earth. After having many close encounters in the waking state, dream state and out-of-body state, l’ve come to the conclusion we’re dealing exclusively with an inter-dimensional phenomenon. I would also go as far to say that my personal experiences of this phenomenon, lead me to believe there is a deliberate intrusion on humanity by certain inter-dimensional beings, who in collusion with select world governments…are using technology to adversely affect our perceptions of reality.
During a recent out-of-body experience, I was advised by a trusted “nonphysical” friend, to re-calibrate my nervous system on a daily basis as a countermeasure against this alien technology and physic attacks, which is capable of affecting us physically as well as psychically. My nonphysical friend also warned of the dangers of man-made technologies that are being designed to blanket the earth in unnatural radiation signals…from my research, I’m fairly certain he was referring to the global roll out of 5G by 2020.”
And how to “Uncover the Nervous System’s Secrets. Your nervous system is not just a collection of nerves; it’s the conductor of your entire being, weaving through every part of your body. It represents your soul’s connection to the physical world, guiding your sensations, thoughts, and emotions. The whole person approach is not only at subluxations, but also at anything that causes interference to the nervous system.” Which the “Central nervous system controls your actions and brain and we can engineer trauma into the DNA that can be passed down from generations” but also “deep state” and “ETs” supposedly “upgrading our DNA” by technology releasing viruses to help progress “evolution”.
This also applies how I heard how “ghost hunters” say “The only thing… The only thing I can think of is that this entity, it causes kind of a symptom of neuropathy or it affects the nervous system.”
To even in the news people like Piers Corbyn going on London Live and “David Icke: 68-year-old British conspiracy theorist and Holocaust denier with the trademark grey mullet who says he is “the man the elite are terrified of”? The former professional footballer turned sports pundit has written more than 20 books and describes himself as a “groundbreaking author and public speaker” but also has said “he was not much of an academic at school”, rose to prominence promoting fringe theories in the 1990s and found a new audience with the Covid pandemic. To even so called “spiritual awakeners” and “spiritual activist” said the “virus / pandemic (Covid) was caused and spread by the rollout of 5G mobile network masts technology and that a Jewish group was involved.”
I just wanted to get your thoughts on this. I feel like the this person along with the others I mentioned are just feeding off of the fears with slogans and big statements (which are bunk) when in reality it’s just any normal tech with no effected DNA involved. And what’s really happening is Hell is what is “corrupting our humanity and DNA”.
Thank you very much Lee
Hi Sam,
I think Curtis is reaching out to wider audiences with some of his outside guests. I understand why he is doing that. OTLE is one of the few really successful outreach programs that Swedenborgians are doing these days. It’s reaching a lot of people. Bringing in people who have different viewpoints that overlap with Swedenborgian ideas in some areas is not necessarily a bad thing.
Having said that, I don’t go for the big-tech conspiracy theories that Gregg Braden seems to have bought into. He says a lot of good things about the amazing nature of the human body and its great potential. But I think his fear of a technological takeover that will destroy our humanity is way overhyped. Even if that is the intention of some big tech types, it’s not going to be successful. See:
Are We Headed for an AI Apocalypse?
As Braden says in the interview, there are inherent limitations to machines due to the materials they’re made from. And as you say, our mind is spiritual, not physical. I believe that even the workings of our physical body will never be surpassed by machines. Life, I believe, will always have a massive edge over non-living machines. Add in our spirit, which is where our consciousness and our ability to think and love actually reside, and our capabilities will always be orders of magnitude greater than anything that physical machines can possibly achieve.
While Braden is sowing fear about a technological takeover that he believes will be attempted by 2030, he’s spreading his message by means of a highly technological platform that depends on all the technologies he’s sowing fear about. Even physical books require high technology to produce these days. And most of his book sales will probably be e-books, which are pure technology.
Luddites have been predicting the downfall of humanity due to the rise of the machine ever since we first started making machines hundreds of years ago. It hasn’t happened yet, and it’s not going to happen with this new round of computerized machines. Machines will always remain tools in the hands of humans. The only question is whether we use those tools for good purposes or for evil purposes.
About chips in the brain, most of what’s being developed right now is designed to help people with physical disabilities live as normal and human a life as possible despite those disabilities. Quadriplegics are gaining the ability to control computers and other machines through a direct neural interface, because their own limbs no longer work. Similar systems will allow blind people to see, deaf people to hear, and so on. These are not terrible technological catastrophes that take away our humanity. They are technological tools that are allowing many handicapped people to regain their humanity.
Perhaps in the future fully able people will get chips embedded in their brain so that they can interface with computers directly rather than having to use their hands to do so. Personally, I have no interest in that, and I suspect that most other people won’t be interested in it either. But if some people want to do that, I say, let ’em! It’s up to them what to do with their body.
Obviously I am opposed to any companies or governments having the power to force people to get chips in their brains. But if people are foolish enough to allow that to happen, then they’ll just have to learn the destructive results of that the hard way, until they smarten up and take that power away from their governments and corporations.
I could go on, but you get the idea. As for the rest of those conspiracy theories that you mention and quote about, you already know what I think of them. 😉
Back to Gregg Braden, he has some nice ideas about how wonderful humanity and the human body and mind are, but I think he’s gone off the deep end on the whole technology conspiracy theory front. I predict that in 2030 we will be just as human as we are today . . . and in 2045 . . . and in 3000 . . . and in 10000.
Hi Lee,
Thank you kindly for the clarity on this subject and what it really means regarding our life here and the spiritual. And how our humanity will be the same in the year 10000 as today.
My only follow up question is regarding “there are inherent limitations to machines due to the materials they’re made from” even if they had the “right materials” materials are just dead matter not spiritual. They correspond or reflect a part of the spiritual world? Since everything created in the physical is essentially a tool for the spiritual?
And what I just realized all these fears that these people spread a lot of them use YouTube or Facebook and even e books as their platform, the very platforms they spread their fear about which is actually ironic. And knowing things only happen if we choose to let it happen shows how we are in control individually as well as collectively, the very thing people like Braden don’t want us to think for some reason which is weird. I suspect that if these conspiracy theorists admitted this, their whole platform would fall apart.
I also remember hearing about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem which says that a system can never become more complex or more capable than its originator. Which reminds me like how we humans can never surpass God or become a God ourselves. Which again makes what these people spread look ridiculous.
I can see how OTLE might want to reach out with others but I feel what others promote compared to Swedenborg and the Bible are just crude in comparison and totally miss the point.
Thank you again Lee!
Hi Sam,
About the materials machines are made of: I was drawing on something Braden said in the video. Basically, even from a materialistic perspective, there are limits to how complex machines can get because the materials they are made of have their limits. But yes, if you add in the spiritual elements that humans have, there is really no comparison between humans and machines. Humans will always remain vastly greater than machines, despite today’s hype and fears.
And I do agree that compared to what Swedenborg has to offer, Gregg Braden’s views are rather thin gruel. I do appreciate his appreciation of the human body. But his fearmongering about technology doesn’t add anything to humanity. Also, although Curtis humored him, he really doesn’t understand what “divinity” means based on his definition of it. Swedenborg explains all of these things in a crystal clear fashion that leaves other ideas and philosophies in the dust.
Hi Lee,
That makes so much sense! And absolutely, so true! I appreciate the further explanation and it really shows how limited and influenced by the latest “fad” these ideas are compared to Swedenborg. It’s like having cataracts vs crystal clear eyesight.
Thank you kindly again Lee
Like I said before multiple times, I really do not want to be stuck in human form 24-7 in any afterlife with all the human BS that goes with it (pain, bathroom activities, etc), so hopefully there is at least shapeshifting where I could be incorporeal now and then at will, in any afterlife realm.
I really do think such shapeshifting could be possible for a spirit being in the New Church afterlife, as there is that story of a boy appearing as a dove from a distance, adult celestial angels looking like babies from a distance, and spirits in hell having dual forms (one in true light and the other in infernal light).
Of course what I would really like is if so-called souls or spirits are really completely incorporeal so-called energy beings, who can have instinctive human forms they naturally appear in that perfectly reflects their characters, but they are not stuck in such.
And at the very least, at least spirits do not have to be stuck in an ugly body that is the wrong weight forever.
Hi K,
I can’t think of anything more to say about this that I haven’t already said. You’re just going to have to find out for yourself after you die.
>You’re just going to have to find out for yourself after you die.
Hopefully that will not be when I still have stuff to do.
And what is rather interesting is that if there is no afterlife, an atheist who passed away would never experience firsthand that he was right about there being no afterlife, and a theist who passed away would never learn he was wrong to expect an afterlife, because any kind of existence after would be an afterlife. It would be as Epicurus claimed:
[If I am, then death is not. If death is, then I am not.]
It is seriously a depressing thought to me to be stuck in (or as) a body with all those gross organs, functions, limits, and needs for an incomprehensible eternity with no relief. It could be a form of hell to me. Like being immortal in this life forever, even if it is somehow more magical or ethereal. So hopefully in any afterlife there can be some solution, because no afterlife sounds better to me than being stuck in or as a body for all eternity.
It sounds so much better and less limited to be a pure mind, not bound by space (or the equivalent), but still able to perceive or even appear in space (or the equivalent) in an avatar form.
Anyway, I hope I was not bothering you with the incorporeal thing. It’s something that seriously bothers me about Swedenborg writings on afterlife.
Hi K,
I assure you, it will not be a problem. No one is stuck in anything in heaven. Everyone there is living exactly the kind of life he or she wants to live.
Further, as I said previously, everyone who arrives in the spiritual world can try out whatever idea of heaven he or she had. Read the stories starting at the beginning of Marriage Love. The particular conceptions of heaven mentioned and tried out there are somewhat old-fashioned Christian ideas, but the principle holds no matter what people think heaven is. They’ll have an opportunity to try it out and see if that’s really how they want to live.
If, upon arriving in the spiritual world, you still think that living as an incorporeal being would be heaven for you, you’ll be able to try it out for as long as you want. Just like the people in the stories at the beginning of Marriage Love, I predict that you’ll soon tire of it after a while of floating around with no arms and no legs and no ability to actually do anything. But that’s not my determination to make. If you truly enjoy living that way, nobody’s going to stop you from doing so.
The bottom line is that you will not be stuck or forced to live in any way that you don’t want to. There is absolutely no compulsion in heaven. However you ultimately decide to live, it will be your own decision based on your own ideas and desires.
So once again, I assure you, it’s not going to be a problem.
>I predict that you’ll soon tire of it after a while of floating around with no arms and no legs and no ability to actually do anything.
Again, that is not how I envision being pure mind. I envision that in a state of pure mind, one can still sense and interact via something like ESP and telekinesis. Instead of gross and limited muscles and sensory organs.
But still, good if nothing is forced in any afterlife.
Hi K,
One of the things people find out when they try out their version of heaven is whether it actually works. There are a lot of things that we envision and fantasize about that wouldn’t actually work because they are unrealistic.
Having said that, angels are capable of “telekinesis” regardless of whether they have a body. They can move things by force of mind. That’s because everything around them reflects what’s within them. If something in their mind changes, then something around them will change without their having to “physically” do anything.
Really, it is God doing it for them. The most powerful angels are the ones who recognize that they themselves have no power at all, but that all power and all ability to do anything is God’s in them, and not their own.
It’s not that you literally wouldn’t be able to do anything. But without a body, there wouldn’t be any feeling of doing anything. It’s like the difference between going for a swim in a video game and going for an actual swim in a lake or pond. Sure, you could change your environment through the power of your mind. But you would be detached from your environment because you would have no organs of sensation to sense or feel your environment. Everything would feel abstract and theoretical rather than tangible and real.
Another analogy is that it would be like having sight and hearing, but no taste, smell, or touch—again, similar to video games and virtual reality. You could see and hear things, and even interact with them visually and aurally. But you couldn’t touch them. You would just float through everything without any tangible interaction with them.
This, I think, is what you would quickly grow tired of.
But really, without some sort of body, you wouldn’t even be able to see and hear, because seeing and hearing require organized structures capable of seeing and hearing. Really, without some sort of body you couldn’t even think, because thinking, too, requires an organized structure capable of thinking. The more you achieved your desire to be disembodied, the fainter life, thought, and feeling would become. If you were able to completely separate yourself from any body, or any organized structure, you would cease even to be conscious because there would be no organized structure capable of consciousness.
So yes, you can try out what you theoretically think would be a disembodied existence. But the more successful you were at it, the less life you would have. This is why I predict that you would soon tire of your idea of heaven.
But again, that’s not my determination to make. If you still think the same way when it comes your time to die, you’ll be able to try it out and discover for yourself whether it works and whether you like it. And once again, if you really want to live detached from a body, you can do so, although I believe that would mean living in something like virtual reality rather than in actual reality. But if you truly want to live in virtual reality instead of actual reality, no one will tell you that you can’t.
In the spiritual world God does everything possible to give people what they want. If what people want is unrealistic, God will still give them as close an approximation to it as is possible. God will do the same for you if you truly and continually want to live without a body. It’s not realistic, but God will give you the best approximation possible.
I guess I would see if there is any afterlife. Also, can New Church angels still use ESP (like so-called “remote viewing”) to sense stuff beyond the magical afterlife equivalent of the 5 senses?
Hi K,
Yes, you’ll find out about the afterlife first-hand when the time comes. And sure, if it doesn’t exist, you’ll never know. But we have plenty of knowledge about the afterlife. It’s just not true that no one has gone there and come back. And it’s not just Swedenborg. By now millions of people have seen the afterlife and come back to tell the tale. There is no rational basis for doubt. See:
Where is the Proof of the Afterlife?
On your question, angels are able to share their thoughts with one another directly. They can also see clearly over vast distances, and can even become instantly present over vast distances—though this may also involve a passage of events for the angels to change their mindset to match that of the place they are traveling to.
At any rate, all the capabilities that we think of as “ESP” are available to angels. But mostly, they live fairly ordinary lives and get so used to these things that they don’t think of them as anything special or strange—any more than we think it’s strange to pick up our phone and talk to someone halfway across the world. It’s just how things work there.
Problem with NDEs is that they are contradictory, varying by different ways and traditions, and of course by religions.
Some NDEs present traditional Christianity, others present so-called New Age with reincarnation, and still others present Thai Buddhism with yamatoots (messengers of death). The Tibetan Book of the Dead varies considerably from New Church writings. And now there are even Gnostics who claim they have seen the tunnel with the light of a number of NDEs is a trap to trick one into reincarnating to feed an evil god with mortal suffering.
There is even disagreement over how corporeal one is in any afterlife. Traditional Christianity holds that the afterlife consists of being in a literal physical body. New Church has this belief on this body that is substantial yet not physical. And at the other end of the spectrum, there are beliefs teaching one can become completely incorporeal.
Point is, given how divergent religions are and how contradictory NDEs are, I think there is still a case for rational doubt in any afterlife. Especially when one looks at mind-brain dependence, and how supernatural always fails when tested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_prizes_for_evidence_of_the_paranormal
Anyway, hopefully either there is no afterlife, or any afterlife does not suck.
Hi K,
No two people who go to the same country even on this earth come back with the same impressions of it. In fact, depending upon where in the country two different people go, and on their own mindset, their experiences of the same country can be radically different.
What they will both agree on is that the country they visited exists, and is real.
PS: If a so-called spirit or soul cannot be destroyed by destroying a spirit body, and a spirit or soul corresponds to some so-called abstraction, then I think it can be possible for a mind to think in an afterlife without some magical ghost body.
Hi K,
Once again, it is not possible to destroy a human spiritual body. This is very clear from Swedenborg’s reporting about how people who try to kill themselves or others are unable to do so. The knife with which they are attempting to kill themselves or the other person gets snatched out of their hand before they can actually plunge it into the heart. Angels also monitor and moderate evil spirits in hell to prevent them from going beyond certain boundaries, one if which is actually killing themselves or another person.
Without a body to inhabit, the human spirit would not be able to think, feel, or do anything at all. Our spirit cannot be separated from our spiritual body. Perhaps we can become unconscious of our physical body, such as if we engage in some virtual reality scene in which we are playing a lion rather than a human being. But even our ability to engage in that virtual reality requires the spiritual organic structures of a spiritual brain and body to be able to engage in them. Without our spiritual brain and body, we would be completely unconscious. We would therefore not be able to “shapeshift” or inhabit other types of bodies or even have the feeling of being a disembodied being. We would have no consciousness at all.
Just as complex physical processes don’t happen magically, without any structures and organs capable of engaging in those processes, complex spiritual processes such as consciousness, thought, and feeling don’t happen magically, without any spiritual structures and organs capable of engaging in those processes. Even virtual reality doesn’t just magically happen. It requires computer chips, cameras, screens, and many other complex parts all connected together into a system that is capable of generating the virtual reality.
Bottom line: It is not possible for a spirit to think without a body capable of hosting it, and hosting conscious thought. That capability requires spiritual organic structures just as complex as, and even more complex than, the physical organic structures required for us to live as human beings here on earth. If our physical self were a rock, or even a whale, we could not have human thoughts and feelings. The physical structures available to us simply wouldn’t be capable of hosting and engaging in human consciousness, thought, and feeling.
PS: In any afterlife, I think I could settle with just the ability to shapeshift, if pure mind thing is no-go.
Hi K,
I presume that in heaven the ability to create and experience virtual realities will be far advanced compared to our current capabilities here on earth. Even if you have a spiritual body that is the perfect expression of your mind, I see no reason why you couldn’t for example, want to feel what it’s like to be an eagle or a lion or a dragon, and inhabit the body of an eagle or a lion or a dragon for a while.
Heaven is not all work and no play. People there engage in games and recreation just as we do here. Especially now that we’ve developed video games and virtual reality here on earth, I presume that we’ll be able to do these things in heaven also, only in a much better and more realistic way. Think of the holodeck on Star Trek, but with the ability to play different characters yourself also, and take on the full body of those characters.
This I believe we can do in heaven because we are still fully human there, including having human imagination. And if we can imagine being something or some creature or some other person, then I believe we can engage in “play” that involves becoming that thing or creature or person in a sort of heavenly virtual reality, which will feel much more real than anything we’ve been able to achieve technologically with our virtual reality headsets here on earth.
Do I know this for certain? No, because all of this was not yet in existence in the 18th century when Swedenborg extensively explored the spiritual world, and no one since then has had extensive enough experience there for me to entirely trust that what they report accurately represents the spiritual world. But there are enough hints in Swedenborg’s writings, and enough reports from near-death experiencers, for me to think that this is how things would work in heaven for people who come from our era and have the concept and experience of playing other characters, races, and creatures in present-day virtual reality games.
Besides, the idea of becoming other animals has been around for a long time—much longer than our current virtual reality technology. I remember as a teenager reading The Once and Future King, by T.H. White, in which Merlin the magician becomes various animals to experience what it is like. (If I’m remembering the book correctly—that was decades ago.)
All of this is a long way of saying that in heaven I think it will be perfectly possible to “shapeshift” in the sense of “playing” other characters, animals, and beings for a time based on our interests and imagination.
If someone thinks the human body is gross on the inside, or even inherently ugly on the outside, will they be cured of such an aversion if they make it to the New Church heaven somehow?
Hi K,
I think so.
Hi Lee,
Back with another question! lol. I was reading some passages of Secrets of Heaven (I forgot what page exactly) and on the footnotes on the bottom it said “7. Swedenborg is building on a very long tradition that held that the soul or higher mind controlled or oper ated the components of the body by means of “spirits,” or very fine fluids or vapors, transmitted through the veins and arteries along with the blood. He states the same idea variously in his scientific works as well; see, for example, Dynamics of the Soul’s Domain (Swedenborg [1740-1741] 1955), part 2, §§46, 199, 240; Draft on the Fiber (Swedenborg 1976a) §§299, 374; The Soul’s Domain (Swedenborg [1744-1745] 1960) §334. [SS]”
Would that be pertaining to the in between substance that Swedenborg talks about or would this be more of his earlier work? Because our spirit and physical body operate on entirely separate planes of reality? And out of curiosity does our spirit interact with our body by correspondence like is that how it’s so called “attached” to our physical body?
Like I hear people talk about seeing a “silver cord” that “to my great astonishment that I had been dragging a cord around with me which came literally out of the centre of my body and disappeared into the ground. It consisted of two very fine lines of some kind of electric blue energy, intertwined and pulsating like electric wire though much less solid. I felt a current passing through it.” It’s attached to them like an umbilical cord and until it’s severed than they’re fully dead? Along with “Is this ‘physical evidence enough to prove that we are in another dimensional environment, attached to the ‘real’ world by a communication cord, rather than in a dream resulting from unusual brain activity? Occasionally I have experienced a violent pull from the cord which has yanked me back into the physical body, experiencing a movement through space and even time.” (This is the link to the full quote. I put it on tumblr with no hashtags or anything so the algorithm won’t recommend anything lol) But would those experiences and those who report that (I read mediums and their “guides” report it from Michael Tymn’s website long ago) be a representation or a correspondence like a baby being born into the physical world?
Thank you again Lee
Hi Sam,
Swedenborg’s theological writings are mostly about spiritual and divine things, but they do also dip into science, history, and so on, mostly to provide illustrations and earthly tie-ins for the spiritual ideas that Swedenborg is presenting. The science and history in them is clearly not divinely inspired—unless you think God makes mistakes—because some of it has turned out not to be correct.
The science in Swedenborg’s theological writings is the science he had learned and developed in his earlier scientific and philosophical period, before his spiritual eyes were opened. When the Lord opened his spiritual eyes and sent him on his new mission to explain the spiritual meaning of Scripture, report what the spiritual world is like, and deliver a new Christian theology to the world, Swedenborg ceased his scientific studies and devoted himself entirely to his new spiritual mission (though there were a few years of overlap in the transition). As a result, his scientific knowledge “froze” at that point, so that the science in his theological writings is what Swedenborg had gained up to the mid-1740s when his transition from scientist to seer took place.
The idea of “spirits” or “animal/soul spirits” (anima is a Latin word for “soul”) traveling in the bloodstream, and also in the lymphatic system, is among the ideas that were part of Swedenborg’s earlier scientific understanding that the further development of science since his time has left behind because nothing like this has been found. However, the idea that the blood is a life-giving fluid does survive in a sense, in that if the blood were not delivering oxygen and nutrients to all the cells of the body, and carrying away their waste products, the body would quickly die. Still, given today’s science, we have to either leave behind the “animal spirits” idea altogether, or read it more metaphorically than literally, as the life-giving properties and activities of the blood and the lymphatic system.
In his theological writings Swedenborg says that the soul is present in the entire body. The idea that soul is “delivered” to the various cells and body parts by the bloodstream doesn’t really fit with that schema of the soul being present directly in the entire body, giving it life. However, there is a spiritual correspondence to what the blood does deliver, which is oxygen and nutrients, generally representing truth and good, not to mention in carrying away carbon dioxide and other waste products, representing falsity and evil that we are eliminating from our soul.
The connection between soul and body does happen by correspondences. This means that specific parts of the mind/spirit are connected with the specific parts of the body that correspond to them.
For example, we think of consciousness as inhabiting the brain because our spiritual brain is where our thinking takes place, and the physical brain not only corresponds to this, but is the direct recipient in the physical body of the thoughts and commands of the spirit. This is why physiologists can localize specific functions of the mind and body in specific parts of the brain. Those parts of the brain correspond to the parts of the spiritual brain where these functions take place. They are the parts of the brain that convey those specific functions to the body, such as the command, “Pick up that apple,” which is routed through specific parts of the brain. (Materialistic scientists, of course, would say that that command originates in that part of the brain.)
About the silver cord, I’ve always thought of it as a correspondential representation of the connection between the soul and the body, not as a literal cord. However, correspondences can be and often are presented as real objects in the spiritual world. It is therefore perfectly possible that this astral traveler could see and feel it in the spiritual realm. Swedenborg does not mention the silver cord, but the idea comes from Ecclesiastes 12:6–7. It is connected to the idea of birth because of the resemblance between the silver cord connecting the body to the soul and the umbilical cord connecting the fetus to the mother. Just as the umbilical cord is cut when a baby is born, so the silver cord is said to be broken when a person dies and permanently enters the spiritual world.
Hi Lee,
That’s very interesting! And I appreciate the explanation on what Swedenborg means and how it relates to our spiritual life and our physical connection along with the “silver cord” as well. The part about the brain reminds me of the other article you wrote regarding “Is free will an illusion” because seeing the brain do this or that we are just seeing the command like you said of our spirit giving our physical body. And about the Anima in the blood that is definitely not entirely wrong because without our blood and cells doing their job we wouldn’t be alive so there is definitely a great correspondence which can take on form of delivering life which that’s how we are connected. Plus Swedenborg was a finite person that was given one of the biggest task in mankind’s history of taking on the infinite which is God so I definitely give him tremendous credit for documenting everything and using his knowledge. And that’s so fascinating too that the Bible talks about the silver cord, until just now I thought it was only a new age thing because of their “claim” on it but really the Bible has talked about it all along!
Thank you again Lee
I am still doubtful that a pervasive developmental disorder (PDD) or other mental disorder (for example: ASD and OCD) that pretty much define the personality of the patient can be magically removed in some afterlife without significantly or even entirely changing who the patient is. Such mental conditions can be inseparably ingrained in the thinking and personality, and they make the way neurons connect different from how they connect in a so-called neurotypical person.
For example, just one of the countless possible symptoms of ASD is abnormally focused special interests, such as train schedules or internal combustion engines. A PDD disorder is truly pervasive: there are so many factors that can be different in a patient with such a disorder, compared to a mentally healthy person.
And if Swedenborg is right and thinking is really done in some magical ghost brain with some supernatural connection to the physical brain, then how come the way a network of neurons in the physical is arranged can fundamentally alter thinking to make a PDD?
And what if a PDD is not really a disorder, but just a different brain setup? Since it would not be a disorder, there is a chance someone with such a maladaptive way of thinking is stuck with such forever. And in the very much human afterlife Swedenborg describes that is built on human interaction, a PDD that stunts empathy or otherwise impairs social interactions is very much maladaptive and ill-suited to such an eternal existence.
PS: I think that “follow by email” and “search this site” things should swap locations. I have to scroll down to search, and I keep accidentally entering searches into the email field.
PS: While people can fundamentally change in this life one way or another, in the New Church afterlife one is stuck in whatever their final level of development in mortality is for all eternity. If people could continue to evolve and change after death like they can in life, then having a PDD in this life does not seem like such a big deal then.
PPS: And can you imagine the agonizing nightmare of one with OCD being stuck with such forever, if such thinking is an inherent part of their mind? That could truly be hell.
Hi K,
Thanks for the feedback on the new sidebar arrangement. I’ve moved the “Search This Site” function back to the top, and separated it from the “Follow by Email” function to make it less likely that the two entry boxes will be confused with each other.
Now about your question:
First, Swedenborg does not say that “thinking is really done in some magical ghost brain with some supernatural connection to the physical brain.” He says that thinking is done in our spirit, not in our body, and that the spirit is connected with the body via correspondences. There is no mention of “magic” or “ghosts,” which are faulty concepts from a Swedenborgian perspective. “Ghosts” implies something wispy; the spirit is very solid and has full organic functioning in its own realm, just like the physical body in its realm. “Magic” implies a lack of cause and effect connection; correspondences are a cause and effect connection.
However, Swedenborg also says that while the physical body is responsive to the spirit, it has a tendency to resist and corrupt what flows in from the spirit.
This is what’s happening when there are physical and biochemical brain disorders that affect a person’s ability to engage in adult rational thought. The disorder is in the body, not in the spirit. When the spirit of such people is detached from their physical body, and they are thinking in their spirit only, their thinking will not be affected by the physical condition that affects their thinking while they are conscious in their physical body, in the physical world.
However, there is a caveat: The spirit of such people is affected in the sense that the spirit cannot fully develop mentally and emotionally when this is prevented by physical disorders.
As a result, Swedenborg says, when such people die, they continue their process of maturation from whatever point it was arrested at by their physical condition. In other words, they grow to full mental and emotional maturity in the spiritual world. They then go on to live a normal adult life in heaven. (It will always be heaven, not hell, if the person was not able to achieve self-responsible adult rationality on this earth.)
As you suggest, it would be very undesirable and unfair for people to be forever stuck with mental disorders that are beyond their control, and that are not their fault. That’s why God does not allow such a thing to happen.
Will these people’s character and personality be affected long-term by the physical condition that affected their intellectual and emotional abilities here on earth? I tend to think so, but not in a way that would prevent them from living a normal and satisfying adult life. Perhaps they will be more introverted and focused on specific tasks rather than being extroverted party animals.
But this, as you suggest, is just one of many variations in human character and personality that are not only normal and healthy, but absolutely necessary for the full functioning of human and heavenly society. Without introverts, who would make sure the train schedules are published properly and without error every single time? Who would have the expert knowledge and focus to fix the internal combustion engines properly? Who, indeed, would program the computers, and engineer the bridges and skyscrapers? It takes people with great mental focus to do these things—people who aren’t always thinking about their relationships and their last, or next, social event.
I used the description of the so-called magical ghost brain because a spirit described in New Church theology is still nonexistent as far as just the physical is concerned (no physical mass-energy involved), and magic because such is beyond physics. Either way, mind-brain dependence appears to undermine the notion that thinking does not really take place in the brain.
And while there may be introverts in the New Church afterlife, I take it you are saying that they still are not socially disabled like people with a PDD can be in this life? And that symptoms like intrusive thoughts or compulsions from intrusive thoughts go away?
PS: thanks for changing that layout
Hi K,
You’re welcome. I like the search box at the top anyway.
If people look at it from a physicalist perspective, they’re going to reject any spiritual involvement or influence anyway, so the whole thing would be a moot point. I’m presuming that since you’re engaging with me on this website, you’re at least open to the possibility that spiritual things are real, and not just ghostly magical things that have no real existence.
And yes, I’m saying that in the afterlife, people with a PDD in this life will no longer be socially disabled, or indeed, disabled in any way.
Intrusive thoughts will also fade away in the afterlife for people who go to heaven because evil spirits will no longer be allowed to attack them, as they are allowed to do while people are still living on this earth for the sake of regeneration. Intrusive thoughts come from evil spirits.
If intrusive thoughts come from demons, then how come medication can reduce or eliminate them?
And if intrusive thoughts come from demons, is there anything one could do other than meds to chase them away?
Hi K,
As long as we are living in our physical body, and our consciousness is focused on this world, our thoughts and feelings do depend on the state of our body. Medications affect the state of the brain and body, which means they can and do affect our thoughts and feelings while we are conscious in the earthly level of our mind.
What meds can’t do is address the underlying causes for intrusive thoughts. They can only mask the symptoms. This is clear because as soon as you stop the meds, the intrusive thoughts come back. The underlying causes are still there. They’ve just been prevented from expressing themselves in our conscious mind. Once we leave our physical body behind, if we haven’t taken other steps to improve our mind and heart, those intrusive thoughts will be right back. And there, we’ll have to deal with them directly, because we will be living in the spiritual world where they originate, and no physical drugs can block spiritual influences from affecting us.
There is no easy solution to dealing with the underlying causes of intrusive thoughts. It requires facing them and engaging in the spiritual battles required to gradually drive them farther and farther out to the periphery of our mind.
The movie and biography “A Beautiful Mind” provides one case study of how this worked out in the life of mathematician John Nash. After making the decision to go off his meds because they dulled his thinking mind and made it difficult if not impossible for him to engage in the intense mental work that his career required, he never did completely rid himself of the intrusive characters that plagued his mind. But through continued effort, he was able to push them to the edges of his mind, where they were no longer a serious problem.
This is how it can unfold for people who choose to confront the problem of intrusive thoughts itself, rather than masking it through meds that can only control symptoms, not deal with causes.
Note that I am not recommending to anyone to go off their meds. I’m not a doctor. I am not qualified to assess anyone’s situation individually. Some people can’t handle what happens when they go off their meds, and there are few to no psychotherapists who are equipped to deal with these issues without the use of meds, because that’s not what today’s psychological professionals are trained to do. Even in milder cases, it’s not going to be easy. A person will have to commit to a lot of hard work with very little professional or even non-professional guidance. It’s not a decision to be made lightly.
Still, I believe that in the future we will study and learn more deeply and thoroughly how to address the root causes of intrusive thoughts, “hallucinations,” and so on, all of which are spiritual, not physical. Then there will be people trained to help others engage in this mental healing work, and people will actually get better from the center outward rather than merely having their symptoms controlled externally.
So if intrusive thoughts (such as from OCD) come from demons, simply asking God to block the demons from doing so is not gonna work? If so, why is that?
And if one passes away and enters the New Church afterlife and faces the intrusive thoughts directly, could the intrusive thoughts win and make the victim a slave of the demons causing them for eternity? Hopefully not, as intrusive thoughts normally do not reflect the intent of the victim who gets hounded by them.
Hi K,
God does not always answer our prayers to take away troubles and hardships because God sees whether or not that would be good for our long-term happiness.
The intrusive thoughts that come to us are not arbitrary. They come in connection with specific flaws or evils in our character that must be addressed before the thoughts can be banished. Otherwise the cause and the opening for the intrusive thoughts will still be there, and it would be like sewing up a deep wound in which there is still dirt, bacteria, and toxic matter. The result would be festering toxicity within that would be a source of further disease and tissue destruction.
What must happen instead is a cleansing process that is analogous to the process of regeneration. The wound can’t just be sewn up. It must be cleaned out and disinfected, and any damaged tissue removed. This can be a very painful process, but if it’s not done, the result will not be healing, but a more serious disease.
In the same way, the flaws and vulnerabilities in our mind must be cleaned out and disinfected, and damaged thoughts and feelings removed before there can be any real healing so that the intrusive thoughts won’t just come roaring back, and even worse than before.
If God doesn’t answer our prayers, it’s because the things we are praying for would make things worse, not better, in the long run. We want immediate relief. God wants long-term healing for us.
And no, it’s not possible that someone who has unresolved and suppressed intrusive thoughts would be dragged involuntarily down to eternal hell as a result. If the causes are deep-seated, but the person has a good heart underneath it all, s/he might spend some hard time in what Swedenborg calls “the lower earth,” which is an area of the world of spirits just above hell, while the aforementioned purging, cleansing, and disinfecting takes place. Once this process is complete, the person will rise up to heaven free of both the intrusive thoughts and their psychological and spiritual causes.
At the very least, intrusive thoughts are ultimately invalid if they go against the will of the victim — that is, they were never intended to be serious and thus the victim is not bound to follow them?
For example, there can be intrusive thoughts about becoming a complete slave of someone, or a Christian renouncing salvation, but they are not really intended and thus not really valid?
Hi K,
I would say that usually, intrusive thoughts are about things that the person having them fears, and has a weak spot about.
Christians commonly fear a loss of salvation. Hence some Christians adopting the (false) idea of “once saved, always saved” to give themselves a sense of security in their salvation. Contemplating the loss of salvation, which is what gives so many Christians a sense of life and hope, is like staring into the abyss.
Similarly, loss of freedom is a universal fear among human beings. We prize our freedom and our ability to make decisions about our own life, and direct our life accordingly. Losing that to some power feels like a kind of death. And it is a death of our humanity to the extent that we lose our freedom.
So yes, these thoughts go against the will of the victim. But they are indeed serious, and must be faced and overcome for the intrusive thoughts to lose their power.
Christians must come to recognize that it is God who saves us, and God is more powerful than hell. No outside force can force us to lose our salvation. Our salvation or loss of it is in our own hands, because we ourselves make the choice for heaven or hell.
And about freedom, although our body can be imprisoned, our mind can still be free. Even if we are literal slaves, we can choose how to react to that, whether with bitterness and fatalism or with a commitment to live a life of freedom in our own mind and heart even if we cannot in body.
Intrusive thoughts are very serious, and not to be brushed off lightly. They are identifying our fears and our weak spots for us, so that we can focus our attention on building and gaining the strength we need in those areas to be full and integral human beings.
As for whether those thoughts will follow us, that depends on whether we do the hard work of building our knowledge, understanding, and character as human beings. That’s what our life here on earth is for. If we abdicate our responsibility to make something of ourselves during our lifetime on earth, we’ve lost our chance, and we can’t expect good things in the afterlife.
By “serious”, I meant actually intended by the victim having the intrusive thoughts. If they go against the will of the victim, then they should not count as the victim intending them.
For example, a Christian having intrusive thoughts trying to renounce salvation are not intended by the victim, and thus are not serious as in they are not intended.
Also, if crippling intrusive thoughts do not cease, then hopefully the victim can chose to cease to exist after death in such an extreme scenario, because that would be pure hell otherwise to put up with intrusive thoughts forever and ever because God does not let a ruling love cease to be.
Hi K,
Crippling intrusive thoughts will cease, especially for people who go to heaven. No earthly intrusive thoughts will be held against someone who has chosen good over evil, nor will they persist in the afterlife, though they may continue during the person’s first stage after death, while s/he is still living in the stage of externals, which is similar to life on earth. Once the person moves on to the stage of internals, the intrusive thoughts will cease because they do not correspond to what’s in the person’s heart.
Even in hell, any “intrusive thoughts” would flow directly from the person’s evil ruling love. They would primarily be in the form of fears of getting done to themselves the evil acts they love to do to others (such as a thief fearing that someone will steal his money and belongings), and fear of punishment for their evil actions. These aren’t really “intrusive thoughts” in the usual sense, though—unbidden thoughts that are contrary to the direction of a person’s underlying will. They’re thoughts driven by the fears that are integrally connected to the evil spirit’s own evil desires and behavior.
So you believe that even minor intrusive thoughts will cease after death?
Hi K,
Yes.
Are so-called spiritual bodies made of spiritual cells? If so, would that mean there is mitosis and cell death going on? Or, unlike with multicellular organisms int he physical, is there a unity of substance instead? The same could be asked of whatever human body God has.
Of course to me it makes a lot more sense if a spirit is pure mind who can manifest in human form as an avatar, rather than actually stuck as some kind of gross human body for all eternity.
Hi K,
My understanding is that the spiritual body has all the parts and organs that the physical body does, because the physical body is a correspondential expression of the spiritual body. But of course, spiritual cells would operate according to spiritual law and reality, not according to physical law and reality.
Though cells had been discovered by Swedenborg’s time, I’m not aware that he ever spoke about them. His theory focused instead on tiny fibers that bundled together to make larger and larger compound fibers. Still, whether it’s cells or fibers, the basic idea is the same: all the parts and organs of the body are made up of tiny parts that group together in compound fashion to make larger parts and organs. This reflects spiritual reality, in which innumerable distinct details group together to make concepts or emotions.
Spiritual beings and things do not have a “unity of substance” in the sense of being one undifferentiated mass of material. They have parts, organs, and distinct and distinguishable details right down to the smallest level—in fact, even finer in grain and resolution than physical things. Their “unity of substance” is not from “simplicity” or lack of differentiation, but from all the trillions of trillions of parts working together harmoniously as one.
And just to emphasize: Spiritual things have more detail than physical things, not less.
Yes, there will be a spiritual analog of mitosis, cell death, waste removal, and so on. This is the ongoing cycle of life, both spiritually and physically. Old and outdated ideas must be jettisoned and carried off, to be replaced by new and better ideas. Old emotions that have outlived their usefulness must be let go of, and replaced with new and more thoughtful and caring ones. This is the continual process of growth and renewal of cells and the organs they compose within the spiritual body. It happens because it corresponds to the continual growth and renewal of the human mind and heart, which is a process that involves letting go of the old and embracing the new.
And yet, even though our body (as I recall) completely renews itself every seven years, we still remain the same person, having the same general appearance. We don’t become a completely different person every seven years. That’s because, spiritually, we do have a stable center, which is our ruling love. Even that might not be entirely stable during our lifetime on earth, because we can make the decision to change our basic motivation in life. But once we die, our ruling love becomes set and stable, and our whole life revolves around it and expresses it to eternity. So even though there is continual “cell renewal” in our spiritual bodies, we remain the same person, just as we remain the same person here on earth even though not a single cell in our body is the same as the ones that composed it a decade ago.
God’s human body works the same way, only it is infinite, and has infinite “cells.” This is not something we can really understand, because our minds are finite. But God is not “simple” as traditional Christian philosophers hallucinate. God is infinitely complex, made of infinite parts, which are the infinite ramifications of infinite love, wisdom, and power.
Of course, there is nothing “old” or “evil” in God to get rid of. The flow from God is all one-way, outward into the universe and into people. There aren’t dying cells and so on in God’s body. But in some way that we probably can’t understand, because it is infinite and divine, God’s body also functions like a human body. It is not a physical body, nor is it a spiritual body, but a divine body. It operates, not by physical law or even by spiritual law, but by divine law.
“And just to emphasize: Spiritual things have more detail than physical things, not less.”
That sounds gross to me.
“God’s human body works the same way, only it is infinite, and has infinite “cells.” This is not something we can really understand, because our minds are finite.”
And to be honest, that sounds like some eldritch horror to me for some reason.
No offense intended here, of course. But as you know, I still do not like the idea of being stuck _as_ a body for literally all eternity with no relief, and I hope that God has any part of Him that can be pure essence as well. Being a body is being a chemical entity that needs constant reactions to sustain such an existence.
Also by unity of substance, I meant could spirit bodies be not made of cells, but instead just a solid mass for each organ? Maybe they’re made of fibers (which may not sound as gross as being made of a bunch of cells for all eternity)?
Hi K,
It is precisely because the spiritual world is not magical, but operates by definite laws, including laws of cause and effect, that organs can’t just be a solid mass for each organ.
We can 3D print a solid heart, and these days even 3D print it out of “meat” so that it is organic. But a solid heart won’t pump any blood. The heart is structured the way it is because that’s the structure that is needed to do its work, which is to distribute the blood to every cell in the body, keeping them alive.
Not only that, but you also couldn’t 3D print a heart made of meat that has the large-scale structure of a heart—two auricles, two ventricles, arteries and veins going in and out, and so on—and have it work. Again, it would just be a solid mass of material shaped like a heart, but this time with the heart’s internal cavities as well. It could not actually pump any blood.
A heart can pump blood not just because it is shaped like a heart overall, but because it is composed mostly of muscle, and of a specific type of muscle that can keep operating day after day, year after year, without getting tired.
Muscle isn’t just a solid mass. It has a highly detailed structure built on long cells that are bundled into strands, which are then bundled into fascicles, and so on until it has compounded and layered up to the level of forming the full structure of the heart. For the heart to be able to beat, and pump blood around the body, each one of those cells must operate (contract) in perfect coordination with all the other cells.
Not only that, but the internal sub-cellular structure of each of those cells must operate for the cell itself to be able to do its work. It is an incredibly complex and detailed structure that ultimately goes all the way down to the atomic and sub-atomic level. If any of these levels of structure did not exist, and have a specific organization capable of engaging in its specific function, then the entire organ could not function, either.
This illustrates why a solid mass for each organ wouldn’t work. Remember, the physical body is what it is because it corresponds to the spiritual body. And if that’s the case, then the spiritual body has every part and organ, and not only that, every bit of fine structure, right down to the cellular and sub-cellular level, and even the atomic and subatomic level, that the physical body has. Otherwise it would not correspond to the physical body (or really, vice versa).
Further, just as the material world isn’t magical, but operates by definite laws, such that a solid mass shaped like a heart wouldn’t be able to pump any blood, so the spiritual world is not magical, but operates by definite laws, such that a solid mass of spiritual heart wouldn’t be able to pump any spiritual blood, and the spiritual body would die—or really, it wouldn’t be alive in the first place.
Blood isn’t just an arbitrary thing God whimsically decided to put into the human body. It corresponds to love and truth combined, which is what feeds the body and keeps it alive. So our spiritual blood is love and truth of a specific type, and without that love and truth, we cannot live spiritually.
All of this, and much more, is why the spiritual body must have at least the same level of fine structure as the physical body, right down to the cellular and sub-cellular level, or it couldn’t function.
In fact, as I said, its structure goes even finer than that of the physical body, and has even more parts. This doesn’t mean it’s a metastasizing eldrich horror. There won’t be more cells blobbing out into extra tentacles, teeth, and organs all over the body. Rather, the detail and structure of each cell will go a few orders of magnitude finer (smaller) than the atomic and subatomic structure that is the basis of the physical body. This means that its capacity for feeling, thought, memory, and action will also be finer and more detailed than the capacity of the physical body for its functions.
God, similarly, is not some metastasizing mass of cells. God’s form is fully and perfectly human. It also appears human to us (especially as Jesus). But it consists of infinite “parts,” meaning its “grain” or “resolution” is infinitely fine. But also God is infinitely present everywhere in material time and space and its spiritual analog, without being bounded by them as we are. Again, we can’t really grasp this because our mind is finite. But we can know these things intellectually, and we can think of and relate to God as to a human being, which is who and what God is.
I’m sorry that all of this grosses you out. Unfortunately, reality does not change itself to cater to our fears and phobias. Reality is a stubborn beast. This is just something you’re going to have to deal with over time, because reality cannot work the way you wish it did. Not physical reality, not spiritual reality, and not divine reality.
The main objection I have to me being stuck as a body in the afterlife is that such suggests mortality, and evolution by natural selection for the plains of Africa. Same goes for God being a Homo sapiens body. But yes, the grossness of blood and guts is also part.
And the afterlife realm is supposed to be non-physical, so I do not see why such cannot function differently from the physical.
PS: Maybe a silly question, but could there be cyborgs in the New Church afterlife (like the Borg from Star Trek or the Cybermen from Doctor Who), or a spirit brain in a spirit machine body? If such works in the physical and if the spiritual is like the physical, then such could work over there as well.
PPS: If someone does not like the way the New Church afterlife works, of course that alone does not change it if such really is real. But forcing a thing on one who does not like it forever can be a form of hell.
Hi K,
Except for people who go to hell, it would not be possible for someone not to like the afterlife as presented by Swedenborg. Each person’s heaven is a perfect expression of his or her own deepest loves and desires. What’s not to love?
Once again, no one is forced to do or be anything in heaven. People in heaven are completely free.
I believe your horror at organic things will also melt away as an “intrusive thought” once you experience what your spiritual body is really like.
Hi K,
I doubt that full-on cyborgs will work even in the physical world. For now, they are creatures of fiction and fantasy, not real-life beings.
Even if theoretically you could have an organic brain attached to and commanding a mechanical body, I doubt that the mechanical body would be able to supply the brain with the nutrients, hormones, and so on that it needs. The brain does not function independently of the body. It has a highly coordinated and integrated two-way relationship with the body, such that the two are interdependent upon one another. Missing limbs can be replaced with mechanical limbs, but if you started replacing vital organs, there would eventually be a time when the artificial replacements would not be able to replicate essential functions of the original organic version, and the body and brain would gradually or rapidly die.
The idea that we can make a body “better than it was before” a la “The Six Million Dollar Man” is mostly hubris, I think. I remember watching that series and enjoying it, but also laughing at it because Steve Austin, the six million dollar man, was always doing things that were physically impossible or that would have torn the rest of his body apart.
I remember one episode in which he used his bionic arm to grab a cable that went over pulleys to a suspended hospital bed that weighed a ton or more. Up the bed went, and he saved the day! But what would have happened in reality is that he would have picked himself up off the floor, and the bed would have stayed right where it was.
In another scene, he bent aside a prison bar with his bionic arm while bracing against his non-bionic arm on another bar, regardless of the fact that the whole structure from one hand through his arms and shoulders to the other hand would have had to be mechanical for this to work. In reality, he would have wrenched his other arm out of the socket, at best, and the bar wouldn’t have budged.
There’s a lot of magical and fantastical thinking about computers and machines, and how they’re going to be superior to humans in every way.
I’ll believe it when I see it. The human body developed over hundreds of millions of years of evolution into what it is today (more on that in another reply). The idea that within a few decades we can make something better is pure hubris, in my mind. I don’t think it’s going to happen.
Even if it does, will it really be better from a human perspective? Would it really be preferable to be a cold, hard machine rather than a warm, living, breathing human being? Human life is not just intellect and mechanics. The beating heart of human life is love, desire, emotion, relationship. These things require a warm, living, functioning body to express themselves fully. Perhaps someone with a robot body might be stronger, faster, more accurate than a human body (though even that is doubtful within the frame size of a human being). But that body will be cold and dead compared to the warmth and life of a human body. I would look at such a person with pity, not with admiration or awe.
What person who has a mechanical leg wouldn’t rather have his or her real leg back? The mechanical leg is a patch. A real leg would be much preferable, but since humans can’t re-grow limbs, a mechanical leg restores essential functionality such as the ability to walk. But for something warm and human like making love, no one would prefer a mechanical leg over the real thing.
Perhaps theoretically cyborgs can exist in the spiritual world, or even in the material world. But who would really want to be a cold, bloodless cyborg when s/he could be a warm, living human being? I can hardly imagine anyone in heaven wanting to be a cyborg rather than a full human. Anyone who did would, in my opinion, have some serious mental issues.
More than that, once again, the spiritual body fully expresses the spiritual mind, which is a living thing, not a machine. Having a machine body would be wildly inappropriate to having a human mind. It would, as I suggested, indicate some sort of serious mental lack and illness.
But really, I don’t think anyone could live with that sort of mechanical mind. It’s not human, it’s not alive, and it’s not conscious. It’s a theoretical construct of science fiction, not something that can exist in reality.
Hi K,
In response to this:
The afterlife is non-physical, and it does function differently from the physical. For one thing, our spiritual body perfectly and instantly expresses everything that our mind thinks and wants, which is certainly not true of our physical body. Our physical body makes a good stab at it, but material issues and limitations often get in the way, such as a spinal injury taking away a person’s ability to walk for the rest of his or her life. That can’t happen to the spiritual body.
Another big difference is that our spiritual body is not mortal. It can never die. Not only that, it can never be permanently injured. Even if injury is possible, our spiritual body will always return to its fully functional state and its completely sound and beautiful, unscarred appearance.
About evolution and natural selection, these are the rather clumsy ways that the physical universe responds to the life that flows in from the spiritual world.
This is another big difference between spirit and matter. Spirit is intrinsically alive. Matter is intrinsically dead.
Living as we do on this earth, we get a skewed view of the physical universe in relation to life. Our planet is teeming with life! Life gets into every nook and cranny, and hangs on even in some amazingly inhospitable places.
But looking out into the universe, it appears that life is very rare. In our own solar system, we’re hoping against hope that we’ll find some sort of microbial life on Mars or on one of the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. But most of the planets and moons are not even candidates for life. Looking outside our solar system, almost all of the exoplanets we’ve discovered so far do not have conditions in which life could exist. Many of them are “hot Jupiters” or “mini-Neptunes” that don’t even have a surface as we know it, or if they do, it’s under such intense pressure that nothing could live there. At best there might be microbes floating in the atmosphere of some of them, but even that is unlikely.
The overall conclusion is that the physical universe in which we live is very hostile to life. Only a few tiny corners of it seem to even have the capacity to host life, and so far we have no idea whether those besides our own planet that could host life actually do host life. Further observation and exploration will gradually answer these questions. Regardless, the vast, overwhelming bulk of this physical universe is totally dead.
This is what life has to work with in expressing itself in the physical universe. It takes a generation or two of stars living and dying even to produce the materials needed to form planets that could host life. And a ridiculously large percentage of stars and planets just plain miss the mark, and can never host life. Clearly, getting this material universe to host life is a massive, complicated effort and process.
This is completely different from the spiritual world. There, life just spontaneously appears all over the place in response to to the thoughts and feelings of the people (angels and spirits) in the vicinity. There’s no need for any eons-long process of evolution and natural selection. Fully formed, organic, detailed, fully-functional deer or sheep or cows or pigs just pop into existence instantly when people in the area have thoughts and feelings that correspond to them. That’s because in contrast to the material universe, which is intrinsically dead and highly resistant to life, the spiritual universe is intrinsically alive, and highly responsive to life.
What’s happening in evolution and natural selection is not, as materialistic scientists presume, matter organizing itself into living forms. What’s happening, instead, is matter reluctantly being organized by spiritual influences into forms that can temporarily host life, which itself is spiritual. Evolution is a working out of the tendency of everything in the universe to take on a human form (see: “Do Galaxies Have Heart and Lungs?”) Getting physical matter to take on human form is a long, complicated, arduous process that takes billions of years, precisely because matter is so resistant to life.
The strange and unlikely processes that have happened to get us into the form we’re in are all things that life, which is spiritual, took advantage of to move inorganic substances toward organic substances, then toward forms capable of hosting life, then toward more and more complex forms until it could finally produce a human form capable of hosting human life.
Even then, it manages to do it only for a few decades, or a century or so at best. After reaching its peak in its twenties or thirties, the physical body gradually deteriorates until it reaches a point at which it can no longer host life, and it dies. Or it is damaged and destroyed even earlier by external accidents and events. Maintaining this physical body in a healthy, living state is a complicated, touchy thing even under the best of circumstances.
All of this is to emphasize that our spiritual body is entirely non-physical, and very different from our physical body here on earth. Our physical body reluctantly has the blood and guts required for it to host our spirit. Before long it subsides back into the organic (non-living) soup of Earth’s biosphere. And even those organic compounds tend to break down into non-organic compounds over time. Everything tends toward death, not toward life.
The spiritual world, and our spiritual body, is just the opposite. Everything tends toward life, and is intrinsically alive. Life arises easily, even instantly, and is completely responsive to the life of our mind and heart. There is no disease, deterioration, and death. There is no ticking clock and time limit on life. Life just blossoms into existence everywhere, and our physical body is immortal and always young and healthy to eternity.
Once again, I believe that when you enter the afterlife, you will very quickly realize how different your spiritual body is from your physical body. And I believe that your current disgust and disdain of physical organics will quickly fade away as you experience the incredibly fine, fast, and flexible responsiveness of your spiritual body to every thought and feeling of your mind.
About the life thing, I think it is pretty clear from observation how metabolism and life processes work at a molecular level. Unless it is by some sort of correspondence, life does not appear to be some supernatural force that animates inanimate matter. I like the idea of so-called spirit being thought or consciousness instead of some so-called life force that has been debunked by metabolism and microbiology.
As for the spirit body thing, I still do not like the idea of being stuck as a body throughout all eternity with the inherent limitations of such (like the spiritual equivalent of pain or hunger).
Like I said, my ideal form would be pure mind that can sense via ESP and interact via telekinesis. And if I want the spiritual equivalent of corporeal experience, I can manifest in a body that is like an avatar or that radio receiver analogy (that dualists like to use to try to explain mind-brain dependence to defend dualism), and when I tire of being in a body, I can make such instantly disappear.
And in my ideal afterlife, the experience of being a mammal in a terrestrial environment in 3D space with one little primate brain is just the beginning. After the spiritual equivalent of eons (or actual eons – why be limited to being outside of time and space like in the New Church afterlife?), existence can be incomprehensibly more advanced. Like being able to manifest in 4-dimensional space in some kind of inconceivable realm, while having the thinking capacity of a Matryoshka brain the size of a solar system. But of course, one can never become one with God by such advancement as God is at an infinite level of advancement.
To put it another way, my ideal afterlife is something like the Q Continuum from Star Trek, but sans the stagnation the Q are depicted as settling into. Not being some spirit body playing royal court in some palace for all eternity.
Hi K,
Most of this we’ve covered before. Metabolism and microbiology have not debunked the idea of an indwelling life force. Scientists still have no idea what life itself is. They can only see and study its effects.
On the body in the afterlife thing, we’re just going in circles. I can’t think of anything new to say in response that I haven’t already said a dozen times before. I would suggest that we put this topic on ice until both you and I have died, and you’ve had a chance to try out your Q-style afterlife. Then we’ll have something to talk about. Personally, I have no intention of living in a palace. I plan to live in a nice quiet little cottage out in the country with my wife, my library, my bikes, and my writing desk, very far from the reach of any royal courts and bureaucrats. That will be my heaven.
Meanwhile, this recent article caught my attention:
Quantum effects in life: Cells compute information billion times faster than we thought
The idea that we are going to surpass the human body with our technology is, in my view, a pipe dream.
Hopefully I won’t find myself trapped in the New Church afterlife exactly as Swedenborg describes it anyway. With Swedenborg being wrong about quite a number of things like worlds in the solar system being inhabited, how disease works, how sperm works, etc., it is possible that the afterlife (if any) could be somewhat like the New Church afterlife, but still different. Like pets being truly alive there, being able to look at the back of someone’s head without causing some weird effect, being able to have different lighting besides the sun always being in front and 45 degrees up, not having to eat nor be stuck as a body, etc. Maybe even no eternal hell nor being stuck in one level of Heaven forever, yet there is still free will somehow anyway.
Anyway, thanks for replies. It is nice you can find the New Church afterlife comforting, even if such afterlife isn’t appealing to everyone.
Hi K,
Bottom line: You won’t be trapped in anything. You will be living your ideal life. That is “the New Church afterlife.”
As you likely already know, I do not want the afterlife to be a continuation of the physical but with some different substance.
But you mentioned somewhere that the spirit body of New Church theology is sort of like an energy being, yet is not a completely incorporeal energy being like that of the Organians of Star Trek: the spirit of New Church theology is the spirit body. And IIRC, you mention such feeling light, rather than how the physical body feels heavy.
Could that have something to do with spirits being able to appear differently at a distance, demons looking different in different light (humanoid verses eldritch horror), souls being made in the image of God so they are invisible yet visible like God is, and the spiritual realm in general being a so-called manifestation realm where what is abstract in this realm (like love or truth) can take form in that realm?
(still sort of confused how it works)
PS: While it may be confusing, that alone does not mean it is impossible. There may be traditional Christians (Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, etc.) who believe that that the afterlife consists of physical resurrection in a perfected physical realm (in a giant golden cube city on a new earth) who may say any kind of non-physical reality is impossible, just like metaphysical naturalist atheists may claim.
Anyway I’m still confused how the spiritual and spiritual bodies work in New Church theology, but at least it sounds like I am wrong if I think of such as just another version of the physical.
Hi K,
I would say that even in this realm, love and truth are not abstract, but real. If I love my wife, that is not an abstraction. It is a real attraction and affinity for her, just as real as gravity. Truth is not an abstraction either. It is seeing things as they really are. It is just as real as eyesight. Eyesight may not be a solid object, but it is real, not abstract.
In the spiritual world, love and truth are not abstract at all. They are the actual substance and form of things. There, people are literally made of love, and shaped by truth. And on the divine level, love is the only substance, and truth is the only form. God literally is love and truth.
Also, as I said before, the Father being “invisible” doesn’t mean it’s incorporeal and abstract, but that we can’t see it because it’s on a whole different “wavelength” than our eyes can detect, and also because it’s hidden behind the part of God that is visible, which is the Son.
What’s different about the spiritual body is that it is a direct expression and embodiment of the person’s true self. There is no external fixity and resistance to the person’s inner self, as there is with the physical body. Swedenborg even says that when we pass into the spiritual world, we take with us an envelope (Latin: limbus) of “the finest things in nature” in order to provide our spirit with some kind of boundary or limit or fixity. I don’t think anyone really knows how this works. The reason I bring it up is that it highlights the difference between spiritual substance and physical matter, and therefore between our spiritual body and our physical body.
Our physical body is heavy and resistive. It does what we want, but not always easily, and sometimes it just won’t or can’t do what we want it to do. I cannot leap tall buildings with a single bound no matter how much I want to do that. At this age, I can barely huff myself up some of the steeper hills in the area on my bicycle. For angels in their spiritual body, if they wanted to leap a tall building with a single bound, they would “just do it,” to borrow the Nike slogan. Whatever the heart wants and the mind directs it to do, our spiritual body will do. (For the angels, at least. Evil spirits do have laws and limits binding the full execution of their desires.)
For the dim-witted skeptics out there, no, this doesn’t mean that angels can make square circles, or create rocks heavier than they can lift. These would be stupid things to want, and angels don’t want to do stupid things. The whole reason they’re angels is that they’ve devoted their lives to doing good and constructive things, and no longer want to do stupid and idiotic things. Angels are also aware of their own finitude (i.e., limitations). They don’t want or try to be the all-powerful God.
What it does mean is that any good thing angels want to do they can do. Their spiritual body does not impose any limitations on their actions the way our physical body does. It fully and seamlessly expresses everything the heart wants and the mind thinks.
I do think that our spiritual body feels literally lighter, as in not being as weighty as our physical body. But I think that “lighter” also means that it doesn’t give any resistance to our will and our thoughts. It is fully and easily responsive. So much so that it is simply an extension of our mind. One flows seamlessly into the other.
If, as in your case, you want your body to take some other form, I don’t see why that wouldn’t be possible. But in that case, I do think it would be an avatar rather than being your actual body. Your actual spiritual body has every essential part, organ, and cell required for your will and understanding to function, and to express themselves in action. A ball of light such as the Organians became when they disappeared at the end of that episode of Star Trek does not have the parts and structure required to support an intelligent conscious mind and all its functions. However, I see no reason why an angel couldn’t “play” a ball of light similar to playing a video game character that is an animal or an animated car or an orc or an elf. I presume it is possible to create much more realistic and full-sensory virtual realities in the spiritual world than we are currently capable of in the material world.
About angels and spirits appearing different at a distance, that’s due to the nature of the spiritual environment, and spiritual light. In person and close-up, people look like ordinary human beings. Even evil spirits look like ordinary human beings in their own hellish light, because they think of themselves as “normal people.” But in heavenly light they look like various kinds of monsters. At a distance, angels and spirits commonly appear in correspondential forms, such as the angels of the highest heaven appearing as infants and young children from a distance because of their innocence, or lustful evil spirits looking like satyrs from a distance because of their animalistic desires.
Angels and evil spirits have regular human bodies in their own day-to-day experience, not the bodies of infants or of satyrs. Their appearance at a distance is correspondential, not literal.
I don’t know if any of this helps. I think it’s probably something you’ll have to ponder and study and develop an idea of over time. And of course, once you arrive in the spiritual world you’ll experience it first-hand and learn exactly how it works.
I like having sunlight at 90 degrees high. 45 degrees in front of me looks ugly and wintery. Yet Swedenborg writes that what looks like the sun is always 45 degrees up and ahead to angels. If I end up in such a realm after I pass away someday, could I get like a special accommodation and have what looks like the sun at 90 degrees overhead to me?
Hi K,
I don’t take those types of statements too literally. There’s enough variability in what Swedenborg says about the sun of heaven to suggest that things are more complex than simply having a sun constantly shining at 45 degrees all the time. For example, he says than angels in the spiritual kingdom see the moon in the sky, not the sun, and yet they have plenty of light. He also talks about something that might be called “phases of the sun,” in which, as angelic communities go through cycles in their state of mind, the sun and moon do sort of a dance in the sky in which they sometimes separate and one or the other becomes dominant and then sometimes merge, IIRC, causing greater or lesser light throughout the cycle. He also talks about a cyclical state of twilight in heaven. So I don’t think that even in heaven we will be stuck with the same old sun in the same old place all the time.
I suspect that there’s a situation similar to the one on earth, in which it seems to us that the sun is rising and setting, and getting brighter or dimmer, but really the sun is in a fixed position relative to the earth, and the earth is rotating, going through seasons as it orbits the sun, and having more or less cloud cover, so that to us the sun is variable, when in fact the sun itself is invariable, relatively speaking. (Of course, the sun does have its own cycles, such as the eleven-year sunspot cycle. But that’s relatively minor in its effects on us compared to the earth’s much greater variability in relation to the sun.)
Another issue is that if the sun is always at 45 degrees, and angels always face the sun no matter which way they turn, as Swedenborg also says, then angels would always have the sun in their eyes. That could get tiresome after a while. Again, I don’t take these statements too literally. I suspect it’s just difficult to express in earthly words exactly how it works and how it looks and feels to us in heaven because the laws of the spiritual world are so different from the laws of the material world.
TL;DR: I think you’ll be able to have your spiritual sun directly overhead sometimes if that’s something you really enjoy.
Although you have said that Swedenborg said that mental illness goes away after death, it still seems doubtful that a pervasive developmental disorder such as OCD or ASD could go away because it’s seemingly so entrenced and pretty much part of the personality.
But hopefully the personality can somehow be separated or disconnected from pervasive developmental disorder thinking. Or in other words, hopefully PDD thinking is not so pervasive that it infects the ruling love or innermost nature of a person. Even if the victim of PDD cannot comprehend thinking normally.
Hi K,
Swedenborg doesn’t exactly say that mental illness (not his words) “goes away.” Rather, he says that people continue their process of growth and development from the point at which it was arrested by some mental condition. In other words, it’s a process, not an instantaneous transformation.
Swedenborg didn’t go into detail on how this works in any specific cases. He only mentions it in passing. But I would surmise that after death people who have OCD, ASD, or any other PDD would grow out of it over time rather than suddenly being a whole different person. The conditions that caused the PDD would be removed, but its effects on the person would not be immediately erased. Rather, people would be able to move forward with their life, and gradually put the undesirable effects of their earthly PDD behind them, while retaining anything positive from it that they might enjoy about their character and life.
This, at any rate, is how I think it would work. It would be an organic process, not the sudden waving of a magic wand. And it would be something that the person himself or herself would direct or at least regulate from his or her own free will, rather than something that is “done to” him or her.
I know someone with OCD who would rather cease to be than have intrusive thoughts hounding throughout all eternity. So hopefully in the future, those thoughts do not torment for long after mortality.
PS: And hopefully at the moment of passing and being revived in any afterlife, intrusive thoughts can be held off then. Can you imagine entering eternity with your first thought being some intrusive OCD thought? Or your final thought in mortality being OCD BS?
Hi K,
Assuming this person has a good heart (i.e., is headed for heaven), the longest those intrusive thoughts could last would be some amount of time into process in the world of spirits after death. Once s/he reaches heaven, they will be gone.
During the passing itself, angels from the heavenly realm (i.e., heart-centered angels) accompany people who pass over. They keep the person engaged in pleasant thoughts, usually about the afterlife, because that’s what people tend to think about as they die. They also keep evil spirits away. And since evil spirits are the source of intrusive thoughts, no intrusive thoughts will be able to break through during that time.
As discussed in the article, The Afterlife: It’s Not as Different as you Think!, I brought up blocking pain, after dealing with a nasty cramp from a pulled muscle. I do not like pain, and that I cannot will it away or block it.
I do not like having to breathe all the time, so I have to surface and cannot stay underwater indefinitely when swimming.
Being too hot or too cold sucks.
Getting hungry or thirsty sucks.
Having to go to the washroom both sucks and is gross.
Come to think of it, the process of eating would be gross if it were not for instinct.
Being limited to plodding along on the ground at 1 or 2 KPH or MPH sucks. Running to go faster means getting tired and wheezy sooner or later (depending on health), which also sucks.
Not being able to slip through solid objects like a ghost sucks. One can be trapped or stuck in places literally.
The body looks sort of gross, at least or especially on the inside.
One cannot do anything except by muscle power (which of course is outdone by machines and even some other biological life), as mental abilities like telekinesis and telepathy seem to be nonexistent (and if they work can be impeded by people not believing in such so-called magic).
It is also a load of bull how without constant hygiene using tools, the average human would resemble some sort of demonic creature that embodies rot then: rotten yellow teeth (if they are still there), hideously long yellowed nails, gross matted hair everywhere, stinking to high heaven, and even more gross downstairs. When other species may get nowhere near as gross without access to hygiene with tools: for example cats stay relatively nice and clean if they just lick themselves, and frogs do not get anywhere near as filthy and rotten as people do without access to hygiene tools.
There is just in general how gross, weak, and limited being stuck in a body of flesh is. How the human body is so weak to so many endless different hazards sucks. Radiation this, acid that, fire this, extreme G-force that, electricity this, biohazard that.
And of course, fun times being perceived as fast and miserable as slow is one of the biggest BS about being human.
And again there is the sensation of pain, as well as being forced to endure endless other unpleasant stimuli because senses cannot be turned off (except for smell).
—
So, I think you can get an idea where I am coming from as to why I do not want to be stuck in a body like the mortal human body for all eternity, and why I think being an incorporeal energy being who can assume corporeal form like an avatar is an ideal arrangement in any afterlife. Putting up with a few decades of being stuck with all that BS of the flesh is one thing, but the equivalent of a million years? A trillion? A googol? A googolplex? 3↑↑↑↑3? Graham’s number? ∞? I think I would rather cease to exist.
Anyway, hopefully if the New Church afterlife turns out to be right, there truly is a way to avoid all that BS, or at least minimize it in such a way that it does not get to me. I do not like the idea of being stuck being so weak and limited for all eternity. Being so weak and limited is a potential source of endless misery.
But at least as you repeatedly insisted, I am not limited by mortal experience with what I can experience in the NC afterlife.
Hi K,
Yes, as I say in one of my articles, the afterlife is not as different as people think. But it is different. And the basic difference is that everything there is spiritual, not physical. This may seem theoretical now, but once you experience it, you’ll realize that the difference is very real. For one thing, there is no entropy and no decay in heaven.
I suppose I could go through each one of your colorful fears and say why it won’t be an issue in heaven. But that would be tedious. So I’ll just say:
In heaven, none of these things will be any issue whatsoever.
But I suspect you’ll have to go there and experience it for yourself before you’ll really believe me.
It is not imagination or colorful fears, but real issues that would make eternity a form of hell if they persisted forever. For example, a few decades of getting tired while running or having to breathe lest there be suffocation may be tolerable, but an eternity of that? That would really suck. Being limited to flesh (or a spiritual likeness) for all eternity sounds like my idea of a hell. But good to know the issues will not be issues in NC heaven, or so you say.
Hi K,
Once again, that’s not how things work in heaven. We do not live forever in a physical body subject to physical laws of entropy, disease, decay, and death. As for getting tired and needing to breathe, these are not big issues.
Hi K,
Breathing won’t be a problem because there will never be a time when there won’t be plenty of fresh, clean air available. Even underwater, I doubt it will be an issue. Either you’ll be able to develop the ability to hold your breath for a very long time, or there will be some sort of breathing apparatus or ability to breathe underwater. Swedenborg occasionally talks about “internal breathing,” which no one has really been able to figure out what he means by. Perhaps there is some sort of “internal breathing” possible in heaven that doesn’t require a surrounding atmosphere.
Getting tired won’t be a problem because in heaven you’ll be in perfect health. If you get tired, it will most likely be because you’re “getting tired” of doing whatever you’re doing, so your energy for that activity wanes, not due to physical lack, but due to lack of interest.
However, once again, there are plenty of people who are into exercise, including endurance exercises such as long-distance running, who might not be happy if they can just run forever without any real effort, and without ever getting tired. For such people, where is the challenge and sense of accomplishment if everything is easy and painless, and you never get tired?
Just because you’re in heaven, that doesn’t mean that everything is easy, and everything is handed to you on a silver platter. It’s just that the limiting factor won’t be external issues as it often is here. Any difficulties will be a reflection of overcoming your own inner self-imposed limitations.
I am reminded of the original Matrix movie (the only really good one), in which it turns out that the machines had originally constructed a perfect virtual world for the humans, free of all conflict and pain, but the humans rejected it because it didn’t feel real. So the machines made the virtual world more like the real world, with all its imperfections. Then the humans lived in it without rejecting it. The humans could have had a perfect world, but it didn’t correspond to their own imperfect psychology.
If there is no entropy or decay in the spiritual, then how come there are organs related to entropy? The reason why people breathe and digest food for example is to get chemical energy to hold off entropy. Cease getting nutrients or oxygen, and cells run out of of chemical energy.
Hi K,
Energy isn’t necessarily to overcome entropy. Mainly, it’s to get things done.
That may be, but when energy is used, entropy increases. The whole purpose of the circulatory, respiratory, and digestive systems is to replenish energy lost to waste and entropy. I also still wonder why spirit bodies would need components that suggest mortality, like said systems.
Hi K,
Only in the material world. Not in the spiritual world. Entropy is a property of matter. It is not a property of spirit. Just as there is no time and space in the spiritual world, there is no law of entropy in the spiritual world.
And no, that’s not the whole purpose of those systems even in the material world. Energy expended is not merely “lost to waste and entropy.” It accomplishes the positive purposes that the person has in mind.
When I was a kid at around 12 or so, I knew a guy who had the mind of a baby but the body of a guy my age. At the time, the guy had a mental disability that prevented him from developing any further. From what I heard, he was gonna stay that way for the rest of his life.
In the New Church afterlife, do you think he would manifest as a baby when he first arrives?
Hi K,
It’s a good question. I sort of doubt it, because he’s used to having an adult body. It seems more likely that he’ll still have an adult body, but his mind will grow up until he has an adult mind to match.
I think that any spirit body one has could appear to be a younger age that reflects a younger mental age, if one is underdeveloped mentally. Like someone on the autism spectrum who is mentally 15 yet physically 30 in this life appearing 15 after passing away, at least after the first state in the World of Spirits is done. And if that is not the case, then at least any mismatch is a temporary problem.
Hi K,
It wouldn’t surprise me if that is the case. But I have also known people in an adult body with less than an adult mind. It just seems unlikely that they would suddenly have an entirely different body than the one they’re used to. And in the world of spirits, where we first arrive after death, there can still be a mismatch between the mind and the body.
Either way, yes, the situation would be temporary. Swedenborg is very clear that people who have mental disabilities have those disabilities removed in the other life, and they continue from where they left off before they became limited by that disability. (Using present-day terms rather than Swedenborg’s terms.) No one remains in an infant or child mind in the spiritual world. Everyone grows up both physically and mentally to full adulthood.
Even if one is stuck in a body of spirit flesh for all eternity in the New Church afterlife, I take it from what you have said that it is not so limited as being in material flesh is in this life? Such as at least angels being able to think at a level on par with scifi so-called energy beings, beyond supercomputer (instead of being relatively slow, unfocused, and forgetful)? Or being able to wield what would be considered by people in this world to be so-called psionic powers, such as telepathy or telekinesis (rather than being limited to mere muscle power to do anything)?
In the Star Trek TNG episode True Q, Q asks Amanda (a girl who finds out she is really a Q or energy superbeing like him): “What do humans have to offer you that even begins to compare with [being Q]? Your future contains wonders you can’t even imagine. The universe could be your playground.” So the New Church afterlife can compete with that, despite that apparent limitation of being stuck in spirit flesh?
Hi K,
“Spirit flesh” is a contradiction in terms. Flesh is flesh. Spirit is spirit. The two are fundamentally different. You will not be living in a body of flesh in heaven. You will be living in a spiritual body.
And yes, angels do have those types of powers available to them. However, angels aren’t interested in power for its own sake. They’re interested in love and service. If you asked angel Amanda whether she wanted to make the universe her playground, she’d most likely say, “Why would I want to do that? I’ve got more important things to do.”
In other words, angels, especially the higher angels, do have those kinds of power at their disposal, but in most instances it’s not all that useful to them, so they don’t bother. And of course, they have that sort of power only if they want to use it to accomplish something good and constructive. Also, they have it only if they recognize that it is really God’s power, not their own. But if, for example, there is an uprising in hell that’s getting out of hand, a single angel can, with one glance, or one shake of the fist, rout entire armies of evil spirits.
Even Q would have no power against angels if Q wanted to do something that wasn’t good, such as tease and bully a less advanced species, as the John DeLancie Q admitted to doing. Despite appearances here on earth, evil has no power over good. It has power only over evil. Therefore angels have tremendous “godlike” powers against anything evil (but really, it is God’s power working through them), no matter how mighty it might feel in the mind of the being bent on doing something evil.
As for angels’ thinking and memory, even the most ordinary angels in the lowest heaven think far more clearly and have a far clearer memory that the highest IQ person who has photographic memory here on earth. And the higher angels have mental powers orders of magnitude higher than anyone on earth, such that they can work out in a few minutes something that would take a brilliant mind here on earth months or years to work out. Of course, they’re thinking on a whole different level, so they’re working out spiritual issues and conundrums, not material ones as most high IQ people here on earth are doing.
The main reason I would want powers beyond muscle power is for the same reason a handicapped person would want to walk, or a blind person would want to see: because I want to overcome the BS limitations of the tyranny of matter (tyranny of matter being a phrase written by Arthur C. Clarke in the prologue of 3001).
And while spirit bodies are not flesh, they are still like flesh, from what I read of Swedenborg writings: the same gross organs, the same apparent need to eat, the same mammalian traits, the same ability to feel pain, etc. Swedenborg says nothing is missing after all.
Hopefully angels can use tremendous powers in everyday life and even for fun (in not evil ways of course), even if such powers do not come from them, and they do not have to ask permission every time they want to do something beyond mere spirit muscle power.
PS: No offense or insensitivity meant towards handicapped or blind people here, BTW. What I meant is my motive for wanting to use ESP powers in any afterlife is overcoming limitations that I have to endure in this life. I am aware the spirit world does not have matter, but it does seem to function like the world of matter (at least to an extent), and I do not want something like the tyranny of matter hindering me in any afterlife. One life of excessively limiting physics (such as entropy and no ability to fly without machine) is quite enough.
Hi K,
There is no matter in heaven. Only spiritual substance. Just as “spirit flesh” is a contradiction in terms, so “spiritual matter” would be a contradiction in terms. And since there is no matter in heaven, there is no “tyranny of matter” there either.
We do have a spiritual body (not a flesh body) in heaven, and it does have the same organs as our physical body, but they are not “gross”; they are spiritual, which means that they exist because they correspond to the functions and processes of our spirit, or mind, all of which are spiritual, not physical.
That’s why, for example, angels can fly without wings. Swedenborg often casually mentions angels flying here and there, not to mention spirits standing three feet above the ground, spirits positioning themselves around his head, and so on, all of which makes it clear that our spiritual body is not subject to “the tyranny of matter.” If it were, angels couldn’t fly, and spirits couldn’t float three feet above the ground.
In short, our spiritual body does not have the limitations that our physical body does. If you wanted to hang around in heaven all afternoon playing with psionic powers, you could do that. How else could a single angel rout an entire army of evil spirits just by looking at them? This is not something that a human being in a material body can do.
And once again, it’s not about asking permission. Angels may look to the Lord for power, but they do so, not to get permission, but to gain the power and understanding they need for a task that is beyond what they have done before. It’s not like going to the government and asking for a grant. It’s like laying a new and bigger cable to the power plant so that you can run bigger and more powerful machinery.
The reason that it’s not asking for permission is that God continually gives everyone, human, angel, spirit, and even evil spirit, exactly as much love, wisdom, and power as they are willing and able to accept. Far from having to ask for permission, the moment God sees that we want some new love, understanding, or power to do something good, or learn something new, God gives it to us.
We don’t realize this here on earth because so many things within and around us stand in the way and block it, and because we’re hardly even aware of our spiritual levels while we’re living here on earth. But in heaven, it becomes very clear that God is continually, freely giving us everything we want and need to learn the things we want to learn and do the things we want to do.
This, of course, assumes that these things are good and true. But angels are angels precisely because they want good and true things.
In short, you don’t have to ask permission because as soon as you want and are open to any good or true thing, God instantly gives it to you. God isn’t requiring you to ask permission. God is just waiting for you to be ready so that God can give you more. That’s what it means to be infinite love, wisdom, and power.
I thought spirit substance is supposed to be like physical matter, only more real and not made of mass-energy from the physical.
Hi Kw
Spiritual substance is not like physical matter. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you. It is a whole different order of substance. Entropy doesn’t apply to it. Time and space don’t apply to it. It has no fixity apart from the human mind and whatever parts of the human mind are permanent. Its substance is love, not matter or protons or quantum energy fluctuations. It’s form/structure is truth, not atomic lattices and filamentary structures. It is nothing like matter.
Things in the spiritual world appear similar not because they’re material, but because they correspond to things of the human (and divine) mind and heart. These ultimately give rise to similar material structures, but material structures are made of matter, and are intrinsically dead, unlike spiritual structures, which are made of spiritual substance, and are intrinsically alive.
In short, physical matter and spiritual substance have nothing in common with each other except that they both correspond to similar elements of the mind of God, each on their own level.
Even if New Church angels have work to do, of course they also have and value recreation (at the right level of priority), I take it?
Hi K,
Yes, recreation is a regular part of life in heaven.
As seen in this selection of clips from a somewhat silly American cartoon series from the ’00s called Danny Phantom, spirits or ghosts are usually portrayed in media as being able to pass or slip through things. According to Swedenborg writings, can spirits do that, at least if they somehow project into the physical?
Vid is “Every Time Danny Phantom Goes Ghost 👻” by Nicktoons (video code is AOrkD2ILuCk).
Hi K,
Spirit and matter interact with one another only through correspondence. Since their substance is on two entirely different planes of existence, they are immaterial to each other. Spirits are present around us all the time, but we can’t see, hear, or otherwise sense them with our physical senses because physical matter can interact directly only with other physical matter (or energy), not with spiritual matter (or energy). So yes, a spirit would pass right through anything physical if it were somehow to appear in the physical realm. But even then, it would be seen with the spiritual eyes of the people seeing it, not with their physical eyes.
The one possible counterpoint to this is if the spirit appeared via the aforementioned “limbus” of “the purest things of nature,” which are material rather than spiritual. Perhaps, as I’ve said before, this is how ghostly images sometimes show up in images taken by physical cameras—if they’re not just hoaxes or some visual artifact. If ghosts (really, spirits) do appear via the limbus, then the limbus itself must be “pure” or “fine” enough to be able to pass through ordinary physical matter. But there are other physical things that pass through ordinary physical matter with ease, such as neutrinos, so this would not necessarily violate the laws of physics.
Could spirits pass through spirit stuff, like momentarily going more ethereal than usual and slipping through the spirit equivalent of solid barriers?
Hi K,
Probably. But normally, spirit stuff is solid to other spirit stuff just as material stuff is solid to other material stuff. It’s just that spirit stuff is not hard and fixed like material stuff. So I suspect that if someone wanted to pass through a wall, the wall would yield and open up a portal to pass through.
I guess since the afterlife is supposed to be a manifestation realm of sorts, there may be situations where a spirit cannot go through a wall, and other times where he can, reflecting various spiritual concepts or principles or the like interacting. Like an evil spirit being unable to slip through the wall of an angel house (assuming the evil spirit could even be there in the first place), or a good spirit being able to slip through the wall of a prison cell in hell.
Hi K,
Sounds reasonable.
Hi K,
Evil spirits can’t even approach heaven unless God temporarily changes their state of mind into a rational one, drawing on the external facade of civility that they wore on earth. If they try to go to heaven without that change of state, in their own evil state, they are racked with excruciating pain and start desperately gasping for breath the moment they approach even the threshold of heaven, and they throw themselves headlong back into their own hell, where they can breathe again. That’s because their evil state of mind cannot bear the light and warmth of heaven, which to them is a destructive force, because light and warmth destroy falsity and evil.
What if there is a people with beauty standards that require induced deformity, like foot binding in ancient China, corsets in Victorian England, or arguably plastic surgery today? Since there is presumably no deformity in the New Church Heaven, would beauty standards change to drop seemingly hellish stuff like that? Or could some women who actually like that sorta stuff have bodies that look like they have the induced deformity but they are not deformed? Hopefully it is the former case.
Hi K,
It’s an interesting question. I tend to think that unhealthful beauty standards will be dropped in heaven. Asian women who had their feet bound will have normal feet in heaven, I think. And I think and hope that the women who get the artificially big lips and other parts settle down about their appearance and return to a healthy beauty in heaven.
Of course, if they’re so vain that all they care about is their own “beauty” (I put it in quotes because all this artificial stuff is not beautiful to me), then they’re likely not going to heaven anyway. And in hell, all bets are off when it comes to beauty.
As you probably already know though, the denizens of NC hell appear to have 2 forms. One in infernal light that looks more humanoid, and one in heavenly light that looks more hideous and demonic.
Hi K,
Right. One of them is the false view they have of themselves. They think of themselves as normal people, so that’s how they see themselves and each other. The other is the true view of them as they appear in heaven’s light, which is truth. When heaven’s light shines on them, their true hideously evil form appears. That’s just one reason they avoid heaven’s light like the plague. For them, it is a plague. Darkness and falsity hate light and truth.
so we still end up
looking the same? same nose same eyes mouth face body weigh etc? would everyone look the same as it is? also do you have a article on why you should believe in the after life or the bible or why people claim it’s “real” i’ve been having derealization and it’s been making me overthink weather if religion is a coping mechanism or not. i know it’s bad but every time i pray for an answer or sign i don’t get it or i might be but i just don’t see it and i’m just scared everyday having a crisis.
Hi Max,
When we first wake up in the spiritual world, we will look exactly the same as we do here. But over time, our body will go through changes so that it perfectly expresses our true inner character—which our physical body here on earth doesn’t always do. But overall, yes, we’ll still have the same kind of body: a male body for those who are men, and a female body for those who are women, each having all the same parts and organs as those bodies have here on earth.
Here are a couple of articles to get you started on those two topics. There are more related articles linked at the end of these ones:
It is good to question things, and throw your toughest skeptical questions at them, rather than just tossing softballs. When an idea or belief can stand up to testing and scrutiny, we can have more assurance of it and faith in it than if it’s never been tested. The process of questioning you’re going through right now is not bad. It’s what you need to do to assure yourself of the truth (or falsity) of these things.
still kinda confuse on what you mean over time out bodies “will go through changes so that it perfectly expresses our true inner character”.. i still wanna obviously look like me you know i would love to change my hairstyle from time to time being able to do silly faces.. that’s what i mean still have the same color of hair and eyes
Hi Max,
If you like the way you look, then your body probably does express your inner character, and you’ll probably look similar in the spiritual world. But not everyone likes the way they look. Many people would be very upset if they had to live forever in the body they have right now here on earth. Not everyone’s body is healthy. Some people have genetic defects. Some people have scars or are missing limbs from accidents. And some people are elderly, and live in a frail body that can’t do much. These things are limitations on, not expressions of, those people’s true inner self.
What I mean is that your spiritual body will perfectly express your spirit. If your current physical body already does that, then I would expect that your spiritual body will look pretty much like it, only better (assuming you choose heaven over hell).
lee what about the older people that died that liked their younger selves? in heaven would we be the same age we died or younger we’d liked?
Hi Max,
Did you read the article? This is covered in the section titled, “In heaven, old people grow young and beautiful.”
I still think that a so-called spirit body (or to me, an ICE*) suggests some kind of mortality. Aside from the nervous system and muscles, every other gross systems and organs of the body are needed at all times to stay alive: take any away, and death happens sooner or later. Same goes for the supposedly human body of God. Like why would He need lungs if He is self-existent and immortal? Yeah, it corresponds to something, but it still reeks of being able to die (along with pain still being a thing in the NC afterlife).
*(ICE = Immaterial (yet) Corporeal Entity. I _still_ think spirit itself should be pure mind or essence that can manifest in a form, but is not that form itself. Even if that is not how it works in the New Church afterlife realm.)
PS: Another thing that seems to challenge immortality and a spirit being an ICE is that the physical body in this life is really a colony of cells: a multicellular organism, where cells come and go.
Hi K,
This is a reflection of the fact that the universal human of heaven is made up of a vast number of communities, and of individuals within each communities, which are the “organs” and “cells” of the body of heaven.
God, also, is not an undifferentiated mass, but has infinite “states.” In other words, God has every imaginable kind of good love and true thought right down to their infinite details, each one of which forms a “cell” in God’s body.
And once again, God and spirit are not subject to physical laws such as entropy and death. In God, nothing ever “goes” because God is infinite, eternal, and unchanging.
In angels and spirits, there is continual renewal of life, so waste products, and perhaps whole cells, might come and go as they do here, but it will be because those cells no longer correspond to something in the angel’s ruling love, or do not correspond as well as they could, and they are therefore replaced with something that is a more perfect and complete correspondence to their ruling love. This has to do with the fact that angels continue to learn and grow to eternity. It is not death in an organic sense, but the sloughing off of lesser expressions of their ruling love so that they can be replaced with greater expressions of their ruling love.
Hi K,
This is a category error. It is attributing material properties and laws to spiritual and divine things.
God and spirit are not subject to the laws of the physical universe, including the law of entropy. God does not deteriorate over time, because God is self-existent. Spirit does not deteriorate over time either, because spirit is intrinsically alive, not intrinsically dead as matter is.
Things do vanish and reappear in the spiritual world, but that’s because the don’t, then do, correspond to the current thoughts and feelings of the people in the vicinity. The people themselves are permanent because they are in an eternal relationship with God, and God continually supplies them with life and with everything they need to support life. This can never fail, as it can in the material world, because God is infinite and eternal, and the source of all life and power, and God never changes, so God never stops supplying life and all the necessities of life to angels and devils alike. It is simply not possible for them to die under these circumstances.
It is difficult, if not impossible, for us to conceive of God as infinitely human. Our concept of humanity, and of the human body, is finite, not infinite. But in general, God’s body parts and organs are about the divine functions of those organs. For example, God’s eyes are about God’s ability to see and know everything in the universe, which God “sees” with God’s eyes. God’s arms and hands are about God’s power to accomplish what God wants to do. And so on. We can and should picture God as a human being, with a human body and a human face. But God’s actual humanity also goes far beyond our rather materialistic concept and image of a person who has a body.
“Pure mind” isn’t anything, because it has no substance. For something to exist, it must have both substance and form. And the form of God, and of people, is a human form. And the human form is not just a shell. It is a complete, organic (in the living, functioning sense) system, complete with all its parts, right down to the cellular and subcellular level. If it didn’t have all those parts, it wouldn’t be human.
There simply isn’t any such thing as “pure mind,” because that is an entity without substance or form.
I think pure mind (or close to it) could be possible in any afterlife. The so-called spiritual realm is completely incorporeal relative to physical reality. And in the physical, there is at least speculation (maybe not just in SF) about information being stored in spacetime itself, like around a black hole.
Also, if so-called psychic powers are real, a mind without a body of flesh (or so-called spirit flesh) could perceive via ESP, and interact via telekinesis. And maybe even be able to manifest in avatars, with that radio receiver analogy of dualism actually working.
At the moment, I think I am leaning towards hoping there is no afterlife at all for me, but if there is one, hopefully I would be able to adapt rather than be imprisoned in an endless hell of an existence in one way or another.
Hi K,
Storing information requires organized structures. Information is not chaotic, but organized. Our data storage methods all require highly structured methods of storage, involving physical media with a highly organized method of recording information on it. Even when data is being transmitted, it’s not just an undifferentiated stream. It’s a highly structured series of waves or pulses whose specific pattern represents the specific information being transmitted. And at both ends, there are sophisticated physical and electronic devices that code and decode the information to and from machine-writable or human-readable form.
Further, “human-readable” means adapted to a specific human mind and body. And the human mind and body themselves are tremendously organized and highly detailed structures and organisms, without which we would not be human. Sure, you could be a ball of light in the spiritual world. But if that’s all you were, you wouldn’t be able to think, feel, see, hear, intend, do, or any of the other things that make you human. So yes, you could be a ball of pure energy. But you would be completely insensate and unable to do anything, because thinking, consciousness, feeling, acting, all require highly organized structures.
Unfortunately, science fiction has propagated the fiction that all these functions can take place without the structures and organisms in which they take place. That’s just not the case. If it were possible to be human without the incredibly complex physical and psychological structures that make us human, and make it possible for us to function as humans, evolution would have come up with them, because more efficient organisms will have a major advantage over less efficient organisms when it comes to survival of the fittest and reproduction. So we can generally assume that our current physical body and brain, not to mention their spiritual counterparts, are the minimum organized structures required to support all the functions of a human being.
Saying that the spiritual realm is “completely incorporeal relative to physical reality” is a red herring if the idea is that the spiritual realm is incorporeal, and is mere energy, or pure mind. True, it is not made of physical matter, and it is not subject to physical laws, such as the law of entropy. But it is not made of pure energy. It is made of spiritual substance, which is just as real and solid on the spiritual level as physical matter is on the physical level—in fact, more real and solid. And it is also just as intricately organized as physical matter—in fact, orders of magnitude more organized and structured than any physical entity, including the human body, can possibly be, because physical matter is relatively dense, crude, and low-resolution compared to spiritual substance.
Conscious thought, emotion, and so on are no more possible in the spiritual world without the organized structures in which they take place than they are in the material world without a brain and nervous system. And the brain and nervous system are the material version of their spiritual counterparts, which are the spiritual structures required for thought, feeling, sensation, action, and so on. These are the structures required for those mental and emotional functions to exist and function.
I’m sorry that this is all such a negative for you. But I will say once again that once you get to the spiritual world, you will realize that your materialistic conception of the spiritual body is completely wrong and inaccurate. Your spiritual body will not be a “prison,” and it certainly won’t be an “endless hell.” It will exquisitely reflect and respond to every least thought and feeling you have, so that it forms a seamless whole with your mind and heart. It will not be heavy, gross, and prone to death like your physical body, but light, responsive, and intrinsically alive.
But I’ll take that up in response to your next comment.
Avatars are inherently limited because the channels of communication with them, and their responsiveness to our thoughts, is crude compared to an actual body inhabited by a mind. Avatars in video games are very limited in what they can do in response to the player’s thoughts. It has to go through a very crude I/O system that can give only generalized commands. The avatar itself has to be programmed to do such things as run, jump, shoot, or whatever. These are mostly just pre-programmed routines that are triggered when a command is given by the player to, say, move from point A to point B. The actual running is not anything that the player’s mind is directing or controlling. It’s just something programmed into the video game.
That’s not how it works with either the physical body or the spiritual body. Every motion you body makes is directly controlled by your brain, such that if you see a big, jagged rock in front of you on the path you’re running on, your brain can rapidly instruct your leg to place your foot such that it will avoid stepping on or tripping over the rock. This seemingly simple thing is an incredibly complex process that involves instructing millions of individual muscle fibers throughout your entire body to contract in a specific way to redirect you leg and foot to a different place than they otherwise would have gone.
An avatar can’t do that. In video games, there is a certain amount of crude control, but the avatar will just plow along, going right through the rock, which in real life would involve pain, stumbling, and so on. Only a mind directly connected to the body by an incredibly complex system of neural pathways can have that sort of fine motor control over the body. By the time you created an avatar that could respond to you mind, it would simply be your body. It would require every neural pathway, every synapse, every muscle fiber, every bone, every ligament, and every other part of the entire nervous system and musculoskeletal system that your body has. Without that, your avatar would be a clumsy oaf, constantly tripping over things, crashing into things, and utterly incapable of doing anything that requires fine motor control, such as threading a needle.
There is a reason that our mind and body are structured the way they are. It’s not arbitrary. You can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to do it a different way.” The way it’s currently done, as I said, already has the minimum amount of organism and structure required to do these things. Otherwise a more efficient organism would have beaten it over evolutionary timescales.
That’s why we have the body we have. It’s what’s required to be a human being. And our spiritual body is what’s required to be a human being in the spiritual world.
PS: Even if the spiritual has no entropy like the physical, I still think that the presence of pain (more intense than in this life which is BS to me), the apparent need spirits have to eat, and spirits being KO’d by misquoted scriptures being written on paper (IIRC) suggest that with enough damage, a spirit body could die. And if I am to be imprisoned in a disgusting body of spirit flesh forever, I think I would welcome that.
Not meaning to sound suicidal here BTW. Living several decades to over a century in flesh is one thing, but living the equivalent of 3↑↑↑↑3 years in spirit flesh with ∞ to go is quite another.
Hi K,
Regardless of what you think, our spiritual body cannot die. That is simply not possible. Period.
The fact that you continue to think it would be possible simply demonstrates that you are still thinking of the spiritual body as being a physical body, not a spiritual one. Your continued use of the oxymoron “spirit flesh” is another indication of this. There is no such thing as “spirit flesh,” if your conception of that is physical flesh in the spiritual world. Yes, there is a spiritual body. But it is not made of “flesh,” which is physical. It is made of spiritual substance, which is entirely different than the physical matter that our physical body is made of. “Flesh and blood cannot inherit the kingdom of God” (1 Corinthians 15:50).
Being KO’d is not being killed. When a boxer knocks out his opponent, his opponent does not die. He just temporarily loses consciousness, after which he regains consciousness and gets up to fight another day. It’s the same in the spiritual world. That guy who got KO’d by the Bible in the spiritual world didn’t die. He just got knocked out for a while.
And no, the spiritual body cannot become so damaged that it dies. Yes, evil spirits can feel exquisite pain when they are being punished, or when they’re fighting each other. But none of them ever die as a result. In fact, one of the great frustrations of evil spirits in hell is that they can’t actually kill anyone, no matter how intensely they hate someone and want to kill him or her. If two evil spirits in hell get into a fight, no matter how much damage they do to each other, neither one of them will die. Once again, it is simply not possible for our spiritual body to die. They will have some injuries, but those injuries will heal, and they will get up to fight another day. Plus, angels moderate evil spirits in hell, preventing them from getting out of hand. It is not possible for evil spirits to strike a fatal blow. Not only the angel monitors, but the very laws of spiritual reality don’t allow it.
Meanwhile, angels in heaven don’t feel the kind of pain that evil spirits in hell do. Assuming you live a decent life here on earth, and don’t go for selfishness and greed as your primary motives, you will have nothing to worry about in the pain department. Any serious pain that an angel felt, if it’s possible at all, would be strictly voluntary, based on engaging in risky activities. There are plenty of guys who would be very mad, not to mention totally bored, if they had to spend eternity never feeling any pain, either because their attitude is, “No pain, no gain” or because risks would feel insipid if there weren’t a possibility of pain from failure. If you’re not one of those guys, then you have nothing to worry about, because pain is not an ordinary part of life in heaven, as it is in hell.
Bottom line: Your spiritual body is not “a disgusting body of spirit flesh.” If you don’t believe me, and want to continue to torture yourself with that idea, there’s not much I can do about it. You’ll just have to find out for yourself after you die.
I still think the human body can be gross, even if it is made of some kind of magical spiritual substance.
Like a very detailed 3D model of a Homo sapiens body in a VR simulation: it is not made of matter: just regions of polygons that react to virtual light sources. Not a single atom of physical matter. And yet, the model can still be gross, with all those internal organs and maybe ugly face modeled in polygons and texture maps.
Point is, no matter _what_ it is made of, if it looks just like the physical body, it can be gross just like the physical body, and can be thought of as flesh in a different medium, even if such is not flesh made of particles like in this reality.
Hi K,
You’re just going to have to experience it for yourself in the afterlife before you’ll realize that it’s not like the physical body.
If there is an afterlife and it is like Swedenborg claims it is, that is. When I pass away someday, I may just lose awareness entirely and that would be that. Or I could wake up in a different kind of afterlife (like in the Pure Land of Amida Buddha where Nirvana is the goal, for example).
Apparent mind-brain dependence and the failure of that radio receiver analogy to satisfactory explain the upstream problem I mentioned seem to point to Swedenborg being wrong (along with a whole bunch of other stuff like Earths in the Universe not matching with space exploration, the origin of disease, how color theory works, etc).
Hi K,
You’ll have to make up your own mind about all of these things. And then, in the afterlife, presuming your heart is good, you will learn the truth if it doesn’t match what you believed here on earth.
Meanwhile, the most important thing is to live a good life. Meaning, live a life of care and concern for your fellow human beings, not just for yourself. That is the path to heaven, and to ultimately both knowing and experiencing the truth.
At present I doubt I would want to live in the grossly over-human New Church afterlife.
Not just because of being stuck as limited human form, but also the lack of real pets there: their souls are just cast into oblivion while only humans get revived and metaphorically eaten and digested into a giant human of an afterlife.
There is also the possibility of being stuck in one level of Heaven or hell for eternity. I recall you say no one is stuck in the New Church afterlife, but I still see it that way.
And then there is all the loony stuff like not being able to look at the back of someone else’s head without magically disturbing their thinking, the sun (which is really a human body or from it) always being at an ugly 45 degree angle ahead (Heaven) or behind (hell), that limbus thing from the world of entropy and decay that one has to drag around, etc.
Hi K,
Well, in a sense, you don’t have any choice in the matter. You didn’t choose to come into existence in the first place, nor did you choose what your genetic make-up would be. You didn’t choose to get born on this particular planet, in the particular country and town you were born in, to the particular parents you had. You’re able to push your life this way or that way, but the parameters in which you are able to do that were pre-existing, and outside of your control. That’s just the reality of human life, no matter how much we might kick against it and throw temper tantrums about it.
The situation of the afterlife is similar. We didn’t set up the rules, nor did God consult us in setting them up. We don’t get to decide how heaven and hell are going to operate, and what the rules will be there. God already did that—and the bottom line is, we just have to live with it. And the sooner we accept that, and ideally recognize that God is smarter than we are, and did a better job of setting things up than we would, the better it will be for us. Accepting reality is a good thing.
Fortunately, the reality that God created is a good one. Most of the mess-ups are things we brought upon ourselves. For example, we humans have killed orders of magnitude more people than natural disasters have killed. In general, we are the masters of our planet, and we can do with it what we want, within the basic laws of the universe that God established from the beginning. If we want to mess it up, we can mess it up. If we want to make it better, we can make it better. God has put the garden of this world into our hands, to “dress it and to keep it,” to use the traditional language of Genesis.
In the spiritual world, that is even more the case. We didn’t establish the rules. But the rules make it so that we can surround ourselves with whatever kind of world and life and people we want to surround ourselves with. We can live exactly the kind of life we want to live, especially if we have accepted the reality that God is the creator and ruler of the universe, and that we are God’s children and subjects, willing to live according to the benevolent rules that a benevolent God has established for our happiness and well-being. If we accept that, then we will live in heaven, where each one of us can live the perfect life exactly as we want to live it.
If we choose hell, that’s on us. God told us not to do it. If we do it anyway, then it’s our own damn (literally) fault, not God’s fault. God still lets us live that way as much as possible. It’s just that choosing evil, which is the same as choosing hell, is self-limiting. There’s only so much God can do about that.
But presuming you choose goodness and heaven, not evil and hell, you won’t have to deal with those sorts of limitations, and the frustrations that go with them. You will have the unlimited ability to live exactly the kind of life you want to live. Specifically, you will not have any of the limitation of a physical body made of physical flesh and bone. You will have a spiritual body, which is not flesh, but spirit, and which is fully and instantly responsive to every least thought and feeling you have. Instead of getting in the way of doing what you want to do, which our physical body frequently does, it will instantly do exactly what you want to do, without the physical limitations of this world. For example, if you want to fly, you can fly. If you want to instantly travel to some distant place, you can do that. If you want to repel vast hordes of evil spirits who want a piece of you, you can do that.
Of course, our spiritual body is not totally without limits. But that’s because we are by nature finite beings, the very definition of which is that we have limits. If that were not the case, and we were totally unlimited, we would be God. And we’re not God. We’re created beings, whose fundamental distinction from God is that we are finite, whereas God is infinite.
So . . . If you want to be God, and have infinite knowledge and power, I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen. But if you’re willing to be a created human being, and follow the basic laws of love and understanding that God has set up, then you can fully live exactly the life you want to live, in heaven.
You’re not “stuck” there, because you are living exactly the life you want to live.
As an analogy, think of yourself swimming in water that is the perfect temperature. Not too cold, but not too hot either. Would your experience be improved if the water temperature were raised ten degrees? Would it be improved if the water temperature were lowered ten degrees?
It might feel like “freedom” to have the temperature be any old temperature. But is it really “freedom” to swim in boiling water? Is it really “freedom” to swim in icy water (assuming you’re not a polar bear)? Why would you want to swim in water that’s at an uncomfortable temperature? Wouldn’t you rather swim in water that is at the temperature that you enjoy?
It’s just the same with the different levels of heaven. Each person is living in exactly the level of heaven that he or she enjoys most. Moving to a lower heaven would be like making the water ten degrees colder than you like it. Moving to a higher heaven would be like making the water ten degrees hotter than you like it. Why would you do that? You’d just be making your life worse, not better.
This is getting long, so I’ll make one more reply to your comment, to take up a few of your other points more briefly.
Hi K,
About pets:
People commonly personify their pets, treating them as if they’re really humans who just happen to be in the body of a dog or a cat. But dogs and cats are not humans, and they don’t have human-level thoughts and feelings. Yes, they have “thoughts” and feelings, but they are animal thoughts and feelings, not human ones.
In particular, pets cannot think about God and spirit, as humans can. They can’t think about an afterlife. They live in the present moment, and they don’t think about the future, even if they may instinctually prepare for it.
Animals also are not capable of human unselfish and benevolent activity. All of their actions revolve around their own happiness and well-being. This is so even when, for example, a dog sacrifices itself to save its master’s life. The dog is not acting unselfishly. It’s acting according to its instincts as a pack animal. Its conception of self is a collective one rather than an individual one. It is of the pack rather than of itself as an individual dog. It will not save a creature that it does not think of as part of its pack. If it sees another pack, it will most likely fight against that pack, especially if that pack is seen as a threat to its pack.
Humans, on the other hand, can decide to “love their neighbor as themselves,” such that we will act benevolently even toward people who are not part of our “pack,” however we conceive of that. We can extend our benevolence to all people, to all animals, to all plants, to the entire planet and universe if we decide to broaden our minds and hearts to that level. We can even extend our benevolence to people who hate us and want to destroy us. Animals are entirely incapable of doing that. Their “benevolence” is limited to themselves and those they consider “their pack/people.”
Pets are not people. They don’t have human souls, capable of abstract and spiritual thought. Their minds do not reach up to the spiritual level, as human minds do—or at least can. That’s why their consciousness does not continue into the spiritual world when they die. They don’t have spiritual consciousness, so it can’t continue in the spiritual world.
The animals that exist in the spiritual world will be just like the animals here, including having that sort of limited, non-human consciousness. They are not sentient in the sense of being able to contemplate their own existence. They just live their existence, as it is, in the present moment. So really, the animals in the spiritual world are very much like the animals here, except that they’re made of spiritual substance rather than physical matter.
In other words, the pets in the spiritual world are real. They’re just as real as our pets here on earth. They’re not human beings, with human consciousness there any more than they are here, no matter how much pet-lovers may personify them. But they’re just as fluffy, quirky, and full of personality as pets are here on earth. Unless you think about it, you won’t be able to tell the differenc.
Okay, I guess that wasn’t “brief.” 😉
About not being able to look at the back of people’s heads in heaven: It’s best not to take that too literally. Swedenborg does talk about seeing the back of someone’s head in the spiritual world in a few instances, usually in connection with evil people and their heads. So it’s not literally impossible. But it’s not how people approach each other there. Directions in heaven don’t work the way directions on earth work, because there is no space in heaven. So we’ll have to get used to some different laws of reality there.
I’m not sure why a 45 degree angle of the sun is “ugly.” It doesn’t strike me as ugly. It’s just . . . the sun in the sky, lighting everything up. Why do you want to make everything in heaven “ugly”?
Besides, even this is not to be taken too literally. There seems to be great variation in how people see the sun in heaven, and even in whether they see it at all. Some angels seem to see the moon instead of the sun, yet they are still living in broad daylight. For some, the sun seems to be obscured behind clouds. Again, the spiritual world has different laws than the physical world does. There is no time and space there. Swedenborg was just doing the best he could to express and describe spiritual realities in physical words, which is not entirely possible. Once we get there, it will all make sense.
As far as the limbus, yes, that’s a head-scratcher. It’s not a key element of Swedenborg’s theology, but there it is, forcing us to do all sorts of mental gymnastics to try to figure out what in the world he’s talking about.
Then again, there are lots of things in this world that defy scientific explanation, but we just have to live with. Atheists and skeptics like to talk as if “science” has things all figured out. But real scientists, if they have any realism and humility at all, recognize that what we know and can explain is like a drop in the ocean compared to what we don’t know and can’t explain. Science is a continual exercise in encountering things we can’t explain, and trying to figure them out. That’s what makes it exciting.
Would it really be a good thing if we could instantly understand everything about God and spirit, and there were no more mysteries to tease out? I don’t think so!
Short reply: I disagree with those claims on pet mentality, and I also think that while I had no choice in how I emerged in this universe, that does not necessarily mean that any afterlife has limited choice as well. Anyway, thanks for the replies.
Hi K,
Perhaps you’re a pet owner who thinks your pet thinks the way you do. Sorry to break the news to you, but it doesn’t.
Hi K,
Our choices in the spiritual world are much less limited than they are here. But the bottom line is that we are not infinite beings, and we do not have infinite choices. We have limited choices. It’s just much less limited in the spiritual world than it is in the physical world.
I still have hope that one does not _have_ to be imprisoned in spirit flesh (I still see it that way anyway) if one winds up stuck (still see it that way) in the New Church afterlife.
o The New Church afterlife (NCA) is a manifestation realm, even relative to the physical if the physical is one as well. So how what is abstract in the physical manifests in the NCA could be altered, maybe.
o Swedenborg describes inhabitants of the NCA possibly looking different from a distance, like a boy appearing as a dove. And of course demons who are stuck in hell look completely different in one kind of light versus another (like a horrifying monster in one light and humanoid in another). So form does not seem to be too fixed.
o In the NCA, there is ESP (I think), telekinesis (like spirit bodies floating) or angels crumbling mountains infiltrated by evil spirits (IIRC), and telepathy (I think).
So it should not be too much of a stretch to imagine that a spirit in the NCA could be just pure mind but able to manifest as an avatar, use ESP to sense, telepathy to communicate, and telekinesis to manipulate, even if he is normally an ICE (Immaterial (yet) Corporeal Entity), in the NCA. Or at least be able to shapeshift to non-human form or be a ball of light with so-called psionic abilities to compensate for the lack of human attributes like limbs and sensory organs.
PS: This part:
[In the NCA, there is ESP (I think), telekinesis (like spirit bodies floating) or angels crumbling mountains infiltrated by evil spirits (IIRC), and telepathy (I think).]
should read:
[In the NCA, there is ESP (I think), telekinesis (like spirit bodies floating, or angels crumbling mountains infiltrated by evil spirits (IIRC)), and telepathy (I think).]
Hi K,
I don’t see any difference between the two versions.
Hi K,
Or . . . maybe these are things that our spiritual bodies can do, precisely because they are not “spirit flesh” . . .
Point was that there is hope I will not be stuck in human form if the NCA is true and I get stuck in it forever.
In the physical, the human body needs a very narrow range of air pressure, temperature, and mixture of gasses to not instantly die. And an even narrower range to be comfortable. There are way too many ways to shuffle off this mortal coil.
Hopefully, if I am stuck in a human body forever in any afterlife, it will not be so weak and limited like that. In fiction, Superman can go into space and it is rather hard to take him out, aside from kryptonite.
Hi K,
In the spiritual world, you literally cannot be taken out. It’s impossible. And whatever conditions are required for life, God continually provides them for everyone. There is no possibility of fatal conditions ever arising for anyone because God’s continual and eternal love will never allow it.
I guess the reason one cannot be taken out is because being taken out would be a manifestation of that which is both abstract in this life and logically impossible, like a manifestation of a square with 5 corners?
Also, hopefully any spirit body does not have a ridiculously narrow range of tolerances for comfort in any afterlife.
Hi K,
It’s not just a matter of abstractions and logic. We have, or are able to have, a conscious relationship with God. Having beings like us, who have that capability, is the whole reason God created the universe. God therefore keeps all such beings (humans) in existence eternally, since they are central to God’s plan for the universe. Anything temporary is unreal compared to things that are eternal. And since God is eternal, only beings who continue to exist to eternity can engage in the mutual relationships of love that is the reason God created the universe in the first place.
On a more pragmatic level, our environment is the spiritual world is not mostly independent of us as our environment here on earth is. Here, if we get dropped in Death Valley in the middle of summer, or at the North Pole in the middle of winter, the environment doesn’t even notice. It will just go ahead and roast us or freeze us, because it proceeds independently of our existence.
That is not the case in the spiritual world. In the spiritual world, everything around us instantly reflects everything within us. Nothing can even exist there if it doesn’t reflect something in the human community in the vicinity. There are also vast empty spaces that reflect things in God that are not yet, if ever, embodied in human beings. Now, since God is love, every environment is one that will sustain life, which is love. And since humans have a foundational desire to live, especially if their life is exactly the one they want, no environment is possible that would kill anyone. Everything around everyone will conspire to keep everyone there alive, because it reflects the human will to live.
I am aware that there are suicidal people here on earth, but that’s because their lives are not the ones they want. That is not the case in the spiritual world.
As far as the range of tolerance, we actually have a fairly wide range of tolerance here on earth in which we can live. Yes, we might need some clothing or some fans, but we humans can and do live in nearly every climate this earth throws at us, from sweltering tropics to freezing tundra. I presume it will be similar in the spiritual world.
Nah, people typically do not have a wide range of tolerance. Without technology or tools, that is. Without a coat or climate control, there is a relatively narrow range of comfortable temperature. Which is one of the many things of human biology I would not want to be stuck with for all eternity. With human biology, so little (maybe even only part of one planet) is survivable without technology or tools.
BTW, a scifi-like energy being would not have to deal with the BS of temperature, since they would be made of maybe spacetime flux alone, instead of matter (or the spirit equivalent) which interacts with the matter (or spiritual equivalent) of the environment (which results in temperature sensation and other issues).
Anyway, thanks for the replies and Happy Thanksgiving!
Hi K,
In the spiritual world, it’s all academic anyway, because there’s no external environment independent from internal state of mind as there is here on earth. In no instance would there be a mismatch between the environment you want to be in and the environment you are in. That is, assuming you chose heaven and not hell.
PS: An energy being with ESP (be it magical or unknown natural process) could sense temperature without suffering from it (no nerves), and could look at the brightest light (like right next to the accretion disk and relativistic jets of a quasar) with no blindness (no retina to fry).
So yeah, I still hope that in any afterlife, I can at least take a break from being in a body of some kind.
Here is a couple of reasons I believe that being stuck in a New Church afterlife spirit body is just like being stuck in the flesh in this life.
1: Swedenborg claimed to meet that guy who did not know he was a spirit until Swedenborg pointed out he was hovering. If being stuck in spirit flesh is very different from being stuck in physical flesh, that guy would have noticed the difference right away.
2: Swedenborg claimed some angels told some other newly arrived guys that “nothing is missing”, and even said they could step aside and see they even have genitals. “Nothing is missing” seems to imply all the same gross blood and guts that being a physical human involves.
Like I said before, being stuck in a bipedal mammalian Homo sapiens body (which appeared via natural selection and adaptation to mortality on the plains of Africa) for all eternity with no relief still does not sound that great to me, nor does it really seem fitting for immortality.
Hi K,
On your first point, the very fact that he was floating above the ground should be enough to demonstrate that the spiritual body and world are very different, and operate in a very different way, than the physical body and world. Here on earth that would be impossible without some sort of antigravity device that we are nowhere near developing. But in the spiritual world, it is so ordinary that the guy didn’t even notice. Also, don’t underestimate the human mind’s ability to normalize strange things.
On your second point, as always, I object to your pejorative characterization of human anatomy as “gross.” Obviously if you cut it up it’s gross, because that’s a gross violation of its integrity. “Blood and guts” are not meant to be scattered all over the place. But when everything is in its place, healthy, and functioning properly, it is the polar opposite of gross. It is the most sublime, exquisite, complex, finely calibrated, and frankly, most unbelievable thing that exists on this material plane, bar none.
Since we walk around with it all day every day, we take it for granted, not to mention commonly treating it badly and causing it to get sick and malfunction. As a result, we tend to downgrade and downplay our body, and focus on its flaws, many of which are self-inflicted. But in reality, every human being on the face of this earth is a walking miracle.
By brute force we have managed to surpass the human body with our inventions and machines in some specific areas, such as strength (e.g., with steel and hydraulics) and mathematical calculation speed (with computers). But as a complete package, we are eons away from producing anything that’s even in the same league as the human body in terms of overall functioning capacity and broad capability set in a small form factor, having low energy requirements. Everything that we have made is “gross” and crude by comparison. Even a theoretical crystalline entity has nothing on the immense, highly differentiated complexity and functionality of the human body. For one thing, crystals don’t move. They’re hard and static.
The human body has no parallel outside the animal kingdom. And even lower animals do not have the overall capability set that the human body does, which is one of the reasons humans are the dominant species on earth. Calling this exquisite organism “gross” is a gross injustice. If you don’t like your body, that certainly is unfortunate. But it doesn’t change the fact that it is a walking miracle.
The spiritual body is even more miraculous. Yes, it has all the parts that the physical body has, including blood, intestines, and genitals. It is the model and pattern for our physical body. But in the spiritual body, all the parts and organs are made of spiritual substance, not of physical matter. That makes them distinctly different from the physical body, which is made of physical matter.
Once again, I don’t think either you or I will be able to fully appreciate the difference until we get there. But that guy floating three feet above the ground without batting an eye is a tiny taste of it. Apparently, in our spiritual body, we can easily float and fly without the need for wings. That in itself should be a tip-off that our spiritual body is a whole different thing than our physical body.
Our spiritual body is also capable of seeing and hearing over immense distances with complete clarity, of projecting itself over immense distances instantaneously, of actually traveling rapidly from one part of the spiritual world to another, of routing entire armies of evil spirits with a single glance, and so on. If we had something just like our physical body in the spiritual world, none of this would be possible.
Clearly the spiritual body, while having the same form as the physical body, has an entirely different quality than the physical body. It is lighter, more responsive, more powerful, more capable, and more perfectly suited to our character than our physical body could ever be. And when it comes to the mental, conceptual, and emotional capabilities that dwell within it, it completely outclasses what is even possible as long as we are still living in our physical body here on earth.
All of this is precisely because it is made of spiritual substance and dwells in the spiritual world rather than being made of “gross” physical substance and dwelling in the physical world.
Merely being able to float, being lighter, having so-called psionic powers, or the body being more responsive (whatever that means) does not magically remove that it is still a body of gross spirit flesh. It would be like me in the physical being able to use so-called psionic powers to do stuff such as levitate and not feel gravity (as much), but I would still be in a gross flesh body.
Really, what would make the New Church afterlife much, much better is the ability to go pure energy (but still able to sense and manipulate via so-called psionic power), or maybe at least the ability to shapeshift.
Hi K,
We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this one. And you’ll have to find out for yourself once you get there.
Another thing we may have to agree to disagree on is that I see the NCA (at least as you say Swedenborg describes it) as a prison, even if people are content with it. In other words, I kinda agree with Hitchens with that celestial North Korea analogy, even if God is not the tyrant of traditional Christianity.
– No advancement (not even the opportunity for advancement) despite somehow still being able to learn stuff and develop (?), no leaving hell forever if one goes there (or else one is tormented by the environment if one leaves).
– No going to a different level of heaven without special preparation from the warden (or else one is tormented).
– Maybe not even being able to leave the home community easily. I can leave where I live in the physical and not get magical anxiety or torment, but seems the denizens of the afterlife do not have that freedom, even if they are content being where they are.
– No changing of the ruling love, which means at least some human BS (like the endless ways one can be inappropriate or sexist or racist or stealing via copying even when one does not intend so) has to endure for all eternity.
– And of course, being imprisoned in spirit flesh forever, in a realm with no objective reality that is not a reflection of thought (despite somehow being more real than the physical).
(I still see it this way despite your insistence otherwise.)
Like I said before, I hope that if the NCA is real and is as you describe Swedenborg describing it, then I hope it is also a temporary stop before advancing onward, or oblivion.
Hi K,
This is mostly wrong, and even the parts that aren’t wrong are bent the wrong way. I could reply point-by-point, but by now we’re just going round and round in circles, and not getting anywhere.
Once you get there, you’ll find out that all your fears were for nothing. You’ll be freed from all the awfulness of this life, and you’ll be living the best life you can possibly imagine. There is no warden. It will be a life in which you are completely and utterly free to do exactly what love the most, with the person or people you are closest to and who care most about you—assuming that you want some companionship.
Meanwhile, I encourage you to make the best use of this life. Build yourself into a good person, even if you think and hope you’ll end in oblivion. That’s the truest form of humanity: doing what is good and right even when you believe there’s absolutely nothing in it for you.
I think at this point, the only way the New Church afterlife (NCA) could be acceptable to me is a modified version of it: the opportunity for advancement from one level of heaven to another and evolving beyond hell, and no being stuck in human form. Just those 2 things alone would be an immense relief and improvement over the NCA as you say Swedenborg says it is.
(no offense intended)
Hi K,
Well . . . we don’t get to choose how God designs reality, physical or spiritual. “Acceptable to you” or not, the afterlife is going to be what God designed it to be, and you’re going to live in it.
The good news is that God is pure love, and has designed the afterlife to give us as much satisfaction, happiness, and joy as we can possibly handle. All you have to do is accept that God is love, and the basis for all your fears about the afterlife will crumble away. See:
God is Love . . . And That Makes All the Difference in the World
I’m aware I likely cannot change the workings of any afterlife, but hopefully if there is an afterlife, it is not a crap afterlife. Especially if one must endure it for all eternity. If it turns out there is no afterlife after all, then there is literally nothing to worry about then.
PS: I think any god who keeps one trapped in a miserable afterlife (directly or by design) is like the Gnostic demiurge, or a wrathful God of traditional Christianity.
Hi K,
That’s just one of many reasons why I don’t believe in either of those gods.