Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named Maria:

Ever since I encountered Swedenborg, I’ve struggled with the mechanics of the afterlife: it sounds both beautiful and terrible. I’ve been told we forget much of our life on Earth and can’t remember the people we’ve loved. When I’ve expressed disturbance at the idea, the answer tends to be “you won’t care, you’ll find better people and will feel like you always had them, etc.” I’m sick to tears of the “it’s like growing apart from dear friends as you mature” simile, because it isn’t the same thing at all.

Say we’ve been open and genuine and generally dedicated to being who we are truly in life. Say we’ve built real and healthy relationships, loving and warm. Will it still be “bye, I’m off on my own way and I’ll forget you!” after passing the stage of the spirit world? Even if our loves are different, will we simply never see or know these people again?

With all due respect to my fellow Swedenborgians, some of them have not quite gotten the message about what the afterlife is really like. Many of them are still affected by the old, outdated view of heaven as a totally alien world where we have some sort of wispy, ethereal existence that is completely different from anything we’ve ever experienced here on earth.

But that’s not how Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772) describes the afterlife at all. Instead, he describes it as a seamless continuation of our life here on earth. We take with us everything that makes us the unique person we are. And we live a life very much like the one we had lived here on earth, only better (assuming we have chosen heaven over hell).

Old friends

Although Herbert Hoover’s ideal of “rugged individualism” has taken on almost mythic meaning in much of today’s society, the reality is that we humans are not islands unto ourselves. We are community beings. Our loves, ideals, beliefs, identity, and character have no meaning or reality on their own, but only in the context of our complex web of relationships with family, friends, co-workers, and other people in our community.

This means that we take with us into the afterlife not only our individual character, but also the many and varied relationships in which that character exists and is formed. So it should be no surprise that Swedenborg describes heaven as an intensely human community. And the relationships we leave behind are not the ones we love, but the ones that don’t feed our soul, or that turn out not to be what we thought they were.

Let’s take a closer look. Along the way we’ll explode a few common Swedenborgian myths about the afterlife.

For more on our friends in the afterlife, please click here to read on.