So, what’s through this door? Where do we go? Is it nothing? Do we just wink out, and never
even remember that we ever existed? Or is it like the “near-death” experiences? Where we see the tunnel and the light, but
what is that tunnel, and where does it go? And is it different when you’re never coming
back? What can we expect on the other side? What world do we step into? Is there still love on the other side? Will we still be ourselves? Will we still have free will? Will we relive scenes from our past? And then where does it go from there? Right now, we’re going to look at 5 things
that you, and I, and everyone are going to find waiting for us, and just how what we
choose, think and feel here carries over. A common experience in near-death experience
stories is a welcome that’s full of unconditional love and joy. This greeting can come from people’s friends
and relatives who have already died, or sometimes from angels and from God. This is from an NDE story by Michelle Miller:
"I saw lots of people I knew, some of whom I've since met, and a lot of whom I knew were
'related' but that wasn't what mattered. . . . I have never since been involved in
such a joyful welcome, being loved, totally loved." And from Barbara Springer: “"I then became
aware of a bright heavenly being. I felt as if I was in the presence of God. . . . [W]hen he embraced me, I could feel
the most powerful love. . . . It was absolute, total, real, great,
engulfing love. . . . I felt as if I had come home.” As part of his extensive experiences learning
about the afterlife, Emanuel Swedenborg was allowed to experience what the death process
is like, and he seems to affirm this beautiful welcome. He described this very loving and very protected
transition that is given to absolutely everybody when they first cross over, and we’re going
to take you through that process right now. During the actual death process, as you’re
leaving your physical body, you will be chaperoned by angels from the highest heaven, who are
conduits for God’s divine love for you. Swedenborg was given a first-hand experience
of what physical death is like, and this is what he wrote:
In addition to the heavenly angels occupying the region of my heart, there were two angels
sitting at my head. I perceived that this is so for everyone. Swedenborg described this very close connection
that will be happening between you and these highest angels during physical death. He said:
All the while I remained at one with the heavenly angels, held in a fairly close embrace in
the area around my heart, as I perceived and also felt in my pulse. . . . They completely discounted all my misconceptions
and falsities. It was not that they ridiculed them; they
appeared not to care about them at all. These angels stay with you, and having them
around actually establishes a powerful protection against evil spirits, and also against any
negativity inside of you. Whenever heavenly angels are present, the
scent of a dead body comes across as sweet. If evil spirits smell it, they cannot come
near. . . The angels take the greatest care at this
point to prevent any idea from rising out of us unless it is a fairly gentle, loving
one. These angels will help you detach from physical
existence and ease into spiritual existence by staying connected with the best and deepest
stuff in your heart. The process is gentle. During this very first phase, it seems like
you’ll actually be in a more of a dream-like state, doing more feeling than looking around
and observing things. But when you’re ready, they’ll wake up
your mind. A different set of angels that Swedenborg
called spiritual angels, will come and help you with this next stage. But everything that happens in the afterlife
is symbolic, and Swedenborg experienced this awakening in a very tangible way. When heavenly angels are with people who have
been awakened, they do not leave them, because they love everyone. But some spirits are simply unable to be in
the company of heavenly angels very long, and want them to leave. When this happens, angels from the Lord’s
spiritual kingdom arrive through whom we are granted the use of light, since before this
we could not see anything but could only think. I was also shown how this is done. It seemed as though the angels rolled back
a covering from my left eye toward the center of my nose, so that my eye was opened and
able to see. To the spirit it seems as though this were
really happening, but it is only apparently so. As this covering seemed to be rolled back,
I could see a kind of clear but dim light, like the light we see through our eyelids
when we are first waking up. It seemed to me as thought this clear, dim
light had a heavenly color to it, but I was later told that this varies. After that, it felt as though something were
being rolled gently off my face, and once this was done, I had access to spiritual thought. This rolling something off the face is an
appearance, for it represents the fact that we are moving from natural thinking to spiritual
thinking. Angels take the greatest care to shield the
awakening person from any concept that does not taste of love. Then they tell the individual that he or she
is a spirit. For what it’s worth, did you notice that
line in the beginning? That account, in case you’re wondering,
is where this channel got its name. Once your spiritual sight and your intellectual
thinking become clear, you will be completely welcomed by these spiritual angels. Swedenborg learned that our character flaws
and issues don’t all just disappear after death. They come with us. But in this first stage of welcome into the
afterlife, God holds that stuff in check. This allows us to be in the company of angels,
and to be shown all the beauty of the afterlife. Swedenborg wrote that newcomers are shown
“scenes of paradise that surpass anything they ever could have imagined.” We’ll get to see these beautiful landscapes,
way past even the cool stuff we see here, though they will tell us that it’s nothing
compared to the true happiness of heaven. You’ll be allowed to experience profound
states of joy, peace and innocence, just to give a taste of what’s possible in heaven. All this has a distinct purpose. It’s to show you what kind of a life God
wants to give us. To be sort of a north star or a motivator
for the spiritual work that we’re going to be doing soon. But another aspect of this first welcoming
stage is joyful reunions. So think about it. Everyone in the afterlife that you have loved
and missed will come from wherever they’ve been living in the spiritual world to greet
you. Swedenborg writes:
I have heard many people who had just come from the world overjoyed to see their friends
again, and their friends overjoyed that they had arrived. If you think about that joy, and the importance
of that meeting, of course, these reunions are going to be incredible, and we talk about
some examples Swedenborg witnessed in our show “Reunions in the Afterlife”. And if you want even more detail about that
first stage with the heavenly angels, check out our episode “How Angels Take Care of
Us When We Die.” So there’s a guarantee that all of us will
be greeted with unconditional love when we cross over, and now Karin is going to tell
us about the next stage, when you’ll have the opportunity to learn about yourself in
a deeper way than ever before. At death, you’re going to leave your physical
body and its limitations behind. But you might be surprised to find that you
still have a body made of spiritual substance, and also sensations that are actually more
sharp and exquisite than they had been on earth. Swedenborg writes:
Almost all the people who arrive from this world are as astonished as they can be to
find that they are alive and that they are just as human as ever, that they are seeing
and hearing and talking, that their bodies are still endowed with the sense of touch,
and that nothing at all has changed. How will you still have a body after shedding
your physical body? Swedenborg learned that in order to exist
as an individual, you have to have a body to operate in. When you shed the physical body, you’ll
become conscious in a spiritual body that has actually been with you all along. At first, your spiritual body will look very
much like your earthly body, except without illness or disabilities. When we enter the spiritual world or our life
after death, we are in a body as we were in this world. There seems to be no difference, since we
do not feel or see any difference. This body is spiritual, though, so it has
been separated or purified from earthly matter. Further, when anything spiritual touches or
sees something spiritual, it is just like something natural touching and seeing something
natural. So when we have become a spirit, we have no
sense that we are not in the body we inhabited in the world. It seems that we even have layers of the spiritual
body, and for more about that, see our episode “Your Spiritual Body.” But in the spiritual world, bodies are only
the outer manifestation of our minds, which is who we really are. We’ve all heard the saying “you can’t
take it with you,” meaning, you can’t take any physical possessions into the afterlife. But you have inner possessions, too, that
you’ve collected during your life on earth — thoughts, feelings, interests, habits,
beliefs, skills, relationship ties, and memories. And it’s these inner possessions that Swedenborg
is talking about here. As "spirit-people," . . . we want, wish, crave,
think, ponder, are moved, love, and intend the way we used to. Studious types still read and write as before. In a word, when we move from the one life
into the other, or from the one world into the other, it is like moving from one [physical]
place to another; and we take with us everything we owned as persons to the point that it would
be unfair to say that we have lost anything of our own after death, which is only a death
of the earthly body. We even take with us our natural memory, since
we retain everything we have heard, seen, read, learned, or thought in the world from
earliest infancy to the very end of life. An important thing Swedenborg learned is that
we have an outer level of our mind, which we’re mostly operating in on earth, but
also an inner level. Since your spiritual body is a manifestation
of your mind, that body will reflect your state of mind. When first arriving in the afterlife, you’ll
be in a similar state of mind as you were on earth, thinking from your outer mind. So at first, your thought patterns and habits
and appearance will be very similar to the way they were on earth. But soon, your deeper feelings and beliefs
will start to emerge. And because your spiritual body reflects your
state of mind, your appearance will gradually change to reflect who you are inside. When we first enter the world of spirits...
our spirit has a similar face and tone of voice as it did in the world. This is because at that point we are in the
state of our external concerns, with our deeper concerns not yet uncovered. This is our initial state after decease. Later, though, our face changes and becomes
quite different. It comes to look like the ruling affection
in which the deeper reaches of our minds were engaged in the world, the kind of affection
characteristic of the spirit within our body, because the face of our spirit is very different
from the face of our body. One universal change is that elderly people
grow younger in appearance. But in addition to that, your spiritual face
and body will change to reflect what’s truly going on in your deeper mind and heart. It will be a powerful way to learn about who
you are beyond your physical heredity and the clutter of earthly concerns. And this process will bring your life and
identity into better focus and clarity, because your spiritual face and body will do away
with any pretense, helping you to better understand yourself and what you want and need. Swedenborg observed these facial changes in
the afterlife, and he wrote about it in “Heaven and Hell”:
People who were engaged in good affections had lovely faces, while people who were engaged
in evil affections had ugly ones. Seen in its own right, our spirit is nothing
but our affections, whose outward form is our face. . . . The reason our faces change is that
in the other life no one is allowed to pretend to affections they do not really have, so
we cannot put on a face that is contrary to the love we are engaged in. We are all refined down to a state in which
we say what we think and manifest in expression and act what we intend. This is why our faces all become forms and
images of our affections. Now some have wondered if we have to be nervous
about our true selves showing in our faces. But I think it will be more of a relief than
anything else. How much stress in earthly life comes from
putting on appearances of one kind or another? Trying to appear as someone that we’re not? This earliest stage after death is not about
perfection, but about finally understanding things about yourself that were fuzzy and
confusing on earth. This is going to help you move forward. On earth it’s hard to tell what is really
“you” and what is just outer influences and circumstances. In the afterlife, just looking in a mirror
could tell you more about your true self than you’ve ever understood before. And remember, you’ll be showered with all
this unconditional love, so whatever you see can be supported by that love. Now Chelsea’s going to talk about the freedom
that we have in the afterlife. God wants to bring us all into the deepest
bliss of the highest heavens, but part of God’s love for us is a deep and abiding
respect for our freedom. We have autonomy in leading our own life and
this continues into the afterlife. After you first experience that unconditionally
loving welcome, you’ll be free to go wherever you truly want to go. And where you’ll want to go has everything
to do with what you enjoy, what your interests are, and the kinds of things you’ve prioritized
during life on earth. In the conditions of the spiritual world,
thoughts and feelings have substance. Swedenborg writes how they actually have vibration
or some kind of pulsation--they can expand and contract. Although I’m sure it’s not exactly equivalent
to our earthly understanding of “frequency”, that term can help us wrap our minds around
this. Spiritual “frequencies” so-to-speak are
dictated by levels of love and wisdom. Lower-ego thoughts and feelings resonate at
a lower, denser spiritual frequency. More inward and altruistic thoughts and feelings
resonate at a higher, more expansive frequency. On earth, I’m sure you’ve had the experience
of feeling uncomfortable around someone, feeling a kind of “vibe” that you don’t resonate
with. When we’re in the afterlife, this feeling
is much more overt. You will only feel comfortable in the company
of people whose thoughts and feelings are in sync with the spiritual frequency of your
own, and that feeling will be so strong that you really won’t be able to stay around
people you don’t resonate with for any prolonged amount of time. For some more food for thought in this vein,
we talk about “spiritual harmony” in our show The Spiritual Force Behind Music, and
for more about thoughts having something akin to frequency, see our show, “Spirals of
the Spirit”. So most newcomers in the afterlife haven’t
yet evolved to the level of love and wisdom that angels live in. Once the initial heavenly welcome is over,
you’ll gradually be let back into the state of mind that is most authentic for your current
spiritual state. And so also you’ll be shifting into the
vibration of those thoughts and feelings. This has a direct influence on the people
you’re drawn to as well. For instance, those heavenly angels who first
help you cross over don’t leave because they they just got the job done and filled
their time quota--no, their desire is to stay with you and support you, but as your state
shifts you may find yourself wanting distance from them, because their aura is starting
to feel uncomfortable to you. You are the one that makes the choice. Swedenborg writes about this:
When heavenly angels are present with the revived, they do not leave them; they love
each one. But if our soul is such that we can no longer
enjoy the company of heavenly angels, we long to get away from them. Your mental interests play a part, too, in
what you choose to explore at this point. Those spiritual angels showing you the glories
of heaven also won’t want to leave you. But they can only share with you what you
have an interest in, and if you don’t yet feel ready or open to taking in deep knowledge
about heaven, you’ll soon feel a pull to move on. Again, your spirit has self-agency in the
process. When we are eager to part with the angels,
they do not leave us but we disconnect from them. Angels love everyone and want nothing more
than to be helpful to us, teach us, and take us up into heaven. When you freely leave the angels’ company,
you’ll be welcomed by good spirits, that is, good people in the afterlife who aren’t
in heaven yet, because they’re still learning and preparing too. And once again, you’ll feel out whether
you’re comfortable with this group — whether you resonate with them or not. Someone interested in goodness will resonate
with a group of good spirits, and will stay with them. Someone more interested in selfish and materialistic
pursuits won’t feel comfortable, and they will leave them. Swedenborg writes how the process repeats
continuously until we come into contact with the type of people whose life in the world
was in total agreement with ours. Among them we seem to find our own life. Then, surprising to say, we live the same
kind of life with them as we had lived in the body. As we sink back into that life, we experience
a new beginning. This new beginning will be your starting place
in the afterlife after this whole journey. You will have come to the place that your
mind and heart had developed to on earth, and you continue from there, in ways that
we’ll talk about soon. But if we’re the ones calling the shots,
and we can go anywhere we want, wouldn’t the obvious choice be heaven? Yeah! And no one is restricted from heaven. But the atmosphere of heaven is one of selfless
love for God and for the neighbor, and so to stay in heaven, our hearts and minds have
to resonate with the love that’s literally in the air there. So as you can guess, this leads to some interesting
situations, and Swedenborg writes about it. Many people who arrive in the other life from
the Christian world bring with them a faith that they are going to be saved out of straight
mercy, because they plead for it. When they are examined, though, it turns out
that they have believed that getting into heaven was simply a matter of being let in,
and that people who had been admitted were in heavenly joy. They have had no notion of what heaven is
or what heavenly joy is. So they are told that the Lord does not deny
heaven to anyone. They can be let in if they wish and even stay
there. Swedenborg continues this passage with a story
of what happened when people who were not prepared took them up on the offer. They went to walk in... But even at the very threshold of heaven,
as soon as they came into contact with heaven’s heat and light, which represents heavenly
love and truth, the people started to feel intense pain and ran away from it. Their bodies weren’t acclimated to the atmosphere
of heaven, and they couldn’t handle it. Experiential learning like this is very effective,
and that clearly was a powerful lesson in spiritual conditions for these people! This doesn’t mean that they wouldn’t eventually
enter heaven, but it gave them the message that they needed more preparation and spiritual
development to get ready. Another form of experiential learning about
heaven involves people being allowed to try out a simulation of what they think heaven
is like. Swedenborg witnessed people being allowed
to try out vivid simulations of how they imagined heaven to be. It was a fully immersive experience for them. He saw perpetual worship rituals, perpetual
feasting, perpetual socializing, and more. People had no time limits on these heaven
fantasies, but, spoiler alert, it wasn’t long before they were all consumed with boredom
or actual distress rather than heavenly joy. Ultimately, they all learned for themselves
that heavenly joy comes from living an active life of loving and serving God and the neighbor,
and that it’s through using skills for activities like that that brings fulfillment and joy. So if you’ve strongly latched onto a false
view of heaven, you won’t just be told “you’re wrong”. That doesn’t work. You’ll be allowed to experience a manifestation
of that concept, so you can come to an understanding in your own time about it. We describe six different “imaginary heavens”
that Swedenborg witnessed in our show “How to Create Heaven On Earth”. So it’s really a self-led process of inner
discovery with the willing support of angels and spirits to help us. Something else that helps us discern the path
we want to take is “the life review.” Jonathan is going to tell us about that. Many near-death experience stories feature
a life review, and here are a couple of summaries that define what that is:
The Being of Light presents the dying with a panoramic review of everything they have
ever done. That is, they relive every act they have ever
done to other people and come away feeling that love is the most important thing in life. A life review, seeing and re-experiencing
major and trivial events of one's life, sometimes from the perspective of the other people involved,
and coming to some conclusion about the adequacy of that life and what changes are needed. Swedenborg affirms that an honest look at
your life will be crucial in order to allow you to progress toward heaven. This is from “Secrets of Heaven”:
We will be led gradually toward heaven by a knowledge of truth and goodness and an acknowledgment
of our own nature. Unless we acknowledge who we are and learn
what is true and good, we can never be led there. The life review is not for the sake of accusing
and shaming. Far from it. It will be to help you understand which things
about your life have been aligned with God’s love and which haven’t. What’s important to God may be very different
than you have been taught or have thought! Here’s a description from the IANDS website
of someone watching their life review in the presence of God:
I actually could feel the joy each person felt when I touched their life in a loving
way. I was getting “caught” doing something
right for once in my life. . . . Reviewing my random acts of kindness
gave me the most joy because I was able to feel the difference I made in someone’s
life that I hadn’t realized at the time . . . and I didn’t even know them. Little acts of kindness mean so much to God. Also, I had to see and feel all the hurtful
things I had done (even the hurtful things I didn’t know I did). I had to feel the persons’ hurt I caused. But . . . God was not judging me. I was looking at my actions . . . with God
at my side loving me while I was judging myself . . . and believe me, no one can judge me
any harsher than I already judge myself. . . . He was asking me, “What different
choices could you have made? What are you learning from this?” . . . This was clearly not the punishing God
I had been taught to believe in. The hardest part of this was realizing He
had already forgiven me . . . I was having a hard time forgiving myself. He showed me how I couldn’t let His love
in without, first, forgiving myself. Punishing myself didn’t make me better in
His eyes, accepting His love was what He wanted from me. Once I was able to accept that God only loved,
it was easier for me to openly and honestly look at my life. Acknowledgment is the first step toward change,
and this life review will help you see what needs changing. It will allow you to sort out what kinds of
habits and attitudes you want to keep, and what you need to reject in order to progress
toward heavenly love. There’s imagery in the Bible that is referring
to this life review. And I saw the dead, great and small, standing
before the throne, and books were opened. Another book was opened, which is the book
of life. The dead were judged according to what they
had done as recorded in the books. In the life review story we just read, the
person perceived that the judgment was coming from herself rather than from God. The truth of God shone a light on her life
story, allowing her to clearly see what was heavenly and what wasn’t. In that quote from Revelation, “the book
of life” represents that heavenly mindset, or what it takes to live in heaven. The individual books represent people’s
individual life stories, which have to be compared against the Book of Life to see what
it takes to live in heaven. This “judgment” scene in the book of Revelation
is not about God pointing fingers and throwing offenders into hell. It’s about God opening up the true story
of your life on earth, the story you yourself have written through your own choices, to
help you have a clearer understanding about how to move forward. Then you’ll have the freedom to accept that
truth and learn how to progress toward heaven, or reject that truth and run toward hell. It seems that the life review can happen in
different ways, actually. In NDE stories it often sounds like a movie
being projected in front of the person. And here’s a description from Swedenborg
in which it actually manifests in books. I saw some books with writing in them like
earthly writing, and was told that they had come from the memories of the people who had
written them, that not a single word was missing that had been in the book they had written
in the world. I was also told that all the least details
could be retrieved. . . even things the person had forgotten in
the world. The reason for this was explained as well;
namely, that we have an outer and an inner memory. . . . The details of what we have thought,
intended, said, and done, even what we have heard and seen, are inscribed on our inner
or spiritual memory. There is no way to erase anything there, since
everything is written at once on our spirit itself and on the parts of our [spiritual]
body. . . . This means that our spirit is formed
in accord with what we have thought and what we have done intentionally. There was a remarkable statement in that passage
about your life story actually being written onto your spiritual body, and Swedenborg describes
this in regard to the angels that will help you through this examination of your life. In “Heaven and Hell” we read:
When we are being faced with our deeds after death, angels who have been given the task
of examining look searchingly into the face and continue their examination through the
whole body, beginning with the fingers first of one hand and then of the other and continuing
through the whole. . . . The things that are inscribed on our
memory from our intention and consequent thought are inscribed not only on the brain but also
on the whole person, where they take form in a pattern that follows the pattern of the
parts of the body. By looking closely at you in this way, much
like a doctor examining the state of your health, angels will help you to become more
aware of the true state of your mind and heart, and of the inner patterns you have established. Your state of spiritual health is not a matter
of adding up how many positive deeds and how many negative deeds you did, because we all
have a mixture of those in our life story. Rather, it’s a question of what your overall,
deeper goals and priorities were during the span of your earthly life. Was it always all about serving yourself? Or did you also consider the welfare of others? Everyone has to review the life they led on
earth. But there are actually no punishments doled
out for those earthly actions. Actions we regret will easily fall away. Actions we continue to justify and enjoy are
what will cause the problems. This is from “Heaven and Hell”:
In the afterlife every evil brings its own punishment with it. . . . Still, no one suffers any punishment
for evil things done in the world, only for current evil deeds [done in the afterlife]. It boils down to the same thing, though . . . because
after death we all return to our life, which means that we are involved in the same kinds
of evil. . . . Good spirits are never punished, though,
even though they have done bad things in the world. This is because their evils do not come back. I have also been granted a knowledge that
their evils are of a different kind or nature. They do not stem from any deliberate resistance
to what is true, and they are not from any evil heart except the one they acquired by
heredity from their parents [thanks, Mom and Dad] which blind pleasure drove them into
when they were involved in outward concerns separated from inner ones. If you haven’t built your entire life on
self-centeredness, if you have a conscience and make any kind of effort to consider the
welfare of others and to resist lower-ego impulses, then these outer negative tendencies
are not going to stick in the afterlife. They will either fall immediately away once
you clearly see them, or you’ll be shown how to purge them. Just as the physical body can be detoxed,
so the mind and the spiritual body can be detoxed. This clarity from the life review is necessary. Think of those maps in a shopping mall. You may know where you want to go, but the
map can’t help without another crucial bit of information. You have to know where you are to figure out
how to get to the destination. And you can’t get to your destination unless
you’re willing to then take the steps. When you use the life review to recognize
and acknowledge what needs changing, you’ll open your heart to receive the willingness
and the understanding to go toward the destination of heaven. And if so, what’s next? We’ll go back to Curtis to find out. So it seems like a pretty good offer--God
and heaven are inviting you to your highest potential. There’s a chance to be immersed in heaven,
which is both a place to live and a state of mind. You get to have your life clearly evaluated,
you’ll be offered this new beginning. The only thing that can stop the help is our
own refusal of it. If we love and justify doing harmful stuff
— if that’s how we get our happiness — naturally we’re also going to refuse any help to get
out of that behavior and learn a better way of life. That’s choosing self-gratification over
concern for others, which is the same thing as refusing heaven. People devoted to that are going to seek places
that resonate with those feelings, and that’s how they end up on a path toward hell — despite
God trying to get us to choose the ly path. We’ll look at the results of that choice
in our upcoming episode “What Is Hell Really Like?”. But once you’ve had your eyes and heart
opened to what life and heaven can be, and if you want to go there, God’s divine love
and all of heaven are ready to offer every service we might need. You’ll be brought to learning centers and
taught about spiritual truth and a heavenly way of life. You’ll have teachers who can meet you where
you are, and teach you in these vibrant, experiential ways — even more exciting than, you know,
a YouTube video like this one. We talked about some spiritual-world wisdom
centers that Swedenborg saw in our show “Where Stories Are Kept in Heaven”. And in our shows called “The World of Spirits”
and “Spiritual Detoxing” we talk about ways that people in the afterlife can be purged
of the ideas and negativity that get in the way of spiritual progress. This is gradually — all this — going to
lighten your load, sharpen your mind, and free your heart from negative burdens we’ve
picked up in this life. Remembering that set of spiritual conditions
that Chelsea talked about, it’s all for the sake of raising your spiritual position,
allowing you to develop a mind and heart that are in tune with heavenly love and wisdom,
and can literally breathe in the atmosphere of heaven. When people go from the world to the other
life (which happens right after death), they take along worldly and earthly qualities incompatible
with the spiritual and heavenly qualities of angels. Since you can’t rise up to heaven in that
condition, this passage goes on to explain what needs to happen. Those who are to go up to heaven are first
prepared, by being stripped of the worldly and earthly
qualities they brought with them. If they were taken up to heaven any sooner,
they could never remain in the communities there, because their wisdom and love are not
refined enough for the purity in which angels live. Once they have been prepared, though, the
Lord takes them up and introduces them into heaven, where they join those angelic communities
in which the true ideas and good impulses of faith and love harmonize with their own. So there you go! Now you know what will happens immediately
after you die. So everbody’s journey into the afterlife
of course in going to be unique to them, but these have been general things that we can
all expect, according to what Swedenborg saw. So you might be asking, why go to the trouble
of learning about something that’s hopefully pretty far away? Well, taking care of yourself involves living
in the present, but , it’s about building a foundation for a healthy future. This is all over life. It’s true of finances, careers, physical
health, and relationships. It’s also true of our spiritual life, which
is going to be all that our life is after we finish these few short decades on earth. So knowing what to expect after death can
help us use our present life in ways that are also going to support our wellbeing in
the future. So, for example, I can look to be good to
myself and use earthly life in a way that’s going to enhance the quality of life after
death and help me get the most out of these first stages of the afterlife when I do get
here. Now all of this stuff we’ve looked at today
will take place in a sort of foyer to the afterlife, the “World of Spirits”. But next time, we’re going to start looking
at the big divisions people have called “Heaven” and “Hell.” Are they really what we think? And, which one will you go to? Well, whichever one you want. That’s next time on Swedenborg and Life. We want the ideas and insights we cover to
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