Our Life After Death E-Book

Emanuel Swedenborg

• Herausgeber: Ale.Mar.
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Beschreibung

“The world of spirits is neither heaven nor hell but a place or a state of being between the two. It is where we first arrive after death. From there in due course we are either raised into heaven or thrown into hell, depending on how we have lived in this world. It became clear to me that it is a halfway place when I saw that the hells were underneath it and the heavens above it, and that it is a halfway state of being when I learned that as long as we are in it, we are not yet in either heaven or hell. In the following pages, where I say “spirits,” I mean people in the world of spirits; while by “angels” I mean people in heaven. There is a vast number of people in the world of spirits, because that is where everyone is first gathered and where everyone is examined and prepared…”

Leseprobe

Table of Contents

Introduction

Editor’s Note

What the World of Spirits Is

Each of Us Is Inwardly a Spirit

Our Revival from Death

After Death, We Are in a Fully Human Form

We Leave Nothing Behind except Our Earthly Body

What We Are Like after Death

Our First State after Death

Our Second State after Death

Our Third State after Death

It is Not as Hard as People Think It is to Live a Life That Leads to Heaven

Appendix: Children in Heaven

About Emanuel Swedenborg

OUR LIFE AFTER DEATH

By

EMANUEL SWEDENBORG

Introduction

There are of course many paths that lead up to the summit of Emanuel Swedenborg’s sweeping spiritual vision of the life beyond. In my case, I came to discover Swedenborg through my research into near-death experiences (NDEs)-those compelling revelations, occurring on the threshold of apparent imminent death, that appear to usher individuals into a realm of transcendent beauty where time dissolves into eternity and God’s light is everywhere. Even before I came to see the unmistakable parallels between the world Swedenborg had described for us more than two centuries ago and that which contemporary near death experiencers were being vaulted into as a result of some kind of near-death crisis, others had already made this connection clear. Indeed, the first, and still in many ways the best, book to be written on the near-death experience in our own time, LifeAfter Life by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., contained a section where those parallels were explicitly discussed. In it, Moody highlighted Swedenborg’s teachings concerning what happens at the moment of death and afterward. My appreciation of Swedenborg’s writings has from the beginning been filtered through and indeed enhanced by my study of near-death experiences and my pondering of their obvious implications both for life after and before death. The book you now hold in your hands is in fact one that, by drawing from Swedenborg’s best-known and enduringly popular work on this subject, Heaven and Hell, provides an excellent introduction to Swedenborg’s vision and understanding of the life beyond. As one quickly learns, this rendering is not one that stems from theological dogma but is, rather, rooted in Swedenborg’s own personal and extraordinary sojourns into the spiritual world itself. His revelations, however, do not derive from the kind of brief glimpses that near-death experiences have often reported to me and other NDE researchers, but from sustained and deliberate forays into this domain. As Swedenborg himself says, he was not merely told but shown through direct experience what the dying person encounters, both at the moment of physical death and afterward, and he was enabled to have such experiences frequently over the last third of his lifetime, a period of nearly three decades. Thus Swedenborg is hardly just a precursor to today’s NDEers; he is a true seer and, as such, he had already mapped the realm that NDE research has tried to sketch out with its own methods. What is the nature of this world? Here, Swedenborg makes it plain, we enter into a domain where the “essence” of ourselves is disclosed, and where we-and others-see ourselves with razor sharp precision for who we really are. Death changes nothing, but reveals everything about us. This is just one of the many points of correspondence between Swedenborg’s teachings and the findings of NDE research, by the way, which indicates that many persons have a detailed “life review” in which they are led to see not merely how they have lived, but the inner meaning and motivations of their actions, and the effects of those actions upon others. At death, we enter a world where, in short, our inner essence becomes “the environment” in which we find ourselves. In the end, Swedenborg says, “everyone returns after death to his own life.” A person who has lived a life of self-centered cruelty finds himself continuing to live that way, far from the light of God. On the other hand, a person who has truly lived for others and for whom the existence of the Divine is at the heart of his life, is already in heaven, Swedenborg asserts, and continues to experience directly the Light of heaven after death and to find himself in the company of like-minded others. Either way, according to Swedenborg, everyone “is going to be an image of his affection, or his love.” So it is, if we follow Swedenborg’s teachings, that we are building our heaven and hell now, and living in them now, too, depending on the inner meaning of our actions in the world.

This, to me, is the great moral lesson in Swedenborg’s vision of the afterlife-and it is one that once again coincides with the moral implications of NDEs: as the beloved Sufi poet Kabir has it, “what is found now is found then.” Near-death experiences emphasize the importance of being involved with the world, not withdrawing from it; of serving others and not merely paying lip service to traditional religious pieties; of knowing, with certainty, that God exists and that there is a life after death. For them, it is their NDEs that have made plain the undeniable truth of these things. Yet Swedenborg was enabled to see all this, and so much beyond this, through his incomparable experiences in the spiritual realm. And because of his remarkable intellect and powers of expression, his writings, as excerpted in this book, contain a depth of wisdom and understanding that no modern NDEes could ever hope to match. Which is why I say the study of NDEs only leads up to Swedenborg’s world - it can scarcely begin to suggest its compass. Yet NDE research is, I think, for contemporary students of Swedenborg an important confirmation of his insights into the afterlife. During Swedenborg’s own lifetime, and certainly afterward, there were many who dismissed his supposed visions, even while acknowledging that he had exceptional psychic or clairvoyant powers. Some, of course, thought him quite mad. However, in the light of NDEs-and literally millions of persons across the globe have had these experiences-it is no longer possible to deny that Swedenborg’s visions have a definite experiential foundation. Too many people have seen what Swedenborg did-if not so far-and have drawn essentially the same conclusions as he did, for it to be tenable to explain away his experiences as merely some kind of idiosyncratic fancy or morbid hallucination. It is ironic that while many world-famous figures have of course long honored Swedenborg and recognized his greatness, it is the collective testimony of millions of ordinary men and women who have described what it is like to die that is helping to bring his sobering yet inspiring vision of life after death to many new readers today. The Swedenborg Foundation has provided a real service in compiling this volume, which will now introduce you directly to some of the essential writings of Emanuel Swedenborg on life after death. May it be a spur to you to examine further the works of this spiritual genius.

Kenneth Ring

Author of Life at Death and Heading Toward Omega

Editor’s Note

This volume presents an excerpt from Emanuel Swedenborg’s timeless classic, Heaven and Hell. Written more than two hundred years before Raymond A. Moody’s Life After Life launched the study of near death experiences, Heaven and Hell describes, from the point of view of a firsthand investigator, our passing to the spiritual world after death and the shape of our life there. Since its initial publication in 1758, it has inspired countless thinkers, writers, and artists. Some scholars see it as forming one of the crucial links between the Enlightenment and Romanticism. This version is based on the translation by George F. Dole, originally published in the Swedenborg Foundation’s New Century Edition of the Works of Emanuel Swedenborg. The focus of this edited version has been to expand the terms that readers usually find difficult in Swedenborg and to represent the clarity of Swedenborg’s thought in each sentence, rather than to preserve a level of diction identical to his. The resulting version has been rechecked against the Latin at each step of the way to ensure that the text does not stray from Swedenborg’s original meaning. For this edited version, some passages within Swedenborg’s original chapters have been omitted or rearranged. In a very few instances, the material in some sentences has been condensed. These omissions and rearrangements have not been indicated in the text. Readers who find this sample of Swedenborg’s work intriguing are invited to read the full version in Heaven and Hell.