And
God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes;
and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying,
neither shall there be any more pain; for the former things are
passed away. Revelation
21:4
The
person, though, has not died at all. We are only separated from
the physical nature that was useful to us in the world. The
essential person is actually still alive. I say that the essential
person is still alive because we are not people because of our
bodies but because of our spirits. After all, it is the spirit
within us that thinks, and thought and affection together make us
the people we are. We can see, then, that when we die we simply
move from one world into another. This is why in the inner
meaning of the Word, "death" means resurrection and a
continuation of life.
Emanuel
Swedenborg
Heaven and
Hell, #445
first published in 1758
