Our Life After DeAth - Swedenborg Foundation

132 Pages·2014·0.32 MB·English

Our Life After DeAth

Our Life After DeAth
A firsthand Account
from an 18th-Century Scientist and Seer
eMANueL SWeDeNBOrG
translated by George f. Dole
introduction by Kenneth ring
swedenborg foundation
West Chester, Pennsylvania
© 2014 by the Swedenborg Foundation. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval
system, without prior permission from the publisher.
First printing 2013
Revised second printing 2014
This volume contains a modified version of text originally
published in Emanuel Swedenborg’s Heaven and Hell, as
translated by George F. Dole in the New Century Edition of the
Works of Emanuel Swedenborg (West Chester, PA: Swedenborg
Foundation, 2000). It is excerpted from material in that volume
titled “The World of Spirits and Our State after Death” (sections
421–535) and “Children in Heaven” (sections 329–345).
The introduction by Kenneth Ring was originally published in
Awaken from Death (San Francisco: J. Appleseed & Co., 1993) and is
reprinted with permission.
Edited by Stuart Shotwell
Design and typesetting by Karen Connor
Printed in the United States of America
Swedenborg Foundation
320 North Church Street • West Chester, PA 19380
www.swedenborg.com
The Swedenborg Foundation
dedicates this volume to
Dick and Sally Brickman
in deep gratitude for their
vision, passion, and support.

CONteNtS
Introduction ix
Editor’s Note xv
What the World of Spirits is 3
each of us is inwardly a Spirit 9
Our revival from Death 15
After Death, We Are in a fully human form 21
We Leave Nothing Behind except Our earthly Body 29
What We Are Like after Death 43
Our first State after Death 59
Our Second State after Death 65
Our third State after Death 75
it is Not as hard as People think it is
to Live a Life that Leads to heaven 83
Appendix: Children in heaven 97
About Emanuel Swedenborg 111

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 compel-
ling revelations, occurring on the threshold of apparent immi-
nent death, that appear to usher individuals into a realm of tran-
scendent 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 connec-
tion clear. Indeed, the first, and still in many ways the best, book
to be written on the near-death experience in our own time, Life
After Life by Raymond A. Moody, Jr., contained a section where
those parallels were explicitly discussed. In it, Moody high-
lighted Swedenborg’s teachings concerning what happens at the
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