260 HEAVEN and HELL §455
b. A starting point should be derived from the truths of church doctrine drawn from the Word,
and these should be acknowledged fi rst; then it is all right to take factual knowledge into account:
6047. So if people have an affi rmative attitude toward truths of faith, it is all right for them to
support them rationally with factual knowledge; but this is not appropriate for people who have a
negative attitude: 2568 , 2588 , 4760 , 6047. It is in accord with the divine design to work rationally
from spiritual truths into factual knowledge, natural truths, but not from the latter into the for-
mer, because there is an infl ow of spiritual things into natural ones but not from natural or physi-
cal things into spiritual ones: 3219 , 5119 , 5259 , 5427 , 5428 , 5478 , 6322 , 9110 , 9111 [ 10199 ].many people may be dispelled by rational considerations and their eyes
perhaps opened a little. If people are focused on truths, it is granted them
to support spiritual truths by rational ones. Who would possibly under-
stand the Word simply from its literal meaning unless they saw some
truths in it by enlightened reason? What else is the cause of the many
heresies drawn from the same Word?b456 Years and years of daily experience have witnessed to me that after
separation from the body the human spirit is a person and is in a similar
form. I have seen this thousands of times, I have heard such spirits, and
I have talked with them even about the fact that people in the world do
not believe that they are what they are, and that scholars think people
who do believe are simpletons. Spirits are heartsick over the fact that
this kind of ignorance is still common in the world and especially in
the church. [ 2 ] They say, however, that this belief stems especially from
academics who have thought about the soul on the basis of physical sen-
sory reality. The only concept this can yield is one of pure thought, and
since this lacks any medium in which and on the basis of which it is
examined, it is like some volatile form of pure ether that can only dis-
sipate when the body dies. Since the church believes in the immortal-
ity of the soul on the basis of the Word, though, they cannot help but
attribute something vital to it, something thoughtlike. However, they do
not attribute to it any sensory capacity like ours until it is reunited with
its body. Their doctrine of the resurrection is based on this notion, as is
their belief that there will be a reunion [of soul and body] when the Last
Judgment comes. The result is that when people think about the soul on
the basis of both doctrine and speculation, they do not at all grasp the
fact that it is the spirit and that it is in human form. There is also the fact
that hardly anyone nowadays knows what the spiritual is, let alone that
people who are spiritual, as all spirits and angels are, have a human form.
[ 3 ] This is why almost all the people who arrive from this world are
as astonished as they can be to fi nd that they are alive and that they are