AC 4622 - Our Interior Essence

AC 4622 [2-3]

If people would only believe
that their interior essence is the spirit,
and that the body and its sensations and members
are adapted merely to uses in this world,
and that the spirit and its sensations and organs
are adapted to uses in the other life,
then from themselves
and almost of their own accord
they would come into ideas
about the state of their spirit after death;
for they would reflect
that the spirit must be the person himself
who thinks,
and who desires, longs for things,
and is affected with them;
and further that all the power of sensation
which appears in the body
belongs properly to the spirit,
and to the body merely by influx;
and they would afterwards
confirm themselves in this idea
by many considerations,
and in this way would at last take more delight
in the things of their spirit than in those of their body.

It is also a real fact that it is not a person's body
which sees, hears, smells, and feels, but his spirit;
and therefore when the spirit is divested of the body,
it is in its own sensations,
the same as when it was in the body,
only now far more exquisite . . ..