they talk with one another, and afterward
associate in accordance with their friendships in the world. I have
often heard that those that have come from the world were rejoiced at
seeing their friends again, and that their friends in turn were
rejoiced that they had come. Very commonly husband and wife come
together and congratulate each other, and continue together, and this
for a longer or shorter time according to their delight in living
together in the world. But if they had not been united by a true
marriage love, which is a conjunction of minds by heavenly love,
after remaining together for a while they separate. Or if their minds
had been discordant and were inwardly adverse, they break forth into
open enmity, and sometimes into combat; nevertheless they are not
separated until they enter the second state, which will be treated of
presently.

495. As the life of spirits recently from the world is not unlike
their life in the natural world and as they know nothing about their
state of life after death and nothing about heaven and hell except
what they have learned from the sense of the letter of the Word and
preaching from it, they are at first surprised to find themselves in
a body and in every sense that they had in the world, and seeing like
things; and they become eager to know what heaven is, what hell is,
and where they are. Therefore their friends tell them about the
conditions of eternal life, and take them about to various places and
into various companies, and sometimes into cities, and into gardens
and parks, showing them chiefly such magnificent things as delight
the externals in which they are. They are then brought in turn into
those notions about the state of their soul after death, and about
heaven and hell, that they had entertained in the life of the body,
even until they feel indignant at their total ignorance of such
things, and at the ignorance of the church also. Nearly all are
anxious to know whether they will get to heaven. Most of them believe
that they will, because of their having lived in the world a moral
and civil life, never considering that the bad and the good live a
like life outwardly, alike doing good to others, attending public
worship, hearing sermons, and praying; and wholly ignorant that
external deeds and external acts of worship are of no avail, but only
the internals from which the externals proceed. There is hardly one
out of thousands who knows what internals are, an