Transcript:
What do you think life after death looks like? Is it so different from the life we are living now, is it the end, or just another beginning? Today let’s talk about life after life.
My name is Shaun McMillan, and this is the Best Class Ever.
Epic Allegorical Christian Literature
Recently I read and studied about some of Christianity’s most epic poems and literature about the spiritual world including, The Divine Comedy which includes Dante’s Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradisio. I studied John Milton’s Paradise Lost as well as some Christian allegory from C. S. Lewis who wrote the Chronicles of Narnia. These are well known texts and even though they are explicitly about the relationship between the earthly world and the supernatural world, these historic authors made it very clear that they were not speaking literally from experience, but only writing allegorical fiction meaning strictly in fictional metaphors.
What I find far more interesting are some lesser known texts by authors who claim that they received divine revelations and had one on one conversations with spirits and/or angels from the spiritual world.
Divined Revelations from Beyond the Grave
As you can imagine these texts are met with a lot of skepticism. I mean how do you verify whether a medium really can converse with those from the afterlife? But there are some bizarre consistencies between their revelations that might lend some credibility to their stories.
For example there are two different sources cited by the teacher I learned Bible Study from who make the same strange observations about the spiritual world, but both come from such strangely different time periods, perspective, and background. I first learned about this from 선생님, the Korean Bible Study teacher from Korea who original source of the Bible Study Lecture series I have been teaching for the past 14 years.
When he was younger he claims that Jesus took him to visit Hell. And upon his return he was so shocked that he said that he absolutely must write a book about how terrible Hell is so that no one will end up there. But then the Holy Son asked him, “Do you think people go to Hell because people don’t know it’s a bad place?”
Then the Lord took this teacher on a visit to Heaven, and upon his return he said, “Oh my God, Heaven is so amazing, I have to write a book about this!” But then the Holy Son Lord replied, “Do you think people don’t make it to Heaven because they don’t know it’s a good place? How people live in this world is what will determine whether they go to Heaven or Hell, so the book I want you to write is not the divine revelation of Hell or the divine revelation of Heaven. What I want you to write about is Salvation. How to live here while you are alive in this world, not how to live in the next.”
Lastly he assured this teacher that he would find others to write those books, books about Heaven and Hell. Later in life he found those books. So now I would like to introduce two of the books he mentioned.
Swedish Scientific Analysis of the Spiritual World
The first is called, “Heaven and all of its wonders and Hell,” by Emanuel Swedenborg. Emanuel Swedenborg was a prolific inventor and scientist from Sweden. He was quite well known in his time during the 18th century enlightenment. Suddenly at the age of 53 he began to have out of body experiences and began having conversations with angels and people in his life who had already passed away.
He wrote this and many other books in Latin, much like Sir Isaac Newton, the intellectual language of their day. In it he tries to explain about all of the stages one goes through after they die, and how the principles of the spiritual world differ but are somehow still related to the physical laws that govern this physical world. The style is very impersonal and academic. Each chapter is named after a governing principle of the spiritual world.
All of Hell Looks like a Person Laid on Their Back
For instance one chapter is titled, “The image of Heaven is contained within the image of man, and the image of man is contained within the image of Heaven.” The idea may sound strange to the more contemporary Western way of thinking, but it makes more sense from an eastern medicine point of view. Some eastern medicine doctors can diagnose your ills simply by looking at the surface of your tongue, or by evaluating the relative health of your face. Because according to eastern medicine, the entire human image is contained within your tongue, within your face, within the image of your hand, and within the image of your feet. I even know an acupuncture doctor who can relieve stress in your neck by putting a needle into your thumb, or relieve indigestion by puncturing the tip of your finger. If you look at the thumb as the head of your body, and the fingers as limbs you can almost see how your body maps out onto your hand.
Contained Within the Image of Man is the Image of Heaven
Another way to look at it is they say that up to 60% of the human body is made up of water just as 70% of the earth’s surface is made up of water. Both have a system of streams, veins, rivers, and arteries which open up into larger pools of liquid life sources whose circulation is critical to the body’s health. So even in this physical world we can see parallels between the image of the human body and the image of the earth, though these two images at first glance seem to look nothing alike. But it does sound uniquely strange when Emanuel Swedenborg says that all of Heaven looks like a person laid on his back.
Pentecostal American Evangelical Christianity’s Revelation of Hell
The other book about Hell suggested by my Bible Study teacher is a book titled, “The Divine Revelation of Hell,” by Mary K. Baxter. Now this author could not be more different from Emanuel Swedenborg. This is a far more recent book, written in the last century, by a Southern style Pentacostal American church. This type of Christianity is also known as evangelical and was quite influential in America 30 years ago. She is not your extremely academic scientist type like Emanuel Swedenborg. Instead she writes in a very personal easy to read style. In fact I read her entire book in one sitting at a book store. She talks about how the sweet Lord Jesus lead her by the hand and comforted her as she went through the terrifying ordeal that is Hell. She describes how horrible the demons look and how awful the different torments for different sins are.
But what is interesting to notice is the way she titled the chapters of her book. The 2nd chapter is titled, “The Left Leg of Hell.” The third is titled, “The Right Leg of Hell.” The seventh is titled the belly of hell. Others are titled, “The Jaws of Hell,” “The Left Arm of Hell,” “The Right Arm of Hell,” “The Heart of Hell.” Because she explains, if you zoom out, all of Hell looks like a pregnant woman laid on her back. This source could not be more distant from Swedenborg in terms of time period, style, background, and context, yet they both describe the spiritual world as looking like a human being laid on its back.
This and many other strange parallels make the somewhat preposterous claim that people have received or experienced the spiritual world start to feel strangely plausible. Of course one can also find some contradictions between these texts, and some of Emanuel Swedenborg’s theology is considered unorthodox, but it’s hard to deny the appeal of learning the principles of another world from such strangely different sources.
As Above So Below
He says that every operating principle in this world has a correspondence with the operating principles of that world. So the two worlds are totally different, but related. The four seasons for example of this world are related to the principles of truth and love in the spiritual world. You can think of the harshness of winter as truth without love. Whereas summer is the wild heat of passionate love without the guidance of truth, but autumn and spring are the happy medium between both extremes. Even traditionally different religions have seen winter as a form of death and spring as rebirth or resurrection, repeating the eternal cycle of life.
So Bible scriptures have significance for both worlds, each passage having both a physical application and a spiritual application. Angels read scriptures thinking they apply to the spiritual world just as we read them thinking they apply to the physical world. But Emanuel Swedenborg explains in the first chapter that many parts of the Bible are in fact misunderstood as literal events. Prophecies about the end of the world; in which the sun, moon, and stars fall from the sky, are meant to be understood as parables for spiritual phenomena, not as a physical literal cataclysmic event.
It’s Hard to Know What We Don’t Know
Science and objective research methods have helped humanity make significant progress in the past 500 years. And just before we discovered quantum physics it seems like the world was a clock as Descarte explained during the enlightenment. The idea was that if we could just learn how things work, we would understand everything. It seemed like there was nothing we couldn’t figure out. But now we have discovered that actually what we have learned is just the tip of the iceberg. Now we know that nothing is as solid as we thought, that everything is made up of tiny, constantly moving particles, and that 85% of the mass that holds the world together cannot be accounted for. We refer to this mysterious part of the physical world as dark matter. Not because it is dark, but because we have just no idea what it is and can only account for it mathematically. And despite all of this physical progress, humanity is still plagued by selfishness, short-sightedness, and some very basic moral problems. We have a great heart and amazing minds, but we still can’t seem to figure out what they were meant for. But the human brain is so amazing that using it just to live a mediocre life for 90+ years seems like a waste. Almost like using a rocket ship merely to get to work day in and day out. I would like to think we were meant for more than that, so let’s continue to push forward exploring the mysteries of life, and even life after life.
For notes on today’s lesson, links to more books about spiritualism, or to hear other great lessons, visit www.BestClassEver.org.
