What Does It Feel Like to Be a Spirit Person?

WHAT does it feel like to be a spirit person?

First of all, think about your physical body. It becomes tired and fatigued, so we must have rest and sleep to regenerate it. Our bodies become hungry and thirsty, so we take care of those needs with food and drink. Our bodies can suffer pains and torments through a great variety of illnesses and diseases. We can lose our limbs through accidents or from other causes. Our senses can become impaired with increasing age. An accident can cause our bodies to lose the ability to see or hear. And a person’s body can be born into the Earth world without being able to see, hear, or speak. On Earth, a person’s physical brain may be so affected that the person is incapable of any normal actions, and the person may have to be taken care of by others.

What a gloomy picture, you will say! That is so, but anyone can be the victim of some, at least, of the catalogue of disabilities I have mentioned. At least three of them are common to every single soul upon the Earth plane—hunger, thirst, and fatigue.

And that by no means exhausts the list. But it will suffice for our purpose.

Now, eliminate, completely and entirely, every one of these unpleasant disabilities that I have listed. Then you have some idea of what it feels like as a spirit person! When I was upon the Earth plane, I suffered from some of the ailments that are common to most of us, ailments that are not necessarily serious, and that we take rather as a matter of course; the minor aches and pains that most people on Earth, at one time or another, manage to put up with. In addition to those minor ailments, I was, of course, aware of my physical body, feeling hungry, thirsty, and fatigued. The last illness of my life was so serious that it was too much for my physical body, and I transitioned into the next life. And immediately I knew what it felt like to be a spirit person.

I found myself standing, talking to Edwin, who was already in spirit. I felt, physically, a giant, in spite of the fact that I had just left my sick bed where my body died. As time went on, I felt even better. I did not have the slightest suspicion of a twinge of pain, and I felt light in weight. Indeed, it did not seem as though I was encased in a body at all! My mind was fully alert, and I was aware of my body. I could move my limbs and my body wherever I wished, apparently without having to use my muscles—I just thought of what I wanted to do or where I wanted to be, and it happened instantly. It is extremely difficult to convey to you this feeling of perfect health because such a thing is utterly impossible on Earth, and therefore, I have nothing to compare it to or to describe as being like something you would have experienced on Earth. This state of being in the afterlife belongs to the spirit alone and defies any Earthly description. It must be experienced. But you will not be able to do that until you become one of us here yourself.

I have said that my mind was alert. That is an understatement. I discovered that my mind was a veritable storehouse of facts concerning my Earthly life. Every act I had ever performed, and every word that I had uttered, every impression I had received, every fact that I had read about, and every incident I had witnessed, all these, I found, were indelibly registered in my mind. That is common to every spirit person who has had a life on Earth.

Now to come to the spirit body itself. The spirit body is the counterpart of our Earthly bodies. When we come into the spirit world, we are recognizably ourselves. But we leave behind us all our physical disabilities. We have our full complement of limbs, our sight and our hearing; in fact, all our senses are fully functioning. Indeed, the five senses, as we know them upon earth, become many degrees more acute when we are in the afterlife. Any abnormal conditions of the physical body, such as being fat or skinny as a skeleton, vanish when we arrive in these realms, and we appear as we should have appeared on Earth if a variety of earthly reasons had not caused us to have the abnormal conditions.

There is a stage in our lives on Earth which we know as the prime of life. In the next life, we all move toward that stage of life. Those of us who are elderly when we pass into spirit have bodies as they were in our prime-of-life period. Others who are young or even were unborn on Earth grow in the afterlife until they have that prime of life body. And we all preserve our natural characteristics; they never leave us. But we find that many minor physical features that we don’t need we shake off with our Earthly bodies— certain deformities of the body we were born with, or that have come upon us during our Earth lives. How many of us are there, when we are on Earth, could not think of some small improvement that we should like to make in our physical bodies, were it at all possible! Not many!

I have told you how the trees in these realms grow in a state of perfection—upright and clean-looking and well-formed, because they have no storms of wind to bend and twist the young branches into malformations. The spirit body is subject to just the same law here in spirit. The storms of life can twist the physical body, but if the Earth life has been spiritually sound, the spirit body will be correspondingly sound. The spirit world reveals the truth for all to see.

How does the spirit appear anatomically, you will ask? Anatomically, just exactly the same as yours. We have muscles, we have bones, we have sinews, but they are not of the Earth; they are purely of spirit. We suffer from no ailments—that would be impossible in the spirit world. Therefore, our bodies do not require constant care to maintain good health. Here, our health is always perfect. Malnutrition, in the sense that you know it, cannot exist here, but spiritual malnutrition—that is, of the soul— does most certainly exist. A visit to the dark realms and their neighborhood will soon reveal that!

Does it seem strange that a spirit body should possess fingernails and hair? How would you have us be? Not different from yourselves in this respect, surely? Would we not be something of a revolting spectacle without our usual anatomical features and characteristics? This seems an elementary statement, but it is sometimes necessary and expedient to voice the elementary.