Here is a Spiritual Conundrum submitted to Spiritual Insights for Everyday Life by a reader named A. Watson:

My father suffered a stroke before he died and was left unable to speak and paralysed. I would like to know if he, and others, are healed in the spiritual world and return to good health. I have been waiting for a sign from him since he passed and have been worried that he is stuck in the same state and unable to contact me. This is contrary to what I have always believed and I know he would be unhappy in that state which bothers me as I hope he is at peace.

Thanks for the good question, A. Watson. I’m sorry to hear about the stroke your father suffered before his death. I hope I will be able to put your mind at ease.

Here is the short answer:

When we die and move on to the spiritual world, we leave our physical body behind, and live in our spiritual body instead. We therefore also leave behind any handicaps or sicknesses that have purely physical causes. In other words, since your father has now left his physical body behind, the stroke that affected his physical body is no longer a factor in the spiritual world where he now lives.

Ordinarily, when we leave our physical body behind, we also leave behind all of its handicaps and illnesses.

However, for people who strongly identify with their handicap or sickness, there may be some time period in the spiritual world when it still persists. That’s because our spiritual body responds directly and immediately to our thoughts and feelings. So if being sick or handicapped is a strong part of our identity as a person, our spiritual body may reflect that for a shorter or longer time.

Some people who have been sick or handicapped for a long time may also need some time to adjust to having a healthy, fully functional body. So there may be a transition period for them as well when they enter the spiritual world.

But for people who hate their physical sicknesses and handicaps, long for full health and fitness, and are fit and healthy in their minds, their physical limitations and maladies will be immediately removed upon death, and they will enjoy full physical and mental health right away.

I see no reason why this wouldn’t be the case for your father.

Let’s take a closer look.

(Image credit: WalesOnline)

Physical health in the physical world

Here on earth, we are subject to many genetic and environmental factors that are beyond our control.

It’s true that we sometimes bring sickness or injury upon ourselves when we carelessly or recklessly engage in dangerous pursuits, or live a terribly unhealthful lifestyle, despite knowing the likely consequences. But many of our physical handicaps and illnesses are beyond our control.

Plus, sometimes we engage in dangerous or physically debilitating activities because we are driven to serve our fellow human beings in particular ways, such as fighting fires or devoting our life to intensive care of a disabled loved one. We may willingly risk physical injury or illness because we care deeply about our fellow human beings.

In short, though we do have some control over our physical health and sickness, there are many reasons why we may be sick or handicapped through no fault of our own, or because we care less about our own life and health than we do about the life and health of others.

And of course, if we are born with a physical or mental handicap, we have done nothing at all ourselves to bring it upon ourselves. It happened for reasons completely beyond our control.

For more on the complex nature of our physical and mental wellbeing, please see the article, “What is the Source of Human Fragility, Sickness, and Disease?”

In short, though we can and should take responsibility and ownership of our physical and mental health during our lifetime here on earth, we can’t always control the things that have affected and are affecting our physical hearth. We may be mildly or severely ill or disabled even if we have done nothing at all to cause it.

Physical health in the spiritual world

But that’s only how it works here in the physical world.

In the spiritual world, the health of our spiritual body depends entirely on our own choices and our own mental, emotional, and spiritual state. No external factors beyond our control can bring ill health or handicap to our spiritual body.

That’s because there is nothing physical in the spiritual world.

Yes, we may loosely speak of “physical health” in the spiritual world, since we do have a body there that is every bit as real, touchable, and huggable as our physical body here on earth. But unlike our physical body here in the material world, our spiritual body in the spiritual world is made entirely of spiritual substance, not of physical matter. And spiritual substance directly reflects and responds to the spiritual realities of our love, understanding, ideas, attitudes, and intentions.

This means that in the spiritual world, it is not possible for any “external” factors to cause us to be sick or handicapped against our will, or through no fault of our own. In the spiritual world, our outer self fully and exactly expresses our inner self—our thoughts and feelings, loves, beliefs, and motivations.

Does this mean we can never be sick in the spiritual world?

Not at all. If our mind and heart are filled with sick, disgusting, and wrong attitudes, motives, and desires, those will be reflected in bodily disfigurement and disease in the spiritual world. If through our life here on earth we have become self-centered, greedy, thoughtless, and power-hungry people, our twisted and inhuman mental and spiritual state will result in a twisted and disfigured body. That’s why in both religious and secular artwork, evil, selfish people (and other beings) are commonly pictured as physically, ugly, fearsome, twisted, and disfigured.

But if through our life here on earth we have become thoughtful, caring, concerned about our fellow human beings, and motivated to do what we can in service of other people, our healthy and very human mental and spiritual state will result in a healthy, beautiful, and very human spiritual body. For more on this, please see the article, “Will My Body be the Right Weight and Appearance in the Afterlife?”

With these principles in mind, we can better understand what happens to our physical health when we die and move on to the spiritual world.

In the spiritual world, physical conditions are taken away

For most of us here on earth, there is no clear correlation between our physical health and the quality of our character.

Yes, some morose and negative people do bring physical illness upon themselves by constantly focusing on how terrible life is, and neglecting their physical health as a result.

But for most of us, being physically sick does not mean we are evil, selfish people. It simply means that various genetic, environmental, and lifestyle factors all conspired together to cause our physical body not to be fully sound and healthy. Most mental illnesses are the same: they are not brought about by any evil intent on the part of the person affected, but by forces beyond their control.

In the spiritual world, all of those genetic and environmental factors, not to mention most of the lifestyle factors, no longer have any effect upon us. Those causes are purely physical. And the spiritual world exists on a plane of reality that is above and beyond the material universe, and only slightly affected by it.

This means that in the spiritual world, every physical cause of handicap, disfigurement, and disease is taken away, and no longer affects us.

After death, in the spiritual world:

People born with physical or mental handicaps are brought to full health and soundness of mind and body.

If a mental handicap caused a person not to achieve full mental adulthood and maturity, he or she will grow from his or her current mental age to full adulthood in the spiritual world.

People whose physical health was damaged or destroyed by genetic issues, accidents, and environmental factors are also restored to full health.

Even people whose negative mental attitudes brought about physical disease will be freed from those conditions if they were good, thoughtful, and loving people at heart.

The only way for us to be sick and disfigured in the spiritual world is if we willfully persist in negative, destructive, selfish, and greedy desires and attitudes.

Only people who go to hell have persistent diseases and handicaps

Let’s take up that last point for a minute.

As explained above, in the spiritual world, our bodily health or disease is a direct expression of our inner, mental and spiritual health and disease. And this does not mean “mental illness” as that is usually defined in our medicine and psychology here on earth, which mostly involves malfunctions of physical brain and body chemistry. Rather, it means whether we have freely chosen, to the best of our ability, to be a good and thoughtful person or an evil and selfish person.

The purpose of our life here on earth is to make a choice about what sort of person we want to be. In the Bible, this is expressed especially clearly in the book of Deuteronomy:

See, I have set before you today life and prosperity, death and adversity. If you obey the commandments of the Lord your God that I am commanding you today, by loving the Lord your God, walking in his ways, and observing his commandments, decrees, and ordinances, then you shall live and become numerous, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land that you are entering to possess. But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish; you shall not live long in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess. I call heaven and earth to witness against you today that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Choose life so that you and your descendants may live, loving the Lord your God, obeying him, and holding fast to him; for that means life to you and length of days, so that you may live in the land that the Lord swore to give to your ancestors, to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob. (Deuteronomy 30:15–20)

In this passage, God is speaking to the ancient Israelites as they are preparing to enter their Holy Land. They faced very worldly choices of good or evil, God or idols, which would result in blessings or curses coming down upon them as they entered their new life in the Holy Land.

Yet the choice set before them of physical life or death, blessings or curses, in a physical land is a metaphor for the spiritual choices each one of us makes during the course of our spiritual journey into our own spiritual Holy Land.

That Holy Land, for us, is our eternal life in the spiritual world. Each one of us has a choice to make:

Will we follow God’s way of loving God above all, and loving our fellow human beings just as we love ourselves?

Or will we instead bow down to the idols of worldly wealth and power and physical pleasure for ourselves, with no regard for God’s commandments and no regard for the welfare of our fellow human beings?

It is only people who make that second choice, for evil and selfishness over goodness, God, and concern for others, who will experience physical disfigurement and disease in the spiritual world. That’s because they will be in hell, where hatred and evil twists us into horrible travesties of our true human form.

And that is 100% our own choice. For more on this, please see: “Is There Really a Hell? What is it Like?”

I should also mention that even the evil residents of hell think of themselves as being healthy and normal, and see themselves that way. That’s because in their minds the way they live—as sick and twisted as it looks to good people looking in from the outside—is totally normal.

Physical conditions may briefly persist even for good people

For people who have made the choice to love God and care for their fellow human beings, their spiritual health and humaneness will be reflected in the afterlife in full physical health in a very sound and very human spiritual body.

Most people will immediately wake up in the spiritual world with a fully healthy spiritual body. They will leave behind all of their physical sicknesses and handicaps because the physical causes of these things no longer have any effect in the spiritual world.

However, even some good people might continue for a shorter or longer time to experience their physical handicaps or sicknesses in the spiritual world. Here are some examples of why this might happen:

Some people seem to glory in their illnesses and handicaps, bragging about just how sick or how handicapped they are, as if it were some sort of achievement! Because of this mental attitude, these people may require some time to let go of their attachments to their physical illnesses and handicaps before achieving full bodily health and moving on to heaven.

Some people have been sick or handicapped for so many years that they have a hard time thinking of themselves as being fully healthy. These people, too, may require some time to adjust mentally to the concept that they no longer have to be sick or handicapped.

Some people who were born with genetic handicaps or diseases, or struck with them at a very young age, may have little or no experience of ever being fully healthy mentally and physically. These people may need some time to grow from their former physically impaired state into a state of full health and full mental maturity.

And yet, every single person who has a good heart through choices made in this life will, in time, achieve full physical and mental health in the afterlife.

And people who never had a shot at self-responsible adulthood due to severe mental handicaps from birth or early childhood will all grow up to be fully physically and mentally healthy angels in heaven, just as all people who die in childhood grow up to be angels in heaven. For more on what happens to children who die, please see: “Where are my Children who have Died? Will I Ever See Them Again?” The same principles explained in that article apply to people with mental handicaps so severe that they remain children mentally, even if they may be adults physically.

Good people will have full health in heaven

All of this is why I can say confidently to A. Watson:

Assuming your father was a good and thoughtful person, he will be quickly healed of the effects of his stroke once he enters the spiritual world. There, he will enjoy full physical and mental health.

In fact, he will have a greater sense of health and wellbeing than he ever experienced here on earth, even when he was in the peak physical condition of his youth. That’s because our spiritual body does not have the limitations of our physical body. It responds immediately and fully to everything that is in our mind and heart.

In the spiritual world, it really is true that “Whatever the mind of man can conceive and believe, it can achieve” (Napoleon Hill).

So for A. Watson and anyone else who has lost a loved one whose body was ill or handicapped, take heart! These physical afflictions no longer affect us in the spiritual world. Your beloved family member or friend who has passed on is by now enjoying a level of physical and mental health that he or she could hardly even imagine before! And the longer he or she lives in the spiritual world, the more youthful, energetic, healthy, and mentally sharp he or she will become.

That’s just how things work in heaven.

Where did all of this come from?

The Bible itself tells us, not just in Deuteronomy, but in many other places that if we follow God’s commandments by loving God and loving and serving our neighbor, God will give us many blessings, including eternal life in an incorruptible spiritual body.

If you want more detail, I invite you to read Heaven and Hell, by Emanuel Swedenborg (1688–1772). This spiritual classic offers a full guided tour of the spiritual realms that has stood the test of time.

This article is a response to a spiritual conundrum submitted by a reader.

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