Swedenborg describes three states that follow death. In the first, the spirit is in a condition similar to earthly life — its outer habits and surface personality are still dominant. In the second state, the interior is opened: what was most deeply the spirit's own rises to the surface, and the exterior falls away. If the interior was good, this is a process of beatification; if it was evil, the process reveals what was concealed. The third state is final settlement — the spirit finds its community, its environment, its eternity.
The World of Spirits is therefore a place of encounter, examination, and discovery. Swedenborg reports meeting people there who still believed themselves to be alive, who were surprised to find that they were dead, who continued their earthly conversations and habits until the second state began. The continuity of personal identity across death is complete — nothing of memory, personality, or characteristic interest is lost, though everything becomes more transparent and inward.
The final movement into heaven or hell is, in Swedenborg's account, entirely self-determining. Spirits are not judged by external verdict and sentenced; they simply find that the community of heaven is unbearable to them if their love is evil, or that the community of hell is unbearable if their love is good. Each gravitates to where its dominant love feels most at home. This makes Swedenborg's eschatology one of the most radical expressions of the idea that character is destiny — that what we become in life is what we are, in eternity, forever.
The intermediate state and its three phases are described at length in Heaven and Hell in the section on "The Three States of Man After Death." Swedenborg claims personal experience of the World of Spirits over many years of visionary experience beginning in 1745.
