Selections from Arcana Cœlestia ~ Emanuel Swedenborg
What is the nature of the correspondence between the soul and the body, or between the things of the spirit which is within man and those of his body which are without him, may be plainly seen from the correspondence, influx, and communication of the thought and perception, which are of the spirit, with the speech and hearing, which are of the body. The thought of a man who is speaking is nothing but the speech of his spirit, and the perception of the speech is nothing but the hearing of his spirit. When man is speaking, his thought does not indeed appear to him as speech, because it conjoins itself with the speech of his body, and is in it; and when man hears, his perception appears merely like hearing in the ear. This is the reason why most persons who have not reflected know no otherwise than that all sense is in the organs of the body, and consequently that when these organs fall to decay by death, nothing of sense survives, whereas the man (that is, his spirit) then comes into his veriest life of sensation.Man is a spirit, and that his body serves him for uses in the world ... the spirit is man's internal, and the body his external.They who do not apprehend how the case is with man's spirit and with his body, may suppose from this that thus the spirit dwells within the body; and that the body as it were encompasses and invests it. Be it known however that the spirit of man is in the whole and every part of his body, and that it is its purer substance, both in its organs of motion and in those of sense, and everywhere else; and that the body is the material part that is everywhere annexed to it, adapted to the world in which it then is. This is what is meant by man's being a spirit, and by his body serving him for uses in the world; and by the spirit's being his internal, and the body his external. From this also it is evident that after death man is in an active and sensitive life, and also in the human form, in like manner as in the world, but in greater perfection.
(from Arcana Cœlestia 4652; 4659)