You desire to know two things about the Unseen World.
1st. You desire to know the real life of the "I" himself—consciousness, thought, memory, love, happiness, penitence and such like.
2nd. You desire to know his outward surrounding, so that you can picture to yourself his life in that world. That is what gives the interesting touch to your knowledge of your friend's life in a foreign land on earth.
Now the first of these is the really important knowledge, and such knowledge you can have and you can understand because it is of the same kind as the knowledge you already have of him on earth.
The second would be an interesting knowledge, but this knowledge you cannot have, because you have no faculties for it and no similar experience to help you to realize it. It is a law of all human knowledge that you cannot know and cannot depict to yourself anything of which you have had no corresponding experience before.
"I," "myself" which goes into the Unseen is the really important matter, not my surroundings. And the essential knowledge, I say, about that self, about his inner real life in the Unseen you can have and you can understand because the inner life there is of the very same kind as the inner life here. If I am told of full consciousness there, of memory there, of love or hatred there, of happiness or pain there, of joy or sorrow there, I can easily understand it. I have had experience of the like here. There is no difficulty.
But the knowledge of the outward environment there—what we shall be like, how that world will appear, how we shall live and move and have our being in a spiritual existence—all that deeply interesting knowledge which imagination could use to picture that life and bring it before us—THAT we cannot have. It is not possible with our limited faculties and limited experience. We could not be taught it. We have no faculties to take it in and no experience to aid us in realizing it. A blind man cannot picture colours to himself, a deaf man cannot imagine music. It is not that we are unwilling to teach him, but that his limited faculties prevent him from taking in the idea.
Realize your position then with regard to the spiritual world. Imagine a population of blind, deaf men inhabiting this earth. One of them suddenly gets his sight and hearing, and lo! in a moment an unutterable glory, a whole world of beautiful colours and forms and music has flowed into his life. But he cannot convey any notion of it to his former companions. He cannot convey to them the slightest idea of the lovely sunset or the music of the birds. We, shut up in these human bodies, are the blind, deaf men in God's glorious universe. Some of our comrades have moved into the new life beyond, where the eyes of the blind are opened and the ears of the deaf are unstopped. But we have no power of even imagining what their wondrous experience is like.
I suppose that is the reason why we have no description of Paradise or Heaven except in earthly imagery of golden streets and gates of pearl. I suppose that is why St. Paul could not utter what he saw when in some tranced condition he was caught up into Paradise and that life was shown to him—"whether in the body or out of the body," he could not tell (2 Cor. xii. 4). I suppose that was why Lazarus could tell nothing of these marvellous four days in which his disembodied spirit mingled with the spirits of the departed.
"'Where wert thou, brother, those four days?'
There lives no record of reply,
Which, telling what it is to die,
Had surely added praise to praise."