After Me
Some people imagine that you are not a self but a soul and that it is the soul and not the self that reincarnates on earth or rejoices in heaven or suffers in hell. This is a distinction without a difference. Almost everyone who imagines going to heaven thinks that the person going there is the person they take themselves to be here on earth. If it isn’t me that goes to heaven but, rather, some other being about whom I know nothing and yet who is supposed to be the real me, where is the reward?
When we imagine reuniting with loved ones in heaven, we imagine them as we remember them, and not as some nondescript soul that doesn’t look, smell, feel, sound, or act like them. The same is true with hell. When we fantasize about this or that person burning forever in hell, we want the person suffering to be the person we know, and not some soul stand-in.
So even when we say our true self isn’t the self we see in the mirror, we don’t really believe it.
In order that the happiness of the saints may be more delightful to them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, they are allowed to see perfectly the sufferings of the damned. . . . So that they may be urged the more to praise God . . . the saints in heaven know distinctly all that happens . . . to the damned.
SAINT THOMAS AQUINAS, Summa Theologica