Will I realize it when I shed my cloak of flesh and bone? How do you know when you go from the material world into the spiritual world? Can metaphysics "call down" the spiritual world and integrate it with what we have here?

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Your mistake here is in thinking they were ever really separate in the first place.

One of my favorite activities in this world is ping pong. I once thought that ping pong was the ultimate physical activity. But in fact the reason I love it so much isn’t because it’s great at expressing physical prowess, but because it’s perfect at translating spiritual prowess to the physical world. If I arm wrestled you, it wouldn’t matter a whole lot whether I was feeling good that day or not. But if I’m feeling spiritually off, then it’s super easy to lose ping pong matches to people who aren’t nearly as good as me.

Spirit suffuses everything, it’s already integrated into what we have here. Metaphysics describes both the physical and the spiritual world.

I’m not entirely sure what the issue is here. Perhaps you feel like the world at large owes you something. Maybe you hate this world because you feel like you’re not getting what you deserve from it and you feel like a world more governed by the spiritual will grant that to you.

That’s not how this world works. Spiritually speaking, this world is intended to elicit from us one thing. Our identity, as ordered by what we love so much we’ll construct our inner world around it despite an uncaring, destructive world.

Will you realize it when you die? The great mystic Swedenborg says no. Many have to be told by angels that they are now dead. Once that task is accomplished, the newly dead person is inducted into a process that accelerates what physical life started.

Your ability to self-direct your own growth is highest in this world, where one’s distance from eternal love and grace is the greatest. In the afterlife, all wishes and desires are granted, meaning there’s little to struggle against.

Your abilities will never feel as much “yours” as they do now. What you build, how you built it, how you got the capacity to do it, all are gifts from the Lord. But they are gifts that are given in such a way that you are able to feel like they are yours. This is God’s gift to all of us.

Once you die and the world in which you have the most say in dissolves around you, all that’s left is spiritual reality. Spiritual reality is designed and operated and manipulated by beings of vastly greater sophistication than us. We are lost in such grandeur. If we absolutely must, we can be granted a realm in which our selfish and profane beliefs can find expression.

Otherwise we find thorough fulfillment and happiness through service to the Lord and our fellows.

For our minds are incapable of serving self and other simultaneously. We can only find happiness in one or the other.