What is the first thing you have to learn in spirit life?

The soul in the body hears but dimly and does not at all see the innumerable influences with which it is surrounded.

The first and most startling thing you have to learn is that your senses, material senses, are not so much to help you to see and hear, as to bar you off from seeing or hearing.

You are on earth as it were with blinkers on. You must not see or hear or know much that surrounds you.

The physical consciousness, which is part of you needs for its development, the temporary seclusion of life from the realities of the world of spirit into which it is ushered at death. 

Hence when you close your eyes in the sleep of death, it is more of a laying down of the blinkers that limited and confined your vision than almost anything else.