by Colin Wilson
Against these objections, we must place the simple fact that there are so many reports of the death experience that follow roughly the same pattern. Any scientist would admit that this makes the evidence more convincing. If one sailor came back reporting that he had been shipwrecked on an island where the natives had green hair and long tails, it would probably be safe to assume either that he was a liar or that he was suffering from delirium tremens. If hundreds of sailors report the same experience over many years, it would be downright stupid not to give it careful consideration. There must be something behind it, if only a conspiracy among the sailors. In the same way, when report after report of people in sudden danger contains the phrase ‘My whole life flashed in front of my eyes’, it looks probable that the brain has some curious ‘rapid playback’ mechanism that is activated by the threat of death. Those who believe in an afterlife may speculate that the purpose of this mechanism is to ‘remind’ the person of his identity, so that he does not enter the ‘next world’ in a state of total confusion. Those who take a more sceptical view may regard it as a natural phenomenon, perhaps due to a flood of adrenalin, or to some electrical discharge caused by emergency. But in view of the number of reports of this sensation, the most indefensible attitude would be to dismiss it as an old wives’ tale.
Does this mean that Bertrand Russell is wilfully blinding himself to the facts when he says that ‘it is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life’? Not necessarily. We have to recognise that the world is full of millions of facts, and that everyone has to choose which ones he finds interesting. Even the greatest intellects can never hope to know more than a tiny fraction of all the facts about the world we live in. Russell chose to devote his life to trying to establish the basic ‘facts’ about logic and mathematics; no one can blame him for not being curious about the existence of an afterlife. And, in view of that lack of curiosity, it is also hard to blame him for concluding that ‘when you’re dead you’re dead’.
Where Russell does deserve a certain amount of criticism is in the shallow nature of his assumptions about why people can believe in an afterlife. He takes it for granted that there is no solid scientific evidence for life after death, and that therefore it must be wishful thinking. To the objection that he has failed to consider the facts, he would probably reply that he doesn’t have the time — but that if someone could present him with one solid, incontrovertible fact to prove life after death, he might be ready to be convinced.
The simple truth is that this is not the way we build up our convictions. I do not decide that a person is trustworthy because I have solid, incontrovertible proof of it. I decide it on the basis of dozens of experiences of that person, which finally fit together like a mosaic, giving me an ‘overall’ picture of his character. It could be compared to a newspaper photograph which, when looked at through a magnifying glass, turns into a series of black and grey dots. Nobody looking at those individual dots could believe that they would really build up into a recognisable face. The strange thing is that when we look at the picture at a certain distance, the dots vanish, and we can not only see a recognisable face, but even the expression in the eyes. If we look at the same eyes through the magnifying glass, it is quite impossible to see how the dots create an ‘expression’.
All this applies particularly to the problems of the ‘paranormal’. I had experience of this a few years ago, when writing a book about the poltergeist — the ‘noisy ghost’ that has been recorded down the ages.* My ex-publisher called on me one day and asked me what I was writing. I had just returned from Pontefract, where I had been investigating a case of apparent ‘haunting’ by a black monk, and I began telling him about it. ‘Surely you don’t really believe in all that stuff?’ He began to raise all the usual objections: inaccurate reporting, mischievous children, seismic disturbances, lying witnesses … I countered each objection by describing some other case in which it could not possibly apply, and he immediately thought up some new objections. After half an hour or so, I saw that nothing I could say would alter his mind. As far as he was concerned, ghosts and poltergeists were a regrettable remnant of mediaeval superstition, and that was that. Every case I described to him was just another dot on the newspaper photograph. Looking at it through his magnifying glass, he could not see that it proved anything. I had spent months studying hundreds of cases, from ancient Rome to modern London, from mediaeval France to present-day Brazil. I had come to recognise all the basic characteristics of the poltergeist, and to see that they never seem to change. In short, they formed a pattern. And unless my friend could be persuaded to spend a few weeks studying the same cases, he would continue to believe that each one could be explained away as fraud or deception. And if I had actually said that to him, he would have felt that I was being patronising. He was convinced — quite correctly — that his powers of reasoning were as good as mine. What he could not see was that, if reason is to be effective, it has to operate on a broad range of facts. Without facts to work on, the most brilliant deductive mind in the world is spinning in a vacuum.
This book is not an attempt to convince anyone of the reality of life after death. It is simply an attempt to present the facts in an orderly manner. At the end, the reader should be in a position to make up his own mind.
*Alan Vaughan: Patterns of Prophecy, 1973, p. 4.
** Access to Inner Worlds: The Story of Brad Absetz, 1983.
*In The Mysteries of Life and Death, no date.
*Robert Crookall: What Happens When You Die, p. 63.
*Poltergeist, A Study in Destructive Haunting, 1981.
CHAPTER TWO
The World of the Clairvoyant
When I open my eyes in the morning, I take it for granted that I am looking at the same world that you see when you open your eyes. On the whole, this is probably a fair assumption. But it can blind me to some important differences between myself and my fellow human beings.
When Charles Darwin arrived in Tierra del Fuego on the Beagle in December 1832, he was astounded that the natives were such excellent mimics. Although they knew no English, they could repeat a whole sentence with a good English accent. Moreover, they could join in sea shanties as they sat round the fire with the crew of the Beagle, by the simple expedient of repeating each word a moment after the English sailors had sung it. (Darwin said ‘the manner in which they were invariably a little behindhand was quite ludicrous’.) Darwin was baffled. ‘How can this faculty be explained?’ he asked. ‘Is it a consequence of the more practised habits of perception and keener senses, common to all men in a savage state, as compared with those long civilised?’
He is on the right track; but his essentially English habits of thought make him incapable of going to the heart of the matter. But a later zoologist, Lyall Watson, understood it:
A pygmy from the dense forests of the Ituri, where it is never possible to see very far, is astonished by the tiny antelope he sees in the distance when taken out on to the plain for the first time. In the perpetual gloom of the forest floor, sound is more important than sight, and the pygmy’s experience is arranged in a different kind of sense life. His is a separate reality.
In other words, the pygmy’s culture is auditory, not visual. In our culture, sight is more important than sound; a city dweller hardly notices the continuous flood of sound that batters his ears, but he has to notice buses and cars because they may run him down. The primitive has to pay the same attention to sounds, because they may indicate the presence of a dangerous wild animal or an enemy. If Darwin could have got inside the head of a Tierra del Fuegan, he would probably have felt as confused as if he was looking through the eyes of a Martian.
The psychologist William James made the same point in his important essay ‘On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings’. He showed that we tend to be blind to things that do not interest us; they are simply ‘not there’. And since each of us is interested in different things, each sees a different world. A man sitting on a bus or t
ube thinks he is surrounded by other members of the same species; in fact, he is among troglodytes, Martians, Venusians, Tierra del Fuegans, Patagonians and a dozen other outlandish tribes.
Among civilised human beings, there is a species whose outlook is as strange and ‘different’ as that of a Tierra del Fuegan. They are called psychics or clairvoyants, and they are far more common than the rest of us realise. Yet when a psychic describes an experience that he or she takes for granted, it may strike the rest of us as either slightly insane or some kind of silly affectation. Here is a description of such an experience:
Soon after our arrival at Okehampton my husband and I went out to catch the tail-end of the sunset. It was one of those evenings when the whole world holds its breath. The moor towered in shadowed contours between us and the sinking sun, and above it the western sky was green and gold like glacier water. Suddenly, without warning, the incredible beauty swept me through a barrier. I was no longer looking at Nature. Nature was looking at me. And she did not like what she saw. It was a strange and humbling sensation, as if numberless unoffending creatures were shrinking back offended by our invasion, and it struck me like a blow that even the windswept little tree against the skyline seemed to be leaning away from us in disgust. ‘What shall we do?’ I whispered to my husband. ‘They loathe us. We can’t gatecrash like this.’
He did not laugh at me. He, too, felt an intruder. So I said, should we stand quite still and explain mentally that we came as friends, with humility, and would be grateful for permission to walk quietly on the moor? I thought, too, of the old days when simple souls linked themselves to wild nature by the ancient magic of oak and ash and thorn.
Writing as experient, not as investigator, there is, thank goodness, no need to invoke sophisticated explanation like autosuggestion for the stonishing experience that followed this gesture of apology. It was as if, like a wheeling flight of dunlin, all those visible and invisible creatures swung round as a unit to inspect us, and I seemed to feel their sigh of relief as they came to a group decision. We were not dangerous or cruel. Our apology was accepted. We might come on — and ‘in’. At the time I did not even think it odd that the little windswept tree was now leaning towards us in a friendly fashion.
That experience had an unexpected aftermath. A couple of mornings later I was alone by a window facing the moor, writing letters and thinking of nothing less than its invisible inhabitants. Then I, too, suffered an invasion, a delightful one. It was as if, like ebullient children, a covey of little invisibles floated in at the window to say ‘Hullo!’ and coax me to play with them. For a moment their visit seemed perfectly normal, but then my analytical mind got going, and at once, for me, they ceased to exist. And now I have no idea at all whether or not I had been conversing with ‘things that really are’ …
If this account conveys the impression that its author is some slightly dotty ‘psychic’, like Noel Coward’s Madame Arcati (as played by Margaret Rutherford), then it is thoroughly misleading. The author, Rosalind Heywood, was a lifelong member of the Society for Psychical Research, a lady of formidable intellect, whose standards of investigation were as rigorous as those of the most thoroughgoing sceptic. In fact, her attitude towards her own experiences is curiously mistrustful and suspicious. When writing about matters of psychical research — as in her book The Sixth Sense — she maintains an attitude of logical detachment that makes her sound rather like Bertrand Russell. But in her autobiography The Infinite Hive, she adopts a more personal tone to describe her own experiences, and the result is one of the most convincing of all insights into the strange, Tierra del Fuegan world of a clairvoyant.
It is worth noting her comment: ‘… then my analytical mind got going, and at once, for me, they ceased to exist’. Clearly, we are talking about the difference between analysis and intuition — that is, between the left brain and the right. This, in turn, suggests that the ‘psychic’ is closely related to an artist like Mozart, into whose head tunes kept walking unannounced. (The composer Saint-Saens also said that in order to compose he merely had to listen.) Civilised man (and woman) has developed the left brain until it completely dominates and overawes the right. A ‘psychic’ like Rosalind Heywood is probably closer to our ancestors of ten thousand years ago (or, if Julian Jaynes is correct, much more recently than that).
It is worth looking more closely into the development of Rosalind Heywood’s psychic abilities, because it enables us to see that she is not really so very different from the rest of us, and that therefore the same faculty must lie latent in all of us.
Born into a fairly typical late-Victorian household, she does not seem to have suspected that she was ‘psychic’ until she was nearing adulthood. Before that, she seems to have assumed that it was simply imagination. She writes:
It was soon after our return from India — I was just thirteen — that I realised that in some intangible way I was at times aware of lesser presences in certain places. Some were grim and sad, and I felt that if only I could see them they would be less unnerving. One was in my bedroom in my grandfather’s house which overlooked Dartmoor. By day it was a gay little room, facing south, with a wallpaper festooned with blue ribbons and pink roses. But at night it was a very different place. Then a mysterious invisible Somebody shared it with me — and I didn’t know who that Somebody was … Had the Somebody been mentionable to a grown-up I might have learnt that my mother and aunt had both independently seen the apparition of an old woman standing at the foot of the bed …
Any developing recognition of her psychic abilities was halted abruptly when, at the age of seventeen, she bought at a station bookstall a copy of The Riddle of the Universe by Ernst Haeckel. Haeckel was a materialist philosopher, and The Riddle of the Universe is a brilliantly lucid account of the discoveries of modern science that became an immediate bestseller in the early years of the twentieth century. He studies the evolution of the body, the evolution of the mind, the evolution of the universe, in the light of modern biology and astronomy, and claims to prove that there is no such thing as a personal God, that free will is an illusion, and that life after death is the grossest kind of superstition.
Rosalind Heywood was shattered:
My poor mother! No bomb could have smashed more effectively the framework on which she had so carefully moulded her daughter’s life. Here at last was the truth. There was no God. Beauty was a snare and a delusion, which merely served to conceal that the universe was a soulless mechanism, clanking round and round forever and ever to no purpose at all. That night I stared at the stars from my bedroom window and could almost hear their rusty gear wheels clanking. Gone was any hope of finding that Central Something, and — my all-wise parents lived in a fool’s paradise.
Soon after this, the 1914 war began, and Rosalind Heywood became a nurse. Her first suspicion of extra-sensory perception came when she was sitting in the room of an unconscious woman, reading The Brothers Karamazov. As she read the section in which Ivan has a discussion with the Devil, the sick woman sat up, pointed her finger at the foot of the bed, and proceeded to talk to the Devil. It could have been coincidence, but it seemed oddly like telepathy.
A few weeks later, she sat watching a man who was gravely ill and delirious. He seemed to be unaware of her presence. Suddenly she experienced a kind of inner ‘Order’: ‘Think him quiet.’ Recalling the previous experience of ‘telepathy’, she decided to give it a try. At once, the man fell into a peaceful sleep. When, later, a Staff Nurse woke him up by moving the screens, she ‘thought’ him asleep again. But when the Ward Sister had awakened him for the third time, it no longer worked:
Then, suddenly, the tossing and delirium ceased, he looked at me with quiet, rational eyes — he was obviously an educated man — and said calmly, ‘It’s no use concentrating any longer, Nurse. I shall not be going to sleep again.’ Then the rational man vanished and the agonising delirium began once more. If this is how death comes, I thought, it is even more terrible than I had imagined. Bu
t suddenly his face lit up. ‘It’s Annie!’ he cried, gazing in joyous recognition at someone I could not see. ‘And John!… Oh, the Light!… The Light!…
What Rosalind Heywood has recorded here is, in fact, an extremely common death-bed experience; in 1960, Dr Karlis Osis, of the New York Parapsychology Foundation, sent out ten thousand questionnaires to nurses, asking about their death-bed visions, and discovered that in a large number of cases, the dying believed they saw a deceased relative on the point of death. Sir William Barrett, the founder of the Society for Psychical Research, had already made the same discovery when he was gathering material for his own book Death-bed Visions.
Oddly enough, this experience did nothing to shake the scepticism Rosalind Heywood had imbibed from Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe. Neither did a great many experiences of ‘Orders’, which led her to take a number of apparently irrational decisions. When a soldier was dying of blackwater fever, and had been given up for lost by the doctors, ‘Orders’ told her to ask him what he would like most in all the world. He replied: ‘A red rose, Sister.’ She heard herself promise him one for the next day. It seemed a mad thing to do in a hospital in Macedonia. But the next day she asked the dispatch rider to take a message to GHQ asking for a red rose; back came a whole bunch of them from the garden of a Greek magnate. The dying soldier recovered. When badly wounded men were unable to sleep, ‘Orders’ told her to make her own sedative and to make it as nasty as possible; she made a random mixture of medicines and added a teaspoonful of salt for good measure. It worked perfectly; after that, the men had no problem sleeping. When a drug addict was refusing to take nourishment, ‘Orders’ told her: ‘Nag him! Nag! NAG!’ It was entirely contrary to her instinct, but she obeyed; finally, he groaned: ‘I’ll eat anything if you’ll only go away’, and was soon eating normally again.
