Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  Most of these examples could, of course, be explained in terms of the subconscious mind. But there are others in her book that are harder to explain. She tells how, about to shut up her house for a month to go away for a midsummer holiday, ‘Orders’ told her that the water must be turned off at the main because a pipe was going to burst. When she mentioned this to her husband, he told her all the technical reasons why pipes do not burst in midsummer. Rather than override his objection, she decided to give a spare key to the builder for use when the pipe burst. He also explained why pipes did not burst in July. In due course, the pipe burst and the builder was able to use the key to repair it. Here it is altogether more difficult to explain ‘Orders’ in terms of subconscious insight, particularly in view of her insistence that all such matters as plumbing are a mystery to her.

  Other examples in The Infinite Hive make it seem highly probable that she was exercising a faculty of ‘precognition’, the ability to foresee the future. This is quite clearly a faculty that simply should not exist. For most other so-called psychic faculties — telepathy, clairvoyance, mediumship, psychokinesis — we can advance more-or-less scientific explanations. But for foreknowledge of the future there is no possible explanation; it is simply non-logical and absurd — in short, an impossibility, since the future has not yet arrived. Yet Rosalind Heywood’s book has several examples of foreknowledge of the future, and most of them defy all rational explanation. She tells, for example, of how her husband met an inventor who seemed incapable of marketing his invention; her husband, who was involved in that line of business, offered to do it for him. When he told her about it, she thought it an excellent idea — until her husband mentioned the man’s name. Then she experienced ‘a wave of dread and repulsion’. ‘Don’t, don’t have anything to do with that man.’ Her husband insisted that it was too late to back out of the deal. He went ahead — and in due course, the man swindled them, was arrested, and committed suicide when on bail.

  Her own explanation is that her husband was subconsciously aware that the man was a crook, and that she picked this up telepathically. But since she gives many examples demonstrating her husband’s psychic abilities, it seems odd that he should dismiss her pleas, and insist on entering into a business partnership with a swindler.

  She cites the following example of her husband’s psychic faculty:

  A big limousine ran into our small sports car and forced it on to the pavement up against a lamp post. ‘It’s all right,’ he said placidly, ‘I dreamt this last night. I know what’s wrong. I only have to change the wheel.’ He got out, looked, said, ‘It’s as I thought’, and changed the wheel.

  The commonsense explanation here is coincidence. But this cannot be applied to the examples she cites of the same ability in her younger son. When he came from England to America to join his parents for the summer holidays, he told her that he already knew the village they were in because he had dreamt it. ‘If you do,’ said his mother, ‘lead us down to the sea.’ He led them down to the beach, then threaded his way among hundreds of sun umbrellas to the one they owned. ‘How did you know this was ours?’ she asked. ‘I dreamt the pattern on it.’

  Rosalind Heywood agrees that this might have been telepathy. But what of the following episode:

  One day … I saw my younger son look up the name of a street in the map of London because, so he told me later, he had ‘known’ that when he went out someone was going to ask him where it was and he did not know. This happened as he had foreseen within an hour.

  Here, if we rule out the very far-fetched explanation of coincidence, or some complex telepathy with a total stranger, the only other explanation seems to be that in some odd sense, the event her son ‘precognised’ had already taken place, and he was somehow receiving a ‘memory of the future’. In that case, the explanation of her sudden foreboding when her husband mentioned the name of the swindler was that she somehow ‘recognised’ it as that of a man who had already swindled them. Obviously, this totally contradicts our notion of time as something that flows only one way. But then, the experiences of psychics often seem to contradict our orderly notions of space as well. One of the basic laws of our world is that no one can be in two different places at the same time. Rosalind Heywood was also able to contradict this from personal experience:

  One hot night my husband was peacefully sleeping while I wriggled, restless and wide awake, at his side in the great carved bed. At last the excessive peace became unbearable. ‘I can’t stand it,’ I thought, ‘I shall wake him up to make love to me.’

  Before I could carry out this egoistic idea I did something very odd — I split in two. One Me in its pink nightie continued to toss self-centredly against the embroidered pillows, but another, clad in a long, very white, hooded garment, was now standing, calm, immobile and impersonally outward-looking, at the foot of the bed. This White Me seemed just as actual as Pink Me and I was equally conscious in both places at the same time. I vividly remember myself as White Me looking down and observing the carved end of the bed in front of me and also thinking what a silly fool Pink Me looked, tossing in that petulant way against the pillows. ‘You’re behaving disgracefully’, said White Me to Pink Me with cold contempt. ‘Don’t be so selfish, you know he’s dog-tired.’

  Pink Me was a totally self-regarding little animal, entirely composed of ‘appetites’, and she cared not at all whether her unfortunate husband was tired or not. ‘I shall do what I like,’ she retorted furiously, ‘and you can’t stop me, you pious white prig!’ She was particularly furious because she knew very well that White Me was the stronger and could stop her.

  A moment or two later — I felt no transition — White Me was once more imprisoned with Pink Me in one body, and there they have dwelt as oil and water ever since. It is only quite lately that I have become aware, though I seldom remember it, that I can deliberately identify myself with White Me and watch without feeling them — that is the point — the desires and repulsions that must inevitably toss all Pink Mes around.

  And in case the reader assumes this experience to be symbolic rather than real, she goes on to cite a case of a woman who had ‘split’ after the birth of a baby. One of her continued to lie in the bed while the other stood by its side. When questioned about the attitude of these two ‘selves’ to one another, she replied: ‘The Me outside looked on the Me in bed with profound contempt devoid of all feeling.’

  Experiences like these did nothing to shake Rosalind Heywood’s basic agnosticism, imbibed from Haeckel; in a sense, there is no reason why they should. The existence of telepathy and clairvoyance is not in itself a contradiction of the ‘materialist’ viewpoint. Even experiences of precognition constitute no challenge to materialism. It may prove that our view of time as a one-way street is somehow mistaken; but the truth about time may be as logical and scientific as our present notions about it.

  What finally undermined Rosalind Heywood’s agnosticism were two experiences of apparent contact with the dead. The first took place in Washington DC in the 1930s. Rosalind Heywood’s husband Frank was in the diplomatic service there. At parties they often met an attractive woman called Julia. One day, she suddenly asked Rosalind Heywood to read her hands — she dabbled in palmistry. As she took Julia’s hands, she found herself saying gravely: ‘You will never find what you are looking for in this world, will you?’ She replied, just as gravely: ‘No.’

  Some weeks later, Julia presented Rosalind Heywood with a snapshot of herself; she was just about to set out for a trip to Peru. ‘Orders’ told Rosalind Heywood that this was important; she accepted the photograph. On the journey to Peru, the plane crashed in the Andes and there were no survivors.

  She found that Julia’s name was stuck in her head, being repeated over and over again. Two days later, she wrote a letter of condolence to Julia’s mother, then lay down on a settee to rest. A Viennese woodcut suddenly fell off the wall on to the floor. The woodcut was undamaged; its cord was intact; so was the nail on the wall.
‘I was standing by my desk trying to puzzle out this conundrum when my eye caught the letter to Julia’s mother, and at that moment I heard Julia speak. She spoke in no uncertain terms. ‘Don’t send that silly letter’, she said. ‘Go to my mother now, straightaway, and tell her to stop all this ridiculous mourning at once. I’m very happy and I can’t stand it’

  She experienced an understandable hesitancy; if, as the wife of a British diplomat, she went around delivering messages from the dead, she might get a reputation for eccentricity. ‘The more I hesitated, the more insistent “Julia” became …’ At last:

  feeling indeed every kind of fool, I got out my car and went. What made the situation yet more embarrassing was that at the time I knew nothing of the conventions of Americans from the Southern States in the face of death, and ignorantly assumed that Julia’s mother would behave like mine in similar circumstances, wear her ordinary clothes, and hide her grief under a mask of frozen normality. If this were so, to barge in and ask her to stop an excessive display of mourning seemed both pointless and rude. However, on arrival at her house, I found all the blinds down and in the hall a covey of melancholy women, talking in whispers and looking like crows. ‘May I see Mrs Howard?’ I asked them.

  They looked shocked. ‘Certainly not’, they said. ‘She’s in bed mourning.’

  That settled it. ‘I must see her’, I insisted, and after much protest they took me up to her room. There, indeed, was the poor woman, alone, in the dark, in bed. Intensely embarrassed, for I supposed this was by her own choice, I got out my message, expecting to be thrown out as mad or impertinent. But her face lit up. ‘I knew it,’ she cried, ‘I knew she’d hate it, and I didn’t want it. I shall get up and stop it at once!’

  On me the effect of her response was curious. From that moment all sense of Julia’s presence vanished; it was as if, content, she had gone off at once on her own affairs, and from then on I thought no more of her than was normal.

  Rosalind Heywood’s second experience of ‘contact with the dead’ occurred some twenty years later, in London. An old friend, Vivian Usborne, had died after a long illness. Towards the end, he expressed a certain amount of bitterness at the idea that death snuffs out man like a candle and leaves nothing behind.

  About ten days later I went early one morning to get a painting by him which had been given to me. It is perhaps relevant that I was hastening to another appointment in which I was emotionally involved and felt no nostalgic longing for Vivian. As I hurried into his room to fetch the picture I was shocked by a sickening blast of what I have come to call the smell of death. I am never quite sure whether this is physical or what a sensitive would call borderline — though he would be hard put to tell an investigator what he meant by that. Then, in staggering contrast … I ran slap into ‘Vivian’ himself, most joyfully and most vividly alive. I pulled up sharply as one would on running into a friend in the street, and then came an experience which is extremely hard to describe without sounding either flat and meaningless or over-dramatic. As with ‘Julia’, I felt ‘Vivian’ communicate inside my mind, and I shut my eyes and stood very still to attend better. He conveyed in some fashion so intimate that the best word seems to be communion, pretentious though that sounds, that he had been entirely mistaken in expecting extinction at death. On the contrary, he now had scope, freedom and opportunity beyond his wildest dreams. The emphasis was not merely on being alive but on this magnificent expansion of opportunity …

  For a few moments I stood very still, acutely aware of the striking contrast between the smell of death and ‘Vivian’ ’s intensity of life — it was as if they were in a different order of things — and then I remembered my duty and ‘said’ to him, ‘This is wonderful, but you’ve given me no evidence. What can I say to the SPR?’

  (I hope that my attempt to describe the immediacy of the purported Julia’s communication with me will have made it clear that ‘said’ is far too remote a word to use for this intimate kind of united awareness. It feels, as Gilbert Murray said of his own telepathic experience, like a kind of co-sensitivity.)

  ‘Vivian’ ’s response to my question was emphatic and immediate. ‘I cannot give you evidence. You have no concepts for these conditions. I can only give you poetic images.’

  At that, far, far above me, I saw — with the inner eye — an immense pair of white wings flying in a limitless blue sky. Though at first an image of such Victorian obviousness seems absurd, it was in fact an entirely apt expression of the scope, opportunity and freedom into which for a few moments I felt caught up. But it was only for a few moments. I quickly became aware that I could not hold the absorbed state which contact with ‘Vivian’ demanded, and very soon had to say reluctantly, ‘Goodbye, I must drop now.’

  Then I dropped — down to the empty room and the smell of death.

  She goes on to add that she has had several other experiences of contact with the dead, but that they were more fleeting than the contacts with ‘Julia’ and ‘Vivian’, and that it would be monotonous to describe them. She adds:

  They all had one of two things in common, either a sense of contemporary purpose on the part of the dead, or an urge to action on my part, and in this they differed from my experience of the phenomenon known as haunting, in which, whatever causes it, the sense of urgency is usually lacking.

  In other words, these experiences of contact with the recently dead were due to a desire on the part of the deceased to ‘get in touch’. Rosalind Heywood merely happened to be ‘open’ enough for them to communicate.

  I have considered her experiences at some length because it is important to realise that the experiences of a clairvoyant are not a series of weid occurrences that interrupt the normal flow of everyday life, but a part of its pattern, its fundamental texture. In fact, as a ‘psychic’, Rosalind Heywood is not particularly gifted. On the scale of a Daniel Dunglas Home or Eusapia Palladino — or even of a Gerard Croiset or Robert Cracknell — she hardly rates at all. She could be described as ‘mildly psychic’, which is why she forms such an excellent subject for study. She is an ordinary housewife, a typical upper-middle-class Edwardian lady who shares most of the values of her class, and thinks that being psychic is slightly discreditable. This is why she is always looking for other explanations for her experiences — so that, for example, when she feels foreboding at hearing the name of the swindler, she is inclined to wonder if it is some form of telepathy with her husband. She even wonders whether, as primitives believe, the name itself could have linked her with the swindler telepathically — then has to regretfully admit that this is impossible because it was an assumed name. She is unwilling to accept the obvious — if equally baffling — explanation that she recognised the swindler’s name because, in some sense, the fraud had ‘already happened’. That is to say, her experience was an example of what Professor Joad once called ‘the undoubted queerness of time’. And in spite of her own abundant experience of ‘clairvoyance’, Rosalind Heywood was the sort of person who was unwilling to believe in the ‘undoubted queerness’ of anything. She had a strong Victorian prejudice in favour of order and tidiness.

  There is, of course, one other possible explanation of her ‘precognition’ — which she is equally unwilling to entertain: that the information came to her from a ‘spirit’. Yet she has just told an anecdote that brings her face to face with that possibility. In the early days of the Second World War, she tried using an ouija board, consisting of a pointer, on which the operator rested his fingers, and a semicircle of cards containing letters of the alphabet. When a doctor friend asked her to demonstrate the board, she decided to rule out the possibility that her unconscious mind was dictating the message by sitting on the floor under the table, with her fingers resting on the pointer above her head. The doctor noted down the message, and told her that someone called George had warned Frank to drive with exaggerated care for the next two days. Frank was Rosalind Heywood’s husband, and his brother George had been killed not long before. The do
ctor was not even aware that Frank was his hostess’s husband. At this time, she explains, she was extremely sceptical about the possibility of life after death (in spite of the experience in Washington with ‘Julia’ — another example of her reluctance to join the ranks of the ‘believers’), and was inclined to wonder if her own unconscious mind was pulling her leg. With considerable embarrassment, she passed on the message to her husband. The next day he told her: ‘If I hadn’t driven with extreme care, as you asked me to, I should have had no less than three major accidents today.’

  But then, although the ‘spirit’ explanation might provide an acceptable alternative to precognition in the case of the swindler — presumably a friendly spirit would know he was a swindler — it still fails to explain how brother George knew in advance that Frank was in danger of having three car accidents during the next forty-eight hours. Here, as in the case of her youngest son’s foreknowledge that someone was going to ask him to find a certain street, we have to fall back on Joad’s ‘undoubted queerness of time’.

  Is it possible, considering Rosalind Heywood’s experience as a whole, to discern some pattern that might help to provide a basic explanation?