Afterlife (38 page)

The result of this experience was a ‘mental rebirth’.
‘My mental energies seemed extended and refined by a new consciousness
and I determined to study the phenomena that I had experienced, in order to try to discover what other people experienced when apparently on the threshold of death.’ The work of Ring and Moody was available to her, and she began her own research into the near-death experience in England.
And when Ring read the typescript of her book
Return from Death
, he felt much as Elizabeth Kübler-Ross felt on reading Moody’s
Life After Life:
that, without realising it, they had been writing the same book.
^*
And they had arrived independently at the same conclusion: that the real importance of the near-death experience is its after-effect on those who have been through it.
And in her conclusion to her book, Margot Grey writes:

It would be a mistake to assume that what Margot Grey is saying is that we would all be better off dead.
The last part of her book makes it clear that she feels the real importance of the NDE to be its effect on the lives of those who have been through it.
Madame Blavatsky once said that although our earth-realism is the ‘solidest’ and most difficult of all the worlds, it also offers us the most opportunity.
This again is a thread that runs throughout world mysticism: the notion that physical life on earth is not some kind of purgatory, to be patiently endured until we can escape to a higher realm, but some kind of unique opportunity.
The main problem of human beings is that ‘confinement-in-the-present’ keeps us in a state allied to sleep or hypnosis, in which we accomplish nothing whatever because we have no idea of what we ought to be doing.
The mystical experience and
the ‘core experience’ both seem to bring a flash of insight into ‘what it is all about’.
This is the insight that emerges clearly from all the writers on the near-death experience, and which Margot Grey states with more emphasis than most.

It could be said, then, that the study of the near-death experience is the most important breakthrough in psychical research since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research more than a century ago.
To the objection that the NDE has nothing to do with psychical research, we can only reply that it seems to have a great deal to do with it.
The SPR originated in a starlit walk during which Myers asked Sidgwick:

With admirable perseverence, the SPR compiled dossiers on hallucinations, phantasms of the living, apparitions of the dead, out-of-the-body experiences, precognitions and seance phenomena.
Sceptics such as Hyslop, Lodge, Barrett and Conan Doyle slowly became converted to the belief in ‘survival’.
Yet there was never a case that was so overwhelmingly convincing that it could be used to confound the sceptics.
The apparition of Samuel Bull
^*
seems to be as well attested as a case can be — except that it was all over just before the SPR arrived on the scene.
The Cross Correspondences is a watertight case for survival — but is so long and complicated that no sceptic would waste his time on it.
Drayton Thomas’s
Life Beyond Death
will convince any unprejudiced reader that his father and sister communicated with him after death; but the descriptions of ‘the world beyond’ remain an embarrassing stumbling block.
So as far as solving ‘the riddle of the Universe’ was concerned, the SPR was a failure.
It provided mountains of data, but no inspiration.

The study of near-death experiences changed all that.
From the scientific point of view it may be irrelevant that
Life after Life
became a bestseller.
Yet it meant that one form of psychical research had made the kind of wide general impact the founders of the SPR had dreamed about.
Moreover, NDEs are not a rarity, like poltergeist phenomena, nor a specialised subject that can only be studied under ‘test conditions’.
Most people probably have half a dozen acquaintances who have had near-death experiences and can verify some aspect of the ‘core experience’.
On the day I began writing this book, I bumped into the wife of a friend on my afternoon walk, and mentioned that I was writing about life after death; she immediately told me about her own near-death experience, which might have come straight out of Moody.
In the middle of the night, feeling very ill with a serious internal complaint, she went downstairs and sat in an armchair feeling sick and exhausted.
Her temperature rose, and she felt consciousness slipping away.
Then she found herself being sucked into a long tunnel with a light at the end.
She experienced a sense of total relaxation and peace, and all her fear of death vanished.
Totally reconciled to the idea of dying, it suddenly struck her that her husband and son would find her body in the chair the next morning; she made an effort to return to her body, and then found herself back in the chair, with her temperature normal again.
The experience convinced her that she need never be afraid of death, and she remarked that it had given her the courage to live as well as to die.
Another local resident described how, after a serious heart attack, he had left his body, and found the room full of a blinding light.
A voice asked him: ‘Do you want to live?’, and when he replied yes, he opened his eyes to find his mother — convinced he was dead — by his bedside.
Elsewhere,
^*
I have described my own mother’s near-death experience when in hospital suffering from peritonitis.
She also entered a state of relaxation and happiness about the prospect of death, then thought that a man dressed in white ‘like a biblical character’ stood by the side of her bed and read to her from a scroll.
He ended by telling her that she could not die yet because she was ‘needed here’.
(This proved to be correct; she had to nurse my father through years of cancer.) She insisted that the experience was not at all dream-like.

Does the evidence of the near-death experience provide that ‘valid knowledge of the World Unseen’ that Myers and Sidgwick hoped to uncover?
Regrettably, no.
It is personally convincing;
it brings the individual an overwhelming sense of insight into the riddle of the Universe.
But as evidence of life after death it is worthless.
It is true that thousands of people, of all nationalities and all religious affiliations, have testified to the reality of the ‘core experience’.
But it could still be some defence mechanism of the brain when confronting death, perhaps the release of an enkephalin, one of the brain’s natural anaesthetics …

Now as we have noted, this also happens to be one of the most basic objections to the whole idea of survival.
The sceptics have always insisted that it is merely a defence against our fear of the unknown.
This was fully recognised by the original members of the SPR.
When they could safely dismiss the idea of fraud or faulty observation, they asked whether the phenomena could be explained in terms of telepathy or clairvoyance or the activities of the ‘subliminal mind’.
Thomson Jay Hudson explained practically all paranormal phenomena as the activities of the subliminal mind.
We have seen that, in fact, there have been a number of cases — the Cross Correspondences, the Chaffin will case, the red scratch case, the red pyjamas case, the Drayton Thomas case, and perhaps a dozen others — where most of these explanations can be ruled out.
And these are backed by literally thousands of cases that, while not ‘watertight’, still strongly suggest the persistence of the personality beyond death.
Anyone who is willing to consider this evidence without bias — even if he finds it ‘logically’ unacceptable — is bound to admit that it points towards the reality of ‘survival’.

If we can accept this kind of evidence, then there seems to be no sound reason for rejecting the evidence of the near-death experience, for the two seem to point towards the same conclusion: that the physical body is inhabited by another kind of body that can survive death.
The near-death experience proves nothing in itself, but when backed up by the testimony of psychical research, it becomes strong supportive evidence.

It is important to make this distinction between primary and supportive evidence; the failure to grasp it has led to much of the hostility to psychical research.
When Swedenborg gave the queen of Sweden a message from her dead brother, or when he told the wife of the Dutch ambassador about the secret drawer with the receipt, this was primary evidence — evidence that he was not merely a religious crank suffering from delusions.
Swedenborg would insist that his writings on the scriptures are
strong supportive evidence of his ‘spiritual insight’, but the rest of us may not agree.
We can reject his scriptual discourses without rejecting belief in his psychic powers.
We may go further and, like Wilson Van Dusen, believe that his insight into the realm of ‘spirits’ was valid.
Or we may, like Steiner, feel that although he possessed genuine mediumistic powers, he somehow imposed his own rigid scientific outlook on his ‘spiritual perceptions’ and falsified them by dragging them down to a material level: a version of what Whitehead calls ‘the fallacy of misplaced concreteness’.
In short, we do not have to accept Swedenborg lock, stock and barrel.
The sensible thing is to accept the ‘primary evidence’, and then decide through commonsense how much of the supportive evidence is acceptable.

Myers’s
Human Personality
is an attempt to present primary evidence for various paranormal faculties.
The Cross Correspondences provide some evidence that Myers survived death, but we may or may not feel that this supports the arguments of
Human Personality
.
And if we decide that the Cross Correspondences
are
primary evidence for survival, we may still feel that the ‘Myers’ of the Geraldine Cummins scripts is an impostor, or a manifestation of her unconscious mind.
Again,
we
decide how much supportive evidence we can accept.
A convinced Spiritualist will be able to swallow it all, including Raymond Lodge’s heavenly laboratories for making whisky and cigars.
We are under no compulsion to do so.
But if we are open minded, we shall agree that the sheer mass of
primary
evidence makes it unlikely that this is all wishful thinking.
This amounts to the kind of evidence scientists demand when investigating the laws of nature.
Like the evidence they try to gather in the laboratory or the observatory, it tends to form a basic pattern.
The next task is to study that pattern, and then look carefully at the vast piles of supporting evidence, and decide how much of it fits the jigsaw puzzle.
This is a question of personal choice; you can accept or reject as you feel inclined.
But those who reject the primary evidence lay themselves open to a charge of wilful blindness or intellectual laziness.

What are the basic elements of this overall pattern?

The fundamental assumption is that the human being is not some kind of complex robot or computer, who works entirely on impulses that flow from the environment.
In
The Selfish Gene
,
the biologist Richard Dawkins explains how he thinks life began.
First, the action of sunlight on various gases created the basic building blocks of life, the amino acids.
The result was a ‘primeval soup’.
This soup was, of course, ‘dead’.
Then, at a certain point, ordinary chemical — and physical — reactions produced a ‘particularly remarkable molecule’, the replicator molecule, which could reproduce itself.
He agrees that this is an unlikely accident to happen — as unlikely as a man winning the first prize on the football pools.
But if a man lived for millions of years, he would probably win several first prizes.
So says Dawkins, the replicator molecule came into existence.
The world finally became full of identical copies.
But the copying process is not perfect; mistakes will happen.
As a result, some replicators become less stable than others, and less fecund.
Some become more stable and more fecund …