Afterlife (5 page)
Authors: Colin Wilson
Our first reaction to this is that it reveals a certain naivety.
We are aware of personality as something that changes and develops over the course of a lifetime.
H.
G.
Wells points out that every single cell in our body changes every seven years, so a man of forty is totally different from the same man at thirty or fifty.
Moreover, personality can alter through some accident; for example, people who have received violent blows on the head may seem to turn into another personality.
One leading investigator of the paranormal, Professor John Taylor, writes in
The Shape of Minds to Come:
‘We recognise personality as a summation of the different contributions to behaviour from the various control units of the brain.’ So to assume that the personality can survive death is a little like assuming that a house will somehow go on existing after it has been demolished, or that the ‘spirit’ of a ship will live on after it has been dismantled in the breaker’s yard.
My personality wilts visibly when I get tired, and it goes out like a light when I fall asleep.
So the very idea of its surviving death seems a logical absurdity.
All these objections were beautifully summarised in an article Bertrand Russell wrote in the 1930s on ‘Do We Survive Death?’.
*
A person, he says, is simply a series of mental occurences and habits, and if we believe in life after death, we must believe that the memories and habits that constitute the person will somehow continue to exist.
This leads him to state flatly: ‘It is not rational arguments, but emotions, that cause belief in a future life.’ He goes on to say that one feeling that encourages the belief in survival is admiration for the excellence of man.
He quotes the Bishop of Birmingham on the subject.
Man knows right and wrong.
He can build Westminster Abbey.
He can make an aeroplane.
He can calculate the distance to the sun.
So how can we believe that he will perish utterly at death?
This, says Russell (in effect), is emotional rubbish, the same kind of rubbish that stood in the way of Galileo and Newton and other great scientists when they wanted to investigate the
universe.
People like the Bishop of Birmingham said that the planets must move in circles, because the circle is the most perfect curve, and that all species must be immutable because God would not bother to create something that was imperfect.… And they were, of course, quite wrong.
Anyway, says Russell, it is only when we think abstractly that we have a high opinion of man.
Civilised states spend half their revenue on murdering one another.
Think of all the horrors that human beings have committed on one another … Surely if our world is the outcome of deliberate purpose, the purpose must have been that of a fiend?
These last arguments are actually as emotional and illogical as those Russell attributes to the Bishop.
The heart of his argument lies in his assertion that a person is simply a series of mental occurrences and habits.
And my own experience contradicts this.
I feel a strong conviction that the being who looks out from behind my eyes is the same person as the baby who opened his eyes on the world fifty-odd years ago.
It is true that he drove a Mini, and I drive a rather heavy saloon model.
It is also true that I have almost entirely forgotten what it felt like to be that baby.
All the same, I feel that we are fundamentally the same person.
Moreover, I have noticed that my own children began to reveal their personalities when they were very small indeed — so small that they could do little but drink milk and sleep.
If John Taylor and Bertrand Russell are correct, and personality has its source in the control units of the brain, then we must all be born with remarkably individual control units.
But we could go on arguing like this until the cows come home.
Nothing will convince Russell that human beings are more than a series of mental occurences and habits, and nothing will convince the Bishop that we are not immortal souls.
Let us, instead, turn to a different type of testimony: that which claims to be personal experience.
The trouble with such stories is that most of them are uncheckable, so whether you can accept them or not depends on your credulity threshold — or what Renée Haynes called the ‘boggle threshold’.
What it boils down to, eventually, is how far we feel we can trust the individual concerned.
Consider, for example, the following story told by the well-known playwright Alfred Sutro, in his reminiscences
Celebrities and Simple Souls
(1933).
Sutro says that he has only
had one single psychic experience in his whole life.
He was being driven along a country road by his chauffeur when he thought he heard the wail of a child.
He asked the chauffeur to stop.
The man said he could hear nothing.
But Sutro followed the sound behind some trees, and down a slope to a river bank.
There he found a pretty child of three or four, crying and sobbing.
She was soaking wet, and had obviously fallen into the water.
He carried her back to the car, but was unable to make her stop crying long enough to tell him what had happened.
He asked her where she lived, and pointed ahead; the girl nodded, so the chauffeur drove on.
Not far away they came to a gate, and the girl signalled towards it.
They drove along a drive to the front door of a ‘largish house’.
As the car pulled up a man and woman rushed out to meet Sutro.
‘Have you any news of the child?’ ‘She’s in the car’, said Sutro, and went back to it.
But the car was empty.
‘Where’s the little girl?’ he asked the chauffeur, but the man looked blank.
‘The child I brought to the car.’ ‘You didn’t bring any child into the car.’
They drove back to the river bank; the body of the child was lying in a few feet of water …
An extraordinary story, certainly one which most people would dismiss as preposterous.
But there is a certain amount of circumstantial evidence in its favour.
Sutro was a famous playwright of his time, and would presumably not tell lies for the fun of it.
And the fact that it was his only psychic experience also suggests that it was genuine.
It was not.
Sutro states that he has told the story to various people who dabble in the psychic and occult, and has been offered various explanations.
But he has never been offered the true one, which is that he has made it up.
It was evidently intended to demonstrate the gullibility of people who believe in life after death …
Once we know that, we can begin to see the weaknesses in the story.
Would a man driving in a car hear the crying of a child?
And even if he did, would he bother to stop to investigate — crying children are not all that rare.
Would the chauffeur not have asked him what on earth he was doing, as he talked to the empty seat next to him and asked it where it lived?
Would he have got out of the car at the front door, leaving the child behind in the car?
These are the sort of questions we have to ask of any ‘supernatural’ experience if we wish to avoid being taken in.
And this was recognised by the early investigators of the Society for
Psychical Research (SPR), when it was formed in 1882.
They saw that it was necessary to get the corroboration of as many people as possible, and to get them to make sworn statements.
Even that, of course, would not guarantee that a story was not bogus.
But in a few cases, the circumstantial evidence and the corroboration of witnesses would combine to make this highly unlikely.
One such story is told in the
Proceedings
of the SPR, Volume 8, for 1892, and it can serve as an example of a story that bears all the hallmarks of truth.
It was told by the Rev.
J.
L.
Bertrand, the Protestant pastor of Neuilly-sur-Seine, and corroborated by the other people concerned.
Bertrand was in Switzerland, leading a party of young men in the ascent of a mountain called the Titlis.
When they were not far from the summit, Bertrand felt too tired to go on, so he asked the rest of the party — led by a guide — to go on without him, and pick him up on their way down.
I sat down, my legs hanging over a dangerous slope or precipice, my back leaning on a rock as big as an armchair.
I chose that brink because there was no snow, and because I could face better the magnificent panorama of the Alpes Bernoises.
I at once remembered that in my pocket there were two cigars, and put one between my teeth, lighted a match and considered myself the happiest of men.
Suddenly I felt as if thunderstruck by apoplexy, and though the match burned my fingers, I could not throw it down.
My head was perfectly clear and healthy, but my body was as powerless and motionless as a rock.
There was for me no hesitation.
‘This’, I thought, ‘
is the sleep of the snows!
If I move I shall roll down in the abyss; if I do not move I shall be a dead man in twenty-five or thirty minutes.’ A kind of prayer was sent to God, and then I resolved to study quietly the progress of death.
My feet and hands were first frozen, and little by little death reached my knees and elbows.
The sensation was not painful, and my mind felt quite easy.
But when death had been all over my body my head became unbearably cold, and it seemed to me that concave pincers squeezed my heart, so as to extract my life.
I never felt such an acute pain, but it lasted only a second or a minute, and my life went out.
‘Well’, thought I, ‘at last I am what they call a dead man, and here I am, a ball of air in the air, a captive balloon still attached to earth by
a kind of elastic string
, and going up and always up.
How strange!
I see better than ever, and I am dead … Where is my last body?’ Looking down, I was astounded to recognise my own envelope.
‘Strange’, said I to myself.
‘There is the corpse in which I lived and which I called
me
, as if the coat were the body, as if the body were the soul!
What a horrid thing is that body — deadly pale, with a yellowish-blue
colour, holding a cigar in its mouth and a match in its two burned fingers.
Well, I hope that you shall never smoke again, dirty rag!
Ah!
if only I had a hand and scissors to cut the thread which ties me still to it!
When my companions return they will look at that and exclaim, “The Professor is dead.” Poor young friends!
They do not know that I never was as alive as I am, and the proof is that I see the guide going up rather by the right, when he promised me to go by the left; W— was to be the last one on the rope, and he is neither the first nor the last, but alone, away from the rope.
Now the guide thinks that I do not see him because he hides himself behind the young men whilst drinking at my bottle of Madeira.
Well, go on, poor man, I hope that my body will never drink of it again.
Ah!
there he is stealing a leg of chicken.
Go on, old fellow, eat the whole of the chicken if you choose, for I hope that my miserable corpse will never eat or drink again.’ I felt neither surprise nor vexation; I simply stated the facts with indifference.
‘Hullo!’ said I, ‘there is my wife going to Lucerne, and she told me that she would not leave before tomorrow, or after tomorrow … They are five before the hotel at Lungern.
Well, wife, I am a dead man.
Goodbye.’ … My only regret was that I could not cut the string.
In vain I travelled through so beautiful worlds that earth became insignificant.
I had only two wishes: the certitude of not returning to earth, and the discovery of my next glorious body, without which I felt powerless.
I could not be happy because the thread, though thinner than ever, was not cut, and the wished-for body was still invisible to my searching looks.
Suddenly a shock stopped my ascension, and I felt that somebody was pulling and pulling the balloon down.
My grief was measureless.
The fact was that … our guide had discovered and administered to my body the well-known remedy, rubbing with snow … Here is for me an obscurity.
I remember only that all seemed to me confusion and chaos, and I felt disdain for the guide who, expecting a good reward, tried to make me understand that he had done wonders … I never felt a more violent irritation.
At last I could say to my poor guide, ‘Because you are a fool you take me for a fool, whilst my body alone is sick.
Ah!
if you had simply cut the string.’
‘The string?
What string?
You were nearly dead.’
‘Dead!
I was less dead than you are now, and the proof is that I saw you going up the Titlis by the right, whilst you promised me to go by the left.’
The man staggered before replying, ‘Because the snow was soft and there was no danger of slipping.’
‘You say that because you thought me far away.
You went up by the right, and allowed two young men to put aside the rope.
Who is a fool?
You — not I.
Now show me my bottle of Madeira and we will see if it is full.’
‘The blow was such that his hands left my body and he fell down, saying, evidently to himself, ‘Did he follow us?
No, we should have seen him.
Could he see through the mountain?
Is his body dead, and does his ghost reproach me for what I did?’
‘Oh’, said I brutally, ‘you may fall down and stare at me as much as you please, and give your poor explanations, but you cannot prove that my chicken has two legs because you stole one.’
This was too much for the good man.
He got up, emptied his knapsack while muttering a kind of confession, and then fled.