Afterlife

  After more talk, I asked her if she could tell me anything about the nature of poltergeists. ‘I will explain’ said ‘Helen’ magisterially. But she did not explain. Instead, she told us that poltergeists had never harmed anyone, and that there was no need to be afraid of them. ‘The living can do you far more harm than the dead …’ And for the next quarter of an hour or so, she rambled on, saying nothing in particular — certainly nothing about the nature of poltergeists. It became clear that she either knew nothing about poltergeists, or preferred to keep it to herself. I was not sorry when Bill announced it was time for another break. By this time, my tape had run out.

  Bill had told me that Sir Oliver Lodge’s son Raymond usually appeared at their seances, so I asked whether I might meet him. In fact, I had already listened to a recording of an earlier seance with ‘Raymond’. Eventually, after more conversation, ‘Raymond’ arrived, and introduced himself to me. It was at this point that my vague doubts began to become insistent. This ‘Raymond’ sounded nothing like the voice I had heard on tape. He spoke in rather a slow voice, with an upper-class accent, and a slightly feminine intonation, like Ella Shields as ‘Burlington Bertie’.

  I asked him if it was true that spirits could see in the dark, and he confirmed this — in fact, told me that when a friend of mine from the Society for Psychical Research had attended one of Martha’s seances, he had astonished him by telling him how many fingers he was holding up. He added that the room had been full of wires at the time, and that the spirits had proved their ability to see in the dark by avoiding them.

  This seemed an invitation, so I asked ‘Raymond’ whether he could tell me what expression I was wearing on my face at the moment. I pulled a horribly distorted face and thrust out my lips. ‘Raymond’ asked hesitantly: ‘You mean if you’ve got your mouth open, or something?’ And quite suddenly, I knew beyond all possibility of doubt that ‘Raymond’ could not see in the dark. I said yes, that was what I meant. ‘Raymond’ replied promptly that ‘he didn’t do that any more’. Why not? I asked, and he explained that it convinced no one. ‘But it would convince me’, I told him. ‘For example, if you could tell me how many fingers I am now holding up.’ I held up two fingers. ‘We don’t do that any more’, said ‘Raymond’ irritably. ‘Why not? Wouldn’t you like to convince me?’ ‘Raymond’ explained that if I left the house, and stated in print that ‘Raymond’ had been able to count my fingers, no one would accept this as proof. They would accuse Martha of using infra-red light or something of the sort. I explained again that it was not a question of convincing other people, but of convincing me. If he could tell me how many fingers I was holding up, I would accept that he was a spirit. If not, I wouldn’t.

  At this, ‘Raymond’ became very waspish. They had already given me all the evidence I should need, he said. They had allowed me to touch the spirits, and to see them by the light of the torch. I pointed out that the torch showed nothing that could be regarded as evidence — not even whether Martha was still sitting in her armchair. And while it was true that someone had taken my hand and allowed me to touch her arm, I could certainly not swear that it was not Martha herself …

  It became very clear that seventy years in the spirit world had not eliminated ‘Raymond’ ’s ordinary human characteristics; it was obvious that he was finding it hard to control his temper. They had given me proof, he insisted. That should be enough. And I insisted that he only had to tell me how many fingers I was holding up to remove all my doubts. ‘We don’t do that kind of thing any more …’ I noticed that as he became angry, the voice seemed to become more feminine.

  It seemed pointless to continue, and I said so. The music was played, and the lights turned on. It was a very awkward moment. I was as certain as I could reasonably be that ‘Raymond’ was a fraud, and it seemed to follow that the whole seance had been a fake. Martha woke up sleepily and asked what had happened; Bill explained that ‘Raymond’ and I had a disagreement. I thanked them and took my leave quickly, anxious to avoid further embarrassment.

  As soon as I arrived home, I wrote to Leonard Boucher in Zimbabwe, and asked him whether Helen Duncan had known him as ‘Len’, and whether he had seen her in Portsmouth. His reply, when it came, was much as I expected. They had been on formal terms — no first names. (In any case, I had never heard anyone call him Len; it was always Leonard.) And he had not seen her in Portsmouth but in Scotland …

  The correspondent who had first told me about Martha was furious when I sent him my report on the seance. He had no doubt whatever that she was genuine, and if I disagreed, then it must be because I had joined the ranks of the wilfully blind. I explained that I was not certain that Martha was a fraud, but that I was a hundred per cent certain that ‘Raymond’ was. This failed to mollify him. Nothing would convince him that I had not gone over to the ‘enemy’.

  The whole episode only served to underline what I had known all along: that ‘communications’ with alleged spirits can teach us nothing about the nature of reality. And the basic task of human beings is to learn about the nature of reality. Even if ‘Raymond’ had been able to count my fingers and read the expression on my face — even if he had been able to read my mind — it would have made no real difference. It would merely have confirmed what I already believe to be true: that such things are possible. But when I listen to the tape recording of that seance, I am seized by an uncontrollable desire to yawn, and by the conviction that ‘spirits’ have nothing to add to the sum total of human thought: even genuine ones.

  What, then, do I believe can be learned from the evidence of psychical research?

  I would suggest that one of its most important insights concerns the personality. We all take personality for granted. I am I, and that is all there is to it. Cases of multiple personality reveal that the truth is infinitely more complex. If I allow myself to become completely defeated by life, I may develop a subsidiary personality that can cope with its problems. ‘Christine Beauchamp’ (Clara Fowler) was timid and fearful, so the cheerful and mischievous ‘Sally’ took over. Louis Vivé was passive and apathetic, so a more aggressive and assertive Louis took over. Billy Milligan was about to commit suicide by jumping off the school roof when a sub-personality displaced him and took over. The obvious deduction is that we already contain many potential personalities, all, so to speak, waiting in the wings and ready to be activated. But in normal, healthy people, they blend with the basic personality without disrupting it. We meet someone we haven’t seen for two years, and realise that he had become ‘another person’, more confident and efficient. We do not feel that he had been ‘taken over’ by a stronger personality; only that he has become more himself. Elsewhere* I have even suggested that every human being contains a whole ladder or hierarchy of ‘selves’. At the bottom rung there is the baby who opens his eyes on a strange world, then the child who begins to develop a mind of his own at about the age of three, then the first ‘completed’ personality at the age of seven, then the adolescent who develops new sexual and emotional potentials, then the young adult who integrates all the previous levels. But this is not the end of development. In ‘great men’ we can easily trace the development of new levels — so that, for example, we speak of the various ‘periods’ of a Shakespeare or Beethoven. But we can also see plainly that even the Shakespeares and Beethovens were incomplete human beings; if they had lived longer and continued to struggle they might have developed to still higher levels.

  This explains why we reject the notion that ‘personality’ survives bodily death. We can see that personality grows and develops, like the body, which argues that it dies, like the body. Yet in cases of multiple personality we can also see that there is a ‘basic self’ that forms the foundation of the personality. Mystical ecstasy seems to dissolve the personality; some mystics have even compared this sense of escaping their individuality to a spirit rising out of a rotting corpse; yet they still remain fully alive and conscious. If anything survives death, it is this basic substratu
m of the personality. And, if reincarnation is a reality, this is also what re-enters the newly born child.

  Perhaps ‘substratum’ is here the wrong word. In Mysteries I have suggested that the ‘ladder’ of selves is not a normal ladder with parallel sides, but something more like an inverted ‘V. The higher we move, the shorter the rungs become, and the more effort of ‘compression’ we have to make if we are to move up from a lower level. (On the other hand, it is easy to fall down a rung, as in nervous breakdown.) Perhaps the ‘ultimate self’ lies at the top of the latter …

  I began this book by discussing Adam Crabtree because some of his cases seem to illustrate that this ‘development’ mechanism also seems to leave room for what used to be called ‘possession’. According to Kardec, ‘spirits’ can wander in and out of us as they feel inclined (and Ralph Allison’s ‘Dennis’ case seems to provide support for this view). They can, to some extent, influence our thoughts. But they cannot, under normal circumstances, ‘take control’, or even exert any real influence on our actions. This sounds, of course, like the grossest kind of mediaeval superstition. But the evidence of psychical research suggests that we should at least accept it as a working hypothesis.

  Perhaps the most interesting aspect of psychical research is the recognition that we seem to possess all kinds of powers of which we are consciously unaware — from telepathy and psychokinesis to astral projection and precognition of the future. Yet I believe these powers are less important than we might assume. All the major religions have recognised them as a by-product of ‘spiritual development’. The Hindus say that a yogi who takes the trouble to walk on water is still in an early stage of development.

  But the alternative — the striving towards God or Ultimate Reality — strikes most of us as uninviting or unreal. This may be simply because we are attaching the wrong meaning to the words. The French psychologist Pierre Janet insisted that the measure of mental health is a faculty he called ‘the reality function’. He was not speaking about some mystical reality — only about the everyday reality that surrounds us all. Repressions, miseries, guilts — above all, preposterous fears and doubts — prevent us from responding directly and healthily to this reality. Human beings are the only creatures who spend 90 per cent of their time in a dream world inside their own heads. We are too subjective. Our basic problem is to learn objectivity — to achieve what might be called ‘objective consciousness’.

  In fact, objective consciousness is less rare than it sounds. We only have to walk outdoors on a sunny morning to experience a sudden sense that life is delightful and boundlessly interesting. If we could maintain that sense all the time the world would become a kind of paradise — no more war, no more crime, no more meanness and pettiness and resentment. Our problem is that we lose this insight so easily. Fatigue lowers our sharpness of perception, and the petty fears and anxieties come swarming back into our minds like rats from the sewers. Everyone must have noticed that when they subject themselves to physical stress, there comes a point at which the level of misery and anxiety suddenly increases steeply. (An easy way to test this is to go jogging, or try digging the garden much harder than usual.) All our slightly repressed mistrust of life suddenly comes welling up from the subconscious. (Not the unconscious: the subconscious — that realm just below the threshold of ordinary consciousness.) The only way to change this is to deliberately set out to drive the rats from the sewers — to subject the fears and anxieties to the scrutiny of the conscious mind and the light of reason. We can ‘re-programme’ the subconscious, so it is no longer a health hazard.

  We are, in fact, approaching the problem of vitalism — discussed in the last chapter — from a different angle. Vitalism, as we have seen, is the belief that ‘life’ is engaged in a struggle to conquer matter by ‘inserting more freedom’ into it. So — as T. E. Hulme expressed it — the amoeba could be regarded as a tiny ‘leak’ of freedom, fishes are bigger leaks, animals bigger leaks still, and man the biggest leak so far (at least on this planet). Our task, according to vitalism, is to make a deliberate, conscious effort to enlarge the leak.

  Whether or not we happen to be vitalists, we can all recognise the kernel of truth in this view. When a man is driving a car at ninety miles an hour, he feels ‘more alive’. When he gets excited as he watches a football match, he feels more alive. But these are fairly crude methods of feeling more alive. When a reader becomes totally absorbed in the fictional world of a novel, when a music lover is ‘swept away’ by a symphony, they experience a certain internal widening of consciousness that seems quite different in kind from mere physical excitement. The football fan knows that his excitement depends on the game; but the person who is carried away by imaginative excitement feels that this experience is somehow within his own control — that he could conjure it up again by an act of imagination. It seems quite clear to those who have a capacity for intellectual or imaginative excitement that this is the key to the deliberate ‘enlargement of the leak’ of freedom.

  Schopenhauer was one of the first philosophers to think in terms of a ‘life force’; he was followed by Edouard von Hartman, and later by Shaw, Bergson and Driesch. They all thought of ‘life’ as a blind, instinctive force, clumsily groping its way towards self-expression. But, as we have seen, Bergson and Driesch later changed their minds. This was for two reasons. First: that if such powers as telepathy and clairvoyance exist, then the forces of life must have far greater control over matter than we suppose. This control seems to be limited by our inability to ‘tune in’ to these powers — or our tendency to actually resist them. (Rosalind Heywood’s ‘Orders’ often struck her as absurd, yet obeying them usually turned out well.) Still, the ‘unseen forces’ seem to behave as if they possessed an intelligent purpose, or as if they were ‘above’ ordinary consciousness. Second: if life after death is a reality, then the ‘other world’ seems to exist on an altogether less ‘solid’ plane of matter than our own — perhaps a plane where matter exists at some far higher rate of vibration. This suggests that ‘life’ has already conquered this plane, and is using it as a base to make forays into our more difficult and inhospitable territory. Gurdjieff once said our earth is the cosmic equivalent of Outer Siberia; a better comparison might be a Wild West or Darkest Africa, still awaiting colonisation and conquest.

  But, as we have seen, the great problem seems to be that when ‘life’ descends into solid matter, it loses its memory. It could be compared to a child who has been sent out on an errand, but who has forgotten his instructions halfway. For human beings, this ‘forgetfulness’ leads to the feeling of being trapped in a dreary world of matter, and to Sartre’s conviction that ‘it is meaningless that we live and meaningless that we die’.

  Under the circumstances, it seems quite plain that the basic problem for the ‘life force’ is how to prevent us from forgetting our instructions, and wandering back home with nothing accomplished — or, as in the case of a Hitler or Jack the Ripper, leaving the world a great deal worse than we found it.

  Let us consider this problem as though we were Higher Intelligences — or Angels — sitting up in heaven, looking down on human beings, and wondering how we can find a permanent solution to this problem of ‘forgetfulness’.

  The one thing on which we all agree is that the purpose of life is to increase its power over matter, to ‘enlarge the leak’ of freedom. So the last thing we want is a race of creatures who feel that life is pointless and futile, and that the sooner they can escape from ‘this dim vast vale of tears’, the better. Ideally, we want creatures who feel that life is immensely interesting and exciting, and that no problem need remain permanently insoluble. We want creatures with an enormous ‘appetite for reality’.

  And the trouble with these human beings is that they all start out full of the feeling that life is going to be marvellous, and that the world is ‘apparelled in celestial light’, and end up bored, disillusioned and defeated. What makes it more annoying is that they are now so close to achievin
g their objective. For hundreds of thousands of years, they have fought grimly against cold and starvation and predators. Again and again, they have missed extinction only by the skin of their teeth. Then they began to use their intelligence to make weapons to hunt their food, and to build weather-proof shelters, and from then on, life began to improve steadily. They created civilisation, and although this involved two undesirable by-products — war and crime — they refused to be deterred, and gradually learned to make life more and more worth living. Then they took one of their greatest steps forward, and created art and literature — the first steps towards the conquest of the world of the mind. At last, it began to look as though they were close to achieving their basic purpose — an impregnable bridgehead in the world of matter.

  Then a new and unexpected problem arose. They began to grow bored with the civilisation their ancestors had built with so much labour. The trouble, of course, was that it had all happened too quickly. They had spent millions of years struggling for survival, and then achieved the security of civilisation overnight. It left them bewildered and confused. Instead of struggling for more consciousness, they began to choose the road of least resistance, and to waste their lives looking for immediate satisfactions.

  Now in the remote past, the ‘Higher Intelligences’ had kept in touch with the human race through certain individuals who were highly sensitive ‘receiving sets’. These people — called prophets and messiahs — could be shown the purpose of life through mystical revelations, and then they used their enormous powers of persuasion to induce everyone to live as if the purpose of life was to earn a passport to heaven. For thousands of years, this method of preventing human beings from ‘forgetting their instructions’ was immensely successful, and the great religions kept man working at the central aim of increasing human optimism and intelligence (for that, in the last analysis, is what it amounts to). But the development of his intelligence caused man to outgrow his religions. And the complexity of civilisation created more and more ‘drop-outs’, people who took it for granted that life is totally meaningless — a brief sojourn in prison, followed by oblivion. There actually came a point, in the nineteenth century, when the steady increase in human knowledge led man to the conclusion that matter is the only reality …