by Colin Wilson
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 thinn
er 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.
The Rev. Bertrand’s observation that his wife had gone to Lucerne a day earlier than intended also proved to be correct.
In a case like this, we have not only the corroboration of the other people concerned, but also the Rev. Bertrand’s apparently ‘impossible’ knowledge of what the guide had been doing while his back was turned. If he was mistaken to believe that he experienced death, then he certainly had some strange experience of extra-sensory perception.
There are a number of interesting points about this account. One is the ‘string’ that Bertrand keeps wishing was cut. He does not explain what he means by a string, but, as we shall see, it can be found again and again in accounts of so-called ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ (OBEs for short), in which people have ‘floated’ out of their bodies and had a sensation of looking down on the physical body, connected to it by a kind of shining cord. Another is Bertrand’s ability to perceive things that were happening elsewhere — what the guide was doing, his wife preparing to visit Lucerne, and so on. Again, this has been described repeatedly by people who claim to have had out-of-the-body experiences. Yet another point to note is Bertrand’s feeling of relief at being out of his body, and the subsequent feeling of reluctance — in fact, of rage — when he was drawn back into it. This is again a familiar feature of such accounts.
And this, basically, is what distinguishes the Rev. Bertrand’s story from the one invented by Alfred Sutro. Sutro’s tale is the kind of thing that people who know very little about psychical research imagine to be a typical ghost story. It is not. If we are to judge by the thousands of records in the annals of the SPR, or its American or European equivalents, ‘real’ ghosts do not sit around on river banks, a few yards from their drowned bodies, making sobbing noises loud enough to be heard over a car engine. They do not allow themselves to be picked up, or point out the houses where they live. Neither, for that matter, do they walk around with their heads underneath their arms, wailing or clanking chains. The typical apparition, as described in report after report, looks quite like a normal person. One lady was sitting reading when a tall, thin old man entered the room; when she looked more closely she recognised him as her great uncle. He looked agitated, and was carrying a roll of paper. He made no reply when she spoke to him, but walked out of a half-open door. She was not in the least alarmed because she made the natural assumption that her great uncle had come to see her. By the next post she received a letter from her father asking her to go and see the great uncle, who was seriously ill. She went, but found that he had died the previous afternoon, at exactly the time she had seen him. A roll of paper was found under the dead man’s pillow, and his niece concluded that he had wanted to change his will in her father’s favour, but had been overtaken by death. This story is taken from one of the classic volumes of early research undertaken by founder members of the SPR, Phantasms of the Living, by Gurney, Myers and Podmore (Volume 1, p. 559). And it follows basically the same pattern as hundreds of similar accounts. (This particular book is well over a thousand pages long). And the story told by the Rev. Bertrand follows the same kind of pattern as hundreds of similar records of near-death or after-death experiences.
It is always possible to pick holes in each individual account. For example, the case of the great uncle was passed on to the SPR by a certain Major Taylor, who explained that the lady who wrote it, ‘Miss L’, wished to withhold her name in deference to the views of a near relative. The whole thing could have been invented by Miss L, or by Major Taylor or, for that matter, by the authors of the book. But then, there are hundreds of cases in Phantasms of the Living, and most of them show the same basic similarities; it seems unlikely that they were all invented.
This is finally the most convincing argument for the view of life after death put forward by Swedenborg: there is such an enormous body of similar evidence to support it. There are literally hundreds of reports of ‘life after death’ that display the same pattern. That pattern is roughly as follows. After the death experience, which may be accompanied by a sense of pain or suffocation, there is a sudden sensation of freedom. In many cases, the person has a sense of passing down a long tunnel, and seeing a light at the end. Then he finds himself looking at his own body. This is usually accompanied by a feeling of deep peace, and a certain relief at having done with physical existence. The person may find it impossible to accept the idea that he is dead, and tries to talk to other people. They ignore him — although animals sometimes seem to be aware of him. He tries to touch them; his hand goes through them. And, again and again in these accounts, the ‘dead person’ is met by relatives who have already died; this happens only when he acknowledges that he is dead. There seem to be many cases in which the dead person is in a state of confusion, rather like being in a fever, and fails to grasp that he is no longer alive. In that case, he may remain trapped on earth — an ‘earth-bound’ spirit — indefinitely.
The obvious objection to the Rev. Bertrand case, as evidence of life after death, is that there is no real evidence that he did experience death. He may only have passed into a dream-like state. Even his accurate knowledge of the guide’s misdemeanours is not proof that he experienced death; it may have been some kind of ‘dream clairvoyance’. But there have been many cases in which ‘spirit mediums’ have relayed messages that claim to come from the dead, and which describe the death process in some detail. Here is a typical case from the records of a modern researcher, Dr Robert Crookall. It concerns the death of Dr Karl Novotny, a pupil of the psychologist Alfred Adler. His friend Grete Schröder had dreamed of Novotny two days before his death at Easter, 1965, and in her dream he announced his forthcoming death. When this actually happened, she was so impressed that she went to consult a medium — although before this she had taken no interest in such matters. The medium transcribed an account of Novotny’s death by means of automatic writing, in a hand which Grete Schröder recognised as Novotny’s own.
‘Novotny’ described how, when he was spending Easter at his country home, he agreed to go for a walk with some friends. He had been feeling ill for some time, and seems to have had doubts about whether to accompany them:
However, I forced myself to go. Then I felt completely free and
well. I went ahead and drew deep breaths of the fresh evening air, and was happier than I had been for a long time. How was it, I wondered, that I suddenly had no more difficulties, and was neither tired nor out of breath?
I turned back to my companions and found myself looking down at my own body on the ground. My friends were in despair, calling for a doctor, and trying to get a car to take me home. But I was well and felt no pains. I couldn’t understand what had happened. I bent down and felt the heart of the body lying on the ground. Yes — it had ceased to beat — I was dead. But I was still alive! I spoke to my friends, but they neither saw me nor answered me. I was most annoyed and left them …
And then there was my dog, who kept whining pitifully, unable to decide to which of me he should go, for he saw me in two places at once, standing up and lying down on the ground.
When all the formalities were concluded and my body had been put in a coffin, I realised that I must be dead. But I wouldn’t acknowledge the fact; for, like my teacher Alfred Adler, I did not believe in after-life … I went up the hill to where Grete lives. She was sitting alone and appeared very unhappy. But she did not seem to hear me either.
It was no use, I had to recognise the truth. When finally I did so, I saw my dear mother coming to meet me with open arms, telling me that I had passed into the next world — not in words, of course, since these only belong to the earth. Even so, I couldn’t credit her statement and thought I must be dreaming. This belief continued for a long time. I fought against the truth and was most unhappy …*
It is easy to sympathise with Bertrand Russell’s mistrust of this kind of ‘evidence’. It sounds like wishful thinking. It also contradicts our commonsense assumptions. For example, he describes himself taking deep breaths of the evening air. Do the dead breathe like the living, converting oxygen to carbon dioxide? Presumably he found himself fully dressed as he stood beside his own body — if he had suddenly found himself naked, he would have noticed sooner that something odd was going on. Does this mean that our clothes also survive death? The account sounds so disappointingly factual. If he had described a whirlpool of coloured lights and a sensation like expanding like a ripple across the surface of a pond, we might find it more convincing. This utterly commonplace description of trying to feel his own heartbeat and getting angry with his friends sounds like the invention of someone with a poor imagination.