by Colin Wilson
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:
whether he thought that when Tradition, Intuition, Metaphysic had failed to solve the riddle of the Universe, there was still a chance that from any observable phenomena — ghosts, spirits, whatsoever there might be — some valid knowledge might be drawn as to a World Unseen.
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 labora
tory 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 …
At which point, Dawkins asks: ‘Shall we call the original replicator molecules “living?” Who cares?…’ And here he seems to be attempting some sleight of hand. The hypothesis of replicator molecules being formed by accident seems dubious enough — as likely as the works of Shakespeare being written by Eddington’s monkeys strumming aimlessly on a typewriter. But to then suggest that these self-copiers would be somehow ‘alive’, and therefore capable of evolution, seems an attempt to play fast and loose with language.
My own deep and intuitive conviction is that there is a basic difference between living and dead matter. So computer experts may try forever to convince me that we might one day build a computer so complex that it would be literally alive, and I shall remain a sceptic. They may as soon convince me that I am not really alive.
What I might be willing to accept is that the basic building blocks of organic matter were created by chance — by the action of sunlight or electrical discharges on ammonia and carbons — and that, when half the work had been done, the force we call life took advantage of the situation to somehow ‘insert’ itself into matter. This seems to agree with my own intuitions about the nature of life, which — in my own case — is a continual struggle of the ‘alive’ part of me to widen the boundaries of the dead or mechanical part, which seems determined to entrap me in the ‘here and now’.
Now if this view is correct, and Dawkins is wrong to believe that life is a mere product of matter, it would also seem to follow that life has its own independent consciousness and sense of purpose. In the 1860s, a philosopher named Edouard von Harmann wrote a vast work, The Philosophy of the Unconscious, largely devoted to examining the amazing manifestations of instinct in nature — all, apparently, so full of purpose, all totally unconscious. He reached the gloomy conclusion that life is full of blind striving towards nothing in particular. But he might just as well have argued that all this blind striving does not begin in a state of blindness. A man who has to walk a mile in the dark without a light is not necessarily lost and aimless. He may have consulted a map before he set out, and know exactly how many yards will bring him to the next crossroads. The incredible complexity in nature, from the amoeba to giant squid, seems to suggest that although life is ‘blinded’ once it descends into matter, it may have had a very clear sense of direction before it set out for its walk in the dark.
The same argument would apply to Darwin’s picture of evolution by natural selection. Darwin, unlike Dawkins, admits that ‘life’ somehow exists apart from matter, but he still sees life as a helpless and passive spectator of the changes brought about by accident and the survival of the fittest. The primitive giraffe may wish it had a longer neck, but it can do nothing about it; millennia will have to pass before its descendente will acquire a longer neck by pure chance. If Dawkins is wrong, the chances are that Darwin was also wrong. Life may not be able to initiate the changes (although even that is not certain), but it may be able to take instant advantage of every accidental change to achieve its own purposes, like a man selecting chunks of stone from a landslide to build his own house. But if he can select stones from a landslide, there seems no logical reason why he should not also be able to make his own bricks. If the study of the paranormal has taught us anything, it is that human powers often seem to be able to defy the ‘laws of nature’. For example, in 1899, a New Zealand magistrate named Colonel Gudgeon went with a group of friends to watch a Maori tribe perform a fire-walking ceremony. They were embarrassed when a shaman held out his hand and invited Gudgeon and his friends to join them. ‘I confer my mana on you.’ To his surprise, Gudgeon felt no burning heat — just a pleasant, tingling sensation — and none of them were even blistered. Clearly, it was some form of mind over matter — a form that should be impossible according to the Darwin-Dawkins view of evolution.
The ‘paranormal’ view, then, presupposes that ‘life’ (whatever that means) can exist apart from matter, and possesses its own consciousness and sense of purpose. In that case, we may assume that when life separates from matter at ‘death’, it returns to a different state of consciousness, involving a higher degree of freedom. In that case, why did it descend into matter in the first place? Presumably to bring the realm of matter under its control — as it may already have brought other realms of ‘finer’ matter — matter whose rate of vibration is higher than ours — under its control.
This view — that ‘life’ is attempting to establish control over matter — is known as ‘vitalism’, and its two leading exponents in the twentieth century have been the philosopher Henri Bergson and the biologist Hans Driesch. It is significant that both Driesch and Bergson joined the Society for Psychical Research and became its presidents. In his presidential address in 1926, Driesch expressed the basic idea of vitalism: that the development of organisms is ‘directed by a unifying non-material mind-like Something … an ordering principle which does not add either energy or matter’ to what goes on. This principle might exist outside time and space.* Driesch was violently attacked by his scientific colleagues for his interest in psychical research — as though it displayed a foolish credulity. Yet it can be seen that, if the primary evidence for ‘survival’ can be accepted, then it is a very short step from vitalism to ‘spiritualism’. Their premises are identical.
The problem for Driesch — and for every other psychical researcher in the past century — is that even sound philosophical premises cannot make ‘the paranormal’ respectable. They might succeed if paranormal research confined itself to investigating the unexplored regions of the human mind — clairvoyance, psychokinesis, telepathy, psychometry, and so on. But it is practically impossible to do this. The moment the investigator raises the question of whether a medium is genuine, he is raising the question of whether the communications come from the ‘dead’. He may decide that mediumship is really another name for multiple personality, and that the ‘communications’ are based on telepathy or clairvoyance; but if he is honest he will admit that there are cases where neither of these hypotheses cover the facts. And to admit the possibility of survival is also to admit the possibility of ‘spirits’. At that point, most modern investigators dig in their heels; they feel as if they are being dragged back into the superstitions of the Dark Ages.
This was the problem we encountered at the beginning of this book. Adam Crabtree is a psychiatrist; his job is to cure people with psychological problems. From his personal point of view, it makes no difference whatever whether the problem is due to Freudian repressions, multiple personality or ‘diabolical
possession’. But from the point of view of his standing in the scientific community, it would certainly be preferable to dismiss the last hypothesis and to think in terms of orthodox psychotherapy. This corresponded with his own inclination. He has described how, when he was a theology student in Minnesota, he came across a pamphlet called Begone Satan by the Rev. Carl Vogel, describing a case that occurred in Wisconsin in the 1920s. A girl named Anna Ecklund began to be plagued with desires to commit ‘unspeakable sexual acts’ and to blaspheme. When she began to show classic signs of ‘possession’, Father Theophilus Riesinger, a Capuchin from the community of St Anthony, decided on exorcism. Anna was laid on a bed, and the ceremony of exorcism began. Within moments, Anna’s body had flown off the bed, and landed against the wall above the door, where she stuck. She was dragged down by main force and the exorcism continued. Her howls and screams were so loud that people came from all over the town of Marathon to see what was happening. The exorcism continued the next day and for many days after. Voices speaking in many languages issued from Anna, although her lips remained tightly closed. Her head would expand ‘to the size of a water pitcher’ and her body swelled like a balloon. Her convulsions were so powerful that the iron bedstead bent to the floor. Various entities who announced themselves as demons spoke to the exorcists, and showed intimate knowledge of sins they had committed in childhood. Finally, Anna’s deceased father was ‘summoned’, and admitted that he had constantly tried to commit incest with her, and that because she had resisted him, he had cursed her and invoked devils to possess her. The father’s ex-mistress also appeared, and admitting to killing a number of her newly born children. During all this time, Anna was deeply asleep, or in trance. Finally, Anna’s body shot up off the bed, so that only her heels were resting on it, and as the priest repeated the exorcism, there was the sound of a strange scream, that gradually faded into the distance. Then the girl’s eyes opened and she began to cry. The ‘possession’ was over.