Afterlife

by Colin Wilson

  It was at this point that a sub-committee of Angels decided to try out the idea of a more direct form of communication, to convince men that there was a life after death. This experiment started in the 1840s, and in the form of a religious movement known as Spiritualism, it spread across the world. Unfortunately, it tended to attract the wrong type of person — feeble-minded sentimentalists — and the scientists and philosophers remained aloof. Later, another committee of Angels suggested the increasing use of the near-death experience as a ‘teaching method’, and this also achieved some success — but on far too small a scale to do much good. Moreover, the whole Spiritualist project was undermined by the constant interference of mischievous ‘earth-bound spirits’ — the criminals, layabouts and juvenile delinquents of the ‘other world’ — who succeeded in creating widespread confusion. On the whole, the Spiritualist experiment is not regarded by the Higher Intelligences as one of their more outstanding successes.

  Which, of course, leaves us with the original question: how can human beings be prevented from ‘forgetting their instructions’ and wasting their lives? This, we recognise instinctively, is the central question of human existence, the Life Question. It is this instinctive recognition that explains why the evidence of spiritualism has made such a surprisingly small impact on the human race. You would expect it to be a matter of passionate interest to every human being. Dostoevsky wrote in The Diary of a Writer: ‘There is only a single supreme idea on earth: the concept of the immortality of the human soul; all other profound ideas by which men live are only an extension of it.’ Yet in the century and a half of its existence, spiritualism has made no real progress: it has merely marked time. This is because we all feel, deep down, that the Death Question is of far less importance than the Life Question.

  One thing is clear: that this matter of the Life Question is no longer a problem that concerns only the ‘Higher Intelligences’. For more than a century now, human beings have also been applying their own intelligence to its solution. (As we have seen, the Society for Psychical Research began when two philosophers asked whether the evidence for the paranormal might help to solve the ‘riddle of the Universe’.) Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, Nietszche, Shaw, Jaspers, Camus and many others have made the Life Question — the ‘Lebensfrage’ — the central issue of their work. (Even I have succeeded in making a small contribution.)

  The outline of an answer is slowly beginning to emerge. It is this. Human beings have no problem maintaining a high degree of purpose when faced with emergencies or difficulties that threaten their existence. And when this happens, we become aware of the actual mechanism of ‘enlarging the leak’ of freedom. Whenever I am faced with some sudden challenge or danger, its first effect is to undermine my vitality. Adrenalin rushes into my bloodstream, and my confidence drops several points. Then I ‘steel myself’ to meet the problem; I summon energy, and discipline myself to face the challenge. And in the moment I overcome the challenge, I experience a deep satisfaction, and a delightful sense of freedom. I have, in fact, ‘enlarged the leak’. And if I could spend my life facing interesting challenges, my self-control and my freedom would steadily increase. And, as far as the Higher Intelligences are concerned, I would have done a thoroughly satisfactory job of widening the bridgehead.

  In A Criminal History of Mankind, I speak of that initial response to a challenge — the rush of adrenalin — as ‘Force T’, the ‘T’ standing for tension. The response to that challenge I call Force C — the ‘C’ standing for control. This is the central issue of human existence, the essence of the Life Question — increasing Force C to overcome Force T. That is how we ‘enlarge the leak’. And that explains, of course, why our most fundamental human impulse is to seek challenges. When we lived in caves, or on the great African savannas, the problem never arose, for we had more than enough challenge to keep us up to the mark: this is why man has become the most successful creature on earth. But when he began to build cities, he already experienced the problem that was to become the greatest obstacle to his progress: ‘challenge-starvation’. He responded to it by inventing war, which made his blood tingle and his heart beat faster. In the succeeding six or seven thousand years, man has become the most aggressive and murderous creature the earth has ever seen — even in comparison with the flesh-eating dinosaurs and the sabre-toothed tiger. He has also developed many less harmful ways of responding to challenge-starvation: climbing mountains, exploring the unknown, conquering nature. But his enterprise has had precisely the effect he was trying to avoid: to make life less challenging. And when life loses its challenge, it also loses its savour, and we begin to feel suffocated and bored. The instinctive response — in adults as much as children — is to look around for some mischief to get into. Boredom releases the destructive urge. This is why one of the chief problems of Western civilisation in the last quarter of the twentieth century is the apparently ‘motiveless’ crime, ranging from vandalism and football hooliganism to mass murder.

  Yet when we apply intelligence to this problem, the answer is plain enough. It is mere force of habit that makes us crave a physical stimulus. Think what happens when I face some interesting challenge. I concentrate and set out to arouse my sleeping energies; then I set out to discipline these forces. But there is, in fact, nothing to stop me from ‘arousing’ Force T by the same effort of concentration and will, and then setting out to control it. In fact, saints and ascetics have always known this trick. They have created their own challenges — fasting, meditating, tormenting the body — in order to strengthen the will. Such exercises seem wilfully perverse until we recognise their purpose — to arouse Force T and subject it to Force C, thereby increasing the sense of freedom and widening the range of consciousness.

  The methods of the saint strike most of us as disagreeably crude and painful. And this is partly because we sense that they are unnecessarily strenuous. The past two or three centuries have seen the development of a power with which our ancestors were barely acquainted: imagination. Modern man takes it for granted because he has been exercising it since he was a baby: reading comic books, going to the cinema, watching television. It is almost impossible for us to realise what life was like for a man of the fifteenth century. From the moment he opened his eyes in the morning, his mind was fixed on the purely practical world; by comparison with modern man, his power of imagination was as feeble as a baby’s hand compared with that of a grown man. He had almost no ‘mental life’. In this respect, man has increased his freedom enormously in the course of a few centuries. (The invention of the novel in the eighteenth century was one of the most influential events in human history.) Nowadays, almost every child is familiar with the experience of becoming so totally absorbed in a story that he feels as if he is living in the Africa of King Solomon’s Mines or the France of The Three Musketeers. And whenever we experience that same absorption, we know that this is the basic solution of the Life Question. Imagination, properly directed and controlled, is a far more efficient means of arousing Force T and Force C than the self-flagellation of the saint, or the self-chosen discomforts of the round-the-world yachtsman.

  Most people will feel doubtful about this statement. This is because we tend to think of imagination as another name for daydreaming or fantasy — in other words, telling yourself lies. This is an error. Imagination is, in fact, basically the power of escaping the present moment. This may sound an equally dubious activity, until we give it a little thought. The central problem of human beings is that they are trapped in the present moment; their horizon is limited by ‘close-upness’. When a child is utterly bored, he feels that the present moment is somehow unchangeable, that it will go on forever. And although they ought to know better, adults are also subject to the same curious delusion. Experience should have taught them that they are stronger than the matter that surrounds them — that, as Wells says, ‘if you don’t like your life, you can change it’. Yet the moment they become bored, they become subject to that familiar sense of
being trapped, like a fly stuck on flypaper. They know that this is absurd, that the future will bring all kinds of changes. Yet they still allow themselves to be bullied and discouraged into a state of passivity by the sheet ‘immediacy’ of the present moment, like a six-foot teenager giving way to a bully half his size because it has become a habit.

  In fact, we are always catching glimpses of our real power over the present. I may be involved in some boring task when a fragment of music creeps into my head, and induces the ‘absurd good news’ feeling. A smell encountered as I walk down an unfamiliar street — of newly baked bread or roasting coffee beans — may evoke my childhood and induce a surge of sheer joy. These moments — Proust devoted a twelve-volume novel to them — are difficult to explain until we can grasp how far we are normally entrapped in the present moment. It squeezes us and suffocates us, and we have become so used to the feeling that we take it for granted as part of the ‘human condition’. What the fragment of music or the unexpected smell does is to remind us that the past seemed just as oppressively real as the present — yet it is long gone. These moments tell us: You are freer and stronger than you think. Hence the surge of pure delight.

  When we think about it, we can see that what we call happiness is nothing more than this sense of not being trapped in the present moment. That is why we enjoy holidays and excitement and romance, just as the early balloonists enjoyed soaring up above the ground, and seeing the world from a ‘bird’s eye view’. Excitement gives us a bird’s eye view of life itself, and seems to neutralise that strange force of gravity that keeps us stuck in the present.

  Now this, in fact, is the real purpose of imagination: not to create fantasies, but to make us aware of other times and other places. When it actually happens, we realise that ‘imagination’ is a totally inadequate word for this faculty that can lift us like a rocket out of the present moment, and make us aware that we are, in some curious sense, citizens of eternity. That is why I have elsewhere coined the term ‘Faculty X’ for the ability to suddenly grasp the reality of other times and places.*

  At the moment, it refuses to work to order; it operates fitfully, when it feels inclined. Yet when it does work, it does so easily and instantaneously, like switching on a light. Quite suddenly, some moment of the past has become totally real, as real as the present: and we realise that it is as real as the present — or rather, that the present does not have some special status of super-reality, just because it happens to be here and now. We were intended to be the masters of time, not its slaves.

  The ease with which this faculty operates suggests that it is somehow encoded in our genes, like our power to walk upright, or the bird’s power of flight. This is why ‘Faculty X’ brings the feeling of ‘absurd good news’. It makes us realise that we already have it.

  And at this point, we may recollect the main thesis of Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: that there is extremely powerful evidence that human beings possess all kinds of unusual faculties of which most of us are unaware, from the extraordinary powers of calculating prodigies and mnemonists (people who can glance at a page of a book and then recite it word for word) to telepathy, clairvoyance and astral projection. And these powers may, in fact, be closely related to ‘Faculty X’ — for example, the erratic power of ‘projecting’ one’s ‘doppelgänger’, so it can be seen by other people in distant places. (In the case of the Rev. Mountford,** we have seen that this included the ability to ‘project’ a horse and cart as well.) Myers’s book is a plea for a new form of psychology to investigate these unknown powers. When Professor Heim saw his whole life flash before his eyes as he fell down the crevasse, he was discovering something about his brain that he had never even suspected. The same applies to the Rev. Bertrand as he lay frozen on a ledge and followed the progress of his students to the top of the mountain. And when Sarah Hall saw her own ‘double’ standing by the sideboard, and when Rosalind Heywood split into ‘Pink Me’ and ‘White Me’, they were encountering an aspect of human personality that is at present unknown to science. When Joseph Rodes Buchanan discovered that certain people can ‘read’ the history of an object by holding it in their hands, he was demonstrating that the unconscious mind has access to ‘hidden’ information. When Alfred Russel Wallace placed a schoolboy under hypnosis, then made him ‘taste’ things by putting them into his own mouth, he was proving that the unconscious has access to other minds.

  But perhaps the most interesting discovery of psychical research is that we can develop these powers simply by wanting to. The psychologist Abraham Maslow made a similar discovery about the ‘peak experience’, the moment of sudden overwhelming happiness. He discovered that when he talked to his students about the peak experience, they not only recalled many half-forgotten peak experiences, but also began having peak experiences far more frequently. Thinking and talking about the peak experience had ‘reprogrammed the subconscious mind’, and the subconscious mind did the rest.

  Which suggests that the chief problem confronted by the human race is not some appalling form of original sin, some deep and justified anxiety about our place in the universe, or recognition of our fundamental weakness and helplessness. It is simply the problem of a badly programmed subconscious. Most of us have allowed the subconscious to become messy and untidy, like a disused playroom that has become a repository for old junk. It smells rather unpleasant because there are a few ancient fishpaste sandwiches and half-eaten apples lurking under the one-eyed teddy bears and mildewed copies of nursery classics. Every time we catch a glimpse of the mess through the half-open door, we shudder and hurry past. Yet it would only take half an hour with a broom and mop to make it one of the nicest rooms in the house.

  The whole history of psychical research has been a series of demonstrations of the apparently ‘absurd’ powers of the human mind. For the scientist, this has always been at best an embarrassment, at worst a scandal. But it now begins to look as though this may be because he is the slave of his old-fashioned idea of the nature of science. More than three centuries ago, René Descartes established the method of modern science and philosophy; he called it ‘radical doubt’. The philosopher, says Descartes, should sit in his armchair and contemplate the universe around him. He should then proceed to doubt everything that can be doubted. Does the sun really go around the earth, as it seems to do? If we question it, we may arrive at the truth. As to the question: ‘How do you prove your own existence?’, Descartes replied: ‘I think, therefore I am.’ And having established this apparently unshakeable foundation, he felt able to relax in his armchair and turn his telescope on the universe outside his window.

  The investigator of the paranormal has no doubt that ‘I think, therefore I am’, but he is inclined to add the disconcerting question: ‘You are what?’ For this is clearly the question that Descartes overlooked: Who precisely am I? He assumed, naturally enough, that he was René Descartes; that is what it said on his birth certificate. But every mystic has had the curious experience of realising that he is not who he thinks he is. In moments of visionary intensity, his identity dissolves, and he becomes aware that it is no more than a mask. Instead, he is looking into the depths of an inner universe that bears a strange resemblance to the external universe. And the question: ‘Who am I?’ can only be answered by pointing his telescope inside himself.

  In that moment, he realises that the apparent limitation of his powers is due to the limitation of his picture of himself. In order to expand those powers, he has to expand his knowledge of himself. He merely has to turn the telescope the other way.

  *The Philosophy of CD. Broad, 1959.

  *Mysteries, Introduction.

  *See The Occult, Chapter 2.

  **See p. 141.

  Select Bibliography

  Allison, M. D., Ralph, with Schwarz, Ted, Minds in Many Places (Rawson, Wade Publishers, Inc., New York, 1980)

  Baird, A. T., Richard Hodgson (Psychic Press Ltd, London, 1949)

  Barnes, F. R. S., Rt.
Rev. E. W., and others, The Mysteries of Life and Death (Hutchinson & Co., London, n.d.)

  Barrett, F. R. S., Sir William F., On the Threshold of the Unseen (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner & Co. Ltd, London, 1920; E. P. Dutton & Co. New York, 1920)

  ——, Death-Bed Visions (Methuen & Co. Ltd, London, 1926)

  Bennett, Sir Ernest, Apparitions and Haunted Houses (Faber & Faber Ltd, London, 1939)

  Bozzano, Professor Ernest, Animism and Spiritism (Arthur H. Stockwell Ltd, London, n.d.)

  Crabtree, Adam, Multiple Man (Collins Publishers, Ontario, 1985)

  Crowe, Mrs Catherine, The Seeress of Prevorst (J. C. Moore, London, 1848)

  ——, Spiritualism and the Age We Live In (T. C. Newby, London, 1859)

  ——, The Night Side of Nature (George Routledge and Sons, London, 1845);

  Cummins, Geraldine, Swan on a Black Sea (Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1965)

  ——, The Road to Immortality (Psychic Press Ltd, London, 1967)

  Davis, Andrew Jackson, The Philosophy of Spiritual Intercourse (Colby & Rich, Banner of Light Publishing House, Boston, 1890)

  Doyle, Arthur Conan, The Vital Message (Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1919)