by Lyall Watson
In this third and last section I will start with the new discoveries that seem to me to be leading this way, and end with an account of a phenomenon that, although it still sets my mind reeling, does I think provide us with our first clear view of some of the hidden realities of life and death.
Chapter Seven: SURVIVAL without the body
On the morning of September 21, 1774, Alfonso de' Liguori was preparing himself for the celebration of Mass in prison at Arezzo, when he fell into a deep sleep. [194] Two hours later he recovered and announced that he had just returned from Rome where he had seen Pope Clement XIV die. At first this was attributed to a dream and then, four days later, when the news of the Pope's death arrived, to coincidence. Then it was discovered that all those in attendance at the bedside of the dying pontiff had not only seen but talked to Alfonso, who had led them in prayers for the dying.
In 1921 James Chaffin, of North Carolina, died, leaving all his property to one of his four sons who himself died intestate a year later. [237] In 1925 the second son was visited by his dead father dressed in a black overcoat, who said, "You will find my will in my overcoat pocket." When the real coat was examined, a roll of paper was found sewn into the lining with instructions to read the twenty-seventh chapter of Genesis in the family Bible. Folded into the relevant pages was a later will than the first one, dividing the property equally among all four sons.
The first of these stories deals with someone who seems not only to have projected himself to a distant spot but to have been seen there by other people. The second tells of someone who was also seen and heard some distance from his body, in this case four years after his death. The reported meeting with a man known to be dead does not on its own provide proof of survival of death, but if walking-talking apparitions of the living can be connected to conscious projection by the person involved, then the possibility exists that apparitions of the dead may be produced in the same way. In other words, behind every ghost there may be a conscious projector. This would be true survival, but such a thing seems to be impossible to prove.
The evidence suggestive of survival is not overwhelming. Even if we assume that, on biological grounds, it is only possible for dreaming organisms (which in effect means just the mammals), we are still left with an enormous pool of possible survivors dating back more than 150 million years. It is certain that the vast majority of dead mice and men tell no tales and have vanished without trace.
We can account for this relative lack of information on four main philosophical grounds. [26] Either these organisms never had any second systems; or these have faded away and ceased to exist; or they have gone somewhere else; or they have been re-embodied here in new living organisms. All of these are reasonable explanations and already provide the basis for most of the world's major beliefs, but there is at least one other possibility. The disembodied dead could be piled up in great heaps all around us in some form that we are incapable of recognizing.
It is not easy to experience the unfamiliar, the things that have no names. Some people claim that they can see the dead, so we label them psychic and look at them a little askance, but perhaps they can. Any sensory experience is partly skill and any skill can be cultivated. Wilfred Thesiger, in one of his superb books on the desert, tells of an old gray-bearded Bedouin who got down from his camel to look at some blurred tracks in the sand, crumbled a few dry droppings between his fingers, and announced, "They were Awamir. There were six of them. They have raided the Junuba on the southern coast and taken three of their camels. They have come here from Sahma and watered at Maghshin. They passed here ten days ago." [269]
Skilled trackers are trained to see things that others would not notice. The shortcoming here lies not in the sense organs, but in the computer program. There are people with special talents who hear sounds that to others are supersonic, or see wavelengths that would normally be invisible, and it may be possible for all of us to practice this kind of sensitivity. Infrared light waves, for instance, are beyond the capability of the cone-shaped cells in our retinas, but they may be just within the range of the rod-shaped ones that lie more densely packed around the edges of the screen. The folklore on fairies and nature spirits has always advised against looking straight at them lest they disappear in fright. Perhaps there are things going on all the time that we could learn to see by simply looking out of the corners of our eyes.
One of the oldest and most persistent of occult ideas is that all bodies are surrounded by an energy cloud or an "aura." This is described as a colorful emanation, taking roughly the same shape as the body and normally extending between one half inch and forty inches from it. The aura of the Buddha is said to have enveloped an entire city. A few people see this spectral haze very easily and have done so ever since they were children. Some others can possibly be trained to see it by a "sensitizing" process that involves first looking through screens filled with a coal-tar dye, but most of us require a more mechanical aid.
In the late nineteenth century the Yugoslavian genius Nikola Tesla invented a coil that not only made alternating current possible but also drew sparks from all parts of the human body. In 1909 a French physiologist used a similar device to register an electrical aura and produce a picture of his hand glowing in the dark as though covered with luminous iron filings. In 1939 two Czechoslovakian scientists published the first "electrographs," which showed leaves with shiny coronas of an unidentified electromagnetic emission. And in that same year a Russian electrician and his wife independently made a similar discovery. Semyon and Valentina Kirlian built an instrument that consists basically of a sandwich of condensors and generates a high-frequency electrical field. [148] The subtitle of their first major paper on the instrument describes precisely what they were doing with it: "A method for the conversion of non-electrical properties of the object being photographed into electrical ones . . . with a direct transfer of charges from the object to the photographic plate."
In the last thirty years, the Kirlians have photographed a galaxy of patterns emanating from leaves, fruits, whole plants, small animals, and every part of the human body. These luminous hieroglyphs can be shafts, beams, flares, striations, crowns, or clots; sky blue, lilac, or yellow in color; bright or faded; they may glow constantly, twinkle, or flare from time to time; they can be stationary or moving. The latest motion picture films from the Soviet Union show quite clearly that these displays change all the time in tune with the change of health and state of mind of the subject being photographed -- and that every alteration of the haze around the body is of the kind long described by those sensitive people who can see it all with their own eyes. [272]
These patterns are in many respects similar to the behavior of plasma that can be seen in observation of the sun, so the Soviet scientists have begun to call the aura a biological plasma body, or bioplasma. [130] A plasma is a gas that has had all the electrons stripped off the nuclei of its atoms. This normally occurs only at very high temperatures in thermonuclear reactions, but there are reports which suggest that electrons could be similarly emitted by a body at the usual temperature of living matter. [1]
Thelma Moss and Ken Johnson at the University of California have built their own high-voltage, high-frequency apparatus on which they have taken photographs similar to the Russian ones. [189] They prefer to call their method radiation field photography, and they stress the fact that changes in frequency, voltage, and exposure time all produce dramatic differences in the results. But if the parameters of photography are held constant, there are still visible changes that can only be caused by the subject. They have now photographed over five hundred people and find that each one has a unique and recognizable basic pattern that changes slightly from day to day and from mood to mood. Certain kinds of food and drink produce rapid changes. In one pair of pictures taken just minutes apart, a fingertip first appears as a black blob with a tiny ring of flares around its perimeter like a shot of the total eclipse of the sun. Then, after the subject has taken a drink of alc
ohol, he suddenly becomes all "lit up" and the second picture shows a brilliant wide white halo surrounding a pad on which every ridge and whorl of the fingerprint is outlined in light. Moss adds that this is a true radiation field effect which has nothing to do with an increase in body temperature and no correlation with the construction or dilation of blood vessels.
Moss and Johnson have shown that marijuana nearly always produces an increase in brightness of the corona of the kind that occurs after exercise. They also tried photographing subjects in relaxed states under various conditions and found that they could produce changes in brightness when doing yoga breathing exercises or going into transcendental meditation. There were dramatic changes in the corona before and after acupuncture treatment, but absolutely no reaction to needles stuck in just anywhere at random. By introducing an optical attachment that made it possible for the subject to see his own corona, it was found that this feedback training enabled him to bring the flare under conscious control. The fact that emotion has a great deal to do with the quality of the emission was nicely demonstrated by the purely accidental discovery that an attractive female photographer got brighter-than-usual coronas from all the usual male subjects.
Perhaps the most interesting findings of all in this imaginative series of tests were those that showed that the energy involved in producing these pictures could, under certain circumstances, be transferred from one subject to another. When a subject was put under hypnosis, his corona increased in brightness, but a simultaneous series taken from the hypnotist found that his emission had dimmed. This is the first time it has ever been demonstrated that hypnosis is not just something you do to yourself, but that the hypnotist actually makes a tangible contribution to the relationship.
Douglas Dean at the Newark College of Engineering has built a photographic apparatus including a large copper plate which develops pulsed square waves of forty thousand volts. With this he has produced two of the most exciting pictures yet to emerge from this entire area. [182] When Ethel DeLoach pressed her fingertip to the plate, it produced a lilac-colored spray of fine threads radiating out about one centimeter from the pad in a pattern much like that made by anyone else ever tested in this way, but Mrs. DeLoach is not an ordinary person. She has a considerable reputation as a healer, so before the next photograph was taken, she was asked to place her free hand on the arm of a friend and to try to cure a sebaceous cyst that lay there as a lump beneath the skin. She applied herself mentally to this task of healing, and exactly two and a half minutes later a second shot of her same finger was taken while still resting on the same spot on the copper plate. This picture is astonishing. It shows the black pad of the finger surrounded by the same hairlike mass of fine lilac strands, now standing up straight and extending about twice as far from the skin, but right on the tip of the digit there is an entirely new display. Burning out from the surface is a vivid orange crown of flame like a ring of gas jets in a blast furnace. Here is superb evidence of what seems to be a deliberate transfer of energy from healer to patient, and, to complete the picture, Dean reports that the next day the troublesome cyst had totally disappeared.
When the work of the Kirlians first came to the notice of scientists in the West, it caused a considerable furor. It excited many, but also left a large number very skeptical because there was some secrecy surrounding the apparatus itself. Now that Moss and Dean have independently produced similar results, and other comparable projects are underway at New Mexico State University and in Brazil, it is no longer possible to doubt that the living body produces, or at least is associated with, an energy body that can be made visible by high-frequency electrical discharge.
Exactly what kind of energy is involved is still open to question. We know that the body produces heat energy, which can be vividly demonstrated in thermographic techniques that involve painting the body in liquid crystals, but this is not the source of the aura. Every time a nerve cell discharges as impulses are carried to and fro from the brain, there is a measurable difference in potential, but this is clearly understood and seems not to be involved. When these sources are combined with the mechanical and electrical energy created in the muscles, blood vessels, and brain, they form a radiation fingerprint that is unique for every species; but there is still another as yet undescribed source that adds the special characteristics of the corona and makes the pattern unique for each individual within that species.
William Tiller, of Stanford University, believes that the evidence we already have is enough to prove that the somatic system is supplemented by at least one other. [273] He calls the combination the human ensemble and suggests that the most reasonable approach yet made to an interpretation of this complex is the yogi philosophy of the seven principles. In the West this system of thought is best known through Theosophy, a movement started in 1875 by the extraordinary Madame Blavatsky, whose esoteric knowledge of Vedic, Buddhist, and Brahmanist literature has been popularized by Annie Besant. [217, 218]
The first level of substance is that of the familiar somatic system that operates on the Einsteinian space-time frame -- about which we already know a great deal. If we are going to assign the new discoveries to their relevant places, then Burr's life field with all its electrical effects fits in here. The second is the etheric level, which is said to be inhabited by the "etheric double" that is unable to leave the body and is primarily concerned with health and the absorption and distribution of prana. The chakras are apparently located at this level, and so if this is where acupuncture operates, this is where the new bioplasmic or energy body belongs. This level forms a bridge between the first, or physical, and the third, or astral, level. The etheric double is traditionally supposed to decay and disappear not long after the dissolution of the body, which fits well with my suggestion that we need to postulate a biological state intermediate between clinical death and what I have called goth. In this model of life, the "organizer" and the "second system," which we discussed earlier, would be divided between the first and second levels, being composed partly of the life field and partly of bioplasma. Absolute death marks the end of the first level and the destruction of the field, but some patterning and perhaps something of the memory and personality survive as bioplasma in the etheric double, until this, too, disappears at some time after goth.
On the third level is the "astral body," which is said to be little more than a vehicle for the mind (which is found on the next three levels) and the spirit (which exists on the seventh plane). Levels four to seven need not concern us here, because it will be a very long time before science can begin to explore these in the way that it now seems to be getting a toehold on levels two and three. The astral area on level three is also difficult to explore, but it is an exciting territory because this is where life in some form must take refuge if it is to survive both death and goth for any length of time. The evidence we already have concerning separation and what has been called astral traveling suggests very strongly that this area has an objective reality and probably can be examined. The second level is very much more amenable to investigation, and I see no major obstacles to our soon being able to formulate physical laws to describe precisely what happens in the etheric area. There may be new and different kinds of energy at work there, but I suspect that they will be found to obey the same rules of behavior as first-level matter.
Tiller suggests that matter of the second, or etheric, level may have the characteristics of a hologram. This is a sort of photograph invented by Dennis Gabor in 1947 which consists typically of a piece of film, but it is nothing like a negative of the ordinary kind. To the naked eye, it is an unintelligible pattern of light and dark patches, but if viewed in the same special optical conditions under which it was taken, this pattern becomes a three-dimensional picture. It is the sort of photograph you can tilt so that even if Aunt Mabel is standing right in front of the Parthenon, you can peer around her to see the architecture in the background. You could, if you so wished, even see the back of her neck, and you could
also share this unique pleasure with the entire family without making any copies of the picture. Just cut it up into little pieces, because every fragment of a hologram can be used to reconstruct the entire image in the same way that every living cell carries the necessary information to construct a complete organism.
This is a fascinating idea, which excites me more every time I think about it. Here we have an established physical principle that could account not only for the phenomena of psychokinesis and telepathy but for all the cosmic and mystical experiences that involve feelings of "at-oneness" with everything. This seamlessness or unity is the one common denominator of all visionary states, whether they be produced by drugs, isolation, training, shock, beauty, music, or sex. In all peak experiences the "I', ceases to exist and seems to become part of the "All." If each of us contains just one tiny fragment of the cosmic hologram lodged anywhere in any of the seven possible levels, there is absolutely no reason why this should not be so. And best of all, this idea cannot be discarded as nothing more than a web of idle semiscientific fantasy, because we already have some evidence that such a hologram does exist and can penetrate from the etheric through to our somatic level.
Remember the "ghost" of the leaf? When part of a leaf was cut away and totally removed, it could still be seen in faint outline occupying its original place. When part of a man is amputated, many of his sensations insist that it continues to exist as a phantom limb. The image remains intact, because the whole structure is embodied in every part. To be sure, these are flimsy strands of evidence, too thin to be called positive proof, but they seem to me to be powerful hints that this could be the one line of research most likely to lead to a breakthrough into those other mystical levels.