Afterlife Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 1985

  by Harrap Limited

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Wilson, Colin, 1931–

  Afterlife.

  “A Dolphin book.”

  Bibliography: p.

  1. Future life. 2. Spiritualism. 3. Psychical

  research. 4. Reincarnation. I. Title.

  BF1311.F8W54 1987 133.9′01′3 86-23950

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80533-1

  Copyright © 1985 by Colin Wilson

  All Rights Reserved

  v3.1

  For

  Simon Scott

  with affection and gratitude

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Analytical Table of Contents

  Acknowledgments

  1 Voices in the Head

  2 The World of the Clairvoyant

  3 Invasion of the Spirit People

  4 Psychical Research Comes of Age

  5 Rediscovering a Masterpiece

  6 Dr Steiner and the Problem of Reincarnation

  7 Decline and Rebirth

  Postscript

  Bibliography

  Analytical List of Contents

  1: Voices in the Head

  Adam Crabtree’s patients who heard ‘voices inside their heads’. Julian Jaynes and auditory hallucinations. The case of Sarah Worthington. ‘Possession’ by a grandmother. The case of Susan: ‘possession’ by a sexually obsessed father. Apparent possession by a living woman: the case of Art. Julian Jaynes and his theory of ‘voices’ from the right brain. Split-brain research. The person you call ‘you’ lives in the left brain. Voices described by mental patients. Wilson Van Dusen on ‘the Presence of Spirits in Madness’. Talking directly with the patient’s hallucinations. The two types of ‘voices’: the ‘higher order’ and the ‘lower order’. ‘… the purpose of the lower order is to illuminate all of the person’s weaknesses’. The similarity between all hallucinations. Van Dusen’s discovery of Swedenborg. Swedenborg’s description of ‘possession’ by spirits — similarity to Van Dusen’s patients. ‘All of Swedenborg’s observations … conform to my findings.’ ‘Angels possess the interior of man.’ Crabtree’s case of the girl who was ‘possessed’ by Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Alan Vaughan is possessed after playing with an ouija board. His precognition of the future. Brad Absetz establishes contact with his ‘other self’. Swedenborg’s views on life after death. Bertrand Russell on ‘survival’. What is personality? Alfred Sutro’s ‘psychic’ experience. The Rev. Bertrand’s near-death experience on a Swiss mountainside. A typical apparition from Phantasms of the Living. The near-death experience: ‘passing down a tunnel’. The death of Dr Karl Novotny, as described through a medium. How far can we trust the evidence of mediums? The emergence of an ‘overall pattern’.

  2: The World of the Clairvoyant

  Darwin arrives in Tierra del Fuego. ‘A certain blindness in human beings’. We are blind to things that do not interest us. The clairvoyant as a different species. Rosalind Heywood’s experience of ‘nature spirits’ on Dartmoor. Development of Rosalind Heywood’s psychic abilities. She reads The Riddle of the Universe. ‘… the universe was a soulless mechanism’. Telepathy with a sleeping patient. A patient who saw dead relatives. Rosalind Heywood’s ‘Orders’. Her powers of precognition. Coincidences? Her son’s dreams of the future. ‘Being in two places at the same time’. ‘White Me and Pink Me’. Her experiences of contact with the dead. The case of Julia. The case of Vivian Usborne. ‘… he now had scope, freedom and opportunity beyond his wildest dreams’. Information from spirits? Her susceptibility to beauty. ‘Those presences’. Jaynes’s theory of how man became a ‘left-brainer’. Ramakrishna’s experience of ‘samadhi’. The magic of primitive man. The porpoise-callers of the Gilbert Islands. How we lost our psychic powers. Rosalind Heywood and ‘The Singing’. Lethbridge’s theory of apparitions as ‘tape recordings’. Mrs Willett’s experience of ‘two minds’. The soldier who found himself ‘outside his earthly body’. The near-death experience of Sir Auckland Geddes. A-consciousness and B-consciousness. Sir Alexander Ogston’s out-of-the-body experience. Rudolf Steiner’s fourfold division of man. Hans Driesch’s experiment with the sea urchin. Harold Burr’s ‘life fields’. The Kahuna theory of the ‘three selves’. ‘Nature spirits’. Adam Crabtree’s case of ‘possession’ by a non-human entity. Rosalind Heywood’s experience with the ‘evil spirit’.

  3: Invasion of the Spirit People

  Catherine Crowe’s Night Side of Nature. Kerner’s Seeress of Prevorst. How Kerner came to accept that Friederike Hauffe was a genuine ‘seeress’. Out-of-the-body experience of a banker. Jung-Stilling’s story of travelling clairvoyants. Mrs Crowe on hypnosis. Volgyesi’s evidence for ‘battle of wills’. Does hypnosis involve a mental force? Why the Victorians were sceptical about ‘the occult’. Feuerbach and the new religion of atheism. The haunting of Willington Mill. Dr Drury sees a ghost. The Hydesville affair. The Fox family and the beginning of spiritualism. The Davenport brothers. Jonathan Koons and the ‘spirit room’. Mrs Hayden goes to London. The life of Allan Kardec. The Spirits’ Book. The split in the spiritualist movement. Why spiritualism aroused such hostility among the intellectuals. Thomson Jay Hudson and the ‘two minds’ theory. His rejection of spiritualism. Steiner: ‘The spiritualists are the greatest materialists of all’. The Fox sisters confess to fraud. Reichenbach and ‘the odic force’. Joseph Rodes Buchanan and the ‘nerve aura’. The birth of psychometry. The life of Daniel Dunglas Home. A seance in a Parisian drawing room. Home’s career in Europe. Lord Adare’s experiences with Home. Home’s ability to change his height.

  4: Psychical Research Comes of Age

  The scientists revolt against spiritualism. The chatter of old women and curates’. Alfred Russel Wallace hypnotises a schoolboy. Mrs Guppy flies through the air. Lewis Carroll: ‘… trickery will not do as a complete explanation’. Robert Dale Owen’s Footfalls on the Boundary of Another World. Myers and Sidgwick go for a starlit walk. The founding of the Society for Psychical Research. Why the SPR was not taken seriously. The Florence Cook scandal. The exposure of Rosina Showers. The Creery sisters admit to cheating. The confession of the Fox sisters. The inefficient cheating of Eusapia Palladino. The death of Edmund Gurney. The Portsmouth hoax. Myers is taken in by Ada Goodrich-Freer. The real achievement of the SPR. Assorted cases. Prince Duleep Singh sees his father looking out of a picture frame. The wife of a railway worker has a vision of an accident. Rider Haggard and his daughter’s retriever Bob. Mrs Spearman sees her dead half-brother. Lieutenant Larkin sees a ghost. The Chaffin will case. An apparition delivers a warning. The red scratch case. Sir William Barrett’s case of a death-bed vision in a maternity hospital. Sir Oliver Lodge and the Raymond case. The ghost of the chimneysweep Samuel Bull. ‘Death is the end of all’. The red pyjamas case. Jung: ‘… the spirit hypothesis yields better results than any other’.

  5: Rediscovering a Masterpiece

  Sarah Hall sees her own ghost. The problem of the ‘psychic double’. Goethe sees his ‘doppelgänger’. Myers’s Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death: ‘probably the most comprehensive work ever written on the subject of the paranormal’. A German vampire. Multiple personality. The case of Louis Vivé. The case of Ansel Bourne. The case of Clara Fowler — ‘Christine Beauchamp’. Myers on genius. Calculating prodigies. The ‘subliminal mind’. ‘Our powers are far greater than we realise’. A ‘double’ goes to church. Strindberg ‘projects’ himself to Germany. The Verity case. The Rev. Mountford sees a carriage before it arrives. Sabom’s case of ‘astral projection’. Can personality survive death? The mystery of multiple personality.
Sybil, The Three Faces of Eve and the Billy Milligan case. Psychic powers of primitive peoples. Dr Wiltse’s near-death experience. The case of Michael Conley. The Rev. Stainton Moses. Spirit Teachings. Moses disagrees with the spirits. William James and Mrs Piper. Richard Hodgson investigates Mrs Piper. The case of George Pellew. James’s ‘white crow’. Are ‘spirit controls’ sub-personalities? How to deceive the spirits. Myers and the ‘Cross Correspondences’. Mrs Willett joins the group. ‘Myers’ communicates with Geraldine Cummins. The problem of the ‘bad telephone line’. Swan on a Black Sea.

  6: Dr Steiner and the Problem of Reincarnation

  Dr Steiner introduces himself to the Berlin Theosophical Society. Steiner’s overnight success. The ‘new religion’. Steiner’s death. Madame Blavatsky. Aunt Tekla ‘communicates’. The Gordon Davis case. The downfall of Madame Blavatsky. Rudolf Steiner sees a ghost. Steiner’s vision of spiritualism as ‘access to inner worlds’. ‘Inwardness’ is the beginning of spiritual life. Steiner’s intercourse with the dead. What happens after death. Whately Carington’s fourth-dimensional theory of life after death. ‘We encounter the Dead at the moment of going to sleep.’ Thomson Jay Hudson cures an elderly relative. Steiner and reincarnation. Myers and the ‘group soul’. The case of Lurancy Vennum. Lurancy Vennum ‘becomes’ Mary Roff. The Alexandrina case. The Pollock twins. The case of Shanti Devi. The case of Swarnlata. The case of Jasbir Lal Jat. The case of Edward Ryall. Why Ian Wilson rejects it. Coleridge’s case of the peasant girl who recited in Latin, Greek and Hebrew. Wilder Penfield and the ‘flashback experience’. The case of Blanche Poynings. The Bridey Murphy case. Arnall Bloxham regresses a swimming instructor. The past lives of ‘Jane Evans’. The pogrom in York. Joe Keeton and Kitty Jay. The case of Sergeant Reuben Stafford. Arthur Guirdham and the Cathars. Group reincarnation?

  7: Decline and Rebirth

  Sir Oliver Lodge and Raymond. Whiskies and cigars in heaven? Conan Doyle is converted to Spiritualism. Bligh Bond and the dead monks of Glastonbury Abbey. Archbishop Lang orders an investigation into Spiritualism. The return of Lawrence of Arabia. The case of Drayton Thomas’s father. The decline of Spiritualism in the 1920s and 1930s. Houdini denounces mediums as ‘human vultures’. The decline of the SPR. The High ’n Dries. Carlos Mirabelli. Rhine and the new methods of research. Basil Shackleton foresees the future. ‘The sheep and the goats’. Helmut Schmidt makes cheating impossible. Karlis Osis asks doctors and nurses for their death-bed observations. Visions of beautiful imagery and deep happiness. Elizabeth Kübler-Ross. The ‘death-denying society’. The forgotten work of Albert Heim. The observations of Noyes and Kletti. George Ritchie’s death-bed experience. Raymond Moody’s Life After Life. The ‘Core experience’. Visions after ‘death’. The ‘vision of knowledge’. Plato’s myth of Er. ‘Institutions of higher learning’. Kenneth Ring on near-death experiences. The sceptical view: ‘It is an expression of individual and collective anxiety about death.’ Ring’s conclusions on near-death experiences. The sceptical view: ‘I felt as if I had suddenly come alive for the first time.’ ‘Right-brain experience’. Margot Grey’s near-death experience. Is the near-death experience a ‘defence mechanism of the brain’? Primary and supportive evidence. How life arose. Dawkins’s ‘replicator molecule’. The philosophy of vitalism. Does life exist apart from matter? Colonel Dudgeon goes fire walking. Driesch and Bergson. How Adam Crabtree became convinced. The case of Anna Ecklund. Ralph Allison’s case of Carrie. The case of Elise. ‘Possessing spirits’. The case of Sophia. The aim of this book.

  Postscript

  C. D. Broad: ‘If the facts of psychical research are true, they literally alter everything.’ But do they? My encounter with Martha, the ‘materialisation medium’. Raymond Lodge loses his temper. Spirits have nothing to add to the sum total of human thought. The problem of personality. How many ‘me’s are there? The ‘ladder of selves’. The problem of human beings: we are too subjective. Flashes of ‘Objective consciousness’. The problem of vitalism. ‘Enlarging the leak’. Has life conquered the ‘higher planes’? History of mankind from the point of view of ‘angels’. Force T and Force C. The importance of imagination. Faculty X. Is Faculty X encoded in our genes? The apparently ‘absurd’ powers of the human mind. Turning the ‘telescope’ inward.

  Acknowledgments

  As usual, I owe a considerable debt of gratitude to the Society for Psychical Research, and its librarian Nick Clarke Lowes, and to the College of Psychic Studies, and its librarian Bernadette Giblin. Both provided me with many books that would otherwise have been quite unobtainable.

  I am grateful to Dr. Adam Crabtree, Dr. Wilson Van Dusen and to Margot Grey for allowing me to quote from unpublished material, and to the late Anita Gregory for some valuable comments. I also wish to thank Joe Keeton, Ray Bryant, Andrew and Marguerite Selby and Ian Wilson, for invaluable material for the reincarnation chapter; and Julie Peters for drawing my attention to the case of the calculating twins.

  Finally, I should like to thank Simon Scott, at whose suggestion this book was written.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Voices in the Head

  Dr Adam Crabtree is a psychotherapist who lives and works in Toronto, Canada. He began to practise in 1966, and, like most psychiatrists, soon began to encounter cases in which patients heard ‘voices’ inside their heads.

  Now such cases are not particularly rare, and ‘hearing voices’ is certainly not a sign of madness. Dr Julian Jaynes, a Princeton psychologist, began to make a study of auditory hallucinations after experiencing one himself — he was lying on a couch when he heard a voice speaking from the air above his head. Naturally concerned about his sanity, Jaynes discovered, to his relief, that about 10 per cent of people have had hallucinations of some sort, and that about a third of these take the form of ‘phantom voices’. One perfectly normal young housewife told him that she held long conversations with her dead grandmother every morning when she made the beds.

  Jaynes, of course, takes it for granted that such experiences are hallucinations, and for a long time, Adam Crabtree shared that belief. Then he encountered a case that raised some basic doubts. It concerned a young woman named Sarah Worthington, who was the patient of a female colleague of Crabtree’s called Jenny. After a treatment that had been initially successful, Sarah Worthington had suddenly plunged into moods of depression in which she was tempted to commit suicide.

  The three of them met in Crabtree’s office, and he began to probe her difficulties. One of his questions was whether she had ever heard voices inside her head, and she admitted that she had. Crabtree asked her to lie down and relax, and to do her best to try to recall these inner conversations. Almost immediately, the girl’s body tensed, and she exclaimed: ‘Oh, the heat! I’m hot!’ And as she went on speaking, both psychiatrists observed the change in her voice. Sarah lacked confidence; this new personality had the voice of someone who was used to exercising authority. When they asked the woman what she wanted to do, she replied: ‘Help Sarah.’ It was a clear indication that this was not Sarah. They asked the woman her name, and she replied: ‘Sarah Jackson.’ She identified herself as Sarah’s grandmother. Crabtree explained that he and Jenny were also trying to help Sarah, and asked the ‘grandmother’ if she would be willing to help; she replied yes. This ended the first session.

  At the next session, the grandmother soon came back. She was still talking about a fire, and at one point she asked: ‘Where is Jason?’ Jason, it transpired, was her son, and the fire she was referring to had taken place in 1910. Sarah Jackson had rushed home as soon as she heard that there was a fire in her street — her seven-year-old son had been left in the house alone. The whole neighbourhood was ablaze. In fact, Jason had been moved to safety by neighbours, but it took Sarah Jackson another hour to discover this, and in the meantime she had rushed around the streets in a frenzy, stifling in the heat. The experience had imprinted itself deep in her consciousness.

  According to the grandmother, she had ‘taken poss
ession’ of Sarah Worthington when her granddaughter was playing the piano — both of them loved music. And it soon became clear that, in spite of her avowed intention of helping her granddaughter, it was Sarah Jackson herself who was in need of help. She was tormented by guilt feelings about her own life — particularly about how badly she had treated her daughter Elizabeth, Sarah’s mother. Elizabeth had developed into an unhappy, neurotic girl, who had in turn treated her own daughter badly. And Sarah’s relations with her mother were a strange duplicate of Elizabeth’s relations with her mother. Both mothers had greatly preferred their son to their daughter, and had taught the daughter that men were everything and women nothing. The grandmother had become fully aware of all this by the time she died, which is why she now felt that she had to help her granddaughter. Instead of helping, she had made things worse; Sarah was frightened and confused by the voice inside her, and was becoming desperate.

  Now grandmother Jackson was ‘out in the open’ things became much easier. She was able to give the psychiatrists invaluable information about Sarah’s family background. And although Sarah was at first astonished to realise that her grandmother was speaking through her, she gradually learned to accept it, and began to achieve deeper insight into her problems. At the end of two months she was cured. The grandmother remained a ‘possessing presence’, but now Sarah understood it she was no longer afraid; in fact, it gave her a sense of comfort to feel that her grandmother was a vaguely beneficent presence in the background of her life.

  The reader’s reaction to this story is probably much the same as my own, when I first read it in the typescript of Adam Crabtree’s Multiple Man: that there must be some purely psychological explanation. Sarah had known her grandmother as a child; perhaps she had heard the story about the fire from her own lips. Perhaps she recognised how similar her mother’s problems had been to her own. And her unconscious mind had ‘re-told’ her the story as a rationalisation of her own sufferings … But the more I read of Crabtree’s book (which his publishers had sent to me, asking if I would write an introduction) the more I saw that such explanations are unacceptable. He goes on to recount another eight cases from his practice, each one involving some type of ‘possession’. And after the third or fourth case, the unconscious mind explanation had begun to wear very thin. A social worker named Susan was unable to sustain any normal relationship with a male, and recognised, correctly, that this was due to some deep resentment towards her father. Crabtree was able to speak to her father — who had died in a car crash — just as he spoke to Sarah’s grandmother, and he learned that he had been sexually obsessed with his daughter. Until she was sixteen, he had crept into her bedroom after she was asleep and had fondled her genitals. On some unconscious level, she was aware of what was happening. She recognised his desire for her, and treated him with contempt, behaving provocatively and exercising her new-found sexual power to make him squirm. The contempt spread into her relations with boyfriends and caused problems. When her father died in the car crash, he was drawn to his daughter as a ‘place of refuge’, and she was vulnerable to him because of the sexual interference. Once ‘inside’ her, he was in a condition of ‘foggy sleep’, unaware of his identity or his present position. Crabtree patiently explained to Susan’s father that he was actually dead, and that he ought to leave his daughter alone. And one day, he simply failed to appear at the therapeutic session; Susan experienced a sense of relief and freedom.