Afterlife

1. Voices in the Head Hint at Other Orders of Being

"All of Swedenborg’s observations on the effect of evil spirits entering man’s consciousness conform to my findings."

Beyond hallucination. Psychotherapist Adam Crabtree's cases of patients hearing "voices" or experiencing "possession" challenge the simple explanation of auditory hallucination. While Julian Jaynes linked such voices to the right brain and a historical "bicameral mind," Crabtree and psychologist Wilson Van Dusen found patterns suggesting external entities. Van Dusen, studying mental patients, identified two distinct types of voices:

• Lower Order: Tormenting, repetitive, limited vocabulary, hostile to religion, focused on weaknesses and obscenity.
• Higher Order: Helpful, symbolic, wise, religious, communicate intuitively.

Swedenborg's insights. Van Dusen discovered striking parallels between his patients' descriptions and the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century mystic who claimed direct communication with spirits. Swedenborg described spirits entering the "organ of hearing from within" and noted that "evil spirits are such that they regard man with deadly hatred." This historical correspondence, particularly the consistent hostility of "lower order" voices to religion, led Van Dusen to consider the possibility of genuine spirit influence, mirroring Swedenborg's accounts.

Possession phenomena. Crabtree's cases, like Sarah Worthington seemingly possessed by her grandmother or Art by his living mother, and even a bizarre case of possession by a non-human entity ("Morlac"), further complicate purely psychological explanations. While the unconscious mind is capable of remarkable feats, the consistency and specific details across multiple cases, sometimes involving information unknown to the patient, push towards considering the "as if it were possession" approach as more than just a therapeutic tool.

2. Clairvoyance Reveals a Wider, More Sensitive Reality

"It was as if, like a wheeling flight of dunlin, all those visible and invisible creatures swung round as a unit to inspect us, and I seemed to feel their sigh of relief as they came to a group decision."

A different perception. Clairvoyants, like Rosalind Heywood, seem to inhabit a world perceived with a different sensitivity, akin to the auditory focus of a forest pygmy compared to a visual city dweller. Heywood's experiences, from sensing "lesser presences" and "nature spirits" on Dartmoor to receiving inner "Orders" that proved uncannily accurate (predicting a burst pipe, warning about a swindler), suggest a faculty beyond normal senses. This sensitivity often correlates with a low "beauty threshold," leading to overwhelming experiences like Ramakrishna's samadhi.

Right-brain connection. This "psychic" sensitivity appears linked to the right hemisphere of the brain, the intuitive, pattern-recognizing side, often suppressed in modern "left-brained" consciousness. Moments of deep relaxation or heightened emotion can lower the "sensitivity threshold," allowing access to this wider awareness. Heywood's description of "The Singing," a vibrant inner sound varying with location (wild places, churches), aligns with theories of emotional or energetic "tape recordings" on the environment, detectable by sensitives.

Beyond the physical. While some phenomena like the "Singing" or sensing presences might be explained by environmental energy fields, Heywood's experiences of apparent contact with the recently deceased ("Julia," "Vivian") and her conviction of their continued, expanded existence after death, challenge purely materialistic or psychological interpretations. These intimate communications, felt "inside the mind," suggest a form of awareness and interaction that transcends the physical body and conventional understanding of time and space.

3. The 19th Century Saw an Invasion of the Spirit People

"Dear friends, you must proclaim this truth to the world. This is the dawning of a new era; you must not try to conceal it any longer."

The Hydesville spark. The modern Spiritualist movement exploded in 1848 with the Fox sisters in Hydesville, New York. Mysterious raps, initially dismissed as pranks, responded intelligently to questions, revealing the alleged murder of a pedlar buried in the cellar (later partially corroborated by a skeleton find). These phenomena, including raps strong enough to shake the house and furniture, followed the girls, suggesting a connection to them.

Spreading phenomena. The raps evolved into more complex manifestations:

• Table moving and levitation (Davenport brothers)
• Musical instruments played by unseen hands (Jonathan Koons)
• Automatic writing and speaking in foreign languages (Daniel Dunglas Home)
• Materialization of spirit forms (Florence Cook, Home)
• Apports (objects appearing from nowhere, like Mrs. Guppy herself)

A new religion. The "spirits" themselves urged their reality be proclaimed, leading to public demonstrations and the rise of mediums. Allan Kardec systematized these communications into "Spiritism," teaching reincarnation and spiritual evolution, though this doctrine caused division within the movement. Despite widespread fraud and the eventual confession (and later recantation) of the Fox sisters, the sheer volume and often compelling nature of the phenomena, particularly those witnessed by credible individuals like Daniel Dunglas Home in broad daylight, left many convinced that something genuinely paranormal was occurring.

4. Psychical Research Systematized Evidence, Despite Scandals

"That trickery will not do as a complete explanation of all the phenomena… I am more than convinced."

Seeking scientific truth. Faced with the explosion of spiritualist phenomena and the refusal of mainstream science to investigate, a group of Cambridge scholars, including Henry Sidgwick, Frederick Myers, and Edmund Gurney, founded the Society for Psychical Research (SPR) in 1882. Their aim was to apply rigorous scientific methods to study the "supernatural," collecting vast amounts of data on apparitions, telepathy, clairvoyance, and poltergeists, culminating in works like "Phantasms of the Living."

Plagued by fraud. The early years of the SPR were marred by scandals involving mediums caught cheating, such as Florence Cook, Rosina Showers, the Creery sisters, and Eusapia Palladino. Even the founders were sometimes deceived, like Gurney by the Portsmouth hoax or Myers by Ada Goodrich-Freer. These exposures, often sensationalized by the press, severely damaged the credibility of psychical research in the public eye, reinforcing the view that it was all based on fraud and delusion.

Evidence persists. Despite the setbacks, the SPR's meticulous documentation revealed a consistent pattern of phenomena that could not easily be dismissed as fraud or simple hallucination. The sheer volume of attested cases, often involving multiple witnesses and details unknown to the percipient, compelled many investigators, initially skeptical, to conclude that something genuinely paranormal was occurring, even if they couldn't fully explain it. The challenge remained convincing a skeptical scientific establishment unwilling to look at the evidence.

5. Compelling Cases Suggest Survival Beyond Doubt

"I regard the existence of discarnate spirits as scientifically proved and I no longer refer to the sceptic as having any right to speak on the subject."

Beyond telepathy. While many paranormal phenomena might be explained by telepathy or clairvoyance, certain cases documented by the SPR strongly suggest the survival of personality after death. These often involve information conveyed that was unknown to any living person present, making telepathy from the living an unlikely explanation.

• The Chaffin Will: A man dreams his dead father tells him where a hidden will is located, leading to the discovery of a valid, later will hidden in a Bible, a fact unknown to the family.
• The Red Scratch: A man sees the apparition of his dead sister with a red scratch on her cheek, a detail her mother had concealed after accidentally marking the corpse.
• The Raymond Case: Messages through two different mediums describe a specific detail in a photograph of Sir Oliver Lodge's dead son, Raymond, before Lodge or his wife knew the photograph existed.

Consistent patterns. These cases, alongside thousands of others involving apparitions of the dying or recently deceased conveying specific information or warnings (like the Samuel Bull haunting or the railway wife's vision), form a pattern that is difficult to dismiss. While individual cases can be questioned, the cumulative evidence, meticulously collected and cross-referenced by researchers like Myers, Lodge, and Hyslop, led many initially skeptical investigators to conclude, often reluctantly, that the "spirit hypothesis yields better results in practice than any other."

The Hyslop-James challenge. Professor James Hyslop, a notoriously tough-minded investigator, became convinced of survival through cases like the "red pyjamas" message from the deceased William James, a detail only known to James and Hyslop from decades prior. Even Carl Jung, while publicly cautious, admitted privately that the spirit hypothesis explained the phenomena better than the unconscious mind alone, highlighting the persistent challenge these cases pose to purely materialistic explanations.

6. The Subliminal Mind Possesses Extraordinary Hidden Powers

"Our powers are far greater than we realise."

Beyond the conscious ego. Frederick Myers's masterpiece, "Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death," argues that the human mind is far more complex than our everyday consciousness suggests. He introduced the concept of the "subliminal mind," not just a basement of repressions (like Freud's unconscious), but also an "upper storey" containing extraordinary latent abilities.

Evidence from pathology and genius. Myers drew evidence from:

• Multiple Personality: Cases like Louis Vivé or Christine Beauchamp (Sybil, Three Faces of Eve) show distinct personalities sharing one body, suggesting a deeper, underlying self. The ability of alter-egos to have different physical characteristics (allergies, eyesight) challenges the idea that personality is solely a product of the physical brain.
• Calculating Prodigies: Individuals like Benjamin Blyth or the "calendar calculating twins" demonstrate instantaneous, non-calculative access to complex information, suggesting a different mode of mental processing, perhaps linked to the right brain.
• Genius: Myers saw genius not as a freak anomaly, but as the ability to tap into this wider range of subliminal faculties inherent in all.

Psychic projection. Myers also explored cases of "psychic projection," where individuals seem to project an image of themselves to another location, sometimes witnessed by others (Emilie Sagée, Strindberg, the Verity case). This, along with experiments in distant hypnosis, suggested a mental force capable of acting at a distance, further supporting the idea of powers far exceeding conventional understanding. These abilities, often appearing spontaneously or under altered states, hint at a potential for consciousness and perception that is not strictly bound by the physical body.

7. Reincarnation Cases Offer Striking Evidence of Past Lives

"Look, here’s that old collar I tatted."

Memories of past lives. Cases of alleged reincarnation, particularly those involving young children, present a distinct line of evidence for survival. Children, often spontaneously and persistently, describe details of a previous life, sometimes in a different family, location, or even gender.

Compelling examples:

• Lurancy Vennum: A girl seemingly "possessed" by the personality of a recently deceased girl, Mary Roff, exhibiting detailed knowledge of Mary's life and family, and even recognizing relatives she had never met in her current life.
• The Pollock Twins: Twin girls born with birthmarks matching scars/birthmarks on their deceased older sisters, exhibiting shared phobias related to the accident that killed them, and recognizing toys and locations from their sisters' lives.
• Shanti Devi & Swarnlata: Indian children who provided extensive, verifiable details about their alleged previous lives, including names, family members, houses, and specific events, often recognizing people and places they had never encountered in their current lives.

Challenges and counterarguments. While cases like Jasbir Lal Jat (a boy seemingly "taken over" by a deceased man after a near-fatal illness) are particularly striking, skeptical explanations like cryptomnesia (unconscious memory from overheard conversations or reading) or even deliberate fraud are often proposed. However, detailed investigations, like those by Ian Stevenson or the Joe Keeton/Ray Bryant case (where documentary evidence for a specific past life, Sergeant Reuben Stafford, was found), make cryptomnesia increasingly difficult to sustain, suggesting that some form of memory or connection to a past personality persists.

8. Modern Research and Near-Death Experiences Provide Glimpses of a Core Journey

"I was moving through this — you’re going to think this is weird — through this long dark place."

A new field of study. While psychical research faced decline, new methods and phenomena emerged. J.B. Rhine's statistical tests proved ESP and psychokinesis in the lab, and S.G. Soal demonstrated precognition. More recently, the systematic study of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs) by researchers like Raymond Moody, Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, Kenneth Ring, and Margot Grey has brought a wealth of consistent testimony.

The core experience. Despite varied circumstances, thousands of NDE accounts share common elements:

• A sense of peace and lack of fear.
• An out-of-the-body experience, often viewing one's own body.
• Moving through a tunnel or dark space towards a light.
• Encountering other beings, sometimes deceased relatives or a "being of light."
• A life review or "vision of knowledge."
• A sense of a border or point of no return.
• A return to the body, often with reluctance.

Consistency across cultures. These patterns are remarkably consistent across different ages, cultures, and religious backgrounds, as shown by studies like Karlis Osis's deathbed observations or Erlendur Haraldsson's cross-cultural research. While skeptics propose psychological or physiological explanations (oxygen deprivation, brain chemicals), the subjective reality and transformative impact of these experiences on the individuals who undergo them are undeniable.

9. NDEs and Mystical States Point to a Reality Beyond the Body

"I felt as if I had suddenly come alive for the first time — as if I were awakened from a long deep sleep into a real world."

Beyond ordinary perception. The subjective quality of Near-Death Experiences often mirrors mystical states, characterized by a sense of profound reality, unity, timelessness, and access to knowledge or loving energy that transcends normal consciousness. This suggests NDEs might be glimpses into a state of being independent of the physical body, accessible when the constraints of everyday "left-brain" awareness are loosened.

A different mode of consciousness. Experiences like Wendy Rose-Neill's spontaneous mystical insight or Margot Grey's OBE during fever share key features with NDEs:

• Dissolution of the boundary between self and surroundings.
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Last updated: May 28, 2025