Authors: Colin Wilson
The Rev.
Bertrand’s observation that his wife had gone to Lucerne a day earlier than intended also proved to be correct.
In a case like this, we have not only the corroboration of the other people concerned, but also the Rev.
Bertrand’s apparently ‘impossible’ knowledge of what the guide had been doing while his back was turned.
If he was mistaken to believe that he experienced death, then he certainly had some strange experience of extra-sensory perception.
There are a number of interesting points about this account.
One is the ‘string’ that Bertrand keeps wishing was cut.
He does not explain what he means by a string, but, as we shall see, it can be found again and again in accounts of so-called ‘out-of-the-body experiences’ (OBEs for short), in which people have ‘floated’ out of their bodies and had a sensation of looking down on the physical body, connected to it by a kind of shining cord.
Another is Bertrand’s ability to perceive things that were happening elsewhere — what the guide was doing, his wife preparing to visit Lucerne, and so on.
Again, this has been described repeatedly by people who claim to have had out-of-the-body experiences.
Yet another point to note is Bertrand’s feeling of relief at being out of his body, and the subsequent feeling of reluctance — in fact, of rage — when he was drawn back into it.
This is again a familiar feature of such accounts.
And
this
, basically, is what distinguishes the Rev.
Bertrand’s story from the one invented by Alfred Sutro.
Sutro’s tale is the kind of thing that people who know very little about psychical research imagine to be a typical ghost story.
It is not.
If we are to judge by the thousands of records in the annals of the SPR, or its American or European equivalents, ‘real’ ghosts do not sit around on river banks, a few yards from their drowned bodies, making sobbing noises loud enough to be heard over a car engine.
They do not allow themselves to be picked up, or point out the houses where they live.
Neither, for that matter, do they
walk around with their heads underneath their arms, wailing or clanking chains.
The typical apparition, as described in report after report, looks quite like a normal person.
One lady was sitting reading when a tall, thin old man entered the room; when she looked more closely she recognised him as her great uncle.
He looked agitated, and was carrying a roll of paper.
He made no reply when she spoke to him, but walked out of a half-open door.
She was not in the least alarmed because she made the natural assumption that her great uncle had come to see her.
By the next post she received a letter from her father asking her to go and see the great uncle, who was seriously ill.
She went, but found that he had died the previous afternoon, at exactly the time she had seen him.
A roll of paper was found under the dead man’s pillow, and his niece concluded that he had wanted to change his will in her father’s favour, but had been overtaken by death.
This story is taken from one of the classic volumes of early research undertaken by founder members of the SPR,
Phantasms of the Living
, by Gurney, Myers and Podmore (Volume 1, p.
559).
And it follows basically the same
pattern
as hundreds of similar accounts.
(This particular book is well over a thousand pages long).
And the story told by the Rev.
Bertrand follows the same kind of pattern as hundreds of similar records of near-death or after-death experiences.
It is always possible to pick holes in each individual account.
For example, the case of the great uncle was passed on to the SPR by a certain Major Taylor, who explained that the lady who wrote it, ‘Miss L’, wished to withhold her name in deference to the views of a near relative.
The whole thing could have been invented by Miss L, or by Major Taylor or, for that matter, by the authors of the book.
But then, there are hundreds of cases in
Phantasms of the Living
, and most of them show the same basic similarities; it seems unlikely that they were all invented.
This is finally the most convincing argument for the view of life after death put forward by Swedenborg: there is such an enormous body of similar evidence to support it.
There are literally hundreds of reports of ‘life after death’ that display the same pattern.
That pattern is roughly as follows.
After the death experience, which may be accompanied by a sense of pain or suffocation, there is a sudden sensation of freedom.
In many cases, the person has a sense of passing down a long tunnel, and seeing a light at the end.
Then he finds himself looking at his own body.
This is usually accompanied by a
feeling of deep peace, and a certain relief at having done with physical existence.
The person may find it impossible to accept the idea that he is dead, and tries to talk to other people.
They ignore him — although animals sometimes seem to be aware of him.
He tries to touch them; his hand goes through them.
And, again and again in these accounts, the ‘dead person’ is met by relatives who have already died; this happens only when he acknowledges that he is dead.
There seem to be many cases in which the dead person is in a state of confusion, rather like being in a fever, and fails to grasp that he is no longer alive.
In that case, he may remain trapped on earth — an ‘earth-bound’ spirit — indefinitely.
The obvious objection to the Rev.
Bertrand case, as evidence of life after death, is that there is no real evidence that he
did
experience death.
He may only have passed into a dream-like state.
Even his accurate knowledge of the guide’s misdemeanours is not proof that he experienced death; it may have been some kind of ‘dream clairvoyance’.
But there have been many cases in which ‘spirit mediums’ have relayed messages that claim to come from the dead, and which describe the death process in some detail.
Here is a typical case from the records of a modern researcher, Dr Robert Crookall.
It concerns the death of Dr Karl Novotny, a pupil of the psychologist Alfred Adler.
His friend Grete Schröder had dreamed of Novotny two days before his death at Easter, 1965, and in her dream he announced his forthcoming death.
When this actually happened, she was so impressed that she went to consult a medium — although before this she had taken no interest in such matters.
The medium transcribed an account of Novotny’s death by means of automatic writing, in a hand which Grete Schröder recognised as Novotny’s own.
‘Novotny’ described how, when he was spending Easter at his country home, he agreed to go for a walk with some friends.
He had been feeling ill for some time, and seems to have had doubts about whether to accompany them:
However, I forced myself to go.
Then I felt completely free and well.
I went ahead and drew deep breaths of the fresh evening air, and was happier than I had been for a long time.
How was it, I wondered, that I suddenly had no more difficulties, and was neither tired nor out of breath?
I turned back to my companions and found myself looking down at my own body on the ground.
My friends were in despair, calling for a doctor, and trying to get a car to take me home.
But I was well
and felt no pains.
I couldn’t understand what had happened.
I bent down and felt the heart of the body lying on the ground.
Yes — it had ceased to beat — I was dead.
But I was still alive!
I spoke to my friends, but they neither saw me nor answered me.
I was most annoyed and left them …
And then there was my dog, who kept whining pitifully, unable to decide to which of me he should go, for he saw me in two places at once, standing up and lying down on the ground.
When all the formalities were concluded and my body had been put in a coffin, I realised that I must be dead.
But I wouldn’t acknowledge the fact; for, like my teacher Alfred Adler, I did not believe in after-life … I went up the hill to where Grete lives.
She was sitting alone and appeared very unhappy.
But she did not seem to hear me either.
It was no use, I had to recognise the truth.
When finally I did so, I saw my dear mother coming to meet me with open arms, telling me that I had passed into the next world — not in words, of course, since these only belong to the earth.
Even so, I couldn’t credit her statement and thought I must be dreaming.
This belief continued for a long time.
I fought against the truth and was most unhappy …
*
It is easy to sympathise with Bertrand Russell’s mistrust of this kind of ‘evidence’.
It
sounds
like wishful thinking.
It also contradicts our commonsense assumptions.
For example, he describes himself taking deep breaths of the evening air.
Do the dead breathe like the living, converting oxygen to carbon dioxide?
Presumably he found himself fully dressed as he stood beside his own body — if he had suddenly found himself naked, he would have noticed sooner that something odd was going on.
Does this mean that our clothes also survive death?
The account sounds so disappointingly factual.
If he had described a whirlpool of coloured lights and a sensation like expanding like a ripple across the surface of a pond, we might find it more convincing.
This utterly commonplace description of trying to feel his own heartbeat and getting angry with his friends sounds like the invention of someone with a poor imagination.
Against these objections, we must place the simple fact that there are so many reports of the death experience that follow roughly the same pattern.
Any scientist would admit that this makes the evidence more convincing.
If one sailor came back reporting that he had been shipwrecked on an island where the natives had green hair and long tails, it would probably be safe
to assume either that he was a liar or that he was suffering from delirium tremens.
If hundreds of sailors report the same experience over many years, it would be downright stupid not to give it careful consideration.
There must be something behind it, if only a conspiracy among the sailors.
In the same way, when report after report of people in sudden danger contains the phrase ‘My whole life flashed in front of my eyes’, it looks probable that the brain has some curious ‘rapid playback’ mechanism that is activated by the threat of death.
Those who believe in an afterlife may speculate that the purpose of this mechanism is to ‘remind’ the person of his identity, so that he does not enter the ‘next world’ in a state of total confusion.
Those who take a more sceptical view may regard it as a natural phenomenon, perhaps due to a flood of adrenalin, or to some electrical discharge caused by emergency.
But in view of the number of reports of this sensation, the most indefensible attitude would be to dismiss it as an old wives’ tale.
Does this mean that Bertrand Russell is wilfully blinding himself to the facts when he says that ‘it is not rational arguments but emotions that cause belief in a future life’?
Not necessarily.
We have to recognise that the world is full of millions of facts, and that everyone has to choose which ones he finds interesting.
Even the greatest intellects can never hope to know more than a tiny fraction of all the facts about the world we live in.
Russell chose to devote his life to trying to establish the basic ‘facts’ about logic and mathematics; no one can blame him for not being curious about the existence of an afterlife.
And, in view of that lack of curiosity, it is also hard to blame him for concluding that ‘when you’re dead you’re dead’.
Where Russell does deserve a certain amount of criticism is in the shallow nature of his assumptions about
why
people can believe in an afterlife.
He takes it for granted that there is no solid scientific evidence for life after death, and that therefore it must be wishful thinking.
To the objection that he has failed to consider the facts, he would probably reply that he doesn’t have the time — but that if someone could present him with one solid, incontrovertible fact to prove life after death, he might be ready to be convinced.
The simple truth is that this is
not
the way we build up our convictions.
I do not decide that a person is trustworthy because I have solid, incontrovertible proof of it.
I decide it on the basis of dozens of experiences of that person, which finally fit together like a mosaic, giving me an ‘overall’ picture of his
character.
It could be compared to a newspaper photograph which, when looked at through a magnifying glass, turns into a series of black and grey dots.
Nobody looking at those individual dots could believe that they would really build up into a recognisable face.
The strange thing is that when we look at the picture at a certain distance, the dots vanish, and we can not only see a recognisable face, but even the expression in the eyes.
If we look at the same eyes through the magnifying glass, it is quite impossible to see how the dots create an ‘expression’.