Let it be admitted at once that no one knows with certainty whether we survive death. The agnostic would laugh the suggestion out of court since to them consciousness resides in the brain, and when this has undergone the irreversible changes associated with death all that remains is a quickly rotting corpse. People with a more spiritual view of existence seem to have much less difficulty with the concept of survival and immortality of the essence of a person, which is traditionally called the soul, or the true self. Sceptics tend to attribute this conviction to the refusal of the person to face the fact of their finitude; and indeed the thought of a total and final obliteration of consciousness can remain a terrible threat to all but the most lion-hearted people, no matter how dogmatically they may assert their belief in some sort of afterlife. The belief in the existence of an after-life state is built into human consciousness and forms part of the credal statements of many religions, starting from antiquity and persisting to the present time. A belief as firm as this deserves some analysis.
There is first of all the integrity of the individual personality so that each of us is unique in their own right and has an equally unique contribution to make to the whole. Life is a system of individual growth, starting with the infant with a mind no larger than its body but developing into an organism who can think, feel and act creatively. This growth and creative action is not simply an isolated personal phenomenon, but is related to the whole community so that our life is far greater than our own perception of it. When we die the contribution does not disappear, but on the contrary lives on in the lives of those whom we knew while in our mortal bodies. But what exactly lives on? It is our psychic presence that is the basis of the freshness of joyful memory; but in the same way it can cast a cloud of darkness when it is distraught and maladjusted. The freshness of our psychic presence is related to its positive work in the world, primarily in the here and now but in a more universal way among all creatures living and dead in the vale of immortality. A third reason that makes us believe most strongly in a life beyond death is the question of the growth of the personality into realms of understanding far beyond anything we could imagine in terms of conditions on an earthly plane.
Much of our lives here are necessarily confined to the squalor of the earth around us. What we make of the earth speaks volumes about ourselves. Some sully it with their psychic residues of greed, hatred and dishonesty. Others enrich it with the psychic grace of good deeds, caring for the world (the reverence for life stressed years ago by Albert Schweitzer), and having an attitude of generosity towards one's fellow creatures - no matter how much they may differ from oneself in lifestyle, religious belief and practice, to say nothing of such basic, irreversible matters as race, sex and family background. Nor can our response to the living conditions of others be ignored, especially the aged, the mentally ill, and those who have borne the burden of the world's cruelty through the horrors of persecution, of which our own century has been so terrible a witness.
If this is the only life, and physical death overtakes us all inevitably and without any redress, the quality of our life here becomes irrelevant. St Paul parodies it thus, "Let us eat and drink, for tomorrow we die" (1 Corinthians 15.32). No doubt the "spiritual person" will at once retort that one should not be living virtuously now with an eye to benefits in the hereafter, and this is very true. But in fact the type of person who lives in this attitude of submerged spiritual self-interest - in truth a very unpleasant hypocritical egoism - is nowhere near God or anything approaching heavenly grace. They are immersed in the baleful pleasures of self-concern to the virtual exclusion of any deep relationship with their fellow humans, and the end of their life is increasing exclusion from the hearts and souls of other people. This fact is made more clear to them as they lie dying, and especially after their essence, the soul, drifts away from the earth it once knew so well in attachment with the physical body, which is now an expendable remnant. Of all this I personally have no doubt through my own gift of clairvoyance, which may be defined as a capacity of perceiving, as if by seeing, what is happening or exists out of sight. (A related capacity of perceiving, as if by hearing, is known as clairaudience; neither of these capacities is rare as occasional phenomena in the experience of many people, but their occurrence is at best sporadic and cannot be summarily commanded.)
In this respect we remember what Jesus said during the nocturnal visit of Nicodemus: "The wind blows where it wills; you can hear the sound of it but you do not know where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone who is born from the Spirit" (John 3.8). Psychical gifts are basically personal phenomena, whereas spiritual gifts ennoble the whole person, in the course of which there is a refinement of the innate psychic sensitivity of the individual so that they become acutely sensitive to vast ranges of existence quite remote from the awareness of their peers. It is this type of psychic sensitivity that is especially valuable, but it is under the aegis of the Holy Spirit and a pure gift of God.
People who claim that they can communicate at will with other modalities of existence beyond earthly realms should be treated with the greatest agnosticism and also some degree of healthy caution if the possibility of magic comes across one's awareness. The undifferentiated psychic realm is far closer to the demonic than the divine. Only a deeply spiritual person, one steeped in prayer, can enter the psychic realm with some degree of safety, and here the motive is all important. Is the penetration of psychic awareness for the benefit of a person or people in special danger or need, or is it a purely selfish action with power or prestige as its basis? Only a life of constant prayer can differentiate between these two motives, because our unaided will and conscience is childishly naive rather than frankly evil in intent.
"The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak" (Matthew 26.41), was Jesus' diagnosis of the human spiritual condition, and until the flesh, which is basic human nature, is cleansed, regenerated and resurrected, people will continue to travel the well-worn path of selfishness. This leads to an almost intolerable isolation on "the other side of death", as one of my most psychologically erudite friends, a psychotherapist who had studied with Jung himself, so felicitously put it. This person has long been dead, but his soul was for a long time not at peace despite his great metaphysical knowledge. The reason for this sad state of affairs - despite his excellent work as a teacher as well as a therapist - was due to a brilliant intellect. He tended to look down on most other people, including his fellow therapists. Two hundred years ago Mozart behaved similarly and suffered accordingly except that in his case he became rapidly impoverished and was buried in a large communal grave, whereas my friend was extremely well off financially though terrified about the financial situation of the world he was soon to leave. His gloom seemed to us to be merely a negative reaction to his impending death (despite his oft-declared belief in the survival of the personality after the death of the body), but in fact there was a very great financial recession some months after his death. It is evident that this psychically and psychologically gifted man was afforded a shaft of precognition, which may be defined as a supernatural foreknowledge of events that are outside the bounds of received information. (The reverse condition, retrocognition, is considerably more common; it is the supernatural knowledge of events that occurred in the past in a locality that were outside the bounds of received knowledge. Examples were noted in chapter 3 of people who had sensed unpleasant atmospheres in rooms and homes where there had been enacted tragedies or sordid crimes in the past.)
It has been shown to me by the gift of clairvoyance that when a person dies the physical "I", recognized only a small time before, has dissolved, and the essence of the person, the soul, is laid bare. There is a very rapid confrontation of their past; the protective function of the body has been irrevocably removed, and now the inner nature is stripped of all illusions related to worldly position or temporal success. Time is gradually swallowed up into eternity just as space now expands into infinity. The familiar doxology says it all much more eloquently, "As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end." The world we at present inhabit is a mere speck on the horizon of eternity, but its very finiteness is exactly what we require for our growth from selfish, unaware children to mature, responsible adults.
The key process that moves us along the path of growth from unaware childhood to full adult stature is service to our fellow creatures, a service that becomes healthy and positively useful only when one gains insight into one's own character. The more suffering we are obliged to undergo as a result of our selfishness the wiser we become, the more acute do our sensitivities to the needs of others reveal themselves to be, and the more generally does the centre of our concern move from the personal microcosm to the infinitely greater world around us, which, as I have already indicated, is a very limited field of eternity also. This is the very meaning of our incarnation, and on its fruits depend the deeper circumstances of our death and the events that succeed it. The more our general attitude towards our fellow humans expands and becomes the core of our concern, in other words, the more that love dominates our lives on earth, and the more easily does the soul become detached from the body when it dies. If the life of the person has not been especially edifying when they were in the living state, the attachment to mundane things persists after death, and on occasion distinct phenomena may reveal themselves to psychically sensitive people.
Usually one can sense a soul in distress by its sudden, completely unexpected contact with the higher reaches of the mind - in other words, from the height of the conscious level of awareness. This is no emotional sensation, but rather a direct, sometimes almost imperious, message for help. The helper must be someone with strong psychic sensitivity but also with the capacity to afford help. Usually the problem is one of guilt for a misdemeanour committed in the past life of the person, and it may vary from a very nasty crime to a quite venial sin which has long troubled the conscience of the individual but has almost equally long been forgotten, or certainly forgiven, by the other person. "There is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear" (1 John 4.18); this injunction shows the way towards dealing with this type of unquiet, or earthbound, spirit of a dead person.
Therefore one prays first to God using the Lord's Prayer and the Collect for the Nineteenth Sunday after Trinity: "O God, forasmuch as without thee we are not able to please thee; Mercifully grant, that thy Holy Spirit may in all things direct and rule our hearts; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen." After this comes a few minutes' completely silent contemplation followed by another few minutes' equally silent prayer to God. Then the spirit of the deceased person is addressed in terms of love and consolation in which the eternal forgiveness of God is emphasized, provided there is genuine repentance on the part of the offender. In the post-mortem state this is far more certain to be attained than when the individual was still alive, for by this time there will have been a general assessment of his or her life on earth and a burning desire to amend their ways in the future. The procedure ends by pronouncing the words of an absolution from the liturgy of a particular religious tradition. These words have to be said with the intent uttered by the priest over a living penitent, and it is far better if a priest absolves an unquiet dead person. But, as I have already said, this is no play-acting sequence, and should be performed only by a psychically aware person or at least one sympathetic to the ideas that I discussed above.
It should be emphasized that a psychically sensitive person could just as easily be unordained as a minister of any Christian (or, for that matter, any other) denomination. It would be ungracious to God to reject help from any quarter as long as it is spiritually pure and detached from material motive. The cruelties committed in the name of religion cannot make any faith ipso facto sacrosanct Therefore an irreligious person, but one who was deeply spiritual in their approach and actions to their neighbour, could be as helpful in dealing with an unquiet spirit as one who was quite bigoted and intolerant. I accept the authority of holy orders, but how these are used depends on the character of the minister. The question depends on the relationship between spirituality and religion. The former is a person's relationship with God and their neighbour, so that if these two are radiant, the individual is deeply spiritual no matter what faith they may profess. By contrast, religion is a system of belief that should lead to a spiritual way of life. Religion, except in the hands of deeply spiritual people, cannot help becoming divisive. It is little surprise that many highly intelligent people discard religion categorically, but their guidepost to civilized living is undermined in the process. In the end they are obliged to reinstate some sort of religion in their lives, but the experience of fanatical intolerance followed by belligerent agnosticism may, one hopes, lead to a more moderate, intelligent type of faith that increases their spiritual potential.
The matter of psychically sensitive people who claim to have communication with the spirits of the dead is a very contentious issue. These people are called "mediums", especially by hostile witnesses, but "sensitives" by those who are more detached in their approach. I have, as I already noted, little doubt that some people have a gift of psychic awareness, but it cannot be called to order despite the claims of some psychics. Furthermore, there is no guarantee of the integrity of their communicators, for some are not what they seem and may well be demonic in character. It is for these reasons that lay psychics are seldom used by professional ministers of religion.
I personally had the rare privilege of working closely with a gifted psychic who was a convinced Christian of Anglo-Catholic sympathies. We worked for twelve years over the telephone at about 10.30 p.m. each evening, and we were progressively trained for work first of all by being shown how to release dead war criminals and other miscreants from the hell in which they had placed themselves by the method I have already outlined. The psychic component of this partnership (I provided a lesser gift of sensitivity) was a lady in her early eighties called Geraldine ("Geral") whom everybody believed was finished as a working force and fit only for imminent death. However, our work progressed apace, and she gained measurably in health and strength. Her only impediment was severe deafness, but this was much less severe over the telephone. After we had done some work for war criminals and a Chinese group who required releasing from the imprisonment of the lower reaches of the afterlife, we were "certified ready", I believe by God, to help individuals who had recently died and whose souls were still earthbound. In some cases they had been dead for some longer time, even several years. When we had contacted the unfortunate individual entities (a useful word to denote an earthbound spirit) I was sometimes instructed simply to give absolution. On other occasions it was clear that the entity was in a state of confusion, not knowing let alone understanding its present disposition in the life eternal. It was my special work to explain matters to the entity, telling it where it was in its present situated, and how important it was that it should move forthwith from its earthbound situation, where it could cause considerable confusion among those living in the location, both emotionally and by producing poltergeist-like phenomena. In my experience I had to address the entity firmly but kindly, explaining the present circumstances clearly and indicating how much happier it would be if it were to quit the earthbound plane and move to that place in the life eternal which God has prepared for its reception and healing.
There are two basic causes for an entity to remain earth-bound: obstinacy and extreme ignorance of the present circumstances, to which may be added a feeling of severe guilt. In these circumstances, I would explain the situation, persuading the entity to quit its present place of domicile and proceed to the place in the life beyond death which God has prepared for its reception and healing. Above all, I encourage this process with a promise of God's loving care when a positive move has been made to leave the earthbound plane and proceed from the darkness of the present to the light surrounding it once its sight has been opened to the greater truth of the present situation. This light is the power of the Holy Spirit, remembering the dictum of 1 John 1.5, "God is light, and in him there is no darkness at all."
When I address the entity I prefer not to use its earthly Christian name, but rather attune myself to its eternal character, but others of a less mystical bent might prefer to be more specific in naming the entity. In fact when we deal with matters that transcend the grave, we are especially wise to be guided by sources above our normal consciousness. The Anglican liturgy speaks of angels and archangels and all the company of heaven - an angel being a special messenger of God's grace. I always enquire from above whether there is a focus of guilt clouding the conscience of the entity and preventing its release from its present earth-bound situation, and if such guilt is present, I enquire from God whether it is right and proper that I should say the words of absolution. In some cases there is no true conversion; the entity wants release but entertains no really positive change of mind, in which case it has to be left to follow its own way. In this respect this course of action differs from the expulsion of a demonic (evil) spirit, which must be delivered into God's care whether it agrees or not. It is very infrequent, at least in my experience, for an unquiet spirit to resist being transferred from its earth-bound situation to the freedom of the heavenly planes where God's love remains the only reality. As I have already indicated, ignorance and fear based on guilt for past actions while the spirit was still incarnate are the two causes for holding the spirit back.
What will happen to most of us when we have "shuffled off this mortal coil", as Shakespeare puts it so memorably in Hamlet's immortal soliloquy (1. 3. 79)? From what has been shown to me, most of us, whose lives have been reasonably disposed to our fellows, without any taint of cruelty on the one hand or any aura of sanctity on the other, will find ourselves in a distinctly recognizable environment on the other side of death. Once we have become acclimatized to the discarnate state, we will find that our movements have the speed of thought and that our range of awareness is immeasurably greater than it was while we were limited to an earthly body. The whole panorama of our earthly life is unravelled before us, in a way well described in the now quite familiar near-death experience. Once all this information has been assimilated, the soul can evaluate the person's earthly life fairly accurately, without either blaming circumstances for its native weaknesses or cringing in shame because of past errors.
None of us is perfect, thank God, for if we were we would be almost impossible to live with because of our self-satisfied judgementalism. No wonder Jesus advises us not to judge lest we should bear the pain of retributory judgement (Matthew 7.1). The essence of holy living is not abiding by a code of rules, but giving of oneself according to the demands of common sense to those who require our assistance. If one overdoes the giving one will soon fall by the wayside of ill health, and end up by being a considerable burden on one's neighbours. If, on the other hand, we do not give what we can reasonably be expected to provide through selfishness and meanness, we lay up for ourselves a harvest of contempt and ill will where there might have been friendship and co-operation. In the afterlife this aversion of others to ourselves cannot be easily concealed, and a painful course of good manners may be in store for us before we can take our allotted place in the work of character building ahead of us.
The key word in all relationships is forgiveness. We have to forgive others who have wronged us while striving and praying to be forgiven by others whom we may wittingly or unwittingly have wronged. None of this can be done except in the presence of God, whose very nature is love: "We love because he loved us first" (see 1 John 4.10). There are two basic Christian views of the life of the world to come: the traditional Catholic view of a gradation of existence from hell through purgatory to heaven as outlined by Dante in the Divine Comedy, and the opposing rigorous Protestant view of the die irrevocably cast at the moment of death, so that the undeserving person is committed to eternal hell, whereas the "saved" individual goes straight to heaven. "Salvation" in this unremitting scheme includes holding the right sectarian views just as much as leading the good life. Therefore those with religious beliefs other than Christianity can expect damnation when they die. This is a most terrible doctrine when some of the cruellest actions have been committed by Christians - many of whom supported Hitler's holocaust in our own century, to give a single example among countless others. Where the medieval Catholic view swerved dangerously was in making money out of the fears of the surviving relatives of the deceased who might be languishing in purgatory. These survivors prayed fervently for their loved ones - something I do each day for the many people I too remember from my association with them when I knew them as earthly companions, friends and clients. The Church, however, promised remission of temporal punishment still due for sins even after sacramental absolution, a promise made even more certain by the payment of money to the Church. This system of "indulgences", as they were called, led inevitably to abuses and also to powerful superstition, and was the immediate inflammatory cause of the Reformation, which, at least in various extreme sects, denied the way open to the sinner, as we have already recounted. Therefore prayers for the dead were completely out of place: the "saved" did not require them, while the damned were beyond the influence of any prayer. Humans are never so happy as when they can act with reckless abandon; throwing the baby out with the bathwater is a usual way of describing such action.
It seems worthwhile entertaining some speculations about the way forward for the distinctly quiet dead - those who have made their peace with our world and are now ready for distinct forward movement. It must be admitted that nobody knows the answer to this enigma, but certain thoughts come closely to mind. The type of heaven visualized in many religions is not only incredible but also almost intolerably boring - rather like a pleasant residential home for upper-class gentry with little to offer in the way of intellectual or spiritual stimulus. Such a condition is really close to true death, and is actually quite horrifying when one considers it entirely frankly in a state of detachment. All real living is meeting, says the Jewish sage, Martin Buber. Therefore I would expect communication on a very elevating level in the life of the world to come. Life is also growth, a product of meeting and the exchange of information on the deepest levels of experience. This deepest exchange of our own essence is the meaning of love. No wonder that there is no fear in love; but perfect love casts out fear (1 John 4.18).
But once this information has been exchanged I would expect the person to continue their onward trail in order to serve the world and thereby grow even further in understanding and sanctity. We learn by suffering much more than by contentment; the cross is the symbol of what I am speaking about, and only when we too can take up our own particular cross in emulation of our Master can we enter the unitary consciousness of heaven in the company of the blessed ones. It is here that the Divine Presence is known and a peace beyond understanding savoured. This state of beatitude does not remain indefinitely, for the entity is destined to grow in darker regions by descending to a distinctly lower level of being for more training in the life of the spirit. Where this place of training might be one obviously does not know, but one possibility is a return to the earth. This is called reincarnation, which the great religions of the East - Hinduism and Buddhism - fully accept, whereas their Western counterparts - Judaism, Christianity and Islam - equally vigorously reject it; though there are individual exceptions also, for instance Shi'ite Islam.
There is some objective evidence that the belief may have substance, inasmuch as very small children may claim memories of a past life before their birth, which could not possibly have been known to them as they were neither living in the locality nor had the capacity to read at that early age. Their parents, when investigated by research workers, were equally ignorant of these long past matters. It is just possible that the children's memories are significant, but agnostics may ascribe them to a subtle priming by their parents who were less ignorant than they purported to be. Most of these cases have been reported in countries where there is a strong acceptance of rebirth. Hypnotic regression techniques can be quite startling in what they evoke, but where do the data arise: from the adult who claims the memories, the hypnotherapist, or some indifferent psychical source like a deceased entity during a spiritualistic seance? Not many parapsychologists are impressed with the findings of hypnotic regression, fascinating though some may be.
I personally am sympathetic to the concept of rebirth, of which reincarnation might be a possibility, because this earth is a particularly fine training ground for character development. If we have failed on the first occasion, it might well be that we are sent back for further work and experience. I cannot visualize a person of fine character reincarnating except if they are sent back by God on a special errand of mercy, perhaps similar to the mechanism of the incarnation, albeit on a vastly smaller scale. I have alluded to spiritualistic communication. Few people outside that field are very sympathetic, because, as in the case of hypnotherapy conjuring up past lives, one does not know the veracity of the medium's "guide" or "control" - a spirit who allegedly puts the medium in communication with the deceased entity. Spiritualism, little more than a century old, has some startling cases in which reliable mediums of irreproachable veracity have brought forth apparently accurate evidence of the spirit of the entity still in communication with those who knew the person when he or she was still alive in the flesh. But the number of such mediums is very small indeed - actually only three have been encountered in Britain and the USA over the last century, and none have appeared for well over fifty years - and so we all wait for the new genius to appear. The sporadic nature of psychic communication and its variable accuracy, to say nothing of the honesty of the medium (for the whole area of professional mediumship is a minefield of fraud) makes the practice of spiritualism of limited importance in releasing the unquiet dead. But I could visualize a priest working with a deeply Christian medium, as I did with my dear friend Geral, who died at the age of ninety-three some four years ago. She would never have called herself a medium, and had no time at all for spiritualists or the practice of spiritualism. It was the murky nature of so much mediumship that put her off from identifying herself with spiritualism.
Chapter 5