No escape from immortality

Jane Sherwood, The Country Beyond: The Doctrine of Re-Birth. 1991 (1969, Neville Spearman Ltd.), Saffron Walden: C.W. Daniel.

T. E. Lawrence ('Scott')

Jane Sherwood, Quaker and medium, died aged 96 in 1990. She started her investigations when her husband Andrew was killed in the First World War.  Unable to accept that so much life and energy had simply dissipated, she tried to contact him, and in so doing opened herself to various lower entities until she managed in 1938 to contact ‘Scott’ (T.E. Lawrence, who had died in1935), her husband Andrew, and a higher entity who introduced himself as E.K. In addition to the conversations, described in The Country Beyond, she published in 1964 Post-Mortem Journal. Communications from T.E. Lawrence, in which Lawrence describes his own early years on the other side and the process of making contact with Jane, Andrew and E.K., who were all on different levels or planes, but able to communicate with each other and Jane, and to cooperate in exploring the philosophical issues raised in The Country Beyond.

The nature of matter: esoteric science

In Chapter Three, Sherwood anticipates the move from religion and the afterlife as an article of faith, to the desire for scientific proof (exemplified by Ian Lawton’s designation ‘Rational Spirituality’, the title of his press). She starts by noting that the view of matter as composed of atoms has been superseded by an understanding of ‘an electromagnetic field of force thickening rapidly in some regions of space and thinning out in others’ (45). The denser fields are perceived as solid or matter, whereas it only appears solid because of the speed of the vibrations, as when a wheel spinning fast appears as a solid circle. Chemically the body is the same as dead matter, ‘both are areas of activity in the universal field of force yet the living patch of energy builds upon itself a variety of other activities ranging from independent movement, absorption of food, reproduction of its kind and so on to the highest energies of emotion and thought in the human being’ (46).  It is these additional powers that distinguish dead from living matter, and which belong to that part of the individual that does not die with the mortal body. As Sherwood puts it, ‘death strikes at the midnight hour which changes the princess back into the beggar maid. The area of dense activity which is the body suddenly loses all of its special powers and reverts to the merely chemical range of processes by means of which it is quickly reduced to the dust’ (46-7).

Conserving energy

A key law of the physical world is that energy is changed but never lost (the law of the conservation of energy). For a materialist who does not believe in the existence of anything beyond a sum of the physical parts, this law appears to be breached in death. The laws of science, applied in all other areas, cannot account for life itself. ‘Let the scientific-materialist ponder the fact of death until he is moved to go in search of what he has lost – the whole range of powers and energies that make up a living personality’ (47).  

As ‘Scott’ ponders his unexpected survival he lists some of the things that escaped from the body: ‘Taking the crudest first, there is life, just the sheer power of feeling, moving and being in a body; then there is emotion – desires and purposes, to drive the body on its various occasions; then thought, the power to understand, to reflect, to plan, to reason; and lastly, there is a mysterious coordination of all these activities which is I myself, a personality which can look on all these other activities and approve or criticize them’ (49). From the level or plane at which Scott was then operating these facets still took on a bodily form, and all he had shed was the injured material body killed in a motoring accident. What did not die with the physical body, that extra dimension that materialism fails to account for, is ‘life, emotion, thought and the ego itself. These were all in the body of escape which detached itself from my injured physical body’ (49). Without these elements those left in the physical body began to function differently. Instead of a move towards organization and complexity the cells in a deceased body obey the law of dissolution and entropy.  

In her musings on her discussions with Scott on the nature of the material and immaterial body, Sherwood observed that: ‘Neither our senses nor our most delicate instruments can as yet trace the energies which have escaped, yet in each of us there exists this higher body which is our real being’ (53). Like more recent students of psychic and occult phenomena, Sherwood and her discarnate interlocutors saw themselves as explorers of a natural, scientific reality, albeit one that our human endeavours could not yet fully measure and explain. Life is not a mysterious spiritual essence but works ‘within matter of the next degree of matter’ (53).  This is in tune with notions of an energetic body or life force surrounding what we normally see as the physical body. ‘Thus, when wounded tissues renew themselves, it is because the invisible body remains whole and the injured tissue is renewed in accordance with it. Growth then, must be the building up of the visible in correspondence with the invisible and the decay of the body in old age as the gradual drawing away of the invisible body as it gently severs the links with the physical order’ (53-4).

The enduring nature of matter and life’s 'implacable continuance'

E.K. had evidently followed the conversation between Jane and Scott on the nature of life and matter, and through channelled writing made his own summary of the situation (54):

The probability is that life is not a mysterious supernatural affair, but the most enduring aspect of matter.  You can injure or destroy the physical form but you cannot destroy the invisible body which interpenetrates it. Like any form of energy, life changes its form and thus escapes your detection, but no power in earth or heaven can destroy it nor prevent its continuance in form after form. For once matter, itself a form of energy, has produced this higher phase of activity, a new thing has been created which is beyond harm from your plane. It has entered upon an eternity of change and transformation and will go on to recur and develop until the end of time. So life, the delicate, the vulnerable, which appears to be at the mercy of senseless accident or malicious force – this tender thing when seen in its true character, is more enduring than the rocks and less to be defeated or confined than the ocean. It has achieved immortality having raised itself into a state of implacable continuance.

On the entanglement between organic and inorganic life, the higher forms of energy that move upward and lifeless matter with its tendency towards entropy, E.K. wrote (55-7):

The two systems of energy are interlocked in the organism as you know it. They work together and modify each other and the whole story of the organism is the story of their gradual disentangling. They finally draw away from each other at death. The inorganic body is returned into the downward trend towards entropy and the invisible body of life is set free into the upward trend towards development. Of necessity it goes on to develop higher phases of activity for you must think of this body which is only invisible to you, as being perfectly material on its own plane. Get rid of the notion of the ephemeral stuff of which phantoms are made. Life is simply matter which has been pushed upward into a higher phase of activity and has thus gained the power to exist and continue in another degree of being. … All living energy systems tend towards greater complexity and the consequent creation of higher forms of activity; all dead systems of activity tend towards greater simplicity and end in stagnation. The organism represents the interaction of both these processes and at its death they draw apart.

An argument against this extension of our view of the natural - against an understanding of the body as composed of an energetic or fine as well as a gross physical body, is that it cannot be seen or measured. This is not, however, entirely true, even if the forms of measurement used are not universally accepted. Healing based on the movement of energy in the fine as well as the grosser body are very widespread, and have endured for millennia. They are also effective in many instances. There are those who purport to see or sense the body’s aura, mood, colour or energy, and Kirlian photography attempts to capture an object’s corona on film, with often beautiful and remarkable results.

We might want to argue about just what is or is not being seen or photographed, but there is no doubt that it is more than the normal physical object. The notion that we are composed of energy rather than solid particles (atoms) is now a commonplace. That the energy of life is transformed rather than dissipated at death does not strike me as far-fetched, lending credibility to accounts such as those given to Jane Sherwood and many others who have successfully bridged the divide between this world and the next.

             

The Curious Case of Roger Straughan and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

A review of Roger Straughan, A Study in Survival: Conan Doyle Solves the Final Problem, O-Books, Winchester & Washington, 2009

In some rare video footage of an interview with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle filmed in the summer of 1927, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle walks into shot at the beginning of the take with a dog at his side, and calls the dog to follow him at the end. During the interview, in which he talks about the character of Sherlock Holmes and, closer to Conan Doyle’s heart, his interest in spiritualism. For Conan Doyle spiritualism is a  ‘great philosophy’ and a subject on which he describes himself as a ‘gramophone’ rather than an expert as such. Conan Doyle justifies spending so much of his time and energy, as well as financial resources, writing and lecturing on spiritualism because of its importance for the human race. He wanted to give others the knowledge and assurance he had himself received that we survive death. Conan Doyle died some three years later in July 1930, but as might be expected from a President of the College of Psychic Studies with an interest in psychic matters stretching over 40 years, Conan Doyle’s desire to prove that ‘there is no death’ did not end with his passing from his physical body. Communications purporting to be from Arthur Conan Doyle (ACD) through various mediums started almost immediately, of which his widow judged some ten percent likely to be genuine due to the quality of evidential communication they possessed. Attempts at communication from ACD have apparently continued to the present day, notably through the physical trance mediumship of David Thompson, examples of which can be heard on Victor Zammit’s Afterlife Report website.

          The 1927 film footage of ACD with his dog is significant to our case, a study of Conan Doyle’s survival, as dogs provided one of the first clues ACD sent to Roger Straughan, academic philosopher and Conan Doyle enthusiast. The Straughan’s much loved but psychotic rescue dog Sgott, a German shepherd/collie cross, had died from a malignant sarcoma. In the interval between death and burial, Roger Straughan reached for some bedtime reading, a volume of collected Conan Doyle short stories. Opening the book at random he alighted on the words ‘his exit was as speedy and painless as could be desired’ (17), which it turned out referred to the death of a dog. On the previous page his eye was drawn to the sentence, ‘A more malignant case I have never seen’, the case being ‘a frightful sarcoma’, and on the opposite page ‘an exceedingly lucky dog’ (18), a phrase often used to describe Sgott, whose anti-social habits would not have been borne by many.
        Written in the form of a detective story, searching for clues and weighing the evidence, Straughan embarks on a journey lasting over a decade in which ACD appears to communicate to him via his literary works. We learn that for Conan Doyle books were not just stories but a way of communicating with the spirit of the deceased, and that contrary to an ‘expert’ who pronounced that ACD hated dogs, he was in fact exceedingly fond of them, that they were even used as a kind of signature of friendship. Using this method of allowing his hand to be drawn randomly to a book, page and sentence, Straughan was even given the target word Conan Doyle had agreed with his last surviving daughter, Dame Jean, before his death (a ring). Apparently many psychics and mediums had approached Dame Jean with messages said to be from her father over the years, but none had hitherto managed to identify their pre-arranged signal.

         As an academically trained philosopher, albeit one with an interest in psychical research, Straughan continued to look for proof, or at least greater certainly, that he was not deluding himself. Rather crucial to this method of communication is the number of misses, as enough questions and random searches might be expected to throw up occasional hits. Like many others I have attempted the book method of divination myself, usually with a bible or collected works of Shakespeare, volumes that might be expected to have the range of vocabulary and reference that would enable a meaningful answer to most questions to be found. In my own case, despite the occasional memorable phrase that seemed to exactly fit the question I had mentally posed, most readings are well wide of the mark, leading me to conclude that the hits are more likely to be coincidence than any form of intelligent communication (I never really asked with what, the choices being my own subconscious or some unidentified external force). Straughan raises the question of hits, and with a success rate of fifty percent or higher, many of which were strikingly apt, he comes eventually to the conclusion that there is an intelligent force at work behind his readings. The question is then is whether this intelligent force could conceivably be ACD himself. One way Straughan sought to approach this question was to look carefully at answers communications in areas in which ACD was known to be particularly interested, which were many as Conan Doyle was a man of considerable breadth. The subjects covered include medicine (ACD was trained as a medical doctor), sport, current affairs and politics, spirituality and religion. We are given many examples of the questions put by Straughan on weighty and trivial matters, and the answers delivered by way of random readings from ACD’s corpus of works.

          A legitimate question the reader might have is ‘so what’? While the book makes an excellent read, well written and intriguing, Straughan himself raises the issue of triviality – a stumbling block for many when assessing the validity and veracity of supposed psychic communications. The answer is that it is precisely the personal, supposedly trivial personal details that are most likely to prove to the receiver the veracity of the communication. More profound spiritual messages or accounts of post-mortem existence are hard or impossible to verify. For ACD the desire to prove his survival was and, we are asked to believe, is of itself of profound importance. Sympathy for a dead dog was precisely the sort of information most likely to catch Straughan’s attention.

The book begins and ends with an account of a rare volume of communications supposedly from beyond the grave through the mediumship of Grace Cooke, under the title Thy Kingdom Come…’. A friend of Straughan’s had located and borrowed the book from a library on his behalf. He was reading it on the 5.35 intercity express from Paddington Station one evening when the train struck a car at a crossing  and derailed. A reversal in the usual order of carriages meant that Straughan was not in his usual position, and escaped with minor injuries, while many others in the centre of the train where he normally sat were not so fortunate. The book was lost, but eventually returned to Straughan, also unharmed, and he wondered whether ACD had a hand in his survival, and if so for what purpose? The tentative answer was in order to write this book, to add another piece of the jigsaw in the emerging picture of the survival of consciousness.

In one of the more amusing and perhaps apposite communications from ACD, Straughan explaines that the book he had been planning to write was a much more ambitious work on the evidence for survival covering a wide range of psychic phenomena. His lingering doubts as to his capacity to complete such a project held him back from sending the book proposal to a publisher. Turning to ACD for advice he alighted on a conversation between an elderly scholar and his son, in which the father ‘had obviously been setting his literary aspirations far too high: ‘“I have set myself a task”, explains the father, “This is nothing less than to publish an English translation of the Buddhist Djarmas. With diligence it is possible that I might be able myself to complete the preface before I die” ‘ (pp.153-4). On the less ambitious and more reasonable project of writing an account of this unusual form of literary mediumship, ACD’s comment was ‘I’ll do the writing’ (p.155), so that settles that then.