The Search For Survival. A Review of Trevor Hamilton, 'Tell My Mother I’m Not Dead'

Tell My Mother I’m Not Dead: A Case Study in Mediumship Research

by Trevor Hamilton,

Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2012.

£8.95, $17.90, 191pp, Appendices, Glossary, Resources and References.

Tell My Mother I’m Not Dead is a personal and intellectual journey for Trevor Hamilton. As a retired academic with intellectual energy and curiosity, as well as a heavy dose of scepticism concerning the paranormal, Hamilton makes a refreshing guide into the world of mediumship and Spiritualism. His search was a response to the death of his son, Ralph, and of his natural desire to reconnect with him. It also sets out to resolve what Hamilton describes as ‘the most important single issue that there was’, i.e. ‘Did we survive bodily death, and if so what did this tell us about the nature of reality, and, fundamentally important, how should we live?’ (p.37). Hamilton found few people open to discussing such fundamental questions, and this book represents an attempt to address these issues through his own research and by reflecting on his personal experiences.

The book is divided into two main parts. In the first, Experiences, we have a chronological account of Hamilton’s emotional journey, together with that of his wife Anne, and of his visits to various mediums. Ten accounts of particular sittings that took place in England between 2002 and 2010 are given, with an assessment of the content and accuracy of the sessions. The anonymity of the individual mediums is preserved in most cases but the context of the sittings is described. The second part, Reflections, addresses what Hamilton sees as eight salient questions arising from his research into mediumship. He draws on both contemporary and older literature in parapsychology in order address issues such as ‘Can a sitter replicate phenomena across a number of mediums and does this support or weaken the survival hypothesis?’ (p.106), and  ‘Is it possible to identify those conditions which make for  successful sittings, and what are the implications of this for the guidance and training of sitters, mediums, and researchers?’ (pp.139-140). As author of the highly acclaimed biography of one of parapsychology’s pioneer researchers, F W H Myers[i], Hamilton is very well placed to review this material. He is familiar with the SPR (Society for Psychical Research) archives, for instance, and well aware of the long history of investigation and weight of evidence pointing to the validity of many parapsychological phenomena.

            This does not make Hamilton ‘a believer’. He is rather a hopeful seeker, but honest and exacting when looking at and analysing his personal encounters with mediums. Most, it must be said, produce a substantial amount of accurate information. When it is laid out in the cold light of day, away from the emotion and expectations engendered by a ‘sitting’, however, much of it is fairly general, rather vague and insubstantial. Hamilton is aware of these issues and evaluates his responses to the sittings with a refreshing degree of reflexivity.

            In the third, briefer section of the book, the Conclusion and Postscript, Hamilton states that he did not feel the need to prove the validity of mediumship per se, which in his opinion had been done with the historical studies of mediums such as Mrs Piper, Mrs Leonard, and Mrs Garrett, all of whom had been extensively investigated by members of the SPR and other researchers adopting the most stringent criteria. Hamilton did note, however, the paucity of information regarding the conditions of any afterlife state from his sittings. This has also been my own experience, and one must turn to channelled writings or accounts of OBEs (out of body experiences) for such accounts. He does mention one such narrative, Paul K. Stoller’s book of communications with his deceased son Galen, in My Life after Life, but finds it not to his taste, more in the realm of science fantasy (p.158).[ii] It is possible that a wider exposure to this genre would have changed Hamilton’s mind, as although it has some unique features, Galen’s account accords well with many other postmortem descriptions published over the last fifty years or more. By way of correction (in what is a generally well edited typescript) the journal Paranthropology appears in the bibliography on a couple of occasions as Paranthology. No doubt less of a mouthful, but inaccurate.

            I found Hamilton’s approach congenial as, apart from anything else, his open minded but analytical stance reflects my own (cf. my  account of a visit to a clairvoyant medium: http://exploringtheafterlife.blogspot.co.uk). For those who wish to know what a sitting with a contemporary medium in the UK is like, and what one might expect from it, Tell My Mother I’m Not Dead is a useful guide. The book makes a valuable contribution to contemporary research on UK mediumship, a subject that is still treated as the object of ridicule by many journalists and intellectuals, often with little or no firsthand experience of the phenomenon. The personal narrative carries the reader through the Hamilton’s search for answers to the tragedy and mystery of death and survival in a way that is both compelling and at times moving. There are no easy or clear answers to many of the questions asked, and Hamilton avoids the temptation to provide them. We do, at least, have a road map and guide through some of the territory, inviting the reader to continue the exploration.

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[i] Immortal Longings: FWH Myers and the Victorian Search for Life After Death. Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2009.

[ii] My review of this book can be found at: http://www.afterliferesearch.co.uk under Research/Reviews. See also an account of T.E. Lawrence’s postmortem experience as channeled through Jane Sherwood: http://exploringtheafterlife.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/no-escape-from-immortality.html  

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.