Afterlife by Colin Wilson Read Free Book Online Page A

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 theywalk 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