Afterlife (35 page)

In the Society for Psychical Research, the sceptics became known as the High ’n Dries.
In the Society’s early days, Frank Podmore had been its only High ’n Dry.
By the late 1920s, some of the Society’s most influential members, including its Research Officer E.
J.
Dingwall and its librarian Theodore Besterman, were High ’n Dries.
The ‘wets’ — or even the faintly damps — hardly stood a chance.
Dingwall went to America to investigate Margery Crandon, and was apparently thoroughly satisfied with her genuineness — large quantities of ectoplasm were extruded from somewhere between her thighs, and reached out to touch Dingwall in the form of a hand — but when he came to write up his investigations six months later, he had changed his mind, and made it clear he thought she was a fraud.
The result of such controversies was that the Society was split by internal dissensions, and ceased to perform the task it was founded to carry out.
One result was that when reports of an amazing Brazilian medium, Carlos Mirabelli, who floated up into the air, dematerialised and reappeared in another room, and caused dead people to materialise in broad daylight, reached the Society in 1927, it was in too much disarray to send a competent investigator, and Mirabelli’s remarkable phenomena were never confirmed.
The days when the Society could despatch a man like Richard Hodgson to the
other side of the world at a few weeks’ notice were long past.

There was one major breakthrough in psychical research — or, as it now came to be called, paranormal investigation — in the 1930s.
A gambler walked into the office of Dr Joseph Banks Rhine at Duke University in 1934 and told Rhine he was convinced he could influence the fall of the dice.
As the two crouched on the floor, it dawned on Rhine that this might be a method for proving psychokinesis — ‘mind over matter’ — in the laboratory.
Eighteen series of statistical tests were conducted over eight years, and they showed one fascinating result: that when people were ‘fresh’, they
could
influence the fall of the die; as they went on and became tired and bored, they got worse at it.
Rhine’s methods may have been dull compared to the experiments of Crookes with Dunglas Home or Richet with Eusapia Palladino, but he effectively proved the paranormal powers of the human mind in the laboratory.

This was undoubtedly an enormous step forward; it demonstrated the correctness of that central argument of Catherine Crowe and Frederick Myers: that the powers of the human mind are greater than we suppose.
But it came no closer to answering the question that the Society for Psychical Research was founded to investigate: is there life after death?
Then, in the late 1930s, another series of statistical experiments brought this one stage nearer.

Dr Samuel George Soal was a mathematician at the University of London, and he was unimpressed by Rhine’s results.
In 1936, a well-known photographer named Basil Shackleton walked into Soal’s office and announced: ‘I haven’t come to be tested, but to demonstrate telepathy.’ He could, he claimed, guess his way through a whole pack of playing cards and get most of them right.
Soal tested him, but was disappointed; Shackleton’s first score was ten out of twenty-five, but after that, he got steadily worse; on the seventh test he only got three out of twenty-five.
Shackleton said he needed a drink to get his powers working; but even after a drink, his score was still disappointingly low.

In 1939, a conversation with another researcher, Whately Carington, gave Soal a new idea.
Carington had been involved in a series of ‘picture guessing’ experiments, and he had noticed a curious phenomenon: some of his subjects were guessing the
next
picture.
Soal went back and looked at some of his own results.
First of all, he looked at the results produced by a London housewife named Gloria Stewart, and found that she
had frequently guessed the next card.
Soal went on to look through results produced by other subjects, but found nothing very interesting.
Then, by chance, he came upon Basil Shackleton’s results.
Here the ‘displacement’ score was even more striking than in the case of Gloria Stewart; again and again, Shackleton guessed either the previous card or the next card, instead of the one Soal was asking him to concentrate on.
Soal asked Shackleton to take part in another series of experiments.
They went on for two years, and demonstrated beyond all doubt that Shackleton was frequently able to guess the next card — a card that Soal himself had not yet seen.
So this was not telepathy; it was precognition: the faculty apparently demonstrated by Drayton Thomas’s father when he was able to predict what would be in the newspapers the next day.

It is true, of course, that precognition does not ‘prove’ life after death.
But if it really exists, it proves there is something fundamentally wrong with our commonsense, materialistic view of the universe.
We can find room for telepathy and psychokinesis in the scientific picture of reality.
But the future has not yet taken place; consequently, there is no possible ‘scientific’ way in which it can be known.
To explain precognition, we need to take a leap into some completely new type of explanation: for example, some fourth or fifth dimension, of the kind suggested by Whately Carington in
A Theory of the Mechanism of Survival
.
When Soal demonstrated precognition, he had taken the most important step towards ‘proving’ life after death since the foundation of the Society for Psychical Research.

In 1942, an American researcher, Dr Gertrude Schmeidler, of Radcliffe College, produced a result that was almost as important.
She was testing a group of students for extra-sensory perception (ESP), and before the experiment, she asked them which of them believed in the possibility of ESP and which didn’t.
She labelled the ‘believers’ sheep and the ‘nonbelievers’ goats.
When she examined the results of the card-guessing tests, she discovered that the sheep had scored significantly above chance.
But what was even more interesting was that the goats had scored significantly below chance.
They were unconsciously ‘cheating’ to support their view that ESP does not exist.
In doing so, they were revealing as much extra-sensory perception as the sheep, but using it negatively.
For years, mediums and psychics had been explaining that their powers often failed to work in the presence of sceptics, and the sceptics had jeered at this as a feeble excuse.
Gertrude
Schmeidler had demonstrated that scepticism is not necessarily as scientific and detached as it pretends to be.

These results were taken to heart by Dr Helmut Schmidt, a research scientist at the Boeing Laboratory in Seattle.
If people are more likely to show extra-sensory perception in a friendly, trusting atmosphere, then it would be a great advantage if the scientist could devise an experiment in which cheating is quite impossible.
Then he can relax and try to coax the subject into the right mood for ESP.
Schmidt met this challenge by devising a machine that used decaying radioactive material to make various lamps go on and off.
Nobody has the least idea when the next radioactive atom will ‘decay’ and shoot out a high-speed particle.
Schmidt’s subjects had to guess which lamp would be the next to light up, and press a button.
Then the machine automatically registered a hit or miss.

Schmidt soon discovered a number of subjects who scored well above chance.
Many of these were already psychic — one physicist admitted that he often dreamed of the future.
Schmidt also produced a perfect demonstration of Gertrude Schmeidler’s ‘sheep and goats’ argument — one extrovert American girl who produced scores well above chance, and one introverted South American whose scores were equally far
below
chance, demonstrating as much psychic ability as the extrovert, but used in a negative direction.
These two subjects were also able to demonstrate psychokinesis — mind over matter — by willing lights to flash on and off in a particular direction.
Helmut Schmidt was the first scientist to demonstrate the reality of extra-sensory perception and psychokinesis in the laboratory.

These advances were impressive.
But anyone who took an interest in psychical research in the 1960s and early 1970s had to admit that it had all become rather boring.
Card-guessing games and random-number generators may produce marvellously convincing proofs of the reality of extra-sensory perception or precognition, but it is hard for most people to work themselves into a state of excitement about it.
This is not quite what Myers and Sidgwick had in mind on that famous starlit walk.

There was at least one researcher who was still working in the older tradition.
Dr Karlis Osis, born in Riga, Latvia in 1917, had worked with Rhine at Duke University on extra-sensory
perception and precognition before he became research director at the Parapsychology Foundation in New York.
Osis was fascinated by the kind of death-bed visions reported by Sir William Barrett — like the case of ‘Mrs B’,
^*
who saw her father and sister in the room as she was dying, although she had no idea that her sister was dead.
He called them ‘Peak in Darien cases’, from the last line of Keats’s sonnet — a suggestion of reverence and awe.
He had the sensible idea of circulating a questionnaire to doctors and nurses, asking them what they had observed about dying patients.
Six hundred and forty questionnaires were returned, covering more than thirty-five thousand cases.
In 1961, Osis published his observations in
Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses
.

One of the first things Osis discovered was that fear is not the dominant emotion in most dying patients.
Discomfort and pain were commoner; but what was surprising was the large number of patients who were elated at the time of death, even to the point of exaltation and seeing visions.
These amounted to about one in twenty.
The visions were often of ‘heaven’ — of beautiful cities or a ‘promised land’.
A six-year-old boy dying of polio saw beautiful flowers and heard birds singing.
Most of these patients were fully awake and in clear consciousness, with a normal temperature.
Many patients who were brought back from the dead by medical attention were often unwilling to be revived and expressed sentiments like ‘I want to go back.’ One doctor, recalling two personal experiences of near death hallucinations, suggested that this might be due to oxygen starvation of the brain.
He had been close to death by drowning, and also by oxygen starvation when his breathing equipment froze up in an aeroplane; on both occasions he experienced beautiful imagery and a feeling of deep happiness; he resented being revived from drowning.
But other medical experts have disagreed, and Osis points out that such visions often occurred in fully conscious patients long before the final slide into the death coma.

In his summary of conclusions, Osis remains cautious.
He notes that Barrett was mistaken to believe that all death-bed visions of relatives involve those who are dead.
He found that 52 per cent were of dead relatives, 28 per cent of living relatives, and the remaining 20 per cent of religious figures.
But the Census of Hallucination taken by the Society for Psychical
Research showed that people in normal health saw twice as many living relatives as dead ones.
So ‘predominance of hallucinations of the dead seems to be a real characteristic of terminal cases’.
And in reply to the obvious criticism that dying patients may be sedated or in states of fever, he points out that most of the visions of dead relatives happened to patients who had not been sedated, who had no ‘hallucinogenic pathology’, and who were fully awake and able to respond intelligently to questions.
So in its general conclusions,
Deathbed Observations by Physicians and Nurses
backs up the conclusions reached by Barrett in
Death Bed Visions:
that dying people usually feel no fear of dying, and that they often believe they are being met by dead relatives.

Osis concludes his study by remarking that his observations need verifying, particularly by studies in other cultures.
This hint was taken up by his colleague Erlendur Haraldsson, who conducted similar studies in India.
It might have been reasonable to expect that, in a totally different culture — particularly one that places less emphasis on life after death — death-bed visions would be of a different kind.
Haraldsson discovered this was not so; the death-bed visions of Indians were much the same as those of Americans.

Osis and Haraldsson approached the problem of death in the detached spirit of a Society for Psychical Research investigation.
The other major investigation of the 1960s was undertaken with altogether more emotional commitment.
Dr Elizabeth Kübler-Ross had visited the extermination camp Maidanek at the end of the Second World War, and established a camp for refugees on the Vista river in Poland.
In America in the early 1960s, now married to a professor of neurology and pathology in Chicago, she was struck by the American tendency to ignore death and pretend that it does not exist.
She often found that doctors would refuse to admit the terminally ill to their wards.
She gained nationwide notoriety when she invited a twenty-year-old girl who was dying of leukaemia to her classes at the University of Chicago, and
Life
ran an article about the experiment.
The death of this girl in 1970 confirmed Dr Kübler-Ross’s feeling that our ‘death-denying society’ needs to have its attitudes changed.