Michael Prescott's Blog

Final ventures

Here is a last series of excerpts from A Venture in Immortality, by David Kennedy. See the previous two posts for other excerpts.

In trance [the medium] Albert Best spoke to me. "Ann is here again, she is saying something about Sauchie. (This is a village in Clackmannanshire.)  I replied that yesterday I had officiated at a wedding where the bride came from Sauchie. He continued, "The groom was another Kennedy, not you, Iain." I agreed that the name of the groom was Iain Kennedy. Next followed, "What did you do to the best man? … Ann says that you did something discourteous but not intentional to the best man!" This was absolutely true. I absent-mindedly closed the official reception without giving the best man the customary opportunity of replying to the toast to the bridesmaid.…

"Ann says you must attend to your socks and buy a few more pairs. You had a hole in one that you wore at the wedding." Again true. To my horror I discovered at the function that a hole was showing above the heel of my shoe. "There is something wrong with your shoe which you are wearing. Take it off." I took off my shoe and discovered that the sole was separating from the upper part on one shoe. This was totally invisible and could only be seen by probing at the joint of upper and sole with a pencil. Still more remarkable facts were to come. Albert, in trance, continued: "Ann is saying that there is something wrong with a light". Now as it happened the bulb in my study burned out the previous night when I was about to finish work and go to bed. I had made a mental note to buy a new 250 watt bulb but had not yet done so. I told Albert Best that my study lamp had gone out. Now this coincidence was a perfectly good explanation of what he claimed Ann had said, "Something wrong with a light". There was a pause and silence for almost half a minute. "No. This is not the light she is talking about. She says that the light could be dangerous." Another pause, then, "Would you please," she says, "check the lights on your car when you leave here. There is something wrong with one of them and that could be dangerous." Immediately after the session I went outside to where my car was parked and tested the lights. I found that my near-side side lamp was out. I also found that the wire behind the side light assembly was hot after the lights had been on for a few minutes.

Here was a source of danger, both of fire and the obvious danger of driving at night without a front side-light. There was no conceivable way in which Albert Best could have been aware of this defect in my car. He had not even seen my car for weeks and in any case it was mid-summer and I would not have my lights on. In addition, there was the heating of the wire behind the light assembly. I am particularly impressed by this piece of evidence from Ann. It could not be known to any human agency, of this I am convinced. This is an example of something which is quite outside any kind of telepathic explanation. It is simple and yet it fulfills all the requirements of a non-telepathic condition....

It appears to be possible for helpers and loved ones on the other side to be aware of sources of potential danger and to try to give warning. This kind of evidence is very difficult to explain except on the survival hypothesis. [pp. 124-126]

In a first-time meeting with another medium, Mrs. Constable, some very good evidence was obtained.

She began, "You are working on a book just now but I feel that you have got stuck. Leave it aside for the moment and tonight just try to relax and scribble down any ideas that come to you, for half an hour or so." Suddenly she stopped, as though interrupted by someone whom she could hear, but who was not audible to me. "What's that you say? It's a lady speaking, she says, 'Tell him not tonight because he has to go out tonight'." I replied that I had an afternoon appointment but that I was free this evening and intended to be at home. "Oh no!" was the reply. "She says you are going to get a telephone call which will change your arrangements in the next few hours."

Mrs. Constable continued, "There is a lady here comes – the lady who spoke just now – a lovely lady – very beautiful – especially her hair. She says, 'Tell him it was my teeth.' She had trouble with her teeth. She is very quiet – shy. She does this to her mouth (here Mrs. Constable put her hand over her mouth) as though she used to hide her mouth or her teeth with her hand."

I must emphasize how completely accurate this description is of my wife. She had a shallow palate and gums. For years of her life, until she died, she was plagued by the problem of finding dentures which were comfortable and even wearable. All together she had four sets of dentures at the time of her death. We used to have a private joke between us. She would say to me, "If I ever come back to you after I die, I'll just put my hand over my mouth and say, "Remember my teeth'."…

At 12 noon, a few minutes after I arrived home, I received a telephone call from the [people I had an afternoon appointment with]. The call was to ask me if I would mind coming out in the evening instead of the afternoon....

This knowledge on Anna's part of the course of the next few hours and the fact that I would be involved all evening might be brushed off as coincidence; a guess on the part of the medium. Yet if it were so, it was a detailed guess because it also mentioned a telephone call changing my plans. The chances of my plans for an entire evening being changed by something of this nature are very, very slender. It has happened to me once in the last two years. I regard this as a significant type of evidence of a non-telepathic nature. [pp. 141-142]

From a session with Albert Best:

Finally, Albert Best continued, "Ann is very light-hearted and as she goes off she says again to you, 'Enjoy yourself, you need relaxation' and smiling broadly she says, 'Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum.' You'll hear about that later she says.…"

On the veridical nature of the statements, my first comment is that as I write this twenty-four hours later, I have just been handed a present of a bottle of Jamaica Rum by a member of my congregation who has returned from holiday. [p. 152] 

Refreshingly, Kennedy acknowledges his own biases; and he includes some trenchant remarks about belief and disbelief:

This is a tendentious book. It begins with a theoretical belief in survival and communication and proceeds to show what happened in one particular instance when one's theories become existential problems. I believe that to acquire this amount of evidence of survival in so short a time would probably not be possible for most people. I was fortunate in so far as my wife and I shared a knowledge of psychical research over twenty-five years and latterly came to accept that evidence as strong enough to say that we both believed in survival. We were therefore agreed that when death parted us we would, whichever of us went first, and it seemed likely to be Ann, try to produce for the other one on this side the best evidence possible.

My part in this was to make this possible by having fairly frequent sittings with mediums of known quality. The fortuitous part which figures so largely is the fact that I knew Albert Best, one of Britain's finest mediums.…

At the same time it is fair to warn the reader that I have been pleading a case. I believed in survival and I hoped strongly that after Ann died I would receive evidence. I am not objective in this; but because I am aware of my desire to find myself in contact with Ann I have tried to guard against hearing what I desire to hear. All my sittings with mediums which were prearranged were tape-recorded and I am satisfied that I did not convey information.

I have experienced sittings with mediums which were unsatisfactory in the sense that the messages were vague and could have applied to anyone. This happened on three or four occasions during the six months since Ann died… One becomes able to recognize easily the medium who is simply filling in. Sometimes I have been convinced the filling in was conscious and fraudulent. At other times I felt that the hotch-potch of unrecognized names and allusions was not consciously fraudulent. Nevertheless, sterile and abortive sittings of this nature do take place and while I have not written down the details, it is fair to warn the reader that looking for evidence of survival has its setbacks too....

I do not claim that any one incident described in this book should stand on its own. I do claim that at least in the view of any fair-minded person a strong "prima facie" case for Ann's survival is established by the totality of the evidence presented. Human beings cannot leave existential questions in the vacuum of suspended judgment. They either make the leap from probability to belief or withdraw into disbelief. This may well depend on emotional factors in each of us. [pp. 156-159, 165]

Further ventures

More excerpts from A Venture in Immortality, by David Kennedy. I'm finding this book very worthwhile. Yes, it's true, as Amos Oliver Doyle pointed out in the previous comments thread, that all these stories tend to blur together after a while. But it's also true, as Art observed in the same thread, that if we don't remind ourselves of the uncanny accuracy and specificity of these narratives from time to time, they will lose their persuasive power.

Anyway, here are more reported after-death communications from David Kennedy's wife, Ann.

While Kennedy was riding on a train with the medium Albert Best, there was this spontaneous communication:

Albert put down his book and in his excited typical stammer which I had come to recognize as the indication that he was getting something, he said, "Ann is just behind me, she asked me to tell you about the slipper". I said nothing and Albert paused for a few seconds as he often does while getting a message right. Then in more confident tone and slower and louder voice, "When your wife's personal effects were brought back from hospital were there blue slippers. No wait. There was only one blue slipper, the other was missing."

He continued in his confident tone as he seemed to see things more clearly, "Your wife is giving this as evidence, you understand? In your wife's toilet bag she says there were three complete sets of dentures which came back from hospital. She is also saying, Teresa. The same toilet bag had a blue container of talcum powder and a triangular small bottle of toilet water." Albert continued, "Your wife was with you this morning when you took out a large silk handkerchief and used it to wrap something in. This morning before you left the house". "Now," said Albert, "she is singing a song which you should recognize. She is singing 'C'est si bon'. She is going now but says as she goes she knows about the Royal Stuart tartan."

Here indeed is concentrated evidence. Nothing vague but precise facts, one after another. First the blue slipper. This evidence was completely accurate. One blue slipper only came back in Ann's effects from hospital, the other was missing.

There were precisely three complete sets of dentures in Ann's toilet bag returned from hospital.… I should also say I was completely unaware of how many sets of dentures she took to hospital or how many were in her plastic toilet bag.… [Kennedy had to check in order to confirm the report. He had been understandably reluctant to go through his late wife's personal effects.] 

The name, Teresa, is Anna's mother's baptized Christian name. She has never used his name since she was married.…

The blue container of talcum and triangular bottle of toilet water was [sic]  in the bag as described.

At nine o'clock that same morning, in my home alone, I took out the only silk handkerchief I possess, a large white silk handkerchief and used it to wrap the microphone of my pocket tape recorder to protect it when I placed it in my traveling case. Albert had never seen this handkerchief at any time. "C'est si bon" was one of Anne's favorite songs which she used to hum. Finally, a week earlier Ann's mother and sister had brought had bought a Royal Stuart tartan large traveling rug as a cover for the sofa.

Kennedy is at pains to point out that he is "not on close personal terms" with Albert Best. "During the last six weeks I have only spoken to Albert Best by telephone and then only when he telephoned me. In many of these telephone calls Albert Best asked me for information or advice, particularly in relation to orthodox churches. [Kennedy was a minister.] ... Although Albert Best telephoned me, I very rarely telephoned him, unless it was for the purpose of trying to arrange a private sitting for someone. From the very beginning I made a point of guarding against the danger of being on familiar chatting terms with Mr. Best because I was always conscious of the over-riding necessity of reducing to a minimum the possibility of conveying information to him. After over twenty-five years experience of psychical research, I am at least aware of the danger of saying in someone's company such remarks as 'Anne and I loved that tune' or 'We had a wonderful holiday there, once'. It may sound calculating, but I have throughout this period and before it, always been aware that the unique mediumship of Albert Best would be the keystone of much of the evidence of survival which I hoped to make available to others. Thus the necessity of keeping myself aloof from this gifted medium, not to cloud the value of the evidence."

While Best was performing a healing procedure on someone else, he spoke to Kennedy, who happened to be in the room:

Once again, in trance and while healing, Albert Best said, "Who is Mrs. Murray, East Kilbride," addressing me. I replied, "That is my wife's sister". "Ah, yes!" replied Albert Best. "Your wife was talking about her. She says that she was with you when you posted a postcard to her sister when you were in London. You posted two postcards at the same time, on Monday of this week. She also says that she was with her sister when she got your postcard."

After a short pause, "You had fish before you came out here, sole, and it wasn't Dover sole. Your wife says you cooked it in a pot and you didn't clean the pot properly. Clean it again when you go home, will you?"

All of this was accurate, including the poorly cleaned pot, which still had traces of fish clinging to it. His wife had been a stickler for cleaning the dishes.

Here is a possible example of EVP, electronic voice phenomena. It comes up in a sitting with another medium, Mrs. Findlater, who says: 

"When you bought that new recorder," (I had bought a new cassette pocket recorder a few weeks previously) "you relaxed and spoke into it. Your guide was there and when you played it back you heard a word spoken twice which startled you because you didn't remember saying that word. The word was OM – OM or God." This again is startling. I did speak a little poetry and some nonsense into my recorder and thought it curious that I had spoken the word OM twice. I concluded that I must have said this word out of my subconscious without being aware of saying it. Yet the voice did seem strange. Yet here almost a month later a woman, Mrs. Findlater, claims that my wife is speaking to me and that a group of those on the other side were responsible for this word which startled me on playing back what I had spoken into my recorder. No living soul knew of this except myself.

Kennedy remarks on "a curious piece of evidence in this series of communications…. This is, in the case of the mediumship of Albert Best the lapse of two months before the first sporadic messages from Ann begin to come through. I would describe Albert Best as pathetically eager to be able to bring me the comfort of a solid reassuring item of evidence from Ann in the two months following her passing and yet he was perfectly honest with me. 'I simply get nothing at all, not even a sense of her presence.'… Now if the telepathy hypothesis is a valid one, or if the more elaborate and speculative theory that somehow a gifted medium has access to the forgotten memories of anyone who ever had any contact with Ann [i.e., super-psi], be correct, the question arises, why should this extended telepathy or access to a universal pool of knowledge not operate from the moment of Ann's death? Why should there be eight blank weeks following Ann's death, when there is complete silence on the part of this gifted medium?… On the telepathic hypothesis this delay is unaccountable. On the other hand in terms of descriptions given by our loved ones and others from the other side, this delay is understandable and consistent."

The delay, as he goes on to say, is normally explained by spiritualists as the time necessary for the recently deceased person to adjust to afterlife conditions and recover from the trauma of dying, as well as from any lingering medical conditions that may obsess the mind. In Ann's case, she apparently continued to feel a shortness of breath – a condition that plagued her in her final months on earth – even though, in her postmortem existence, it was all in her mind.

Though I'm quoting some (but not all) of the best evidence in this book, I'm not able to include the author's extended ruminations on the relationship between spiritualism and the Christian church, his analysis of philosophers like Kant and Heidegger, and many other interesting subjects. The book, though sadly out of print, is worth seeking out.

Get me to the church on time

A Venture in Immortality, by David Kennedy, is a 1973 memoir about a series of after-death communications from the author's wife. The book is out of print and available only from used booksellers. I'd never heard of it until it came up on Michael Sudduth's Facebook timeline; Dr. Sudduth seems to have a good opinion of the book, so I decided to track it down. I'm now about 60 pages into it, and I agree that it's well worth reading. 

David Kennedy was an engineer who, in middle age, became a minister. He and his wife Ann were intelligent, well-educated people whose idea of an enjoyable evening was to read passages from Plato to each other. They regarded each other as soulmates, and their happiness persisted despite Ann's chronic health problems, stemming from an incurable heart condition. After Ann passed away, David was understandably grief stricken, but before long he began to receive some remarkably evidential messages via mediums.

What makes the book so worthwhile, beyond the author's obvious intelligence and sincerity, is that both he and his wife had a longtime interest in psychic phenomena and life after death. They were thoroughly familiar with the investigations of the Society for Psychical Research and had plowed through back issues of the SPR's journal from 1906 forward. As a result, Kennedy is in a good position to evaluate the evidence that comes through, distinguishing between solid hits and more neutral statements that might apply to any number of people. He is also open to the hypothesis that mediums rely on telepathy and clairvoyance rather than communication with the dead, and he is always on the lookout for communications that would strain the ESP hypothesis to the breaking point.

Here are two interconnected episodes found early in the book that especially impressed me.

Sunday, 15 March was my Communion Sunday and in the Church of Scotland Communion or the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper is only celebrated twice or three times a year in most churches. It can mean two long and exhausting services, each lasting for 1 1⁄2 hours with interviews between each service and a hasty snack in the church. One may arrive at the church at 10 a.m. and return home at 4 p.m. literally exhausted and depleted of nervous energy.

Normally, when my wife was alive, I would stretch out on the sofa and sleep deeply in total exhaustion for about an hour and a half. Then at about 5:30 p.m. Ann would come through from the bedroom and awaken me in preparation for going out at 6 p.m. for my evening service.

On this particular Sunday, March 15, I came home as usual at 4 p.m. exhausted. Rather foolishly I lay down on the sofa and in minutes I was deeply asleep. So deeply asleep that I am certain I would have slept for hours blissfully removed from the prospect of an evening congregation assembled and no minister arriving to conduct the service. I was deeply asleep. Gradually I became aware of the intrusion of a bell continuing to ring. The ringing continued and I slowly awakened to the fact that the telephone was ringing.

I staggered from the sofa, still half-sleep, picked up the telephone and heard a woman's voice say, "Is that the Reverend David Kennedy? My name is Mrs. Lexie Findlater. I am telephoning from Grangemouth (a town 40 miles away). Your wife is impressing me so strongly that I have to telephone you now. I have tried to write a letter and put off this feeling but I am being told that I must telephone you now, now, she is so insistent, yet I have no idea why. Your wife is simply saying, 'Get out now and use the old notes'. I don't know what it means but I had to do this."

Now Mrs. Findlater, it will be remembered, was the medium whom I had met in the two private interviews described earlier, the first one two weeks after my wife's death. She only knew my name and not my address. She had to find my address and telephone number from directory enquiry. It took amazing confidence and courage to telephone a person who was almost a total stranger and then say that she did not know why she was telephoning except that my wife was impressing her that she had to do this.

I thanked Mrs. Findlater for telephoning and explained to her that if she had not telephoned me at this moment I would have slept right through the time of my evening service – it was 6 p.m. when she telephoned. I just had time to grab the notes of an old sermon, rush into my car and arrive at the church, get into my robes and 'make it' for the 6:30 p.m. evening service.

Now here is a case where my wife claimed that she saw me sleeping deeply, likely to miss my evening service. It was her habit to awaken me. There was only one way to get me to my church in time. She could not herself impress me, so she impressed strongly a more sensitive person, this woman 40 miles away, and got the thought across that she must telephone me. In other words, Ann managed to do for me what she had always done, awaken me on this particular Sunday. I had always relied on her to do this. If there is a better example of loving concern and intervention from our dear ones on the other side, it would be difficult to find.

Yet this is not the end. Three days later Albert Best [another medium, who, unlike Mrs. Findlater, was a personal friend of the author – MP] telephoned me and after an amazing message from my wife, concluded by saying "And Ann says, 'For heaven's sake get an alarm clock and don't sleep in again at the end of the week'."

Now comes the amazing evidence of that telephone call from Albert Best. Before the telephone rang I was in the middle of the kind of job a man has to learn to do for himself when he is living alone. I decided that my yellow pullover was in need of washing. I knew the general rules about washing woollens carefully and gently in warm water and soap flakes. I'm afraid I was overindulgent with the soap flakes. Anyhow, in a short time I had the basin overflowing with soap suds in a rich lather while I squeezed away at my yellow pullover.

Just then the telephone rang. Albert Best on the other end. "Are you shampooing, I mean not your hair, something woollen? I see lather, suds overflowing and something woollen in the basin. Your wife is saying that she was watching you doing this." I told Albert that I was actually washing a pullover in soap suds when he interrupted me. He replied, "Well, your wife is saying, 'Put in the black pullover while you're at it, the one with the egg stains on it, it needs washing badly'." Then followed the remark about getting an alarm clock which I have already referred to. Needless to say there was a black pullover, with egg stains, which I had forgotten about and which badly needed washing.

What does one make of this? Is it a fantastic form of telepathy in which an ordinary ex-postman has powers which would make him a fortune on stage or television? In which he knows not only exactly what I am doing, but the contents of my linen cupboard? Or is it the more reasonable explanation that my wife, who was always fussy about my dress and appearance and also insisted on doing these washing jobs right to the end, is still close and still aware and still concerned and because of the unique situation of my being in touch with a gifted medium, is able to show that same concern from beyond the barrier of death? [Pages 44-46, 1987  trade paperback edition]

Splinters of truth

I’ve been thinking about various issues relating to postmortem survival and the evolution of consciousness. Well, I guess I’m always sort of thinking about that. But lately I’ve been thinking that I’ve probably gotten off on the wrong track with my focus on information processing and my attempted analogies to computer systems and virtual reality.

All analogies will break down at some point (this is inevitable when comparing qualitatively different things), but in this case the analogies seem to fail pretty quickly. Trying to compare consciousness to a laser beam reading a disk just doesn’t seem to work, because a laser beam is not aware, let alone self-aware. And then what is the render engine (the thing that converts bits of data into a graphical environment)? Is that also consciousness, or is it something else?

If we say that consciousness can choose which data path to follow, then it’s not really like a laser beam (which can’t choose anything); it’s more like the person using the computer, whose choices control the direction of the game. But then the analogy fails in a different way, because we are attempting to explain consciousness by comparing it to the (conscious) computer user - which explains nothing. It's like explaining an orange by comparing it to another orange.

Or if we say there are no free-will choices and the program just plays out inexorably, then what is the role of consciousness? At best it is a merely passive observer. 

Although I think there is some merit in the idea that information is fundamental to reality, it seems to me that extending this idea to computer systems, even as a rough analogy, is not helpful. It obfuscates more than it clarifies. It offers a veneer of "scientific" respectability, while actually being too vague and inherently untestable to be scientific at all  

That’s one thing I’ve been noodling on. Another, related point is that it’s probably a fool's errand to try to understand "how it all works." The Flatland analogy that’s often come up in this blog is relevant here. A Flatlander - a two-dimensional being in a two-dimensional world - might, with great difficulty, be able to grasp the concept of a third dimension, at least in purely mathematical terms. It is doubtful he could visualize it except in the crudest terms. Even if he experienced it directly, as does A. Square in the novel Flatland, he could not express his insights in terms that would be intelligible to less enlightened Flatlanders, nor would he himself retain more than a foggy impression of his experience.

Now imagine the insuperable difficulties faced by a Flatlander trying to grasp the fourth (physical) dimension, or the fifth. 

I think we are in a comparable position. Our brains, constrained by the laws of three physical dimensions plus time, simply aren’t capable of processing the realities of an almost infinitely higher-dimensional system. Even if, like St. Paul, we were taken up to "the third heaven," we would be tongue-tied upon our return. Eyes have not seen what we had seen; ears have not heard what we had heard. The best we could do is relate to it as a dream - Bottom's dream, because it hath no bottom. 

The human mind, limited by the narrow parameters of the human brain, just can’t grasp these mysteries. We can grasp at them, like a baby trying to catch a sunray. But our fists will close on air. Even an episode of "cosmic consciousness," in which the secrets of the universe are seemingly revealed in a blinding epiphany, will last only a short time - minutes or hours - and afterward will leave only a fading, distant glow, an emotional impression, a half-glimpsed, half-remembered "something" that haunts us but eludes description. It is as if we briefly saw the whole picture in a glass, and then the glass shattered, and we are left with only splinters of the truth.

Perhaps the best we can do - this is my third point - is try to imagine a reality in which time does not operate as it does here, and in which the laws of cause and effect are altered in ways that would seem illogical by earthly standards. A tangled hierarchy, in which the end is embedded in the beginning, may be the best way of looking at it. Familiar examples include a Möbius strip, a snake swallowing its own tail, and the famous Escher drawing of two hands sketching each other. 

For our purposes, we can see the evolution of personal consciousness as a tangled hierarchy (also known as a strange loop). At one end of the continuum is the Oversoul or Higher Self, the culmination of personal development, which comprises all the selves that have come before. (Although the term "before" is problematic here.) At the other end of the continuum is the mundane self, the ego-identity that you and I would recognize as "who I am." The paradox is that the Higher Self is informed by and constructed out of the experiences of the various mundane selves that make up its incarnations, and yet at the same time (except there is no "time") the Higher Self chooses those incarnations and watches over them, sometimes providing guidance. 

In our earthly terms, this makes no sense - the hand is drawing itself. But from a higher-dimensional perspective in which every time is now, and the story is both fully told and still unfolding, it can (perhaps) make sense. Not the kind of sense we can truly grasp - like Flatlanders, we are too limited to make it real - our mental equipment would overload and short-circuit long before we were able to achieve real understanding. But vaguely we can discern the outlines. Perhaps.

Does this mean we lose our precious mundane self, our "I", sometime after death? No, because nothing is ever lost. Everything that ever was or ever will be always is, in the eternal now. Does it mean that we surrender our memories of this life when we enter our next incarnation? No, because our multiple incarnations all play out at once; we are alive in the 21st century, and in Ancient Rome, and in a lunar colony, and in the afterlife realm, all at the same time (because there is no time). Does it mean that our Higher Self is subjecting us to suffering that we would not have chosen? No, because the Higher Self is us; as the apotheosis of all our mundane selves, it can choose nothing that we haven’t already chosen.

A man of eighty, looking back on his distant childhood, feels both a sense of continuity with the child he was and a sense of detachment from him; he both is that child, now and forever, and is not that child, whom he has long since left behind. He may feel sorry for some of the suffering the child went through, yet also glad about it, because it made him the man he is. The child would not have wanted to suffer, but the man knows better. And the child and the man are the same. (And yet different.) 

Paradox is the only way to understand it. And yet paradox by its nature is incomprehensible. Which gives us another paradox - we can understand only by the method of not understanding.

A dream that hath no bottom, indeed.