Michael Prescott's Blog

Shutting down

For a variety of reasons, I've decided the time has come to essentially shut down this long-running blog. I've certainly enjoyed our conversations over the years, and I appreciate all the feedback – well, most of the feedback! 😊 – that I've received. But I think it's time to move on.

For one thing, having published my book on the subject of the afterlife, I feel I've basically closed the door on the subject. There isn't much more I can say, and I don't have new insights to offer. I find topics challenging mainly when I'm trying to figure out how I feel about them; once I've reached a definite conclusion, I tend to lose interest.

Also, in this day of cancel culture, cyberstalkers, and general craziness, I feel it may be best to keep a low online profile – or no profile at all.

Finally, I don't want to merely go through the motions of blogging, as I've been doing lately. It's best to go out on a relatively high note, I think.

I do intend to keep the blog online so people can refer to archived posts. At some point, I'll probably go through the material and cull the more dated or wrongheaded pieces. After that, I'll try to organize the rest in some fashion that will make it easier to use. For the moment, keep in mind that there's a search feature on the left-hand side of this page if you scroll down far enough. It will allow you to search for any term that appears in any of the blog entries. There's also a list of topics for browsing.

I will keep comments open for a short time, but before long I'm going to close all comments on the blog. The existing comments will remain, but there won't be any new ones.

Two items before I go. First, I want to report that Dr. Piero Calvi-Parisetti has come out with a new book called Step into the Light. According to the book description,

the author engages you in a scientific “detective work” aiming to establish the credibility of [NDEs, deathbed visions, and channeled accounts]. He reviews all the alternative explanations which have been proposed for these phenomena, showing that not one of them is capable of accounting for the empirical evidence. The conclusion is that these sources are indeed likely to be what or who they claim to be, and therefore it is reasonable to trust them. Then he systematically describes the process of dying and the various stages of life in the spirit world, based on (and extensively quoting) the coherent, consistent testimony received from these different sources.

I read the same author's earlier book 21 Days into the Afterlife and liked it a lot. I haven't had a chance to read Step into the Light yet, but I'm sure it's very worthwhile.

Second, I'm currently reading Dr. Bruce Greyson's memoir After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, which I'm scheduled to review for the Journal of the SPR. The book recounts some of the numerous NDEs that Dr. Greyson has examined in the course of his long and groundbreaking career. One of them was not only unfamiliar to me but also seems highly evidential. Here's an excerpt from the book:

Jack Bybee was hospitalized with severe pneumonia at age twenty-six, in his native South Africa …

"I had been taken very ill, and was three to four weeks in an oxygen tent… I was friendly (read 'flirting,' when I could be) with a nurse from the farmlands of the Western Cape. She had told me it was her twenty-first birthday that weekend, and that her parents were coming in from the country to celebrate. She fluffed up my pillows, as she always did. I held her hand to wish her a happy birthday, and she left.

"In my NDE, I met Nurse Anita on the other side. 'What are you doing here, Anita?' I asked. 'Why, Jack, I've come to fluff your pillows, of course, and to see that you are all right. But, Jack, you must return, go back. Tell my parents I'm sorry I wrecked the red MGB. Tell them I love them.'

"Then Anita was gone – gone through and over a very green valley and through a fence, where, she told me, 'there is a garden on the other side. But you cannot see it. For you must return, while I continue through the gate."

"When I recovered, I told a nurse what Anita had said. This girl burst out into tears and fled the ward. I later learned that Anita and this nurse had been great friends. Anita had been surprised by her parents, who loved her dearly and that presented her with a red MGB sports car. Anita had jumped into the car, and in her excitement raced down the mountain, De Waal Drive, along the slopes of Table Mountain, into 'Suicide Corner' and a concrete telephone pole.

"But I was 'dead' when all that happened. How could I possibly know these facts? I knew them as stated above. I was told by Anita in my experience."

When Jack told me the story about fifteen years ago, emphasizing his astonishment at meeting the nurse he thought was still alive, I recognized right away that there was something important in his account … Jack had no way of knowing that his nurse had died, and no yearning to see her on her weekend off with her parents. This was an apparent encounter with the deceased person that couldn't be dismissed as wishful thinking. And Jack was not the only experiencer who told me a story like this. [pages 132, 133]

That seems like a good note to end on. Thanks for your support, and I'll see you on the other side!

The case of Miss Edmonds

I've been reading a book published in 2017 called Eusapia Paladino: Materialisations and Intellergetic Phenomena in Physical Mediumship, compiled and edited by Scott Dickerson. It's a collection of articles from the turn of the last century concerning the controversial Sicilian medium who, although she was known to cheat when she could, also almost certainly produced legitimate phenomena when she wanted to. You can read a review here. I haven't read far enough yet to find out what the title word "intellergetic" means, though I assume it has to do with phenomena that appear to be caused by an intelligent agency.

I find the book kind of boring so far; the opening essays focus too much (for my taste) on philosophical abstractions, without getting into specific cases. An exception to this is a lengthy passage from the lead essay "The Spiritistic and Spiritualistic Explanation of Mediumistic Phenomena," by Caesar de Vesme,  which originally appeared in the Annals of Psychical Science, July 1907. (The book gives the publication date as August 1907, but you can find the actual article online, in the July issue. Scroll down to the article directly below the Table of Contents; the embedded link in the Contents doesn't work.)

De Vesme recounts a case that was apparently quite familiar at the time, but which, like so many others from the period, has been largely forgotten today. It's worth resurrecting. In the excerpt that follows, I've broken up the second, very long paragraph into four shorter paragraphs for easier reading. Italics are in then original.

Everyone is, no doubt, acquainted with this case: Judge Edmonds had a daughter in whom mediumistic faculties were revealed by the spontaneous phenomena which occurred in her presence, which soon aroused her curiosity to such an extent that she began to frequent séances. When another personality manifested through her she sometimes spoke different languages of which she was ignorant.

One evening when a dozen persons were assembled in Mr. Edmonds' house, in New York, a Mr. Green, a New York artist, was present, accompanied by a man whom he introduced under the name of Mr. Evangelides, of Greece.

Soon a personality manifested through Miss Laura Edmonds, who spoke to him in English and communicated to him a large number of facts, tending to prove that the personality was that of a friend who had died in his home several years ago, a person of whose existence even no one present could ever have known. From time to time the young girl uttered words and entire phrases in Greek, which suggested to Mr. Evangelides to ask her if she could speak to him in Greek. He himself, as a matter of fact, spoke English with difficulty.

The conversation was carried on in Greek on the part of Evangelides, and alternately in Greek and in English on the part of Miss Laura. Now and then Evangelides seemed to be much affected.

The next day he resumed his conversation with Miss Laura after which he explained to those present that the invisible personality who seemed to be manifesting through the medium was one of his intimate friends, who had died in Greece, the brother of the Greek patriot, Mark Botzaris; this friend informed him of the death of one of his own sons, who had remained in Greece and was in excellent health at the time that his father left for America.

Evangelides returned several times to Mr. Edmonds' house, and, ten days after his first visit, he informed him that he had just received a letter announcing the death of his son; this letter must have been already posted when the first interview of Mr. Evangelides with Miss Laura took place.

"I should like," writes Judge Edmonds on this subject, "that some one should tell me how I should regard this fact. It is impossible to deny it, it is too obvious. I might as reasonably deny that the Sun shines on us … This happened in the presence of eight or ten persons, all educated, intelligent, reasonable, and all as capable as anyone of distinguishing between illusion and real fact."

Let us, however, make an effort in psychical acrobatism: Let us suppose that Evangelides had telepathically received tidings of the death of his son, and that this information had remained latent in his brain until the clairvoyance of Miss Laura Edmonds managed to evoke it, in connection with that which related to Mark Botzaris and all the rest. Still it would be illogical to attribute to the medium the gift of speaking the Greek language, and the knowledge of the death of the boy to two distinct causes. How came it that Miss Laura spoke Greek? The hypothesis that can explain this phenomenon has not yet been invented!

Mr. Edmonds informs us that his daughter had never heard a word of modern Greek up to that day. He adds that on other occasions she spoke as many as thirteen different languages, including Polish, Italian, Indian, whilst, in her normal state she only knew English and French – the other only so far as it can be learnt in school. And this J.W. Edmonds was not a nobody, far from it. He was President of the Supreme Court of Justice of New York, and President of the Senate of the United States. No one has ever thrown a doubt on the absolute integrity of his character; his writings prove his brilliant intelligence. There is, therefore, no more reason for refusing to give credence to his accounts, so well authenticated, than to those of the savants who experiment with Eusapia Paladino and others.

What's most interesting in this account is that Laura Edmonds was reportedly able to converse in Greek at least part of the time, even though she had no knowledge of the language. The additional claim that she conversed in other languages is also interesting, though not substantiated by any details.

The super-psi hypothesis seems strained to its limits, or more accurately beyond its limits, by this kind of phenomenon. Laboratory studies of ESP have not, as far as I know, produced any cases in which telepathy or clairvoyance resulted in the spontaneous acquisition of a new language.

The Past Lives Podcast

My one-hour interview with Simon Brown on The Past Lives Podcast is now available online. Stream it here. 

The focus, naturally, is my recently released book The Far Horizon. The book deals with reincarnation only in the later chapters. The podcast, despite its name, explores a variety of other topics, as well.

Q & A

My friend Michael Tymn, who's written several excellent books on evidence for the afterlife and who maintains a blog at the White Crow Books site, interviewed me recently about my new book The Far Horizon. He asked good questions, as you would expect. 

I noticed that one commenter on Mike Tymn's site said that the Jacqui Poole case had been debunked by Tony Youens. For those who are interested, I addressed Youens' arguments at length in my blog post on the case. 

The Far Horizon

My book on the afterlife, The Far Horizon, published by White Crow, is now out as a Kindle ebook and in paperback. An Apple Books digital edition will follow. 

Here are some links: 

White Crow Books page, which includes links to Amazon sites in the UK, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan, as well as to Book Depository, which ships worldwide. 

Amazon US sales page for the Kindle edition.

Amazon US sales page for the paperback edition. 

My author website's page on the book. 

Also, I will be a guest on George Noory's radio show, Coast to Coast AM, on Wednesday, January 27, in the second two hours of the four-hour program (i.e., hours 3 and 4). This show airs late at night — 1 AM to 5 AM Eastern, 10 PM to 2 AM Pacific — but all episodes are archived and can be accessed for unlimited streaming or downloads with a $6.95 monthly fee (cancelable at any time). 

I've never done a radio show, and now I'm diving in headfirst with a two-hour live appearance on a nationally syndicated program. Yikes. Probably I won't be that great (as I warned them). Experience counts for a lot in things like this. But I'm sure the host can carry me if I falter. 

Record check

When mediums produce strongly evidential information under conditions designed to prevent cheating, three explanations are commonly given. The first is that the medium is actually in touch with the postmortem consciousness of the deceased "communicator," who continues to exist and function in an afterlife environment. The second is that the medium is using ESP (or psi) to read the minds of the sitters, or a more robust form of ESP, sometimes called super-ESP (or super-psi), to read the minds of distant strangers, clairvoyantly access hidden documents, etc. The third explanation is that the medium is accessing the Akashic Records.

What are these records? According to certain strains of mystical lore, probably originating with Madame Blavatsky's theosophy movement, the Akashic Records consist of the total life experience of every embodied being throughout all of history. The records, which might be visualized as books or computer files, can supposedly be accessed by people with sufficiently powerful psychic talents. The idea is that the medium, rather than getting in touch with a discarnate personality that still functions on another plane, is absorbing the information from these records and then presenting it as if it came from the deceased person directly.

If this interpretation is correct, then it could be argued that all the evidence that comes from mediums, no matter how accurate and convincing it may seem, really does nothing to advance the hypothesis that human beings survive death. All that survives, it could be said, is a complete record of their experiences, but the unique self-aware ego – the personal "I" – has been extinguished. This line of thinking is somewhat popular among people who embrace a spiritual dimension but are not too keen on personal survival.

What I want to question is whether there is necessarily any conflict between the idea of the Akashic Records and the idea of personal survival. This point has been brought up before, as I recall, by Matt Rouge in comments on this blog. But it's worth a post of its own.

First let me explain my view of the personal self. The easiest approach is via an analogy involving light and refraction.

Imagine a beam of pure white light that passes through a prism. The prism refracts the light into a variety of colors. Now, let's say the pure white light is the universal consciousness that is the ground of being, the sine qua non of all existence. Just as pure white light contains all other colors as potentials, universal consciousness contains all varieties of individuated consciousness and potential form. But that potential is not actualized without the prism. Only when consciousness passes through the prism is the rainbow of colors brought out. 

(Another possible analogy is a beam of laser light passing through a holographic plate and bringing out the three-dimensional image encoded in the plate. But I think the prism is simpler.) 

For purposes of my analogy, let's say there are countless prisms, each of which is different from any of the others. When the light of consciousness passes through any of them, it produces a unique pattern.  To reverse the motto on our currency,  e pluribus unum, it's a case of "out of one – many."

But what is this prism? It's the whole constellation or matrix of experiences, thoughts, feelings, memories, and other subjective content connected with any particular embodied existence. This is why every prism is different from all the rest. Each is built up out of a unique set of experiences and responses.

The prism, then, is just like one of the books or computer files in the Akashic Records. It is a complete record of all the experiences and attendant mental states that make up a particular life. And in this sense, I think the Akashic Records do exist. It is irrelevant whether we think of them existing in some library somewhere or floating around in space or whatever. Conventional concepts of space and location are probably inapplicable to higher planes of reality anyway. The bottom line is that the complete dossier on each one of us that mediums are said to access, according to the Akashic Records hypothesis, is probably very real.

Even so, it does not follow that postmortem survival is not real. In fact, I think the opposite conclusion is implied.

What, after all, is the self, the personal consciousness or personality or ego or "I"  that would survive death? It is the interaction of the pure light of consciousness with a specific prism. All that is required for the personality to exist and function is a)  a matrix of experiences that defines that particular personality and makes it unique from all others, and b) pure consciousness focused on this matrix.

As long as the matrix exists, the person with whom it is associated will also exist – at least if universal consciousness continues to interact with the matrix. And if universal consciousness is the ground of being, it must continue to interact with the matrix, because it interacts with everything. Anything outside of universal consciousness would be outside of existence altogether; it would not be a thing at all; it would not exist.

In short, it  is perfectly possible to combine the idea of the Akashic Records with the idea of personal survival. Moreover, it is  difficult, perhaps impossible, to separate the two. As long as the matrix of one's life experience exists, then it must be bathed in the pure light of consciousness that perfuses everything, and so the individual personality must continue.

Now, it could be argued that  the whole idea of a record of one's life – a matrix – surviving after death is mistaken. We might think that this matrix just crumbles away once physical life is over. In that case there would be no Akashic Records and no postmortem survival, and the only explanation for evidential mediumship, other than fraud, would be super-ESP.

I find this alternative unlikely. The destruction of the information matrix would seem to be possible only in the context of linear time, because only in linear time do you have beginnings and endings (creation and destruction). While the matrix is certainly built up over the course of a lifetime in linear time, there is little likelihood that the matrix as such exists only in linear time. It is far more plausible that it is stored in some extracerebral fashion, which would place it outside the physical plane and therefore, presumably, outside of time and space as we understand them.

If this is not true, then we are left with the difficult task of explaining many documented cases that strongly suggest extracerebral consciousness, such as near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, epiphanies of cosmic consciousness, past-life recall, and savant syndrome. 

To sum up, I think the likeliest scenario is one in which a nonphysical matrix of information, constructed over the course of a lifetime of experience, persists after physical death. Universal consciousness, which itself is egoless and impersonal, acquires the characteristics of ego and personality when it is refracted and individualized by this matrix. The intersection of the thoughts and memories that make up a unique mindset on the one hand and the vivifying power of pure consciousness on the other is what produces the individual self. 

Book review: The Afterlife Therapist

I just submitted this review to Amazon, and since it's relevant to our interests, I thought I'd also post it here. 

____

Retired college professor Stafford Betty has written more than one book on visions of the afterlife. In these books, such as The Afterlife Unveiled, he has compiled excerpts from channeled literature — material purportedly conveyed from departed souls via automatic writing.

His latest book, The Afterlife Therapist, is a departure from these previous books in that it is a work of fiction. Now I can already hear skeptics guffawing that the channeled material is equally fictional, and I suspect some of it is. But the new book is avowedly fictional — the story of psychological counselor Aiden Lovejoy, who continues his occupation in the first sphere of the “afterworld.”



I came to the novel not knowing what to expect, and was pleasantly surprised by what I found. The Afterlife Therapist is as deeply researched as Richard Matheson’s What Dreams May Come, and offers greater psychological depth. The characters may be angels, but they are not saints. They are, after all, still at a comparatively low level of spiritual evolution, still subject to ego-driven conflicts and doubts. Dr. Lovejoy is by no means too good to be true; his character faults prove frustrating to his colleagues and mentors in the next world, just as they did when he was on earth. His arc of development, which is by no means completed at the story’s end, is entirely believable. This focus on the imperfections of all-too-human souls sets The Afterlife Therapist apart from similar books.

Another key difference with other books is the novel’s variety of characters and incidents. Just when you think you know where the story is going, it jogs off in a new direction. Some of these moves are quite bold; at one point, a historical character is introduced, reigning over a petty kingdom in a shadowy netherworld. When his name came up, I thought, “This is probably going to be over the top,” but it plays out very well.

Speaking of shadowy netherworlds, I have to say that, for me, the chapters set in the lowest levels of the afterworld were especially compelling. Perhaps it reveals something not-so-great about my own level of personal development, but I found Betty’s depiction of these fogbound, grim, rat-infested hells viscerally real.

Having read many books on postmortem survival, I’m inclined to believe in it. My expectations with regard to the next life are not always in line with Stafford Betty’s — his afterworld is essentially physical; it exists in physical space not far from the planet Earth, though it is undetectable by Earth’s instruments. While this is consistent with some channeled literature, I feel that asking for the physical location of the afterworld is like asking for the physical location of a dreamscape. We’re dealing, I suspect, with a spectrum of frequencies of consciousness, rather than of matter. But nobody is going to agree on all details of such an esoteric subject, and the truth, as J.B.S. Haldane once said of the universe, is probably not only stranger than we imagine but stranger than we can imagine. In any event, the physicality of the afterworld in Betty’s novel allows for an interesting excursion to several alien planets, another bold move that works out better than you might think.

I highly recommend The Afterlife Therapist as an ambitious, imaginative, serious, and self-reflective work that reaches far beyond the usual limits of afterlife exploration.

Coming soon: The Far Horizon

Despite the paucity of my posts lately, I haven't been entirely idle. I finally got around to writing my book on the afterlife, which I call The Far Horizon: Perspectives on Life Beyond Death. 

I was planning to self-publish this short (45,000-word) book and maybe sell a handful of copies. But when I announced it on Facebook, a helpful Facebook friend, Maryam Ebadi, contacted Jon Beecher, who runs White Crow Books, the well-known niche publisher of paranormal titles. Jon was interested in handling the book and got in touch with me. We had a very friendly FaceTime chat—one of the few times I've ever used FaceTime—and agreed to do the deal.

So the upshot is that The Far Horizon will come out in both paperback and digital editions through White Crow, probably within the next three months or so.

Here's the blurb I wrote for the book when I was planning to self-publish. It gives you the gist:

THE FAR HORIZON

Over the past century and a half, a wealth of evidence has emerged that is consistent, at least, with the hypothesis of life after death.

• Near-death experiences
• Deathbed visions
• Mediumship
• Apparitions
• Past-life memories, and memories of a between-lives state

Yet even those who are inclined to take this evidence seriously may struggle to make sense of it. How can the idea of an afterlife be integrated into our everyday experience? How can we connect the seemingly nebulous notion of postmortem survival with the hard, tangible reality of life on earth?

Through metaphors, images, and analogies—illustrated with dozens of documented cases drawn from the literature of parapsychology—this book suggests ways of looking at life beyond death, not as a baffling anomaly, but as a logical extension of our experience of reality here and now.

The hope is that we can learn to see reports of an afterlife as something more than mere ghost stories … and to sharpen the focus of our gaze on The Far Horizon.

———

The book offers four main metaphors or "models" of the afterlife, all of which have been discussed on this blog:

1.  the virtual-reality simulation model
2.  the spectrum of frequencies model
3.  the Flatland model; and 
4.  the diamond model.

There's also a concluding chapter that examines the meaning and purpose of it all. 

Although my focus is not on "proving" postmortem survival, the various models are illustrated with case studies that serve as evidence. I have to say that most of the material (both the models and the case histories) derives from posts I've already published on this blog, which is how I was able to put to the book together pretty quickly. However, it's not just a compilation of blog posts. I extensively rewrote most of the content and structured it into what I hope is a coherent presentation.

One thing I discovered when rereading old blog posts is how many typos there are. I never realized there were so many. Oh, well. You get what you pay for, and this blog is free. The book will cost money, but it will also be professionally proofread.

Cheers! 

 

Splitting the difference

Matt Rouge recently reminded me of a study that came out in 2017, purporting to show that split-brain patients retain a single locus of consciousness. Although I put up a brief post about it at the time, I don't think I fully appreciated the implications.

In a corpus callosotomy, the sheaf of neural fibers connecting the left and right cerebral hemispheres is surgically severed. A connection between the< hemispheres remains intact, but is considered too weak to provide more than minimal communication. Decades ago, split-brain patients were tested in a famous series of experiments, as Science Daily explains:

In their canonical work, [Roger] Sperry and [Michael] Gazzaniga discovered that split-brain patients can only respond to stimuli in the right visual field with their right hand and vice versa. This was taken as evidence that severing the corpus callosum causes each hemisphere to gain its own consciousness.

This conclusion, in turn, has been used by skeptics to argue that consciousness is generated by the brain and therefore cannot survive death. I don't necessarily think this argument has the force it's supposed to have. One could argue that if the brain serves as a filter for extracerebral consciousness, then if it is cut in half, it simply functions as two filters. By way of analogy, a funnel that produces a sound by channeling a wind current would produce two sounds if it were somehow made into two funnels. There would still be only one current of wind.

In any case, a more recent study casts doubt on Sperry and Gazzaniga's conclusions:

[Yair] Pinto and his fellow researchers conducted a series of tests on two patients who had undergone a full callosotomy....  To the researchers’ surprise, the patients were able to respond to stimuli throughout the entire visual field with all the response types: left hand, right hand and verbally. Pinto: ‘The patients could accurately indicate whether an object was present in the left visual field and pinpoint its location, even when they responded with the right hand or verbally. This despite the fact that their cerebral hemispheres can hardly communicate with each other and do so at perhaps 1 bit per second, which is less than a normal conversation. I was so surprised that I decide repeat the experiments several more times with all types of control.’

According to Pinto, the results present clear evidence for unity of consciousness in split-brain patients. ‘The established view of split-brain patients implies that physical connections transmitting massive amounts of information are indispensable for unified consciousness, i.e. one conscious agent in one brain. Our findings, however, reveal that although the two hemispheres are completely insulated from each other, the brain as a whole is still able to produce only one conscious agent. This directly contradicts current orthodoxy and highlights the complexity of unified consciousness.’

It would appear that at least one set of researchers has made a mistake somewhere, since their results directly contradict each other. If the more recent experiments hold up to scrutiny, the implications are pretty serious.

In my post from 2017, I focused on the possibility that a common argument against survival had been undermined. But when I look at it now, it occurs to me that Pinto's study amounts to something close to positive evidence for survival. After all, if the two hemispheres of the brain still have a single locus of consciousness despite minimal connectivity, it would strongly suggest that consciousness originates outside the brain and simply uses the brain as an instrument — or at the very least, that consciousness, having originated in the brain, assumes some kind of extracerebral status that can persist even when the brain has been seriously impaired.

In other words, either consciousness originates in "the cloud" and is downloaded to the brain as needed, or consciousness originates in the brain and is periodically uploaded to "the cloud" for safekeeping. Either way, the destruction of the brain at death should not necessarily affect the content stored in the cloud.

For what it's worth, my personal view is that both of these options are correct: there is a give-and-take relationship between the brain and consciousness, similar to the back-and-forth communications between a Mars Rover and Mission Control, with data from the Rover transmitted to Mission Control, and Mission Control analyzing those data and sending back instructions. Note that the Rover has a degree of autonomy, analogous to reflex, instinct, or any learned behavior that has become automatic; it can respond immediately to certain problems without waiting for advice from Mission Control. I believe I first came across the Rover analogy in The Biology of Belief by Bruce Lipton.

Additional evidence for the contention that consciousness can be extracerebral may perhaps be found in the work of John Lorber, who discovered that some people with very limited gray matter can nevertheless function normally, and Karl Lashley, who found that no matter what part of a rat's brain he excised, or how much of it, the rat could still remember how to navigate a maze. 

Reconstructing the Green Book

Back in 2007, I wrote a post about the book The Open Door, by Theon Wright, which had been recommended by a reader. I described the book as

the detailed record of experiments in automatic writing carried out by Wright's parents, Nella and George, and later by Theon's brother Stowell and by Theon himself. The unusual thing about these experiments is that little effort was made to obtain verifiable evidence of identity, the usual procedure in mediumship, particularly in the days when Wright's parents were at work. Instead, the focus was on obtaining wisdom, what the Wrights called the Philosophy of Self, essentially a version of nondualistic mysticism in which the development of one's higher Self contributes to the overall development of Cosmic Consciousness.

To be honest, I've mostly forgotten the book by now, but I recently received an email from Paul Smith, who said that he became fascinated with The Open Door after reading my post. He told me, 

The attraction of the book’s message is that it marries in a single vision a monistic idealist metaphysics of the emanation of the Divine Source into creation and the subsequent return of that creation to its Source to a cosmological understanding of human becoming that encompasses both incarnate and posthumous existence. 

He added that he had undertaken a project based on the book's contents:

I have completed a reconstruction from The Open Door of what Theon Wright’s father assembled, bound in green leather and called The Green Book, which forms, in essence, a course of instruction in essential metaphysics, very much along the lines of Advaita Vedanta or similar non-dualist teachings, as delivered – as close as I can presently determine – from a discarnate being, once bodily human, who has realized the Self.  The content of the included reconstruction should be more or less identical to that of the actual “Green Book”, barring the absence of personal family matters, but without the attempt at subject ordering of the actual volume, which is now lost.  I did write to Theon Wright’s son, George Wright, a few years back in an attempt to obtain a copy of the actual Green Book, but never received a reply.

He sent me his reconstruction of the apparently lost text, but as I explained in my reply, the material was too long for a blog post, and there could be copyright issues associated with reproducing so much of The Open Door's text, even though the book is long out of print. Appreciating these concerns, Paul has chosen to put up his reconstruction of The Green Book on ScribD, while, he tells me, continuing to try to contact the copyright holder(s). 

Readers who are interested in channeled literature, especially literature that focuses on philosophical issues rather than proof of identity, may want to check out this very interesting project.