first time in the history of post-mortem examination we have at our disposal an object which exhibits the characteristic of 'repeatability' which is to be considered a conclusive proof of the existence of this object. Thus we have the possibility of systematic intensive research in this field.
From the results of this investigation it can be inferred whether this or that recording is true or false.
Facts are the true language of science.
Obviously the virulent discussion of and research into forms of consciousness after death are far from exhausted by questioning people who have experienced suspended animation or the hunt for transcendental voices. Hypnotists use suggestion to send human 'guinea-pigs' not only back to their youth, but also way past their intrauterine existence into a life before birth.
Thorwald Dethlefsen [12], a young hypnotist from Munich, possesses accurate records of séances in which the hypnotized subject is first returned to the age of a babe in arms and later asked about his existence before birth. This hypnotic retrospective covers two or three previous births! When asked the
'guinea-pigs' assured him that they had lived before their subjective birth under other names, in other places and often with a different sex. They named names and birthdays from these previous lives and, although they did not know them, spoke in the languages of the countries in which they had lived two or three births ago. And to give the reader cold shivers, on more than one occasion they described their own deaths. That makes research really spooky.
Morey Bernstein [13] used hypnosis to send Mrs. Ruth Simmons back to the ages of four, three, two and one years. Bernstein forced Mrs. Simmons to think even further back -before her birth. Suddenly she began to talk under a different name, as Bridey Murphy, from another life in Ireland about the middle of the nineteenth century. Everything Ruth Simmons said was recorded on tape, transcribed and checked up on the spot in Ireland by linguistic comparisons (Gaelic), examination of church registers and village records. The descriptions of places and people by Ruth Simmons alias Bridey Murphy tallies exactly with the information gleaned on the spot. Naturally the hypnotized guinea-pig Ruth Simmons had never seen the old records, nor could she have known of them by telepathy, because no one who could have acted as a 'transmittee' had shown any interest in the dust-covered documents.
Did Ruth Simmons experience all the things described in her trance in an 'incarnation' in the last century? It seems inadmissible to accept that, because it would be overstretching our imagination and demanding too much of our realistic way of looking at things. Yet: 'What everyone considers settled is what is most worth investigating,' as the physicist George Christoph Lichtenberg (1742-1799) said.
It is the old, old story. People who take a great interest in the explanation of such phenomena do not waste their time convincing materialists who find the only metaphysical reality in material things and reject as nonsense everything that cannot be described by their formulae, masses and weights.
Incidentally I feel that materialists are the very people who ought to agree with 'my' Trinity of spiritmatter- energy - after all it concerns the centre of their world picture. I want to keep my hobby-horse on a loose rein and not ride it to death, especially as it is given unequivocal support by a man like Werner von Braun [14]:
'Science has established that nothing can vanish without a trace. There is no destruction in nature, only transformation.'
In contrast to the religious interpretation (the 'soul' is immortal) I consider it very probable in the physical sense that the conscious energy of dead people can make itself felt in our four-dimensional world by conversion into another form of energy. If energies from the 'other world' can make themselves perceptible among us, the reverse path - from the earth to the 'other world' - must also be practicable. Our state of consciousness is bound to the fourth dimension, the unfolding of time, an attachment that is possibly not applicable in the 'other world'.
The world-famous French clairvoyant Belline, aged 50, lost his only son, aged 20, in a car accident in
1969. For twenty months Belline vainly tried to establish contact with Michel through his telepathic abilities. But suddenly he sensed an 'invisible nearness', which he described as a 'third ear' or 'lighthearing'.
Belline was afraid he was the victim of an illusion conjured up by his suffering. He began to tape the conversations he had with Michel: in 1973 they appeared in a book[15] with a foreword by Gabriel Marcel of the Institut de France, as well as the opinions of 90 personalities in the world of art and science, about the experiment.
The timelessness of the fourth dimension in the other world became clear from the records.
8th April 1971, 8 a.m.
Belline: Michel, what is it like 'over there'?
Michel: It is another world, a dream which cannot be expressed in words. Movement, transparency, thoughts. Here neither earthly good nor earthly evil exists. It is a kind of homelessness. a kind of dream in countless dimensions and vibrations. ... Here, time as you conceive of it at this moment, becomes a caricature. That's all I can say.
If it ever becomes possible to direct conscious energies from here to the 'other world', we should be able to ask those who live there for data about past and future. The reason: the 'other worlders' exist in a timeless dimension their state does not seem to be shackled to the passage of time.
In terms of physics this possibility is quite feasible. Variable states of energy - say elementary particles which can transform themselves into each other: a neutron into a proton, an electron into a neutrino - have quite different 'life spans'. Many of them have such short life spans that they really ought not to exist. The life of a positron or sigma particle lasts for a trillionth of a second. How can we really conceive of that? A million times a million times a million = a '10' with 18 noughts! A neutral pion
'lives' exactly 10 15 (i.e. ten to the minus fifteenth) seconds and the luckless neutrino has no life span at all in a state of rest (rest mass = 0). But if such a neutrino is accelerated it 'lives' again.
In spite of their absurdly minute life spans, elementary particles conceal up to 10 22 electron volts.
They shoot out of the universe through suns and planets, later to transform themselves into myons and neutrinos - in 100/1,000th of a second.
Forty years ago physicists were convinced that they had discovered the smallest particle in the atom.
Today they know that there is a subatomic world which is tinier than the atomic nucleus and contains much more energy than anything that we can so far conceive of as 'nascent energy'.
The concept of time breaks down in this miraculous world. Physicists no longer know where or how they should classify the electron, that building stone and atomic envelope. With mathematically proven particles which travel faster than light - say, the tachyons, tradyons and luxyons calculated by Gerald Feinberg - all concepts of time collapse definitively. They behave in exactly the opposite way to our
'normal' elementary particles.
Instead of exhibiting infinite mass and with it infinite energy when they reach the speed of light - as Einstein reckoned they would — these particles lose mass and energy the faster they travel. What is really inconceivable is that the speed of light is the lowest limit of their velocity - above it they can reach a trillionfold the speed of light. If our concepts of time have already become hazy owing to the prospect of interstellar space travel, they fall into a state of total confusion when they tackle particles that move faster than light. Every normal person is convinced - and justifiably so until now - that before an effect exists there must be a cause. But here everything is upside down. With particles travelling faster than light, the effect can come first and the cause later. Something is going on, but we do not really know what.
Thus, just as physicists in general recognize the existence of antimatter, (*) we can also postulate in the distant future an 'antitime' in which a 'counter-time' unfolds opposite to all 'Normal time'. Then there would be - how can I make it intelligible? - no past, present or future. Memories of the future are taking place now, today, at this very moment! The concept of time becomes the subjective unfolding of states of consciousness. If we can still speak of consciousness in such a context. ...
In so far as the conscious energy of the dead exists outside all ties of time, and terrestrial conscious energy can make contact with it, the mystery of prophesy would be solved. What is still hypothesis could in future not only be proved by the conclusions of technical research, but also realized in practice. Hypotheses in the sense of