Free Afterlife by Colin Wilson Page B

this is physical or what a sensitive would call borderline — though he would be hard put to tell an investigator what he meant by that. Then, in staggering contrast … I ran slap into ‘Vivian’ himself, most joyfully and most vividly alive. I pulled up sharply as one would on running into a friend in the street, and then came an experience which is extremely hard to describe without sounding either flat and meaningless or over-dramatic. As with ‘Julia’, I felt ‘Vivian’ communicate inside my mind, and I shut my eyes and stood very still to attend better. He conveyed in some fashion so intimate that the best word seems to be communion, pretentiousthough that sounds, that he had been entirely mistaken in expecting extinction at death. On the contrary, he now had scope, freedom and opportunity beyond his wildest dreams. The emphasis was not merely on being alive but on this magnificent expansion of opportunity …
    For a few moments I stood very still, acutely aware of the striking contrast between the smell of death and ‘Vivian’ ’s intensity of life — it was as if they were in a different order of things — and then I remembered my duty and ‘said’ to him, ‘This is wonderful, but you’ve given me no evidence. What can I say to the SPR?’
    (I hope that my attempt to describe the immediacy of the purported Julia’s communication with me will have made it clear that ‘said’ is far too remote a word to use for this intimate kind of united awareness. It feels, as Gilbert Murray said of his own telepathic experience, like a kind of co-sensitivity.)
    ‘Vivian’ ’s response to my question was emphatic and immediate. ‘I cannot give you evidence. You have no concepts for these conditions. I can only give you poetic images.’
    At that, far, far above me, I saw — with the inner eye — an immense pair of white wings flying in a limitless blue sky. Though at first an image of such Victorian obviousness seems absurd, it was in fact an entirely apt expression of the scope, opportunity and freedom into which for a few moments I felt caught up. But it was only for a few moments. I quickly became aware that I could not hold the absorbed state which contact with ‘Vivian’ demanded, and very soon had to say reluctantly, ‘Goodbye, I must drop now.’
    Then I dropped — down to the empty room and the smell of death.
    She goes on to add that she has had several other experiences of contact with the dead, but that they were more fleeting than the contacts with ‘Julia’ and ‘Vivian’, and that it would be monotonous to describe them. She adds:
    They all had one of two things in common, either a sense of contemporary purpose on the part of the dead, or an urge to action on my part, and in this they differed from my experience of the phenomenon known as haunting, in which, whatever causes it, the sense of urgency is usually lacking.
    In other words, these experiences of contact with the recently dead were due to a desire on the part of the deceased to ‘get in touch’. Rosalind Heywood merely happened to be ‘open’ enough for them to communicate.
    I have considered her experiences at some length because it is important to realise that the experiences of a clairvoyant arenot a series of weid occurrences that interrupt the normal flow of everyday life, but a part of its pattern, its fundamental texture. In fact, as a ‘psychic’, Rosalind Heywood is not particularly gifted. On the scale of a Daniel Dunglas Home or Eusapia Palladino — or even of a Gerard Croiset or Robert Cracknell — she hardly rates at all. She could be described as ‘mildly psychic’, which is why she forms such an excellent subject for study. She is an ordinary housewife, a typical upper-middle-class Edwardian lady who shares most of the values of her class, and thinks that being psychic is slightly discreditable. This is why she is always looking for other explanations for her experiences — so that, for example, when