The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom

Introduction by Michael Roll:

The Scientific Case For Survival After Death

This article by Sir Oliver Lodge “The Mode of Future Existence” was published in The Queen’s Hospital Annual in 1933 (Birmingham). It is because this great scientist wrote articles and published books linking survival after death with the scientific discipline of subatomic physics that he has been vilified by obscurants who still control scientific teaching throughout the world. They are locked into Einstein’s materialistic model of the universe - the theory of relativity and the Big Bang. Relativity and the Big Bang are incompatible with quantum mechanics, the study of the invisible part of the universe.

“I don’t believe that the individual survives the death of his body, although feeble souls harbor such thoughts through fear or ridiculous egotism.”

Albert Einstein, New York Times, April 19, 1955

Sir Oliver Lodge was the first person to send a radio message, one year before Marconi came on the scene. His great contribution to science has been played down solely because powerful materialists do not want people to find out he was correct in saying we all survive, the mind separates from the dead brain. There is a plaque at Oxford University on the very spot where Sir Oliver Lodge sent the first radio message. A photograph of this is on the website of The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom: www.cfpf.org.uk

The same treatment has been meted out to Sir William Crookes who actually proved by repeatable experiments under laboratory conditions that there are people living in the normally invisible part of the universe, that we are dealing with natural and normal forces in the universe. Crookes was awarded the Order of Merit, and made President of The Royal Society. He invented the cathode-ray tube. Look up x-rays in the encyclopaedia or on the internet. Crookes was the pioneer of subatomic physics proving that reality exists beyond our five physical senses.

Censorship and character assassination are the only weapons left in the armoury of those who have a great deal to lose from the truth. The attack on Sir William Crookes has been so vicious that he now carries the emotive labels of liar, cheat, crank, fraud, gullible idiot, spiritualist, and his enemies have also tagged on that he was a sex maniac just in case the other labels are not enough.

“It’s hard to change how people think. People have vested interests, and their projects and reputations would be threatened if certain things were shown to be true.”

Professor B.D. Josephson, Nobel Laureate for Physics: Mind-Matter Unification Project at Cambridge University and member of the Society for Psychical Research, interview in the New Scientist on 9 December 2006.
Website

The ether referred to in this article was thrown out as a result of orthodox scientific teaching embracing Einstein’s theory of special and general relativity in 1905/1915. A disaster that has set scientific endeavour back over 100 years. The ether is what the religionists call the “spirit” world, somewhere to go when our physical bodies pack in. Our physical bodies are only ‘space suits’ that we use for our short stay on planet Earth. Scientists are beginning to realise their mistake and they are bringing back the ether under new names - the quantum energy of the vacuum, dark matter or dark energy. The “spiritual” part of the universe now has a cosmological location:

Front Cover of New Scientist - 2 April 2005:
WIND OF CHANGE: For 100 years we have rejected the idea that the universe is filled with invisible ether. But no longer...

“I anticipate that the future of psychical research lies with revolutions in the physical sciences, not with psychology.”

Professor John Poynton (Zoology) 2006, President of the Society for Psychical Research

The Bath-based scientist Ronald Pearson has had his paper “Quantum Gravitation and the Structured Ether” published by The Russian Academy of Sciences following the Sir Isaac Newton Conference that was held in St. Petersburg in 1993. Newton (A Unitarian ) was adamant that the force of gravity is in fact the force of the “spiritual” part of the universe. In 1997 Ronald Pearson’s paper “Consciousness as a Sub-Quantum Phenomenon” was peer-refereed and published by The Center for Frontier Sciences at Temple University in the USA in their magazine “Frontier Perspectives”.

Hardly anybody knows that the French Nobel Laureate for medical science, Professor Charles Richet, carried out the same repeatable experiments under laboratory conditions, proving survival after death, as Sir William Crookes. Hence this statement from Richet:

“There is ample proof that experimental materialisations should take definite rank as a scientific fact.”

Reference: ‘Thirty Years of Psychical Research’ 1923 (W. Collins & Sons)

A German scientific team led by Baron von Schrenck-Notzing obtained the same results as Crookes and Richet.
Reference: ‘Phenomena of Materialisations’ 1923 (Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner).

Also a Canadian scientific team led by Dr. T. Glen Hamilton.
Reference: ‘Intention and Survival’ 1942 (Regency Press)

An Irish team led by Dr. W.J. Crawford (1881-1920) did the same.
Reference: Sir William Barrett 'On the Threshold of the Unseen' (1918)

The only reason this experimental proof of survival, carried out by international teams of scientists, did not cause a revolution is because the experiments lacked a mathematical theory - what the ether (the spiritual part of the universe) is actually made of.

“I have been in touch with the minds of certain people who have parted from their bodies. How can a mind get in touch with us when it has no body? It must borrow some material form: but because “spirits” are discarnate it does not mean they have no bodies. They have substantial bodies, not made up of matter, but as I think of ether.”

Sir Oliver Lodge

As usual Sir Oliver Lodge got it spot on with the following statement:

“We have to be guided by the facts, and if the facts seem incredible as they do, we have first of all to assure ourselves that they are facts, and then conclude that there is a department of knowledge to which we have as yet not got the key.... Any possible utilisation of the ether, however, by discarnate intelligence must be left as a problem for the future.”

Well the future is here at the beginning of the 21st century, we now have Sir Oliver Lodge’s missing key thanks to Ronald Pearson’s published papers. His latest paper ‘Survival Physics’ has been published in the Paranormal Review, October 2005. This situation is summed up very well by the Nobel Laureate for Physics Professor Richard Feynman:

“If your theories and mathematics do not match the experiment, then they are wrong.”

Ronald Pearson’s theory and mathematics match the experiments proving we all survive the death of our physical bodies. Everything now rests on repeating the pioneering experiments with a contemporary materialisation medium using the sophisticated recording equipment that we now possess. In 1874, Sir William Crookes only had access to early photographic equipment to capture on film a ‘spirit’ person fully materialising. He took his photographs in the newly invented electric light. Now, we have access to John Logie Baird’s infra-red camera. Baird reports in his memoirs that one of his colleagues carried out an experiment where he took the fingerprints of a recently deceased person who materialised. These fingerprints were identical to those on the dead physical body. In Britain, not so very long ago, this proof would have been good enough to hang someone for murder.

We Cannot See Microbes Without A Microscope

In 1882 Sir William Crookes and his fellow scientists started the Society for Psychical Research in order to carry on his vital experiments - working with mediums, nature’s interpreters between people on Earth and those who are living in the normally invisible part of the universe.

Every scientist knows that if we are going to make a careful study of anything that is beyond our five physical senses then we have to work with an instrument that can do the job. For example, we can’t see microbes without a microscope or television pictures without the medium in our front rooms, a television set.

At the moment, the only way we can make contact with people who once lived on Earth, where all five of our physical senses are working, is by carrying out experiments with a materialisation medium. The mind and brain is a far more sophisticated instrument than anything invented by humans on this planet.

Adrian Berry, the science correspondence of The Daily Telegraph, sums up the attitude of all those who have a great deal to lose when these uncomfortable discoveries in physics eventually hit people on mass:

“Few subjects infuriate scientists more than talk of paranormal phenomena because if confirmed the whole fabric of science would be threatened.”

This only applies to those who are locked into the materialistic model of the universe. They all start from the base that the mind and brain are the same, that there is no question of anybody actually surviving the death of their physical bodies.

“Supernormal phenomena: I strongly applaud your statement that, if such phenomena were demonstrated to exist, they would not be supernatural but natural.”

Professor Richard Dawkins (Zoology) Oxford University.
Letter dated January 22, 1992

References

Baird John Logie: ‘Sermons, Soap and Television’ 1988 (Royal Television Society) ISBN 1 871527 007

Crawford, W J: The Reality of Psychic Phenomena (1919) ISBN 9781905961108 (2008 edition)

Crookes Sir William: FRS.: ‘Experimental Investigation of a New Force’ published in the Quarterly Journal of Science’ July 1st 1871

Essen, Dr. Louis D.Sc. FRS, OBE. ‘Relativity - Joke or Swindle?’

Einstein Albert: ‘Ether and the Theory of Relativity’.
An address delivered on May 5, 1920 at the University of Leiden, Holland.
Einstein said on his 70th birthday:

“Now you think I am looking at my life’s work with calm satisfaction. But there is not a single concept of which I am convinced that it will stand firm. I am not sure if I was on the right track after all.”

Feynman Prof. Richard P.: ‘QED’ 1985 A course for laymen in subatomic physics. (Princeton University Press) ISBN 0 691 02417 0

Findlay Arthur: ‘On The Edge of the Etheric’ 1931
Available from the Psychic News Bookshop, Clock Cottage, Stansted Hall, Stansted, Essex CM24 8UD

Lodge Sir Oliver FRS.: ‘Ether and Reality’ 1925 (Hodder & Stoughton)

Lodge Sir Oliver FRS.: ‘Psychic Science’.
Contribution to the encyclopaedia of science, ‘The Outline of Science’ volume two, (George Newnes Ltd. London 1920’s)

Lodge Sir Oliver FRS.: ‘Why I Believe in Personal Immortality’ 1928 (Cassell and Company Ltd)

Lodge Sir Oliver FRS.: ‘Phantom Walls’ 1929 (Hodder and Stoughton)

Medhurst Dr. R.G.: ‘Crookes and the Spirit World’ 1972 (Souvenir)

Pearson R.D.: ‘Theoretical Physics Backs Survival’
This and other articles by Ronald Pearson can be read on the website of The Campaign for Philosophical Freedom: www.cfpf.org.uk

Roll, Michael: ‘A Rational Scientific Explanation For So-Called Psychic Phenomena’ October 2004 in the Paranormal Review

The Mode of Future Existence

1933 Lecture by Sir Oliver Lodge FRS

When we consider the question of Survival from the physical point of view we are up against the ancient problem of the connection between mind and body. The body is certainly made of matter, but matter is inert, it never does anything, it is completely controlled by the forces acting upon it, which forces exist in the empty space surrounding the atoms. Left to itself, matter merely continues in whatever state it was last made to accept. If it was spinning, it continues to spin with constant angular momentum. It has no power of changing its state or of stopping. If it was in a state of locomotion, that motion also continues unaltered. This is called the law of inertia, and to it all material atoms are absolutely obedient, whether they form part of an engine or of a clockwork mechanism or of an animated body. There is no exception. All matter is inert.

If any change is observed in atomic or material behaviour, it is a sign of some activity, some energy apart from matter, demonstrating its existence by acting upon matter, and causing some acceleration or retardation proportionate to the force exerted. This is called the second law of motion. Furthermore, every kind of energy known to us exists in the empty space between the atoms and exerts equal force upon the boundary atoms at either end of that space, so that every action is accompanied by an equal opposite reaction. This is called the third law of motion, or it might be called the law of energy. Energy only makes itself manifest by its effect on material bodies, but its main existence is in space. We have no sense organ for perceiving energy itself, our senses tell us of nothing but matter. We can see the results of energy as expended upon matter, but we have no direct apprehension of the energy. We are not acquainted with anything in the Universe save by its effect upon matter, and that is the origin of our tendency to philosophic materialism; we are liable to doubt whether things not apparent to the senses can have a real existence, though there is no justification for such a doubt.

The physical Universe does not consist of matter alone. If it did, it would be absolutely inert, no change would ever occur. Experience shows us constant change, constant activity, and, when analysed, the source of this activity is always found in the field or space between the atoms. That is where the energy exists, that is where it is stored; and we can gradually realise that it is through interaction between the void and the material particles that every change or activity is accomplished. A field of force always exists in what we call vacuum or Ether, what the Ancients called 'void'; never does it exist in matter. Yet force is only made manifest by matter. It is only by observing the behaviour of material bodies that we can become aware of the existence of a field of force or of a seat of energy. Energy is constant in amount, but it takes various forms. The form with which we are best acquainted is the form of motion, and that is the only form ever associated with matter. All the other forms are hidden and make no impression upon us, save when they encounter material particles and thus display their existence. No one, for instance, could experience a magnetic field without a bit of iron to test it with. No one has any knowledge of the broadcast waves which now surround us unless he has a suitable detecting apparatus in the form of a wireless set and a telephone. And, strange to say, we can only appreciate light when it impinges upon some piece of matter and thence is deflected into the eyes. When we see a lighthouse or searchlight beam tracking its way across space, it is not the beam that we observe, but the dust particles which are illuminated by it. We can only see material objects: we have no sense for radiation itself, nor for an electric current, only for its activity in affecting various kinds of matter. These are only instances of a quite general law.

We cannot understand the activity of the material Universe without taking energy into account, and this energy exists in the space between the particles. Matter is discontinuous, consisting of isolated particles, they are connected only through space. But inasmuch as this space is impregnated with energy, it must be something more than mere emptiness. It makes no impression on our senses, and yet it is full of energy, and is the reservoir of all activity; hence we have agreed to call it the Ether. A magnetic field exists wholly in the Ether, iron filings are only used to demonstrate it and map it out. An electric, a gravitational, field is in the same predicament. Cohesion, too, and indeed every action between material particles, is an affair of the Ether. In no other way can one piece of matter act on another. Every kind of physical action is really transmitted across space - that is, through the Ether - just as really, though not so obviously, as electric and magnetic attraction, gravitation, and light. Atoms and their constituents are never in contact. Ether forces or Ether strains have to be appealed to, when we try really to understand the most ordinary activities in daily life. Even a simple push is exerted through an infinitesimal layer of Ether. Every variety of potential energy exists in the Ether: matter has no energy except kinetic; and recently an ethereal explanation of even that kind of energy shows signs of emerging from the theory of relativity.

Animated matter differs in no respect from every other kind of matter, except that it is subject to animation.

So when we say that life only exists in a material organism, we ought to say that life only manifests itself in association with such an organism, and that when it is dissociated from matter we know nothing of its existence. We have no right to say that it is extinct. All that we know is that it is no longer manifest it has gone out of our ken. But the same may be said of every form of energy in itself, it has no power of becoming known to us but by its effect on material bodies. A body under the action of life can do many things, can initiate spontaneous movements, can build up an organism, can operate on the physical Universe, and leave structures behind it of interest and beauty, but it is not the material body that does these things; they are due to the life or animation of the body.

If, then, we can adduce any evidence that life or mental activity exists in space, and only sporadically makes itself evident by some material activity, the state of our present knowledge of physics renders our acceptance of the fact entirely harmonious. We have to do no violence to our physical conceptions if we admit the fact of survival. Life and mind never were functions of the material body, they only displayed themselves by means of the material organism. The organism was not essential to their existence, but only to their display - that is, to our apprehension of them. If they ever find means of operating in a novel or unusual manner on a physical organism, then they may still manifest their continued existence; and that is exactly what they do. Why should we decline to receive the evidence?

Telepathy shows that mind can act on mind without the use of any bodily organs, hence certain people may have a faculty of apprehending a spiritual world direct; and this may account for genius and inspiration. This has been well argued by F.W.H. Myers, and I shall not labour it now.

If you have evidence of the existence of a spiritual world, a world of help and guidance and sympathy, then you can hold to it in spite of every denial of the materialists, who can only base their denial on the absence of any sensory stimulus to their material organism. Such a world may exist all round us, and yet can only be spiritually discerned. The faculty of discernment does exist in some people, and their positive evidence overweighs a wilderness of negation from people whose perceptions are limited to the bodily senses. One of the most elementary forms of discernment is (rather absurdly) called Psychometry. An object put into their hands may convey more information than the senses can give: a psychometrist can tell something of its history, something of its association, something of its possessor. By special faculty they can tell far more than could be arrived at by chemical tests. They can tell, for instance, that a bit of stone has formed part of a pyramid, or that a ring has taken part in a scene of slaughter, or that a piece of writing or drawing has been done by a certain person normally quite unknown to them, and can even tell what the circumstances of that person were at the time, and what they were doing.

The existence of a spiritual world throughout the depths of space is becoming to me a great and fundamental, even a physical, reality. The manifestation of that world in connection with material organisms on one or other of the planets is a comparatively trifling and temporary episode, of great importance doubtless in the history of evolutionary development, but our real existence is not dependent on a material organism. Our spiritual and real home is in the Ether of space.

Chemists and biochemists are liable to limit themselves unduly to the purely material aspect of things. A chemist's business is to deal with matter in its various forms; that is his job, and he need not be expected to go beyond it. A physicist takes into account the Ether as well, though he may, for a time, prefer to call it space. He is not limited to material particles, but studies the fields of force which connect them and make them active. The psychologist goes further still, and studies the action of the mind. I would I could say that the biologist is a student of life, but at present the tendency is for him only to study animated organisms and their behaviour, limiting his attention to what is manifested by the material processes brought about by life, and not thinking that life has any existence apart from its instrument of manifestation. We shall never understand the Universe by attending to matter alone and ignoring everything which makes it active and interesting. We cannot even understand the bending of a steel spring or the fall of a raised weight without implicitly taking the Ether into account. We are continually making experiments on the Ether and realising the consequences of its abundant qualities. If we make the assumption that it is a physical vehicle of life and mind too, we are only extending our generalisation in the same direction.

A supplementary and semi-physical treatment of Survival is now becoming possible; a treatment which is well calculated to replace the old materialistic view that man had only a material body, and that when that body died and decayed, the animation, the personality, and the individual, necessarily ceased to exist. It is also well calculated to replace the popular idealistic notion that any spirit which survives the death of the material body must survive in an entirely disembodied condition, and be out of relationship with the physical Universe. Many people suppose that it then belongs to another order of existence, or, as some would say, of non-existence; that it is likely to be free from any relationship even with Space and Time, and must have departed entirely out of our ken; so that communication or intercourse with it is no longer possible, until perhaps at some future day when the material body shall have been somehow resuscitated and restored to its old function, in glorified form, so that the spirit can resume its active control. That this superstitious idea has been prevalent is testified to by popular modes of expression, such as:

'On the Resurrection morning, all their dead the graves restore. Father, mother, sister, brother meet once more.'

This depressing notion of future existence - if it can be called existence in the interim - is not a scientific or psychological view at all; but it has been the religious, or at least the ecclesiastical, view through medieval times; hymns and liturgies are saturated with it, and it continues to this day the chief representation of what, by strictly orthodox people, is meant by Survival.

A modern theory which seeks to provide the emancipated spirit with any kind of organism related to the physical world might thus be ranked as a return to a modified form of materialism. For though, when properly understood, the view I advocate ought to emancipate us from materialistic bugbears, and although it wholly condemns the idea that flesh and blood or any particles of terrestrial matter are revivified and inherit Eternal Life, yet popular ignorance of what is meant by the Ether, and of the certain fact that the Ether is a part of the physical Universe and has definite properties which can be experimented on and ascertained, may well suggest all manner of difficulties in understanding the hypothesis I am trying to expound. Wherefore it will probably be considered unsatisfactory, both by the scientific materialist and by the theologian; possibly also by some spiritualists.

The necessity for some kind of organ or instrument or habitation for an emancipated spirit has been intuitively felt by many inspired writers. The most ancient classical idea was that of a condition rather melancholy - unhouseled, wistful, shadowy and sad - but this notion was improved upon even in later classical times. And towards the end, 'Not unclothed, but clothed upon,' 'God giveth it a body,' are modes of expression very familiar to modern ears.

The existence of a spiritual body is an idea, in one form or another, at least as old as St. Paul. It has been upheld by some of the Greek Fathers of the Church; it has been vaguely in the mind of many modern investigators; sundry obscure and super-normal facts seem to lend it strong support. And recently an etheric version of such a body has been approved - and if not inculcated, at any rate, regarded as a step in the right direction - by some of the more thoughtful and philosophically minded communicators 'on the other side'.

What they know by experience is that, though discarnate, they are certainly not disembodied; they feel no more disembodied than we do. They tell us that they still have substantial instruments of manifestation which serve for intercourse among each other, and that it is through this permanent instrument that they are able, occasionally and under certain conditions, to operate indirectly, through our organisms, on the matter of this planet. They operate with more difficulty than in the old days, partly because they have to make use of other people's mechanism; but still, subject to many restrictions, they exert influence in a somewhat similar way, and thereby are able occasionally to know what we are doing; and they claim sometimes to succeed in helping and stimulating us, not only mentally but physically.

Now, although the departed may not understand fully and completely of what their present body is composed, or how they operate on it so as to produce the results they desire and aim at, they are still only in the same predicament as they were when here, and as we are now. For we do not know how we control our bodies of matter, nor what the nature of the connection between mind and matter is. We know that we have muscles and nerves and brain centres. We can dissect and describe this part of the mechanism. But how a physiological instrument - how any kind of mechanism - can think and feel and plan and will and remember and hope and love, we certainly cannot explain. And probably we shall never be able to explain how such a thing can happen; for the thing to be explained does not happen, it is only imagined to happen through a misapprehension. The truth is that it is we ourselves who really do all the psychical things; we employ our bodies only as instruments for recording and transmitting our thoughts and for exercising muscular action on matter. The body itself neither thinks nor wills nor sees nor feels. It is an instrument, a channel, a medium.

Although full explanations about our method of controlling of a body are not yet forthcoming - either on this side or on that - yet those 'on the other side' are quite willing to accept the suggestion that their bodies, which to them feel so substantial, and all the surroundings in which they exist, are related to the thing which we here call the Ether, very much in the same way as they used to be related to the familiar thing known as Matter.

That Ether is a very substantial entity, far denser than any form of matter, has been gradually becoming clear to physicists. At first, we only said that it must be denser than lead or gold or platinum, but now we find that it must be out of all proportion denser. I have made an estimate of its density, in the light of electromagnetic theory, and it comes out inevitably huge. Every cubic millimetre contains as much substance as what, if it were matter, we should call a thousand tons. As the Ether is not matter in the ordinary sense of the term, our ordinary units of measurement are inappropriate; but on the analogy of matter, the Ether is of the order a million million times as dense as water. All its properties are of supernormal magnitude. Its rate of vibration which enables us to see any ordinary object is five hundred million million per second: a number so great that to try to conceive such a number of vibrations per second simply dizzies us. The number of seconds which have passed since ancient geological periods of twenty million years ago is about this number. Yet we familiarly make use of these vibrations. Our wonderful organ, the eye, is constructed so as to cope with them, in the easiest possible manner. And most people are ignorant - as ignorant as are the animals - of the strange ethereal environment amid which we all live, and of which the vibrations convey to us so much information, and awaken so keenly our sense of beauty.

Until instructed, we can hardly help thinking of matter as dense, and of Ether as tenuous, but that is a poetic illusion associated with the term 'ethereal'. It is an illusion based on the testimony of our senses, which, as so often happens, have to be corrected by deeper insight into the real nature of things. Matter appeals to us so strongly, not because it is anything but a gossamer-like or milky-way existence in the vast continuity of Ether, but because our obvious bodies are made of matter, and because our animal sense organs are specially adapted to existence in association with matter, and give us information about nothing else. Even light, which we know is an Ether vibration, tells us nothing about itself without study; what it tells us familiarly is - not about light, but - about the material objects which have emitted or scattered or differentially absorbed it. We get this information by lifelong, indeed age-long, inherited and instinctive experience. We interpret the luminous indications without difficulty, and we forget the strangely complex nature of the processes which underlie all our channels of information; we only find their true nature out when phenomena are fundamentally analysed and seriously cross-questioned. When we have pursued this line of investigation for many years, we find that the important thing in the physical Universe is Ether, and that matter is trivial in comparison. Yet we can freely admit that matter takes such splendid and beautiful forms that it is worthy of the continued study of generations of scientific men; and we need not wonder that they become so enthusiastic over its properties that they are able to imagine it the sole reality in existence. That, however, is a mistake; it constitutes a mechanism actuated and wielded by mental and spiritual power, which is dominant and supreme.