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“Seven Minutes in Eternity ” With Their Aftermath By William Dudley Pelley

THE AFTERMATH To “Seven Minutes in Eternity”

THE second class of correspondents universally wanted to know how much of the article was fact and how much fiction. Some of them would pick out tiny differences of phraseology and context, minute discrepancies in the narration which, any person writing at high speed in the exhilaration of composition might be guilty, and offer them as evidence that fabrication seemed to underlie certain sequences of my narrative.

To this class of questioner I wrote a personal letter wherever practicable, assuring each one of them that whereas whole sequences of my report were deleted in the interests of common credibility because dogmatic church people might take umbrage at the magazine for printing such an article, everything that did get printed was cold-blooded fact, to the best of my knowledge and memory  There was no deliberate fiction in the article and it was not written to make a literary sale or to enhance my reputation by means of sensationalism. The editors of The American Magazine will testify that I wrote the article under protest, that I abhorred having the designation of Spiritualist or occult freak attached to my name as a writing man. At the time I was finally persuaded to do it, none of us knew whether it would be accepted by the public or whether we would be charged with perpetrating a hoax. We realized that we were pioneers of a sort, and due to the fact that I could not go the whole way and tell everything, I was risking my whole reputation “on one game of pitch and toss”. Happily the experiment came out all right and yet I am no more eager to go on exploiting myself as a receiver of such phenomena than I was a year and a half ago.

In this second class of correspondents, wanting more light on phenomena so amazing as those I set forth, I grouped also those learned psychologists, psychiatrists and physiologists, who went to the trouble of composing monographs to convince the editors of The American Magazine that they had let themselves in for a hoax, in that what had happened to me was the result of a sort of mental hallucination which they treated daily. Others gave overwhelming argument that I must certainly be a secret user of drugs — or that the experience resulted from a prodigious use of tobacco.

What I could not tell these eminent professors is the same thing I could not fully delineate to the magazine’s other readers, and which I have not told to many persons aside from my intimate friends.

It is a thing which could be told only to those who have witnessed the results of the phenomena in my life and affairs since: the persistence of the strange, supersensitive powers which were awakened in me by contact with those on the Other Side that night, and how that contact has been preserved in uninterrupted sequence ever since.

Let the modern psychologists and psychiatrists explain these as hallucination if they will. I submit that hallucinations do not endow us with supernormal perceptions; that they do not enable us to contact so-called dead people exactly as though they were alive. My mental radio was awakened by my experience to such an extent that I can tune in on the minds and voices of those in another dimension of being. I can carry on conversations with them for myself or for others without trance of any kind, proffer questions and get sensible, intelligible and oft times invaluable answers. I have in some cases taken down ten-thousand word lectures on abstruse aspects of science, physics, cosmology and metallurgy. I spend two to three hours a night, three or four times a week, giving time to such hyper-dimensional instruction. And lest the skeptical doubt the origin of such knowledge, and contend that it bubbles up from my subconscious, let me tell this brief anecdote —

After one of my discourses with a Great Brain not operating at present in a physical body, I heard another voice speaking in a language I did not understand. I asked the stenographer at my elbow to write out phonetically in long-hand the words of this strange language as I heard and repeated them.

Word by word she took them down, marking the vowel signs properly so that later we might read them phonetically. Twelve pages of this queer script were recorded. Some weeks later I showed the message to an erudite philologist who found over a thousand words of pure Sanskrit in it, composing a sensible message that had to do with present-day happenings in the world’s affairs, but coming apparently from an ancient Atlantean soul who declared he had not incarnated in mortal form for a period of 65,000 years. . . . This message was given me in Sanskrit to refute those superficial scholars who delight to explain one of Nature’s most prolific manifestations by naming it all the Subconscious. . . .

I have taken down a 400-page book on Political Economy so advanced in context and knowledge that it has surprised authorities on the subject who have perused portions of it.

As for my taking drugs or being poisoned by tobacco, I have had two physical examinations for life insurance since the experience and have been pronounced physically perfect.