© Tom Lethbridge 1965 [1]

You can take a letter from an unknown person and with the short pendulum apparently see whether the writer has an affinity with you or not. I do not think that it is wise to put much store in this. One does not know how much the pendulum can be affected by the operator’s thought.

Quite a small phrase in the letter might give enough irritation to the reader to cause an adverse reaction on the pendulum. Words are terribly misleading, for they are coded thoughts. When decoded some words may be of quite a different value to what was meant by the writer.

There is another possibility of error. With the short pendulum an affinity is shown between male and female and the reverse between man and man. However, the affinity is clearly strong enough at times to overcome this general tendency, even to the extent of great enthusiasm being shown by the pendulum when swung between two letters from people of the same sex. The short rate pendulum is evidently of more general significance than the long individual rates. The thought rate appears to be stronger than the sex rate.

All this is of much general interest; but I do not regard it as coming as yet into the world of science in the same way as I regard the more exact behaviour of the long pendulum. Yet many dowsers work entirely with the short, unrated pendulum and correct its vagaries by mechanical means. I think that they are mistaken and are behaving like an anxious first mate trying to correct the balance of his vessel by shifting the cargo, when the dangerous rolling in a sea-way is in reality due to an error on the designer’s part on the drawing-board.

It is a rate on the long pendulum, which will tell us eventually whether the writer of a letter has blue eyes or brown or whether he would like to stick a knife under your ribs, or present you with a case of champagne. The pendulum is simply an indicator of what something outside our five senses is ready to tell us and the simpler the indicator is, the more likely it is that the information will come through as that something intended.

Wise women, sensitives, or what you like, get this information direct without any intervention from an indicator. But our pendulum goes a long way towards showing that the information, which these sensitives give, is liable to be correct, even if it is also confused.

Once it becomes clear that there is a something, a something which does not require a brain to act as a computer and which knows many things which the five senses cannot supply to the brain for its computing, we have taken a considerable step forward. In fact we have left the three-dimensional world of length, breadth and thickness and begun to explore a fourth dimension. [2]

This perhaps is the next stage of evolution, to become four dimensional. It may sound utter rubbish to people with ideas firmly rooted in the three, but we are beginning to find evidence for its existence. If one single event can be shown to have been correctly forecast before it took place in earthly time, you are in another dimension where cause may precede effect and this is impossible in three-dimensional science. But innumerable cases are known where this has happened and I have even done it myself as a small transistor radio beside my wife’s bed bears witness, for it was bought with the profits.

The future and the past can often be observed by people using the sixth sense and I very much doubt whether the most case-hardened materialist does not really know this in the secret parts of his make-up. He may flap and bluster and growl, if he is honest he must appreciate that no theoretical extension of the functions of the brain can explain all the curious facts with which we have been dealing.

If all the soft parts of a sea urchin decayed 100 million years ago and only the life of the sea urchin was in those soft parts, how could we possibly detect its rates for sex and thought today? The only explanation must be that there was something about that sea urchin which was independent of those soft parts and that it still functions after that enormous lapse of time.

The only explanation that I can see at present is that that something is mind, spirit if you like, and that the mind is only linked to the brain, or whatever you like to call it for a sea urchin, by the electro-magnetic field. It is our mind, being independent of the three dimensions, which knows about matters which cannot be deduced from three-dimensional data.

This mind, our real life, exists in four dimensions, and as such has no bounds in time or space. It is not easy when one has been brought up from childhood to think in terms of three dimensions to be suddenly expected to do so in four. But apparently all we have been discussing relates to the properties of the fourth.

The signals without words, which go out over immense distances regardless of the laws of mechanical electro-magnetism; the foreknowledge of the future; the ability to contact things out of reach of these senses; all of the intangible phenomena connected with these fields of force; none of these really pertains to a three-dimensional world. They belong to a fourth in which life belongs to a mind with a different rate of vibration. [3]

We have, I think, ample evidence that this force exists. However, it is outside time and distance. It is probably incorrect to call it fourth-dimensional as I am liable to do. It seems in fact to be non-dimensional. Extra Sensory Perception works by means of a non-dimensional force and it works in other planes beyond the three-dimensional plane of Earth. If you can learn how to use this force, you can work miracles. In an extremely small way we do work miracles by using the pendulum. Our step into the dark appears to be one into the light.

We have talked, somewhat childishly perhaps, about third and fourth dimensions. The fourth dimension is thought by many to be time. But our study appears to demonstrate that Earth Time does not exist beyond the point of 40. Much that we investigate is beyond this point.

Therefore, or so it seems to me, the fourth dimension belongs to this earthly life and not to the next phase. There you drop at least one dimension. This surely means that though in the next world there is available a much greater mass of fact to study with the mind, yet there is no urgency about it. You can just flip over the page of the book of life in any order you fancy.

Only in the fourth-dimensional life must you snatch at clues, because time is short. In this urgency surely lies the whole point of life on Earth. It is to sharpen your intellect, make it more fitted for thinking things out and to store the mental library of your psyche-filed with the fleeting impressions which are only to be found on Earth with its time sequences.

Only here do the blue shadows glide across the glen and the wild, white-topped breakers crash on the rocks. Only on Earth will the rowan trees turn red in the autumn and the beech put on its lovely pale green mantle in the spring; for without time there will be no seasons.

But, if you store your library with this kind of memory, you have it all there with you on the next lap and with heightened telepathy you will be able to exchange similar memories with others who have collected a comparable store. However, those who have made no attempt to appreciate their earthly surroundings will be faced with unutterable boredom of what little they have acquired and it is obvious that the wish to return to Earth for something better would be great. This is the reason why reincarnation is a reasonable supposition.

As I explained before, you cannot find a rate for time on our first 40-inch whorl of the spiral and this is because it is rushing away and you cannot catch it. It offers no obstruction to make the pendulum gyrate. But after the first whorl you find it with a rate of 60-inches, which is also the second whorl’s rate for Life. Whatever happens to time on our next stage, it is something quite different from what it is here and no longer runs away from us. We would not understand it to be time as we know it.

It is possible to take the investigation further than this; but to do so it is necessary to have a pendulum with a longer cord and a place where you can swing it. I do it down the staircase well, leaning over the banisters. The floor below is concrete, which is neutral and does not have the disadvantage of elm boards. Swinging our pendulum from the higher point up the stairs, one soon finds that there is a third whorl to the spiral. The story seems to be repeated once again. But, as was the case with the first whorl, this time there is no reaction for time.

It will be a long job to study this new phenomenon. It seems, however, that the inference is clear and is exactly comparable to the metamorphoses of an insect. Our earthly life compares with the larval stage and contains time and movement. The next phase is like that of the chrysalis, which remains for a while apparently dead and completely inert. Then comes the stage of the perfect insect when time and movement not only return again, but are much accelerated.

Here we must stop until more work has been done; but at least we can leave this study with a greater conviction of the survival of the individual human mind. Further, the story, which the pendulum seems to be trying to tell, is the same as that told through mediums by means of automatic writing and suchlike devices.

After death, we are told, there is an interval of quiet reflection, followed by a reawakening to a new life, recognizably similar to Earth Life, but without its unpleasant side. This new life will have the time sequence once again. It would, I think, be crushingly dull without it.

Endnotes

[1] Source: Chapter 6 of ESP: Beyond Time and Distance.
[2] Brian Greene, author of The Elegant Universe, refers to the three space dimensions as left/right, up/down and back/forth. Buckminster Fuller disliked up/down; (‘…there is no up or down in Universe’) and preferred in/out. [Ed]
[3] Source: Chapter 4 (pages 55-56) and Chapter 11 of A Step in the Dark; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, ISBN 07100 1741 3.