© Tom Lethbridge 1965 [1]

More than 30,000 tides have swept through the Minch since that evening long ago when I looked anxiously over its waters, towards the distant saw of the Outer islands, hoping to see the green ray. [2] Pulled by the moon twice a day, the tides flow silently up Loch Snizort and all the much loved inlets of the west. They stir the lugworms in their burrows and wet the feet of the whistling curlews and shrill redshanks. Yet in all these years I have never seen one green ray, nor met anyone who has done so. Instead I seem to have become involved in a maze of invisible rays, numbered by the million.

This is a very difficult picture to appreciate: but, when you see a blanket hanging on a line today, you just say to yourself, ‘Oh, a blanket.’ You do not pull the thing to pieces in your mind, imagining all the crossing threads of wool which make it. You do not reduce these threads to neutrons and electrons. You seldom picture the sheep from which the wool came, among the heather. You do not even have qualms of conscience about it, as did a Home Guard sergeant of mine, who when asked what had happened to some missing gas-capes, replied, ‘I swear I haven’t taken them, sir. I haven’t taken anything since I sold those blankets to the French girls in the last war.’ The object is a blanket and that is that.

It must be something vaguely like a blanket which covers the whole surface of the earth with its invisible rays. We speak of a blanket of fog, so why not a blanket of rays. These rays are not entirely the product of my guesswork based on experiment. Dowsers in aeroplanes have claimed to have been able to locate minerals in the land far below.

If, as I think, our cones of force surrounding objects continue outwards and inwards as rays, the outgoing ones must, I think, be limitless in length and so outside our normal earthly three dimensions. For long periods each day, however, enormous numbers of them must be in contact with the sun. Others at given times would be in contact with the moon. Some would contact both spheres. But many others would frequently extend out into a void.

It would be interesting to know whether the double-cone round an object shrinks when there is no contact with the sun. The taut-string theory might not then apply. This must be a subject of future investigation. The whole idea might well be wrong and the cones produced in some other manner. But if it is partially correct, there might be a very different size of cone when the rays were meeting the moon, and different again if they hit a planet.

It is absurd to think that I might get more than a minute fraction of the answers right. I should imagine that a good scientist would feel that he has had a successful life if he solved one of the questions and I am the most unqualified pioneer.

I am like an untrained prospector wandering out into an unsurveyed desert to look for gold. If he was a good traveller, the prospector might be able afterwards to draw a very rough map showing where certain springs and mountains lay near the fringes of the desert. Picture him trudging across a sandy waste with his pack and billy-can towards a hazy something in the far distance which may be a range of hills. This is me. Someone else can come later with his motor transport, theodolites and water carriers. But he will not have such an exciting time.

Then too there is this power in living animals of directing the rays. One can prove that this is possible by pointing with one’s finger when searching for something. Naturally there must be flexibility in this matter where living and moving animals are concerned. If their fields are to provide channels for the life force, or whatever we are to call it, they cannot be fixed in one plane, or the animal would have a fit when it lay on its side, or ran about.

Also our fields are presumably made up of innumerable cones all interlocking and producing something like a haze round the body. Some of these rays can evidently be pointed at will. But they all appear to be four dimensional. They are not governed by the brain, but by the mind. They are not bounded by time; nor are they governed by distance. Therefore they are also outside the rules of ordinary three-dimensional science and since all nature is governed by law, new laws have to be worked out to explain their behaviour.

Apparently this is the reason why much religious thinking is clearly in such a pickle today. It is trying to fit a four-dimensional subject into a three-dimensional frame, and it is going backwards from its intended line of evolution. It used to be four dimensional, but has listened to so much scientific talk that it has lost confidence in itself. The more it tries to be modern and up to date, the less probable it becomes. Yet I have not the slightest doubt that if it gave up trying to fit phenomena belonging to its own subject into a narrower world and applied itself to a scientific treatment of the other, it would soon discover that much of what it always used to teach was susceptible to real scientific laws. Even in this brief investigation we are surely beginning to realize that.

It is somewhat strange for me to write in this manner. I was trained in an environment in which everything was ultimately derived from an interpretation of Darwin’s ideas. I gave little thought to anything of a religious nature. But, if one is trained to reason in a scientific manner, you tend to apply this to things you do not understand.

After following out various lines of investigation, all facts seem to point to one main conclusion. The assumption that everything is three dimensional and can be studied in terms of these three dimensions is wrong. There are many phenomena which are outside these dimensions. When you study these phenomena you find that most of them fall into what seems to be a religious category. It is not necessarily confined to any one religion; but it is something to do with a mind, or perhaps spirit, which is distinct from the body and acts with no regard to earthly time or distance.

Its study throws great light on those, mostly well authenticated, accounts of the founder of any great religion that we have. If we study our phenomena and those of the actions of this religious founder, the similarity is clear. It is obvious that He had complete mastery of fourth-dimensional knowledge. Further than that I need not go.

I regard the Gospels, to a very large extent, as completely accurate, simply because they fit into and agree with a definite line of research. It is surely a pity if the Church of England is giving them up just at a time when it is beginning to be possible to understand them.

There is nothing in the work with the pendulum which most other people cannot do for themselves. There may be a few people who seem unable to use it, but not many. We are not unusually gifted in this way, although now that we are more used to the thing, it may work a little better than it did. We treat it completely casually, but with interest.

I rather suspect that any concentration of thought hinders the reaction and that if you really thought hard enough you could make it give faulty answers. In fact somebody else can probably will it to go wrong. But if you take it entirely dispassionately, not caring what the answer may be, then I think anyone can get the same kind of results that we do.

This is a mental business, some kind of coded message from the mind to the brain and the link is very slight. One knows from experience that people in a mentally worried state can cause worry in oneself. One can also prevent this by muttering some rubbish a few times in one’s own thinking apparatus.

I do not think the link between mind and brain, which the pendulum indicates, is any stronger than the telepathic link between oneself and the disturbed person. Therefore I have little doubt that the pendulum’s reactions can be upset by excitement on the part of an onlooker and even by the over-keenness of the operator. The proceedings must be coolly dispassionate, really scientific.

However, the interest can be enormous, and it is so ridiculously easy to make the experiments. But the subject is not in the least easy. It is probably more complicated than any other science. Once one has moved beyond the simple analysis of inanimate matter and become involved in the study of the organic, nothing seems to be without its contradictions.

The strange interruptive substances, and those which completely reverse rates of what appear to be sex, are most remarkable. Since the pendulum can apparently show exactly where something is going wrong in a person’s body, one wonders whether one of these reversing substances could not be used to put it right. What could be done with graphite, for instance, in this way?

Men in the Fens used to carry small potatoes in their pockets, because it was believed that they prevented rheumatism. Was this the same principle and did it work? There is much work to be done on all this before even a vague idea of its future possibilities can be obtained.

But I feel sure that if one can once link up the fourth-dimensional mind with the third-dimensional brain great advances will be made. This is what Indian philosophers have tried to do for thousands of years; but with a curiously blind eye to the practical possibilities. Eastern ideas appear to be much more selfish than Christian ones. The one aim seems generally the betterment of themselves and not the help which could be given to others. Some of them have appreciated that they were dealing with a great science but at the same time have not treated it in a scientific manner.

This is where I feel we can start with an advantage. The scientific approach is now ingrained in the western mind. Start at the very beginning: ‘Strip off the layers,’ as Old Sir William Ridgeway used to say, and build everything up from practical experiment in the simplest manner. Bring in no unnecessary complications until the foundations are laid.

This we have been trying to do; but it is far too great a work for a single married couple all by themselves in an isolated Devon combe. Still the isolation has a great advantage in itself. You can think clearly without being bothered by aimless tumult and din. For this reason eastern sages frequently retire to caves and so on, far away from the gabble of the towns. There they can not only think in peace, but there is nothing to break the fragile link with the natural rays rising all about them and nothing to cause their own limited supply of power to leak sideways into the diminished stores of other people.

When people congregate in large numbers, not only is there a continuous wearing down caused by the noise; but there must be a perpetual sideways leakage, back and forth, to other members of the population, tending to lower them all to the rate of the most nervous and mentally inefficient.

The wreckage from the cities, which washes up here from time to time, shows clearly what is happening. These unfortunates, who would have been bright and intelligent in other circumstances, creep greyly about the house, looking like the ‘sad ghosts’ of antiquity. Some insulator could probably stop all this and return them to their natural human state. But ‘Hurry! Hurry! Hurry!’ call the crazy voices and nobody knows what for. To raise the standard of living some people answer.

But what use is there in raising the standard of living on some computer scale when no one appears to have the least idea of what to do with life. How can you free people from this terrible vicious circle, when, if you raise the standard of living, they all use their added money to jump into cars and join a mad rush to some place chosen by the leader of their particular herd?

Here, taking their noise with them, for they can no longer live without it, they lie in countless thousands, like schools of stranded dolphins, absorbing the same leakages from each other from which they had been suffering before.

There is an answer and it is to find something to isolate each person at will from all the others. Then, perhaps, his or her mind might have a chance to send correct ideas to its attendant body. The link is so weak and the fuss and flapdoodle so strong, but the possibility may be there of finding relief by means of the apparently trivial little pendulum.

I cannot be expected to find this on my own. It is surely the business of Church and State and worth far more money in research work than anything that goes towards atomic bombs, or even education. If it is not found, it cannot be long before the whole insane house of cards collapses and the mental homes, already overflowing, will be quite unable to deal with the resulting flood. The answer, I feel sure, is something quite commonplace; but it has to be sought with complete honesty.

What too is this life which we are supposed to live? As far as I can see from the information given by the pendulum, every living thing, or every fragment of a thing once living, whether it is a lump of coal, a fossil, a live cat, or the tooth of a dead fox, has one rate which is common to all life. It is common too to the piece of paper on which I am writing. This rate of 20-inches covers the birds of the air and the fishes of the sea, the grass of the field and humanity itself.

But the organisms which built up the lump of coal have been what we call dead for perhaps 200 million years. Yet they still retain this rate, which seems as if it must be that of life itself. This life therefore appears to be something to do with the fourth dimension, in which the other three dimensions share. The dead object in the three-dimensional world is still alive in the timeless fourth.

If I am right in identifying this 20-inch rate with life, and I have no confidence in my own judgement, then all life is timeless and immortal. We have found a rate also for death and sleep of 40-inches. It is apparently stronger than the life rate. But, although it is stronger, yet every fragment of a dead organism still retains the life rate also.

This is something of such very great importance that others must surely wish to take the very little trouble necessary to go through the series of experiments which I have been trying to describe and seek the answer for themselves. This can be an entirely personal search, carrying conviction to the seeker himself without any interference from the opinions of experts who as yet do not exist.

If he carries it out successfully he will apparently learn that man can in measure create; although he cannot in the three-dimensional world endow his creations with life. But they are, as has often been said by others in a somewhat different sense, extensions of himself and apparently his link with them lasts for ever.

Whether his fourth-dimensional self, which has clearly much greater knowledge than his earthly body, can perhaps make its creations live is another problem. But it seems possible that it might be so. What for instance is the 40-inch death rate, which is double the rate of three-dimensional life? Is it not probable that it is the life rate of the higher dimension at a higher rate of vibration?

There I will leave this story and return while I may to the three-dimensional world with the green of the grass and the far off grumble of the sea on the pebble beach; to the buzzards wheeling over the combe and the gulls shouting to each other. All have life in them today in three dimensions; but it is becoming clear that although this life may apparently die, yet it remains alive in a fourth.

Perhaps I have really seen the green ray after all and been too occupied with trivialities to appreciate what I was looking at. Yes, of course this must be the case, for this morning just as I was finishing this book, I saw the swallows come.

At one moment there was no swallow to be seen anywhere. Suddenly some tiny specks swept in from the sea. They raced over the roof of the shed where last year’s nests are still on the rafters, passing over the ancient cider apple-tree, which is almost completely hollow and full of water.

And then, for an instant, they hung in the air fluttering. They swung round in a swift arc and swooped through the half-door into the shed. They had passed the end of their ray, which stretched from here across Africa, and for a second did not know what had happened. Then they realized they were home.

Endnotes

[l] Source: Chapter 12: ESP: Beyond Time and Distance; Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965.
[2] The first chapter of ESP begins with one of Lethbridge’s crew remarking: ‘Let’s see if we can see the green ray.’ To which Lethbridge replies: ‘I had never heard of the green ray and neither apparently had any of the company. We were told that it was a beam of light sent up by the sun at the last moment of its setting. If you could see the green ray, any wish you made would be granted. Anxious heads at once lined the ship’s rail, for some of the young men were interested in the girls on board. Judging by the results, one young man at least must have seen the thing. I saw nothing and never have seen the green ray. I do not know whether there is such a phenomenon, but I fancy that there is. If you stare too long at a bright light and then turn your eyes on to something else, you often see a green spot.’