© Tom Lethbridge 1967 [1]

Some six hundred years had passed since the Life of Christ when Paulinus taught Christianity to the Northumbrians. In that long period Christian beliefs had been the subject of much debate and acrimony. Dogmas had been formulated and refuted and others had taken their place. Emperors had been converted and another had given it up in disgust and reverted to paganism. Whole sects, like the Gnostics, had been subjugated and their books destroyed. Beliefs held in reincarnation had been taught and then declared anathema.

What sort of Christianity did Paulinus teach? According to Bede this included the doctrine of Everlasting Life, Salvation and Eternal Happiness. However, we can feel certain that a belief in miracles was also taught, for when Oswald, who succeeded Edwin after a brief interlude in AD 635, was killed in battle by the pagans, acts of miraculous healing were said to have taken place not only by touching his remains, but at the spot where he was slain. After all, a great part of the Gospels is taken up by reports of miraculous healing.

It seems to be the fashion now to doubt the miracles recorded in the Gospels; but if these are explained away, what is left? When Christ was asked by the disciples of John the Baptist if He was He that should come, He replied with a list of miracles which He had performed.

The only creed of the earliest Christians was to say that they believed in Christ. Even in Paulinus’ day the creed was half the length it is now and apparent impossibilities like the ‘resurrection of the body’ were not in it. The whole belief of the original Christians seems therefore to have been confined by what is now contained in the Gospels, nothing else.

The theories of St. Paul and other apostles were not in it and certainly not many of the dogmas which have grown up since. There was nothing about the equality of Christ with His Father, a dogma that split the Greek church from that of Rome. There was little doubt about Christ being God. Indeed He said that he was Son of His Father, but He also said that other men were too.

It seems that you can be a perfectly good Christian and yet believe in nothing which is not stated in the Gospels. But you must believe in miracles, or, as we would say in our study, you must believe in Extra Sensory Perception. It is as simple as that. You have to accept a force which is not in the scientific text books. If you see and believe that there is this force, that is ‘the grain of mustard seed’ of the parable, nothing in the Gospels is any longer scientifically improbable. All follow laws of nature as yet uncodified.

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 in the dark appears to be one into the light. What can we infer from this hotch-potch of scraps and snippets drawn from many sources? I have always fished with a net of narrow mesh. My clues are small, but they are becoming very numerous. They are also almost entirely ones which result from our own experiment and observation carried out over a period of years.

If you add them all together you begin to see that man is something very different from the pictures drawn for us by three-dimensional science. He is not just a semi-animal resulting from aeons of chance evolution of millions of living cells.

All the evidence goes to show that these cells, each of which is in reality a living entity of its own, have not been put together by chance. Their arrangement is the result of a carefully prepared plan. The whole thing was worked out, apparently though a process of trial and error, which took no time at all, on the next plane to Earth.

Into this association of cells was put something quite distinct from it. This something was it seems an extension of what we may call a mind, or a soul, whose real dwelling place was on a plane above the Earth plane. We say above, but this really conveys no location in space; it is only a term to indicate a higher rate of vibration.

The two portions of one mind, or personality, are nearly cut off from one another owing to the refracting effect between the two whorls of the spiral. This is necessary, for the detached piece of mind is evidently located in its earth body to gain experience from life in a denser medium. It is an adventurer and explorer.

All that it learns can eventually be taken back to the parent mind. Of course if it becomes completely absorbed in animal matters, it learns nothing at all and the experiment is a failure. As far as one can see, a very large proportion of the experiments are failures. Presumably, however, since no time is involved on the higher plane, the parent mind can take its experimental portion when its body dies and send it out again. This would be reincarnation and the evidence as a whole, collected by other research workers seems to show that this does take place. The object of the whole exercise is surely the evolution of the mind on the higher plane.

There is obviously a Boss above, controlling the mind, and it seems reasonable to assume that there is a whole heavenly hierarchy. But it is also probable that messages from minds on Earth get no farther than contact with the individual’s own parent mind. If they do go beyond this, they would be passed on by the parent mind itself.

Elsewhere I once compared a life on earth to a cinema film, which a given mind was compelled to watch. This comparison can of course be only partly true. But if it is only partly true, then our main mind on the higher plane can unroll the reel of film and see what happens before and after the actual event as it appears to us.

If, by use of the unknown force, with or without some such mechanical aid as the pendulum, we can get through the refracting zone and contact our real self, then information is available to the earthly mind, which is quite outside the reactions of the five ordinary senses.

Perhaps in a way this is cheating, but it is not supernatural and it is making use of powers which are available to a large number of us. As Dunne pointed out, however, such interference may alter the chain of events depicted on the films. Our true self knows what will happen to its projected child in its earth-body; but if that child takes independent action on its own, the predicted course may be to some extent deflected.

This is surely the reason why prophecy, although in some cases correct, is in others widely wrong. Even Christ apparently predicted disasters, comparable to an atomic war, with an error of many hundreds of years in the date. It is this problem of time which is so very hard for us to understand.

With life on earth, time runs in a continuous stream from the earliest geological phase to the present day. Effect must always follow cause in the three-dimensional world. In the non-dimensional world it is not so. Yet the non-dimensional world is linked to the world we know.

When we try to find a rate for time on the first whorl of the pendulum’s spiral, it cannot be done. At least I cannot find a time rate. But I can find it on the second whorl. It is 60. That is 20 plus 40. This is quite a shock. We know that there is time in our three-dimensional world; although it may be of a different order for every living species. Why therefore does the pendulum behave as if it did not exist?

It took me some time to think this problem out, but the answer seems to be relatively simple. The pendulum gives is answers by the gyrational change in its movement. Some obstruction causes a block in the free flow of current and the swing of the pendulum is forced back and into a circle. With every concept we have tried except time this is the case. But there is no block with time in the three-dimensional world. It is running away ceaselessly.

In the next phase, however, we have reason to think that it does not move in this manner. I have said that there is no time on the next plane, but this may well be incorrect. We can find a rate for it and so it presumably exists. But it is something quite different to the time we know.

It is impossible for us to grasp the implications of a world of that sort, for we are not designed to do so. But there are people, sensitives, or mediums, who do appreciate things in this way. They foresee future events as clearly as if they were seeing them with their eyes. However, many of them appear to be lost in earth time and do not know whether an event has happened yet or not.

In the three-dimensional world of nature, time is of great importance. The most important case from our point of view is the development and growth of a baby. Here the whole organism has to change from one living in the airless dark into one living in light and breathing air. Enormous numbers of its living cells have to develop for these functions according to an exact plan and timetable. If anything goes wrong with this scheme, the baby cannot live and breathe.

But this is a prearranged plan. How can there be a plan without a planner? It is difficult to see how this point so frequently evades the attention of otherwise most brilliant men. So firm is the grip of the dogma of Darwinian Evolution on their whole outlook that they cannot bear to visualize the planner.

umed that there was a planner. He has been conveniently dropped out by later scientists. All sorts of clever ideas are put forward to try to show how the multitude of dividing and living cells in the baby know where and how to develop. No idea carries conviction, however many letters there may be after the author’s name.

You cannot expect the cells of Bolboceras arminger to develop into legs, wings, eyes, internal organs and so on without a plan to work to. Without a plan how can it change from an egg into a grub, from a grub to a chrysalis and from a chrysalis to a perfect flying insect? How can you produce an insect’s complicated wing by any chance development? It cannot start from a flapping leg gradually growing membrane. Besides, it comes from a different place. There can be no Darwinian evolution of an insect’s wing.

All through the evolutionary story, as told in the study of geology, it is evident to anyone with a mind unclouded by dogma that some entity was experimenting along many lines and with varied success. The experimenter was not infallible anymore than the designer of aeroplanes is infallible.

Many experimental animals were evolved which vanished from one cause or another. Each was evolved by improving on the one before, but it did not evolve itself. Someone made use of known laws and known material, each cell being a living and reproducing unit, to improve the design. But some main designs could not be developed far enough. The plan was then abandoned and a new one tried out.

The evidence for the existence of a planner or planners is clear for all to see. But there is not the slightest evidence to suggest whose mind, or minds, does the planning. There may well be very many planners in an ascending order up to the one who planned the whole universe. Who that is is quite beyond our comprehension and the problem is no concern of this study. But if we admit that there is a plan and a planner, surely our study does throw some light on this plan. The careful arrangement of the rates on our circular card can hardly be a matter of chance. Take just the four cardinal points on it again.

Why should Sun, Light, Red, Fire and East, each with a rate of 10-inches, come opposite to Moon, Sound, Green, Water and West at 30-inches? They might have been scattered anywhere around our forty-divisional disc. Why does Heat not come under 10-inches with Fire? The answer is that it is associated with Life at 20-inches and nothing could live without it.

But to those, who like myself do some painting in water colour, the question which at once comes to the fore is why is Green opposite Red? For years I have mixed blue and yellow to make green. Blue and yellow are primary colours so we were taught, green is not.

But green and not blue is the colour of chlorophyll, without which most of the vegetable world could not live. It is of primary importance. It is also far more easy for man’s eyes to see. If a vessel’s starboard light were blue and not green there would be many more collisions at sea. Once more we have to go back to the beginning to look at things afresh. To the planner green is the important colour, blue is not.

Then take the cardinal points themselves, the North, South, East and West. They are not the points of the Earth’s magnetic field, but those of the Earth itself. Magnetic North moves about in an area of Arctic Canada. Its bearing from Southern England changes about 15 seconds a year and it is far from the North Pole.

The North Pole itself has been relatively steady for much of man’s history; although this was not always so and what would happen if the Polar Ice caps melted is anybody’s guess. But compared with the magnetic pole it is fixed and immutable. There it is in a waste of frozen waters where there is no sun for half a year.

We find North at 40-inches along with Cold, Death and Black, the beginning and end of our scale, 0 as well as 40. For it is the beginning of the next whorl of the spiral. The Sun rises as a Red Ball of Fire in the East, all three on the same rate of 10-inches. It sets in the West at 30-inches and at its setting there is the phenomenon of the Green ray, or Flash, which, although few of us have seen it, is a natural phenomenon.

With the setting of the Sun the Moon takes over. All this is so elementary and obvious that one would have thought that a human living on Earth might have devised it. In fact a mind comparable to a human mind must have done so.

But is not our Earth mind simply a projection of our higher mind and is not this itself presumably a projection from one still higher? It looks like an indication that all mind works in a similar manner. The planner made his plan in much the same way as we might have set about it ourselves.

The ancient Biblical story of God saying: ‘Let us make man in Our Own Image’ has some sense in it after all. But God of this story said this to other planners. He was not doing it in isolation. On that particular level, which was thought to have planned man, there was still no ultimate Almighty. Just as Paulinus’ teaching appealed to the common sense of Edwin’s intelligent councillors, [2] so we, surrounded by so much scientific fact that it tends to become a bore, can begin to catch a gleam of truth from our unorthodox study.

We have built up our ideas very slowly from a long series of apparently trivial experiments, which are open to anyone who can work the pendulum, and most people can do so, to test for themselves. Several people have already written to me in confirmation. They get the same rates as we do. But, although we trust our observations, we are little qualified to reason from them and there may be numerous errors in our conclusions. Each person must draw his own conclusions if not from his own observations, at least from a confidence in ours.

The issues are of vital importance to everybody. They are those of whether our minds and personalities are temporary and perish with the brain, or if they survive death and the disappearance of the brain. The former belief leads to every kind of greed and selfishness. There can be no hope for a stable, happy world as long as this creed of materialism holds sway.

All we have learnt from our experiments tends to refute the materialistic belief. It tends to show very clearly that a part of our mind is not bounded by the earthly three-dimensional bonds of time and space. It also knows far more than does our Earthly one. Yet the two portions of mind are linked, although prevented from close co-operation by something comparable to the refracting layer between air and water.

Everything we know in our Earth life appears to continue on the next, but there are certainly additions. The biconical fields of force with which every fragment of matter seems to be surrounded, are evidently perceptible to our other mind. It can single them out with no difficulty and pass back the knowledge to us by the simple pendulum contrivance. The miracle of this world is the commonplace of the next.

To understand why this should be so, it is necessary to see if we can appreciate a little of what the pendulum has been telling us about our mind (or is it our spirit?) beyond the 40-inch rate. It has told us that this mind, as I shall continue to call it for convenience, can sense things hidden from us by a veil of matter whether they are beneath a layer of soil or behind a stone wall. It can also jump across thousands of years of our time and do this both forwards and backwards.

It has a further qualification which is quite beyond our earthly conceptions, for it can apparently appreciate objects in two places at once. Now the faster anything moves the closer it becomes to being in two places at the same time. If it moved at an infinite speed it would be in all places at once and appear to be at rest.

We can surely infer therefore that, to our mind beyond our earth life, things move very much faster than they do here. Everything, including ourselves, vibrates much faster on the next plane than it does on Earth. Green is still green and red red, but it is probably more intensely green or more vividly red.

Owing to this greatly increased rate of vibration, things which are solid and impenetrable to us are no longer so on the higher plane. Someone on this higher plane would be able to pass through the solid obstructions of Earth with as great ease as television vibrations pass through walls of houses or steel decks. This is more than half-way to understanding the mysteries we have been trying to investigate.

Solids on the next plane are vibrating so fast that we cannot sense them at all, but they are solid enough to the individual on the next level. Just as everything is now known to be in constant movement here, so it is on the higher plane. The only difference is the speed at which things move. There is nothing unnatural about the next level. Things simply move too fast for us on Earth to sense them.

Endnotes

[1] Source: first half (pages 136-146) of the final chapter (11) of A Step in the Dark; Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1967, ISBN 07100 1741 3.
[2] This story is told in Chapter 22: Saxon Britain. [Ed]