Why I Believe the Dead are ALIVE!

Books on the conscious survival of the human soul after death are as old as Pythagoras. Pythagoras, just in case you have never heard of the gentleman, was a celebrated Greek philosopher. He was born on the island of Samos some six hundred years before Christ.

Excerpt:

When I say that books on the conscious survival of the soul after death are as old as Pythagoras, I by no means write conventionally. Probably no man who ever lived, unless it be as an expert in matters of physical life and death and the capabilities of the soul fort functioning above morality than this celebrated Greek who traveled down into Egypt in his' teens, put himself under the tutelage of Nilotic mystics and emerged in middle life to found the memorable colony of Crotona, in southern Italy.

Among the extraordinary doctrines that Pythagoras gave to the centuries were: Numerology--that numbers are the principles of all things--that the universe is a harmonious whole, that the heavenly bodies by their movements cause sounds, which produce the Music of the Spheres, that the soul is immortal and passes successively into many bodies and that the highest aim and blessedness of man is likeness to the Deity. Of course, little brainstrapped theologians of his day couldn't see him for snakebite and had his colony raided in the most approved modern fashion.

His buildings were burnt and his colony scattered. What actually became of Pythagoras himself was never found out. Some say he dematerialized. Some say he ascended, not unlike Christ. Some even go so far as to declare that he knew so much about the secrets of life and death that he had been able to keep himself alive since the fifth century before Christ and is going up and down the world as an apparently normal human being in garb of the present.

Anyhow, Pythagoras applied himself systematically and scientifically to the great business of finding out precisely what the human soul is capable of doing under any and all conditions --even the conditions of vacating the moral body and losing it--and compiling a great library of lore for exceptional students who were by no means reluctant to explore those avenues of research.

So when I remarked that books on the survival of the soul after death are as old as Pythagoras, I am really harking back to survival of the soul after death have been published with a fair degree of steadiness and consistence ever since--and doubtless they will go on being published till types and eggshell papers are no more. The reason for this lies in the fact that when a given person has actually started exploring for himself in valid mystical "dead" people have apparently conversed with him, his immediate reaction is to stumble wildly from the psychical laboratory and make for a typewriter with maximum speed. He wants to shout his discoveries to the universe on the somewhat naïve notion that he is the first man--or woman--in Cosmos to make them. Frankly, I set down in these opening pages of this personal testimony that I have been no exception to the impulse.

HAVING, up to the year 1928, lived nearly fort decades of entirely normal existence, raised as a lad in Methodist parsonage--as I shall doubtless have cause to refer to again--and embracing the calling of nondescript newspaper-man until I graduated into the more affluent vocation of magazine writer and novelist, I looked upon all attempts to prove communication with the so-called dead as the screwball futilities of manifest maniacs.

My father's orthodoxy had taught me ever since I left kilts --kilts being the substitute for rompers when I was very young--that "there is no voice or knowledge in the grave where thou goest." In another place the Hebrew authorities said, "The dead know not anything." That settled the matter. Who was I, or my father's relations or colleagues in orthodoxy, to challenge the pronouncements of experts in Theology? As a matter of fact, I was far too busy being an ordinary young American with my own way to make, to give the slightest time or thought to exploring into what some call the Eternal Verities and settling the matter one way or another.