Another soldier "goes West"

My last two blog entries involved communication purported coming from Bob Bennett, an American soldier killed in World War I.   This one involves communication said to have come from Thomas Dowding, a 37-year-old British soldier, also killed on the battlefield of WWI.  Dowding's communication is reported in a 1917 book titled "Private Dowding."  The messages were received through automatic writing by Wellesley Tudor Pole..

Wellesley Tudor Pole began receiving messages from Thomas Dowding on March 12, 1917.   Pole did not know Dowding when he was alive, but Dowding was somehow able to recognize Pole's mediumistic ability and make his presence known.  He told Pole that he had expected extinction when he died and was so elated at finding himself "alive" that he wanted to get the word to others.  He said he had been a schoolmaster in a small East Coast town before the war and had joined the army in 1915.  After undergoing training in Northumberland, he was sent to France in July 1916.  He was killed by a shell splinter the following month. 

"Physical death is nothing," Dowding communicated through Pole's hand.  "There really is no cause for fear.  Some of my pals grieved for me.  When I ‘went West,' they thought I was dead for good...One moment I was alive, in the earthly sense, looking over a trench parapet, unalarmed, normal.  Five seconds later I was standing outside my body, helping two of my pals carry my body down the trench labyrinth toward a dressing station.  They thought I was senseless but alive.  I did not know whether I had jumped out of my body through shell shock, temporarily or for ever...I seemed in a dream.  I had dreamt that someone or something had knocked me down.  Now I was dreaming that I was outside my body.  Soon I should wake up and find myself in the traverse waiting to go on guard."

Dowding explained that after he was declared dead his body went to the field mortuary and he remained with it.  "I still expected to wake up in my body again," he continued.  "Then I lost consciousness and slept soundly."   When he awoke, his body had disappeared.  He continued to feel as if he were in a dream.  "Then the shock came!  It came without any warning suddenly.  I had been killed by a German shell!  I was dead! I was no longer alive.  I had been killed, killed, killed!

After realizing he was "dead," Dowding found himself "floating in a mist that muffled sound and blurred the vision...It was like looking through the wrong end of a telescope.  Everything was distant, minute, misty, unreal.  Guns were being fired.  It might all have been millions of miles away...It was like looking down from above the clouds, yet that doesn't exactly express it either. ..All this time I was very lonely.  I was conscious of none near me...I think I fell asleep a second time, and long remained unconscious and in a dreamless condition. "

When he again awoke, "all that was not really me slipped down and away.  The sense of loneliness deepened."   Dowding then explained to Pole that he was having a hard time getting ideas through him. "I cannot see your pen, but I see my ideas as they are caught up and whirled into form within your mind...I can use your mind freely because I see you have deliberately chained your imagination and so I can impress you freely and clearly."

Dowding then communicated that he had been met by his brother, William, who had died three years earlier.  William explained to him that he had a hard time reaching him because the atmosphere was so thick.   His brother explained to him that he (Thomas) was responsible for the "thickness" because he had lived a selfish life.   William assisted him to a "rest hall." where he experienced a fountain that played music, color, harmony, and bliss.  He began meeting others and exchanging ideas. 

Curious as to what was going on in the war, Dowding was introduced to an old gentlemen who had been a newspaper editor.  "...he had died at eighty-one and has not thrown off earth conditions yet.  He therefore surrounds himself with these conditions.  His son on earth runs the paper, a French journal.  The old man can read his son's thoughts and so divines the world's news through his son's mind.  He has built himself an office, full of telephones and tape machines.  These machines are in a way illusory, but they please the old gentleman."  The old man then told Dowding what was going on in the war situation.  He also informed him that he was able to get many of his ideas into the paper's editorials through his son's mind, although the son didn't realize it.

"How awful to be chained to an earthly property like that!" Dowding mused.  "Tell people to control their worldly interests from outside.  If you identify yourself heart and soul with some material project or undertaking, you will find it hanging on to you over here.  It will obsess you, blot your view, make progress impossible.  This old French editor came over here a good many years ago.  He still lives on earth in mind, so far as he is allowed to do so.  Take a bird's-eye, dispassionate view of all your worldly interest.  Master them or they will master you.  In the latter case, when you get here you will be miserable.  Life will seem empty, a wilderness.  Earth ties will tighten their grip, yet you will be unable to respond.  Confusion will result - that is purgatory. "

Dowding speculated that he was able to free himself of earth conditions faster than the old editor because he was not interested in making money.  His problem was that he was too reclusive."

In a communication on March 14, 1917, Dowding said he had met a "messenger" from a higher sphere.  He was told that he was in a state of consciousness not far removed from earthly existence.  "I am journeying towards a wider, true life, but I am not yet there.  I have no right to speak with any authority on my experiences here...Anyway, my life seems quite as real as it did on earth, even more real.  There is something that lives and moves within me that is not illusion.  That something will forge its way out into the light some day.  I can but go on trying.  Meanwhile, perhaps I had better not come to you again.  Let me thank you for your patience.  You have helped me through difficult purgatorial hours.  I may return.  I do not know. "

Two days later, on March 16, Dowding returned, explaining that the messenger, who was from the Christ Sphere, said it would be okay as long as he made it clear that the conditions he found himself in are impermanent, and, to that extent, unreal.   "We humans hide from the light.  We grovel among the illusions created by our thoughts.  We surround ourselves with misconceptions. We refuse to rise into the Christ Sphere.  The Christ Sphere is everywhere, and yet, by some strange paradox, we were able to shut it out from view.  All these thoughts were new to me.  I begin to see what is meant.  If I did not do so, I could not pass the ideas on."    

The messenger explained to Dowding that he was still living in a fog, a fog of his own creation and design. "We cannot live in the celestial heights," he was told, "until we have completed our work in the valleys."

Next blog entry about Janurary 7:  Private Dowding gets a glimpse of hell.