More on the Afterlife Dress Code

This is a continuation of my prior blog post.  Thanks to afterlife cartographer Steve  Beckow for calling my attention to additional references on the subject.  Steve's recently updated website is at

http://www.angelfire.com/space2/light11/fc/fc-index1.html. 

       Also, one of the very best survival sites on the web is up and running again.  It can be found at http://www.survivalafterdeath.org.uk/

On March 11, 1932, Sir Oliver Lodge, a distinguished British physicist and educator, had one of his many sittings with Gladys Osborne Leonard, perhaps England's most famous medium.  His son, Raymond, who was killed in France during WWI, communicated and attempted to explain conditions on his side of the veil.  "Father, we are obliged to create conditions, and what you might call things, on our plane," Raymond stated through Mrs. Leonard's voice mechanism.  "They've only got a temporary life.  They are illusions, something to the same extent as a materialization is an illusion.  On your side, you have something material for the time being.  It's something natural in appearance, in feel, apparently in every way it appeals to the senses of this body (touching Sir Oliver).   On our side we are bound to create certain things, houses, clothes, partially for the time being, in order to make a satisfactory harmonious and suitable setting for the soul to live in and work in.  And they become a medium of expression...It's one of the necessary illusions of our life."

When Sir Oliver asked Raymond if he was saying that he lived in a world of illusion, Raymond said that he was in a an extension of the illusory world in which his father was living.  "We are in touch with a world of reality because we are in the outer rim of the world of illusion," he explained to his father.  "We're more sure of the world of reality than you are.  Father, the spirit universe is the world of reality.  Spirit and mind both belong to the world of reality."

Sir Oliver, knighted for his pioneering work in electricity, radio, and the spark plug, pondered the situation in writing:  "I know that its inhabitants say it is extraordinarily like the earth, that they have flowers, and trees and houses, and can get anything they want by merely wishing for it, which seems rather strange, "but I was not prepared to think of it as a world of illusion wherein all such objects of sense were illusory."  In further discussing the matter with Raymond and Frederic W. H. Myers, his old friend, who had died in 1901, and who also communicated through Mrs. Leonard, Lodge concluded that it was a temporary environment for spirits who have recently crossed over and still making adjustments before going on to realms of higher vibration, which become less and less illusory and more and more real as a soul advances in the spirit world. "We are not transported to the full blaze of reality all at once," Lodge surmised, pointing out that a table that feels solid and substantial is really a multitude of whirling electrons with great spaces between them and that when we stand on the floor we are bombarded upwards and supported by a great multitude of little blows delivered by the atoms beneath our feet.  As none of this is apparent to the ordinary senses, it can be considered illusory even though we choose to interpret it in a way that appeals to our coarse-grained sense organs.      

On September 12, 1945, Phillip Gilbert, a sailor in the British navy killed in WWII, communicated with his mother, Alice Gilbert:  "You want me to tell you more of conditions here.  It's not easy to explain how one can be solid and yet not solid.  Still, anyone who knows anything about physics and electrons knows that all earthly matter is just that - seeming solid and yet really a mass of vibrating particles.  We are the same, I think, the body I use now looks to me very like my old one, but there are no organs, as you know.  I think I function through my thought, somehow. I can will myself into any clothes I want. I usually get myself into my tweed coat and flannels...Some people go about seeing themselves in the most fantastic outfits.  They are dressed as their inner nature builds them up. That is why, at first, Grandpa so often showed to mediums in a sort of black cassock, like a clergyman."

Phillip went on to say that people in higher planes become more and more luminous and that Christ is seen as a mass of violet golden light.

At a later sitting Phillip told his mother that he had encountered a young woman who had been a model when alive and still did not realize she was "dead."  "She still went parading up and down to an imaginary audience," he communicated.  "But there were gleams in her of a capacity for service.  When I spoke to her, she at first thought it was the prelude to adventure, so I had to do some little stunts to show her I was not an amorous sailor.  In fact, I managed to wish myself into the garment of an Egyptian priest, for a moment, and then back again as the British navy once more - the poor thing thought she'd had one too many.  However, little by little, I got her to understand that she had been killed by a ‘V2' a year ago.  At first she was rather upset, for she has little power of concentration, but soon, being quite a sensible wench, she got the idea and she perked up. Her first idea was to see herself in a few remarkable garments. She seems to have no relatives or friends here that I can find, but I think she has some intention of finding her family still on earth and parking herself near them for a time.   You see how queer it all is, far different from the easy falling into heaven theories we were brought up on."

At still another sitting, Phillip told his mother that he met a very attractive young woman, or, at least, she had been attractive when in her earthly shell.  In fact, she had been obsessed with her beauty and was a very selfish woman.  However, much of her beauty was due to heavy make-up.  Like the model the woman had yet to realize she was dead. "She had, of course, no  idea how to create for herself, and she hovered miserably around the beauty parlours [on earth in an effort to tidy herself up.]"         

On October 11, 1943, Geraldine Cummins, the renowned Irish automatist, recorded a message from Hilda Gibbes, recently deceased.  "Paradise, Purgatory, and Dante's Inferno, Harold says, are all here, but they are so different from what people on earth imagine.  On earth, possession is nine-tenths of the law. Nobody possesses anything but themselves in this life.  That is Govy's first maxim. It made me think that poor X., who has such a shriveled, mean little self, will be in a state of chronic bankruptcy in this world.  He will wear his ugly city clothes, because he only feels a really respectable and worthy citizen when he is dressed in them.  You see we appear what we imagine ourselves to be.  So he will wear the habit he is in the habit of thinking about.   He can only imagine unlovely things, therefore his appearance will be as unlovely as it was on earth when he makes his debut at the levee for the newcomers from the earth.

Later in the transmission, Hilda Gibbes communicated: "About clothes, I shall write you a fashion article next time. But when I wrote about X, I think I explained that we are our own tailors and dressmakers.  We think of and wish for the kind of clothes locked away in the wardrobes of our memories, and they appear. They are not always as we like them. But that is due to our own shortcomings.  I have pulled out such a lot of pretty things from the drawers and wardrobes that belong to my mind...To a great extent people dress according to the period.  Sometimes, though, they break out in great gaieties of coloring and material.  But we share memories and the newly-dead bring over new ideas about clothes.   So we keep the past generation up-to-date, and some of them look rather sweet in modern dress, when, of course, we have always thought of them in clothes of a past period.  I am losing hold of the pen."

The Rev. G. Vale Owen, a clergyman of the Church of England, developed the ability of ability of automatic writing and received many messages from the spirit world.  "Both the texture and the hue of our garments take their quality from the spiritual state and character of the wearer," his deceased mother explained to him.  "The atmosphere also has an effect on our clothing, and enters into the influence of our own personalities in its effect on texture and colour. So that while, if we were all of the same quality spiritually our clothing would be of the same tint and texture, by reason of the atmospheric influence, this is in fact modified by the degree in which our own characters differ one from another...Also the tint of our robes changes according to the part of the grounds in which we happen to be. It is very interesting and instructive, and also very beautiful, to see them change as one turns down a side walk where different vegetation flourishes, or where the arrangement of the various species of plants is different.

Through another medium and to another person, Frederic Myers, Sir Oliver Lodge's old friend mentioned above, communicated: "We were accustomed to wear clothes that belonged to our particular period. The images of these are deeply marked in our subconscious memory. So our first instinct is to appear to those we love as we were on earth. Our minds, though unconscious of the imaginative act, fashion out of this amazingly plastic ether every thread, every inch of the garments which we habitually wore during our earth life. Naturally, after a while, we come to realize the change in ourselves and, aware at last of the creative powers of imagination, devise strange and lovely coverings for our etheric bodies. But as these fancies are largely drawn from it they are limited by the subconscious memory in character and kind. ..."  Myers went on to say that this applied primarily to souls who had just passed through the gates of death and were still in the lower realms or spheres.

Claude Kelway-Bamber, a British pilot killed during WWI, communicated with his mother through Gladys Osborne-Leonard.  "I dress as I did with you, but some people wear white robes because they think when out of the mortal body it is the correct thing to do," he told her.  "If I chose to wear a tunic and sandals, or a "Beefeater's" getup, no one would laugh and jeer; they would realize it made me happy, and that is reason enough." However, he was later taken by his guides to a higher sphere to see Christ.  "When the appointed time came, my guides provided me with a plain white robe to wear, and we passed through connecting shafts to the Christ-sphere.  My general impression was that of brightness, almost dazzling; the air scintillated like diamonds - it almost crackled, it was so full of electricity; my feet had not a very firm grip of the ground."

In communicating with her husband Steward Edward White, the famous writer of the last century, Betty White explained it this way: "Instead of our having to create clothing mechanically, for instance, we do so by a diversion of frequency.  We can create directly by an impingement of our frequency on a lower degree of frequency.  We use degrees. Color is a manifestation of a certain degree of frequency.  I want it in my clothes.  I don't make the color.  I impinge on that particular frequency, and call it to my frequency."

In a current booklet titled "Afterlife," The Rev. Donald Rose, a Swedenborgian minister living in Bryn Athyn, PA, relates the teaching of Emanuel Swedenborg, the brilliant 18^th Century scientist turned mystic.  He states that most intelligent spirits (i.e., most advanced)  wear clothes that gleam as though aflame, some radiant as though alight, while the less advanced wear pure white and soft white clothes that do not shine, and those even less advanced wear clothes of various colors.  In one of his many writings Swedenborg is quoted: "Once when I was looking abroad in the world of spirits I saw, in a certain meadow, men clothed in garments like those of men in the world, from which I knew that they were lately come from the world." 

Frederick Sculthrorp, a pioneer in astral projection, told of his journeys into the spirit world while still in the flesh.  "Regarding the creative power of unconscious thought, I was once talking to a teacher in spirit, and he asked ‘Where do you get your clothes?'  I tried to remember my tailor's name on earth and could not.  But this was not what he meant.  He said, ‘Look' and pointed to my clothes.  I looked down and saw that I was wearing my every-day clothes, reproduced in every detail, even to a small stain that was on them, the result of a  too vigorously squeezed tube of toothpaste, which I had not been able to completely remove."

The Rev. Charles Drayton Thomas, a Wesleyan minister and psychical researcher,  carried on detailed conversations with his deceased father and sister through Mrs. Osborne-Leonard.  He wrote that his father wanted him to understand that he now lived in a body which, to him, was as real and substantial as the body he had inhabited on earth. "Instead of the vapourish form which I had imagined to be the dwelling place of the departed soul, he described a replica of his former body, but one which possessed powers of movement, and an extension of the senses, far surpassing anything familiar to earth.  He spoke of being suitably clad in garments, and not, as I had supposed, draped only in a cloud of light."  His father further explained that his spirit body was built up by the character formed while in the flesh.