Excerpts from There Is Life After Death

 

There Is Life After Death (1978) is the second of two books of transcripts compiled from tape recordings of Direct Voice seances with medium Leslie Flint when the widow Mrs. Eira Conacher was able to learn about life in the ascended realm of human existence for her husband Douglas.  Eira wrote in the Introduction: 

At one of my early direct voice sittings my husband said: "I would like to concentrate on this form of communication; my idea is to be of service and to try to get my thoughts and my message and my knowledge to as many as possible, through what I hope one day will become a book."

 
To avoid repetition as far as possible I have deleted passages here and there, and in one or two instances included information on the subject in question from tapes not otherwise used.

The seances usually commenced with a welcoming from 'Mickey,' Flint's 'control.'  This article presents excerpts from the transcripts of transcendental communication presented in There Is Life After Death.  Eira's own statements are identified with the word 'Self' and parts of one of her conversations with Mickey are included.  The 'Douglas Conacher Collection of Leslie Flint Recordings' are available for listening without charge at wholejoy.com.  The first tape recording was made by Eira on October 16, 1959, the year after her husband's physical demise.

Douglas (Direct Voice):

In producing this book I seek to place in the hands of innumerable readers a guide to the truth as I now know it to be; that life is truly eternal, and death but the gateway to life; that one only begins to live when one has died; that death is the beginning of a greater realisation and a greater wisdom.


At the same time we should realise that earthly existence is essential.  Indeed, one might liken it to the schoolroom in which we must learn lessons that are needed before we enter the greater outer world of the spirit.


In some instances it may be necessary to return to the schoolroom for a brief span of time to learn some lessons we may have failed previously.


Perhaps some of us when on earth were taught things in all sincerity by our teachers which nevertheless have proved to be wrong.  In that category I feel that I can place myself.  I learnt lessons taught not necessarily by bad teachers, but shall I say ill-informed teachers, and although not a prejudiced person, I blindly accepted certain things which I now know to be false.

Yet I realise only too well the difficulties of those in high places, particularly those who perhaps have been given a work to do and endeavour to do it as best they can, and who perpetuate many assumptions which I now know to lack truth.  But this is not in any way a criticism, for all I say and all I endeavour to do, is done in love; my one aim, my one desire, is to serve.


Voice (deep, vibrant and with a French accent): I am so pleased to come and speak to you, Mrs. Maconacher.

Self: Who is speaking, please?

Voice: Maria.  Maria.  You know there are many people who come to you from this side; apart from your husband, there are many other people who are interested in being of service.  I think you are going to do a lot of writing because you are getting a great deal of inspiration from our side.  Oui.  You will do more than you realise.  Your husband was a very talented man, but he did not have the opportunity to develop certain aspects of his ability.


Douglas: You know this time business puzzles me.  I have not a clue really as to time.  Since I have been here, I have found it very difficult to be sure about time as such.  In fact, I am more conscious of time through your mind.


Oh, I do think it is marvellous that I can come and talk to you like this!  Of course I do not know what my voice sounds like.  All I know is that I am here and speaking to you through this 'box,' which in some remarkable way transmits my thoughts into sound.  It is rather strange; one concentrates one's thoughts, and the voice-box automatically responds.

I suppose, in a kind of way, it is rather like on earth; you think of what you wish to say and your vocal organs automatically respond, and you vibrate the atmosphere and create sound, and people hear your thoughts as sound.

This is exactly what I am doing.  But in a sense this mechanism is artificial, which will possibly alter the voice.  I would like to become very familiar with this form of communication so that I can do it better.  I want to help you.


Self: Have you seen the Rev. W. Stainton Moses lately?  (He had often been seen and described by mediums as being with my husband.)

Douglas: Yes I have, and I must say he is a most wonderful person, and has been a great blessing and help to me.  We get on very well together.  Do you find his book interesting?

Self: Yes.  I am still reading it.  The Rev. Maurice Elliot is on your side now.

Douglas: Yes, he is with us.  Many people I never even knew on earth I have had the pleasure of meeting here — the Rev. Drayton Tomas, for instance; and I have met Inge.  Do you remember Dean Inge?

Self: I remember how much you enjoyed his books.


When I come to talk to you, I am not exactly solid to your world.  It is like a half-way house.  I am more conscious of your thoughts than I am of the physical self.  I am conscious of the room in which you sit because I have tuned in to a certain extent to the atmosphere and condition of the place.  But it is really the mental aspect you are receiving, the thought which is being transmitted artificially, as it must be, to you; and of course that has its complications.  I shall improve as I get more confidence and know a little more of how it is done.  Today I feel more tuned in, as it were, than probably I have ever been before.


I would not like people to think, as so many do on your side, that after death you suddenly become very angelic; or if you have not been so very good on earth, that you are condemned to the lower realms.

Here people are as they are, good and bad and indifferent.  But since the majority of people are a combination of so many things, in the beginning you enter a condition of life which is general for the average person.

Gradually you evolve, you assimilate new knowledge, you meet new people who are often more advanced and they can help and show you many varying degrees of life.  You enter into a new spirit, as it were.


Death is a tremendous adventure!  It means starting out in a new world, meeting old friends, making new ones, seeing new sights, having new experiences, getting rid of all the infirmities and ills of the body; being able for the first time to feel a sense of lightness without having to carry around a body which quite often had become sick and ill and difficult.


Self: I liked your earlier comparison of death to a voyage we take.

Douglas: Yes, it is in a sense a voyage — a voyage of discovery.  But many people do not prepare for it by their thoughts and their actions — by doing what they know within themselves is right.

That good which you have within yourself is, in a sense, the only luggage you can bring with you.  The things which are God, the things which are of the highest in man — these are what man should cultivate.

So much luggage has to be discarded by people and forgotten.  Man carries too much weight.  He loads himself with all kinds of thoughts and ideas and responsibilities which are a drawback and a hindrance.  Man must learn true values and then he will carry only that which is good.

Death is something to look forward to, realising that it is a release from all the evils of the material world.  It is rather like the chrysalis and the butterfly.  Man is like the chrysalis not fully conscious and aware, not yet released from the prison of his thoughts.  When he is able to depart from material thoughts and ideas — then he will become a beautiful spiritual creature and find happiness in a spiritual realm.


Self: Mickey, we always call you Mr. Flint's control.  Could you explain what that means, please.

Mickey: Well, I suppose a control is a person who takes charge under  the varying conditions that prevail at the time of communication.  It is my job to be close to the medium, and to help some of the newcomers through.  Those who have had little or no experience of communication need advice, and I act in the capacity of controlling the conditions that are prevalent at the time of communication.

At first, people from your side and ours who are not familiar with this form of communication are very apprehensive, and I have to be cheerful and amusing to relieve the tension.  There is often tremendous tension in the atmosphere  at such sessions as these — people become over-anxious or a little emotional, and they need calming and amusing to make them forget themselves.  It's not an easy job but I love it, and I meet all sorts of people.


Self: You have a very important job, Mickey.

Mickey: Yes, and it is a job for which one has to train.  I was with this medium several years before I was even allowed to communicate let alone act as control.

People say, "Why should they send someone like Mickey who to all outward appearances is not very advanced"; but what they don't realise is that in order to communicate, no matter who we are or from what sphere, we have to lower our vibrations in order to tune-in with you and your world, and that in itself is not an easy thing to do.

Therefore, someone like myself who over a long period has trained to do that, can be a great help.  Often I can relay messages when when spirit friends may find it difficult to lower their vibrations sufficiently to communicate with your side.

Self: I think you are advanced but assume this innocent air!

Mickey: Well, I do my best, Auntie.  I live in two worlds more than the average communicator.  In order to work with the medium, I have tuned in to his vibrations, but I also have my own separate existence which is on an entirely different sphere.  In a sense I have to live in two worlds at the same time.


Douglas: Everything that has life on your side has life here.  But the lower forms of life, such as reptiles and insects and so on which are common in your world, do not exist in the same shape and form on the highest planes.  They all go through stages of evolution; they are all in the process of change.


Here we do not marry — there is no giving and taking in marriage, and there is no possessing.  Here one does not desire to possess another person in any sense.  One is completely in harmony with another soul, tremendously tuned in, and has like thoughts, like outlook, like mind.  There is no birth in the sense that you understand it.

Of course all this is natural law too, but it cannot be regulated by material ceremonies.  Two people will only remain together when they are absolutely right for each other, when they are so tuned in, when this love is so overwhelming, so all-embracing, that they naturally and instinctively desire to be as one and assist each other to expand and grow in mental and spiritual stature.


Here nothing is hidden.  Everything is shown gradually, in its evolution.  If you want to tune-in to someone for whom you have admiration, you can see that person and by the mere process of thought, enter into a condition of their life and their personality.  You see events as they actually happened in the form of picturisation in ether, almost as if you were watching a moving picture screen — a cinema screen.


On earth you are living in a world which is really the product of past lives, past minds, and to some extent you are suffering from the wrong thinking and wrong actions of people who went before you.  The world is always creating.  Man is given free will and the opportunity to do great things, and often he does in some directions.  But unfortunately man also builds and creates through his mind things which are not happy.

People often say "Oh, why does God permit this, and God allow that," but God does not interfere with free will.


There are many, many spheres — that is, there are many conditions of life and many forms of development.

There are spheres here which are very like the material and natural conditions of earth, and to some extent the earthly way of life.  It is not until you get away from the material aspect of life that you really begin to lose this feeling that certain things are necessary and that they have to be produced in a certain way.  It is all a matter of development and evolution.


Here you learn that fundamentally all things are mind or the power of thought.  The creative power is from within.  It is the better part of man — the God-like part of man — that brings forth this beauty.


Self: Yesterday, I was trying to help a young man who was very upset at the passing of his mother to understand something of this truth, but his comment was: "It all sounds very nice but it can't be proved."

Douglas: When a person say it is all very interesting but it cannot be proved, I think he is being foolish.  For the simple reason that if he does not make the effort, he cannot expect this knowledge to fall into his lap.


If a person sincerely endeavours to discover the truth, it is all there to be discovered, and he will be helped and guided and has no need to fear.


Self: Can you tell me about the government of your world?

Douglas: One can say that we are conscious of government from the point of view of everything being in order, everything being conducted in an orderly fashion.

We see the results of government, although we are not fully conscious of the people who govern us.  There is no such thing as government as you understand the term, and yet there are those who are much more highly evolved and developed, who have a great part to play in the lives of thousands and millions of souls and organizations in each particular state of being.


Self: Which body are you using today?

Douglas: The etheric body.

Self: Is the spirit body within the etheric?

Douglas: The spirit body, as such, is not in a sense a body.  If one can realise that as one goes through varying degrees of experience, or shall we say, stages of evolution, so are there subtle almost imperceptible changes that take place.  Although one would not feel anything, there would be an inner awareness of certain aspects of change.

I do not want you to think that we become bodiless, just spirit and mind, as it were, and an animating force.  It is true that this life-giving force — this power, this part of the indestructible which we call God, this breath of life, whichever way you like to put it — is the reality: But we are still individuals and recognisable as such.


Douglas: Here animals have freedom to roam and enjoy their existence; there is no fear in their make-up.  They do not fear one another or man.


Self: Has anything particularly exciting been happening on your strata of the spirit spheres?

Douglas: The answer to that would be that it is never anything else but exciting.  When you consider that untold millions upon millions of people have come over here through generations and generations of time — in all different degrees of evolution, different types of individuals, educated, uneducated, all different nationalities, different viewpoints, different approaches to life — the whole immensity of it is such that to even begin to depict the minutest part beggars description.


This assumption that the earth is the only world to be concerned about is wrong because there are lives, there are people, there are worlds that have been going on for untold centuries upon centuries, millions upon millions of years.

On these other worlds the consciousness of people is much more spiritually and psychically advanced than on earth; their knowledge is tremendous!  There are degrees of intelligence much more highly advanced than anything known on earth.

In fact people on certain planets are very concerned about the earth, and indeed have been trying to make contact.

The vast majority of people on other planets are to all outward appearance similar to ourselves, and many of them are also very like material earthly beings mentally; but there are other conditions of life where the shape and form are different; I could not even begin to describe that.


What is important is that the power of the Holy Spirit manifests itself in many forms and in many ways.

Christ cannot be narrowed down in the sense that He is often narrowed down.  And, then again, we must not refer to him as a person.  God and Christ are one — but in a spiritual sense.

People become confused about all this because they will give shape and form, they will give name and title.


It is the power of the Holy Spirit manifesting in so many different ways that is life itself.  It is the power which generates in us and through us and about us.  It is this that makes us part of the divine spiritual beings.  Because we have outward shape and form we think of ourselves as people.  But we must not think just of figure and shape and size and appearance, of names and titles — we must think of the Holy Spirit, that eternal power which is life itself, and which generates in all things.

There is eternal life not only in the human but also in the animal kingdom.  People seem to think that an animal has no life beyond the material.  That is not so.

There is a vital spark of life in all things that have being — an eternal spirit which is all the time motivating new life.


Douglas: The book [Chapter of Experience] is going to do a great deal of good and arouse tremendous interest.  Now you will have to do a follow-up.  That is going to take some time but you have done this so beautifully.

Self: I have only written down from the tape recorder what you have said, dear.


Self: What is your work now, dear?

Douglas: I do various things.  I am a teacher and visit various planes, or spheres where thousands of souls congregate and live on different levels of consciousness.  One tries to convey to these people something of life that we have experienced which is beyond their normal knowledge.  In other words, to try to raise up their desire for further knowledge and experience.  But not by speech as you understand it.  We can convey by our thought-forces and by assembling our experiences together.

We are able to vibrate the atmosphere.  We are able to transmit on certain wavelengths not only what we are thinking, what we are feeling, and what we are expressing — but we can also picturise it.  We can transmit thought-pictures.  As they are hearing our thoughts as sound waves, they are also seeing in picture form in the atmosphere that which we have in our minds.

It is almost like a television set.  We are, in a sense, what you would term transmitters.  You could say that not only are we receiving sets, but we are also able to give out; we are able to send out.


Self: You seem to work very hard, dear.

Douglas: When one is working one is happy.  The realisation that you are serving, uplifting, guiding, and some senses I hope inspiring others to seek and to find — this is the kind of work which brings joy to one's heart.

The whole point is that all of us, more or less according to our experience, are working for the betterment of the human race, the betterment of humanity.  Each one is contributing his bit according to his light.

Even those on the lower planes are seeking — perhaps they are not always aware or conscious of it — and yet there is an inner awareness that something is lacking, they only need that little guidance, that little help, that little inspiration that we can give, to set them on the path of progression.

We are all instruments, my dear.  You are as much an instrument as the medium and Mickey, and all the others working in this pattern we are creating.


We see you and others like you as vital links in a chain which we are building up over a period of earthly time.  When it is strengthened, this chain will be of such power that people in your world will be able to understand a little more, and the strength of it will pull them nearer to a realisation of the spirit, to be uplifted by it.


Self: Can you tell me about your new vibrations, your new habitat as you call it?

Douglas: Yes.  One has to realise that there is no such thing as a demarcation line between one state of being and the next; there is a kind of intermingling.  At first one may not be aware or conscious of a new state of being.  In most cases this will come gradually.

It did so with me.  I can only say it was as if I were in a sleep-state — drowsing if you like — and then instead of awakening into the condition of life to which I had become accustomed, I was aware of changes.  The environment was different, the whole atmosphere was more rarified, there was greater luminosity.

Unconsciously, perhaps, we accept everything around and about us as being natural and as we desire it.  We acclimatise ourselves and settle in and accept this as a matter of course whether it is in your world or in this life.

 

From the 1973 book Chapters of Experience: (left) "A psychic sketch of Douglas drawn by Frank Leah, clairvoyant artist, in 1962—four years after Douglas's so-called death.  Neither of the Conachers had ever met Frank Leah when this sketch was made"; (right) "Douglas at age fifty-nine"