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was seldom what he would have chosen himself — and noticed that he began to lose weight, and to feel fitter than ever before. His ‘hand’ later used crayons and paints to create an extraordinary series of paintings, and to make metal sculptures. It also began to write poems in free-verse form, and these poems were remarkable for a certain clarity and purity of language.
    What had happened is that the right-brain self had begun to express itself; we might say that in the parliament of his mind, the member for the unconscious had worked up the courage to start making speeches. Psychologists refer to the right brain as the ‘non-dominant hemisphere’; in most of us, it behaves like a suppressed housewife who never dares to utter her own opinion. Brad’s hours of quiescence had taught her to overcome her shyness.
    One day when he took up a pencil to allow his hand to write, the handwriting was quite different from his own. A woman named herself and briefly introduced herself. Brad’s immediate reaction was a powerful sense of rejection. He pushed the paper away, and said forcefully: ‘I will not be a mouthpiece for anyone but myself.’ The ‘communicator’ went away and did not return. Here we seem to have a clear distinction between the ‘voice’ of the right brain and some external communicator or spirit.
    In short, whether we can accept it or not, it seems that there
is a prima facie
case for the existence of disembodied entities with which we can, under certain circumstances, communicate.
    Let us, for the moment, give Swedenborg the benefit of the doubt on these matters, and consider what else he has to say. His views are very simple. According to Swedenborg, man is aspirit who inhabits a body, in precisely the same way that a driver sits in an automobile. The body is no more the man than the automobile is. At death, the man leaves his body behind, and continues to exist in an incorporeal form. When the heartbeat ceases, the spirit — that is, the man himself — passes on to another plane of existence, and this is described by Swedenborg at some length in his book
Heaven and Hell
.
    Our first reaction to this is that it reveals a certain naivety. We are aware of personality as something that changes and develops over the course of a lifetime. H. G. Wells points out that every single cell in our body changes every seven years, so a man of forty is totally different from the same man at thirty or fifty. Moreover, personality can alter through some accident; for example, people who have received violent blows on the head may seem to turn into another personality. One leading investigator of the paranormal, Professor John Taylor, writes in
The Shape of Minds to Come:
‘We recognise personality as a summation of the different contributions to behaviour from the various control units of the brain.’ So to assume that the personality can survive death is a little like assuming that a house will somehow go on existing after it has been demolished, or that the ‘spirit’ of a ship will live on after it has been dismantled in the breaker’s yard. My personality wilts visibly when I get tired, and it goes out like a light when I fall asleep. So the very idea of its surviving death seems a logical absurdity.
    All these objections were beautifully summarised in an article Bertrand Russell wrote in the 1930s on ‘Do We Survive Death?’. * A person, he says, is simply a series of mental occurences and habits, and if we believe in life after death, we must believe that the memories and habits that constitute the person will somehow continue to exist. This leads him to state flatly: ‘It is not rational arguments, but emotions, that cause belief in a future life.’ He goes on to say that one feeling that encourages the belief in survival is admiration for the excellence of man. He quotes the Bishop of Birmingham on the subject. Man knows right and wrong. He can build Westminster Abbey. He can make an aeroplane. He can