AN OLD MAN ATTEMPTS TO JUSTIFY SOME OF HIS PECULIAR BELIEFS
It seems that I have some rather odd ideas about God. All well and good, but I am not entirely clear why I should be writing them down, or why anyone else should be interested in reading them. However, here goes….
I am certain that an Entity exists that has a spiritual influence over us, a spiritual influence that has real-world effects on this planet and its occupants. However, I do not think that this entity is the same as the over-arching, universe-spanning, eternal and immutable Power that the traditional religions of the world think of as ‘God’.
The poet Charles Williams named this lesser entity as ‘Operative Providence’, but I think that it could be better described as a Planetary Angel. Furthermore I have formed definite opinions about the nature and origin of this Planetary Angel.
I very much doubt if these ideas are original to me, but I have not yet found much written evidence that anyone else has thought along the same lines, though I suspect that the Neoplatonist philosophers of the Renaissance might have dug over this ground before.
Firstly then, I maintain that our Planetary Angel is concerned with this planet, and is not concerned with any other part of the universe. Perhaps there is an over-arching, Supreme Being in charge and controlling everything, galaxy wide, universe wide, perhaps there is not. However, I am an Earthman, and this planet is quite enough for me to be bothered about.
Secondly, I am convinced that our Planetary Angel is not a single heavenly ‘personality’, but is a collective entity, a Being comprised of unnumbered billions of individual spiritual essences, the minds and personalities of every lifeform that has ever existed on the planet; the ‘souls’ or spirits of all the humans, animals or plants for whom Earth was home.
These spiritual identities continue to exist after the physical death of their material structures. They develop spiritually and, as they do so, increasingly coalesce into the collective and creative force that a majority of humans recognise is influencing life on Earth, and usually, but not always, calling it ‘God’.
If this is true, then we can say with confidence that our Planetary Angel only began to exist at the same time as life began on this planet, and began slowly, developing over many millions of years.
All this might seem entirely crazy to many people, but perhaps a few might possibly be interested, to know how I came to form these very left-field opinions. Previously, I have tried to express this heterodox belief system of mine in the spoken text or lyrics of my musical suite, ‘The Solar Heresies’ https://www.judge-smith.com/wp/product/the-solar-heresies-the-lunar-sequence/ released on CD in 2020, but a musical libretto is not, perhaps, the best vehicle for detailed explanations of anything, let alone spiritual belief systems. Curiously, just as I was writing these words, a friend phoned and told me that he had been listening to ‘The Solar Heresies’ and was curious to know if I had any evidence for the story it told. So I will try and ‘show my workings’, and explain the various experiences that led to my tentative conclusions on this subject. A lot of these experiences involved communication with ‘Dead People’ by various paranormal means, and if you regard such activity as taboo and inadmissible for serious consideration, then my ‘workings’ may not carry much weight with you.
I dropped the idea of the standard-issue Christian God very early in life. My objections to the idea were the same then, as a young boy, as they are now. God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost, as they are usually presented, seem a rather odd and unattractive trio. God the Father appears to have an insatiable appetite for Praise and Worship. According to scripture, we are required to Praise Him and Worship Him incessantly. To me, this extraordinary need for adoration and applause seems no different to the demands of a narcissistic dictator or deranged cult-leader for endless acclaim and flattery. What kind of God needs to be worshipped all the time? A vain and insecure one, I would have thought.
As regards God the Son, I have no problem with respecting and reverencing his life or his teachings. He seems to have been an admirable example of a Holy Man. However, there have been many other miracle-working and love-teaching Holy Men (and Women) on the planet, and my problem with the cult of Jesus is that I can see no particular reason to believe that only one among them, Jesus of Nazareth, can guarantee a safe-passage to a happy Afterlife; an exclusive safe-passage which is only available to his followers.
However, this anti-Christian argument perhaps gives the wrong impression of my views. I have known many church-going Christians who are kind and even saintly people, and Christianity itself has a lot to recommend it. Certainly there are a lot worse religions knocking about out there. Great wisdom has been brought forward by followers of many different faiths, and this includes Christianity. I have personally drawn great benefit from the writings of committed Christian C. S. Lewis (more from him later) while the spiritual teachings of the Indian Jesuit priest Anthony De Mello are an indispensable and central part of my life.
At the age of around twelve, I formed a lasting affection for the books of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Certainly Sherlock Holmes was a delight, but I also loved the writer’s other novels and short stories. Having worked my way through various historical romances, I read ‘The Lost World’, and found the characters of Professor Challenger, Ed Malone and Lord John Roxton, to be hugely appealing. They also feature in a later novella and couple of excellent short stories, but the only other full-length novel in which they appear is ‘The Land of Mist’, which I duly devoured eagerly. The story describes the journalist Malone’s investigations, which he undertakes with the daughter of the famous scientist Professor Challenger, into the world of Spiritualism; a hot topic at the time of writing (1926). The pair have a series of adventures that lead them to the inescapable conclusion that the dead really do survive in another wave-band of existence, and can, under certain circumstances, communicate with ‘the living’. Together they manage to convert the irascible and resolutely sceptic Challenger to their point of view.
The book is every bit as engaging, exciting and well-written as ‘The Lost World’, and I at once became fascinated with the world of psychic phenomena, mediums and séances, although it would be many years before I had the chance to investigate it for myself. This subject has always been contentious, and the Conan Doyle novel has long suffered from what I feel is unjust negative criticism. This comes in the form of furious denunciations by militant Sceptics, but also comes from admirers of his earlier work who seem to be embarrassed by an older Sir Arthur’s passionate commitment to Spiritualism. The novel includes extensive Appendices, in which Conan Doyle details the real events which feature in the book as fiction, and, in later life, I have personally witnessed many of the psychic phenomena he describes.
The next stage or way-mark on the route to my current ‘theology’ was the several years I spent as a young man in the cult of Scientology. I could write a book about my time as a Scientologist, and incidentally, this would not be one of the many ‘I-escaped-from-cult-horror’ Scientology memoirs. These shocking and very believable tales of control and abuse come mainly from ex-members of the Sea Organisation, the cult’s paramilitary caste of ‘warrior-monks’. I never joined-up to this, which involved signing ’a billion year contract’, and I remained a ‘civilian’ during my time as a follower, with a lot more personal freedom of action, although I did end up spending some months on the ‘Sea Org’ flagship ocean liner with L. Ron Hubbard himself.
The main connection of Scientology to my subsequent theological speculations is the fact that Scientology is a reincarnation cult. Their whole elaborate system of therapy and spiritual development is based on the recovery of what seem to be past-life memories. It must be said that their technique for doing this is simple, effective and does not involve drugs or hypnosis, and over the course of my time in the movement, I recovered hundreds of memories of incidents that appeared to have happened to me in the course of other lifetimes. These recovered memories seemed very detailed and entirely real, although I was always conscious of a certain qualitative difference between memories of my life in the here-and-now, and memories recovered from previous lives.
Hubbard’s beliefs and teachings contain some fascinating and potentially valuable nuggets amid a lot of flim-flam, science fiction and coercive control, but eventually I realised that the practice of Scientology itself was a scam; a money-grubbing re-enactment of that story of The Emperor’s New Clothes. Hubbard’s followers are offered almost unbelievable spiritual and psychological powers and benefits, which are only attainable through a series of tightly controlled (and increasingly costly) levels of ‘Scientology Processing’.
However, these ‘superpowers’ are not actually achieved by the student, but the poor Scientologist is taught that failure to achieve these states can only be due to their own crimes and shortcomings, so they happily boast of powers and benefits they do not have, while desperately pursuing the next level of training and initiation which they believe will finally solve their problems and make it all come true.
Scientology is an expensive product that definitely does not do what it says on the tin. I was able to leave the cult without regrets and without too many problems, but for years I still remained convinced that reincarnation was an established fact of life. It is, after all, an ancient and highly respectable view of existence held by billions of Hindus and Buddhists, as well as the majority of Western New Age enthusiasts.
In the early 1990s I was fortunate enough to meet some sane and intelligent people who were very active in the study and practice of Spiritual Mediumship. My earlier interest in the subject, as originally introduced to me by Conan Doyle’s novel, was rekindled and I took up my new friends’ offers of introductions and invitations to séances. I was privileged to witness some extraordinary manifestations and I have, in fact, subsequently written a book on the whole subject of ‘Life-After-Death’ (‘The Universe is Made of Voices’ https://www.judge-smith.com/wp/product/the-universe-is-made-of-voices-book/).
This article not the place to re-argue the case for and against the concept of Life After Death. There is a vast literature about the question, both pro and con, and only empirical evidence of Survival, experienced in person, can decide the answer for any individual, and that evidence will decide it for that individual alone.
For the purposes of this piece, it is sufficient to say that I became convinced that someone’s personality does not cease to exist when the death of the physical body takes place, and that people continue to survive, outside the physical universe entirely, in another ‘wave-band of existence’. Furthermore they appear to continue to live actual lives, in some respects similar to life on this world, in some ways extraordinarily different.
I received messages from friends and relations now dead, messages which contained accurate and substantive information, unknown to the medium. These communicators and their messages were not ‘on my mind’ or hoped-for, or anticipated by me, and thus were unlikely to have been available to the medium by some form of Telepathy. (I would like to point out that, while Telepathy is often offered as a possible explanation of mediumistic communications, it is also a concept that is every bit as unscientific and off-the-wall as Life After Death.)
Having been well-briefed by my new psychic investigator friends and becoming more familiar with the literature of the subject, I did not fall into the easy traps of ‘helping’ the medium, or accepting vague ‘messages’ that could apply to anyone, or, in some cases, being scammed by someone using well-known ‘Cold Reading’ techniques.
It was now as certain to me as it could be, that these phenomena were genuine and that, not to put too fine a point on it, We Do Not Die. Further support for this conclusion came from my extraordinary experiences of Physical Séances at which discarnate Dead People seemingly caused materialisations and levitations that would be thought physically impossible.
Could these have been faked? Certainly. Anything can be faked, given sufficient technical resources. The question is, were the things that I saw and experienced faked? I believe not, because the technical resources that would have been required; holographic projectors, hoists, trapdoors, trick props and so on, would have been substantial, complex and expensive, and there were a dozen reasons why they simply could not have been available or present at those particular times and places.
I was now convinced that the Universe was clearly ‘larger’ and more many-layered than I had been told, and there was obviously a lot more going on in this Universe than was described as going on in the official Scientific paradigm.
I experienced many sittings for trance communication and was constantly impressed by the high intellectual quality and coherence of transmissions brought through by mediums who were very obviously unconscious and unaware of what they were saying. However, I was now puzzled by an apparent contradiction. Dead people were apparently continuing to exist in a Life After Death, and in some cases remaining there very happily for a considerable time, and yet, I asked myself, isn’t everyone supposed to get re-born down here on Planet Earth? How did this work? When does Reincarnation happen?
I was fortunate to be at a ‘sitting for trance’ with a well-respected medium when this subject was dealt with very convincingly. The medium was unconscious, and was speaking in the voice of his guide or ‘control’. The sitters were invited to ask questions of this disembodied person who spoke with the voice of an elderly upper-class gentleman, very different from the medium in every respect. A lady sitter asked whether Reincarnation, as a doctrine was true or not. The ‘old man’ replied that it was not true and didn’t happen, at least not in any way familiar to us. However, we were told that beliefs about this question differed in the afterlife as they do here on earth. “I know lots of people who are expecting to reincarnate at any moment”, he said dryly. “But I don’t know anyone who’s done it yet.”
It was now my turn to question the communicator, and I explained that I had recovered innumerable and very convincing memories from my past lives, and how did he explain this. Without missing a beat, the old gentleman told me that my past life memories were probably all perfectly genuine. “But they are not your memories. They are other people’s memories; dead people who share similar vibrations to your own, and with whom you share a psychic link.”
It took several other sittings with this and other trance mediums, together with reading many transcripts of communications from séances long past, for me to begin to understand the concept of spiritual vibrations. This rather New Agey phrase in fact appears to refer to something very real; actual waves, like radio waves, with complex and changing wavelengths, but vibrating in who-knows-what universal medium. They are emitted and received by every living thing, and they enable links and channels of influence to open between minds when the wavelengths of these ever-shifting and multi-layered transmissions happen to coincide.
This is not the place to discuss this extraordinary natural phenomenon in any detail. I have attempted to explain what I understand of it, as best I can, in my book mentioned above, but it seemed then, as it does now, to provide a logical and convincing alternative explanation of ‘past life’ memories and other reincarnation phenomena.
This idea is startling; a vision of of minds influencing other minds, an influence that is intermittent and constantly changing as the personal ‘vibrations’ of those minds modulate independently, moving in and out of tune with millions of other minds, both the minds of ‘living’ people and those of ‘dead’ people. Once this idea takes root, countless examples of vibrational influence from other minds, both living and dead, on our own mental processes then become obviously apparent, and it has opened up vast areas of speculation for me.
Quite soon, other spiritual phenomena, as reported by Communicators came together in my collection of evidence and began to coalesce into a more coherent image of a supernatural Prime Mover. In personal séance experiences and in further reading, going back to Conan Doyle’s era and beyond, I came across many references to ‘The Light’, a dominant feature in so many accounts of the Afterlife. An omnipresent radiance emanating from some loftier plane, it is described as being a source of life-giving and healing energy. It is godlike, or even regarded as a direct manifestation of God itself. And far from effecting only those wavebands of existence occupied by ‘dead people’, it was said to penetrate to our own physical world and to be the source of healing and inspiration, and who-knows-what else. In particular it was said to provide the tiny psychic ‘nudge’ precipitating evolutionary shifts and step-changes in human development and civilisation. The source of this influence is whatever it is that answers our prayers, and our prayers are certainly answered, if not always quite in the way that we would like.
An answered prayer can easily be put down to coincidence, but as Archbishop William Temple said, sometime in the first half of the Twentieth Cecntury, “When I pray coincidences happen. When I don’t, they don’t.”
These spiritual interventions bring us healing, flashes of intuition, moments of inspiration, sudden warnings or feelings of certainty. However, rather than reaching us directly, unmitigated and at full-voltage, I was informed that these spiritually elevated vibrations flow ‘down’ to us through intermediate beings whose vibrations are more directly attuned to us; operating according to the theory of Spiritual Vibrations outlined above.
My experiments in trying to develop a slight gift of spiritual healing led me to begin regularly asking the ‘powers that be’ for specific energies to be transmitted to me.
It also began to seem natural to me to say ‘thank you’ when these requests were granted, and before too long I was happy to speak to these Powers about all manner of things. Amazingly, I felt that I got great benefit from doing this. I became aware that my state of mind, and, not to put too fine a point on it, my luck improved when I talked to whatever it was I was talking to.
So what was I doing? Was I praying? I do not know. I was saying ‘Please’ and ‘Thank You’ and asking for things and being very grateful when I got them, but I did not feel the slightest need to ‘worship’ or ‘praise’ whatever it was I was talking to. I had to acknowledge the existence of some sort of multidimensional and powerful spiritual entity, but was this thing God? If it was, then God was nothing like the God of my childhood, or any other God I had heard of. I had no sensation of communicating with a single being, no matter how vast and omnipresent. This ‘God’ seemed more like an organisation than an individual personality. This was a radical and powerful new concept for me, and the idea of God as a powerful and benevolent collective or consortium, rather than a single Being, has since become an important part of my thinking.
Another major characteristic of the Afterlife now became apparent. Most mediumistic communications seemed to come from people who had died (or ‘performed the act of death’, as one Communicator often put it) not too long before. These people were in some way nearer to our earthly wave-band of existence, and in a ‘place’ or condition in which communication to us was still occasionally possible. Only a few authentic-sounding messages came from people who had been there for hundreds of years, and the Communicators that I was coming to trust regarded mediums claiming to ‘channel’ famous figures from distant history with polite incredulity.
According to them, and according to numerous earlier Communicators over the previous hundred years, as recorded in Spiritualist literature, everybody, once dead, has the opportunity, and was given the encouragement, for spiritual growth and development. This would eventually raise their ‘vibrational signature’ to the point that they resonated more with a higher wave-band of existence, and they would then move away from the surroundings they had previously occupied onto a ‘higher plane’.
I have heard this process of spiritual growth and development described as being quite inevitable. ‘Corks at the bottom of a deep bucket’ is one image I have heard used. Some corks are more buoyant than others and all will rise at different speeds, but in time, all will reach the top. An even better analogy I have heard used is that of a tall glass of soda water. The inside of the glass is coated with bubbles which, one by one, detach themselves from their moorings and begin to float upwards. As they do, each little bubble accelerates and grows bigger and bigger. Sooner or later, say the Communicators, every individual, like a bubble, and no matter how attached they are to a ‘lower’ vibration, will eventually, and of their own will, begin to rise and will begin to expand, growing in spiritual energy.
My informant assured me that, as part of this advancement, people might choose to abandon certain aspects of their personal individuality, in order to form closer bonds with others of similar vibrations. These ‘cells’ of spiritual life-force can join together to create groups or confederations with a shared identity.
Although my communicator understood that this process of mental fusion might not sound particularly attractive to someone still proudly individual, and happily ensconced in the physical universe, he assured me that members of these mind-melded ‘group souls’ enjoyed greatly expanded consciousness and amplified spiritual abilities.
Another, quite astounding, revelation that he came out with, and one which I have since found described by other Communicators, is that all life-forms, not only human beings, or higher mammals, but all life, animal and vegetable, including the humblest single-cell organisms, survive into an Afterlife. As he pointed out, reasonably enough, the life-force inherent in an insect is the same life-force inherent in a human being, and has the same quality of survival and persistence following physical death. According to him, the spiritual identities of individual plants, flowers, trees, cattle, birds, bugs and protozoan slime, all continue to exist in an Afterlife.
He made a good point: ‘We have trees, flowers and animals here, in the same way that you have. How do you think they got here?’ Furthermore, he insisted that all these numberless life-forms also grew, developed and expanded in spiritual power, as time passed, in the same way that human beings did. With rather beautiful imagery he said that he could ‘show us a huge bank of magnificent blooms that are the final spiritual expression of a single daisy’.
C. S. Lewis (1898 – 1963) the author who is most celebrated for his Chronicles of Narnia, and for important and influential books on Christianity, also published, between 1938 and 1945 three fantasy novels known as the ‘Cosmic Trilogy’; Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra and That Hideous Strength. These books have made a great impression on me since I first came across them as a teenager. They are full of extraordinary concepts, and Lewis’ writing is daring and beautiful, particularly in the last two books.
However, there is one element among the many thought-provoking ideas in the ‘Cosmic Trilogy’ that is directly relevant to my own ideas on the subject of God. Lewis’ fictional universe is regulated by the ‘Oyéresu ‘, Planetary Angels, each one responsible for the wellbeing of individual planets. They are ‘in control’ of their inhabitants and guard the physical integrity of the planets themselves. Lewis’s Oyéresu are hugely powerful and lofty spiritual beings with godlike abilities, and are associated with the classical deities (Venus, Mars, Jove, Mercury etc.)
I was attracted by the simple concept of a planetary God, a God concerned with its own world, not the universe as a whole, and acting gently, with a light touch but with great power, to promote the well-being of its own planet.
I subscribe to the relatively mainstream belief that life has probably developed on innumerable other planets in the universe. But I should point out that in the very large number of ‘psychic’ communications that I had read or experienced, there are no really believable messages from, or references to, beings from other planets. The wave-bands of existence from where Psychic Communications seem to come, appear to be occupied exclusively by ex-inhabitants of Planet Earth. It therefore seems very likely to me that each planet that has developed Life will also have developed their own spiritual universe with their own ‘prime mover’ planetary angel.
The image of a polymorphous, multifarious God grew more and more distinct in my imagination; a real deity whose sphere of action was our planet and the beings on it. But where had it come from? Was it the creation of some overarching Creator God, who had maybe seeded the universe with similar planetary ‘prime movers’? Or had it somehow been generated by the planet itself. This idea has parallels with the ‘Gaia’ Hypothesis of James Lovelock, except that I see the influence of ‘dead’ organisms on the management of our planet to be of more significance than that of ‘living’ organisms.
The concepts I have outlined in this piece now came together to suggest to me, with overwhelming persuasiveness, that the god that answers our prayers, the god that cares for our planet, the god that floods the innumerable wavebands of our spiritual universe with light, is nothing less than the accumulated spiritual energies of every living thing that has ever existed on Earth. Everything and everyone that has lived and died, uncounted billions of organisms, from small and primitive amoebas, to all manners of animals, then every human being who has ever lived, from degraded criminals to great spiritual intelligences; they have all ‘died’ and then passed on to other wavebands of existence to grow and develop to their ultimate potential.
And as these spiritual beings rise and expand, they have increasingly coalesced, amalgamated and fused together to form the powerful and benevolent ‘operative providence’ that we call God.
Well, there we are. And is it true? I have no idea, but I think I am probably on the right track, whereas most other people would say that this is all completely loopy and that I am a grade-one nut-job. Sometime in the next twenty years, but not too soon I hope, I will probably be deceased, and in a better position to find out how close to reality my views were. I will report back, if I can.
Judge Smith,
Somerset
2025
