Sir Stafford Cripps: messages from the other side
Why we cannot prove our beliefs
Image: Sir Stafford Cripps in 1947.1
Both my parents are dead, and yesterday I gave the floor to something my father had said. Today, I give the floor to my mother. The difference between my father and my mother is that, to date, my father has not once spoken to me from the afterlife. My mother has, on a number of occasions. So, on this occasion, I give her the floor not as an echo from the past but as an active voice, which is, I can assure you, a strange thing to do.
My mother died in an English hospital on Friday, 23 February 2007, at 2.35 p.m. I know, because I was there. Whilst other family members came and went the evening before and gathered in the forenoon that day, I spent most of the previous evening alone with my mother. She could barely eat and when the orderly came around to take the order for teatime, my eyes alit on one thing I thought she could probably manage: fruit-flavoured gelatine pudding. It duly came an hour or so later and, for this last meal she would ever take, the roles for the first meal I ever took were reversed: this time, I fed her. That, I can also assure you, is a circle very squared.
She was able to formulate thoughts and to speak them, but it was in a whisper that never appeared on a stage I knew. There was one fantastic mis-hear on my part, which changed the direction of my life and would not be resolved for fully ten years. But of much more relevance here is a question she asked me loud and clear. There was no mistaking it. There was no way I could demur on answering it either. But the true answer I did not know. So I acted on impulse and made it up. Her question was, “Is there an afterlife?” My answer was, “Yes.” And, with that, the question-and-answer session ended.
It was one of the most consequential questions and answers that you can pose and reply to in a whole lifetime. I felt bad. I had humoured her. I had not been honest. Easing her passage with fairy stories. And yet, my answer had come instinctively, based on my belief. And whilst my belief stems from the teachings and evidence and learning of a lifetime, I did not qualify my answer with references to authority and supporting documentation. I simply said it. Because I believe it, and, in the end, once belief is attained, the evidence that got you there becomes irrelevant. Belief changes in an instant of epiphany from being a product of the rationale of the mind to being the visceral knowledge of the heart.
As an aside, if you want to witness the reverse process, I can recommend no better example than the moment at which Santuzza reveals to Turiddu’s mother, Lucia, his infidelity in Mascagni’s opera Cavalleria Rusticana, played wonderfully in the clip by Fedora Barbieri as Lucia—watch her facial expression change, for which she has no lyric to back it up—and Elena Obraztsova as Santuzza.
LUCIA
Why did you signal me
To be silent?
SANTUZZA
O mother, you know
That before he went for a soldier
Turiddu had sworn
Eternal faith to Lola.
On his return, he found her married,
And sought with a new love
To quell the flame
Which burned in his heart:
He loved me, I loved him.
But she, envious of my only delight
And forgetful of her husband,
Burned with jealousy …
She stole him from me …
And I am left disgraced;
Lola and Turiddu are lovers,
And I am left to weep.
LUCIA
Lord have mercy!
What is this you’ve come to tell me
On this holy day?
SANTUZZA
l am condemned!
O mother, go
And pray to God
And pray for me too!
When Turiddu comes,
I will plead with him
Once again.
LUCIA
going towards the church
Holy Mary,
Have mercy upon her!
There are, I know, some here who express scepticism in this regard, and therefore I need to make clear one thing: what it is that I believe in. Since childhood, my fascination with spirits, ghosts, poltergeists, manifestations and the like has been great. A friend of my sister-in-law, Matthew Manning, spent his childhood being chastised for playing tricks with his own family. He was accused regularly of having re-ordered the furniture in the family home in the quiet of the night. It got to the stage where the boy was locked and battened in his room at night, and yet the furniture continued to be restacked in the oddest of configurations. Writing appeared on the walls of the house, one example of which purported to be by Sir Stafford Cripps, who was a parliamentarian who acted as Britain’s Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1947 to 1950. He died of cancer in Zurich in 1952, three years before Manning was born. Manning’s abilities have been questioned and doubted. He is a practitioner of auto-writing, whereby spirits from the other side communicate through him in the form of drawings or writing, which convey a message, with an effect that is not unlike the spelling-out of words on a ouija board.
By the by, Sir Stafford Cripps was a remarkable socialist politician, and is perhaps most famous for taking a far-sighted view when war broke out, that a German victory could result in emancipation of the British working class:
I do not believe it would be a bad thing for the British working class if Germany defeated us.
Money cannot make armaments. Armaments can only be made by the skill of the British working class, and it is the British working class who would be called upon to use them. Today you have the most glorious opportunity that the workers have ever had if you will only use the necessity of capitalism in order to get power yourselves. The capitalists are in your hands. Refuse to make munitions, refuse to make armaments, and they are helpless. They would have to hand the control of the country over to you.
In short, to rephrase Sir Stafford: it is workers who make guns. It is workers who fire guns. And it is capitalists who profit from the two, in terms both of the sale of the guns and the geopolitical gains that result from firing them. If the workers refused to make them, there would be none to fire, and no wars for them to die in for gains they will never share.
I think I can assert that Sir Stafford Cripps was no nobody. Just why he chose to communicate with the modern world through Matthew Manning is something I cannot say. It’s been described to me by someone who has also auto-written on my behalf, that it is like waiting by a row of telephone kiosks in a railway station: you take the first one that becomes available, you don’t hang around waiting for a particular kiosk. However, why he chose Matthew Manning is insofar unknown, but it is as good as attested that he did. In one of the auto-writings on the walls of Manning’s childhood home was a signature by the politician. When government records were unearthed containing papers that bore the man’s signature in life, the two were found to be identical.
Now, the moral of this tale is not that I believe in God, as such, or even that God exists. To that extent, and for a dying woman, the question was remarkably well-phrased: not is there a God? but is there an afterlife? But it does draw me to a conclusion that I was right when I guessed on the evening of 22 February 2007 that there is an afterlife, beyond which I really cannot offer any further conclusion. Not as to whether the afterlife is dependent on the existence of God, nor as to whether God is perhaps a confabulation and synthesis of various strands of evidence that mankind has cobbled together as an entity, a simplification that aids our understanding at this stage of life, before our understanding gets expanded at some later stage, of death.
I mentioned there, en passant, that I’ve seen auto-writing being done. The matters that were written of were of direct relevance to me (some in words, one as a drawing—of direct relevance also to one particular subscriber to this blog, I can reveal), but were subjects of which I knew for a fact the medium had no knowledge whatsoever. Quite aside from the faith I place in him, the possibility of a fraud is ruled out by the subject matter. Someone in the afterlife had the will and determination to convey to me in this life the message that came. Of that I have no doubt. But its authorship was not expressly revealed at the time. That would come on the later occasions. Meanwhile the question why? is one that can take many years of careful reflection to answer. Nothing in this realm is easy.
In the years since her death, therefore, my mother has several times come back to tell me I was right. Telling people that fact makes me feel uncomfortable, however, because, even if belief stems from teachings, I or no one can make you believe. You cannot be led to God, or to any belief, by the nose. You must sniff Him out yourself. Only you can. If you suspected your partner of infidelity, you would only believe it once you had hard evidence. But you can never have hard evidence of God; that, however, does not mean that you can never believe in Him. It just means you have to have stronger suspicions. So, adducing evidence of a key question in people’s lives (on their deathbeds if not up unto that point) sounds like oversell.
Part of that erroneous conclusion stems from how people generally view belief: as something, just like any other fact or phenomenon, requiring evidence. And, when we think of evidence, we think of courts of law and science laboratories.
Belief is the precise opposite of judicial evidence. It rests on our spiritual senses, and not our five human senses, whereas a court will only hear evidence of the latter. Spirituality and morality proceed exclusively from intention. Our regulator in life in such matters is our conscience, whereas every other aspect of our life is governed by the law, which is a construct of man and not God, and, therefore, by the courts, the construct of man invented in order to rule on his construct of law. Matters judged by our consciences are judged based on intention; it is our intentions that betray our honesty or otherwise. But a court cannot judge intention as such; it must judge what people actually do.2 Somewhat comically, a court then separates acts and intention from each other and proceeds to analyse both; the act is determined on the basis of witness testimony and documentary evidence; for the intention itself, whilst it purports to do so, the court does not in fact look into the perpetrator’s mind, but into what his state of mind is likely to have been based on the surrounding circumstances, since, as Sir Thomas More said and every judge knows, “I have no window to look into another man’s conscience.”
So, how much evidence does a court need? Well, it’s often said they seek the truth, but the point at which a court deems itself to be in possession of the truth is itself somewhat arbitrary, especially given the alarming rate at which convictions get overturned. Their judgment is not predicated on knowing truth, but rather on knowing what they consider to be enough truth.
All that said, spirituality defies evidence: if the auto-writing by Sir Stafford Cripps on Matthew Manning’s childhood home’s walls were conclusive evidence of the other side, why is the matter still a subject of debate? Here is a strange fact: the more evidence you adduce in support of your belief, the more sceptical the unconvinced are of its veracity. Evidence in spirituality weakens your argument; people will only believe in the mysterious as long as it remains a mystery.
Finally, to know whether your intentions are pure, you need to interrogate your conscience: it will tell you. But, to determine whether court testimony is truthful, the usher asks the witness to swear before an entity, evidence of whose existence would actually fall foul of the court’s own rules of evidence, on a Bible whose authorship is unattested in terms of the rules on hearsay. Even if you affirmed, rather than swearing, that as a witness you would be telling the truth, that, in and of itself, entails a leap of faith on the part of those who are supposed to believe you—because you say those words.
That means that, if you conducted a legal debate on whether God exists, you’d essentially need to swear on the Bible that He does, before you could argue that He doesn’t.
By Yousuf Karsh - [1] Dutch National Archives, The Hague, Fotocollectie Algemeen Nederlands Persbureau (ANEFO), 1945-1989 bekijk toegang 2.24.01.04 Bestanddeelnummer 902-2072, CC0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=37131262.
There is a conundrum here:
God doesn’t take account of what you do, but of what you intend.
In statutory offences, courts judge what you do without considering your intention (such as breaking the speed limit).
In more serious offences (theft, murder), the prosecution must prove what the accused did as well as what they intended to do, and so must prove both act and intention. But, because they cannot actually go into the accused’s mind, they extrapolate intention from the circumstances surrounding the act, and therefore the split into act and intention is in fact spurious.
But the whole judicial process is spurious, because, before a court can pass judgment, it has to know what the intention was, not of the accused but of the lawmakers who passed the law. That applies whether the law is written or unwritten, comprised in a statute or in case law: the question is always what the person who laid down the law intended with that law. Courts of law therefore spend their time trying to figure out what everyone intended; and yet it’s only the accused and lawmakers themselves who can say what they intended. And, when it suits politicians, they simply invent what was intended, as in the case of Tyler Robinson.
Can there even be such as thing as a rule of law?