Last night I started reading The Road to Immortality, a book purportedly written by the deceased psychical researcher F.W.H. Myers, as channeled by Geraldine Cummins. I can’t vouch for the authenticity of the material, of course, but what I’ve read so far has been highly interesting and very relevant to issues discussed on this blog over the past couple of weeks. "Myers" talks about the distinction between the higher and lower self, the evolution of postmortem consciousness, and the illusory nature of the physical world (and of the immediate postmortem world, "Summerland").
Cummins was responsible for the famous text Swan on a Black Sea, in which she allegedly channeled Winifred Margaret Coombe Tennant, a medium known pseudonymously as Mrs. Willett. This is often cited as one of the most convincing channeled books because of the many personal details it reveals about Mrs. Willett, details confirmed by her two sons.
One bit of phrasing in The Road to Immortality made me think there is at least a chance that the real Myers is behind the scripts.
When they shuffle off the heavy body, when in a finer shape they take flight from it, they frequently do not realize the fundamental unreality of earth…. They can, at any time, if they choose, escape from the coil of earth memories, from what I might term the "swaddling clothes" of the life after death.
The living Myers was a classical scholar and an expert on poetry and literature, certainly including Shakespeare. The above sentences play off a famous line from Hamlet’s soliloquy: what dreams may come, when we have shuffled off this mortal coil, must give us pause. Most people, I think, have an erroneous interpretation of this image. They seem to picture a person shuffling his feet as he walks off stage. Actually, the image is of person sloughing off his physical body, much like a snake shedding its skin (its "coil"). Note that the communicating "Myers" gets the image right, correctly equating shuffle with slough and coil with the physical body or with swaddling clothes.
This does not prove anything, of course, but if the image had been rendered incorrectly, it would be pretty good evidence that the real Myers was not being heard.
The entire book can be read online (or downloaded to read offline) here. The same Web site offers three other free ebooks by Geraldine Cummins. (The rest of the site is devoted to marketing some sort of New Age self-help technique.)
A brief discussion of The Road to Immortality and its sequel is found here here (scroll about halfway down the page).