Sir Aukland Geddes was a doctor and professor of anatomy who eventually served for years as the British ambassador to the United States. He had an extremely distinguished career serving in a variety of lofty roles. In 1937 Geddes addressed a dissertation to the Edinburgh Medical Journal, one you can read here. His address (entitled "A Voice From the Grandstand") included some startling accounts. One was an account of long-distance telepathy, stretching from India to Scotland. Geddes stated this on page 367:
"A sister in Edinburgh has a severe heart attack as a result of shock and anxiety, because she knows intuitively that her brother, stationed in India, has met with some disaster, though no physical message of any sort has passed. Will you tell me what scientific steps you will take in Edinburgh to deal with the true cause and not the symptoms of the illness ? This is an actual case. The knowledge, of course, was conveyed by Telepathy, but what does that mean ? It is a mere word, and adds nothing to what I have just said she felt at a distance. Yet telepathy, as a result of the research carried out in Professor Rhine's Department of Psychology, Duke University, must I think be accepted as a primary datum of science."
Geddes was telling the medical authorities he was addressing: telepathy is a fact of science. No one who has seriously studied the evidence gathered by Professor Joseph Rhine should be at all surprised by this statement. The evidence Rhine gathered was indeed "smoking gun" evidence showing the existence of ESP and telepathy, as I discuss in my post "When Rhine and Pearce Got Smoking Gun Evidence for ESP," which you can read here. Very many scientific authorities conceded in that decade that telepathy had been well-proven. But senselessly in later decades professors developed a kind of amnesia about previous research on this topic, and seriously studying the topic became a senseless taboo of science professors.
Geddes then tells us (on page 368) of another astonishing case, one of endless medical cases in which the mind seems to have a mysterious influence on the body, in a way suggestive of mind-over-matter. We read of a mysterious cure of eczema, a disease involving red, itchy patches on the skin.
"Another case : A girl, a victim for years of extremely bad eczema, receives a letter which fills her with joy and thankfulness and within a few days the skin of her face and arms becomes soft and normal and, what is more, she suddenly acquires beauty and dignity. In this particular case the skin condition existed years before the tension that was ended by the letter. In the interval she had suffered much at the hands of many physicians, but they had all failed 'to cure the eczema.' "
On page 373 Geddes begins to tell a narrative that was probably unlike any that his doctor audience had heard. In all likelihood the event described was probably something that occurred to Geddes himself. Geddes states that he will read a "unique document," but it is not the first account of an out-of-body experience. But since such experiences were little known prior to 1937, we can excuse Geddes presumption that the experience was unique. He first states this:
"I am in a position to read to you to-night an unique document. It is the record of the experience of a man who passed into the very portals of death and was brought back to life by medical treatment. The record was taken down in shorthand by a skilled secretary as life was re-establishing itself. Its existence has been known to some of your teachers, perhaps to some of you, for some time. I have to request that those who know to whom this strange experience befell will respect the anonymity and professional secrecy in which this communication is veiled."
He then gives us the first-hand narrative of an out-of-body experience:
"On Saturday, November 9th, a few minutes after midnight, I began to feel very ill, and by 2 o'clock was definitely suffering from acute gastro-enteritis, which kept me vomiting and purging until about 8 o'clock. . . . By 10 o'clock I had developed all the symptoms of very acute poisoning ; intense gastro-intestinal pain, diarrhea ; pulse and respirations becoming quite impossible to count. I wanted to ring for assistance, but found I could not, and so quite placidly gave up the attempt. I realised I was very ill and very quickly reviewed my whole financial position : thereafter at no time did my consciousness appear to me to be in any way dimmed, but I suddenly realised that my consciousness was separating from another consciousness, which was also me. These for purposes of description we could call the A and B consciousness, and throughout what follows the ego attached itself to the A consciousness. The B personality I recognised as belonging to the body, and as my physical condition grew worse and the heart was fibrillating rather than beating, I realised that the B consciousness belonging to the body was beginning to show signs of being composite, that is, built up of ' consciousnesses ' from the head, the heart, the viscera, etc. These components became more individual and the B consciousness began to disintegrate, while the A consciousness which was now me, seemed to be altogether outside my body, which it could see. Gradually I realised that I could see not only my body and the bed in which it was, but everything in the whole house and garden, and then I realised that I was seeing not only ' things ' at home, but in London and in Scotland, in fact wherever my attention was directed it seemed to me ; and the explanation which I received, from what source I do not know, but which I found myself calling to myself my mentor, was that I was free in a time dimension of space, wherein ' now ' was in some way equivalent to 1 here ' in the ordinary three-dimensional space of everyday life.
I next realised that my vision included not only 'things' in the ordinary three-dimensional world, but also 'things' in these four or more dimensional places that I was in. From now on the description is and must be entirely metaphorical, because there are no words which really describe what I saw or rather appreciated. Although I had no body I had what appeared to be perfect two-eyed vision, and what I saw can only be described in this way, that I was conscious of a psychic stream flowing with life through time, and this gave me the impression of being visible, and it seemed to me to have a particularly intense iridescence. I understood from my mentor that all our brains are just end organs projecting as it were from the three-dimensional universe into the psychic stream and flowing with it into the fourth and fifth dimensions. Around each brain, as I saw it, there seemed to be what I can only describe in ordinary words as a condensation of the psychic stream, which formed in each case as though it were a cloud ; only it was not a cloud.
While I was just appreciating this, the mentor who was conveying information to me explained that the fourth dimension was in everything existing in the three-dimensional space, and at the same time everything in the three-dimensional space existed in the fourth dimension and also in the fifth dimension, and I at the time quite clearly understood what was meant, and quite understood how ' now ' in the fourth-dimensional universe was just the same to all intents and purposes as 'here' in a three-dimensional universe, that is to say a four-dimensional being was everywhere in the ' now,' just as one is ' everywhere ' in the ' here ' in a three-dimensional view of things. I then realised that I myself was a condensation, as it were, in the psychic stream, a sort of cloud that was not a cloud, and the visual impression I had of myself was blue. Gradually I began to recognise people, and I saw the psychic condensation attached to A, B, C, D, E, F and to quite a number of men that I know, especially to G and H. In addition, I saw quite a number of people that I know had very little psychic condensation at all attached to them. In addition to those just mentioned, I saw ' I ' very clearly and she also gave a visual impression of blueness ; ' A ' gave purple and dark red ; ' B pink ; ' D rather indefinite grey brown ; ' E ' pearly ; and ' F ' apricot colour ; ' G ' was definitely brown. Each of these condensations varied from all the others in bulk, sharpness of outline and apparent solidity.
Just as I began to grasp all these I saw ' A ' enter my bedroom ; I realised she got a terrible shock, and I saw her hurry to the telephone ; I saw my doctor leave his patients and come very quickly, and heard him say or saw him think ' He is nearly gone.' I heard him quite clearly speaking to me on the bed, but I. was not in touch with the body and could not answer him. I was really cross when he took a syringe and rapidly injected my body with something, which I afterwards learned was camphor. As the heart began to beat more strongly, I was drawn back, and I was intensely annoyed, because I was so interested and just beginning to understand where I was and what I was ' seeing.' I came back into the body really angry at being pulled back, and once I was back all the clarity of vision of anything and everything disappeared and I was just possessed of a glimmer of consciousness, which was suffused with pain.
It is surprising to note that this dream, vision or experience has shown no tendency to fade like a dream would fade, nor has it shown any tendency that I am aware of to grow or to rationalise itself as a dream would do. I think that the whole thing simply means that but for medical treatment of a peculiarly prompt and vigorous kind, I was dead to the three-dimensional universe. If this is so and if in fact the experience of liberation of consciousness in the fourth-dimensional universe is not imagination, it is a most important matter to place on record. Since my return with the injections there had been no repetition of any sort or kind of the experience or of the clear understanding that I seemed to have while I was free from the body."
The account above of someone describing himself as something like a blue cloud or condensation may have corroboration in the account below. Below is a very interesting account of a doctor who claimed to have twice seen a soul departing from the body when someone was dying. The doctors claimed that the souls looked like blue smoke.
You can read the account here:
The account here tells the same account in fewer words:
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