--- title: Improvement Era description: Monthly periodical of the Mormon church, 1897 onward. This library holds the issues of November 1897 to December 1930. authors: - Pelley, William Dudley collections: - periodicals tags: - magazine - improvement-era periodical: Improvement Era volume: 32 number: 9 published: 1929-07 publisher: Young Men’s Mutual Improvement Associations publisher_place: Salt Lake City language: en type: magazine reference: "William Dudley Pelley, “Seven Minutes in Eternity,” *Improvement Era* 32, no. 9 (July 1929): 713–721." source: url: https://archive.org/details/improvementera3209unse transcription: Transcribed from the Internet Archive scan of each issue (the item for each issue is named in the issue's own source); unnumbered advertising leaves are omitted, printed page numbers are kept as page markers. identifier: improvementera3209unse start_page: 713 end_page: 721 rights: status: public-domain basis: US publication 1930 or earlier (published 1929-07) source: https://archive.org/details/improvementera3209unse publication_year: 1929 note: The Internet Archive item metadata carries a blanket "© Copyright by Intellectual Reserve, Inc." notice. The library owner judged it inapplicable because this issue was published in 1929, before 1931; a scan-level notice does not restore copyright. --- # Seven Minutes in Eternity Seven Minutes in Eternity" By William Dudley Pelley (Conclusion) THERE is a survival of human entity after death of the body, for I have ,seen and talked intelligently with friends whom I had looked down upon as cold wax in caskets. But that is not all. There is plenty of aftermath. To describe the effects of the experience, however, it is necessary to intrude a few personal confidences, none of which I am eager to make. I brought something back with me from that Ecstatic Interlude — something that had interpenetrated my physical self and which suddenly began to function in strange powers of perception. I was born the only son of an itinerant Methodist preacher. Soon after my birth my parents began that old-fashioned Odyssey of traveling from "call" to "call" in the northern Massachusetts back hills. Orthodox Protestant theology, as it was forty years ago, was far more plentiful in my father's household than bread, butter, clothes, and fuel. Camp meetings and quarterly conferences, the higher criticism, predestination, free will and election, infant dam- nation, hell fire, and the day of judgment constituted the household in my young and "tender" years. God early shaped up to me as a weird combination of heavenly Moloch and sublimated Overseer of the Poor. Parish poverty forced my father from the ministry, but with grim New England rigor he saw to it that his relinquishment of a pulpit did not lessen my surfeit of conventional theology. Three times to church on the Sabbath day and twice during the week — Tuesday evening class meeting and Thursday evening prayer meet- ing— left me small opportunity to forget my Maker and the grati- tude I owed him. Just what this gratitude was owed him for troubled my small soul exceedingly jn those far-off years, because I found myself created a perpetually hungry, shabbily dressed, and none-too-happy youngster who had to start his life labor at fourteen years of age and stay with it thereafter, even to the present. Rebellion Against Religious Authority IN THE years between fourteen and twenty-two I became a smold- ering young Bolshevik against every kind of authority — par- ticularly against religious authority which had apparently sanctioned these injustices against me — and by picking up the rudiments of a Reprinted, by permission, from American Magazine of March, 1929. First part published in June Era. 714 IMPROVEMENT ERA July. 1929 denied education through promiscuous reading, I went far afield from accredited Christianity. No need to clutter up this article with a list of the books I read, but at twenty-two, in a little town in northern New York, I was publishing a brochure magazine of heretical leanings. I had discovered myself possessed of a certain facility with iconoclastic language, and the courage of my ignorance. Fresh from a wry, lonely, misunderstood childhood, cluttered up psychologically with the worst sort of New England inhibitions, revengeful that I had been denied social and academic advantages for which my hunger was instinctive, I proceeded to play a lone hand and make things hot for several godly people whose only indictment was that they represented Authority as aforesaid — and especially spiritual. On maturer perspective I see that I should have been spanked — or educated — but all the theological misfits in forty-eight states and a couple of foreign countries were soon buying my magazine, and my twaddle was piling up to give me much heartache later when I came to see that I took out on God what I should have taken out on inhibited environment. The Almighty stood the onslaught pretty well, however. I got into newspaper work, and marriage, and fatherhood, and more poverty, and that was the last of the heretical magazine, though not of its owner's theological complexes. I shopped around in my religions. I read still queerer books. And inevitably the day came when immature intelligence couldn't stand this food, and instead of digesting it, I ejected it a la mal de met For ten years I was one of the worst agnostics that ever had books come to his post-office box in plain wrappers from freak publishing houses. I had brains enough to see that my life had been started all wrong and was "getting no better fast," but had not the academic or social equipment to alter existence and start myself about-face. Those were cruel, cruel years — looking back on them now. A couple of my business projects went to whack. So did my mar- riage. With each additional snarl I got more and more vindictive. The death of my first daughter mellowed me somewhat for a time. I wrote a couple of novels in which love of human nature was largely a reflex from the fearful storm of hatred and despair that was waging inside me. I knew my life was a ghastly mess, that I was cynical and caustic, that the so-called "friends" whom I could trust could be counted on the fingers of one hand — and most of those would stand watching — that we got nothing in this world unless we fought for it with the ferocity of a Siberian wolf-dog and that America's entry into the World War found me in the Orient, without a doubt Death ended everything. July, 1929 SEVEN MINUTES IN ETERNITY 715 not at all a healthy place for one striving to escape the biological premise for human existence. I went with the Japanese forces to Siberia, acted as Red Triangle man, consular courier, and war cor- respondent through the Bolshevik-Czech campaign, and came back to the United States to face a newspaper business in ruins. The swarming millions of Asia had not confirmed my faith in the con- ventional Almighty's goodness and wisdom — had made me only more skeptical, in fact — though I never had anything but remorse- ful tenderness in my heart of the Man of Sorrows and what he epitomized in the human scheme of things. Taking Life by Strong-arm Methods TO save my newspaper creditors from loss, I went to Hollywood and labored among the Flesh Pots. I made a score of motion pictures, most of them flops because I had a most uncanny facility for roiling the very persons whom I should have made my friends. I wrote a couple of books which my publishers refused. I fought with them in consequence, still taking life by strong-arm methods. I wrote many stories that editors rejected. I fought with them, too. When an editor wouldn't buy a certain story I sat down to my typewriter and contrived to tell him that I thought him an ass. f even told the editor of The American Magazine that he was an ass — in spite of which he showed his caliber by taking my opinion as painlessly as possible and going right along buying and publishing my better submissions. That hurt worse than if he had fought with me. You see, I had the unfortunate complex that the attainment of success meant a knock-down-and-drag-out scrap. It made me a lone wolf at life, getting the least bit mangy as I reached my forties. Time after time I tried sincerely to correct my psychology and get back certain religious (not theological) cues I felt I had lost with the passing of boyhood. I plunged deeper than ever into eleven-pound volumes on all sorts of race traits and behaviorism. It was a walking exposition of how a man may reach middle life and be the worst internal mess that ever got into "Who's Who." Brings Something Back TfN view of such an autobiographical summary, can you see the JA significance of my nocturnal experience? I went about my bungalow in the days that followed as if I were still in a sort of trance — -which verily I was. Days of this, with a queer unrest galvanizing me, a feeling that I was on the verge of something, that out of my weird Self-Projection onto another plane of existence I had brought something that was working within me like yeast. 716 IMPROVEMENT ERA July. 1929 Then came experience number two — not quite so theatric and therefore harder to describe. One night while still imbued with the "feeling" of my fourth dimensional adventure, I took down a volume of Emerson and opened it by chance at his essay on the Over-Soul. In the middle of it, though not reading any specific line, epigram, paragraph, or page, I had a queer moment of confusion, a sort of cerebral vertigo, then a strange physical sensation at the very top of my head as if a beam of pure white light had poured down from above and bored a shaft straight into my skull. In that instant a vast weight went out of my whole physical ensemble. A veil was torn away. An Indescribable Experience [ saw no "vision," but something had happened and was continu- -U- ing to happen. A cascade of pure, cool, wonderful peace was fall- ing down from somewhere above me and cleansing me. My book fell from my fingers to the rug and stayed there. I sat there staring into space. / was not the same man I had been a moment before! I mean this physically, mentally, spiritually. I knew that somehow I had acquired senses and perceptions that I could never hope to describe to any second person, and yet they were as real to me as the shape of my wrists. For a time I wondered if "much learning had driven me mad," but then I recalled that really mad people never question whether or not they're mad. Next, I was aware of some- thing new and strange and different from anything in my whole experience — There was someone in that darkening room with me besides Laska, my dog. In fact, I was aware that several living, vibrant personalities were with me in that room. Laska sat up, cocked her head from side to side, and wagged her tail at some of them — at nothing — apparently — one of them, in particular, standing by my desk at the north end of the room. And yet I was not in the slightest afraid. Why be afraid of our friends? * * * Discovers Hidden Powers TTN all of my life up to that time I had never seen a ghost, never had ■"■ more than an academic interest in psychic phenomena. I had not invited any of these experiences that I knew of. They had simply come to me. What really had happened was, I had unlocked hidden powers within myself that I know every human being possesses, and had augmented my five physical senses with other senses just as bona fide. legitimate and natural as touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing. That July, 1929 SEVEN MINUTES IN ETERNITY 717 I had help in unlocking those hidden powers I do not deny. Never- theless, nothing had happened to me that has not happened to hun- dreds of other people, but only very rarely do they talk about it. What those hidden powers are, and why I maintain that they are bona fide, legitimate, and natural I shall have to leave. But they had suddenly shown me that life is not at all the ordinary, hum- drum, three-meals-a-day thing that I had always accepted. Its essence or its meaning is so vast and fine and high and beautiful that it overwhelmed me, and a recognition of it performed a sort of re-creation in me that made me feel I was actually not the same fellow I had been just before. My desire to explain what I mean by this is almost an ache within me at this moment. But, for some uncanny reason, words are not the medium to convey it. Thought doesn't convey it. Feel- ing doesn't convey it. The "me" that is the Bill-Pelley identity can convey it only by being, and the fact that I am gets it to you. Is that last a nonsensical statement? Well, I hope I'm not cracked. All I can say is, that I know by experience that there is a great, overpowering existence outside of what we call Life — that I have been in it and felt it — that having been in it has endowed me with certain capacities that have transformed my whole concept of the universe and, some of my friends are kind enough to add, have transformed me — physically as well as mentally and spiritually. Ordered to Give up Cigarettes MY first dramatic physical reaction was a sudden change in the components of my body. I discovered that miraculously I had lost my "nerves." Ever since childhood I had lived under such a tremendous nervous tension that it had kept me under-weight, put lines in my face and an edge on my voice, shattered me psychologically so that opposition of any kind infuriated me and made me want to crash through it like an army tank flattening out a breastworks. Attacks of nervous indigestion were so common that I no longer gave them thought. Suddenly all this had departed. I was peaceful inside. And the change soon began to manifest itself in concrete form. One day in my office I took a package of cigarettes from my desk. About to apply a light to one of them, / heard a voice say as gently as any worried mother might caution a careless son, "Oh, Bill, give up your cigarettes!" And even before it had occurred to me that no one was present in the flesh to address me thus audibly, I an- swered: "All right!" and tossed the package into the near-by 718 IMPROVEMENT ERA July. 1929 wastebasket. I went all that day without smoking. Next morning, again, I reached for my tobacco tin across on my desk to load up my corncob. It was knocked from my hands with a slap that tossed it upward in the air and deposited it bottom upward at my{ feet with the tobacco spilled out. No cautioning this time. But I knew! I haven't smoked tobacco in any form from that day to the present — this after twenty years of smoking a dozen cigars a day, lighting one from the butt of the other. Moreover, I haven't had the slightest ill effect nor did I go through the agonizing torture of "breaking off." I just didn't smoke any more — didn't have the nervous urge — didn't even give tobacco a thought. The same strange prohibition seemed to shut down on coffee, tea, alcohol, and meats. I endured not the slightest distress in giving these items up. They simply ceased to exist for me. And, inversely, a strange new sensation began to manifest itself in my muscles and organs. I had the glorious feeling of physical detachment from the handicaps of bodily matter. No form of bodily exercise seemed to take energy that I had consciously to supply. I had always been slightly stoop-shouldered. Without any unusual exercise, my spine straightened of itself, so to speak. Along with this physical phenomenon went the unexplainable faculty of withstanding fatigue. If I wearied myself by prolonged physical labor, it was the healthy weariness of boyhood that over- took me, and a sound night's sleep wrought complete readjustment. On the other hand, I found I could sit at my typewriter twelve hours at a stretch, if necessary, with hardly a muscle protesting. I had suffered consistently from insomnia ever since a period in my twenties when I worked as police reporter on a morning newspaper. Now I went to bed and to sleep. With this physical alteration came a different feeling toward those around me. This perhaps was the most astounding aftermath of the whole adventure. Certainly it appeared to have convinced my friends that some extraordinary thing had occurred, since it dramatized my rejuvenation, so to speak, and gave them some- thing to perceive with their senses. Nervousness Ends I DISCOVERED, for instance, that I couldn't show any more ner- vous bellicosity to those with whom I came daily in contact. I recall specifically that just before my strange experience I had made an unfortunate investment in a chain of western restaurants. I was striving to withdraw with minimum loss. Local banks and bankers July, 1929 SEVEN MINUTES IN ETERNITY 719 had refused to come to my assistance in order to lubricate the situa- tion and help hold the proposition together till a purchaser more competent in the food business than myself should be procured. I submit that I had every chance to be incensed at them for not assist- ing me, for my bank account had run into thousands upon thousands of dollars and the conventional banking advice and aid at the right moment would have made the whole commercial ordeal only a passing incident. Six months before I would have been so fighting mad that my hatred of this sort of treatment and my loathing of "bloated capital- ists who showed themselves only fair-weather friends" would have made me physically ill. In fact, I formerly prided myself on being a good hater. But somehow, worried though I was, I hadn't the slightest ill will toward these banking people, and I went ahead and pulled my proposition out of the hole without their financial aid. And, inversely, when the situation came to the surface and others heard of the fight I was making, I was overwhelmed by their manifestations of good will and their practical assistance. For the first time in my experience people were going out of their way to perform services for me, to counsel me, to seek my society, to make me and my problems one with themselves — yes, even to offer me unsolicited loans. I think this amazed me more than the strange- ness of my physical rebirth. At first I thought it might have some- thing to do with a resentment those persons held toward the bankers who had abandoned me just the moment a cloud showed on my horizon. I thought they might be acting in a sort of sympathy and nursing their own barked knuckles. Then I became aware that some of them hadn't heard of my predicament, and that startled me. What on earth had gotten into folks that they were so interested in me and my activities? I came through to New York some weeks later to mend literary fences and renew some sagging editorial acquaintances. I was not at all prepared for the attention I got. It had never happened to me before. I was utterly at a loss. I discovered that some sort of invisible wall between me and the rest of the world had been razed. It is embarrassing to dilate on this state of affairs and the altered social relations maintaining now with friends who were for- merly only acquaintances. And yet — deep down underneath it all — from the very first I have had instinctive understanding. And that understanding has been growing in clarity every day and hour since that epochal night in the bungalow. I must concede that it increasingly comprises many factors 720 IMPROVEMENT ERA July. 1929 and revelations which I am constrained from reporting. Still, there are conclusions and equations I may draw that have a universality of application. What Caused the Change? WHAT is this thing which happened to me, and why did it happen? First, I believe my subconscious hunger after what the Bible terms "the things of the Spirit" — that is, the sincere desire to pene- trate behind the mediocrity of three-meals-a-day living and ascertain what mystery lies behind this Golgotha of Existence — attracted to me spiritual forces of a very high and altruistic order, who aided me in making a hyperdimensional visitation. I believe such hunger will always attract such forces. Second, it goes without saying that having made such a visita- tion and having had certain questions concretely answered by those I confronted in that dimension, my subconscious (or for that matter conscious) knowledge of what the Fourth Dimension is, and means, and what can be done within its area, undertook to operate first upon my physical body and to bring about the rejuvenation which subsequently came to me. And yet I can no more explain the Fourth Dimension with words than I can convey to a man blind from birth the redness of the color red. I know what it is myself, as I know what redness is. I can see how it interpenetrates Matter, constituting the "inside" of it, so to speak, and how projections from it must come out the reverse of what we know them on the physical plane. But I can no more make it intelligible to the average reader than Einstein can explain Relativity to a group of men in a smoking car, all of them unfamiliar with advanced mathematics. Third, these experiences immediately revealed to me that there is a world of subliminal or spiritual existence, interpenetrating the ordinary world in which most of us exist as ordinary two-legged Americans, full of aches and worries, and that this subliminal world is the real world — the world of "stern reality" if you will; that it is waiting for the race to learn of it and "tap" its beneficent resources, without waiting for what we call physical death; that our "dead" dear ones are existent in it — alive, happy, conscious, and waiting for us to join them, either at death or any time we reach that stage of spirituality where we can make contact with them. I have seen my own there and have visited with them! Understand thoroughly — I am not a Spiritualist, an Occu- list, or a Psychic Researcher, in the ordinary meaning of those terms. I am not trying to convert anyone to anything. I'm simply telling you that something happened to me which was not consciously July. 1929 SEVEN MINUTES IN ETERNITY 721 self-invited; that my friends attest to an even greater alteration's having taken place in my personality than I am capable of feeling from within. Spirituality the Essence op Life THERE is in every human heart a hunger and thirst for the things of the spirit, but in many of them this desire has been so em- balmed with the poisons of worry, doubt, fleshly desire, struggle to attain the wherewithal for physical survival, that for all practical purposes it no longer exists. But the day is coming in the evolution of the race when spirit- uality is going to be the whole essence of life, instead of the world's present materialism. Here and there have always been those who, by their unusual visions, self-invited or otherwise, might be called monitors for the rest of us — showing us what we all may attain if we so order our lives and thinking as to be susceptible to such revelations. I believe that Nature — God — Universal Spirit — give the Great Cause any name you will — is taking this method of conferring unusual experiences upon these "monitors/' to give the whole race an inspiration by which it may quicken its spiritual pace. There is nothing any more prohibitive, morally or ethically, to exploration of these new great Fields of Real Reality than to exploration of the fields of radio or atomic energy. In fact, the Great Cause intends that we shall explore them. At any rate, whether I am right or wrong, I know that for a limited time one night last year out in California my spiritual entity left my body and went somewhere — a concrete place where I could talk, walk about, feel, and see; where answers were returned to questions addressed to physically dead people, which have checked up; in the waking world and clarified for me the riddle of earthly existence. I know there is no Death because, in a manner of speaking. I went through the process of dying, came back into my body and took up the burden of earthly living again. I know that the experience has metamorphosed the cantankerous Vermont Yankee that was once Bill Pelley, and launched him into a wholly different universe that seems filled with naught but love, harmony, health, good humor, and prosperity. What's the answer to that? There is no answer, except that it must be accepted as inevit- ably as I am forced to accept the awareness of my own entity. I know because I experienced. Further deponent sayeth not!