The New Revelation by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

I have spoken in the text of the striking manner in which accounts of / life in the next phase, though derived from the most varied and / independent sources, are still in essential agreement -- an agreement / which occasionally descends to small details. A variety is introduced / by that fuller vision which can see and describe more than one plane, / but the accounts of that happy land to which the ordinary mortal may / hope to aspire, are very consistent. Since I wrote the statement I / have read three fresh independent descriptions which again confirm the / point. One is the account given by "A King's Counsel," in his recent / book, I Heard a Voice (Kegan Paul), which I recommended to inquirers, / though it has a strong Roman Catholic bias running through it which / shows that our main lines of thought are persistent. A second is the / little book The Light on the Future, giving the very interesting / details of the beyond, gathered by an earnest and reverent circle in / Dublin. The other came in a private letter from Mr. Hubert Wales, and / is, I think, most instructive. Mr. Wales is a cautious and rather / sceptical inquirer who had put away his results with incredulity (he / had received them through his own automatic writing). On reading my / account of the conditions described in the beyond, he hunted up his own / old script which had commended itself so little to him when he first / produced it. He says: "After reading your article, I was struck, / almost startled, by the circumstance that the statements which had / purported to be made to me regarding conditions after death / coincided -- I think almost to the smallest detail -- with those you set / out as the result of your collation of material obtained from a great / number of sources.

I cannot think there was anything in my antecedent / reading to account for this coincidence. I had certainly read nothing / you had published on the subject. I had purposely avoided Raymond and / books like it, in order not to vitiate my own results, and the / Proceedings of the S. P. R. which I had read at that time, do not touch, / as you know, upon after-death conditions. At any rate I obtained, at / various times, statements (as my contemporary notes show) to the effect / that, in this persisting state of existence, they have bodies which, / though imperceptible by our senses, are as solid to them as ours to us, / that these bodies are based on the general characteristics of our / present bodies but beautified; that they have no age, no pain, no rich / and poor; that they wear clothes and take nourishment; that they do not / sleep (though they spoke of passing occasionally into a semiconscious / state which they called 'lying asleep' -- a condition, it just occurs to / me, which seems to correspond roughly with the 'Hypnoidal' state); / that, after a period which is usually shorter than the average / life-time here, they pass to some further state of existence; that / people of similar thoughts, tastes and feelings, gravitate together; / that married couples do not necessarily reunite, but that the love of / man and woman continues and is freed of elements which with us often / militate against its perfect realization; that immediately after death / people pass into a semi-conscious rest-state lasting various periods, / that they are unable to experience bodily pain, but are susceptible at / times to some mental anxiety; that a painful death is 'absolutely / unknown,' that religious beliefs make no difference whatever in the / after-state, and that their life altogether is intensely happy, and no / one having ever realised it could wish to return here. I got no / reference to 'work' by that word, but much to the various interests / that were said to occupy them. That is probably only another way of / saying the same thing.