Testimony of Light - An Extraordinary Message of Life After Death - Part One

Aart Jurriaanse in his private publication Life – Now and Hereafter offers this advice –

Anybody genuinely interested in the after-life, should make every endeavour to obtain a copy of this lovely little book in which Helen Greaves has so effectively pictured conditions apparently prevailing on the other side of the veil. The state of existence described, and which the average well-meaning individual may reasonably expect to encounter on passing over, seems so attractive, that the condition commonly known as “death”, really appears to be something to look forward to, instead of being dreaded, as is the case at present with the vast majority of mankind.

Helen Greaves and Frances Banks used to be close friends. Shortly after Frances took leave of her physical vehicle in 1965, she established telepathic contact with Helen, who had temporarily remained behind. By means of this “channel” Frances was enabled to provide fairly detailed descriptions of conditions she encountered in the etheric worlds.

Helen has recorded the gist of these telepathic communications in TESTIMONY OF LIGHT.

Helen begins by providing a brief “Biographical Introduction,” followed by a description of Frances’ “return” to the spheres of the spirit. The rest of the book consists of the actual “scripts” provided by Frances, and is the source from which the following extracts have been selected.

You are free to disseminate these writings as the author has stated that all his writings may be freely used and are not subject to any restrictions. Please note, however, that Helen Greaves, has asserted her right to be identified as the author of Testimony of Light – An Extraordinary Message of Life After Death (Publishers – Neville Spearman Ltd, The Priory Gate, Friars Street, Sudbury, Suffolk, UK). Frances' scripts are an amazing account of life after death and I urge you to bookmark and read these pages at your leisure. These extracts make for interesting and compelling reading!

HELEN (pp. 13–26):

The “scripts” in this book have, I believe, been communicated to me by telepathy and inspiration from the surviving mind of Frances Banks, M.A., who left this world on November 2^nd, 1965.

Frances Banks was an intimate friend of mine. For the last eight years of her life we worked together psychically and spiritually. We also explored the deep levels of mediation.

Those who knew Frances Banks intimately will recognise her ‘signature’ in these scripts. In her earthly life she was a pioneer and she exhibits, by her frank communication and interpretation of her life in the spiritual realms, that she still merits that epithet. She was ever striving to learn, to discover and then to impart that which she has made her own to others when she lived among us; and she has carried this characteristic with her in the Beyond.

Frances had indicated that these ‘accounts’ which are of an inspirational teaching nature, should be made public, in the hope that a first-hand report of that phase of living to which we are all graduating, may be of value.

Frances Banks died, as she had lived, fully conscious of what she was doing and where she hoped to go. She refused drugs until the very end, bearing her pain with fortitude. At the last she spoke of seeing incarnate and discarnate entities in her room. She arranged her material affairs and said ‘farewell’ to those of her friends who were near enough to visit her. She astonished the good Scottish doctor who attended her at the last by saying cheerfully, a day or so before she lapsed into a coma – “Goodbye, Doctor. See you in the next world!”

After her death I felt cut off from all spiritual contact. My mind was dry and arid. For some weeks I found it most difficult to meditate, or even to withdraw into the quietness of the soul at all.

Then one evening, a Sunday, about three weeks after Frances’ death, as I was sitting alone beside my fire listening to radio music, I gradually became aware of a Presence. The air seemed to take on a great stillness and a hush of expectancy. I switched off the radio and allowed myself to relax into this peace. No thought of a possible communicator from another world occurred to me. No word was spoken in my mind. I was very still and quiescent. Slowly my whole being seemed to be caught up into a peace and beauty that I cannot describe. This beauty was both around me and within me. Almost imperceptibly I passed into a state of deep meditation in which I was conscious of being immersed in light. I was part of the Light yet the Light issued from beyond me. I felt a One-ness with all that was highest and best and with the eternal Self within me. I felt the nearness of spiritual Presences. I was swept on into a meditation in which Frances and I had participated some years before. I even heard my mind repeating invocations from that meditation.

Gently, and with great reverence, it was borne in upon me that I was not only in touch with my own immortal soul, but also with the soul of Frances Banks.

It was some days later when I felt Frances’ mind impinging on mine, as it had often done in our time together on earth. Words dropped into my thoughts which did not come from my consciousness. I knew that her discarnate mind and my incarnate one had linked together again in telepathic communication.

Frances had something to say! She wished to get her message across. I was the one who had been her ‘Celestial Telephone’ as she had called it. What more natural than that she should wish now to speak and not merely to listen? She was now in the position of ‘seeing a little farther’. I knew, from my personal experience of her, that Frances never wasted a minute when she could be about her Father’s business. Now that she was evidently restored to consciousness and awareness after the change into her new life, her first burning desire would be to make known all that was happening; to send back at first-hand. She would now be able to demonstrate the next life, of which she had written and spoken; to expound with authority on the subject which had been so close to her heart; the reality of Life Everlasting; the continued progress of the Spirit.

I sat down, took my pen and began to write. Words, thoughts, sentences tumbled out on the paper. It was almost as though I took dictation. Yet this was not automatic writing. I was perfectly in control. I could feel that her mind was using mine. This was a composite effort. Her mind ‘inspired’ the subject matter, the experiences and later, the stories of her fellow-travellers in the Life Beyond. She explored the potentials of my mind, and enabled me to employ the craft of writing which I had learned in my journalistic work.

At a further period in the writing of the scripts, Frances explained that she herself was working with, and under the inspiration of, a group, or band, for this transmitting of her impressions of the Life Beyond to be translated into a book.

Later, as I became more used to this method, I was even able to ask a question and receive an immediate answer. I wrote for an hour. My pen scarcely lifted from the page. When I read through what I had written my astonishment grew. This happened for several days and I became more astounded at the subjects upon which I had written. I could not, without effort and without definitely searching my limited imagination, have invented such stories as poured through me. It was exactly as though I was simply registering and translating her thoughts at certain times.

During this time though, I was perfectly aware that I was ‘under compulsion’ to carry on with the work until all that she wished had been communicated.

“Many may ridicule,” she insisted, “but if only a few are strengthened in consciousness, and helped to live closer to Reality, then our partnership has not been in vain.”

Frances was convinced of the fact of communion with the spiritual worlds and of the reality of the higher self in each one of us. She trusted implicitly in the survival of mind and personality beyond death and she was reverently aware of the spirit within which urged her on – the ‘Christ-in-You’ of Christianity.

Always she strove for a ‘break-through’ to Spirit, and by this, I do not mean only psychic communication. Her belief was that, through meditation, through retiring into the deep centre of oneself and finding the place of the silence of the soul, communion could be established with advanced souls; higher beings, great ones whom we call Saints.

This, she felt, was the message for the New Age into which we are now emerging, a greater extension of man’s consciousness, so that even during the limitation of earthly life, he can enter the beauty of the spiritual worlds and receive inspiration therefrom. She stressed, also, that man should realise and accept his place in a divine scheme.