Transcript of the Isaac Watson Session with Leslie Flint

Betty Greene:
How did you find yourself?

Watson:
A sense of tremendous relief. My goodness me, I was so glad to get away from the Earth and out of that body of mine. And away from…well, some of the people that were only just waiting for me to die, so that they could get my money. But I’m afraid they were all rather disappointed. I made sure of that.

Greene:
How did you actually find yourself Mr Watson? What conditions did you find yourself?

Watson:
What? Conditions?

Greene:
Well I mean, what sort of, um…

Watson:

Well I found myself over here, first thing I remember was my father coming to meet me. Funny thing was I remember “waking up”—I suppose is the way you’d put it—it would appear to me to be (well, it was) a garden.

First of all I thought it was the garden of our old house. We had a magnificent garden. My father was a great gardener and very interested in that. This place was so like it. And I remember I was sitting on a seat and looking across the lawns to an ornamental lake, which my father had had built. And I remember waking up and seeing my father coming towards me with his hands outstretched. First it didn’t strike me as odd. I think I thought of it all in such a natural manner, as if it was the most natural thing.

I remember him sitting down beside me and congratulating me. Well this struck me as odd, why I should be congratulated. In fact, I couldn’t think what I had done, what I had achieved. He wasn’t a demonstrative man on Earth and there he was telling me how happy he was, that I’d come through and succeeded.

For a moment I didn’t understand what he was referring to and then it suddenly dawned on me, that this was all an unnatural situation. What was I doing on this seat in this particular place—which was really of some forty years previously, possibly more, in my youth; my early years, my formative years?

We often went to the country during the summer months when business permitted—and in the winter too. And it was just as if I had come down for a week or two in the country to my father’s place. And it struck me as being so strange, because it was as if I could remember at that particular moment, that I had been much older, and that I was lying on a bed and that I was, and had been for many months, suffering a great deal with my lungs and chest, having great difficulty with breathing.

But here I was, as natural . . . and breathing as easily as I had done in the old days.

And my father said, “you know, you’re now out of it all.” And it began to dawn on me that this was an unreal situation. But I . . . what he meant was, that I was out of the old life and I couldn’t help thinking to myself, “well I can’t be dead.” And yet everything seems to imply that some big change has taken place, because this is all so familiar and yet, it was forty . . . fifty years ago in my life.

Then I thought to myself, “well how could it be, this place?” If it’s . . . if it’s a new life that I’m in, if this is true, then I don’t see how my father’s property can be over on this side of life.”
It was all bewildering.

And he was saying to me, “of course you know that we have still got the old house.”

And I thought this was so strange. He said, “you know this is an exact replica.”

I said, “What do you mean an exact . . . exact replica?”

He said, “Of the old home.”

And I could see, of course, that it evidently was a replica. Although to me it seemed identical, I thought it was the house, but I knew that it couldn’t be.

And he said, “Let us go in and see the others.”

And I said, “Others? What others?”

And he said, “Oh, Mother and Simon.”

Simon was a young brother, by the way, who passed in infancy and when he said “Simon’, it didn’t mean a thing to me. I said, “Simon, Simon, who the deuce is Simon?”

He said, “Simon is your brother. Don’t you remember the baby brother who died when you were about three or four years old?”

I said, “Simon?” I didn’t remember any of this.

Anyway we went into the old house. It was exactly the same. Everything about it was the same; the same furniture, the same statues, the same mantelshelf. Everything was identical in the drawing room; the piano was there and I could see, as it were, as if I were going back more than 50 years—all perfectly reproduced.

And there was my mother, looking so young, so very young, and I hardly realized at first that it was she. But it was she, but as she was when my mother and father, presumably, first met. And there was a tall young fellow. I should think he looked about seventeen, eighteen. It turned out to be this brother who died in infancy. Puzzling.

And then I remember asking my people, I said, ‘Well how is it that you have this house? How did it come about?” I said, “I accept the fact that you say I am dead and I realize something tremendous has happened, but I don’t understand how it is that one should have one’s old home reproduced. Who makes all this furniture? Who makes all the carpets and things and how does all this come about?”

And my father said, “Well, this is something which is not easy to explain, but this is something which we you earned—which we have earned.”

And I thought to myself, “well I don’t know that I’ve earned anything in particular.”

And, uh, I’m remembering my father; although he was in many respects, a good man, at the same time he was a very strict man; a man, I suppose, running a business, which . . . one had to be when on Earth. But he was honest and just and indeed, he was a remarkable man in many ways. But I couldn’t see the justification for all this, which seemed so remarkable because it was so identical in everything.

My father said, “Well of course, to some extent, one’s conditions, one’s surroundings, one’s life here, if you like, is due, to a great extent, as to what you were yourself when on Earth; your attitude of mind to others, your efforts on behalf of others – and, to some extent, the way in which you yourself have given yourself to others.” And as he was saying this I couldn’t help but think, “well there may be something in this if he says so.”

And yet I couldn’t really say that either my father, or for that matter, myself, were particularly over-generous people. We were sensible, we helped people it’s true and we were particularly good to our work-people. But evidently, from what I gathered, that as you live, to some extent, that must and does affect your way of life over here and what reception you have. So, evidently, we couldn’t have been so bad. We’d made for ourselves some preparation, without our even realizing it!