The Road to Immortality provides the reader with a sublime vision of the afterlife, allegedly communicated from ‘other side’ by the eminent psychologist and psychic researcher Frederic William Henry Myers.

Myers was one of the founders of the Society of Psychical Research and he spent much of his life researching the survival of consciousness, so it is not surprising that having passed away in 1901, if he found himself conscious of his surroundings, he would try to communicate with his colleagues and loved ones still in the flesh. According to a renowned automatic writing medium Geraldine Cummins, this happened in the 1920’s.

Communicating through Cummins, Myers stated: “We communicate an impression through the inner mind of the medium.  It receives the impression in a curious way.  It has to contribute to the body of the message; we furnish the spirit of it. In other words, we send the thoughts and the words usually in which they must be framed, but the actual letters or spelling of the words is drawn from the medium’s memory.  Sometimes we only send the thoughts and the medium’s unconscious mind clothes them in words.”

Discarnate messengers such as Silver Birch have spoken about the group-soul and Myers went into great detail about the subject.

“When I was on earth, I belonged to a group-soul, but its branches and the spirit – which might be compared to the roots – were in the invisible,”

“Now, if you would understand psychic evolution, this group-soul must be studied and understood.  For instance, it explains many of the difficulties that people will assure you can be removed only by the doctrine of reincarnation.

You may think my statement frivolous, but the fact that we do appear on earth to be paying for the sins of another life is, in a certain sense, true.  It is our life and yet not our life.  In other words, a soul belonging to the group of which I am a part lived that previous life which built up for me the framework of my earthly life, lived it before I had passed through the gates of birth.”

Myers further explained that the group soul might contain twenty souls, a hundred, or a thousand. “The number varies,” he said. “It is different for each man.  But what the Buddhist would call the karma I had brought with me from a previous life is, very frequently, not that of my life, but of the life of a soul that preceded me by many years on earth and left for me the pattern which made my life.  I, too, wove a pattern for another of my group during my earthly career.

Myers added that the Buddhist’s idea of rebirth, of man’s continual return to earth, is but a half-truth.  “And often half a truth is more inaccurate than an entire misstatement. I shall not live again on earth, but a new soul, one who will join our group, will shortly enter into the pattern or karma I have woven for him on earth.”

Myers likened the soul to a spectator caught within the spell of some drama outside of its actual life, perceiving all the consequences of acts, moods, and thoughts of a kindred soul.  He further pointed out that there are an infinite variety of conditions in the invisible world and that he made no claim to being infallible. He called it a “general rule” based on what he had learned and experienced on the Other Side.

Geraldine Cummins (January 24, 1890 - August 24, 1969) was an Irish automatic writing medium and author.

Cummins automatic writing was mainly of a spiritual nature and was witnessed by several theologians and scholars who later endorsed and edited her writings. Her first book, The Spirits of Cleophas (1928), claimed to supplement the biblical books of the Acts of the Apostles and the epistles of St. Paul. It was a historic narrative of the early church and the work of the apostles from immediately after the death of Jesus to St. Paul’s departure from Berea for Athens.

In the production of the first two sections of the book, Cummins was associated with F. Bligh Bond, the noted English architect, illustrator, archaeologist, and psychical researcher, but later she received the scripts independently. Her second book, Paul in Athens (1930) is a continuation of ‘Cleophas ‘The third, The Great Days of Ephesus (1933), followed the same line of thought.

The trilogy offered new interpretations of several obscure passages in the Acts of the Apostles, which apparently are more in line with the early church. For example, it was claimed that only a profound student could have given the head of the Jewish community in Antioch the title “Archon,” because the usual title was “ethnarch.” In the chronicle of Cleophas, Cleophas was not the direct communicator. The information came through an entity know as “the messenger.” The messenger was ostensibly lower down the spiritual food chain than Cleophas and therefore could communicate with Cummins on the earth plane.

Cummins’s fourth book, The Road to Immortality, a series of communications allegedly from F. W. H. Myers, gives a glorious vision of the progression of the human spirit through eternity. In the Introduction Beatrice Gibbes described the method of communication employed by Cummins.

She would sit at a table, cover her eyes with her left hand and concentrate on “stillness.”  She would then fall into a light trance or dream state.  Her hand would then begin to write.  Usually, her “control” would make some introductory remarks and announce that another entity was waiting to speak.  Because of her semi-trance condition and also because of the speed at which the writing would come, Gibbes would sit beside her and remove each sheet of paper as it was filled. Cummins’ hand was quickly lifted by Gibbes to the top of the new page, and the writing would continue without a break.  In one sitting, Gibbes stated, Cummins wrote 2,000 words in 75 minutes, whereas her normal compositions were much slower—perhaps 800 words in seven or eight hours.

Gibbes added that she witnessed the writing of about 50 different personalities, all claiming to be ‘dead,’ and all differing in character and style, coming through Cummins’ hand.

The noted physicist and psychical researcher Sir Oliver Lodge offered his observations of Cummins’s genuineness in the book’s preface:

“I believe this to be a genuine attempt to convey approximately true ideas, through an amanuensis of reasonable education, characterized by ready willingness for devoted service, and of transparent honesty.”

Cummins went on to author The Swan on a Black Sea: a Study in Automatic Writing: the Cummins-Willett Scripts (1970). The book is a detailed study of her automatic scripts received from the deceased “Mrs. Willett” a pseudonym of Winifred Coombe-Tennant, the British suffragette, politician, and philanthropist. This highly regarded work contains a foreword by parapsychologist Professor C. D. Broad.