Book: Testimony of Light (Part 1)

TESTIMONY OF LIGHT
-by Helen Greaves 1969
First published in 1969 and subsequently reprinted annually by the Churches’ Fellowship for Psychical & Spiritual Studies


Telepathy between the living is now generally accepted, but Telepathy between the living and the so-called ‘dead’ is both more doubtful and less common. The highest level of communication is undoubtedly that by Telepathy, and this remarkable book is an outstanding example of communion between the minds of two close friends on either side of the veil...Those who known both Helen Greaves and the late Frances Banks – and their respective writings – are impressed by the authenticity of these scripts. Their phrasing and contents are typical of Miss Banks as they are completely unlike the style of writing shown by the ‘author’ in her previous books and articles...Frances Banks’ message – that the death of the body is but a gentle passing to a much freer and fuller life – presents itself with great clarity and conviction.
- back cover of book

“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 meditation…For twenty-five years she (Ms Banks) was a Sister in the Anglican Community of the Resurrection in South Africa” - pg 13

In the words of that great Seeker after Truth, Francis Bacon, she vowed, “I will find where Truth is hid, though it were hid indeed within the Center”. –Pg 14

Then one evening... as I was sitting alone beside my fire listening to radio music, I gradually became aware of a Presence…I was swept on into a meditation in which Frances and I had participated some years before. … 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…. Words dropped into my thought, which did not come from my consciousness. I knew that her discarnate mind and my incarnate one had linked together again in telepathic communication.... I sat down, took my pen and began to write. Words, thoughts, sentences tumbled out on to the paper… –pg 22-24

She trusted implicitly in the survival of mind and personality beyond death and she was reverently aware if the spirit within which urged her on – the Christ-in-You of Christianity...Her belief was that through meditation, through retiring into the deep center of oneself and finding the place of the silence of the soul, communion could be established with advance souls, higher beings, great ones whom we called 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 there from.

The Scripts as dictated by Frances to the author Helen

5th December 1965, 8:30 p.m. –pg 27.
…. I am in a kind of rest home now. It is run by the Sisters of the community to which I belonged when in incarnation…Souls are brought here from earth and from other places (but I do not know much of those places) – when they are ready. They are ‘nursed’ and taken care of here, as am I…Here, there is no compulsory confinement, and no punishment, except what you mete out to yourself! You can come and go of course… but I realize already that you can only ‘go’ elsewhere, when you are ready… After the Change (she passed away), was over and I was free of my earthly ‘covering’ I ‘woke up’ here in this hospital of the Rest House…. I have discovered that I can use telepathy both ways, to receive and to relay. There is not the difficulties here that we experienced on the earth… I knew now that I could ‘tune in’ and even ‘see’ the earthplane, if desire was strong enough to loosen the barrier between your world and my new one… Now I dwelt in a realm of Thought; and such thought Power, when rightly implemented, can penetrate the dense plane which is the world of human habitation.

12th December 1965 – pg 32
Somewhere in the deeps of my mind two ‘blueprints’ are brought forward into my consciousness.... One is the Perfect Idea with which my spirit went bravely into incarnation. The other is the resultant of only a partially understood Plan … in fact my life as it was actually lived. It was a shock to me, and a very salutary experience, to find that these two plans differed exceedingly. And yet, one learns so much by facing the results…During this experience the whole cycle of your life-term unfolds before you in a kaleidoscopic series of pictures. During this crisis one seems to be entirely alone. Yours is the judgment. You stand at your own bar of judgment. You make your own decisions. You take your own blame… You are the accused, the judge and the jury...The second stage of this recapitulation starts when the soul feels strong enough and calmed sufficiently to take the earth life, round by round (so to speak)… But I will tell you that now you seem no longer alone. Someone is beside you. Whether it is your own High Spirit or a Great Helper I have yet to discover. Only now, as you ponder, work out, go over, tabulate and judge what you did AND WHY AND WHAT WERE THE RESULTS (good or bad) you are gloriously ‘aware’ of this great Being beside you, giving strength, peace, tranquility and helping with constructive criticism. This is a wonderful experience, though harrowing at times... Because this plane is only a few rungs or so higher than the earth plane, there are the same conditions, hospitals, as with your civilizations, and prisons, only here they are selfmade.

18th December – pg 36
“So now you see that consciousness is on an upward spiral, and progresses onwards… even your own….”
“…We had all that Light all the time… and so few of us knew it!” (said the scientist)

1st January 1966
… I would relate my experiences with, and the story of, this brilliant surgeon (she called him Doctor X) who is here with us and who, in his lifetime, indulged in drug-taking until it became an addiction. This man has a brilliant mind. (In this section is the surgeon recap how he relied on the Inner One for help on the operating table and how his fear of losing contact with the Inner One, prompt him to take drugs to calm his mind. Eventually his mind broke and he was certified unsound, put away into a home). … As the film of his life unwound before us, the Doctor saw that he had indeed done his part. He had followed his Pattern, worked out his Blueprint, even though he had badly smudged it in the performance. At the end he saw! He understood. His fault had been a weakness in the soul’s contact with the personality which he had allowed to widen until it threatened to break completely. But he had been released before that had happened. His failure had been his refusal to delve into that Inner One whom he knew… If I should say that there were tears in his eyes when the revelation ended, I would be partly right. There were tears in his soul; tears for lost opportunities. But also tears of relief. Doctor X is a soul with dedicated skill. He will go on to the greater Light…

3rd January pg 47
Yet I knew that I could not bear the High Frequency of His vibration for long. This Leader said that soon…But we had both had a taste of the beauty of the Higher Spheres and of communion with progressed souls… I felt as though I was shining. The Light stayed with me. This is Life… Life more abundant...
The man had been a Nazi leader; well known and extremely powerful during the last war. After the downfall of Germany he had committed suicide. (I cannot give his name but it is not Hitler.) Since that time he had been ‘lodged in the shadows’. Mother Florence explained that he had been ‘wandering in the lower places’. You would no doubt refer to this dark place as the ‘lower astral’. In any case, for twenty earth years, he had been imprisoned by his own evil. Now he had been rescued. He was conscious of his terrible cruelty and filled with remorse. The ward was dark and gloomy,… a pall of murky twilight seemed to hover over it. Only slowly did it become apparent to us that ‘something’ lay on the bed…. The poor creature’s body appeared to be covered with sores and scars; the eyes were closed. “He thinks he is blind” Mother Florence whispered. “He is not of course. But the Light here is too bright and penetrating for him yet; and he cries out that it has blinded him”. “In the next ward”, Mother Florence was saying, “is a woman who was one of his victims, a young Jewish mother who has arrived with him. She has been bound to him by her deep hatred. But she is progressing because she had real love in her heart…She has the power of Love in her soul.

5th January – pg 52
I did not meet the Leader of their Group again. Maybe, as a very new girl, I have to learn to tune up my vibrations to meet Him. He is a very advanced soul, a Master in His own right, and disciple of the Lord Jesus who, I have been told, lives in a Plane far beyond this. As we learn to purify our vibrations, to enlighten our ‘bodies’ and thus refine them into the actuality of receiving more Light from the Divine Mind, so we progress onwards. Doors open to us which were closed before; perception grows clearer and keener and we are able to comprehend more fully the true meaning and purpose for which the Life Force has descended into the slowest and most inert vibration. Jesus came to show and demonstrate that man lived on after leaving the earth plane. He taught that this God Force, this Life is truly within every one of us, dimmed yet inextinguishable.

11th January –pg 58
I would envisage great Beings walking with men on earth. That time will come, no doubt. Perhaps is already happening, but men have no vision to see….man would not yet be ready to receive them. The Planes of the Spirit stretch onward into infinity…. I long to go on, to view those Planes of Light, to touch those Great Lives…By man’s thoughts and inspirations he weaves for himself his future place in this dimension. This is a logical Law. In earth life he can build a façade about himself. Here he has no such mask. He is known for what he is, and what his inner subjective life has made him. …the newly transported soul graduates always to its rightful place, to the place it has earned and prepared. We do make the mistake of valuing intellect to highly in the earth life, scorning the simple follower of Reality.

13th January – pg 64
Our Nazi patient is still the same; inert, motionless, shut up on the shell of himself…Even the Jewish woman has been to see him! She stood looking at this pathetically disfigured soul and at last she whispered, “He doesn’t look so evil, does he?”... There must be some good which the Great Ones recognized, …his besetting sin, which blacked out all else, was love for power; its swelled into viciousness against another race, even causing him to put to death men, women and children of that race. But unless we are All-Wise how can we judge what he did?

17th January – pg 72
… yet in the power of this Light, my mind and spirit stretch out into a glorious extension. Yet what do any of us really know of the subjective extensions of the mind?...Therefore, by thought and will, we can travel far out beyond what constitutes our immediate circumstances, if we wish... This is a world of thought indeed! So is the earth plane, from which I have just graduated. Only there, thought is slower in action because all vibration, and hence all results or effects, are slower, and one has a façade, a persona with which to mask thought. Here one seems to be naked. There is no mask even for thought, one’s inmost thought, and sometimes I shudder at the realization that our fellows here can read us, as we read books illustrating character and thought and action on earth. Here, one’s thoughts return to one like boomerangs, potent and immediate in their effects. As a thought, negative or positive, comes into mind, it crystallized into immediate action. In the human mind, a negative thought can creep in and insinuate itself between all one’s good intentions, lying, apparently dormant. Then it becomes a nucleus attracting to itself thoughts of similar content until it takes on a semblance of force through emotion; later the results, physical, material or spiritual, are manifested... Here the thought-pattern is determinate of one’s welfare, one’s progress, one’s happiness and joy…. We have to learn to live in this new frequency; to guard the doors of one’s mind; to anticipate the boomerang action of negative emotions…This is the way of life on these planes and every soul must assimilate the Way before proceeding onwards into planes of even higher frequencies.

23rd January- pg 81
Some of the souls who come to our side and who have perpetrated much evil, take a great deal of advising and helping at this point Remorse overwhelms them and often they choose to live in the gloom of regret. This is rightly termed ‘gloom’ (and I am not referring to the Place of Shadows)... I have visited the ‘lower regions’ though, I assure you…. Believe me it is a terrible region, or regions, of semi-gloom, of unwholesome ‘sticky’ emotions, of utter distortion of all that is beautiful. One’s feelings are wrung by the pitiful sights; compassion flows out for those poor half-alive creatures in their self darkness...There are wonderful Helpers in these regions. These have to be advanced souls, strong in themselves and firm in he Light before they can choose to do such work. Whilst I was there on a visit, I saw the face of a Being of such beauty that I was arrested in my progress onwards and had to stop awhile must to be in the aura of this Great One. I learned afterwards that he had been almost a saint on earth. He was a great mystic, though an unlettered philosopher...That place was shadow indeed. The shadow of death, but not so definitely the death of the body as the death of the mind, for there the mind is inert in the density caused by the wrong use of a God-given faculty, man’s mind and freewill. This density causes the soul to be starved to such a deficiency as to render it ‘cut-off’ and its Light shut away...Soul is Light infused… or infused Light. The shutting away of the soul is darkness.