1937 to 2011, a rented room at night, a church in Los Angeles, 72nd Street, Phoenix, an office in Arkansas
Is anyone on the other end?
Napoleon Hill, Joseph Murphy, Neville Goddard, Abraham through Esther Hicks, Dolores Cannon
Five people across seventy years said the same thing in five accents. There is a mind beyond yours, it listens to what you think and feel, and it answers. They disagreed about its address. Aliens and the spirit realm are the two addresses on offer, and the one broadcast from the other end anyone has ever confirmed has no words in it.
Every night for years, a man who sold correspondence courses sat alone after everyone else had gone to bed, closed his eyes, and held a meeting. Nine dead men sat around his imaginary table: Emerson, Paine, Edison, Darwin, Lincoln, Burbank, Napoleon, Ford, Carnegie. He asked each one for a quality and wrote the answers down. After a few months the meetings got so real that they frightened him, and he stopped, and then he started again because he missed the company.
Napoleon Hill put that scene at the end of Think and Grow Rich in 1937 and said the counselors were imaginary. What came back through them, he said, was not. He called it Infinite Intelligence, and he called the imagination the receiving set it broadcast on.
Five people across seventy years made that claim in five accents: there is a mind beyond yours, it listens to what you think and feel, and it answers. Every one of them described a radio. They only disagreed about who is on the other end. Two addresses have been offered, the spirit realm and the stars, and there is a third station on the dial that none of them put there.
Here is the receiving set. Six marks on the glass: the five of them at the year they wrote the thing they are known for, and one more at the far end. Turn the knob, drag the needle, or use the arrow keys. Between stations is static. On a station the voice tells you what it told everyone, with one line on what checks out and one that does not.
Static. Turn the knob.
1937
Napoleon Hill
The receiving set
Hill sold correspondence courses and said Andrew Carnegie had commissioned him in 1908 to interview the richest men in America. The chapter on the sixth sense is where the book stops being about money. A receiving set in the head, nine imaginary counselors who answer when asked, and a warning that the meetings get real.
Honest note.Carnegie's biographer found no record that the two ever met, and in the year the meeting supposedly happened Hill was wanted in Alabama over a lumber fraud.
1944
Neville Goddard
The wish fulfilled
Born in Barbados, came to New York at seventeen to dance, studied seven years with a teacher on 72nd Street called Abdullah. Three hundred recorded lectures came down to one sentence. Assume the feeling of the wish fulfilled. Not want it, not ask for it. Feel it as already done, in the drowsy minute before sleep, and let the world rearrange itself to match. He is the only one of the five who put the other end inside the person.
Honest note.In 1929 Rose Mackenberg, the investigator Houdini used to expose fraudulent mediums, published his ordination certificate as evidence against his ministry. He was twenty-four and already a target.
1963
Joseph Murphy
The garden
A chemist's son from County Cork who trained with the Jesuits, worked as a pharmacist in New York, and preached for twenty-eight years to a church in Los Angeles. His picture is soil. The subconscious is a garden, thought is seed, and the garden grows fear with the same care it gives anything else. The gardener's one job is to choose what goes in the ground before sleep.
Honest note.A hundred cures with no names, none of them checkable, and the teacher he says he shared with Neville rests on his word alone.
1985
Abraham through Esther Hicks
The scale
In Phoenix in 1985 Esther Hicks, raised not to believe in such things, began to speak in a voice that was not hers. It calls itself Abraham, a collective, and when it speaks her accent changes. Its one real instrument is the emotional guidance scale, twenty-two feelings from joy at the top to despair at the bottom. Where you sit on it is the reading, the answer from the other end arrives as a feeling, and the work is to climb one rung at a time.
Honest note.It all comes through one woman in a trance and cannot be checked from outside. Her bid to copyright the phrase law of attraction was refused, because a book had used it in 1906.
1993
Dolores Cannon
The keepers
A Navy wife who used hypnosis to help people stop smoking until, in 1969, a client went under and described a life as a flapper in Chicago in the present tense. Cannon took clients deeper than most hypnotists go and said a different voice came on at that depth. It described the spirit side as a rest, a school, a council, a choice to return. It also said Earth was seeded and is tended from elsewhere, and that some of her clients remembered being among the gardeners. Aliens and the afterlife are one subject in her books, with two addresses, and both answer.
Honest note.Four studies at Carleton University in 1991 found that subjects told past-life memories were common produced them, and subjects told they were rare mostly did not. The method cannot tell remembering from enacting.
2.7 K
Penzias and Wilson, 1964
The hiss
In the spring of 1964 two Bell Labs astronomers in Holmdel, New Jersey pointed a horn antenna the size of a boxcar at the sky and found a hiss they could not get rid of. Every direction, day and night, summer and winter. They evicted a pair of pigeons from the horn. The hiss stayed. It was light from 380,000 years after the beginning, cooled to 2.725 degrees above absolute zero, falling on every square meter of the Earth at once. A sliver of the snow on an old untuned television set was it.
Checks out.Every radio telescope on Earth picks it up, it won the Nobel Prize in 1978, and it is the only broadcast from the other end anyone has ever confirmed. It has no words in it.
Two addresses, and a third
The two addresses are not as far apart as they look. Cannon's gardeners from elsewhere and Cannon's council between lives are the same voice in the same chair. Neville's second birth and Abraham's non-physical are the same move, a mind bigger than the person placing the call. All five made the Hermetic bet from the tablet: the pattern up there and the pattern in here are one pattern, and a mind of the right shape can get a signal across. The simulation page makes the same bet with whoever is running this on the other end, and the panpsychism page asks whether there has to be another end at all.
The honest notes do not add up to five liars. Hill may have been one. The rest reported what they experienced. What the notes show is that every receiver was also a transmitter: the room, the expectation, the book read the week before, the hypnotist's phrasing, all of it went out on the same set the answer came in on, and no instrument yet built can tell the two apart. Jung said the same about the scarab.
So the question stays open, in a specific way. Everyone who has picked up the other end was alone in the room. The one signal that is not alone in the room is a hiss at 2.7 kelvin that every antenna on Earth agrees about, and it says nothing. Tune to it for a minute before you decide. It is still on.