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“Seven Minutes in Eternity ” With Their Aftermath By William Dudley Pelley

THE AFTERMATH To “Seven Minutes in Eternity”

Almost a year has now passed since I wrote for “The American Magazine” the narrative of my personal experience in a Fourth Dimension of Matter which I called “Seven Minutes in Eternity” . . .

I believe I have now had time to digest the import of the experience and see it in its proper perspective.

At first I was dubious about writing the article. It was a very deep personal experience and its nature was such that I did not care to have myself labeled a freak or a crank. But The American Magazine’s editors persuaded me, and so the article was written and published. The circulation of this publication is around 2,225,000 copies. Advertisers estimate that each copy of a given magazine is read by at least four persons. Which means that something like ten million people had access to that narrative, and because it was the first article in the magazine, most of them read it.

I know because of my mail in reaction.

Immediately the recount was published, things commenced happening in the offices of the American Magazine. Mail addressed to the editor or to me as author of the narrative, assumed proportions analogous to that of Col. Charles Lindbergh after his epochal flight to Paris. I happened to be back in California at the time. Frantic trans-continental telephone calls began to reach me from New York imploring me to return and take up the gigantic task of answering the thousands of correspondents who wanted more light on this extraordinary experience.

I returned to New York and began the labour of sorting, classifying, analysing, and answering this plethora of letters. Because of the pressure of my regular literary work, it required six months!

But the strange part is, those letters are still arriving — because of a magazine article published nearly a year ago — and my replies still keep one typist busy the better part of each day.

These reactive letters, I discovered, grouped themselves into three classes:

• The greatest mass came from persons who declared they had undergone a similar experience;
• the next largest division came from those who were neither facetious, skeptical nor derogatory, but who merely wanted more light;
• in the third class was that great army of spiritually-minded people who only wanted to thank me for giving them an incentive toward stronger Christian faith and to implore me not to rest with the writing of this one article.

And here is an astounding fact:

Out of all the mail that resulted from the publication of “Seven Minutes in Eternity”, less than 24 actual communications derided me as an eccentric or expressed open disbelief that I was sane and normal!

The great army of English speaking people who read of my experience paid me the compliment of taking my account at its face value and asked only that I answer specific questions about that Fourth Dimension in which I testified that those they loved were dwelling.

To me that speaks volumes for the true spirituality of the English speaking peoples. . . .