Episode 345 - The KA of Gifford Hillary

About this Episode

Dennis Wheatley was an author "on the margins". In other words, he was a flawed (tho' very popular in his day) writer who was not taken seriously by most critics. But his distinctly marginal themes and observations gave him a kind of crossbow into truth that endow more than one of his novels with Inspiration. I am a big fan of Dennis Wheatley.

In 1956 he published a novel about the immediate aftermath of one's bodily death. It is called The KA of Gifford Hillary and I can't recommend it highly enough. In it, the narrator is murdered, and his 'KA', or immediate soul -- not exactly his Soul in the Christian sense, but the sum of accretions and experiences had by his human ego -- is suspended, as it were, before he can proceed towards Ultimate Destiny. Gifford Hillary's KA is put on hold, you might say, because there is a crime, a heinous crime, of which he was the victim; and the unresolved nature of the crime has to be resolved before he can move ahead.

Whether this makes any sense to you or not, I think there is something to it.

Why? Well, because three times in my life I have seen, or sensed directly, the KA of persons I loved. First was a college roommate who drowned in our sophomore year but appeared to me four months later on an escalator in Grand Central Station. Second was my best friend, who after his sudden and all-alone death appeared to me during Centering Prayer in All Saints Episcopal Church, Winter Park. And third was a close college friend who caused me recently, one day after her sudden, unexpected death, to find a letter she had written exactly 50 years that was the pure essence of sincere upbuilding.

So three times I have met a KA. And three times an unresolved death was, at least for me, given "peace at the last" (BCP). Oh, and I'd rather encounter a KA than become one at the point of death. Look to yourself now!