Major Wellesley Tudor Pole O.B.E. (23 April 1884 - 13 September 1968) aka TP, was an English writer, philosopher and mystic. He authored many essays and books and was a life-long spiritual truth seeker, being particularly involved with spiritualism and a movement devoted to the preserving the Chalice Well and Bride's Mound of Glastonbury, England. On a visit to Istanbul (then known as Constantinople) prior to the Young Turk Revolution in 1908, he heard of 'Abdu'l-Baha head of the Baha'i Faith. In November 1910 TP met 'Abdu'l-Baha and had the privilege of interviewing him over a nine day period in Cairo and Alexandria. The meeting must have had a profound effect on Tudor Pole, because he embraced the faith and for the following decades he would remain active in the Baha'i Faith. While a major in the British army Tudor Pole (in collaboration with Sir Winston Churchill) came up with the idea for 'The Silent Minute' which TP claimed was divinely inspired, and during World War II, all over Britain and the Commonwealth, millions of people joined together every evening at 9.00pm just before the news, to the chimes of Big Ben, to pray for peace. Tudor Pole remarked at the time; "There is no power on earth that can withstand the united cooperation on spiritual levels of men and women of goodwill everywhere. It is for this reason that the continued and widespread observance of the Silent Minute is of such vital importance in the interest of human welfare." In 1917 he wrote Private Dowding: The personal story of a soldier killed in battle. In the introduction Tudor Pole explains how this encounter with the Deceased entity who called himself Private Dowding, was his first experience of clairvoyantly inspired automatic writing; On Monday, 12th March 1917, I was walking by the sea when I felt the presence of someone. I looked round, no one was in sight. All that day I felt as if someone were following me, trying to reach my thoughts. Suddenly I said to myself, 'It is a soldier. He has been killed in battle and wants to communicate.' That evening I happened to call upon a lady who possesses some degree of clairvoyant power. I had forgotten about the soldier, until she described a man dressed in khaki, sitting in a chair near me. He was gazing intently in my direction. She said he was mature, wore a small moustache, and seemed somewhat sad. Not a very intelligent character apparently, but an honest one. I came home and sat down at my writing-table. Immediately my pen moved. Did I move it? Yes, in an involuntary sort of way. The thoughts were not my own, the language was a little unusual. Ideas were mainly conveyed in short simple phrases. It would really seem as if some intelligence outside myself were speaking through my mind and my pen. Private Dowding is now considered a 'classic' in Afterlife literature. Wellesley Tudor Pole continued to author several books including, The Silent Road, A Man Seen Afar, and Writing On The Ground.

Introduction PART 1 The Wilderness PART 2 The Awakening PART 3 The Messenger PART 4 Private Dowding Returns PART 5 The Passing of Major P PART 6 Survival: The Interlude of Silence

Private Thomas Dowding, a 37-year-old British soldier, was killed on the battlefield in WWI. On March 12, 1917, he began communicating through the mediumship of Wellesley Tudor Pole. After floundering in the ethers, not even realizing he was dead for a time, as time goes on that side, he was met by his brother, William, who had died three years earlier, and began his orientation."Hell is a thought region," Thomas Dowding communicated on March 17, 1917. "Evil dwells there and works out its purposes. The forces used to hold mankind down in the darkness of ignorance are generated in hell! It is not a place; it is a condition. The human race has created the condition."Those who enter it are led to believe that the only realities are the sense passions and the beliefs of the human 'I'. This hell consists in believing the unreal to be real. It consists in the lure of the senses without the possibility of gratifying them...Hell, apparently, or that part of it we are speaking about, depends for its existence on human thoughts and feelings."Purgatory and hell, Dowding learned, are different states. He was in purgatory. "We all must needs pass through a purging, purifying process after leaving the earth life. I am still in purgatory. Some day I shall rise above it. The majority who come over here rise above or rather through purgatory into higher conditions. A minority refuse to relinquish their thoughts and beliefs in the pleasures of sin and the reality of the sense life. They sink by the weight of their own thoughts. No outside power can attract a man against his own will. A man sinks or rises through the action of a spiritual law of gravity."And so it was that his brother and the angel failed in their rescue mission. "He would not come away," Dowding communicated. "They had to leave him there. Fear held him.He said his existence was awful, but he was afraid to move for fear worse conditions befell. Fear chained him. No outside power can unchain that man. Release will come from within some day."Dowding returned to the Hall of Silence to ponder what he had just witnessed, determined not to return.