Bøker av Stafford Betty

GUARDIANS OF THE AFTERWORLD tells the story of Numen and Sephia, two powerful spirits who accept the responsibility of managing Earth's afterworld, the "Astral," where the dead go. This is not a religious book. Their adventures grow out of a secular research background that points to survival of death as a natural and near certain fact. One's character, not beliefs, is the only yardstick determining one's destiny, a destiny not written in stone, but open to change as one navigates the new environment. Numen and Sephia, from different planets in the Milky Way galaxy, learn to overcome their mutual strangeness and work effectively to improve conditions for the Earth's 9 billion astral citizens, all with histories on the planet that range from the saintly to the demonic and the wealthy to the destitute. These histories impact the Astral environment in many ways. War breeds violent death and overwhelms the receiving stations. Exclusivist religions have to be abolished. Brutes and terrorists must be quarantined, then rehabilitated if possible. Orphaned children cut off by death need to be loved and educated. Suicides must be nursed back to health. Spirits roaming the Earth and sewing confusion everywhere must be stopped. Aliens threatening invasion must be reasoned with. Music and the arts must be regulated to some degree. The power of Gaia, the soul of the Earth, needs to be harnessed for good and away from destruction. Earth's wild animals, harvested for sex and fashion, must be preserved. Earth's terrible poverty, killing babies by the millions and overwhelming afterworld resources, can't be allowed to go unchecked. Individual grievances must be heard and adjudicated. These problems and a thousand others confront the Guardians. Their powers are limited, but they were hero and heroine on their planets, and they have now accepted a more challenging role as servants to a planet not their own. A final challenge was learning how to love each other, their personalities as different as ice from ember.

Following his death Aiden Lovejoy finds himself in a strange but wonderful world-a vital, busy, challenging environment with great joy beckoning. There is much work to be done, however, and the progress that "the dead" are invited to make can stretch over eons. Aiden, a family therapist in earth life, picks up where he left off. Alongside the beauty that surrounds him are hellish zones where disfigured characters choose to live, and their suffering calls out to him. But he has troubles of his own, and souls from higher worlds inspire him to reach higher. For some readers this fast-paced, soul-searching novel will help make sense of the present crisis surrounding us.Professor Stafford Betty, author of The Afterlife Unveiled and other similar works, writes: "The laws of this world, its differences from the afterlife scenarios of the world's religions, and its rationality and 'amazingness' stand out. All that happens to the novel's characters is supported in a general way by evidence. The details are of course fanciful, but the world in which surviving souls are embedded owes far more to research than to unaided imagination. Something like this is the world I think we will all enter, whether Christian or Buddhist or atheist or whatever, when we die. As I see it, we are all pilgrims on an infinite march."

In this book Professor Stafford Betty pulls together the best evidences for survival of death. The very best, he maintains, come from psychical research. The near-death experience, deathbed visions, reincarnational memories of children, communication from the so-called dead through mediums, apparitions, poltergeists, spirits that reach out to us through electronic instruments, spirits that attach themselves to our bodies, and episodes of terminal lucidity in Alzheimer's patients are all included.But philosophy has a lot to say as well. In simple terms Betty lays out the evidence against reductive materialism that claims all our experience is generated by the brain and that we perish at death. Viewing the brain as an instrument put to good use by the immaterial self is much more consistent with the evidence. Finally, he surveys the universal affirmation by the world's religions that we survive death. Betty brings together memorable examples and careful analysis of each type of evidence. Each type is imposing enough by itself, but taken together they build a case for survival of death that is insurmountable. He shows that life after death, as mysterious as it is, should no longer be regarded as a hypothesis, but, like dark matter, a fact.

The future of the world hangs in the balance as the religion of peace struggles against violent opposition.

A teenage boy must confront his unusual gift for seeing people that no one else can see...

Heaven and hell-are they real places, or are they fantasies invented to inspire good behavior and overcome our fear of dying? In this book Stafford Betty, a university professor and international expert on afterlife research, answers these questions. He allows deceased human beings speaking through authentic mediums to describe their actual worlds. And what they tell us would revolutionize the world's religions if they would listen.Our brothers and sisters in the afterlife are not "resting," as Christian theology often asserts. They live in a world of infinite possibility, and their wills are as free over there as they are here. They are busy beings, and some are climbing toward higher realms while others languish. Suffering in the afterworld, not just joy, can be intense; it exists to awaken souls to their errors so they will enter into the happiness of those higher spheres, where corruption can't enter. Professor Betty explores those heavens, those places where love reigns unchecked-as well as those unhappy places where it doesn't.The religions we've fashioned here on earth could all use an upgrade. They are moons that derive their light from the central sun. This book is about that sun.

Kiran is a gifted but self-absorbed college professor who grew up on ritzy Marine Drive in Mumbi. Now working at a leading California university as a professional philosopher, he lives in a sham of a marriage to Lisa, an American, but this comes to an abrupt end on a visit home to India when he dies in a plane crash. As Kiran watches annihilation gallop toward him, and then death - suddenly he discovers he's still very much alive-more alive than ever. But now he must face his karma.... He relives the events of his selfish life not as he experienced them, but as his victims did-his students, his fellow workers, above all the women who loved him. Eventually he seeks out Shalini, who committed suicide after he rejected her in favor of her rival, Lisa. Kiran, facing heavy odds, is assigned the task of rescuing Shalini from her self-made hell in the Shadowlands. Will he succeed - and if he does, what then? He cannot stay where he is. He must move ahead into diviner worlds, or "repeat the grade." ... And what about Shalini? Where will her passion for Kiran take her next?

What happens to us when we die? Many think of heaven as an unimaginable state of bliss. As for hell, it's far out of proportion to any sin we might have committed and makes a travesty of God. But what if the afterlife was something very different? The key to such knowledge is mediumship. Three decades of research have taught the author, a world expert in the field of death and afterlife studies, who the most reliable voices are. These accounts are far better developed and more plausible than anything found in the world's scriptures or theologies. We hunger for a reliable revelation telling us that life here and now is meaningful and good, that each of us has an important part to play in its proper unfolding, that we are accountable for all we do, and that the godless materialism all around us is a pathological mistake. The world ahead, unlike ours, is fascinating and fair. Authentic mediums may be the closest thing to the voice of God that our planet has.