Posted on 11 February 2025, 22:01

Heaven and hell—are they real places, or are they fantasies invented to inspire good behavior and overcome our fear of dying? In my book Heaven and Hell Unveiled I share what thirty years of research have taught me.  I allow deceased human beings, our “spirit friends,” speaking through reputable 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 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 mistakes so they will long for the happiness of those higher spheres, where corruption doesn’t exist.

Those realms where love reigns comes vividly alive in this book—as do those unhappy places where it doesn’t.

Our spirit friends tell us the universe is a moral gymnasium with challenges at every level, from physical planets to the lowest hells to the highest heavens. The progress that spirits are allowed to make is striking, radical, far-reaching, and can stretch over eons. The afterworld is a vital, challenging environment with extraordinary delights –for those who are deserving. It is no lotus-eating paradise for the lazy. We are pilgrims on a challenging, ascending march.

Religion doesn’t cease when we die. The heart of heaven’s religion is loving service, not belief. Spirits serve in countless ways. They might perform work in the grim Shadowlands where subbornly unrepentant souls gather with their own kind; or inspire musical compositions or artistic expression for us earthlings; or care for orphaned children who have died before their parents; or counsel confused, distraught newcomers who are unaware they’ve died. The list is endless.

Many spirits retain their interest in earth and delight in our attempts to communicate with them. They welcome prayers from Earth on their behalf, as when Catholics pray for the “souls in purgatory.” Such prayers let them know they are remembered and loved by their children and friends. Love doesn’t cease at death, and prayers are a good way to express it. They also pick up earth’s calls for help and respond in whatever way they think best. If the prayers are addressed to God, as they often are, spirits “pick God’s pockets,” so to speak, and send help back to earth telepathically, sometimes through dreams. The Creator doesn’t do our work for us. It’s up to us to help each other. It’s part of the schooling at all levels.

What about judgment? The spirits tell us how it really works. They say nothing about a God sitting on a throne with scepter in hand. We are our own judges. But the anguish of judgment is real, usually embarrassing, and sometimes terrible. Its purpose is change, not punishment. Eternal hell is universally repudiated.

The spirits also address philosophical questions. They hint at why the Great Spirit (one of God’s many names) doesn’t micromanage the material universe and turn Earth and other material planets into paradises. They explain why spirits like ourselves need to be immersed in physical bodies, suffer, and die. They describe the various ways more evolved spirits play their parts in the government of the physical universe.

Do malevolent spirits bother us? Most spirits on the dark side aren’t malevolent; they’re just lost or earthbound. But they work their mischief on Earth anyway by attaching themselves to vulnerable beings whom they feed off. Even the terrifying subterranean caverns in the bowels of the Shadowlands where the worst of these reside are ultimately probationary and remedial. Some souls, perhaps most eventually, graduate from the Shadows as they recognize their past failures and present miseries. For them evil is a transitory phase.

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.

It would be misleading for me to claim that I know for certain what happens when we die and what follows. Mediumistic communication is a slippery subject, and I am aware of its potential pitfalls. But I am also widely read in the area, and what I’ve tried to show here is the remarkable richness of the best of spirit literature. For reasons well outside the scope of this blog, I take it very seriously. I think the reader would be wise to as well.
Meanwhile, be a force for good in this world.

Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying?  and Heaven and Hell Unveiled. His latest novel, Guardians of the Afterworld is published by White Crow Books.
Stafford can be found at http://www.staffordbetty.com.

NOTE: If your browser will not accept a comment at this blog, send it by email to Jon at .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) and he will post it.

Dear Stafford,

This is very well put and I have little quibble with any of it. I did, however, want to give some attention to your post title, namely whether heaven and hell are ‘real places’. May I suggest that this is something of a misstatement. In your book, “Heaven and Hell Unveiled”, you forward as the second of your summary points (p.13) that “The afterworld begins at the Earth’s surface and extends outward. Earth is the nucleus of the entire world system that the spirits describe. ‘The spirit world begins very near the earth and extends millions of miles beyond,’ writes the spirit of Leslie Stringfellow…” That particular set of messages, stemming from the late 1800s, is not out of keeping with its general era in its views regarding the structure of the afterlife.  One finds similar ‘spatial’ accounts in other early Spiritualist writings, particularly in America.

In this regard, it is worth mentioning a book by Raymond Bayless, otherwise an excellent researcher into the paranormal and survival of death. Bayless is the author of a number of books, but let me call out two here for particular mention: ‘Voices from Beyond’ (1976), almost certainly the best study of direct voice in mediumship (one that I’m shocked I didn’t discover earlier than I did), and ‘The Other Side of Death’ (1971), a solid overview of evidence related to posthumous survival. Despite the excellence of both of these volumes, each is curiously lacking in a respective particular regard. In the first, Bayless is comprehensively informative on direct voice mediumship – indeed, I learned much from him – but nowhere mentions Leslie Flint, which is an absolutely glaring lacuna in a book of that copyright date. In the second, Bayless gives curiously overweighted attention to the proposed structure of discarnate states found in earlier Spiritualist writing, which is skewed toward such spatial accounts as the one you have forwarded above.

Thus, Bayless summarizes (pp.41-2) the views of Josiah A. Gridley in his ‘Astounding Facts from the Spirit World’ (1854), Hudson Tuttle in his ‘Arcana of Nature’ (1859), Robert Hare in his ‘Experimental Investigation of the Spirit Manifestation’ (1855) and (pp.55-6) James Hewat McKenzie in his ‘Spirit Intercourse’ (1917), all of whom propose spatial schemas based on a series of discarnate spheres with radii at progressively greater distances from the earth. Thus, and to take just the latest of the above-mentioned volumes, McKenzie postulates that the first sphere, which he terms the astral world, is situated 300 to 750 miles from the surface of the earth, in turn divided into three primary divisions each at a different distance. He goes on from there but this should give a sense of it. The problem with all of these schemas is that they are subject to the Yuri Gagarin rebuttal: we’ve been up there and have looked around and found neither such spheres nor the geographies or inhabitants thereof.

If this is all the discarnate or posthumous literature had to offer, it would be pretty thin gruel indeed. However, I expect that McKenzie’s mention of such a spatial schema marks something of the extreme tail end, historically speaking, of such spatial schematizing as it appears completely absent from later sources. While the understanding of distinct, hierarchically ordered levels, spheres or realms is maintained, what one finds in later posthumous material is either of two descriptions: the first forwarding that these distinct levels are separated not by physical space but by ‘vibrational’ level; the second forwarding that these distinct levels are shared geographies that are mutually projected forth or imagined out of the internal state of being of their inhabitants. This first view is ubiquitous across later and contemporary communicators but the second is also common enough. My own tentative understanding is that these two views are not contradictory but rather complementary in each giving an angle of understanding on the actual situation. But I think the earlier communicated view of spatial separation of discarnate levels has to be, at this point, honorably retired from serious consideration.

Let me term, for sake of discussion, the second of these three views the ‘vibrational’ view and the third the ‘imaginal’ view. These are each quite large subjects and I am treating them very briefly here, but the point I wish to make, to bring matters back to your post title, is that neither of these views is conformable to the notion that spiritual levels have a ‘place’. In other words, to use the traditional religious language, Heaven and Hell are ‘real’, but they are not ‘real places’.  This is not to suggest - and is not in conformity with the posthumous literature - that discarnate levels or geographies or realities are not experienced by their inhabitants as being spatialized. But this in itself demonstrates nothing regarding their underlying reality, just as the experienced spatialization of a dream environment to the dreamer says nothing regarding that spatialization being in any way objectively real.

There is a ‘final thought’ in Bayless’s ‘The Other Side of Death’ (pp.185-6) that addresses this very point very well and is worth quoting at length:

“The nature of an after death world from the standpoint of psychical research can be viewed in two primary ways. One, it is a non-objective world, generated by thought as a dream, or it actually is constructed of an extraordinarily rarefied form of matter and is objective and perceivable by the senses of non-earthly, ‘astral’ bodies. A variation of this last view is what can be called the fourth-dimensional theory, which suggests that a perfectly objective world of matter exists in a framework of four spatial dimensions, and consequently is not perceivable to our third-dimensional senses and a way of thinking. [NB It is worth interjecting here that the notion of discarnate reality existing in higher-dimensional space has been forwarded by a handful of theoreticians on this side of the veil - see, for example, Jeffrey Mishlove’s award-winning Bigelow prize essay - but appears nowhere that I’m aware of in the discarnate literature itself.]
Professor H.H. Price, paraphrasing Professor Hyslop, wrote [NB Bayless is referring to Price’s essay ‘Survival and the Idea of ‘Another World’’ (1953)] that a nonobjective and mentally constructed after-death world would include the action of telepathy on a great scale. In such an existence, probably groups of similar minds would share a common environment, but perhaps no one overall world would accommodate all surviving spirit. He further pointed out that the dreamlike after-death state would actually be similar, in many respects, to an objective world after death. It would have a common structure similar to groups of similar-minded spirits, the result of common memories and wishes. Such a world would seem perfectly real to the experiencer exactly as certain vivid and realistic dreams are accepted as reality by the dreamer. To be exact, practically all dreams, no matter how inconsistent in logical, are accepted by the dreamer as a real environment. Therefore, a mentally constructed world really could not be distinguished from our physical world and, in the long run, both ideas meet on common ground.”

Let me conclude both Bayless’s ‘The Other Side of Death’ as well as this comment by offering a coda from his book which is of such general importance that it justifies the non sequitur of including it here: in referring to the problem of sorting out subconscious intrusion of the medium into discarnately communicated messages, the author comments (pp.189-90) “It is a problem, however, that can [ital.] be dealt with, and one splendid weapon which can be used against it is the study of the overall concordance of psychical phenomena of all kinds. The work of Dr. Crookall [NB who authored a foreword to the book], for example, provides a splendid example of this principle at work.”  I wholeheartedly agree with this statement: cross-correlative study of the discarnate literature and associated phenomena is the single best tool we have – the ‘one splendid weapon’ – of separating out the wheat from the chaff, the solid and true from the questionable and false.

Best,

Paul

Well stated, Stafford.  I shudder every time I hear someone say, “May he rest in peace.”  I’m too well rested now and don’t want to further rest when I get there. I hope someone says, “May be return to an active lifestyle.”

In retrospect, I should have included a quote of Pheneas, a supposedly high spirit with whom Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was receiving communication during the 1920s.  I used the quote in the Epilogue of my book, ‘The Afterlife Revealed,” but it escaped me when writing to the council. 
Among the messages Pheneas communicated was one in which he said that for the sake of future generations, a new right understanding of God is necessary.  “Love, not fear, must reign in each heart,” Pheneas stated. “Humanity must know the kind of existence they will lead in the lower greyer spheres if their lives are selfish and evil in the earth plane.  Knowledge of where a man’s actions are leading him will help and inspire him to live at his highest and what to avoid.  The knowledge of the real and human happiness in the higher worlds ahead will give a man courage in facing sorrows and difficulties on this earth.  The hope and joy of great happiness and the fulfillment of all his heart’s ideals will make life here so much easier to bear, and so much more radiant.”
Michael Tymn

A truly great summary which echos my own exploration of the spiritual aspects of life for the past 60 years. I have read all of Stafford’s well-researched books and enjoyed them thoroughly.