Following on from my previous blog, here is more of Frances Banks’ description of the afterlife. She is describing her first two years since death.
She dispels two illusions common to earth. First, many people of prominence back on earth will discover that their prominence doesn’t follow them into the afterlife, while others of better character will be surprised to discover how admired they are. In this new world deception is impossible. Your aura broadcasts to all you meet exactly what kind of being you are. She puts it this way: “In earth life he can build a façade about himself. Here he has no such mask. He is known here for what he is, and for what his inner subjective life has made him.”
The second illusion is the myth of salvation or damnation by one’s beliefs. Frances has much to say about the dogmas of earth’s religions: “There are no tenets, no creeds, no formulae, no hard and fast rules devised by any mind to restrict or confine progress here. . . . No soul is coerced, forced or bound by creeds. . . . Helpers and Teachers and Great Souls are here to explain such errors of thinking, but there are no rules to follow and obey except the Divine Precept of Love, Light, Wisdom and Understanding.
So you don’t have to believe that Jesus Christ is your Lord and Savior in order to be saved, or that there is no god but Allah, and that Muhammad is his prophet to avoid damnation. In her world, beliefs don’t mean anything by themselves. All that counts is the sort of life they inspire in you. Frances, incidentally, doesn’t feel that she has ceased to be a Christian in the afterlife. Now she is free, as she puts it, “to find the far more glorious truths which are inherent in the Christian religion.”
Judgment is one of the leading themes of the book. Its midsection focuses on sixteen spirits Frances met. She tells us about their earth lives, then shows us what awaits them in the afterlife. We are introduced to a Nazi leader “lodged in the shadows” for twenty years since his suicide in 1945, and a young Jewish mother “bound to him by her deep hatred.” The Shadow Lands are of special interest to Frances. She tells us there are “hells of the spirit and the mind, confining states of misery; dark, depressing and as real as the tortured consciousness of the dweller makes them. . . . [They contain] squalid dwellings inhabited by unhappy, tormented beings who jeer and mock and pursue their warped existences.”
She tells us that missionary spirits routinely enter these dark spaces and invite “the stumblers” to repent their crimes and receive rehabilitation. No one, however, is ever forced. C. S. Lewis said that “the gates of hell are locked from the inside.” Many spirits, Frances tells us, feel more at ease inside the gate after a lifetime of evildoing inside their self-made hell, as far away from the light they hate as they can get. Frances tells us there are three conditions to be met before one can progress: facing one’s defects, yearning to be free from those defects, and service to fellow spirits. Some want to change, some don’t. Just as on earth. We’ve been looking at the dark side of the afterlife, but there is much more light than darkness in Frances’s world. He tells us there are Higher Spheres where great souls dwell and teach their wisdom. Each of these destinies, one upward and the other downward, is self-made. Clearly, Frances is on the upward path. “I feel,” she says, “that I am starting on a Path of Light which leads upwards and onwards into Realms of unimaginable beauty and wonder and of which I have, as yet, but the faintest glimmer of comprehension. The journey itself is compensation enough for the trials of earth.
Helen Greaves, the medium, reports having a vision of Frances seventeen months after her death. “This was not the Frances I had known . . . This was a different Being, a Spirit filled with Light, radiant and glorious. . . . I distinctly recall that her robe impressed me. It was of a light soft blue and it sparkled and shone. . . . Her face was the face of a young woman. She looked breathtakingly beautiful.
Downward into darkness or upward into the light. We have seen both. But there is a third destiny. Frances tells of meeting old friends and former teachers from former lives. Frances tells us that reincarnation is a living option in her world. But she also makes it clear that not everyone in her world must reincarnate. For some there is “swift progress to other and higher spheres.”
One gets the impression that, as nice as their world is, it’s just a humble anteroom to the True Heaven where something as sublime as God dwells. There is a becoming modesty throughout this book. Clearly Frances has a long, long way to go before she reaches her goal, and she knows it. Nevertheless, her world is much closer to God than ours is. We don’t think of sunlight as divine, but the spiritual Light of Frances’s world is. It’s this Light that Frances thinks of herself as evolving toward. This Light is God’s ambience. We hardly see it at all because earth’s slower vibrations shut it out and leave us in a densely material environment, but Frances, living in an astral environment where light vibrates faster, can. Se tell us that our world is nothing compared to the infinitely glorious, utterly indescribable Light that is to come. This last Light is no reflection, no ambience. Rather it is what Frances calls “the eternal Centre of Light and Creative Energy which men call God.” As she tells it, “we progress onwards and upwards into that Divine Self, after aeons of endeavour, into inclusion in the Divine Company, into bliss which is inexplicable at our present stage of understanding.”
This is a mind-blowing book. It is full of surprises, full of descriptions that the human imagination wouldn’t dare to speak of if it could even think them up. Frances tells us that the Light of her world is not only visible; you can hear it. She tells us that during festivals of music, one doesn’t just sing as we do: “One is singing with the whole organism.” Whatever that means! Occasionally she overreaches herself and just stammers.
You’ll get a much fuller picture of Francis’ world in my book Heaven and Hell Unveiled, which I drew upon in my course The Meaning of Death before retiring. I delight in sharing it with you now in a classroom that requires no tuition.
Stafford Betty, Professor of Religious Studies, CSUB, (ret) is the author of When Did You Ever Become Less by Dying?, Heaven and Hell Unveiled and his novel, Guardians of the Afterworld. His latest book, The Hell Dwellers: A Novel about the Dark Side of the Afterlife is coming in 2026. Stafford can be found at staffordbetty.com.
