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June 20, 2014 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
01:04:37
Edition 162 - The Afterlife

We feature California-based afterlife researcher Professor Stafford Betty…

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Across the UK, across continental North America and around the world.
On the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Well, summertime continues here in the northern hemisphere.
London is pretty nice right now.
Very lush, very green, very warm, little bit of a gentle breeze.
We've had some heavy rain, but that's only made the trees display their leaves even more greenly and lushly, and the grass grow even faster.
It's rather nice, I have to say, because you know I don't do winter.
Thank you very much for your recent emails, all of the guest suggestions.
I'm going to do some shout-outs on this edition.
I'm not going to be able to mention all of you, sadly, because we'd be here for the next hour and a half, but I'm going to pick out some names and we're going to go through a few themes and just a few comments that you made about shows.
Linda Moulton Howe, the last edition, most of you thought great.
One of you thought Linda sounded like she was involved in her own edition of the X-Files, and I quote, and I think that's because the phone was cut off or there was an interruption in our conversation that appeared at a very odd point where she was talking about security agencies, and that's never happened to me before.
Also, Marty, who's a regular emailer, hello Marty, emailed, accusing Linda of poor thinking.
Now, let's just get this into context.
Most of you thought it was a great show, and I really enjoyed the show.
But we talked about the hybrid, Rachel, and the book that had been written about that account.
Marty says, if Rachel had no bones, she couldn't stand up.
If she had an exoskeleton like an insect, it would be hard.
It appears that the mother of the other girl simply noted that Rachel's arm didn't feel like a normal arm.
However, Linda made no sense going on about exoskeletons.
It made her sound silly, says Marty.
But I have to say, Marty, that I've had many, many, many scores of emails telling me how much they enjoyed Linda Bolton Howe and what she had to say.
So, you know, I think if you get a lot of varied reaction from people, you're probably getting it about right.
I hope so.
But thank you for your email.
Let's say hello to some of you now.
Dee, thank you for your email.
And you enjoyed Linda Bolton Howe, you tell me.
Joe Kelly wants me to try and deal with the RSS feed.
I'm going to talk to Adam, my webmaster, Adam Cornwell, about that.
Rich Williams, thank you for your email.
Anthony Acri in Toronto, thank you for getting in touch.
Claire sends me a long email detailing some very strange events.
Claire, I'm going to reread it and we'll take it from there.
Kevin Turley suggesting Jerome Corsi, we'll get on to that.
Art Rise in Washington, thank you for your email, Art.
Terry enjoyed the Grey Wolf Gerard Williams interview about Adolf Hitler apparently escaping after the war to South America.
Joe Kennison tells me to think about this when I talk about flight MH370, the reports of fire in the sky.
We should have made that clearer.
You're right.
Keith, thank you for your email in Wilmington, North Carolina.
Nice things you said.
Craig in Minnesota, suggesting George Green or Laura Eisenhower.
Good call.
Darren in Japan.
Also like Gerard Williams and the book about Hitler, the tale about Hitler escaping.
Jason Romeo in Sydney, some nice comments.
Thank you for your email.
John Glass in Western Texas.
Thank you for getting in touch.
Lano Anderson at your summer home in North Carolina.
Listening to the unexplained.
Made me very jealous of where you are.
And Max in Sweden, fascinating story.
That's another one for me to reread.
And thank you very much.
If you want to get in touch, please email me through the website www.theunexplained.tv.
That's www.theunexplained.tv and the website designed, maintained, created by Adam Cornwell at Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
That's also the place to go if you'd like to make a donation to the show.
Remember, we are independent media.
We're not the big guys.
We're doing the stuff that they don't, want, and can't.
So we need your donations to continue.
Now, the guest on this edition of the show is somebody very different.
If you're expecting a lot of wham-bam stories, then you're not going to get them here.
This is a thinking show, this edition.
The guy we're going to talk to is Professor Stafford Betty, described as a bit of a maverick when it comes to religion and spirituality.
You're about to hear why.
He's a guy who teaches at California State University in Bakersfield.
Religions is his field.
But he's also a bit of an expert on afterlife research and ideas of heaven and hell.
So I thought Stafford Betty would be a good guest to get on, just to do something completely different and have a bit of a cerebral conversation that's not full of gee whiz stories, but just full of stuff to make you think.
So you tell me what you think about Stafford Betty as we contact him now in California.
Stafford Betty, thank you very much for coming on The Unexplained.
It's my pleasure to be here.
I feel honored to be asked.
Well, I'm delighted to have you on because you're a name that many of my listeners won't know, but by the back end of this, I hope that they do know.
And, you know, one of the first things you said to me when we were in email contact was, are you sure you want to do this because, you know, I'm not a kind of UFO alien type person.
This is not what I do.
And that's exactly why I want to have you on here.
Because you come at the afterlife and notions of religion and heaven and hell from an academic perspective and a lot of study.
And you have a very impressive CV.
But the one thing that people seem to say about you is that your approach to these things is different.
Even though you come from academe, you look at the afterlife and heaven and hell and those traditional concepts which are bedrock religion in a different way.
Do you go along with that?
And if you do, how so?
That's exactly right.
That's well put.
The afterlife is, first of all, let me say that I think one of my strengths is that I don't have any of the usual gifts that a medium, for example, would have.
I don't claim to be a mystic or a medium or any of those rather suspect things.
I'm just a professor.
But I'm a professor who has an unusual interest.
I'm interested in what is About 20 or 25 years ahead of me.
I don't see why that would be peculiar for a human being because, after all, we all know that we're going to die, and there should be a natural curiosity about what's going to happen after we die.
I've had that natural curiosity ever since I was a boy, for whatever strange reason.
And my research is carried through right up to the present.
I think it is the ultimate mystery, isn't it?
And as we get older, we lose people close to us and we see them go through the process, and we kind of hope, a lot of us, that they will try to make contact in some way.
And some of us believe that they do and they have.
And some of us are in for a very big disappointment when they apparently don't.
That's correct.
I am uncomfortable with that mystery.
I want to peel back the shackles that keep us away from that mystery.
And that's what my research is doing, hopefully accurately doing.
Well, a lot of you mention mediums, and I know that you talk in your work about mediums and psychics sometimes in a most disdainful way.
They're not the route that you like to travel, but a lot of people swear by them.
And a lot of people have had, that I know, have had inexplicable encounters with people who claim to be able to connect with something that is beyond.
From what you've said in these couple of minutes, I am presuming you just think that's hogwash.
No, that's not correct.
I am suspicious of certain kinds of mediums, but my bread and butter comes from the study of the classic mediums, most of whom came out of Britain in the late 19th century and early 20th century.
There's just an amazing amount of very reputable information that is coming to us, that has been trying to come to us for all of these decades.
It seems as if it's only at the present time that there has been an enormous amount of looking back to this research and then adding to it by present, by more contemporary evidences.
And that's what I'm looking at.
I'm looking at mediumistic research, and I'm learning a great deal from it.
Yes, I'm suspect, I'm suspicious of certain types of mediums, particularly those who make a buck selling their wares to an unsuspecting public.
But that sort of medium does not interest me, nor does the medium who actually is in the business of putting people in contact with loved ones.
I think that's a wonderful thing to be able to do.
It's not what my interest is.
I'm interested in the descriptions that the classic mediums have given of their world.
And the world, by of their world, we're talking about the world of spirits, not the mediums' world, but the spirits world who come through the mediums.
That's been the focus of my research hours.
And I suppose if you look at these things in an academic way and you go back to the raw data, the raw research and writings of the time, what you would be looking for are commonalities between accounts.
Yes, that's exactly where it starts.
And those commonalities are very impressive.
I have the sense that if I've read 30 of these accounts, 30 of these descriptions of the afterlife coming through these reputable mediums, presumably from spirits, I can be pretty sure of what the 31st one is going to say because there is so much consistency.
If there were not consistency, I would think that there was nothing there, that basically a medium is simply projecting unconsciously her own biases and you might say just at best giving us hallucinations.
But I don't think that's the case because there is so much similarity and congruity.
It seems to me that the only way to explain that is to assume that our mediums really are in contact through their spirits coming through them with something that's real.
Well, there is another way of looking at that, and that's the skeptical and cynical way of looking at it, I guess.
England at that time was an era where communication wasn't by the phone or the internet or anything like that because we didn't have them.
But there was word of mouth and there was rumor and word spread between people because one person told another person who told another person.
I'm wondering if the commonalities, if the similarities that you're seeing from mediumistic accounts of that time, if they just simply come down to the fact that people are sharing the same view.
Yeah, we might call those copycat communications.
Yes.
And that, of course, is the ever-present danger with making too many assumptions about the reality of the afterlife or what we can actually know about it.
However, there are very good answers to that sort of suspicion.
And that is that back in the heyday of psychical research, there were ways of getting around that problem.
And one of the best ways was the classic book test.
I don't know if you know what a book test is.
I presume your audience doesn't.
A book test would be a time, would be an occasion when a spirit was allegedly coming through a medium and providing information about something that was written in the margin of a book in the spirit's library while he was still alive back on Earth.
And he remembers exactly what page he wrote this marginalia in what book and where exactly it was in his personal library, which is still intact.
So that's the kind of thing that a learned person does, or those of us who've been through the university process and had to read a lot of books.
We annotate the books.
We write little notes just as aids to memory there.
That's the kind of thing.
And if you can get something on the other side to recall a note made in a book on this side of life, then you've proved something.
Is that?
That is exactly.
You've got it exactly, Howard.
That's exactly what the book test is designed to do.
And there were about 3,000 of these book tests that were undertaken in the late 19th and particularly in the early 20th century by top-notch, often scientifically literate experts.
And the results were surprisingly Accurate, and there's no way to account for that.
It's hard to say, well, the medium must have somehow picked up on that.
Maybe she was reading somebody's mind who knew where that particular Martinellio was, but nobody on earth knew where that material was.
The only person who knew about it was the person who was deceased and is now trying to tell us where that information is.
Now, if he can do that, that seems to me that he has established his credentials.
We can be pretty sure that he is the source of that information and not the medium.
Once we establish that, then everything else begins to be taken more seriously.
Then we can believe that he really is describing the world where he is right now.
And that's the way my research has proceeded.
It's interesting that you do it this way.
One of the first interviews of this kind that I ever did, before I ever dreamt of doing a show like this and getting involved to this extent, but I always had an interest even when I was a teenager, I did a student documentary and I went to meet somebody who's still a leading researcher.
He works at the University of Nottingham in the UK.
He's getting up in years now.
His name is Alan Gould.
Oh yes.
If you've read the name, the way that you said, oh yes, suggests that you know who this man is.
Very much so.
His writings are just first rate.
He is an amazing man and I must try to speak with him again.
If I tell you that the last time he and I had a conversation, which I recorded, it was when I did this project, and that was 30 years ago, three whole decades.
But I remember being very impressed with the story that he told me of going to a medium and the medium supposedly communicating with a man who was also an academic.
And there was a piece of information about Alan liking steak that the medium couldn't have known and the person that Alan went with couldn't have known.
And I think it was actually something that Alan himself didn't know.
That's it.
It was a piece of information that the man's wife, the friend of Alan's wife, knew, because every time Alan would visit, the guy who died would say, make sure you get a nice piece of steak for Alan.
But that was a piece of information that the widow of the person who'd passed knew.
The medium communicated and couldn't have known that she knew, and Alan himself did not know.
But every time he'd gone to visit this man, he'd had steak, and that had been a common theme.
Now, that to me at that time, I haven't told this story very well, but that's a pretty compelling piece of information.
That's exactly the kind of information that we call evidential.
It's an evidential communication.
There's no way to account for it except to assume that the medium really is bringing forward through her or him a real spirit.
I quite agree.
And the literature is full of that kind of evidential.
I mean, literally tens of thousands of little snippets like that, snippets of accuracy, suggest overwhelmingly to me that we really do have spirits communicating through us through certain mediums.
And can you think of one of those pieces of information that spoke to you perhaps more than others?
I think the most interesting one that I've ever come across is the famous chess match between the grandmaster living and the deceased grandmaster.
It happened in the 1980s, and the medium didn't know how to play chess.
So the invitation was from, it was coming from our earth.
It was being presented by a man who was curious to see if such a chess match could be arranged.
And sure enough, eventually, someone from the other side turned out to be a grandmaster, a Hungarian grandmaster from the early 20th century, answered the call.
And the chess match ensued.
It took seven years, 48 moves, and it was a brilliant match, carefully analyzed by one of my colleagues, Vernon Nep, who was a South African chess champion for a while.
And his analysis was that these moves could not have been made except by chess masters.
But in this case, one of the masters was deceased and the other one was very much alive.
It's interesting that the person who won the match eventually was the person living.
Now, what do we read into that?
What we read into that is there's no way that the medium could have come up with all those correct moves.
The only thing he could do was to relay the move that was dictated by the deceased grandmaster.
So therefore, he proves his existence.
Well, indeed, but I wonder why we don't hear more exercises like this undertaken.
Because we don't, do we?
We don't hear about great feats of research that are happening in this day and age.
In 2014, who is doing this kind of thing?
There are many people who are doing this kind of research.
I work with them.
We communicate with each other constantly in a closed network online.
There are about 90 of us who are members of survivalnet.com.
And there is research being done like this.
And these researchers, I'm not one of these researchers, incidentally.
I'm just one of these people who you might say borrows from their wisdom and from the information and tries to write about it and make much of it.
But these are guys who are in the trenches.
And what they are doing is most interesting, but it's not getting out to the public.
And the public, by the public, I'm talking about the serious scientific public, these folks simply don't look at this information.
They don't read books like the ones that I write.
They don't read books like the esteemed Chris Carter, Oxford graduate, who wrote this wonderful book, Science and the Afterlife Experience.
They simply scoff at this type of literature.
They're not real scientists, in my view.
They're pseudoscientists, because a real scientist is open to just about anything that comes along that's relevant to his study.
So the 90 members of Survival Net, which is an organization I've never heard of, sounds fascinating to me.
These are people who are serious scientific researchers and they are making some headway in 2014.
Absolutely, they are.
A very impressive headway.
And large numbers of them from all over the world.
The only thing they have in common is that they speak English and write English well.
These are top-notch minds doing the research in the trenches.
And when you say that, what sorts of research methods are they using?
Well, they will, let's see, one of the things that many of them focus on is reincarnation research.
Another is deathbed experiences.
Others work in electronic voice communications.
They work in just about all of the various areas that we would call parapsychology today.
And as there were commonalities between the research that you looked at out of England in the late sort of 19th century, early 20th century, this work being done by SurvivalNet, are they telling similar stories of what's over there when we get there if we do?
They certainly do.
It is curious that one of the things that I'm particularly curious about is knowing if there's any technology over there in the other world.
And there's no mention of that from contemporary sources.
And the assumption is that technology, the kind of technology that we are using right now, is simply not necessary.
There's no reason to use it because one can communicate directly over great distances, remotely.
And so there's no need of it.
And that's so there's not much, in other words, there's not a whole lot of dissimilarity between what was reported 100 years ago and what is reported today, which is not surprising given the conditions over there.
Well, I think that's what I've done.
A lot of people talk about, if you read about these things, about there being this summer land place that is, you know, rather like what I can see out of my window today, very beautiful, very tranquil, very countrified.
If I tell you a story from my own family, I lost my mother in 2006, and of course that was an enormous blow to me.
But my sister, who'd spoken with her more than I had about this, told me the story, and indeed we told the story at my mother's funeral, about how my mother had pneumonia when she was a child.
A lot of children, you know, decades and decades and decades back here in England, suffered from pneumonia.
Health conditions were not as they were when I was growing up and when you were growing up.
She came very close to death, and she had what we might call a near-death experience, where she went to a place where there were familiar people, where it was green and beautiful, and everybody seemed to know everything.
There was tremendous tranquility.
And she believed all her life that she had seen a vision of what is to come, but had been allowed to come back.
What do you make of that?
I have no doubt that she did exactly what she claims, because many, many books have been written about similar experiences.
She probably had a peep into what you rightly describe as Summerland.
It is a term that is actually used by spirits, sometimes, not all by any means, to describe their rather, you might say, low-level heavenly experience.
What is interesting is that we have reason to believe that the experience of an evolved Eskimo, for example, or a Maori from New Zealand would not be what we think of as summerland.
Evidence suggests that there are many sectors of, shall we call it, heaven, and that the one that we treasure is the one that we get.
And what most Brits and Americans treasure is pretty much the summerland that is described in these accounts.
But those are not the only sectors within the other world.
There are many.
There are as many sectors as there are various cultures.
And there are very many levels as well of what we find in these areas.
Not all people, when they die, get to experience summerland, even if they do come from Britain or America.
It depends on the quality of their lives here.
It depends on the way they think and have acted and have talked.
It depends on their character.
There are darker regions of the afterworld for those who have darker characters.
So the law of karma, if you will, permit me to use that traditional language, does overwhelmingly seem to apply over there.
How do you know that?
What is it that has made you believe that, Stafford?
The accounts of virtually every spirit who has dared to describe at book length his or her world over there, there's without exception a commitment to this what we can conveniently call a law of karma, where there is recompense.
And I wouldn't call it punishment, but perhaps that's the only word I can think of at the moment.
But it's not a punishment that is meted out by God.
It's simply something that one comes to once one becomes fully open to one's own memories, including those memories which were excluded and buried subconsciously.
All of that that was in the subconscious bursts out with a clarity that we have never known before.
And we begin to see our true motives and what was behind the things that we said and did.
And oftentimes that can be not only embarrassing, but just horrifying.
And that, of course, leads to a great deal of discomfort and unhappiness in the other world.
It's not a permanent unhappiness, but it certainly begins to be that way.
It starts out that way.
So depending on the kind of life you've lived here, it's almost like this past life review they talk about where you have to confront the things that you did.
It's very much a process of having to reconcile your soul with whatever you did and the things that you buried over here and the issues you didn't confront.
And Most of us have those.
Over there, you have to square yourself with them before you can move on.
That's exactly right.
Which is quite a sobering recognition, isn't it?
Yes, overwhelmingly.
I have never read an account that did not go into that at some detail.
So we can assume that there really is justice in the other world and that we get what we deserve.
I want to get back to SurvivalNet, this organization.
How did you come across them?
I was introduced to it by a couple of people who had read my first book, The Afterlife Unveiled.
They were impressed enough by it to make a recommendation that I be allowed to join that rather secret fraternity.
And that's how it happened.
They had to vote me in.
If one person had blackballed me, I would not have been permitted to come aboard.
But fortunately, no one did.
And it's just been a tremendous asset to me because so much great research is being done there that I can actually feed off of and write about.
I suppose the greatest kind of research they could do, and I wonder if they are, you will know, is if a member is perhaps nearing the end of his or her life and agrees to report back to the other members.
Surely that is the ultimate proof, isn't it?
That would be a pretty good proof, but I'm not aware that anyone has dared to do anything like that.
It's a most interesting proposal, which I will make to the group today, as soon as we finish our show.
I'd like to know why no one has come up with that.
But I'll bet you that once I raise the issue, there'll be a great deal of excitement about it.
And a lot of trading emails back and forth about how this might come about and who might be willing to do it.
Well, if they're not doing that.
Perhaps it's a little bit...
I don't know.
But I think that's that we need to get over that kind of.
But if they don't do that, what do they do then?
If they're doing a lot of work in this area, and you said they've made great strides, what are they doing?
Well, one of the things that they're doing is to work with mediums and put brain scans on them.
In other words, what is happening in their brains when they have opened up and feel that spirits are coming through them?
Does the brain scan show anything that is different from just ordinary states?
And the answer is yes, there are profound differences.
As a matter of fact, what happens, we have discovered, and this is just one example, is that when the medium is on and the spirit is coming through, the parts of the brain that are usually, the parts of the medium's brain, of course, that are usually active when he or she is concentrating, reading a book, thinking carefully, is totally shut down.
It becomes extremely becalmed.
And that's exactly when the automatic writer, let's assume that that's the way the information is coming through, is coming through at its best.
The other interesting thing about it is that the quality of the writing becomes better when those areas of the brain are shut down and presumably a spirit is coming through and is dictating the writing.
That's just one instance of the kind of, you might say, laboratory research that they're doing.
Okay, that is.
Did I make myself clear there?
Yeah, but yes, I was taking it in, but sounds to me like a trance, a traditional trance.
It doesn't have to be a trance, but it can be.
It can be a mild trance.
It could be a deep trance.
Or it could well be that the person is simply becalmed.
In other words, has succeeded in pretty much eliminating her or his thoughts and allowing the thoughts of the spirit to come through in whatever fashion.
Generally, that would be through some sort of automatic writing in which the spirit would take over the hand and the arm of the person and write out his message.
And the research that they're doing, this is going to sound like a really silly question, but I'm not afraid to ask those.
I've done it before.
I'll do it again.
What's the point of it?
Why are they doing this?
The main point of survival net is to prove, or at least to make a much better case, scientifically grounded case, for survival of bodily death.
That's why we call it SurvivalNet.
Okay, that makes sense to me.
And what's the best evidence that they have come up with that they've been able to tell you about?
Well, the account that I've just given you is the best kind of evidence that comes from a strictly laboratory type of approach.
The other approach is the approach that I use by going back to the sources and by analyzing them carefully and by looking at all of the evidential that comes through in so many of the great cases of the past.
And not just of the deep past, but of the more recent past.
And analyzing that information and looking at the evidential that suggests that, yeah, this is not coming from the medium.
This is coming from something underneath the medium, the spirit.
And of course, the medium herself is going to always claim, this is not coming from me.
These are not my thoughts.
Sometimes the thoughts that come through the medium are quite inconsistent with her own or even contradict her own deepest beliefs, and yet they keep coming through.
And so that kind of analysis, the analysis of texts, is what a number of us are doing in SurvivalNet.
Myself, Chris Carter, who wrote a wonderful book, Science and the Afterlife Experience.
He's Oxford trained.
And Mike Tim, my American colleague, who is, I think, knows more about mediumship than anybody else alive.
And that's what we do in our books.
And so we get around to actually describing what the afterlife is probably going to be like for most of us when we die.
And whether any of us are coming back?
Because you studied one of your specialties is Asian religious thought and Sanskrit.
If you look at Hinduism, for example, there is a circle of life and we're born and we die and we return and we come back for another go.
Is that what this research through SurvivalNet is showing or what?
We have a couple of people in SurvivalNet whose research is focused almost exclusively on reincarnation.
And these are people who have very gifted minds and know how to do research that, to me, strikes me as compelling.
And these are people who are focused exclusively on reincarnation research.
Basically, the research that they do comes from the earlier research done by Ian Stevenson, who was the classic reincarnation researcher working at the University of Virginia.
And now his successor, Jim Tucker, is doing the same thing.
These folks work with little children ages two to five who remember, allegedly remember their previous lives.
And so what we're doing here, what these researchers are doing, is looking at these memories, these alleged memories by these little children and seeing if they match up with people who we can historically point to and say,
yeah, person who died at a particular time, maybe six years ago, this three-year-old's memories is exactly fitting this woman who lived in New Mexico.
And are there many cases like that?
I mean, we have a celebrated one over here.
There was even a TV documentary about it, a little boy in Scotland who said that he was from the island of Barra and described people on Barra and somebody who was killed in an accident there.
It was all true.
And this child was so young, there is no way that he could have known all of this stuff.
Right.
No, there are many, many cases like that.
And that's one of the more famous ones.
It has, I think, a TV documentary has been made on that.
I've seen it.
And there are literally thousands of cases like this that have been written about.
So reincarnation research has elevated, let's put it this way, elevated reincarnation into a level of respectability that it did not enjoy 60 years ago.
It all started from this Canadian parapsychologist and licensed psychotherapist.
And actually, he's an MD.
And all I can say is that what he started has yielded almost an avalanche of follow-through.
And it seems to me that the reincarnation case is something that is simply part of our world.
And we need to look at it.
And I do, and other members of SurvivalNet do.
We take it seriously.
Books have been written about it.
Many books have been written about it by Ian Stevenson in particular.
20 Cases Suggestive of Reincarnation is his classic.
And yet, it's just a shame that hard scientists don't read this material, this meticulously detailed material.
And if they did, they would come away.
It seems to me if they have normally open-minded, open minds, with at least a sense that something like this is probably going on.
Can you explain it some other way?
I don't know how you could do it as easily as you could by assuming the hypothesis of reincarnation.
Well, I suppose one way you could do it is memory retained in the DNA, perhaps.
You could, but there is no evidence that that kind of memory really ever has occurred.
DNA doesn't seem to carry over that.
At least I don't know of any psychiatrist or psychologist who would lay claim to that theory.
I've heard the theory, but there's no evidence that there is such an ability in the DNA of a person.
But anything's possible.
But I think reincarnation is a great likelihood.
The only problem in this area is that so many of the reincarnational memories of these little kids, most of them, are memories of people who died fairly recently, perhaps just two years before the birth of the child, or perhaps at most 10 years before the birth of the child whose life the child remembers.
Whereas the talk of reincarnation that comes through most of these mediumistic accounts that I am so familiar with and write about involve a great deal more time between the death of a person and the presumed rebirth of that person later on, maybe decades, perhaps even a century or two.
There's also the mysterious failure by some of these accounts to even mention reincarnation.
You would think that if reincarnation were true, it would be universally true, and every one of these spirits would mention it and affirm it.
That is not the case.
Most of them do, particularly most of the more recent accounts.
It's almost universally affirmed.
The difficulty with it is that there is no evidence or is there that we're all going to reincarnate like that.
And when I think about it, I get really, really, really worried because I don't want to come back.
You know, I want to go on to something else.
I want to go forward.
I don't want to come back here.
Right.
What do I want to come back here for?
Right.
I don't want to flunt the course either, Howard.
The assumption, though, is that all of us did, and that's why we're here right now, if you're a reincarnationist.
But again, we get a great deal of light about this from these spirit sources describing their world and describing the laws of their world.
And they will tell you that reincarnation is an option.
It is an option that most of us will be encouraged to take because there are lessons to be learned on earth that we simply cannot get as well over there.
But for those of us who have learned our lessons and are truly prepared to do the kind of work needed over there in the heaven worlds to move forward, to evolve further, there is no need to come back.
And many of these accounts will tell you that they don't account.
Many of the spirits who write these accounts will tell you that they don't feel that they need to come back and they have no intention of coming back.
But as one puts it, even though I'd rather not, perhaps I'll have to.
You'll have to learn Greek verbs again and all of that.
Right.
So anyway, I don't think I want to train to be a journalist.
If you're prepared, if you have evolved, if you've learned the lessons necessary here, and that doesn't mean that you can't screw up, but it means that you have learned certain, picked up a certain wisdom that will enable you to be comfortable in the world beyond, to be very joyously comfortable over there.
So you've got it.
It's almost like an entrance exam.
If you've learned enough in your incarnation here or incarnations over this side, and you go there and you've learned enough to be able to go forward, then they will admit you and it will be seen to be the right thing.
And then you can go forward to eternity.
If not, then you will be encouraged to see that it's time to come back and have another go and try and get it right this time.
That's right.
However, I want to be clear about this.
God does not fit in anywhere in these negotiations.
This is something that one comes to on one's own.
At most, one will pick up spirit counselors over there and will be encouraged to take another dip.
But again, one never has to.
One's will is free, but it will become clear at some point, if one needs to come back, that one will and will probably not only do it resentfully, but gladly will come back.
One of the things that is sometimes mentioned in these accounts is a kind of boredom that can set in over there.
There are many spirits who are simply not prepared to enjoy the more spiritualized experiences in the heaven worlds.
They look forward to, they miss things like competition.
They miss things like sex and good food, all of the earthy joys and dangers.
They miss the danger of earth.
Well, if you put it that way, then maybe I will be coming back.
No, I know.
There are a number of reasons that a person might choose to come back.
But you can be sure that if these accounts are correct, that you will be guided to come back by those who are wiser than you and will be able to counsel you.
And so, you know, it's not as if we are left alone, but in the last analysis, it's our choice.
You've written a novel set in the afterlife, I read in your biography.
Yeah.
What do you make of it there, in the world where you're not constrained by the evidence that researchers give you, where you can allow your own mind to roam a bit?
Where did you get it?
Well, the hero of my novel is a materialist, atheist, philosopher type.
There are plenty of them around me.
I know them well.
And of course, he dies, and he's astonished that he didn't just become nothing, which is what he expected.
He finds himself rather at sixes and sevens in the afterworld.
He was a selfish character.
He's not condemned because he was an atheist.
There's no condemnation, actually, at all.
But he was selfish.
He was not a particularly generous, evolved husband or father or colleague.
And it's these character flaws that get in the way of, you might say, spiritual rising, spiritual evolution in the world over there.
And he's a person who gradually realizes that he needs to come back to Earth and learn how to love better, how to not just love those two or three people he thought were worthy of his love, but just people in general, his students, all of the people he snobbishly looked down upon.
And so the novel climaxes that he comes to on his own.
Can you just say that again?
You broke up just at that point.
Can you just say the novel climax is at?
Yeah, the novel climax is when my character, when the lead character, makes the decision to come back to Earth for another try.
He comes back with great reluctance, but he feels that he's doing the right thing.
He's finally been humble enough to recognize that there are lessons for him to learn that only he can learn on Earth.
And so that's the way the novel concludes.
So the novel and the way that it develops is not too far away from all of that research done by those guys at SurvivalNet you talked to.
Exactly right.
This novel owes its existence to all of the research that I've been doing over the last 35 years and that my colleagues have been doing helping me along the way.
No doubt about it.
I wrote this novel not so much as an exercise in entertainment or to simply charm the reader.
I wrote it to teach the lead.
I guess I'm inveterately a teacher and I wanted to make the research that I've done come alive in a fictional form that would be attractive and that would have plot, character.
And so it has all of those features.
And I must say that the novel has not sold anywhere nearly as well as my nonfiction pieces, The Afterlife Unveiled and this most recent book, Heaven and Hell Unveiled.
You haven't found your market yet.
But you also write a blog for The Huffington Post.
Now, I look at The Huffington Post in my news guys every day.
That's got its feet firmly on the ground.
What are you saying there?
Well, you know, I have written What I was doing was testing the waters.
I wanted to see just how far I could go.
They are very open to the kind of information that I'm sharing with your audience right now.
The reason for that is that Ariana Huffington herself is very much a believer in the afterlife.
I think that's the only way to account for my success because I have taken some risks that were rather surprising.
I didn't expect a blessing.
I didn't expect publication, actually.
Three out of four of my essays have been accepted.
The one that was not accepted was titled Materialism, The Creed of the Scientific Fundamentalist.
It came down a little bit too hard, and it sounded a little too antagonistic to, no doubt, many of her readers.
And as a result, the piece was not published.
But I've had greater success with three of my other articles, which basically, I think in a careful sort of way, without coming on too hard, presents the evidence that I've been sharing here with you.
I suppose the bottom line for all of this is, having done the research and reading that you've done, being in contact with these 90 individuals all around the world who are every single day researching this stuff, do you feel more comfortable about what's coming your way down the track?
I do.
I'm not at all worried about death.
I don't want to die.
Of course, I have commitments and my kids still need me.
But when the time comes, I have absolutely no concern about becoming nothing.
What I am concerned about is in meeting.
There were some things that I did as a younger man I'm not very proud of.
And I'm going to have to deal with that and perhaps deal with one or two people whom I hurt.
It might well be that they want to encounter me, and they can if they want to.
There's no way that I can stop them.
Or indeed, Stafford, that you have to encounter the emotions that you engendered in others.
I think that's the thing that I worry about.
Although I've tried to do well by people in my life, like every human being, I know I have hurt some people along the way, and sometimes it was in my quest for my career that was the most important thing in my life.
So, you know, I neglected people who were important to me.
And I kind of think, well, I'm hoping that there is something beyond this life.
But I'm not looking forward to having to confront all of that stuff because I know that although I've tried to be good and a lot of people think that I am good, I am by no means perfect.
And that probably goes for most of us.
You've described me to a T. I would say that I do expect to have those uncomfortable, embarrassing revelations.
However, I'm not afraid of them.
It seems to me that, in other words, there have been occasions here when a friend would dare to pin me down and say, you know, you're really screwing up here.
You're not, you need to be doing, you need to be doing something a little bit differently.
One of my children actually called me on something.
And I think that I have learned a great deal from those daring moments that friend and child have brought to me.
And I expect to have those encounters over there.
And you're right.
The deepest encounter you're going to have is with your own self.
You're going to uncover the true motivations behind your acts.
And they will not always be pretty.
But that's okay.
I don't mind suffering a little bit if it's in the interest of soul growth.
And that, of course, is what the afterlife is going to provide you with, with soul growth, with growth in a way that is simply closed off to us here because we don't see things as clearly.
We're not as close to the source, as I put it, at this level as we will be in the world to come.
Embarrassing and hurtful moments, but in the interest of soul growth and eventual spiritual evolution.
In my life, some of the most connected people that I've met have been from the Indian subcontinent.
I was on a pirate radio ship years and years ago when I was in my early 20s, and I was working with a guy there who was from South India somewhere.
He was incredibly spiritual and incredibly connected.
You've been to India a number of times, haven't you?
I have.
I've been there four times.
Four times.
What have you taken away from there?
No, my specialty is Indian religions and in particular Hinduism.
I know exactly the type of person you're talking to.
Such people have had a profound influence on my life.
I was raised a narrow Roman Catholic.
And when I went to graduate school in New York City, I started running into a few of these people.
And my life was changed dramatically.
And I became no longer a narrow Roman Catholic or a narrow anything, but very much a pluralist and deeply attracted to the spirituality of some of these Indian holy men and women, particularly women, just superb people whose whole lives have been led in the service of others.
What's interesting about the research that I'm doing is that that type of person is going to be most congenially happy once death comes, because the world that she will encounter will be a world where more service is expected.
There are just tons of things to do in the afterworld.
And those of us who use our time well will be using them in the service of those whom we can help.
And instead of feeling, oh, what a grind, because generally when we help on earth, you know, it's not very much fun, over there, it's much more joyous.
And we have more of an impact and perhaps more success.
There are many ways to serve.
We can serve fellow spirits who are in dark places, who need to be brought out of the shadowlands, as they're sometimes referred to.
We can help people back on Earth telepathically.
There are a number of ways to help.
And it seems to me that these Indian models that you and I have both come into contact with are, you might say, prototypes of the sorts of beings that we want to become and that we will have a chance of becoming In the next world, I have met some remarkable people, both here in the UK and on my various travels in different places.
You have students, obviously, at the university where you're at, and presumably some of them are quite skeptical about the things that you talk about.
What do you tell them when they're dismissive?
As some people emailing me after this program, because we've talked in a fairly cerebral way today, you know, you haven't been delivering me loads of gee whiz whiz-bang stories here.
We've been talking about some fairly deep and cerebral issues.
And I'm just wondering, when your students raise those things and say, you know, where are the big stories?
Where's the punchline?
What do you say?
Well, I do have some stories.
And sometimes I tell them a story or two.
And it gets their interest, but it generally doesn't change their mind.
Basically, the materialist kids that I run into have drunk up the materialism of their science teachers in high school and have been made to feel that to believe in anything like religion or afterlife or soul or God is pretty, I mean, it's not what smart people do.
And so they come into my course on death, on death and afterlife, a few of them, with, you might say, mindsets that are profoundly opposed to taking any of it seriously.
And there's generally no way to reach these kids.
Now, some of them do come around.
They come with skepticism, with genuine skepticism.
They look at the evidence.
They think, wow, I didn't have any idea that any of this could be taken seriously.
This is a much more attractive world than I thought there was.
So you find all types, Howard.
You find those who couldn't care less about what I have to say and struggle through and make their Bs or Cs, and those who are turned on, electrified, and become true believers in the world of spirit that I think is just part of our world and part of our reality.
It's just the way the world is, the universe is.
I'm not the most religious person in the world, I have to say.
But one thing that did imprint itself upon me in Bible class when I was very young, and I don't think I did for very long, was the notion that people who can believe having not seen, having not had direct proof themselves, are indeed blessed.
Now, you've done a lot of third-party research that hasn't involved you, and yet you've come out with a synthesis of beliefs that you're very comfortable with.
You said that you have stories.
I wonder, has anything directly happened to you?
Because my listeners will email me and say, this guy is all very well.
He's read an awful lot of other people's research, but hasn't really done very much himself or hasn't really experienced anything himself.
I wonder if you have anything to answer them.
No, I don't because I am not so gifted in that way.
But I have had many stories told by my students over the years that I've collected.
But still in all, no, I think that that is my strength, though, Howard.
What I might be blamed for is a necessary strength on the part of a researcher.
A researcher who bases his conclusions on his own experiences is going to be suspect.
It takes a person like myself who has studied many, many of these accounts from a strictly cerebral point of view who can come across more plausibly to a more critical audience.
And that's one of the reasons that I'm sometimes praised.
I come across as bringing a certain amount of caution to the subject.
It's a caution that comes precisely from the fact that I don't have mediumistic gifts.
So I see that as a strength rather than a weakness, though I can see why your audience might be a little put out by it.
But has anything in inverted commas unexplained happened to you?
Look, I've had, even in the last couple of months where I've cleared my parents' house, had strange experiences.
The most bizarre one that's happened to me recently, and I've told my listeners about it, is I was about to leave my mother and father's house for the last time.
It had been sold, and I'd done the final clearance.
There was no more that I could take.
And I just sat at the kitchen table and I thanked them for everything they'd done for me.
And then something compelled me to go to a drawer that I wouldn't have gone to.
And in the bottom of that drawer, in a place where I wouldn't ordinarily have looked, was a broadcast quality recording of my parents together that I didn't even know and had forgotten existed.
And if I hadn't felt compelled to do that in the last two minutes in that house that I'll never go back to, I would never have heard that recording of them, which I will now treasure for the rest of my life.
I am convinced that's beyond coincidence.
Yeah, I am too.
And I've heard so many stories like that that are impressive, but I have none to offer on my own.
So there you have it.
You're going to have to speak for me on this occasion, Howard.
I'm happy to turn it over to you.
We're so blessed.
I know that I'm going to get criticism from people who say that, you know, what research is he doing and why have you put this man on here?
And I put you on here for the simple reason that we've had that cerebral conversation.
And I think a conversation like that had to be had.
So that's where you're on here now.
Yeah, I think that's exactly right.
And if one were to read either one of my most recent books, they would find all kinds of extremely interesting accounts from the most interesting of subjects, including most of them being spirits, that would, I don't know, whet their appetite for more.
And again, a researcher and most of the people on SurvivalNet are researchers like me.
I would say 50% of them at least have never had a profound spiritual experience such as you're describing.
What I have had, I can say this, is from a very early age, deeply spiritual experiences coming out of my boyhood religion, mystical type experiences.
But they don't involve anything that would be as remarkable or as, shall we say, corroborative as the one that you've just described.
But spiritual experiences, moments when everything seemed to be right in the world and I was just dancing through life for just a very brief period, maybe just a half an hour, an experience that I've never been able to recapture.
I've had two or three of those in my life.
And that's, in other words, I've always been a very deeply spiritual type of person.
You might say a religious sort of person, but not a parapsychologically or a paranormally gifted person.
Okay, if anybody wants to know about you and your research, where do they go first?
They go to The Afterlife Unveiled, which is a book I wrote in 2011.
It was published by a British press.
And the most recent one just come out a couple of weeks ago called Heaven in Hell Unveiled.
It also, it's called Updates from the World of Spirit.
Heaven in Hell Unveiled, Updates from the World of Spirit.
And it also is published by another British press, British publisher.
Seems to me that the Brits have a great deal more interest in my research than Americans.
I'm not sure why that is.
Maybe you just slipped under the radar.
I'm not sure.
We talked about heaven, about the fact that it's very nice over there.
We didn't talk too much about hell, though.
If you're Adolf Hitler or Saddam Hussein or somebody who's, as you tend to have in America very sadly recently, somebody who's opened fire on a lot of people in a public place, what do you expect?
Well, there are hellish regions in the astral world and large populations that make their home there.
What's sometimes referred to as the shadow lands is a vast world of many conditions.
The landscapes, they vary from sordid city neighborhoods to parched, gray scrubland, to dark, lifeless deserts.
And is there any kind of redemption over there for Saddam Hussein or Hitler or some mass killer?
Yeah, there are.
So we assume that Ted Bundy's over there repenting.
Right, exactly.
If he is, now probably he's not, because you don't have to.
And spirits who are that deeply into their own evildoing have a very tough time admitting that they did anything terribly wrong and just keep seeing things from the same view that they had when they committed those murders.
But there are missionary spirits.
That's the word that is often used.
Missionary spirits that minister to souls in the shadow lands.
And residents there can free themselves if they're willing to face up humbly to their errors and crimes and repent them.
And of course, that does sometimes happen.
Some do, but most and perhaps all will eventually.
But many jeer at their would-be helpers and seem to prefer their dull lives over the challenges of higher worlds that they are apparently frightened of.
Does it not strike you as being odd that we don't hear from Saddam Hussein or from Hitler or Osama bin Laden?
They haven't communicated back from wherever they are.
I don't think that they would know how to do that.
It takes a certain amount of skill to be able to do that well, nor would they be able to find a medium whom they could congenially connect with, I'm suspecting.
What's really puzzling to me is that we haven't had any of these book-length communications coming from the Muslim world.
I've been looking for that and I can't find it.
I know that they come from China.
Unfortunately, those accounts have never been translated, and so I can't read them.
But the entire, you know, one-fifth of the world's population we've not heard from, and that's the Muslim world.
Just very briefly, Stefan, what are you working on now?
Right now, I am beginning to hatch out my next work, and that's going to be a work on the philosophy of religion, which is a standard area within philosophy.
And most of the books being written are, they seem to me to be way over the students' heads.
And what I want to do is to write a book that addresses students at the level of the kids whom I teach at this relatively ordinary California State University institution where we're not dealing with the Harvards and the Cambridges, but with students who are not that particularly gifted or don't have much background.
And I want to write a book that really reaches them at their level.
And so that's what I'll be doing.
And I will incorporate in this book much of the research that's been done by my conferers and the writings that I've been doing, because I know that this stuff is very interesting to our students, much more so than the classical material that comes through the philosophy of religion.
A lot to think about there.
What do you make of Stafford Betty?
Tell me.
You can email me through the website, triple w.theunexplained.tv, www.theunexplained.tv.
Okay, a different kind of show, but I think we were due for one where we do more thought and we don't just tell stories.
I think that was quite planned.
But let me know what you think because the show is done for you.
Please keep making guest suggestions.
I see them all and I get onto them all.
Go to www.theunexplained.tv, send me an email, and I'll get straight on it.
Thank you very much for your nice comments recently.
Life has been very, very busy and quite exhausting for the last couple of weeks, but I'm continuing to do the shows and getting them out there because it's important for both of us.
And thank you very much for all of the nice things you've said.
Thank you to Adam, my webmaster, for his hard work at Creative Hotspot.
And above all, thank you to you for keeping the faith with the unexplained.
And until next we meet, here on The Unexplained, stay safe, stay calm, and stay in touch.
My name is Howard Hughes.
I'm in London.
This has been The Unexplained.
And until we meet again, take care.
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