Guardians of the Afterworld by Dr. Stafford Betty, released January 2024, and Nosso Lar: Life in the Spirit World as dictated by the spirit Andres Luiz to Francisco Candido Xavier, released in 1944 and translated into English, are both books about life beyond bodily death. The former is a work of fiction that compiles years of Dr. Betty’s study of what one aspect of the afterlife may be like based on religious texts and scientific survival studies. The latter is written like a biography, if you will, of a physician who had crossed over to a plane of existence called Nosso Lar.
Guardians follows two fictional characters, Numen and Sephia. The first chapter deals with the development of the guardians from two planets in the Milky Way that are very different from Earth. With their mentor, Fruva, they adapt to their new human spirit forms and positions as guardians of the astral realm just above our own, populated with discarnates. The remainder of the book follows them through the difficulties of running this astral level.
Nosso Lar follows Andres Luiz as he navigates the spiritual bureaucracy that apparently exists in the discarnate realm, which helps those in the Umbral region (think Purgatory) overcome the individual issues that keep them from spiritual growth and advancement. He must also shed the earthly attitudes of core family identities to include all people as sisters and brothers.
In Guardians, the victims of the war between Ukraine and Russia continue their conflict in the astral plane, causing Numan and Sephia to address them all.
In Nosso Lar, since this was written on the advent of World War II, the governor must address those who are concerned about loved ones still on Earth and quell the fear and anxiety of the newer members as war looms in Europe.
If either of these accounts is true, we may expect a similar existence as our kind of hierarchical structure on Earth. However, we will have spiritual capabilities and a greater awareness of the different astral levels or spheres that lead to higher and higher levels of growth and abilities. To ascend to these higher spheres, one is expected to work toward one or many goals, assist others toward advancing into the astral from the Umbral, and find forgiveness and love toward each other. Almost every religious Earthly text states those goals as a necessary requirement for heavenly entrance, so it shouldn’t be surprising.
In Guardians, Numen is curious about the lower realm, where people dwell in fear of the astral plane, thinking that they must exist as they did when they lived on Earth. They continue to slink along dirty streets, imbibing on the sins and addictions they had grown so accustomed to…still living in the flesh instead of the spirit. He meets Pol Pot, once a dictator on Earth, who could not relieve himself of the belief that those he had killed were a necessary sacrifice for the welfare of the state. He followed a path that led nowhere and could not be convinced that it was futile. Numen and Sephia would meet astral dwellers who would frequent these lower planes, trying to convince these discarnates that they were living in a hell they created for themselves.
Andres Luiz, as a physician on Earth, wanted to continue his work in Nosso Lar. When he was allowed to work with “patients” in the spiritual realm, he found that his earthly focus on the physical body left him ignorant about the conditions he would see at this particular hospital. These people in transition from the lower realm were to be spiritually rehabilitated to advance into Nosso Lar or be sent back to the lower realm.
What is striking about both accounts is that every human (and alien) soul has free will to follow the path of spiritual awareness and advancement or fall further into the clutches of a corporeal focus. Many of those atheists or agnostics I speak with say that they can’t believe there is a god who would allow human suffering. But human suffering is a composition of human choice, not the will of God or whatever primary consciousness that runs things. If the autocrats of the world simply chose to uplift the people of their countries rather than think their path is the only, best route, perhaps there would not be war in Ukraine or Gaza right now. If large corporations put more emphasis on people rather than profit, perhaps we wouldn’t be humans suffering from income disparity, climate change, and radicalism. The goal of life on Earth is to find the path toward spiritual enlightenment, fraternity, and forgiveness, recognizing that we are all connected and that none of us knows the path the other must follow in this existence. It is not like these are the only two texts that emphasize this…there are thousands. It is not as if the spiritual realm doesn’t try its level best to send us clues….we’re simply ignoring them.
NOTE: Dr. Stafford Betty will be interviewed on Friday, June 14th at 7 PM EST via Zoom. Please go to Rhine.org for more information.
My travels as an editor have led me to this book from the latest book to be released by White Crow Books in the series from New Thinking Allowed. Since the New York Times release of Naval video footage and a story by Leslie Kean, the discussion around UFOs (or UAPs now) has gone from fringe woo-woo to “Hey, there must be something to this after all.” As a result, the book I’m editing has come from transcripts by people Dr. Mishlove has interviewed over the years who know about “alien encounters”. Only one has to do with the physical close encounters of the name-your-number. The rest are about the experiences of the victims or, as we say in parapsychology “the experiencers”.
I am not a believer in the “alien visitor” hypothesis considering that we have so little data about the origins of these phenomena but I do think something is going on, and has since we branched off from our ape ancestors to begin the genus “Homo”. If I’m starting to sound like the ancient astronaut theorists from the History Channel, please continue reading so I may disavow this idea and explain further what I mean.
One of the interviewees brought up this book called The Nine during their discussion with Dr. Mishlove and I thought it would be worth checking into. This is the book blurb:
Stuart Holroyd, skeptical, open-minded, and well-informed, became
Observer to a remarkable U.S. group of psychics headed by a famous American scientist and an English aristocrat. They claimed that they had made contact with galactic intelligences and their “evidence” was astounding…
– Did three “selected” minds help to avert world disaster?
-Was the group in constant communication with extraterrestrials?
-Was it possible for these alien intelligences to effect a landing on Earth?
-Had they, in fact, already visited Earth in previous centuries?
-Did the group’s meditations avert Kissinger’s assassination and a Middle East holocaust?
from the book’s back cover
This is a pretty good summary of what I read. You’re probably wondering why Henry Kissinger is involved. This book was written in 1977 after the Middle East was having fits about Israel. Yes, I read this book just before Hamas invaded Israel in October 2023 taking prisoners, killing Jews and anyone else they came across which included Americans. The synchronicity is not lost on me.
The writer, Stuart Holroyd, is a British author famous for being one of the original “Angry Young Men” in the 1950s before it gained popularity in the 1960s. He went from being angry to looking into the paranormal and esoteric. The American scientist was Andrija Puharich who had over fifty patents, primarily medical, one of which involved hearing aids. He studied several very powerful mediums, healers, and Uri Geller, the Israeli famous for spoon-bending and other psychokinetic feats. The aristocrat was Sir John Whitmore, a racecar driver who had a near-death experience, which caused him to sell his pile in England and use his fortune to bankroll Puharich’s work for a while. The third was a trance medium named Phyllis Schlemmer, the Transceiver of the Nine. Several other people were tangentially involved with the project including a young man named Bobby who was to be an important addition to the group but opted not to stay.
Andrija Puharic and Uri Geller (1972)Phyllis Schlemmer Sir John Whitmore
The Council of Nine, as they called themselves, spoke through Phyllis while Whitmore and Puharich listened, sometimes using a tape recorder to capture what the Nine said. The author treats these events in chronological order and determines, from the many interactions the three principles had with The Nine, those communications he deemed were coherent and important. Interspersed throughout are reality checks. Holroyd pulls the reader through the fourth wall to say, “Hey, yeah, this reads like fiction, but I promise you, this stuff happened.” And, “Yeah, I bet you’re thinking ‘pull the other one’ right now, but if you look at it, it could just be nine super powerful dudes talking to these three humans.”
Puharich took these communications in stride since this wasn’t his first rodeo. He had worked with a transceiver and a healer and had received similar messages. However, the three principles frequently squabbled and their egos interfered with the plan on occasion. It is fun to read The Nine rebuking three accomplished adults over their issues with one another, but that’s where the fun ends and the explosions go off in your mind as you continue to read. Taking what The Nine say at face value as the author recommends, a series of messages peeking into their reality unfolds that would make Philip K. Dick freak. Like the President of the United States has several members of the White House Press Corp, The Nine used several spokes-entities as liaisons to speak through Phyllis, primarily one named Tom.
The primary reason The Nine were in contact with the three was to avert a devastating possible World War III with Israel as the center of the conflict. Whitmore, Puharic, and Schlemmer together apparently made a perfect “human” to work through and with to achieve these goals. Bobby would have been a better transceiver but, according to Tom, he forgot what he came here to do. When asked why they didn’t force him, manipulate him, or use other tactics to convince him of the importance of his task, they replied that we humans have free will and The Nine cannot interfere, even if humans made the choice before coming to this planet. The message here is that we come to this life on planet Earth with a plan for our lives, but our memories get wiped and we may not achieve our goals. We also have free will to do with our lives as we want. It’s not all candy on Halloween though. If we don’t achieve our goals here, we get to go through remedial school when we leave our lives here and before we can progress to higher planes.
Other messages and information include:
“…more advanced technologies would help ensure the survival of the planet”
Bioengineering. Both Phyllis and Bobby were re-engineered to be better transceivers.
“…dark forces that try to prevent all this happening, and one of their ways is to insinuate false teachings in the communications. It is not so difficult for them for they are sly and under the guise of something fine, they can be misleading.”
They had different forms as if they were from different planets
Many different types of craft would land over nine days leaving teachers behind to help Earth evolve (this is a future event).
“To raise the vibration of the souls, to bring them out of darkness – and when we say darkness, we do not mean negativity but true darkness – for they do not see and do not understand the cosmic, and they also do not understand that when they hate and when they are angry, this creates a problem for the universe. Only by raising the level of the consciousness of this planet, and perfecting the love and the core that is inside each human being, can we go on then to perfect other planets in the galaxies. This planet is one of the lowest that the soul comes to learn a lesson. The tragedy of this planet is its density. It is like a mire; it is sticky, and these beings get trapped in this stickiness…we are going to raise the level of this planet, make it a lighter planet. The energy then coming from it will be sent into the universe and will help raise the levels of consciousness and the levels of other planets…”
“…this planet has lagged behind, it hasn’t progressed like it’s supposed to…beneath this planet…are other beings, other civilizations, that there are other people with more technology that can help raise it, but this planet is so bogged down in pure ego, and without harmony and out of balance, that it’s upsetting the master plan.”
The Nine are equivalent to the top cosmic governing council
There is no other planet like Earth and every being that exists in the Universe must take a turn here. If this planet fails, then all the souls that haven’t had a turn here will not obtain the necessary growth.
UFOs come from many places, including the place The Nine inhabit, but many are not physical, just appear to be.
“…[The Nine] are not God. All of you and all of us make God…Many of your physical beings deify other physical beings, when it is truly them.”
“Many souls when they die are trapped in the atmosphere and are evolved over and over on this planet, and seem to be going nowhere. This planet was originally created to teach a being balance between the spiritual and the physical world, and so these beings never evolve beyond the belt of this planet. Their desires hold them to this planet.”
The emissary, Tom said, “The difficulty we have in understanding the problems you have in this gross heavy density world that as physical beings you must exist upon…”
Dr. Puharich had worked with another transceiver prior to Phyllis named D.G. Vinod who had achieved contact with The Nine. He had also worked with, and wrote a book about, Uri Geller who, Puharich claimed, had abilities given to him from superhuman entities which he said were The Nine.
This can be taken at face value and be applied to the unknown experiences that humans have had even before the Roswell event’s flying saucers. This could also be a misinformation campaign if you are to believe those who think that Puharic was using mind control to test CIA tactics. Those people skeptical of Puharic tend to have a Christian philosophy and are against The Nine because they have been quoted as saying that Christianity is based on a false premise. Tom called Jesus of Nazareth the “Nazarene” and claimed he was simply human but given many superhuman abilities to guide humanity forward. Instead, we deified Jesus and created another religion. I guess you can see why Christians would be miffed and would want to debunk The Nine.
There is the issue of veridical data. None of the tapes that Puharic made exist and much of the experimental data has not been shared by the Stanford Research Institute researchers who looked at Uri Geller’s ability. Over and over in this book and the book “Uri”, Puharic claims that the tapes were wiped and the documentation disappeared. One has to wonder why that happened or even if it did. Why was a book about The Nine written but no proof provided? Is this another trick like the Scientology philosophy? Was it a CIA brainwashing program? Why were so many influential people involved? Why is The Nine still so pervasive today, especially amongst the wealthy and powerful? And, what happened to Puharic when he returned to the U.S.?
Imagine being Hermione Granger, or Harry Potter or even Merlin from King Arthur’s court, now throw all that out of the window, it isn’t like that at all. Humans really don’t have a huge effect on reality, which is good if you think about it. For instance, you wouldn’t want to be turned into a ferret because you mouthed off at the wrong magician. Doing real magic takes a great deal of effort and practice at being brainless. It turns out that our brains tend to interfere with our ‘minds’ which are the conduits to the data stream that gives us magical ability. Most of us wouldn’t be very good at it even if we spent a lot of time meditating while firmly grasping a crystal shard. Just like any other skill, it’s a combination of genes, talent, and practice. That’s the bad news.
The good news is that we do have a measurable effect on our reality, albeit a small one. Experiments done for over a century have shown that intention and attention can somehow manipulate the probabilities to our favor if we spend time dwelling on it. Our ancestors knew this quite well though it freaked out people in positions of power. Nostradamus, the famous precog, hid his ability from the Catholic church which was really quick to toss people like him into a fire or drown them for their own good. Not all psychically skilled people feared for their lives. The Oracle of Delphi was a highly regarded figure in antiquity providing useful information to seekers. Shaman or healers in small communities helped their people find food, avoid danger and healed them of their infirmities. Psychic mediums provided solace to grieving mothers and widows after the Civil War. Remote Viewers sought information about Soviet maneuvers during the Cold War. Police have found missing persons or solved crimes using information gleaned from the psychic realm.
Real magic can be classified into three different aspects: divination, force-of-will, and theurgy which have been reclassified using modern terminology. To divine information is to pull it out of the air so-to-speak which parapsychologists call Telepathy, Clairvoyance, Remote Viewing, Precognition, etcetera (please refer to my posts on each of these subjects). Anyone who reads tea leaves, Tarot cards or palms of hands are also classified as diviners. Theurgy is the utilization of spirit entities for information which includes but is not limited to spiritual mediumship and shamanism. Force-of-will can be classified as psychokinesis which is a big word for manipulating things without physically touching them. New Thought may also fall under this classification because you can manipulate your own fate.
Much of the book “Real Magic” is filled with experiments that prove that we can manipulate reality and even see probable futures. This throws those who believe in the mechanistic dogma for a loop. According to mainstream science (e.g. classical physicists) magical ability is impossible. Ask a Quantum mechanic and they’ll say they aren’t sure what’s making this car run but they CAN see that causality and time don’t really work the same in the subatomic world as it does in the visible one. Psychologists and Neurobiologists are still holding fast to the belief that the brain creates our self-awareness but cannot find where it is happening. Materialism is hitting a wall so in comes Idealism. Where Materialism sees self-awareness as a manifestation of the brain, Idealism says that self-awareness, or Consciousness, is a fundamental part of reality that sits below physics, chemistry, biology and all that we know of reality. This subatomic realm may not just be a data field but part and parcel of who we are.
I recommend this book as a primer for those interested in the field of parapsychology and for those whose minds just can’t quite wrap themselves around the concept of psychic ability. It is a comprehensive, comprehensible and at times comical look at supernatural abilities but also a treatise on how parapsychology has been ignored at best and demonized at worst. It argues quite eloquently for the existence of the magical but does not apologize for the century of strict laboratory experimentation on the subject. If you want to learn how to become a wizard, play an online game instead… this is not the book for you.
I was asked to write up a blurb for the upcoming Rhine Friday night talks to make it interesting and compelling for people to attend. I did well enough to compel myself to purchase and read the book before the author has even taken to the lectern. Dr. Pasciuti is a Jungian Transpersonal Psychologist who is also a psychic experiencer. His book on personal growth through crises goes beyond the day-to-day issues we all must weather to those of a supernatural (psychic) type. I haven’t read many self-help books nor have I read many psychology texts other than those I was assigned in college (and other programs) so I cannot say for certain that other psychologists have not delved into supernatural subject matter. However, the predominant philosophy out there is that supernatural events are simply impossible and must be reduced to the workings of the brain. I disagree of course, and my fervent desire in writing for this blog and my series of books about Callie O’Callahan is to teach others that their supernatural experiences do not automatically make them insane.
The book is written in layers, the first section dealing with topical matters of life and difficulties that we all share with subsequent sections delving deeper into more personal levels of development. The sections regarding spirituality are where the supernatural phenomena are handled quite deftly. In our predominantly Christian materialist society, many psychic phenomena can lead people to a spiritual crisis especially if it happens only once or a very few times. We do not teach people in our Western philosophy how to deal with apparitions, telepathy, psychokinesis or precognition because it isn’t supposed to happen…yet it does happen…to so many people. Dr. Pasciuti handles the psychic subject with care, because this book is for a broad audience, by using personal and client experiences as examples and bringing across the most current hypothesis for psi in his section called “Sit Lightly in the Saddle of Belief”. Instead of beating us up with dogmatic belief systems, he weaves psi experiences in gently and carefully with the other issues that might cause us existential crises.
His client Dawn exemplifies the expansion of human consciousness once the ten key areas of human development have been examined. The author’s experience both with clients and his own path has led him to believe that this is possible for everyone to attain. Besides recognizing the ten key areas, it is important to reveal those aspects we are unaware of called Shadow Areas. Some people may still be dealing with issues from a past life which can be revealed through regression therapy if done properly by a skilled therapist. Time in quiet contemplation, meditation, ascetic practices, breathing exercises or even running or biking for miles can aid in opening up the brain to the mind and the mind to Consciousness.
I am a Taoist by philosophy which means I do not follow any religious belief system. It also means that I do not try to understand God (The Tao is unknowable). Wow does that free up your mind. Anyway, I also view life through Yin and Yang: all things have light and dark, constructive and destructive, positive and negative, the flow of Yin and Yang determine how much of one or the other prevails. A third aspect is Wu Wei or be like water: it flows over or around obstacles and conforms to its environment. I also look at many different philosophies and choose aspects that work for me and throw away the rest. Reaching an enlightened state where the mind touches the Consciousness of which we are all a part is a personal journey that is different for everyone. This book is not a self-help book that will guide you step-by-step through a process, rather, it discusses those areas that can hold us back from our true potential if we do not recognize them and try to balance them.
When I was growing up, there was a fantastic show on our PBS station called “Connections” by James Burke. He would begin the show with the unlikely connections one thing had with another such as what chimneys had to do with romantic love. He would methodically chain the degrees of separation from the one to the other. This is what Mitch Horowitz has done with “The Miracle Club: How Thoughts Become Reality” between the New Age movement and psychic ability. What connects the two is positive intention and how it works is still a matter of conjecture.
J.B. Rhine studied psychic ability, calling it Extrasensory Perception, for decades and wrote about something he called the decline effect. Eventually, those he tested would get pretty bored trying to guess which card was next in the pile causing their once-positive results to fade. It’s like a tired baseball pitcher starting to throw home runs. If the baseball coach knows precisely when to pull the pitcher, they won’t give up a base to the opposition. Knowing when this decline effect occurs can prevent negative data from skewing the positive results the researcher has obtained thus far. Skeptics include the tests where decline effect has occurred to show that there is no statistical effect at all.
Helmut Schmidt found that his subjects testing for psychokinesis fared much better when he recognized how psychic ability truly manifests in people: “it is neither egalitarian nor available on-demand”. He chose to study subjects who already showed promise in the psychic arena rather than study a pool of unknown subjects who might, once again, skew the results to the negative. Here comes the baseball analogy again: If a beginner picks up a bat, they might hit a nice soft pitch to the infield if they hit the ball at all. Every once in a while, that beginner will get lucky and hit a home run. An aspiring baseball player might spend years of hard work and still not get 200 hits out of a thousand pitched balls. Then there is the one amazing hitter who gets above 400 hits out of a thousand. I promise you those remarkable baseball players have some sort of mental ritual they go through to succeed while they’re at bat.
Schmidt also recognized that even the talented psychic needed to be comfortable in their surroundings to have the greatest psychokinetic outcomes. He would come to their homes with a random number generator and wait until they were “psyched” for the test. He was patient and upbeat with everyone and his results showed positive hits well above the average. Those scientists who attempted to replicate his results fared far worse. Why? They didn’t understand that psychic ability is mercurial and techy. They put subjects in uncomfortable labs and gave them no incentive for success, just a few dollars for participation. That’s like giving every little leaguer a trophy because they showed up to games.
In “The Miracle Club” Horowitz spends several chapters discussing, in detail, how to reach a desired goal. He explains the methods of Émile Coué (a psychologist who used autosuggestion for psychotherapy), and Neville Goddard (who used autosuggestion to make things happen in his life) which correlate quite nicely with the methods employed by successful psychics. I had participated in an experiment at the Rhine Research Center testing whether a meditative state would increase my psychic ability. We spent a couple of hours a week learning autosuggestion during meditation to obtain a goal (one of our choosing). We were tested in the ganzfeld room before we were taught this method and then again soon thereafter. Up to that point, I had been using a form of Transcendental meditation that I had learned from taking Aikido classes, but this one was more focused and intentional. This type of meditation is shallower and does not involve completely clearing one’s mind of all thoughts, rather it allows to focus on a desired effect in a very relaxed state like when you start to fall asleep (hypnagogic state).
Another method of focused intention is taught by Bill Bengston called Image Cycling. The practitioner chooses twenty goals each with an associated symbol. For instance, if you’d like a particular car, you would write it up in a journal and then picture a steering wheel. The cycling begins slowly at first and then speeds up significantly until you are visualizing all twenty icons in less than a second. Bill claims that this gets the practitioner into a receptive state. His method is currently used as a psychic healing technique; however, those healing practitioners also get something off their list. My friend Susan got the car she wanted and had to replace that desire with another in her journal. Basically, it’s a win/win for both the healing practitioner and the patient.
Positive visualizations require two things. First, the imagined scene needs to be a completed task. For instance, if you want to get a certain number on the dice, you visualize the dice being thrown and ending on that number. If you want that job, you must see the supervisor shaking your hand. It’s not enough just to see these things, you must feel the handshake or hear the sounds of a casino when the dice falls. It’s like a total immersion fantasy that you believe with all your heart will come true. Secondly, the mind needs to be in a receptive state. Goddard and Coué both employed the hypnagogic state to employ their statement of intent. It also works when just waking up, during intentional meditation, or using Bengston’s image cycle.
No one knows how this works, though Horowitz does describe some possible hypotheses in the book, mostly having to do with quantum mechanics. I have a different hypothesis which several physicists (the number continues to grow) like Max Planck also consider as necessary to any physics equation, that of consciousness. If consciousness permeates all things, all things can be manipulated and our reality is not as fixed as we might believe. Back a decade or so ago, I enjoyed playing MMORPGs like Everquest. I had an avatar in the game that I manipulated to do my bidding. The software engineers made that place a reality for my avatar and they manipulated her reality while I took her places I wanted her to go. I think of life on planet Earth as avatars that consciousness inhabits in a reality that it programmed. With practice, we can manipulate that reality just a bit.
I attended a talk given by Dr Joe Gallenberger last month on psychokinesis and winning in Las Vegas where he had briefly described spoon bending that seems to defy the laws of physics. When I was growing up, a self-proclaimed psychic known as Uri Geller would go on talk shows bending spoons at the neck between the bowl and the handle. Two rather famous people, Dean Radin and Michael Crichton, claimed success at gatherings known as “PK parties”. Mr Radin had folded the bowl of the spoon over without effort in front of several witnesses. He later attempted to bend the bowl of a similar spoon with conscious force but was unsuccessful without the aid of pliers. I asked Dr Gallenberger if there was a study done on spoons bent by mechanical force versus those bent by supposed psychic means. Apparently, there was a physicist, Dr Wilbur Franklin, who had placed spoons bent by Uri Geller and those bent by the usual method in an electron microscope and the findings are described in a book called “The Spoon Benders”. I could not find the book Dr Gallenberger recommended but did come across this award-winning work of fiction.
