MYSTERY WIRE — The centuries-old arguments between science and religion about what happens when we die have been blurred by the handful of academics who have studied what they say is ‘the afterlife’.
Dr. Stafford Betty spent three decades as a professor in the California State University system and admits he caught some grief from colleagues over his interest in the afterlife.
“Certainly my colleagues mostly felt that they did not want me to be associated with their reputation,” Betty said. “They felt that my presence there was a kind of a tarnishing of their own reputation, and the reputation of the philosophy and religious studies department at CSU Bakersfield. So that that really did to my detriment. It kept me from making contact with the best students, the brightest students who were steered away from me for fear that I would contaminate them. Absolutely there’s no question. But that my interest in another world suggested to them that I must have been a fairly unhappy person because I wasn’t content merely with this world. I think I’m a lot happier than almost all of them because I don’t fear death. And they do.”
Betty says there is evidence that human consciousness exists separately from the brain. He has written five books on the subject, including The Afterlife Therapist, and is considered one of the leading academics on what might exist on the other side.
“Scientists are put out because I am alleging that there is such a world that they can’t measure, and that most of them don’t believe in,” Betty told Mystery wire during a recent interview. “And without a question, I am doing that. And the assumption by them is that all of our experience comes by way of the brain, and the brain generates all of our experience. That’s not the conclusion that I draw. And that my fellow researchers draw, not at all.”
Related afterlife articles:
- Charles Manson is not in heaven unless I got some things wrong
- Sometimes You Don’t See The Light – The Void: A Place of Nothingness in the Afterlife
- The Looming Divorce Between Religion and the Afterlife
From afterlife theories, to mediums communicating with the other side, to demonic possessions, Dr. Betty talks about all of it with George Knapp in the interview you can watch and read below.
George Knapp
Stafford Betty, I don’t imagine there are a lot of people like you, people in academia working for a university who study the afterlife, it must be a very small fraternity isn’t it?
Stafford Betty
It is, as a matter of fact, sometimes I feel like I’m a fraternity of one. That must not be true. I know that there are other people who are interested in my research in academia. But I don’t know anyone who has gone into it in anywhere near the depth that I have. I’ve published five books on the afterlife in the last 10 years. And I think that’s quite unique in the profession. It’s quite different.
George Knapp
Five books, 10 years. I mean, it sounds like a mission as an obsession, as much as a project.
Stafford Betty
It is, I wouldn’t say obsession, because my life is much broader than just my interest in the afterlife. But by all means it is a mission. And the mission is to get this, I think, extraordinarily good news out to the public. And the public is receptive to it. academia is not, not yet. And the reason that the public eats these books up, and one of them has done surprisingly well, the first one that I published way back in 2011, is that the news is so good. Most people don’t like the idea of simply dying and becoming nothing. That’s a real downer for most people. Now, as I talk to people who say, they actually prefer that it makes me wonder if they are in denial, or if they really have a miserable life. Because what shows up in my research is a fascinating world of considerable beauty, and of tremendous interest to those who survive and have led a basically decent life, we certainly are held accountable for the deeds that we do. And in this respect, our research dovetails with the religions of the world, they’ve always preached that, you know, we get what we deserve. And that turns out to be largely true, not in the same way that religions imagined it, we can get to that a little bit later. But without a doubt, the kind of character that we form in this life, by the choices that we make, and by the habits that we build, spill over into the kind of afterlife that we are likely to at least start out at. The will, is always free. And we can make adjustments once we get over there. And we can make changes, radical changes, and we will be encouraged to, many of us. Because there are definitely dark worlds where many dark people are going to find themselves in initially.
George Knapp
How much academic freedom did you have? I mean, you spent decades in the university system in California, and have published books and you’re clearly interested in this topic. Was there pushback professionally for you? I mean, I can see that a professor of religion might be okay in pursuing this, but I don’t know what kind of reaction you got from your colleagues.
Stafford Betty
Yeah, it’s very negative. Without a question. And when I retired, I retired a little less than a year ago. It took me three years to get a well deserved, emeritus, and that’s something that professors need in order to continue their work and look as if they are in good standing once they retire. And that came from … those earlier turndowns were the pushback. Certainly my colleagues mostly felt that they did not want me to be associated with their reputation. They felt that my presence there was a kind of a tarnishing of their own reputation, and the reputation of the philosophy and religious studies department at CSU Bakersfield. So that that really did to my detriment. It kept me from making contact with the best students, the brightest students who were steered away from me for fear that I would contaminate them. Absolutely there’s no question. But that my interest in another world suggested to them that I must have been a fairly unhappy person because I wasn’t content merely with this world. I think I’m a lot happier than almost all of them because I don’t fear death. And they do.
George Knapp
How much of it is wishful thinking. I mean, you’ve had to consider this. I mean, you know, you said a lot of people wish are hoping for an afterlife. Some people don’t care. I mean, you know, it is something we’d like to believe that we go on. So I would worry that in your kind of research, that it clouds the issue,
Stafford Betty
It surely does. And that’s why I have gone to such great trouble to research in depth, looking at dozens and dozens of accounts, coming to us from the other world, through legitimate mediums, to see, to make sure that you know, that I’m not guilty of this kind of wishful thinking. And I’m quite sure that I’m not, and the evidence just keeps pouring in. Not only from mediumistic research, but from other areas as well. You’re probably aware that there are such things as deathbed visions, near death experience, there’s a lot of research done on little kids who remember previous lives, there are very strong, a great deal of research done on on what we call apparitions or ghosts, many ghosts have been seen simultaneously by many people. And and the research that has been done in this area is extraordinarily deep. I don’t know anyone who it who is living today, who, with a few exceptions, who have put all of this together, as as thoroughly as I have. But there certainly have been people in the past who have research one or another of these areas in tremendous depth. And I’m deeply indebted to all of these researchers, and they go back 150 years.
George Knapp
Let’s talk about science versus religion in dealing with this issue. So this is the afterlife has long been the province of religion, based on faith. And sciences, as you have told me before, has been pretty hostile to it. You’ve written an article about the looming divorce between religion and the afterlife, I’m guessing that you get pushback from both sides that religion is happy that science is going into that, and science isn’t happy that you’re dealing with a religious topic. So talk about both halves of that.
Stafford Betty
Yeah. Thanks, George, that is of great interest to us all. First of all, scientists are put out because I am alleging that there is such a world that they can’t measure, and that most of them don’t believe in. And without a question, I am doing that. And the assumption by them is that all of our experience comes by way of the brain, and the brain generates all of our experience. That’s not the conclusion that I draw. And that my fellow researchers draw, not at all we recognize the importance of a healthy brain. The brain is not the generator of our experience. We researchers feel that and we have excellent reasons for this. The brain is the receiver and the transmitter of the information that we come to the, generator of experience of consciousness is our what we call soul or the self and it’s immaterial. And it works through the brain, the brain being its transmitter, and its receiver. It’s a lot like a television set, a TV, that tunes into specific electromagnetic waves, and converts them into image and sound. So I held the brain is extraordinarily important. But it is not the generator of our experience. Science has serious trouble with that, George, because they they don’t see any such thing as, as a soul. They recognize that we are conscious, but they see, they say they claim that consciousness somehow emerges as a byproduct of electro chemical brain events. And now, they have no way of proving that they have no way of even making sense of that. And they acknowledge that it’s extremely mysterious to them how that should could ever happen. But they believe that that at least is superior to the thesis that we are recommending that, basically, the brain is just the transmitter and the receiver rather than the generator. So you see that they have terrible problems with this spiritual dimension. Now about religion, to get to that. The conclusions that we’ve come to the afterlife scenarios that have evolved from all the research that we’ve done is that there is nothing about religion that has a right say, we own this area. We’re simply made in a way that we don’t die. And we’re all made in that way. And it doesn’t matter whether you are a Baptist, or Catholic, or an atheist, or a Buddhist, or a Hindu, we’re all going to die. And we’re all going to have this very natural experience of surviving bodily death. And it’s not as if there is some god that is awaiting us to see if we have acknowledged him, please them, follow the rules. That’s not at all what comes through the research that we’ve done. So you can see that religious people find our conclusions rather daunting and suspect, not all of them, because there are some who have open minds and find this intriguing, and find their perspectives have broadened, and that we bring to the table something far more attractive than their scriptures have ever imagined. But others are completely turned off and threatened. So there you have it.
George Knapp
Let’s talk about consciousness a little bit. Science doesn’t really know what it is. The assumption is that it’s generated by the brain. And when the body dies, the brain dies consciousness is gone. It’s sort of like your comparison to a television set. I guess you pulled the plug on the set, right? The set’s dead. But the programming is (inaudible).
Stafford Betty
That’s well done. Another analogy is this, take the analogy of a computer that operates, it functions wonderfully, as long as there’s no glitch, as long as there’s no bug in the computer, as there’s no virus. But if the computer has a virus, then you can’t communicate. Now, there’s nothing that has happened to you the communicator, but the people on the other side might assume that there’s something wrong with you because they can’t hear from you anymore. It’s nothing wrong with you. But the computer is glitched. It’s has a virus, and the brain when it gets sick, or when it’s damaged, will make it seem as if you simply have disappeared or you have degenerated into something that is subhuman or at least subnormal when, in point of fact, what appears to be the case is that there’s nothing wrong with your consciousness, nothing wrong with your soul. It’s just that you can’t communicate through in the normal way, because your computer is damaged, your brain isn’t working. And that is the conclusion that becomes overwhelmingly convincing once we look at all of the evidence for survival, this must be the case because we know that the brain certainly does shut down and it stops working altogether. There must be something else then that we are and that carries through and forward. And it does and that is the being that becomes a conscious in an afterworld.
George Knapp
What is the evidence that consciousness continues after the brain dies, what is it that you study? Give me some examples.
Stafford Betty
I will, I’m going to go ahead and just nail the 10 areas that we are looking to. And the first one is the near death experience. There’s an awful lot known about that. Let me just go ahead and main these 10 areas and we can come back and talk about anyone that you want to the near death experience. deathbed visions, deathbed visions are quite different near death experience. Re-incarnational memories of little children I mentioned earlier, communications from the so called dead through legitimate mediums, apparitions or ghosts, poltergeists, spirits that reach out to us through electronic instruments, so called Instrumental trans communication. On phones, we get these mysterious calls from another world and they claim that they are the deceased of deceased loved ones of the person, they’re trying to communicate with spirits that possess our bodies, or attach themselves to our bodies, and episodes of terminal lucidity in Alzheimer’s patients. So, we in addition to this, we have a proper way of looking at what philosophers are telling us. And, of course, we have all of the claims by the religions of the world, which don’t mean much to me, they’re very suspect. Nevertheless, they’re perhaps better than nothing. They are these scriptures that all assert that we do die, and then we continue to live. And that’s at least worth mentioning. Let’s put it this way. So all that evidence comes together. And gives us the, not the assumption. But the conclusion. It’s so overwhelming. George, that we we draw the conclusion that we in fact, have the evidence that we do continue on, do you want to go into any of these areas in greater depth?
George Knapp
Yes, mediums, for example. I know in the afterlife therapist, you mentioned hundreds of books that have been written by people who communicate with the other side or say they do. How do we know that it’s legit, you know, that that field has been polluted with some pretty bad characters who pulled up scams over the years? How do you know that they’re legit? And how do you how do we know who we’re communicating with?
Stafford Betty
Right? Okay. The the most important … first of all, there are a number of ways to answer that question. The one that I think is most important is that if you begin to collect these various books, and there are over 100 books that in considerable detail, describe the experiences of spirits in the world, that we are naming the afterworld, the afterlife. And they come to us and the only way they can, through mediums. And let’s put it this way, that is the main way they come to us, that’s where we get the most and the best and the clearest information about what that world is like, after all, it’s their world, it’s where they are, and you would expect them to know a great deal about it. And what they do. And they claim that they are very concerned about the the denial of that world, they think that’s extraordinarily harmful to human beings, it creates a kind of a darkness, in our perspectives, a kind of pessimism about what happens to us when we die. And that’s not good. And so when you when you read enough of these messages, you see how incredibly similar they are. And they come to us from all over the world. Many of them come from the British Isles, some come from France, Germany, Brazil, United States, Canada. And this has been coming to us over the last 160 years now. And when you start comparing one account to another account to another account, you can see that they’re describing the same experience the same world. And so that’s one of the main areas that’s impressive. Another factor is this, is that many of these spirits have an acute memory about their place in the world before they died. And they have a lot of information about that. This is called evidential. They present evidence that they are the person they claim to be and it’s pretty easy to check out to see whether or not the evidence that they are presenting really does check out with people who remember them with libraries, where they would send you to check out a particular place in a book, the margins of a book in a particular shelf of a library where you will find this to be written. And it’s remarkable how much evidence they present to prove their Bona Fides. And the other thing is that, this is this is a little peculiar, but mediums who have become rather famous in our area of research will oftentimes bring a number of different spirits through, and one in particular, Geraldine Cummins, the most famous 20th century medium, an Irish woman, has presented over 50 different spirits, have allowed 50 spirits to take her over and to present their messages. And the handwriting’s of each of these is distinctly different. And some of the handwriting matches the handwriting of the alleged spirit while that spirit was alive in the flesh. And there’s just a lot of evidence like that, but you can’t really explain in any other more or less logical way. So these are just some of the things that we look at. There are others as well. But that’ll probably do for now, George.
George Knapp
The near death experiences. So I’ve read a lot on that, and interviewed a lot of people who’ve had experiences and have shared them. I find that to be compelling. People who are dead, they’re physically dead, they see things that they should not be able to see. And then they come back, they relate that information. That’s pretty persuasive.
Stafford Betty
Yes it is, exactly, it is indeed. So that’s one of the one of the main 10 types of evidence. First of all, it is remarkable that all of this evidence, which is quite distinct from every other element in this collection of evidences all point to the same conclusion that we must survive in order for it to be explained, the near death experiences is one of the major ones. And what’s what’s particularly interesting about this, well, there are a number of things. First of all, there is a great deal of similarity in the contours of the of the of the typical near death experience, particularly the ones that are well developed. And it doesn’t matter the background, it doesn’t matter whether you’re an atheist, or a Buddhist or whatever. And and it’s just remarkably similar. The beam of light that is reported, the memories of a previous life, the meeting of deceased loved ones, the feeling of the knowledge that one is outside of one’s body, all of this evidence is similar, in spite of tremendous differences in what was expected to happen at ones death. An atheist certainly doesn’t expect any of this to happen. A Catholic expects something like this maybe to happen, but not very much like this. And yet everybody, in spite of these very different backgrounds, has roughly the same type of experience. And it’s really hard to explain that away as some sort of an hallucination because they wouldn’t elucidate in the same way if it were a hallucination. The other factor, which is what you just mentioned, is that a number of these well developed, near death experiences involve becoming aware of an event that they experience, they see something happening in a different part of the hospital, where they are having this experience, or even, you know, in somebody’s home back in Baltimore, where they managed to visit a sister who’s bringing the groceries and they awake, and they come out of this, and they start talking about these specific memories that they have. And they check out. Which indicates they really were present in order to be able to see what they report. And of course, you know, you call the sister back in Baltimore to ask, you know, were you really bringing the groceries at 940 yesterday? Yeah, I was. What do you ask? Things like that George. That’s really to me compelling.
George Knapp
You know, I’m not a particularly religious person. And I and so I when I’ve heard these stories about what heaven is supposed to be what the afterlife is, you know, people are happy and blissful all the time, hot and cold running bliss, we’re floating on clouds, we’re playing lutes. And we’re just happy all the time. It just didn’t sound that interesting to me. You know, I didn’t sound like a place where I wanted to be forever.
Stafford Betty
Not at all. And it’s not at all that way. And I know that there are people who are, there are certain Christians, I know quite a few Christians who believe that, you know, all it takes to go to heaven is to is to give your life to Jesus, and they want to be happy. And and they really don’t have any sense of what’s involved over there. They just know that it has to be happy. And what if they go anywhere to get information about it, they go to the book of Revelation, which is the last book of the Bible, of the Christian Bible. And you know, when I read that account, I think to myself, Good Lord, I don’t think I would want this for more than a couple of weeks. And, so what we find in the evidence, and the descriptions in these wonderful books that are written by these spirits working through legitimate mediums over the last 260 years is a fascinating world. And it has without a question, many, many occupations that are available. Much is expected. I mean, it is an extremely challenging environment. It is not a place where you just go to cruise and get lazy and, and it’s, it’s, it’s it’s an interesting place. And I feel like I ought to read at least just one or two passages, a dark passage and a light passage.
George Knapp
You know, as I said before, you have this image of people on clouds playing lutes. And it didn’t sound very interesting. But the structure of the afterlife what happens over there?
Stafford Betty
Well, I’m going to read just three short paragraphs from my book, The Afterlife Unveiled. Just to give you some idea. First of all, spirits do not usually refer to their world as heaven. Their world is actually a spectrum of realms stretching from the lowly joys and satisfactions of a novice soul just come over to spheres of unimaginable radiance, perfection and fulfillment that they have only heard about or at best visited to darker murky or regions where souls have a lower order reside. So it’s got just about everything you can imagine in it. Here is a description of the kinds of interests that are available over there, the astral world. This is the afterworld, another word for it, provides opportunities for every wholesome interest or avocation. From science to music, to theology, to astral architecture, to home building, it is a joyful, endlessly fascinating place full of challenges for those who desire to grow. But listen to this. There are hellish regions in the astral and large populations that make their home there. What is sometimes referred to as the Shadow Lands, is a vast world of many conditions. The landscapes vary from sorted city neighborhoods to parched, gray scrub land, to dark, lifeless deserts, the vivid clarity of higher realms is missing. Instead, there is a dull overcast, temporarily lost or confused or stubbornly unrepentant souls populate these regions. So there is something for every kind of human being that we can even imagine. And so again, there is a law of karma, the habits that you have developed in yourself through years of life on our planet, carry over into that world, you don’t, you become, your thoroughly yourself when you die. Everything that you’ve made of yourself here, continues over there, nothing has changed just because you drop the body. You have a new body, it’s the body that is within you right now. Nothing miraculous happens at death, you just shed the outer shell, and you carry on into a world that is appropriate for you, given the conditions that you deserve, given your karma.
George Knapp
You mentioned about one of the forms of evidence being reincarnation, the memories, children who recall previous lives. Everybody come back?
Stafford Betty
No, that’s not the consensus. Most people do. But the whole point is to go on beyond the need to come back. If you have learned the lessons that are available to us all. In a physical planet like Earth, there’s no point in coming back anymore and you will know it, you will not feel attracted to a return, you will want to go on into higher realms into more spiritual, into more ethereal realms where there’s even greater beauty and greater joy for those who are worthy of it and ready for it. And you will not even be attracted to this kind of environment if you’re not ready for it. You’ll miss the hunger, the food, the sex that you never got enough off on earth. And will come back. This is the picture that I get from reading all of these sources. I’m just going to go and read one thing. You can elect not to return and many do after they have achieved a certain spiritual development. But the physical plane is a school for learning and development. And so most souls do desire to return for a series of incarnations, but they know going into flesh that rebirth will be no party, they desire to return to Earth conditions not because it’s going to be easy or fun, but because the challenge of Earth’s obstacles and limitations will bring, they hope, the best out of them. But for a relatively mature so a return to Earth might resemble the experience of a teacher starting a new term after a summer vacation. So I like to think that, you know, you and I are here because we were interested in a new term and learning more And my assumption is given all this information that everybody here desired a return, or was basically required to return because they were simply unready to go any further, in the world of spirit.
George Knapp
You mentioned about dark realms, the dark places. So I guess as a reaction to, as a result of what you do here when you’re when you’re here on this plane. And some of the evidence that you had discussed on your list ghosts, poltergeists, things of that sort? What’s going on there? Why are those spirits still attached? Why would they intervene in our lives here sometimes scared the hell out of us?
Stafford Betty
Right? Yeah, there’s a, there’s a tremendous amount of evidence for the reality of what we can now call earthbound souls, or earthbound spirits. These are spirits who died, and and went over to the realms of light and found themselves completely uninterested in the spiritual contours of that world. And basically we’re frightened by a diviner, a diviner world than they even imagined. And they sort of gravitate quite naturally back to lower realms into the Shadow Lands, and even back into Earth conditions. And so they find themselves so attracted to the addictions, for example, take an alcoholic, a raging alcoholic who dies, and that person is going to continue thoroughly to be himself with his addictions, the addictions don’t go away, because they are internal. They’re not purely physical, they are internal. And this person is going to be desperately feeling the need to get more of what he misses. And the evidence is overwhelming that it’s possible for a person like that, to gravitate back to Earth conditions. Of course, he’s unseen, he doesn’t have a physical body. So he rose the planet unseen. And who does he seek, he seeks people who, like him, are raving alcoholics, he finds himself in bars, he finds himself attaching himself as much as possible to someone sitting in a bar, close to being completely drunk, and sort of just sort of imbibing the fumes of the alcohol around him. And that, of course, is a kind of spirit attachment. It can even lead to an outright possession of that person’s body.
George Knapp
I was going to say, you’ve written about this, I’m sure this drove your colleagues crazy, but you’ve written about demonic possession, it’s a real thing?
Stafford Betty
It’s a real thing. And, and it’s remarkable how many psychologists and psychotherapists are coming around to an open mind on this subject. I was asked to present my paper on, on on possession. And it was incredibly well received, there wasn’t a single person in that audience of 50 people, all of them involved in psychotherapy in one form or another, who hadn’t seen very much the sort of thing that I was describing, and made them wonder, what is really going on here. I mean, a possessed person is a horrible thing. Typical signs of possession are incredibly foul language, that really doesn’t seem to have any connection with what this person is usually how he usually speaks. supernatural power in the worst conditions, including levitation, and this is, levitation? Come on. That’s not that’s just fiction. No, it’s not fiction. It happens. And I can cite cases. And there are cases written in our newspapers, a famous case 2012 and Indianapolis Star about a couple of kids who levitated. Horrible stench, hatred in the eyes, and unnatural voice, violent anger, sometimes levitation. So these are signs of something horrific going on in our world. And they are very real. Unfortunately, this is one of the signs that we do survive bodily death. I wish it were not. But it is, it’s indicative that there are spirits here around us who have led lives before and because of their addiction, have come back to bother us. Not so much because necessarily they always hate us, but because they just want to have what we have. They get in our way. And they, they they turned the alcoholic into a worse alcoholic than you would have been otherwise, here’s an alcoholic trying to break the habit and here’s this guy drink through him. So there’s all kinds of mischief around us.
George Knapp
Demons then possess somebody, really the spirits of unhappy people who’ve gone the other side? Not some other kind of entity?
Stafford Betty
Right? Mostly, they are very exaggerated cases of possession, which are truly, would seem to be truly demonic. It does seem as if there is a small, relatively small contingent of spirits on the other side, who take great delight in making human beings on the planet miserable. And I think what percentage of these earthbound spirits are of that type. I don’t know. My sense is, maybe 10% are truly bent on on doing damage because they are sadistic and they enjoy, they get a kick out of making people miserable, out of seducing them to suicide. And these voices that so called schizophrenics hear, I’m convinced often are not explainable by some sort of brain problem. I think many of these schizophrenics are being bothered by by spirits who are working through them, trying to make them kill themselves. There’s this constant refrain you hear from many of these schizophrenics, do it! Do it! You know, somebody is waiting for you on the other side. All these seductions horrible, some temptations, and of course, many schizophrenics succumb to those invitations.
George Knapp
Toward the end of their lives, Thomas Edison, Nikola Tesla, were both working on what they call the spirit phone, a form of communication systems communicate on a regular basis with the other side, is that a realistic possibility, have you done some research into that in an attempt to do the same thing?
Stafford Betty
I have, when I first heard about this kind of transmission, I thought to myself, this can’t be I did not regard this as a legitimate area of interest for me. I was finally forced to look into it. And and I, and when I started looking into it, I was incredibly impressed by the evidence. There are spirits on the other side who are trying to reach us through technology. And you might think, well, you know, why do that? Why not just reach us in the usual way through mediums. And I think the reason is that they know that mediums are suspect, and they tried to get through to us using technology. And they have become quite successful at this, not nearly as successful as when operating through a human being. But nevertheless, what does come through is very consistent with what comes through the usual route, the medium, the world that is described over there, the world of spirit that they are living in, is obviously the same sort of venue or the same sort of world that comes through in the case of mediums. So we have technology being used by the spirits who are trying to reach us in that matter. And then the usual way of trying to reach us through the mediums, and the world that each describes is astonishingly similar. And so that in itself is enough to pique my interest.
George Knapp
You know, we talked at the beginning of our conversation about how lonely it has been for you in the academic circle. You do this kind of research, we reported about a contest sponsored by Robert Bigelow, and I don’t want to ask you whether you’re in it or not. He is putting up a lot of money has a lot of tension around the world. Sort of not necessarily the reaction to the contest, but my perception of it is that there are pockets of research, scientific and otherwise around the world. Is there a community of this that maybe has been brought out of the woodwork by that contest?
Stafford Betty
Oh, yeah, actually, it’s not been brought out of the woodwork. We know each other very well. There are about 75 of us who are members of closed, as I would say, internet group. It’s called survival net and it’s not … there’s no way that an outsider can break into this. It’s closed and there are 75 of us. And and these are people, some of some of them have credentials, far beyond my own people who work in industry, people who are not academics at all. And they have made names for themselves in other areas. And so we know each other, we have been out of the woodwork for a long time, and people in this group are going to be very interested in this prize because it’s involves quite a bit of money. And this is an area where none of us have ever been rewarded with any kind of a grant, or minimal grant money available, because the science snubs us and wouldn’t consider giving us money to carry on with our research, which is a great tragedy, because there’s probably no research more important than what we do. It has everything to do with the way we look at ourselves and our lives and our future. And yet, there’s just no money there. And somebody named Bigelow came up with over $2 million in prize money to invite us to present the evidence for this afterlife that we are so you know, excited about. And so, yeah, I’m going to be involved in this, and many of my colleagues will be too. So we’ll see. We’ll compete with each other.
George Knapp
Final question, you look at the bottom line would be this is a question that pretty much everyone should have an interest in what happens next, you know, is there something else, right? We die, and it can give you hope, I guess, if you accept it, but it’s also, you know, hopefully, a not just a matter of faith into something that you can research. Right? More. So what would you recommend that people read or study or find out about other than your book, The Afterlife Therapists?
Stafford Betty
Yeah, there’s some extraordinarily strong evidence as a collection of evidence brought into that. I would send a seeker to a couple of places. In addition to my own books, the five books that I’ve written on the afterlife, are really a good place to start to get information about all of this evidence, and and indeed about the nature of the afterworld itself. But in addition to that, I am deeply indebted to many of my colleagues who have been interviewed by Jeffrey Mishlove, on YouTube, in his program called New Thinking Aloud. And I’ve done five interviews with him. But my colleagues, and there are hundreds of other colleagues who have been invited to speak and there are literally close to I think I’ve counted them over 500 different interviews that are all related to the subject that we’re interested in. Also, Keith Parsons, in the last five years, is British. I think he’s retired and he is a master at creating videos. He places them on YouTube, he doesn’t charge anything. And these are incredibly attractive and very well done videos that are our attempts to prove the reality of an afterlife, given the evidence that you and I have discussed here. His most recent one is called in greedy and greedy son and Mr. Jensen, and how do you find this guy on YouTube? You would go to Dr. Keith Parsons, afterlife researches. And he has about 30 of these programs, and they are incredibly impressive. And I think they they are more compelling than even the books that are out there. Because they’re so extraordinarily professionally well done by this man, Keith Parsons, he’s hard to find online. And I think the only way to get to him is through the knowledge that you would have to have in the knowledge of the actual name of the program, and the specific program that he has placed on YouTube. And again, the most recent one is (inaudible) and Mr. Jensen, and it’s an incredible, it amounts to what kind of proof that there is an afterlife. It’s so well done.
George Knapp
Thank you for sharing some time with us. So I hope you’ll keep us in the loop. If you write something new. I have some new research you always have a platform here.
Stafford Betty
Thanks so much, George. It’s been a pleasure working with you.