Evidence from Beyond: An Insider's Guide to the Wonders of Heaven--And Life in the New Millennium: More After-Death Communications Received

Mattson, a Lutheran pastor and seminary teacher whose interests during life included the paranormal, died in 1970. According to this book, in 1971, he started sending messages to his daughter, Ruth Mattson Taylor, through a clairvoyant, discussing his afterlife. Despite Mattson's mainline Protestant credentials, his after-death messages portray a New Age world replete with karmic Lords, reincarnation, UFOs and astral planes. After adopting a long, thin body with huge eyes to survive the demands of multidimensional space travel, Mattson was able to visit other planets on an exploratory space mission (he found no life on Mars but life similar to humankind on Venus). He describes other souls' tasks in the hereafter: one heavenly brigade of volunteers helps to free souls trapped in mangled bodies from war zones such as Bosnia, healing victims from their war traumas by bathing them in various colors. (Trauma recovery, both in heaven and earth, is very big here; homosexuals are those who had a bad experience with someone of the opposite sex in a past life and who now choose a same-sex partner to overcome that psychic trauma.) According to Mattson, people in heaven can visit their past lives and incorporate parts of their past personalities into their present souls, which are works in progress. All in all, Mattson's ""insider's guide"" is a colorful if credulity-stretching commentary on the the possibilities of afterlife. (One surprising element is that toward the end of the book, Taylor's deceased brother also joins in with messages that his heaven is completely different from their father's; he's exploring music, not space, and plays in several celestial bands.) (Nov.)