WHAT TO DO WHEN YOU ARE DEAD: Living Better in the Afterlife

Hamilton-Parker, a well-known English medium, explores one of the most important questions of all time: What will the afterlife be like? With help from multiple sources (his spirit guides, people who have had near-death experiences, other mediums and ancient religions), he appears to have the answers. Unfortunately, these answers often seem shallow, contradictory and historically inaccurate, raising further questions. For example, in one chapter, he writes that after death, evil persons are caught up in lower astral planes, where they have to confront their misdeeds until their souls "progress" to higher planes. But in an earlier chapter, he has claimed that souls are able to immediately reincarnate in order to escape confronting their illusions. On one page, he correctly describes the Egyptian God Osiris weighing one's soul against a feather, but on another he speaks of Osiris as a god in the Tibetan ("spelled "Tibitan") afterlife. Such careless errors are disconcerting. However, many readers will be pleased to discover that, according to Hamilton-Parker, pets "continue to live with us in the spirit world," and deceased children enjoy a special realm in heaven created just for them. Deceased adults can experience transcendent sex, an organized society and magnificent halls of learning. As an accumulation of different afterlife beliefs, this book has some merit for New Age readers, but it is marred by inconsistency. (Jan.)