About the Author: Sue Wilson
Sue Wilson was born in Canada. She left home when she was fourteen to attend a Christian high school, where she lived on campus. In addition to her secular classes, she took all the mandatory daily Bible classes and excelled in sports, music, and public speaking. She was valedictorian of her graduating class.
During her last year in high school, a visiting missionary from the States convinced her she needed to share her church's version of Christianity with the world. She left Canada at age nineteen to attend a Christian junior college in the States, a school that specialized in missionary training. There she met and married a South African ministerial student and began taking many courses in Biblical and related studies, along with her required secular classes. She and her husband then moved to a senior Christian university and completed their degrees. Sue graduated summa cum laude with a bachelor's degree in education, her husband with a master's degree in Biblical studies. They went to South Africa right after college to work with a church there. During that time they had three sons.
Because of religious differences in a congregation that was even more conservative than the churches they had attended in the States, Sue and her husband returned to America so he could work on a second master's degree in counseling and they could become self-supporting missionaries and teach what they felt people really needed to help them solve their problems. But because of financial difficulties, her husband had to take a job in sales. He had little time or interest in pursuing the religious issues that had forced them out of the ministry in Africa.
But Sue, at home with three young children, began to study the Bible even more intently and visit other denominations of Christianity in search of answers to the many questions she had about religion and the obvious differences among the denominations and even individual churches in the same denomination. When her husband came home for a few days between sales trips, she was anxious to discuss her questions and findings with him. The more she questioned, the wider the chasm between them became.
In the midst of all the tension Sue was diagnosed with breast cancer, and forced to put negative religious teachings about the after-life to the test. At the height of her despair in the hospital, waiting for the test results that would determine whether or not she was going to die and have to face a God she still feared, Sue had her first powerful sixth sense experience, which confirmed her suspicions that what the church taught about connecting to God and staying connected was totally false. Discovering this "good news" was also the beginning of the end of life as she knew it, for things went from bad to worse as she lost not only part of her body, but also church and husband in the span of a few short months.
She gradually recovered and began to rebuild her life, continuing her studies on problems with religion. Research from dozens of related books, and continued spontaneous sixth sense experiences, ultimately set her free from her fears created by negative family and religious conditioning and inspired her to write To Heaven Through Hell to help others who have struggled with the same problems.
Doing the research and writing the book took Sue over thirty years. During that time, she was partner in a music business for seven years, taught world history and geography in public schools for eleven years, and re-married. She and her American husband live in Missouri. She is a dual citizen of Canada and the US.
Whether we're talking about eternal Heaven and Hell in Western religions or Reincarnation and Karma in religions of the East, Sue Wilson shares overwhelming evidence that what most religions teach about what happens when we die is totally wrong and fosters irrational fear and extreme codependency. She asserts that contrary to these unsubstantiated teachings, death is a positive experience for everyone!
Wilson is not an outsider looking in on this subject. She's a former minister's wife and missionary to Africa, a world traveler, and a retired world history and geography teacher. In To Heaven Through Hell, she shares an incredible journey into the invisible realm beyond the physical world through a number of spontaneous paranormal or sixth sense experiences, along with her extensive research from theologians, psychologists, psychiatrists, doctors, scientists and a host of others in the helping professions... all of which refute religion's erroneous teachings concerning life after death.
Among her many sixth sense experiences are a powerful near-death experience in which she cries out to the God she has learned to fear in fundamental Christianity and is assured that God's love is unconditional not only for herself, but for all of us; the appearance of her father's ghost who tells her that when he died he went to God immediately and was fully immersed in love and understanding as we'll all be when we die; and an amazing regression experience which helps her understand that the purpose of reincarnation is opportunity, not karma.
Wilson encourages readers to formulate healthy beliefs about God and the universe. She shows how embracing positive beliefs about life after death, especially, removes the fear of dying and enables us to get on with the wonderful business of living. She helps readers tap their own sixth sense and gives a problem-solving model that incorporates all the senses...the five traditional ones, the controversial sixth, and a seventh sense we often overlook in our desperate search for answers...common sense!
And though she acknowledges that religious institutions have done much good in the world, she challenges them to admit to the damage they have also done with destructive teachings about life and death, and to replace them with better ones. To acknowledge that all religions are resources, not roadmaps, including their own. And to turn their buildings into lively classrooms where their members can find solutions to the real problems they face as human beings, using good ideas from all disciplines in society and rejecting the rest.
