Before I started intensively researching life in the love permeated atmosphere of The Other Side, I had a vague image of a sea of wispy, vaporlike beings floating around hugging each other twenty four hours a day. I don't know when I've been so relieved to be wrong. With the possible exception of an eternity of harp playing, can you imagine anything more unproductive, not to mention boring?

It turns out that we have very real, very distinct identities on The Other Side, with our own looks, our own personalities, our own interests, and our own preferences. It's true that there is total acceptance at Home, and no ego or aggression, but there are absolutely people we gravitate toward and away from. It's not that we dislike anyone. We just like some people more than others, without the added edge of human meanness on earth. I hope it won't be confusing if I occasionally use words like person and people to refer to the population on The Other Side, as opposed to staying exclusively with beings and spirits and entities. It's simply to stress the fact that we never, ever stop being us, whether we're in this dimension or that one, and even more, that not for a moment does death mean we cease to exist.

Visages: What We Look Like At Home.

We absolutely have bodies on The Other Side. We have eyes that blink, hearts that pump blood through our veins, and organs that are a mirror image of our bodies on earth, the exact same placement but reversed from left to right. I once asked Francine why we bother to keep all our organs, when such bodily functions as digestion and waste elimination are no longer necessary. She said, "Because that's the way God created us." Fair enough.

Similarly, I asked her about another fact-no matter what age we are when we die, we're all thirty years old on The Other Side. Why thirty? "Because we are." Francine is not an easy woman to argue with.

Just as on earth, we each have a unique visage, or outward appearance, at Home. We come in all heights, weights, nationalities, hair colors, eye colors, and skin colors. What's fascinating is, we can change styles according to our own tastes without ever losing our identities, and without spending a moment in a salon, at a makeup table, or under a plastic surgeon's scalpel, through the easy, powerful process of thought projection. Changing styles on The Other Side can include changing nationalities.

Remember, there is no bigotry at Home, which is one of the reasons they call it paradise, so if there's a look we like, we can assume it without worrying that it might subject us to discrimination.

For example, shortly before I came here for this lifetime, I adopted the appearance of an Asian woman on The Other Side, for no other reason than that I found it attractive. It didn't throw everyone into hopeless confusion about who I was, and I didn't have to run around reintroducing myself to my friends. People simply thought, She's wearing her Asian look today. It's no different from people on earth saying on Halloween night, "There's Aunt Rosemary in a Marie Antoinette costume," or, on Christmas, "Here comes Uncle Bob in his Santa Claus suit." Our visages on The Other Side can have an effect on our perceptions of ourselves in this dimension.

When I was a small child, before Francine explained all this to me and I was still fresh from Home and my Asian visage, I spent hours in front of a mirror pulling on my face, trying to adjust my eyes, nose, and mouth so that I'd look familiar to myself. Wouldn't it be jarring to gaze into a mirror expecting to see a thirty-year-old Asian woman staring back but finding a little Caucasian girl instead?

Just this week a client sat in my office in tears, wanting my help to get to the bottom of her lifelong self-consciousness about her looks. She'd spent a fortune on plastic surgeons, tanning salons, tinted contact lenses, and hair colorists, and she still considered her natural, petite, blonde-haired, blue-eyed beauty "a bad joke, like I'm walking around in some total stranger's body." I did regressive hypnosis on her, fully expecting to find some prominent persona from a past life interfering with her ability to be comfortable with herself. 

Instead, we discovered that on The Other Side, she is a very tall, very elegant black woman with the regal features of African royalty, and it was that visage she kept looking for and trying to duplicate in this current incarnation. Once we got to the core of her unhappiness, she was able to embrace the looks she chose this time around and relax in the certainty that she will be that gorgeous black entity again someday for as long as she likes.

Excerpted from 'Life on the Other Side' by Sylvia Browne Copyright 2000 EP Dutton.  Sylvia is truly on a mission for God. Simply put, she is determined to show the world that the soul survives death. In addition she wants to emphasize that God, both Father and Mother God, are infinitely loving Beings, not full of wrath and hate as represented by many of today's religions. Sylvia feels that all people can reach God by knowledge and reason, rather than relying upon faith alone. To help Sylvia on this mission, God gave her a psychic ability that is unmatched by anyone, which is evident to all who have seen her work on television shows. 

Many times she has appeared on the Montel Williams Show, Leeza, Unsolved Mysteries, etc; where her astonishing insights and communications with the dead are nothing short of miraculous. 'Life on the Other Side' was listed as # 1 on the New York Times Best Selling List within 10 days of the released date. 

To learn more about Sylvia and her lectures, classes and spiritual counseling or to order her books click on www.sylvia.org