From Here to Eternity : Ditch the seances and Ouijas. The dead have gone high-tech. They’re e-mailing, faxing and phoning us now, say two parapsychologists.

The afterlife has gone online.

In an apparent end to centuries of being forced to contact the living through such primitive techniques as seances and Ouija boards, the deceased are finally entering the Computer Age.

From out of the ether, it seems, a Who’s Who of expired humans are now transmitting a plethora of post-mortem faxes, e-mail and phone calls, according to parapsychologists.

No word yet from Elvis, but communication has been established with Michael Landon, Albert Einstein, Madame Curie, Thomas Edison, a cat named Quink and a Latvian psychologist known as Konstantine Raudive.

These and other entities are said to be holding forth on all manner of topics--from afterworld golfing and hell to dead Vikings and reincarnation machines.

The details are spelled out in a thin new paperback called “Conversations Beyond the Light” (Griffin, 1995), by Pat Kubis and Mark Macy.

Kubis, a retired Orange County community college professor, who says she began having out-of-body journeys as a freshman at Hollywood High, and Macy, a former small-town journalist, belong to a cadre of researchers who believe the dead are sending messages from the planet Marduk, in the Spiral Galaxy NGC4866, on the third astral plane.

Marduk, as everyone knows, has three suns (so it never gets dark--only dim).

It also has skyscrapers, blimps and a river that encircles the globe “like a snake biting its own tail,” according to reports from its otherworldly residents.

Among the 60 billion souls supposedly living there are gnomes, giants, Indians in tepees, cavemen, Vikings and such luminaries as Eleanor Roosevelt and Scott Joplin.

“We are not miraculously changed at the moment of death,” Kubis and Macy write. “We carry our thoughts, attitudes and desires with us.”

Thus, afterlife denizens still drive automobiles (solar-powered, of course) and fly airplanes--not because they need them to get around, but because they “liked” them on Earth. They also play golf (“You can have a hole in one every day”), engage in sex (but never get pregnant) and eat synthetic meat (animals may not be killed, lest it disrupt their spiritual evolution).

“Heaven is what you believe it is,” Kubis and Macy say.

For deceased-since-1905 author Jules Verne, who supposedly sent a recent three-page fax on the afterlife to Luxembourg, that means hanging out in a sumptuous palace that features solid silver furniture, a well-tanned harem and shrubs that magically trim themselves. Unfortunately, he adds, “All beauty . . . ends in numbing the soul, and perfection is often the symbol of stagnation.”

The only escape, apparently, is to enter a reincarnation machine, which shrinks departed spirits into a single cell for shipment back to Earth.

For the moment, however, Verne has opted to dispel the tedium by joining Timestream, a group of dead scientists and celebrities who have figured out how to send messages across the veil through televisions, tape recorders, telephones and computers.

Margaret Ryan, a spokeswoman for America Online, says she’s never heard of anyone getting e-mail from heaven (subscribers aren’t allowed to impersonate anyone), but adds that the company isn’t entirely opposed to the idea. “They [the dead] would have to have a living checking account or credit card,” she says, but otherwise their business would be welcome.

As for modems to send the messages, the deceased apparently have that problem wired.

One heavenly hacker says he focuses his thoughts into a spiritual typewriter that somehow transmits text to earthly computers. Another cyber soul relies on “unbalanced electrostatic-electron- physiology-mystical-radar-telepathy.”

“To modern science, it’s utterly incomprehensible,” says Macy, who met in England this month with other paranormal investigators to discuss the phenomenon.

One dilemma: how to present the news to the public.

“We don’t want to sensationalize it,” says Macy, who has spoken to the Hartford Courant, Entertainment Weekly and NBC’s “The Other Side,” but has turned down interview requests from supermarket tabloids. “When there’s negativity . . . or ridicule, it tends to harm the contact field [a psychic link between this dimension and the next].”

(Uh . . . sorry.)

For that reason, Macy and his colleagues have also declined to subject the communiques to scientific scrutiny.

“The bottom line is there’s no way to convince anybody unless it happens to them personally,” he explains. “The Catch-22 is that it won’t happen to anyone unless they’re open to it. . . . When we deal with skeptics, it weakens the contact fields.”

So how did this whole thing get started? According to “Conversations Beyond the Light,” the first electronic breakthrough came in 1956, when a Californian named Attila von Szlay somehow picked up otherworldly voices on audiotape.

Three years later, Swedish film producer Friedrich Juergenson inadvertently recorded more mystery utterings while taping bird songs. One was his deceased mother, saying in German: “Friedel, my little Friedel, can you hear me?”

That, in turn, led Latvian psychologist Raudive to experiment with the technique--and he received nearly 70,000 disembodied communiques.

Both researchers are now dead, but are said to be continuing their work from the Other Side. The deceased psychologist purportedly places post-mortem phone calls; the movie man broadcasts his visage across television screens.

Europe seems to be a hotbed of posthumous postings. A Luxembourg couple claim to be in touch with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. A German psychic tunes in TV images of Einstein. And a British man claims to hear from a 16th-Century spirit who communicates in Old English via mysteriously appearing computer files and chalk-writing on the floor.

In the United States, the dead tend to be more terse. One of the Great Communicators with the Great Beyond is Sarah Estep, a tape-recording enthusiast from Baltimore whom the Washington Times described as a “petite grandmother, ex-elementary schoolteacher, former Girl Scout summer camp director, amateur pipe organist and practicing Methodist.”

But even though she’s been listening for otherworldly voices since 1976, the messages rarely run longer than a few words.

Part of the problem, apparently, is that departed souls have no larynxes. So the only way to hear them is to flip on a tape recorder, crank up a white noise machine, then play back the tape through headphones and listen for whispered phrases.

The dead somehow use the background noise to create voices, parapsychologists say.

Skeptics, of course, argue that the messages are imagined or accidental.

They scoff even more at the idea of computer-literate corpses.

For one thing, the “photographs” sent over on TV screens and computers typically show the deceased wearing such earthly items as eyeglasses and neckties--and looking considerably older than the 25 to 30 years the authors say everyone reverts to in the hereafter. There are also few, if any, pictures of afterlife scenery, such as Marduk’s giant river, its “butterflies as large as soup plates” or its Viking villages.

Macy and Kubis explain the clothing and eyeglasses as holdovers from the dead person’s earthly self-image. Thoughts create reality in the next world, they say.

And soon, they add, the evidence of afterlife communication with the dead will be overwhelming. Once the skepticism is overcome, the authors say, the potential is unlimited. Murder victims could even testify at the trials of their accused killers.

Now there’s one twist the Simpson case hasn’t taken--yet.