Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 16, 2021 • 54 Comments
Book News, Understanding Reality
Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam,
And admit that the waters around you have grown,
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone,
If your time to you is worth savin’.
And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone,
For the times they are a-changin.’
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)
It is an extraordinary fact that even though we are already twenty-one percent of the way through the twenty-first century, the mainstream scientific community remains convinced that consciousness is produced by our brains. There is no scientific evidence that this even might be true beyond the fact that parts of the brain can be stimulated by conscious processes! And there is a lot of evidence that it isn’t true.
The fact that consciousness is the base of reality isn’t even a new idea. I have just interviewed Leonard Perlmutter for Seek Reality. He’s an expert on Eastern spiritual teachings, and he shared with us the amazing fact that those who invented the practice of yoga knew five thousand years ago that consciousness is primary and it pre-exists matter. It’s not an especially radical idea, either. Some of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century knew or suspected the primary role of consciousness, in part because this conclusion logically flows from some of the oddities of quantum mechanics.
It has been easy for afterlife researchers to come to appreciate the primacy of consciousness. We who spend a lot of our time in non-material pursuits are used to reasoning outward from the afterlife realities, which clearly are based in consciousness. But mainstream scientists are enmired in studying matter, so understandably their logical model is based in matter. But surely by now they must be getting a clue? I have of late been watching for developments in the field of consciousness research, and this week I attended an online IONS presentation with considerable interest.
If you don’t yet know IONS, you should. The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973, after he had a spiritual experience while he was returning from the moon. IONS has always been a serious science-based investigator of what used to be seen as woo-woo ideas, and the very word “noetic” refers to the human intellect. So last week with a lot of hope I attended an online IONS presentation by Joachim Kepler, Ph.D., who is a research director at the Department of Consciousness Research (DIWISS) in Roth, Germany. Both IONS and DIWISS are at the leading edge of consciousness studies, and Dr. Kepler’s talk was called Linking Consciousness to the Foundations of Physics: Toward a Self-Consistent Theory of Consciousness. Linking consciousness to the foundations of physics? Toward a self–consistent theory of consciousness? To someone who has for decades been waiting for mainstream science to catch up with reality, that title sounded like music! But what Dr. Kepler said turned out to be another painful reminder of just how completely lost mainstream science is as a belief-system. I have watched his presentation three times now, trying to find some way that my first reactions were wrong.
Sadly, Dr. Kepler’s ideas amount to a thoughtful rearrangement of the deck chairs on the scientific ship to nowhere. And he ignores the implications of an enormous body of evidence that helps us to understand consciousness, including telepathy, remote viewing, near-death experiences, and two hundreds of years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. All his work amounts to just an attempt to explain how human beings are aware and able to think. And he still is reasoning outward from matter, and not from consciousness itself! How can anyone hope to understand anything if he isn’t trying to get inside whatever he is studying? Dr. Kepler’s presentation still requires matter for the creation of consciousness. He makes the zero-point field the place where consciousness is generated; which isn’t necessary, but as an idea it isn’t flat-out awful. However, he then includes the human brain as a kind of organizer of whatever is given off by the zero-point field. He still requires the brain for the creation of consciousness! And he refers to panpsychism, which is a Medieval idea that posits that all matter is by its nature somewhat conscious. He refines it into cosmopsychism, in which matter by its nature is potentially conscious, but not everything material is conscious. And thus this poor scientist who is trying to be relevant while he keeps his materialist bona fides clings firmly to matter, and he shies away from any thought that consciousness is primary and pre-existing.
But scientists are becoming more desperate now. As recently as a decade ago you could read smug articles in popular science magazines about how we would at any moment be celebrating the discovery of the source of consciousness inside the human brain. But that optimism has largely petered out. You still see cautiously hopeful articles which offer some trivial nothing of an idea that you know is going to lead nowhere; and you see more and more fatalistic thoughts by dead-ended materialist scientists. Here is a response by an “intelligent design” scholar to one such jaded materialist scientist’s article about the impending death of humankind. And his response was published just this month! When you know that the scientist being slapped down is considered by his fellows to be an important thought-leader, you realize that materialist science has arrived at the point of being entirely broken.
The fundamental fact of human existence can be stated in one sentence. What you and I experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the only thing that exists! Everything else that we think is real is created by consciousness, composed of consciousness, and set in place by consciousness. There is nothing else. And our minds are all part of that same consciousness energy, which is one of several important proofs that our minds are eternal. By definition.
The problem with the failed scientific dogma of materialism is that, no matter what we believe, we cannot change reality. Materialism as a strain of rational thought goes back at least three thousand years, and for a while grounding scientific inquiry in “solid” matter made sense. We have talked here at length about the fact that all religions are human-made, and against that backdrop the notion of studying anything non-material probably seemed for a long time to be veering dangerously close to superstition. Mainstream science and mainstream religions have been a pair of worthy adversaries! If there is anything nuttier than designing your system of inquiry around your need for everything to be material, then that nuttier worldview has to be designing all your beliefs around a god that you have thought up yourself and then imbued with superhuman powers.
It is time now for humankind to shun all beliefs and at last try to figure out what actually is going on. What scientists believe has no more value to us than does whatever the Pope believes! And when we investigate all of reality with a truly open mind, we cannot escape the conclusion that a base non-material energy must underlie everything. There have been some wonderful working scientists who have open-mindedly sought the truth and arrived at a similar conclusion, among them Thomas Campbell, Evan Harris Walker, Dean Radin, and now Bernardo Kastrup. And of course, it was the immortal Max Planck who came right out and said ninety years ago that consciousness is primary. So this is a theory backed by illustrious scientific minds who have persisted, even despite the fact that they were defying all the matter-based rules of the scientific playground.
And once you are used to the primacy of consciousness, you find that it explains so many things that otherwise NEVER will be explained! Let’s list here just a few of the basic questions that materialist scientists will never be able to answer. Not in a thousand years:
All of this is going to end, just as deluded thinking always ends. We used to suspect that scientists were going to get a clue only when communication with the not-really-dead had progressed to the place where we were chatting through the veil with a cellphone app. But now I think it will be sooner than that. As Max Planck is reported to have said, science advances by deaths. And right now, in some fourth-grade science class there is a courageous little girl who soon will risk her career to develop a viable consciousness-based theory of everything. The timing will at last be right, and her work will hit this despairing world like a thunderclap of liberation. And then, gloriously, everything really will change!
Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen,
And keep your eyes wide open. The chance won’t come again.
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin.
there’s no tellin’ who that it’s naming’.
For the loser now will be later to win!
For the times they are a-changin’.
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)
Dear Roberta, Reading your post was an intellectual pleasure. Among other valid points made, you wrote: ” But what Dr. Kepler said turned out to be another painful reminder of just how completely lost mainstream science is as a belief-system. I have watched his presentation three times now, trying to find some way that my first reactions were wrong. ” Well, I too got the announcement about Dr. Kepler’s session, and so immediately engaged in an email conversation, much to his credit. We compared perspectives, and at first it appeared we had agreement that consciousness was primary, with material and its behavior based on consciousness, what I like to term a universal field of consciousness in which our individual consciousness functions.
But alas, he insisted that he had a good theory that proposed, as you observed, that consciousness was derived from a statistical function of– he could not really say, of something best characterized by the materialist perspective. I argued that Newton had a perfectly usable math model for how gravity worked, but Einstein’s General Relativity Theory proved to be more accurate, thereby demonstrating that Newtons model was not any true description of Nature, but merely a useful approximation. Furthermore, Einstein’s own model likewise imagines space as tangible, becoming distorted by mass, but lacks any explanation of how empty “space” may exert any force over material mass. So, I tried to explain that he owned the same sort of problem in translating a statistical property of material into producing consciousness. Furthermore, I pointed out that I had published a logical analysis of quantum mechanics which demonstrated that its core doctrine, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, which held that fundamental particles naturally existed as a hazy statistical distribution of possible locations, was a mistake, because recent technology was able to observe particles as having a definite existence, just as Einstein had intuited. He read my paper refuting the truth of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and agreed my analysis was valid. But despite that,
he clung to his materialist model employing a statistical model of matter that would somehow (he knew not how) lead eventually to understanding consciousness.
I estimate that his problem is he yet seeks to appeal to materialists for his professional acceptance; that is that stance forced on all junior rank physicists if the wish to get funded and gain professorships. Given his materialist stance, I wondered why he was invited by IONS to make his presentation, and so I did not bother to listen. Thus, I appreciated your review vindicating my judgement:
” Sadly, Dr. Kepler’s ideas amount to a thoughtful rearrangement of the deck chairs on the scientific ship to nowhere. ” Well said!
Oh my dear Jack, you were wiser than I! But I kept thinking that surely IONS wouldn’t invite just one more clueless materialist science to discuss consciousness, would they? I came to surmise afterward that their sister organization in Germany likely pushed for an invitation for that institution’s star presenter. And the IONS scientist who questioned him afterward, Arnaud Delorme, seemed to be as nonplussed by what Dr. Kepler had said as I was. He tried to ask simple questions, but even those were more than Kepler could answer – he seemed not even to have thought about most of them! I agree that his problem is that he is trying to keep mainstream scientific credibility while he builds some consciousness street cred besides, but to do that is impossible. I felt bad for all of them!
How did life begin?? What if it never ‘began’? What if it’s all happening ‘now’?
The idea of Beginnings and endings are part of the materialistic paradigm. The paradigm of time, but it’s always now, ever notice?
Yes, we exist in an eternal “now.” However, from life here, we learn to see events as coming and going, as having a start, and sometimes a finish. So, did God just always exist, or did God come about somehow. In the philosophy of physics there is the concept of “block time.” “According to the block universe theory, the universe is a giant block of all the things that ever happen at any time and at any place. On this view, the past, present and future all exist ” In my own theorizing I represent this concept by assigning to time a dimension just like the spatial dimensions, so that “now” is the equivalent of zero, on the dimension, negative values are about the past, and positive values are about the future. Conceptually, the three dimensional universe then exists at each point on the dimension of time. Regardless, time and the existence of God remain for us the deepest of mysteries.
Oh my dear Jack, it is good of you to continue to care about investigating the details of material physics! It’s so much harder to try to understand anything when reasoning from this material perspective, while reasoning from the physics of the astral plane makes it so much easier to make sense of things. So I applaud you for your efforts here!
My dear Addie, this is a great observation, and a profound one. The whole concept of this material-seeming reality is based in our need to grow spiritually, which seems to be why it was given this odd physics based in the concept that things are solid and immutable, and also why this reality includes space and time.
In most of reality, more spiritually-developed people can easily affect matter in major ways with their minds, but we can’t do that here because it’s important that we take our obstacles in these lives seriously. And in most of reality we can be anywhere in an instant and there is no need for us to notice or care about change, but here the distance-enforced separations among people are another obstacle for us to overcome as we seek to grow spiritually.
And having time, of course, allow us to see and appreciate our personal changes as we grow! In fact, it is starting to look now as if the creation is happening freshly in each micro-instant, with changes happening in the past as well as the future. How could we tell the difference? It looks increasingly likely that we are living while here in a filmstrip. Amazing.
Hi Roberta, you have talked about that consciousness is primary many times since I have been following you in the past few years , with your Sunday posts and multiple guests on your weekly podcast. At first, I had a great deal of trouble trying to understand the concept. But over time, I find, gladly it has sunk in and I do get it now. Thanks for not giving up on presenting the concept! My advice for anyone who is having a hard time grasping the subject is to keep listening and contemplating and then one day ” bravo”, it all makes sense!! Dave
David, One source of helpful information (not hard proof, but very convincing) is the 2016 text, The Self Does Not Die, ( https://www.amazon.com/Self-Does-Not-Die-Experiences/dp/0997560800/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2S25EM1N4DHS0&dchild=1&keywords=titus+rivas&qid=1589967631&s=books&sprefix=titus+rivas%2Cstripbooks%2C224&sr=1-1 ). This text presents a collection of over a hundred cases of Near Death Experience cases in which researchers verified that activities reported about that were distant from the traumatized body (thus not possibly in range of sight or hearing) were highly accurate. The best explanation is that the individual’s consciousness was freed from its connection to the body/brain to visit elsewhere.
Hi Dr. Hiller. Another great source of information is found in the best selling book “Evidence of the Afterlife” by Jeffrey Long, M.D. who has studied these experiences since 1998. Although NDE’s do not include the actual afterlife, they are perfect examples of consciousness being completely separate from the brain.
I’m confused because Dr. Kepler seems to support the zero point field. Since this is supposedly the place where electromagnetic fields create matter from thought, I don’t understand how there is room for anything materialistic here. I am obviously not understanding this right, as I know that thoughts have great importance, but they have no physical components, and I fail to see how matter can be created by them
Dear Lola, It’s not you that’s confused but Dr. Kepler, as in my email discussion with him on this very point–how can his physics math model conceptualize any connection to consciousness– he admitted that he did not know, but hoped that eventually he would find the connection. Roberta’s review was perfectly correct that he fails to connect the dots, and really has no hope for ever doing that.
Yes, Jeffrey Long’s books about the NDE are excellent. Many of the chapters in my own text were first posted as individual papers on the NDERF web site as I wrote them, before later compiling them as an integrated text about the nature of consciousness.
Dear Jack, as you know, I am not in general a fan of NDE materials because I keep hearing from people who mistakenly believe that they can tell us something of what happens after death. But in fact, these reports that some NDE-ers can give about things that were happening far from where their bodies were during the NDE are actually pretty wonderful proof that the mind easily can exist apart from the brain! Thank you for mentioning this book.
Oh my dear David, I am so glad that it finally has clicked for you! It took me a while to really get it, too, but fortunately we stand on the shoulders of giants. And the truth is the truth! Our grandchildren’s grandchildren will be learning all of this by the third grade 🙂
The Universal Yoga explores trying to find the timeless. By Murdo MacDonald Bayne. The Tibetan Adepts early 60s were well documented. TY!
Dear Matthew, I’m sure that I’m a latecomer to the teachings of the Yoga masters! I knew people in the sixties who were into Yoga, and especially other religion majors; but I was into Christian history at the time. It is a wonderful validation, though, isn’t it, that this central human truth was discovered so very long ago?
“It is time now for humankind to shun all beliefs and at last try to figure out what actually is going on”
This is spot on and needs to be repeated over and over. Drop all beliefs. Beliefs are what hold us back. Forget what mama and daddy told you and think for yourself. Or better yet, EXPERIENCE for yourself.
This is very good advice. By holding onto any belief system, one becomes trapped in it, and progression becomes virtually impossible.
Roberta Grimes has helped me so much and your and other comments are so helpful to me as I slowly free myself from belief systems. I see others clinging and claiming their belief is the true belief and it just pushes me to continually question.
Dear Ana, I’m so glad that you have found that our little community has been helpful to you! In fact, all belief-systems are human-made. There is no religion that was founded by the genuine Godhead, and in fact Jesus came into His earth-body intending to end all religions and teach us to relate to God individually. So when people insist to you that they have the right beliefs, you can just smile and withdraw. No need even to argue. But, just know that whatever it is that they believe, it is of man and not of God.
There are formalized belief systems, and, by contrast, how we individually learn with brain and mind to develop perception of our reality.
In principle, we cannot exorcise our own mechanisms for interpreting the physical stimuli bombarding our senses, or the function of our consciousness to “hear” the subtle messages that are not physical in nature, such as when conscience is consulted for guidance.
What we can do, however, is to logically analyze formalized religious and scientific propositions and systems, and thereby detect inconsistencies and internal contradictions such as displayed by Dr. Kepler’s modeling, by politically inspired doctrines such as found in the RCC magisterium, and by the writings of Protestants such as by Calvin who condemns most of us to Hell before we are born.
Dear Jack, you tend to think more deeply in these matters, and to present your ideas in intellectual terms, but personally I think quite simply. I don’t even argue with belief-systems any more, whether they are religious belief-systems or scientific belief-systems! Instead I say, “A pox on both your houses! You are wrong, and you are teaching nonsense.” A bit crude perhaps, but at this point I don’t have a lot of time left in which to get done all that so desperately needs to be done!
Dear Lola, I just did a Zoom with an Indonesian teenager, a Sikh who lives in a mixed-religious community and has been deeply traumatized by the fears that other religions and their proponents have inflicted on him. I’m sure there are many, many young people in his position, worldwide! By putting aside all beliefs now and open-mindedly seeking the truth, we can help so many people!!
This poor kid is another example of being affected by a fear based religion and, unfortunately, you are likely right in that he is one of many all over the world. I think most of these people have been brainwashed at a very early age.
Dear Lola, it was actually not his religion that was causing him distress, but rather it was the pressures from others who were insisting that he was backing the wrong horse. His religion was the wrong one, their various religions were each the right one, and unless he left his religion of birth and somehow chose the right one now, he was for sure going to hell.
I talk with a lot of people via email, phone, and zoom, and this is a recurring theme, although in some countries it is worse than in other countries. I think it isn’t as much of a problem in the US, Canada, Australia, and probably also the UK and Western Europe, where Christianity is primary and the various Christian denominations co-exist amicably. Nor is it likely to be a problem where just about everyone is a Muslim. But in regions that are religious melting-pots – India, southeast Asia – adherents of the various religions proselytize one another, and often they use fear to try to force conversions. What surprises me is seeing how much distress this often causes, especially for the young, and how easily the truth can allay their fears!
Oh yes indeed, my dear Daniel! I think the time for us to be patient with those who feel the need to cling to old beliefs is really, entirely over now. Their old beliefs are based in fear, and they are doing tremendous harm in the world, to no purpose. It’s time for all of us to seek the truth together!!
I suppose it is worse in some other countries, but I have met some fundamentalist Christians who can be downright nasty if you disagree with them, and they will try to make you seem unworthy of their company. This is starting to change, though, thankfully.
Oh yes, my dear Lola! There is no one more arrogant than a fundamentalist Christian if you threaten their worldview! And it used to be – as recently as even a decade ago – that they were generally certain about it, calm and at peace. But now there is often a desperation about it for them. It’s fear. They have based their lives on a set of beliefs, and they so badly need those beliefs to be right!
There is no one more fundamentalist about the teachings of Jesus than I am. But unlike any religion, simply following the teachings of the genuine Jesus is entirely based in evidence and truth! Nowadays I’m sometimes challenged, too; but unlike fundamentalists – who have based their entire worldview on someone else’s ideas about Jesus, and about God – I just smile.
Quote from above: “…right now, in some fourth-grade science class there is a courageous little girl who soon will risk her career to develop a viable consciousness-based theory of everything. The timing will at last be right, and her work will hit this despairing world like a thunderclap of liberation.”
Hi Roberta, hi everybody! When that fourth-grader DOES NOT win the Nobel Prize although the proof still stands with everyone else who is experiencing it, then we will really know the corner has been turned.
Yes, my dear Mike, that likely will happen, at least the first time she is nominated. And the ninth and the tenth times too, perhaps. But Max Planck is right, in that new ideas rise in physics gradually, as the old bulls die off. He had thought it would be the physicists of his day whose deaths would signal the birth of the primacy of consciousness as a commonplace in physics, but instead it will likely be the retirements and deaths of the baby boomers. What’s a hundred years more of ignorance, give or take?
Hi Roberta. As coincidence would have it, last night I came across a fascinating interview on Coast To Coast AM that tied in perfectly with your topic this week. It was with Professor Robert Davis regarding the field of consciousness research. He seems to also feel that consciousnrss is fundamental to reality in some way, and feels that “science, consciousnes, and spirituality should be integrated into a new overarching scientific field,” and that we are in the midst of a pardigm shift. I hope he’s right. He expressed support for the work of Dean Radin, and is working on a documentary called The Consciousness Connection based on his book, Unseen Forces: The Integration of Science, Reality, and You. I don’t know if he’s on your radar, (he wasn’t on mine) so thought I’d mention him. It is nice to hear more and more voices supporting the idea of consciousness studies.
Just to clarify, the documentary is based on Robert Davis’ own book, not one by Dean Radin.
Dear Scott, it’s delightful to hear this – thank you for sharing it! In truth, more and more serious people are coming to this conclusion, and even people with scientific credentials. And it should make a lot more difference than is likely to be the case! The problem we face is that the scientific community has been stonewalling the notion that consciousness is primary for more than a century now. The hole that it has dug for itself is deep! For the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals to suddenly say, “Oopsie! Need to make a change here,” would put a whole omelet of egg on their faces, at a moment when science is especially concerned with maintaining its credibility. So… I don’t expect this book even to be noticed beyond the C2C crowd.
I would so much love to be wrong about this!
Scott, Appreciate your mention of prof Davis having appeared on CTC, which I had missed. I was not aware of his interest in the nature of consciousness, and so just sent him a note. Of course my own work post retirement has been about the nature of consciousness and is nicely summarized by this post on the IANDS Information website ( https://near-death.com/near-death-experience-of-space-time-and-consciousness/ ). There are a few of us who have come to the conclusion that consciousness (alias the soul or spirit) is discarnate, but conventional science remains aghast at that idea. I have written letters a few times to the Scientific American when the print there ignorant articles tying consciousness somehow or other to the brain, but have been reliably ignored.
Oh my dear Jack, no mainstream scientist of any stripe welcomes the notion that consciousness might be primary! They can’t entertain that idea because an entire century of scientific inquiry has been built on enforced materialism. A lot of careers have been wasted on what amounts to an artificial system and not scientific inquiry at all, and at this point all the working scientists who have been caught up in this nonsense just want to get to retirement before their world falls apart.
Hi Dr Hiller. I hope you and Prof Davis will be able to connect. I like your description of consciousness as “discarnate.” That’s an interesting way to put it.
We have 🙂
Dearest Roberta,
This is a great post. I agree with Dr Hiller, it is an intellectual pleasure to read and ponder it.
What really gets me is the herd mentality where people actually hold fuzzy thinking and it’s resultant ideas as closely as truth. Many people just believe ‘we can’t ever know if there is life after death’, just because they have grown up thinking that. They have never challenged this pedestrian belief. So people just block everything to the contrary from their minds. The human ability to block something in front of them, that they refuse to see, is astounding. (I’m sure I’ve done it a lot, though I try to avoid fuzzy thinking as best as I can.)
– Why should I accept the notion that I cannot know if the mind endures post mortem?
– Can I find out if this is true or false?!
– Who writes or talks about this subject? – What can I learn from topic researchers?
– Can I do experiments with my own consciousness?
– Are there everyday people who have experienced states of consciousness that involve the mind as enduring outside the body?
Roberta, I used to think like this as a youth, and ask these questions. Thankfully, I am by no means alone in this! Many people really want to KNOW. They have an inner need to know. And there are so many individuals who have sought and have actually found out.
You know my dear, a few years ago I surveyed my close friends. (I don’t really have social friends, only deeper ones.) Eleven out of twelve individuals had some kind of paranormal experience. The one exception was my dear atheist friend who often ‘explained away’ unsourced phenomena without doing actual research. He was blocking anything non material. It’s a form of reductionism in order to remain in one’s comfort zone. Lately he has let new thinking in and calls himself agnostic. He now admits that the soul or a divine force could logically exist beyond his experience.
My other eleven friends range from the religiously inclined to believers in a primordial divinity to devout secular agnostics. You know they had quite an array of spiritual experiences between them: they had shared death experiences, even out of body experiences as a child. One gent hovered over his own body on the operating table, and happily described the words and actions of the doctors and assistants during the whole process. One lady heard her guardian angel warn of a poisonous snake directly in her path. Some individuals had (de ja vu) clear dreams of places before they visited them. My dear belated aunt, astral travelled at night to a remote room of the family house and heard a conversation of two family members. She repeated the entire conversation accurately the next morning, to the astonishment of the speakers.
It is a tad frustrating that the vast body of paranormal experiences, many involving the mind free of the body, has not been taken seriously by mainstream science and culture. Meanwhile the old truism, that we can’t know what really goes on, can actually be disproven.
The thing is, none of my eleven friends talked about their amazing experiences with others, mostly out of fear of sounding balmy. Perhaps I’d be shocked if I really knew how many people in this world have had spiritual happenings; who knows how vast this pool of knowledge is?
Well Roberta, I can’t wait for the day when that little girl grows up and proves eternal consciousness. It will change the world. It may not be Charles Darwin who is hailed as the scientist who had the single greatest idea about life. It may end up being this girl, who is yet to be revealed! And I hope to live to see it. 😉
Dear Efrem, you make a wonderful point! It has been estimated that more than half of people who reach middle age have had what we might consider to be an extraordinary experience, but they never talk about what happened to them. And I am one of those people! I had experiences of light at eight and again at twenty – a voice speaking to me from out of a flash of light – and I never mentioned those experiences to anyone until I was in my forties, my father was dying, and my mother had a similar experience. She didn’t want to tell me what had happened to her, either! But she was giddy – odd, with her husband dying in the next room – and I guessed, and then was confounded when she related her experience which had been very similar to mine.
Yes, we who have amazing experiences want to protect them, and also want to protect ourselves. I ask myself now why even as a child I never talked about it, and I think it simply feels too sacred, too intimate, too precious. To share it at all would dilute it, so we hold it in our hearts. But yes, I think you would be astounded to know how nearly universal these experiences are!
Dear Roberta, Carol Bowman writes that her study of past life memories in children found that 40% recall coming here from–let’s say Heaven– but around age six start to lose that memory. She was not a professional psychologist, so when I read that number it struck me as authentic, as I recalled from Child Developmental Psych that adults generally recall back to around age six, with little memory before that age. Myself, I never had the benefit of any such recall, but I have experienced incidents that are best explained, perhaps only explainable, by interventions that pared my life.
Reference for Bowman’s book (the first one which is good, not the second one): https://www.amazon.com/Childrens-Past-Lives-Memories-Affect/dp/055357485X
Hi Jack! I’m a big fan of Carol Bowman’s work, and I recall some of her stories about early childhood memories. It’s unusual, but I have a vivid memory from when I was barely a year old! I think I’ve mentioned it here before. It remains vivid, to this day.
So, I’m a baby toddling along this very tall hallway with ivy wallpaper, minding my own business, heading for the bathroom to have a bath. It may have been the first time I was diaperless and alone for long, but I seem to have been checking out my body. And I discovered that something really major was missing! I vividly recall this sense of extreme disappointment and thinking, “Oh. I’m the other kind this time.” And as an adult, that is the most amazing part of this memory for me! I have nearly always been male, so naturally discovering that I was going to have to go through a whole life as “the other kind” was a downer. But, as a baby I actually even knew there was another kind? I actually thought in terms of having repeated lifetimes?
I resisted the notion of reincarnation at first, but that remembered thought was part of what helped me get past my reservations!
Dear Roberta–what a fabulous recollection. That memory of prior life surely has opened your mind to recognize the deception of materiality, and the fact that it’s the immaterial realm that is fundamental, not the illusion of hardness that impresses both common sense and physicists– and neurologists, Pity that most folks and professionals go thru life under all sorts of illusions about what is real and what is truly important.
Efrem: What you said is so true. I am so sick of hearing people say that they had spiritual experiences that they never mentioned because they feared being thought of as “crazy.” Also, the world has been full of people with unshakable belief systems, who don’t even think to do any research on their own belief systems to see them from a different perspective. I learned more about the history of Christianity on this blog than I ever learned in school or from anyone who declared themselves a Christian. In fact, I personally have never known a Christian who did any research at all on the history of Christianity. They are in a “comfort zone” of their own making. The philosopher von Goethe said it takes many years for a new idea to be accepted. It certainly seems so, especially with this subject matter
My dear Lola, what might change all of this will be an easily-usable source of reliable afterlife information. Being in a material body that lives for such a short time, with amnesia about our actual lives and with a very keen awareness that we are “mortal,” is agonizing! Of course people want a way to comfort themselves with the possibility that they might not just blink out after all. And they won’t question whatever their comforting belief might be, because if they lose that slender belief they fall into a pit of raw terror as they face their inevitable end.
Given the scientific obsession with materialism, most people really don’t know that the truth is so well known and so wonderful! But now, with the Internet, it should be possible to give people a good source of real, objective information. We’ll see….
Yes, the internet is crucial for this to happen. That, plus the fact that more and more credible people like Craig Hogan, Dr. Jeffrey Long, Dr. Raymond Moody and Dr Pin van Lommel, along with many others, now support and write books about life after death based on their own experiences and research, making it much harder to keep this in the “woo woo” category.
Lola, and include Ken Ring. Now here is a funny bit. On Tuesday I had cataract surgery on my bad right eye. The surgery went well, and then I noticed, as I had been warned, that the glass lens inserted in my eye would at times gleam from light rays, Then the next day I got in the mail Ken’s new book. So I emailed Ken that I would now be reading his new book, Reflections in a Glass Eye, with a glass eye. He did enjoy the irony, as did I.
Dr. Hiller, I can’t believe I forgot to mention Kenneth Ring. I am an absolute groupie of Kenneth Ring and have read every single book he wrote, except for the one you mentioned. His book “Lessons From the Light” has helped me more than I can say, I’m glad that he is still around. He is truly a great inspiration.
Hello Jack! I don’t believe we’ve ever interviewed Kenneth Ring on Seek Reality, and if he has a new book and is interested I would be happy to talk with him. Please send me his email address, and we’ll see what he thinks. We all have to stick together!
Oh my dear Lola, how I wish I could believe this! But I have witnessed so many decades of scientific stonewalling drspite good work being done to get the word out, and by wonderful credentialed people. I have seen the scientific gatekeepers grow gradually ever more intransigent as more and ever more scientific careers were wasted in going out ever farther on science’s slender materialist limb. Sixty or eighty years ago, for them to turn the Titanic in time to avoid their own self-generated disaster would have been much more readily possible. But how do they pull an Emily Litella now, and simply say “Never mind,” when a billion dollars of donor funds is at the moment being altogether wasted on a search for the source of consciousness inside the brain?
I have come to think that all we can do now is to fight foolish un-seriousness with simple evidence-based truth, and to focus on educating everyone. Not with tidbits, but with all the truth assembled in a way that it makes rational sense to everyone. We are about to try that. Let’s see where it goes….
Dear Roberta, Unfortunately, Ken Ring is going thru an extended period of poor health and is also about to have a procedure that he says will be painful. So he has not been up for interviews and this will likely continue; likewise, he restricts his email access. He feels that he is in his end time, and in fact makes that feeling explicit in his just published book.
I think the problem is their egos. They would have to admit they were going down the wrong path for all these years and spent countless amounts of money doing so. In a way, this would make them look like fools.
So sorry to hear about Kenneth Ring’s bad health, but I’m not surprised as he is not a young man any more. He was a true pioneer and was never afraid of what his colleagues might think of him or his research despite being a professor of psychology at a major university. He was the first to document the fact that blind people, while having these experiences, could suddenly see (for the first time in many cases). That alone should have caught the attention of scientists, as there was no physical reason for that to happen but, as usual, it got ignored
My dear Lola, they are going to look like even bigger fools, the longer they delay their inevitable acceptance of what is true! It is outrageous, frankly, that our most trusted source of truth has spent the past century bald-faced lying to us. No other term even fits, at this point! Scientists who are co-conspirators with the materialists – which is all of those who still have traditional scientific careers – are deliberately lying to the people who trust them most. And yes, that is going to be pretty embarrassing when eventually they have to admit to it. But putting it off any longer is only going to make those who have trusted them even more angry. And with perfect justification!
We have been lied to by the gov’t, religious leaders and scientists for many years. Thankfully, we have had many brave wonderful researchers to help pull us out of this muck!
Oh my dear Lola, if only it were that easy! Please again read what you are saying: the government, religions, and science all are arrayed against dissemination of the objective truth. That is true, but it is too gigantic an offense against humankind for most people to believe it! They don’t see the lies as muck, but rather they believe the lies they are hearing. So, yes, we are going to begin an informational website and try to break through to individuals on a broad scale. We cannot in conscience do otherwise! But still, there is no pretending that it will be easy, or that we won’t be denigrated and demonized. We will be! And one of the beautiful things about being as old as I am is that I find that I no longer care 🙂