Posted by Roberta Grimes • November 30, 2019 • 61 Comments
Understanding Reality
It is deeply tragic for everyone living that the mainstream scientific community still insists that what we experience as conscious awareness arises from unconscious matter. A full century ago, the great quantum physicist Max Planck found that notion preposterous; and many other thoughtful physicists, including the deathless Albert Einstein, have said or hinted that they also understood that consciousness must predate matter. The scientific dogma of materialism which was codified at the turn of the previous century has taken mainstream science on a hundred-year-long detour to nowhere! Scientific investigation must be an open-minded search for the truth if it is to be of any value at all, yet the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals still continue to insist that reality must be studied from the viewpoint of matter alone. Belief-systems are religions, by definition. And like all religions, materialist science is as frozen in time as a fly in amber, stuck now a century into the past.
Meanwhile, research scientists need to make a living, so they must find ways to do funded research that fits within their materialist restriction. And with the scientific community still insisting that at death we blink out like a light, you may not be surprised to learn that there are gullible and desperate people who are eager now to fund research into creating a material eternal life. This research is of course unnecessary. The scientists and their funders are already immortal! And their research is guaranteed to lead them nowhere, since the materialist limits imposed on the process of figuring out a material immortality are making it impossible for researchers to learn enough for their efforts to amount to anything.
Are you thinking that with so much evidence against it, surely no one still believes in materialism? You may be right, but the pressure to conform remains strong. With the start of the year 2020 barely a month away, a man who is “the chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle” and serves on Scientific American‘s board of advisers still feels required to pen these sentences: “There is little doubt that our intelligence and our experiences are ineluctable consequences of the natural causal powers of our brain, rather than any supernatural ones. That premise has served science extremely well over the past few centuries as people explored the world.” Dr. Christof Koch is to be pitied. This poor man had to write those demonstrably absurd sentences as a sop to the materialist thought-police, and his article itself refutes them, as presumably does his recent book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed. As he points out, no matter now rapidly and well a computer is able to calculate, it still doesn’t develop what he calls “experiences.” He is referring here to awareness. Emotions. Nuanced understandings. A living sense of self.
Because they are not allowed to study anything except from a materialist perspective, mainstream scientists still cannot define what consciousness is, figure out how or where it originates, or even describe how it might work. Nor, for that matter, can they define death. And their insistence on what is called “monism,” which is the primitive belief that the mind cannot exist apart from the brain, means that they must remain resolutely unaware of every bit of all the amazing and consistent evidence about consciousness that exceeds their materialist theories.
Many scientists are coming to see that what some call “feelings” are a missing ingredient in all their attempts to create artificial intelligence. Whatever they build lacks emotions, empathy, a sense of self, and all else that makes up a human being. As one of them puts it, “Fiction is full of robots with feelings… But in real life robots have no more feelings than a rock submerged in novocaine.” And all the ideas now being proposed to begin to bridge that gap depend upon consciousness being spontaneously generated in the robot, just as they still are forced to assume that human consciousness is generated in our brains. One researcher suggests that if robots are programmed to recognize perils to their own existence, perhaps that will instill in them a will to survive, and from that might come a sense of selfhood, emotions, and then consciousness and all the rest. Which seems to be a pretty big stretch!
Many scientists aren’t so much concerned about robots’ feelings, though. They just want to create advanced robots that can infinitely improve their own ability to learn. And all of that is well and good, but among scientists there is not even a consensus on whether artificial intelligence yet exits at all, or what needs to happen before it can be said to exist. Do the functions performed by a computer even qualify as “artificial intelligence”? The plain fact is that no matter how many calculations a computer can do at once, and no matter how rapidly it can do them, there is no relationship between those activities and the complex array of attributes which make up the individual awareness that we experience as human intelligence.
And even if scientists could create an intelligent and self-aware robot, it still is hard to 
imagine how that robot could become a fully intelligent and self-aware YOU when your body dies. So, inevitably, scientists who are trying to develop a workable material immortality are turning to seeking some way to mechanically perpetuate each human being’s awareness. They need to find a way to “upload” our minds. After all, as one researcher says, “According to the first law of thermodynamics, the energy that powers all life continues on and can never be destroyed.” Since consciousness seems to be a form of energy, they are trying to find a way to work with that; but they ignore the fact that the first law of thermodynamics actually states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So if consciousness really is energy, then by definition it cannot come from the brain! Still, all that immortality funding is there, so scientists are exploring what they call “the gray zone between life and death,” and they are trying to understand how Near-Death Experiences might be generated by the material brain. They are hoping to find ways to detect consciousness in matter, and to measure whether and the extent to which some material thing is conscious; and they are working out how they might establish some form of mechanical communication between brains. To add to the stress of these pointless efforts, there is a growing suspicion that preserving your awareness may not be possible after all, and a rising doubt that your uploaded mind still would really have the same awareness that it did when your material brain was alive. But the funding is there, so they press on.
Yet all of this research combined is not bringing the mechanical immortality of your personal awareness any closer. Even worse is the fact that the mainstream scientific community’s absurd insistence that reality must be only material despite all the contrary evidence just further deepens the worldwide negativity which is rooted in the fear of death. As young Americans turn away from Christianity, they then face the scientific certainty that they will be extinguished when their bodies die. And this surge in them of existential fear is especially tragic when a lot of evidence suggests that in the face of death, and even unexpected death, the truth takes over and fear is gone. This ambient negativity rooted in false science has created what is an otherwise inexplicable uptick in Americans’ midlife mortality, in what are called “deaths of despair.” Scientists use that term, and then they attribute these deaths to a wide variety of problems, with no awareness that our rapid nationwide secularization and a concomitant surge in the fear of death is a primary underlying cause.
The silly scientific dogma of materialism is doing humanity incalculable harm! We must find a way to put it behind us. But, how?
AI has come a long way, I think it is scary myself.
I’ve heard it said the perfect AI is one that could self replicate and have all the attributes of the human kind.
I personally think it sounds a lot like us. It is like to me, that we are the Creators AI and we do just all that!!! We are created are we not???
Dear Rockey, if it were indeed possible for AI to be actual “artificial intelligence,” it would be scary indeed! But as it is, since it is impossible for even animate matter to generate consciousness, it certainly never will be possible for inert matter to do it. So no matter how fancy it becomes, AI will be nothing but ever fancier human-programmed computers, forevermore. Even if they are programmed to assemble more computers, inert machines is all that they ever can be! I was surprised, really, when I researched this post after having not looked at the literature in awhile, to see that they are still stupidly trying, after having made literally no progress at all!
I watched a program about AI that they hooked two of them together and they created their own language that only they could understand. They freaked out and unplugged them right away. It is like Terminator in real life. Pandora’s Box
Feel like I am wondering in the desert here.
I understand how creepy that seems! But inanimate computers can be programmed to interact with people and/or with other properly-programmed computers to create a language that only they can understand. That’s easy! If these computers were responding to their programming and “they unplugged them right away,” that tells you only that they were drumming up drama. Always, always follow the money! There is a lot of money available for working on AI projects, but that does not for a moment suggest that they are making any progress.
Dear Rockey, we have a problem only if a computer’s machinery and programming can generate consciousness. And they can’t. No matter what, they can’t, any more than your coffee table can generate consciousness.
Roberta,
The tag line “follow the money” should appear in your main article above! I know you mention they have the funding…but from whom?!? Just as the FDA/government aren’t really calling the shots…follow the money.
PS..when I first submitted this it said “Human verification failed” lol
It’s still just one computer connecting to another computer, an interface between two machines.
Precisely, dear Barbara!
Proof is in the pudding I always say, I know that I deal with some sort of AI every day, and just by sending this message there is a bot monitoring it. It is obviously a concern or we wouldn’t have to click on, I am not a robot, or do things that prove I am not one. It is when they do things on their own that concerns me, for as you pointed out the do not have a consciousness. And who know what kind of monster could be released here. One that does not feel I assure you.
I understand, dear Rockey. There are bots everywhere! There are computers everywhere as well, and without this little laptop computer and the computers that run the Internet I wouldn’t be able to visit with you this way. Computers quite literally run our lives, don’t they? But they do it only with our permission and at our convenience. Always. They are machines, and they always will be machines! No matter how fast and efficient and downright gigantic a computer is, it is not “artificial intelligence” because it is not intelligent! For something to be intelligent, it needs to be conscious, so no machine ever can be intelligent; I would argue further that for something to be intelligent it also needs to be alive. The most a computer can do is to mimic whatever illusion of intelligence it is programmed to mimic (such as helping to invent a language).
What is happening now is the logical endgame of the century-long detour of science into materialism. That detour was never anything but desperation, a stopgap to avoid their having to look at communications from the dead and other phenomena so they wouldn’t risk (gasp!) inadvertently finding something like the Christian God. A hundred years ago they were battling religion, altogether overlooking the fact that what they should have been battling all along was ignorance! So now they have painted themselves into their materialist corner, and when they can’t figure out what consciousness is and how to generate it using matter, they will eventually have to stagger out of that corner and turn their pockets out in shame.
They got nothin’. And because all their assumptions are bogus, that never is going to change. The scientific community demonizes all the consciousness-based evidence by calling it “supernatural,” and they refuse to recognize any of the researchers now doing such wonderful work in this field; but they also have made the origin and nature of consciousness the hill they are willing to die on. And the death of their foolishness cannot happen soon enough!
Agreed. The truth is right in their face, yet they foolishly close their eyes to it. I don’t even come close to the knowledge that the scientific community possesses, yet I can see it plain as day…
Yes, precisely right! Science is a belief-system, a religion by definition, and by now its practitioners have laid down a full century worth of scientific research based at least in part on bogus assumptions. That is a lot of investment, so we can’t expect its gatekeepers – the peer-reviewed journals and university departments – to just pull an Emily Litella and say, “Never mind!” But the whole thing is starting to fall apart now, as more and more young scientists (like our wonderful friend Bernardo Kastrup) decide that they aren’t going to waste their careers as so many in the past four generation of scientists have wasted theirs. We do live in interesting times!
Dear Roberta,
Regarding sponsored materialism within scientific communities, I’m reminded of William F. Buckley, one of America’s premier conservative intellectuals in the last half of the 20th century. In his own unique style – gleeful fodder for impressionists of the time – he interviewed many prominent intellectuals of the day on his long-running television show, “Firing Line”.
When he passed away, Buckley was feted for his mellifluous speech, staggering – even arcane – vocabulary as well as his unique cognitive ability to debate. And, in nearly all of his obituaries, his devout Roman Catholic faith was mentioned as well. (His belief was so staunch that he vigorously protested when they stopped doing High Mass in Latin!)
Now I’m wondering if the paragraph about his religion was replaced with, “Buckley was certain of an afterlife for all beings and argued extensively for the truth of said notion” that he would be as roundly admired by establishment intellects. Among academia, i.e. materialists, his religion was viewed respectfully or, at the very least, as a charming personality quirk.
Without meaning to knock anyone’s faith – among possible readers of your blog – I’ll argue that his Catholic – with a big “C” – certainty about a fictive, punishing God who desires complex rituals by way of obedience, all rendered indirectly via priests’ discretion, deserves more than a raised eyebrow considering all that we know.
If I may, because it may or may not be related, I’ve been taking spirit photographs for almost three years that contain recognizable images of human/animal faces and other shapes which are assuredly not pareidolia. This happens with uncanny regularity. (I don’t refer to so-called “orbs”, either, but swaths/shapes of mist and light that are truly inexplicable.)
Because I’m no scientist, and for other reasons, as well, I’ve never proffered said images by way of “proof”, but, as one friend who’s a college professor in the field of mathematics said, “These seem to prove – at least – that realities beyond terra familiar definitely exist.” One of his colleagues, when shown the photos right after they were taken, simply stormed off in a huff.
It’s somewhere between a pity and an outrage that scholars are confined to study that which is concrete, comfortable and fund-worthy. I’m sure that you’re familiar with Dr Jeffrey Mishlove’s YouTube program, “New Thinking Allowed”. (It was on PBS for decades.) His guests include has many heterodox scientists whose range of expertise embraces physics, anthropology, math, psychology and every cross-discipline in between. Yet it will not surprise you to hear that, among their Wikipedia bios, any foray beyond conventional studies – especially when it comes to afterlife research – is footnoted with sneering peer reviews.
Still, recent polls cite an overwhelming percentage of Americans who believe in an afterlife – even atheists. (!) This latter statistic is one of the happiest surprises I’ve read in a while.
In a nutshell, your hard work, Roberta – and that of others – seems to be paying off despite what “science” refuses to either acknowledge or bring to the table. Thank you for another mountain of evidence. You must feel like Sisyphus at times, but please know your eloquent and convincing words are not lost on us
With all blessings of the season,
Brett
Very well said, Brett. Was your response channeled? 🙂
I too would love to see your photography. In my day to day existence it is a lonely walk. It’s nice to connect to like minded folks.
Blessings,
Missy
Oh dear Brett, thank you for this – it’s a lovely contribution! Yes, I find fascinating the fact that individual guides are working now with millions of individual people to both help them break away from Christian dogmas and help them increase their afterlife-related open-mindedness. None of this is accidental! Sometimes I feel like a foot-soldier in this gigantic army of afterlife researchers and educators, with each of us doing our little part and all of us together certain to be victorious!
I’m interested in this spirit photography you’re doing – are you sharing samples?
Amen, sister. Finally, some ‘good sense’ to counter the ‘common sense’ or materialist and AI nonsense plaguing our society. It is long overdue to move humanit’s forward and out of philosophical ruts inherited from centuries gone past — including the outrageous idea that artificial intelligence could ever compete with human intelligence or consciousness. Anyone who uses voice recognition knows this – no machine will ever adequately understand the nuances and dynamics of speech and the power of context, never mind the complexities of socially mediated, culture-bound and historically shaped interpretation and perception. This misguided technofaith is so dangerous and may be evidence of wider social problems indicating social regression. Today’s high school graduates struggle with reading and writing cursive and deciphering time from clock faces …
Keep up the brilliant writing – the world and its so-called experts need the wake-up call more than ever.
Brava!
Dear Dr. Divyne, thank you for your thoughts here! I find “This misguided technofaith is so dangerous and may be evidence of wider social problems indicating social regression.” to be so profound! Social regression is clearly endemic in the United States now, and perhaps also in the world: in our schools, in our families, in the general relationship between men and women, in our public entertainments, in our governments, and in our spiritual lives. Everywhere. And as someone who grew up in the Fifties and Sixties, I am confident that all this descent into misery and chaos began in the Sixties as a general reaction against the too-stuffy (but in many ways much happier than today) Fifties. Uptight fashions, prudishness, religious rigidity, and very uncomfortable gender roles were ripe for our rebellion against them all! It just went too far. We went from too much to very much too little in the way of love, kindness, respect, and shared social structure and aspirations. We threw out what was good with what we didn’t like, and now we are taxed with somehow re-creating a modern version of all the good things that we so thoughtlessly tossed away.
Descent into misery and chaos began in the fifties and sixties I can see that. I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s, where people were just flat giving up on each other. They would just medicate drinking alcohol or doing drugs sending the children to there own devices. Scripture states that a child left to him or herself disgraces their parents. In the 90’s I watched as the whole family structure in my family and others totally denigrate. Women left their men and the children rebelled against authority of every kind. The men just sank into depression and medicated their lives away because all hope of a unified family was gone, and there was no light at the end of the tunnel. Today no one is even talking to each other, everyone is in there own separate little bubble, and have no respect or trust just vindictiveness trying to figure out how they can make each other feel their pain. They flat won’t forgive and even the mention of doing so brings on a whole slew of anger. Here is a fact if they won’t learn the truth, growing up, than they must teach themselves, now where does that knowledge come from.???
Very true, Rockey. I noticed the same thing during that time. Many teenagers just used their homes to eat and sleep in. Family unity was almost non-existent, and it wasn’t just men who medicated themselves. Almost no one was really happy and they almost never knew why. I think they depended on others to make them happy, but of course, that never works.
What I see as a main contributor is the hypocrisy, men and women get married take oaths and have children, go to church, and send the children to youth camps to gain spiritual learning. Yet what they see in the street is not what the see in the church, parents separate totally disregarding the oaths they took in marriage. They see there mom and dad loving each other one day and totally hate each other the next. Acting like Christianity didn’t exist. It is a wonder to me that the kids are taught how to live right, and the parent go against that teaching. Leaving everybody frustrated. I can just imagine a child saying if this is love I want to part of it…..
Oh my, dear Rockey, you paint a bleak picture! And I don’t say that you’re wrong, but I do see some encouraging signs that the pendulum may be swinging back again. It is certainly true, though, that after having lived in nuclear families under a paterfamilias and with strict family roles – and after having gotten along pretty well for many hundreds of years living that way, even though some women and children chafed a bit – we have been conducting an interesting social experiment over the past sixty years or so. What happens when we get rid of the age and gender roles and the whole family structure altogether? Well, we have learned what happens….
I myself have been to youth studies as a youngster, I learned how it should be, as to how it is. I have gone to church, been to many Bible studies, and listened to Christian radio on a regular bases. What it comes down to me is, they talk and teach about the rubber hitting the road, but it never does. It is my understanding that a disciple Means Learner Doer. Well as far as I can see the rubber is not hitting the road, they are not talking the talk, or walking the walk, just preaching it. I see no way it can continue for much longer like this. To the preacher it is only a job, I asked how much one made and it is a $60,000 a year income, $30,000 for the youth pastor, plus some monies come from Gov. funding. once you get past the youth you are on your own, no more funding. that is that. dipped in the water now good luck!! It is a bleak picture. It is the same with our prison populations. The Gov. funds go to programs like that too. But, when the money is gone you are on your own good luck with your self and oh don’t expect us to call and see how you are doing either. Now that does not sound like something Jesus would do to me.
Roberta: You said that you found out that there is still much time and money being invested to prove that consciousness comes from the brain. I don’t understand that, as there are cases in medical journals that prove this can’t be true, such as the case of Pamela Reynolds, a young woman who was blind since birth and had a dangerous aneurysm in her brain that needed to be removed or she would die. When she underwent surgery, her blood flow and brain were shut down in order to repair the aneurysm. Yet, she was perfectly able to see grass, trees, and her deceased grandmother while the operation was taking place. Her surgical team was dumbfounded because the parts of her brain that would generate dreams and hallucinations were completely shut off, making it impossible for her to “see” anything, much less remember it. This means that something else was at work here and must have been consciousness. If so, that proves that it doesn’t exist in the brain, so why was this ignored? (Hers is not the only case, and the others were ignored as well)
Dear Lola, they have no interest in Pam Reynolds. They are trying instead to come up with some sort of brain-based explanation for NDEs as elaborate and very intense dreams (or something), so they can dismiss every NDE as just that. All the many amazingly veridical NDEs can then be individually ridiculed as imagined or dismissed as lies, and thereafer outright ignored.
This is nothing less than a battle for the belief-system – the religion – which for a century has been the very soul of science! Try to convince very devout Catholics that Jesus didn’t really die on the cross and rise from the dead, or that the bread and wine don’t transform into the Lord’s body and blood during the Holy Mass. How do you convince them of any of that, when they are absolutely lead-pipe certain that these things are indeed true, and their truth is the whole foundation of these people’s Catholic worldview? It is amazing to steep yourself in current scientific articles and realize how stunningly resolute most scientists still are about maintaining their beliefs in obvious and thoroughly debunked idiocies like the notion that consciousness comes from the brain. They will fight for their beliefs to the death. No matter what.
Yes. I realize they don’t want people around like Pam Reynolds to rock their boat, but it is atrocious (and not even scientific) to ignore her case. She was blind from birth and her brain was completely shut down at the time. Even her own doctors all agreed that she couldn’t have possibly been dreaming or having a hallucination. Pam herself even said that nothing ever felt more real to her. With people like this doing “research” we might as well forget any meaningful scientific breakthroughs, as there won’t be any unless it’s something that fits into their paradigm. We need a new group of researchers who aren’t afraid to come out of their pigeon hole.
My dear Lola, I have been watching this nonsense going on for my entire life! And there are others, too, even older than I am, and others who have long since died of old age who couldn’t believe that mainstream science was continuing sixty or eighty years ago to ignore the incontrovertible truths of their own day. And yet, so it is. The scientific gatekeepers’ decision more than a century ago to turn science into a study of only what is material, and to insist that they could defend the proposition that what is not material does not matter, has had an appalling effect on the world that will be apparent only in retrospect. The great polymath, Nikola Tesla, said in his own day, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
I remember that Tesla did say that, and I totally agree with him. It’s too bad that he was one of a kind. Oddly (or maybe not so oddly), he is purported to be one of the “genius spirits” who are working on the soul phone with Gary Schwartz and Mark Pitstick. It definitely would be something he would do. What a terrible waste of research money to not include the unseen and only give credence to the material. No wonder no one is getting anywhere.
I have little to add to these excellent, insightful comments except another huge THANK YOU, Roberta.
It makes me very happy to know that, despite the erroneous beliefs of materialist-science believers, when their time comes, they will realise how wrong they were.
Hopefully they can then work from their labs in the Afterlife and spread the wonderful news!
Love and Blessings, K
That’s a good thought, Kristian. Wouldn’t it be ironic if the same people who stubbornly hold onto these ideas would be the very ones to refute them in the afterlife?
Dear Kristian, as they say, “from your mouth to God’s ears!” As it is now, some of the scientific leading lights of prior generations are working on various afterlife communication projects, which include but are not limited to just the soul phone Gary Schwartz is working on. Once we have any reasonably reliable system based in consciousness principles in place, and people are using it routinely, the scientific community will be shamed into dropping all their materialist nonsense. Speed the day!!
I believe that everything happens for a reason and feel that there could be a very good reason why so much money is being pumped into AI now. The materialists think that it is serving their purpose but, in my opinion, it is serving the purpose of the powers to be (i.e. God, Source, the Universe). From the afterlife, we know that we incarnate as human beings with only 20 to 30% of our essence (or soul so to speak). What if the reason this is the case is that the human carbon-based body is only capable of housing that much of our essence? What if a silicon-based (i.e. transistors, capacitors, circuit boards etc.) vehicle could be developed that could accommodate more than this 20-30%? We could live life in a human 2.0 vehicle that would allow for us to experience more of reality than our current vehicles are capable of. This is just speculation, but I see the potential for AI to be the next evolutionary step in man’s quest for spiritual development. When the SoulPhone comes on-line this speculation can either be confirmed or debunked.
Don: I wouldn’t doubt that a similar thing has already happened with a much more technologically advanced civilization in this vast universe. We would never recognize that they are partly an advanced artificial intelligence. I have heard that AI is advancing rapidly, so we have no idea what is possible in the future – things that even science fiction writers couldn’t dream up..
Dear Lola, building more complex robots and computers is coming along, but their goal is to replicate the complexity of life and somehow make consciousness arise from that. And it won’t ever happen. AI is advancing rapidly toward nowhere.
Oh, I see. That’s quite a tall order, especially when they don’t have any idea what consciousness actually is. Do they think that it will magically “appear” as AI technology becomes more sophisticated?
Dear Don, I love your sweet optimism about this! Here are some of my own thoughts:
1) I don’t think there is any reason why we can’t be in our full eternal minds while we are in bodies of any size. No, the reason why we leave most of our eternal minds at home is that we strip down to just the parts of our minds that equip us for rapid spiritual learning. Apparently for us to have all those memories of the astral and of other lifetimes, and also that much greater ability to understand, would make it harder for us to come here and progress spiritually.
2) We know, too, that the game we are playing is completely rigged. The beings governing this planet decided 70 years ago that we won’t be allowed to use another nuclear bomb in anger, and so we have not. Until very recently (well, 100 years ago), they kept us from knowing the truth about the afterlife, until the vibration of the planet fell so low that human life on earth is now at risk. If it were their will that AI happen, it seems to me it would likely happen much more easily! Instead, in the year or two since I last checked, and before this week’s post when I took another look, there has been no progress. Literally zero!
My own view is that AI is the last gasp of materialism. When it is proven by repeated failures that no matter how fast and fancy computers are, they will not ever become conscious, then the game will be up, it seems to me. And only then will the scientific community be shamed into following friend Tesla’s suggestion that they suck it up and start investigating non-physical phenomena!
Of course. I never meant that these future AI beings could actually have a consciousness. Most likely, they would be robotic in nature and perhaps seem to be intelligent (depending on how they are programmed), but they will never contemplate the beauty of a sunset or cry when they see someone die or get hurt. They will likely be devoid of emotion.
It is interesting to contemplate the idea that cosciousness could inhabit a non-biological vehicle, rather than a “meat robot” like ours. I can’t say it has never happened somewhere in the universe. It makes me think of Battlestar Galactica or the character Data on Star Trek. On the other hand, if a silicon based body or something similar was a better option, why would spirit have wasted so much time evolving these biological vehicles we use for our spiritual growth? We still have no idea how miraculous these bodies of ours are. They say we are currently using only a portion of our brains, and what is all that so-called “junk DNA” for? Maybe it is just waiting to be activated when our consciousness is ready for it. Just the same, would AI-type bodies offer interesting opportunities for our souls to experience some sort of growth at some future point? Who knows? One of the big areas of research now is cyborgs, where our bodies would be modified with all sorts of devices, artificial senses, neural intefaces, etc. It seems pretty scary, but could there be some ways it might add interesting experiences for our souls? ( It doesn’t appeal to me, but it does to a lot of the younger generation. Just playing Devil’s advocate. 😉 )
I agree, dear Lola, that emotion really seems to us from here to be the key. The very essence of consciousness is emotion, from fear at its lowest vibration to love at its highest, Until matter can give rise to emotion, it is not alive – period! So scientists are seeking silly ways to make robots feel emotions, like (for example) programming them to recognize and avoid perils to their survival. From that, scientists hope that their robots will go on to develop self-awareness?! But trying to avoid perils is consciousness at the level of a C. Elegans, a 900-cell worm! And these worms that react to threats like too much heat or light don’t go on to develop what we would recognize as something like awareness. We cannot even discern that they have a rudimentary sense of quite literally anything at all.
This repeated scientific running-up against stupid and obvious dead-ends is what you get when you let dogmas govern your system of inquiry. To mandate by fiat that everything important is material and not “supernatural” (whatever that means) is to guarantee that you never will figure out anything.
Very true. Just because robots can react to something that might be perilous to them doesn’t mean they are thinking beings. Without certain “triggers” that are programmed into them, they would have no reaction because they would not “recognize” anything that could be perilous. Like I said previously, research on this will go nowhere unless they accept that something other than the brain is at work here.
Roberta,
Thanks for your post which in turns brings forward interesting feedback. Good comments on Science trying to create a human being using scientific methods, ignoring the spirit that resides in us all. A technological being with the entire capacity of a human is ludicrous. I appreciate all the achievements that scientists and inventors advance but their work and knowledge really boils down to discovery of facts or materials that already exist. Thus creating a technological being with any human awareness will always remain just that – a technological being with limited function. We have an Alexa, and I can say once in a great while she comes off with a witty comeback, but mostly her responses are lame and predictable. And she is not even equipped with a body. Lastly, and maybe you are writing about this soon: I am trying to better understand how, being in this body and leaving behind our greater self awareness allows us to grow spiritually. Does everyone grow spiritually regardless of their lot in life? There are some people that appear as spiritually tuned in as a rock. Is their reincarnation a “dud” so to speak, or I suppose some people think even rocks have a spirit. I am reviewing Mikey Morgan’s story and how they planned their life out, but that still seems tenuous once you leave the other side, and allow human being’s free will to enter the picture. Also, I do believe DNA is fixed in the physical sense, so maybe the spirit of consciousness has more power than we are programmed to believe. Of course, that is Science telling us so.
These are great questions, Tim
Dear Timothy, I would love to be able to write about precisely why these lives on earth effectively help our eternal minds to grow spiritually, but although we can guess, i don’t think that any of us really knows that for certain. Your questions are good ones, and here are what I believe are their answers:
1) There is evidence that it is indeed possible for us to set ourselves back spiritually, and – perhaps curiously, from our perspective – some of the most dangerous life-plans seem to be the ones we wish that we were living now: great wealth and power. Lifetimes full of adversity seem to keep us humble, keep us striving, and give us the most and the best chances to choose love over negative emotions.
2) Some people who seem to outsiders not to be “spiritual” may nevertheless be growing by a lot. Most of our spiritual challenges and stressors are inward, and if we can handle them well then we grow spiritually stronger. I hear from some of these people as it is happening, and no one is more surprised than they are to find themselves changing in such positive ways!
3) A planned life is not “tenuous” to live. Remember that although we don’t remember while we are awake what actually is going on, we all have spirit guides, and we travel in the astral to meet with them nearly every night. There is a time during most 24-hour periods when we voyagers into the world go back and check in with home-base! When Thomas broke into my life through a medium nearly five years ago and told me what the heck I had signed up for, my first question was how I could possibly do all that! He said, “You are already doing it.” Nearly everything I ever had done in my life had been directly a part of this plan, but I just never knew it! I had thought all along these were just my own notions, but they weren’t. More and more, I clearly see that.
4) The fact that we strip down to minds designed for rapid spiritual learning but not much more when we come to earth is an advantage! It’s like giving a baby a quiet environment without the dogs running around so he can concentrate on learning to stack blocks. Like stripping to shorts and a T-shirt so you can use the gym machines without risking getting your floppy outdoor clothes stuck in them. None of us is a spiritual genius! But we all will be, one day. And this is the way that we get started.
5) Nothing is “fixed. ” Not DNA, and not even the past! As i have written elsewhere, there is no objective time, no fixed past, and creation is freshly happening in each moment. Our minds are therefore immensely powerful! They are part of the one Mind, which is why once enough of us have sufficiently raised our spiritual vibrations we will quite literally transform everything!
I hope these answers help, dear Timothy. I realize this is all complicated enough to make your eyes cross, but it is also quite, quite wonderful!!
quote, Tim: ” I am trying to better understand how, being in this body and leaving behind our greater self awareness allows us to grow spiritually. Does everyone grow spiritually regardless of their lot in life? There are some people that appear as spiritually tuned in as a rock. Is their reincarnation a “dud” so to speak, or I suppose some people think even rocks have a spirit.”
Last point first – yes and no. There’s an explanation of the situation in Julie Gale’s book ‘Soul Trek’. Lola’s just started reading it….
Now to your first question – probably most but probably not all. Some may remain at the level they were at when they incarnated. As we don’t know the individuals we share this dimension with we also don’t know anything about their apparent level of spiritual advancement. How could we assess it?
Is the incarnation of such an individual a dud, you ask? perhaps….. But perhaps not but it matters only to the individual in question anyway.
quote, Tim: ” I am reviewing Mikey Morgan’s story and how they planned their life out, but that still seems tenuous once you leave the other side, and allow human being’s free will to enter the picture.”
Yes outcomes may not be exactly as planned before incarnating, the actions and omissions of other incarnates affecting the path of our lives. But how we react to, and deal with, those changes is perhaps as important as achieving exactly what was planned.
We can see just a little of the big picture, if we can see any at all, and then just as incarnates. It will almost certainly look very different from the perspective we’ll again have as discarnates. 😉
Thanks Mac – yes, I suppose I am always looking for some way to assess my own spiritual growth or to gauge where I am in the grand scheme of things. They say that wisdom comes with age, but perhaps the wisdom is really spiritual awareness of those things that matter. Unlike many religious organizations, spiritual growth doesn’t come with star stickers or feathers to put in your hat.
At 71 and a half I’m still waiting for my wisdom to arrive! 🙂
I think you’re right though, Tim. It’s not conventional wisdom but the understanding about issues of the spirit that matter more than material ones – even though concerns about the latter often crowd out the enlightenment of the former. 😉
I’ve given up wondering whether I’ve made the spiritual progress I’d planned on making before I arrived here on this last occasion. What will be, will be….. 🙂
Hey Timothy,
I reckon you asked some very important and interesting questions here. You know I spent years trying to glean understanding of any spiritual growth I may have made. Then I was ‘told’, gently but strongly, to forget it and just enjoy myself. I began to trust that things will all be okay in the end. (This understanding was given to me, to fit my own mind space. I’m just sharing; not saying that it applies to you or to anyone else…)
I remember someone said that ‘enlightenment’ is what happens when there is nothing left but love.
And that’s what I focus on; love. As I can, how, where and when I can; love given to whoever I can give it to. It is kind of selfish really, I just enjoy the happenings of love and live each day.
Sometimes I get tired and rest a little. Sometimes I pause and acknowledge some sadness, but overall I’m much happier.
Just saying. 🕊🙏🏼🌅
That’s a wonderful way to feel, Efrem. You can’t ask for any better than that. Don’t worry about your spiritual growth – you are doing just fine.
❣️🙏🏼🌅
I echo Lola’s sentiments, dear Efrem!
❣️🙏🏼🌅
quote, Roberta: “1) There is evidence that it is indeed possible for us to set ourselves back spiritually, and – perhaps curiously, from our perspective – some of the most dangerous life-plans seem to be the ones we wish that we were living now: great wealth and power.”
I’m not persuaded that there is evidence we can set ourselves back spiritually. That would fly in the face of the teaching that underpins my understanding and for me it simply isn’t logical either.
We can’t ‘unknow’ what we know although we may forget because of the frailty of our phyical body’s memory systems. But what we ‘know’ spiritually isn’t recorded solely in physical brain cells (if it’s in them at all) but in our psyches. If that weren’t the case spiritual progress would be lost after every incarnation.
We might be able to ‘turn our back’ on the spiritual progress we’ve made, I suppose, but psychically we can’t unknow what we’ve learned from previous incarnations, experiences that resulted in spiritual progression.
It makes no sense to me to suggest that whatever spiritual progress we’ve made could later be lost by our actions. (or omissions) I can accept those actions might temporarily prevent us moving any further forward but not that they would result in our going backward.
It sounds like this is a matter of coming here making mistakes, something that happens all the time. If we have great wealth and power, we could help many, many people. Conversely, we could wind up using it for selfish reasons and hurt the many people we could have helped. A life review, which almost everyone agrees we go through, would show us whatever other people felt and suffered through as a result of our actions, and I think everything from then on would depend on our reaction to what was shown us in the life review
Dear Mac, with respect and love, I’m sure you know that to hew to any particular teaching in the face of contrary information is to adopt a belief-system which is no longer an open-minded search for the truth. And if you want to do that, you should! It just is important for the sake of all who read here that we point out that the fact that something “flies in the face of the teaching that underpins” our own particular understanding should not automatically be a reason to refuse to consider new information.
My research tells me that we don’t ratchet higher, pause, then ratchet higher again, but indeed we can lose spiritual ground. I first saw this decades ago, in the documented communications received a century ago through deep-trance mediums. There were several newly-dead loved ones who had chosen wealthy lives in the Gilded Age, and they regretted it as soon as they got home and had their life-reviews. They all seemed to feel that they had done themselves spiritual harm, and I recall one man in particular who was horrified and said something like, “I set myself far back, and I wanted to do so much good with that money!”
We know, too, that people who die and are unable to forgive themselves for something done in the most recent lifetime will set themselves back, will vibrate more and more slowly, and will put themselves into the lowest level, from which they will have to be rescued. Jesus even said this, for heaven’s sake! And it’s okay. Everyone will be rescued in the end, and everyone will be perfected. But I don’t think we can comfortably teach people that it is impossible to set yourself back spiritually, when the evidence is strong that indeed you can do exactly that!
Dear Roberta
With the greatest of respect isn’t it the case that all of us align ourselves – wittingly or unknowingly – with those whose guidance resonates for us individually. It matters not to me that other sources of information appear to contradict what appeals to my reason unless there is sound evidence to re-consider its veracity. I don’t consider I subscribe to a belief system given that my guidance comes from various sources unassociated with any belief system. I expect you might say similar. 😉
The piece you quoted – as ‘evidence’ – was nothing of the sort for me. The regrets of recently-passed-over individuals who FELT they had done themselves spiritual harm isn’t what I consider to be evidence. Even being unable to forgive oneself and needing help to overcome one’s remorse and/or feelings of guilt still doesn’t – in my book – equate to spiritual retrogression; we’ll have to disagree on that point, I guess. 😉
My role isn’t one of teaching anyone anything but I feel it’s right to sometimes offer alternatives so readers can judge for themselves. 🙂
Dear Mac and Roberta,
This is a very interesting topic and, perhaps, far afield from this particular blog entry. It’s worth exploring in more depth. Anyway, I am as always reluctant to challenge either of you in a comment or anywhere because you both have high-octane spiritual backing, a tremendous amount of wisdom, and I’m just, well me (I do have a 1,000-or-so-year-old shaman’s wife whispering in my spiritual ear from time to time, so if I may…).
In the midst of an infinite sea, who is closer to the shore? Since — when we take us all out of the experiment of time and space and consider all of this within the larger picture of reality — we are all already perfect and at one with the eternals, then the exercise we get with this experience we perceive as incarnation is, in fact, something else beyond comprehension. In short, cosmically there can be no spiritual growth at all — because we are perfect before we begin and while we are beginning and as we begin to complete and as we begin to begin again.
There are two (at least two) ontological problems with this experience we perceive as incarnation. It IS set in time and space and, because we come to it from an eternal Mind, we also have…God help us, an eternal conscience. So when we “complete” our incarnation, this conscience runs us through the life review and — egad! — no matter what we did, we feel we’ve gone backward. If we did enough we, as Jesus alluded, put ourselves into the outer darkness where we need to rediscover our eternal point of view. This in fact would feel like spiritual regression and perhaps even hell.
Good points, dear Mike! Thank you for sharing them. I think especially the fact that we are already perfected – or so we are told – is a wonderful point. Spiritual growth is apparently a process of remembering who and what we already are, so you might say that we have already retrogressed to be as far back down the scale as we are now, right 😉 ?
Cosmically speaking of course!
Mostly great points, Mike, but I can’t go along with that last one. 😉 Best we just agree to differ on that issue, eh? 🙂
One out of so many ain’t bad!
This makes sense, but in order to avoid putting ourselves in outer darkness, what would we need to do – forgive ourselves? Hopefully, there must be a way to avoid this outer darkness. This is pretty scary – at least to me.
My dear Mac, please don’t take personally my need to speak directly to others here in a teaching and mentoring role. I don’t know who you have read to establish your belief-system, and I am sure they are all wonderful sources. You superbly manage AfterlifeForums.com, and as I thought I said plainly above, I wasn’t speaking to you or trying to change your views when I addressed the people here who might be seeking my direction.
Again, everyone, as you can see, reasonable people who are widely read in this field can disagree about whether or not advancement to a certain spiritual level can mean that you have a lock on that level or higher for eternity. It therefore seems to be just sensible not to count on the possibility that you own your spiritual growth and you cannot lose it, and to consider an ongoing process of learning ever more perfect love with an emphasis on learning prevenient forgiveness to be the surest method for achieving solid spiritual progress on which you can continue to build forevermore.
dear Roberta
I’m sorry I wasn’t following protocol. I’ll bow out.