Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 22, 2022 • 18 Comments
Afterlife Research, Death, Understanding Reality
Now I’ve been happy lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come.
And I believe it could be. Something good has begun.
Oh, I’ve been smiling lately, Dreaming about the world as one!
And I believe it could be. Someday it’s going to come.
‘Cause I’m on the edge of darkness. There ride the Peace Train!
Oh, Peace Train take this country. Come take me home again!
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Peace Train” (1971)
If you had found a way to transform humankind for the better in barely a heartbeat of time, what would you do? If you could make every person on every street in every nation in the Western world feel spontaneously less selfish and more loving? More compassionate and kind? If you had a way to actually accomplish the transformation in each human heart that religions over all the earth and throughout human history have been trying to achieve, although without much success?
We are just now coming to realize that immortality may be that magic bullet. And for my part, slow learner that I am, it is only now that I really am able to see how important this awakening is! When I first began to speak and write about the afterlife, I was vaguely worried that if we were supposed to know that we survive our deaths, then for certain we would already know it. I was still enough of a Christian that my instinct then was to follow the herd. Perhaps we were supposed to be ignorant of our true nature and our destiny, to keep us focused on our lessons here? In the summer of 2010, I became so obsessed with the notion that I might be committing a cosmic crime in publishing The Fun of Dying that I did in fact pray fervently that if that book should not be published, then God could please take me in my sleep. But God didn’t take me. That fact surprised me at the time.
Instead, over the intervening decade I have been pulled and prompted to do more. A podcast, starting in 2013. Putting on annual afterlife conferences with Craig Hogan, beginning in 2014. Channeling Liberating Jesus in 2015, which required that my beautiful Thomas become an active part of my daytime life. He assured me that I was following a plan, and that plan was well on course. I had a role to play, but no worries, my child: it’s going to be a tiny role. We wrote more books, but to my dismay he wouldn’t let my favorite of them be published. He told me it was all about timing. Although of course, my actually knowing the plan or any details of how the timing worked would have been information far above my pay grade!
And then, about five years ago, Thomas put into my mind the thought that it was time for “an online afterlife university.” So I talked about it with friends in this field, but I couldn’t really envision it. And frankly, the more we talked about it, the dumber the whole thing started to seem. It would be just a more efficient way to do the annual conferences that Craig and I were already putting on, and each of those attracted just a few hundred people. So, what was the point of going online with that?
It is only now – I mean, literally this week – that I begin to see my Thomas’s plan. The role that I long ago signed up for is apparently starting to unfold, and pretty much everything in my life seems to have been preparation for it. Now, as we are working toward debuting Seek Reality Online, Thomas has begun to give me amazing downloads of information! I’m sure that for years we’ve been talking about this during our nightly guidance meetings, but the difference is that now he is letting me remember some of what he is saying. So I have awakened on some recent mornings with my mind full of ideas and insights that for certain didn’t come from me! Apparently, we are close enough now that Craig and I can be told what’s going on. And of course, I want to share it with you! But I can’t. Not yet. Thomas does, though, want me to tell you more clearly the reason for Seek Reality Online. And the first, essential goal of this project.
We have found a wonderful team to create the SRO website. And they began by insisting that we must treat our new enterprise as a business, which means among other things that we’ve got to position it well against its competitors. And that has turned out to be our first stumper. After a brief period of head-scratching, we had to say, “Um. Sorry. We don’t have competitors.”
That was an amazing fact to confront. And it wasn’t happy news for them, because a business that has no competitors at all is either trying to sell ice in Alaska – something anyone can find for free – or else they’ve come up with some weird product that no one is ever going to want. I think it wasn’t until we had delivered all our initial information, and they could see how well thought out this project is, that they even wanted to help us with it!
And that got us thinking. Do we actually have competitors? Are we overlooking something big? And if we really don’t – and it appears that we don’t! – then how is that even possible? The answer to our question seems to be that our role is to spearhead the first maturation of the whole field of afterlife-related education.
The afterlife-education field is full of experts. Many of them have been Seek Reality guests, or they spoke at some conference that I helped to host, so I know and I often like and admire them. Every day I get multiple emails announcing that this or that well-known afterlife name is going to be part of this or that event. Even if we discount everything that deals primarily with near-death experiences, there still are wonderful consciousness experts, afterlife-history scholars, and mediums and channels, plus spiritual healers and teachers of every stripe. But all of them remain at what I think of as the gee-golly phase of afterlife education. They are experts at sharing their own kinds of proof that the afterlife is real. That was even what our conferences were all about: just providing ever-better proof of an afterlife!
But this gee-golly phase of any kind of education starts to get old after a while. Okay, so I’ve talked to my Mom through some mediums. I’ve learned about how things look in the afterlife. I’ve discovered there are tricks that I can do with my mind. But, then what? No matter how much you learn about the afterlife from experts in their various fields, you still don’t really know all that much. And you don’t know anything for certain. Even to this day, the whole field of afterlife education is in the nature of a hobbyist’s pursuit. People go to conferences (now online), and they attend online events with famous mediums, but they are collecting bits of information the way a hobbyist collects teaspoons. Or guns. Or hats. Although it’s obvious that even at this level, the spread of afterlife awareness has been useful! The proposition that we survive our deaths is becoming a lot more broadly accepted, and that is helping to lessen people’s fears. But if the afterlife really exists, and if all of us are going to end up there, then shouldn’t there be some kind of available travelogue?
I first met Craig Hogan in the summer of 2008. He had just published Your Eternal Self, which turned out to be – like The Fun of Dying – just a first draft of what was going to become a part of that much-needed travelogue. He and I became professional friends because we shared an unusual obsession: we both felt driven to understand the afterlife as an actual place, and to figure out how it precisely fits with the place where we are now. Neither of us needed to see any further proof that the afterlife is real! But we were bored with simply teaching the proofs. So we each had set out to try to make sense of every aspect of what really is going on!
And Seek Reality Online is going to be the full-fledged afterlife travelogue that the world so desperately needs. In fifteen short videos, or in a podcast that will be just eighty minutes long, it will tell you what Craig and I have spent decades learning about how reality actually works and your own place in it. There will be a members’ section, too, where you can review evidence, watch videos, attend classes, ask questions, and network. This isn’t about giving you comforting hope. It’s a grounding in your eternal reality that can help you become as certain that your life is eternal as you ever have been sure about anything. I have heard from hundreds of Seek Reality listeners. I invite their emailed questions, so I have learned what it is that people need to know in order to lose their fear of death. And I have learned that it takes a year. Maybe two. But once those predictable questions are answered, with education and counseling the fear goes away.
And Thomas tells us now that teaching the certainty of universal immortality is the reason for Seek Reality Online. He says its purpose is to deliver immortality on an epic scale. He even tells us who its first target audience will be, but in fact I should have realized this before he pointed it out!
Craig and I were both born at the start of the baby boom that followed the Second World War. We can see now that was likely by design! For seventy years, the outsized Baby Boom generation has led every major cultural trend in the Western world, from suburbia in the fifties through the youth quake of the sixties and disco and nesting in the seventies, to the eighties and nineties go-go quest for success; and then on to the aughts, and our gradual downshifting toward a vigorous old age. There were so many of us that we treated every stage of life as something we were free to reinvent. And now, what is the next stage of life for Baby Boomers that is ripe for reinvention?
Thomas refers to us as “the gray army.” As he points out to me, when we were young, we were sure we were going to transform the world! And he tells me now that is about to happen. He says that the generation of freedom marchers, women’s liberation, and Woodstock that went on to pioneer disco balls, big hair and shoulders, and then the active senior lifestyle, now is about to pioneer immortality. Well, we’ll see. He has given us the plan that we are to follow for the next five years, and we can see that the outcome he wants is possible. And it even looks like fun! At least, it’s a more exciting way to spend our old age than senior centers and shuffleboard.
Is writing The Fun of Immortality in my future?
I had thought that today we would be explaining why immortality might be the magic bullet that can transform the world for the better almost right away. But apparently, we’ll be talking about that next week….
Now I’ve been smiling lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come.
And I believe it could be, Something good has begun.
Oh, Peace Train sounding louder, Glide on the Peace Train!
Come on now Peace Train!
Yes, Peace Train, holy roller! Everyone jump upon the Peace Train!
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Peace Train” (1971)
Good morning Roberta!
Today’s post, though omitting the “announcement “ you were hoping to share, fills me with hope and puts a smile in my heart! What a change in the world if we turned our attention toward useful and truthful information instead of the cacophony of craziness around us!
Thank you and have a wonderful day and week!
Oh my dear Fran, thank you for saying such lovely things! It is actually pretty exciting to finally have a direction, and to understand what this project is supposed to be about; and yes, I can see that it’s likely to make a very substantial difference for people to have access to the simple truth. But, as a Baby Boomer last-hurrah? Thomas tends to be way more creative than I am!!
I hope your week will also be lovely. Is it only me, or does time seem to pass more quickly now for everyone?
HI Roberta,
I’m thrilled to hear this wonderful plan! I’ve continued to creatively write with my Mom (and others) on the other side- this process of working with those who have passed has been extremely helpful in my quest to understand our eternal-ness! So I am blessed to have this first hand experience, but many others need to hear from you. Knowing WE continue on really helps one live life more fully. I love my family and friends more deeply – and enjoy Life’s journey much more as fear/worry is less of a factor. I’m in such deep appreciation for all of this powerful information you’ve helped bring to our awareness. I can’t wait to see/hear what’s next! It will bring much healing to a weary world. Thank you so very much Thomas, Craig and you Roberta! God speed!
-Jenny Bross
Dear Jenny, I agree that having an ongoing personal relationship with people who are not in bodies can wonderfully enrich our lives! And it seems to enrich their lives as well.
I guess that what has surprised me most about this project is that when we set about putting the information together, we really did have the whole detailed and complete story! I hadn’t realized that – it had been building up when I wasn’t paying attention. But I’m excited now for you to see what we are doing!
Dear Roberta,
I do agree that raising the certainty that we are eternal spirit experiencing a temporary life for acquiring experience not available in the bliss of Heaven, would elevate the quality of interpersonal, group, and national relations. I would offer too that increased attention to the Golden Rule would also raise the quality of life in the material world, and really do so more directly.
I also have to wonder why God does not accomplish both actions thru an expansion of the conscience that all creatures are gifted with when their spirits enter a material body to live, instead of having any unreliable reliance on what scattered wise folks are able to do by educating others, something that the world’s religions have failed so miserably to accomplish for thousands of years. It is all a puzzlement.
Oh my dear beautiful Jack, thank you so much for frankly expressing your feelings here! It’s clear that to you people’s being more certain that there really is a life after death doesn’t look like a magic bullet that can altogether transform humankind. Quite right! It didn’t look that way to me, either. Not for many years! To be frank, it wasn’t until we began to prepare the scripts for Seek Reality Online – and Thomas began doing these downloads – that I started to see his larger vision.
He tells me that what we are talking about is the difference between belief and fact. There are many people now who believe in life after death! But they believe in it only as a theory supported by evidence, since evidence is all they have. It’s there – it’s even probable! – but it isn’t REAL. Not the way you know that Paris is real, even if you’ve never actually been to Paris. As you so very well express the problem in your first sentence, life after death always was and it still remains just a beautiful idea supported by some tantalizing evidence.
Now, suppose that you could know as much about the actual afterlife as you can know about Paris. Right down to the menus in the best restaurants! The flight departure schedules from here and the Charles de Gaulle Airport map, the differences among the key hotels, the best tours, and even the right time of year to go if you want the most splendid weather? Suppose that you could really know all of that?
In fact, that information (or its equivalent) really is available now for the genuine afterlife, as a concrete place. And even more, since we are talking about needing to make sense of navigation to other dimensions, when mainstream science continues to refuse to consider the possibility that those dimensions exist. Dealing with a very different kind of physics, a radically different culture and customs, no-time and no-space, our greatly augmented eternal minds, and so on. Establishing the afterlife with the same level of certainty that we can apply to some earthly place really is a great deal more difficult!
But doing that as best we can will be the point of Seek Reality Online.
My dear, sometime within the next twenty years you and I will be heading for the ultimate airport. And then, we’re going to want the best possible travelogue!
So I think the next reasonable question is whether my Thomas’s claim that our knowing the afterlife is fact is going to make much difference in people who are still in the midst of life on earth. And apparently we’ll be talking about that next week.
And my dear Jack, someone has just emailed me and reiterated your question about the expansion of consciousness! You have your fans here 🙂 But you and he raise a good question, which does deserve an attempted answer.
I think first that because our temporarily stripped-down earth-minds are designed for rapid spiritual learning of the sort that
happens here, it is likely that the Godhead cannot much add horsepower to our limited earth-minds without messing with their spiritual-learning efficiency. But, there are other ways!
As always, though, whatever is done is going to be profoundly respectful. In studying the extended relationship that the genuine Godhead has had with this earth-community, one thing that always strikes us is how light-handed and respectful God seems to be! We aren’t meant to be able to see divine interventions, when in point of fact there is a lot of evidence that creation is an ongoing process in the nature of a filmstrip that includes an entirely reinvented past in each new frame; so for all we know, the divine meddling could be constant and we would be none the wiser.
But actually, even with that, I think we can see the raising of the planet’s vibration being accomplished carefully but nevertheless in a variety of ways behind the scenes even in the course of my lifetime. The veil between dimensions has been demonstrably thinning over the past century, so for example now we have widows reporting physical sexual relations with their deceased husbands. Reported nowhere in the literature, and first reported to me only about two years ago! I am also hearing now fairly often from people who have been developing other kinds of active relationships with departed loved ones, and again this is just within the past few years. I am hearing from an amazing number of disaffected Christians in their sixties and seventies who still love Jesus, which again is something that wasn’t happening just a few years ago… and now Thomas is telling us that those are the folks who are our initial SRO target market. So I guess I’m thinking as I write this that indeed God is working pretty effectively to change things on earth, just as you suggest that God should!
Thomas tells me that the Godhead is indeed “preparing the battlespace.” Or he also calls it “tilling the ground.” There are a great many such changes happening in the West over just the past decade that remove what would have been barriers to the spread of the truth. Many of us working in this field have been told that the most efficient way to raise the planet’s vibration is to lessen the fear of death worldwide, and it’s pretty clear that is now exactly what is happening. Good suggestion, my dear Jack. And clearly already being taken!
Hi, Roberta:
I was stuck with a phrase that your enterprising assistants used: that they must “position you well against your competitors.” I love words and their origins, their etymologies. Co and com mean “with.” Petere means “to strive.” Competitors enjoy striving alongside others who share a love for a common interest and who each want to excel in it.
Rivalry is another thing altogether. Your rival sees a river (that you might both enjoy sharing) and sees it as their private possession. The rival will try to prevent your drinking from their river.
I wonder if your consultants are used to seeing others in business as rivals rather than competitors.
Roberta, I believe you are unrivaled.
Godbless,
Father Nathan Castle, OP
Oh my dear Father Nathan, how delightful it is to see you here! And your observation of the difference between competitors and rivals makes a very good point. In fact, in the field of afterlife education, it would be great to have some real competitors! The more knowledgeable teachers there are, the more people we will together be able to help. Our website development company, too, makes the point that if there are others in the field, then they will already have done a lot of the hard work of product design and targeting, and we can benefit from what they have learned as pioneers; but being the first means that we are kind of flying blind!
And you, my dear, are really one of a kind in what you do as well. You are unrivaled indeed!
Dearest Roberta,
Congratulations, 🎈 you are pioneering ‘another kind of physics’ by illuminating the nature of the genuine afterlife. For so many people this is truly a new way of seeing; a unique kind of thinking. You and Dr Craig Hogan will present people with the dimensionality of earth 🌎 and the different levels of the Afterlife. Suddenly there will be a mind map of the personal journey past death – involving different planes of existence. To many ardent seekers this will be a tad familiar – but for others this thing will involve a kind of perception not considered before.
All in all, this is very exciting my dear. ❣️
Oh my dear Efrem, as we began to work concretely on the SRO curriculum, it quickly became clear that you are precisely right! No wonder it has been so difficult for people to imagine a genuine afterlife, down all the generations, when the physics of nearly all of reality – more than 95%! – are so altogether different from the physics that operate in this limited material universe. It is hard to avoid referring to material physics as “artificial,” when it seems pretty obviously to be intended to be just part of earth-school, and to be meant to override consciousness physics only here, so our minds can’t cheat on our earth-school lessons!
But yes, dear wonderful Efrem, this is all quite exciting! What a glorious time it is to be alive on earth!
Quote from above: “For seventy years, the outsized Baby Boom generation has led every major cultural trend in the Western world…”
Hi Roberta, hi everybody! It is important to note that this past week, Thích Nhất Hạnh left this planet at 95 years old. This world has recently lost a number of those sages of the “previous” generation (including my sainted mother) — we don’t need a list, as we can look them all up — promoting us “boomers” to seniors. As you point out, the call is on now for us move up from what you note as the “gee-golly” phase of understanding life is eternal to implementing a Cosmic awareness of how Life really works. The up-and-coming generations are not only ripe for a new way of seeing and living, but wide open to embracing it and carrying it on. Boomers are now called on to leave a legacy of not just a changed society, but a changed reality. That takes more than meditation, making appointments with mediums and attending conferences.
Oh my dear Mike, you are so precisely right! It was Thomas who first pointed out that we should be marketing SRO to baby boomers, the generation that was going to transform the world… and how right he was! Craig just today sent me a kind of position paper based in Thomas’s marketing plan, and it looks extraordinary. I think our generation feels kind of sad now about having degenerated from our original high ideals, but we yet may have a surprise or two up our sleeves!
Our epiphany will be that it is not and never has been a philosophy, but a way of being. A butterfly does not live as a caterpillar.
Hi Roberta. This wouldn’t be the first university Thomas helped found, so it makes sense that he’s doing that again now. Also, the boomers pioneered the way to the moon, so why not add the ultimate moonshot feather to their cap? Your organization may be the first to tackle this, like the first man to walk on the moon, but hopefully more will follow. “One small step for man ….” 🌜🙏🌈
You know, my dear Scott, that connection to the University of Virginia never had occurred to me. Duh! When he first started talking about an online afterlife educational project, maybe five years ago now, he always referred to it as an afterlife university, and that term felt kind of overwhelming to me; but of course he would think of it that way, wouldn’t he? It was only in the last year or two, when he started referring to it as Seek Reality Online, that I could even envision doing this!
And we do hope that others will also want to undertake doing organized afterlife education! There are more than 50 million baby boomers right now in just the U.S. alone, and all of them need this information!
A lot of us have been getting our Magic Bullet from the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Also, Stewart White’s book, The Unobstructed Universe, makes this argument in the first several chapters. I would say that humanity, at this moment, is shifting its perspective, as both the Swedenborg Institute and several NDE channels on YouTube are really putting out some great content.
A university to help people adjust their perspective to what happens when we die would be very helpful, I should think.
Here is a sample video from the Swedenborg Foundation. They’re always a great watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vz0EX6EQ8Ss&t=1675s
Oh yes, my dear Bruce, Emanuel Swedenborg is extremely well regarded, and I absolutely loved White’s The Unobstructed Universe when I read it, many years ago. Most people want to know just the facts, so we will have a way for them to get those facts easily; but for people who want the source materials, we will be providing those as well. Thank you for sharing!