Roberta Grimes

Going Home (Part Four)

Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 12, 2024 • 18 Comments
Afterlife Research

Bless this house, O Lord we pray; make it safe by night and day.
Bless these walls, so firm and stout, keeping want and trouble out.
Bless the roof and chimneys tall, let thy peace lie over all;
Bless this door, that it may prove ever open to joy and love.

Bless these windows shining bright, letting in God’s heav’nly light;
Bless the hearth a’blazing there, with smoke ascending like a prayer;
Bless the folk who dwell within. Keep them pure and free from sin;
Bless us all that we may be fit, O Lord, to dwell with thee.
Bless us all that one day we may dwell, O Lord, with thee!
Helen Taylor (dates unknown), “Bless This House” (1927).

It is difficult for you to conceive of, or in any way to possibly imagine how incredibly different is the greater reality that we enter at death, when we compare it to this sad, pale, and puny material universe that is all that we know. Here, this little matter-based reality is all around us, and we think of it as something real, something that seems to be even grand and amazing. But the greater reality that we enter at death is at least, oh, fifty, or perhaps it is even a hundred times the relative size of this whole material universe. Think of that! And much of the astral reality that we return to at death is dazzling in its beauty, beyond wonderful in all its heart-stopping details, just so far beyond anything that we ever have dreamed of in all our wildest imaginings. So, to begin our tour, please first pause here and re-read last week’s post. We are about to paint for you on a canvas that is so much bigger and grander than anything that you ever before have imagined, and in colors that you cannot conceive of in your wildest dreams. It will be easier for you to stretch enough to put your mind around it if we can begin from where we left off last week.  

So, have you reread last week’s post? All right, then let us here further define what we can know about our greater reality from this earthly viewpoint. We must warn you in advance that what we know now is not nearly as much as we would love to know! Not surprising, of course, given the size of it all, and given our necessarily limited perspective from here. A few astral travelers out of the body have written about the little bits that they have seen, enough so I think that we can be sure about what we know in general terms. But even just the sheer size of it means that all of it is still a great unknown, just as most of the earth was a great unknown when Christopher Columbus first set bravely out in the earth-year 1492. But there is a first time for everything, isn’t there? And here is what we do think we know:

• Travel and Creation in the Astral Realities are Mostly or Entirely by Mind. To enter the astral plane is to enter a universe exclusively of the mind, and the higher we can go in vibration, the more completely and obviously that is true. We merge at death with the sixty percent or more of our minds that we had left behind here when we were born on earth; and with that added consciousness power regained, we soon can travel even unimaginably long distances instantly, or we can materialize at once whatever objects we might miss from our earth-lives to furnish our new astral homes. So, while there are some cities in the astral with grand municipal buildings, most people in the afterlife and in the general astral plane live very widely scattered, since they can be anywhere so easily and right away.
• We Have No Need for Money. My dear mother-in-law lived through the Great Depression on earth, so she really knew how to “pinch a penny twice,” as she used to say. The first thing that she was eager to tell me through a medium after she died at the age of ninety-four was, “You can have whatever you want here, and you don’t need money!” The astral hierarchy, to the extent that there is one, seems to be of our degree of goodness and saintliness on earth, so we find a story in the literature from the nineteenth century of a man who had devoted his earth-life to helping others, and this man rejected the astral mansion of gold that he had been given in the afterlife as too grand and uncomfortable. He preferred to mind-build for himself a cozy thatched cottage to live in instead.
• Levels Three and Above are Lit and Warmed by God’s Love Alone. There seems to be no starlit universe with planets to be seen at any of the fifty to a hundred or more astral sublevels which are perhaps each the size of this whole material universe, but instead there seem to be just endless vistas of unimaginable size and height and depth created by mind, where the only light and warmth is God’s love. So of course, compared to the earth, it all feels vast and beautiful, and up through about collective level five it seems to be amazingly solid and uncrowded! But although clearly it feels very different from that lowest material level, it all does still feel entirely real. Reportedly, none of it feels vague or artificial. You easily move up or down in vibration by mind simply by wanting to be somewhere else, and you are not aware of the change in vibration until you hit your own vibrational ceiling. Let’s say you are vibrating near the top of Level Four, and you try to move higher. Unless you are moving with a Level Five or higher friend who can shield you in his or her energy aura, then once you hit your own vibrational ceiling, you at once become aware of a sense of being terribly battered by that more intense energy. You simply cannot go higher than your own spiritual development allows, unless someone who is vibrating higher will come with you and shield you. But otherwise, you can travel anywhere, and at once! And of course, the higher you go, the brighter it is, when God’s love is the only light.

Of course, to yet again reinforce what is true, our silver energy cord which connected us to our earthly body has broken well before we entered the afterlife. During our earthly lives, it was easily possible for us to travel from the earth into what we think of as the “public” parts of the astral plane, those parts which are open to astral travelers from the earth-level, wearing astral bodies and with our silver cords still attached; and then to return to the earth again. And when this happens for us during awake out-of-body experiences or near-death-experiences, we will have some amazing and aberrant memories of those experiences! But if those who are astral-traveling during NDEs or OBEs might enter the afterlife area, even for an instant of time, their silver cord which keeps them attached to their material body back on earth will instantly snap, and their body then dies on earth. Death is always a one-way trip.

In fact, it may surprise you to learn that nearly all of us while we are living on earth will travel to the open-to-the-earth-level parts of the astral plane on many nights! And, why not? We might have no conscious awareness of it while we are living an earth-lifetime, but we still subconsciously think of the gigantic astral plane as our true eternal home. And one important fact about our minds is that they almost never need to sleep. About the only time that our minds ever sleep is shortly after our bodies die, when we first return to the afterlife. Then, we will generally have a good, deep sleep that typically lasts for an earth-day and -night, or even two, after which we will not need to sleep again until after we have just completed another earth-lifetime. But for now, during the phase of deep sleep that usually occurs before or around midnight on each earth-night of our lives and can last for a few hours, nearly all of us will leave our bodies for a while. Some of us will just hang around our bedroom, or perhaps around our house. But many of us will astral travel; and we might then meet with our deceased loved ones or with our spirit guides. We might do other things too, take classes and play tourist and so on. We will have no memory of any of these excursions unless our guides allow us to have such memories.

Since it is my beloved guide Thomas’s responsibility to help Jesus to maintain His divine-human balance, Thomas has been taking me along with him on his nightly excursions to visit Jesus in the astral plane ever since I was an infant. But Thomas never has let me remember anything about these experiences until early April of 2022, when for that one summer, he let me remember perhaps a dozen adventures that we took together to meet with Jesus by His astral river on Level Three of the astral plane, where Jesus greets an endless parade of Christians who have only just died. There Jesus personally welcomes home every person who has requested that Jesus welcome him or her home. Of course, Jesus Himself is not, and He never has been a Christian. That is the Roman Emperor Constantine’s religion. But Jesus deeply loves all Christians, just as He loves every one of us! And as the Roman religion dies at last, Jesus has asked Thomas and me to begin to prepare for Him a teaching website on earth. So far, Jesus has approved the name teachingsbyjesus.com, and He has approved His new website’s content, such as it is, but we all know that this is just the beginning. He tells us that He wants us to do something to it now with AI. So we await His further instructions.

When I was spending all that time with Jesus in the astral plane two summers ago, and I was for a change very much aware of being there, I was mostly just raptly listening to Jesus. But I also learned quite a lot about what it is like to be on astral Level Three. For one amazing thing, the astral atmosphere is altogether different from what it is like to be outdoors anywhere on earth! The outside air does not move at all, for one thing. There is no weather, which makes it feel almost as if you are inside a building. And the very air that you breathe smells and feels like love; well, actually, it smells a lot like flowers, and it feels warm and moist and gentle on your astral body’s skin. This is even on the lowly third level, where the light is dimmer than it is on the material level, since there is no sun, and we are so far from Level Seven. It seems to be always perhaps just before sunrise, although when I would look at Jesus, He has a glow about Him so I saw Him clearly. The sky always looks bright, and it is full of those non-earth colors that are indescribable. And Jesus Himself has such a strong personal energy, even when He is remembering to tune it back for His companions by a lot, since if He does not tune it back, it is painful for normals to be anywhere near Him. His personal energy is uniquely just one strong, high, pure and absolutely overwhelming Note. Thomas tells me that after all Jesus’s additional service in healing people who have been damaged by Christianity over the past seventeen hundred years, Jesus now vibrates even higher than Level Seven, so of course He can go anywhere in the astral now that He likes, and even above the Godhead Level of this reality.

But for most people, the fact that we can travel instantly anywhere in the astral plane, but we cannot go higher than our own level of spiritual development will allow us to go, becomes such a great frustration for us! People will ask me why, when our astral lives are so perfect, why on earth do we ever choose to come back here again and be reborn into earth-bodies and suffer over again all this earthly stress and pain? Well, this is why. Until we have attained somewhere near the top of Level Five in spiritual development, at which point we can become spirit guides for people on earth and thereby continue to grow spiritually, until then we keep bumping up against that frustrating ceiling of painful buzzing if we ever try to travel to the higher, more beautiful and interesting places. And we cannot grow much, if at all, spiritually in the lower astral plane because there is nothing much there that is negative, so there is nothing to push against, nothing really in the afterlife or in the lower astral plane but God’s pure love.

So, reluctantly at first perhaps, we begin to get together with old friends and new, we choose our spirit guides for this next lifetime, and we start to meet regularly with sixth-level teachers to plan our next lifetime on earth. (Or even conceivably on a different planet, but I don’t know enough about that process to say much about it.) These planning meetings happen in conference rooms perhaps, or outside under great leafy trees, and they feature whiteboards and diagrams. My own planning for this present lifetime was done in a big paneled conference room that was windowless and lit by skylights. And I was allowed to recall bits of one meeting that Jesus and some formidable sixth-level Beings attended with Thomas and me.

Of course, one problem for anyone wanting another incarnation on earth nowadays is the more limited availability of suitable bodies. Thanks largely to modern elective abortions in Western countries, the available bodies in places where people would most like to live in order to be able to learn whatever it is that they most need to learn spiritually, the demand now much exceeds the supply. We prefer to reincarnate repeatedly into the same general culture, to avoid having to learn whole confusing new cultures each time that we return to earth. So we are competing now for fewer bodies that are about to be conceived and are likely to be taken to term; and we fret over choosing among them as to gender, location, possible defects or illnesses, genetics, and so on.

But, let’s say that you and those planning to be born to share this next lifetime with you make compelling appeals to the Powers for the right set of bodies at the right times and places, and you all get your go-ahead together. Now you all enter the afterlife pre-birth launch area, and you go through the process of being prepared to be born on earth. There are some descriptions in the literature of what this process entails, and apparently it does involve an actual shrinkage, the giving-up of most of your eternal mind into some sort of storage, and the attachment of the limited aspect of your mind that remains to the just-conceived zygote inside your mother-to-be’s material body on earth by its new silver cord. And while we generally do attach to and enter our newly-conceived body at the zygote stage or soon thereafter, we are generally out of our growing new body inside our mother’s uterus most of the time until the second, or even the third trimester.

It is important to understand that this new infant about to be born is a whole new being! It is not the same person who died on earth and entered the afterlife perhaps a hundred years ago, and then eventually decided to reincarnate in order to attempt to grow more spiritually in order to be able to explore higher astral levels. This new being will have a genetically different makeup, has different characteristics to allow for different kinds of learning, will have a different family and different experiences on earth, and might be of a different gender. There is in fact abundant evidence that each new incarnation is a whole new being altogether! Oh. Really? Oh dear. So then, why reincarnate at all? Good question. We will talk about the answer to that next week.

In the fifth and final segment of this series, we will answer your remaining questions.  We’ll talk about many of the glorious and very enjoyable things that there are for you to do in your busy eternal life in the astral plane. And is there anything that might go wrong? If there is, what might you do to fix it? What is likely to surprise you most? And we will try to answer what is really the most important question of all. Why do we get to enjoy our whole glorious eternal lives so much? Just, Why??   

 

(This is the fourth of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what our eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)