Posted by Roberta Grimes • June 14, 2025 • 1 Comment
Afterlife Research, Understanding Reality
Whether I’m right, or whether I’m wrong,
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong,
I gotta be me, I’ve gotta be me!
What else can I be but what I am?
I want to live, not merely survive.
And I won’t give up this dream of life that keeps me alive.
I gotta be me, I gotta be me!
The dream that I see makes me what I am!
That far-away prize, a world of success,
Is waiting for me if I heed the call!
I won’t settle down, won’t settle for less,
As long as there’s a chance that I can have it all!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta Be Me” (1967)
Dearly beloved, please let us help you know something that never before might have occurred to you. Very surprisingly, you are unique. There never has been, and there never will be another person just like you. The human-made institutions, and especially science and the religions, all tell you that you are insignificant, don’t they? And sinful, right? Easy to stick in one box with all the other people who ever have lived? After all, there are eight billion people on earth right now, and there have been roughly 117 billion people ever born since God’s useful experiment with humanity began. So, how might you possibly be so unique? But, my dear one, you indeed are absolutely unique, no matter what anyone might say. Your bodily design, your genetics, even down to your distinctive breathing pattern: every physical thing about you turns out to be amazingly somewhat different from all of everyone else’s physical and material aspects in God’s great human experiment. And your life-plan is entirely your own. Your history of having lived different lives on earth turns out to be yours uniquely. My goodness, I have lived seventeen different lifetimes on earth, just with my beloved friend Thomas, or so I am told! And all of that is just the various physical aspects that make up who you were in composite as you were first born on earth in this single earth-lifetime. Add now all the mental and spiritual aspects of you, the whole life in consciousness that you have lived just in this one lifetime, all your thoughts and ideas and memories that have been uniquely your own in every moment! When you assemble all the facts that comprise who you are, I think that now you can begin to see yourself more as God has always seen you. My darling, you truly are unique! You are splendidly in God’s eyes a shining creation, unique in all eternity, and therefore you also are uniquely loved.
Indeed, God sees each one of us in just this way. Each person, not just on earth but in the entire greater reality, is as unique, as special, and therefore as treasured by God, as you and I are. What is wonderful about knowing this is that as you go about your day, you look at each person that you see so differently! So of course, each of us eventually will live in eternity in the perfect love of God which passes all understanding. My dear one, when we talk about “Going Home,” you should immediately think of the sort of sky-rockets and gigantic celebrations that would greet the treasured creatures that you and I and all of us uniquely are! This having spent a little time on earth was very hard duty, and it was meant to be so, since stressing our consciousness with negativity is how we can best grow ever more perfectly in love. But our school-of-hard-knocks graduation at last will be happening for us very soon, and we will get to go home to our real eternal lives, where we live forever deep within perfect and joyous freedom, and in the pure love of a doting God.
Of course, there are reasons why you and I might shrink from the thought that going home is going to be just one gigantic party. We are born on earth with our minds temporarily stripped of what we estimate is about two-thirds of our greater minds, including virtually all of what would otherwise be pre-birth memories; and then while we are here, we are told by mainstream science that these material bodies are in fact the sum-total of who we are. So, no wonder the thought that these bodies will one day die, and will crumble into dust kind of brings us up short! But in truth, of course, these material bodies are no part at all of who we are. As we said last week, when they become no longer able to sustain our lives here, whether that might be due to disease, damage, or just the organ breakdowns that come with very great old age, then the consciousness energy that is who we actually are simply slips out of our material bodies and re-forms into what looks like us but hangs above us in the air. And then – please trust me on this – our greater minds and memories all come right back from before we were born, and we will be glad to go right on back to the home that we will suddenly remember very well!
Our frame-verse might seem to you to be an odd choice. But I like the song, and especially the original single as it was sung by Sammy Davis, Jr. I see it as how we have to tackle the challenges of earth-life as we are living it in the moment; we really can’t look much beyond our earth-lives now. But Thomas disagrees. Thomas sees these words as just the narrow mindset of a man who is building his earth-life inside a framework of believing that it is all there ever will be, and never realizing what glories will lie after it when eventually he must let it go. As you can see, my dear spirit guide and I don’t always agree on everything! The author of this tribute to life on earth wrote it almost sixty years ago. As best I can tell, he is now ninety-one. And I smile for him, to think of what joys he has waiting just ahead of him now, in this next stage of his beautiful, eternal life! Because, yes, this is something that I personally once somewhat worried about, even when I felt sure that our afterlife was real, and pretty sure that everything about that afterlife was going to be fine. But, I still was wondering whether I would feel like me, even in the afterlife? And, will you still be you? Fortunately, we researchers know by now that, yes indeed, God’s love for unique you and me is in fact so perfect that each of us individually will remain the deepest and truest versions of ourselves that you can possibly imagine!
So, let’s pick it up now where we left off last week, and complete what is humankind’s customary journey home. We have lately learned that close to one-quarter of those who leave their bodies now do not at first complete their transitions; although both Mikey Morgan and my Thomas assure us that most of the folks for whom their arrival at the next level is delayed, find that their delay is a brief one. And remember, too, that for those who might go astray for a longer time, there are many, like my friend Fr. Nathan Castle, who is a frequent guest on my Seek Reality podcast, who do spirit rescue work. There is evidence from Fr. Nathan and others that completing your transition right from the deathbed or instead taking a temporary detour really is by choice; and there are many reasons why you might choose the detour route. There is ample help for you in those cases, and we’ll make that topis part of our next week’s blog post. For now, though, let’s assume that you have just left your dying body, and the mist that is you has re-formed into your astral body in the space above your material body, still attached to it by a softly glowing bluish cord, and…
When we transition home to an arrival garden after an earth-life well lived, there are a few things that will happen pretty quickly. And there are things about the overall physics of the place that you really are going to enjoy! There are things that some of the more adventurous of us or the more studious of us will tend especially to really love doing. There are questions, too, that people generally want to have answered. We will talk next week about these wonderful arrival details. Meanwhile, though, the singular fact that both Thomas and I would like you to take away from this morning’s time spent together is that you in particular are God’s best-beloved child. We want you to know that, because it is true! And since it is true, you live in joy for all eternity. There is nothing whatsoever that ever can harm you.
The ancient Hebrew Bible contains our very first written remnants of the genuine God’s efforts to reach out to humankind. And the earliest bits of the ancient Hebrew Bible ever found were discovered in 1979 in burial caves just outside Jerusalem’s Old City. They are engraved in a couple of tiny silver scrolls that were almost impossible to open, and they have been scientifically dated to the 6th century BCE, so they are centuries older even than are the Dead Sea Scrolls. Today, they rest in the Israel Museum as a timeless testimony to the Jewish people’s ancient and unbroken connection to God, to the Torah, and to the land of Israel. And to my wonderment and delight, they contain the very same blessing that our dear Reverend Turrell used to give to my childhood congregation from the back of that old New England Congregational Church during each Sunday of my growing-up. Here, given to you now, is the One True God’s earliest suggested blessing that was His gift to the ancient Jewish people:
“May the Lord bless you and keep you;
May the Lord make His face to shine upon you and be gracious unto you;
May the Lord turn His face toward you and grant you peace.”
Ah! What a gentle comfort it is for us to know that one day we will be going home to the God who has, from time out of mind, loved and cared for each perfectly unique human child of God so tenderly as to give to each of us this blessing that we could then share daily with one another! And meanwhile, God’s love also is such that God gives to us the mental space and freedom to be oblivious children here briefly in this material world, too, each for our own little playful time….
I’ll go it alone. That’s how it must be.
I can’t be right for somebody else
If I’m not right for me.
I gotta be free, I’ve gotta be free,
Daring to try, to do it or die.
I’ve gotta be me!
I’ll go it alone. That’s how it must be.
I can’t be right for somebody else
If I’m not right for me.
I gotta be free, I just gotta be free!
Daring to try, to do it or die, I gotta be me!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta Be Me” (1967)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
Good Morning, Roberta.
I was wondering if you could provide a bit of clarification “…But our school-of-hard-knocks graduation at last will be happening for us very soon, and we will get to go home to our real eternal lives, where we live forever deep within perfect and joyous freedom, and in the pure love of a doting God.“
Is this the end of reincarnation?
Thank you!
Susi