Roberta Grimes

Near-Death

Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 31, 2026 • 0 Comment
Afterlife Research, Understanding Reality

O Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the works Thy hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy pow’r throughout The universe displayed!
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!

 When thru the woods And forest glades I wander,
And hear the birds Sing sweetly in the trees;
When I look down From lofty mountain grandeur
And hear the brook, And feel the gentle breeze,
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885;1949)

Four years ago, my husband had surgery for a minor intestinal issue.  When he woke up in recovery with me holding his hand, my beloved looked stark and stricken; he was horrified. He could barely even get these words out, but he told me in a voice that was feeble with fear that he hadn’t had a near-death experience while he was under general anesthesia, so that meant that there is no life after death. Now he faced only blankness forevermore. When I realized that he was serious about this – and getting that through my head took some minutes – I told him that, wait a minute darling, of course your lack of an NDE meant nothing of the kind! Most people who have general anesthesia don’t have near-death experiences at all; and remember, darling, I’m an expert on the afterlife!! But no matter what I said to him, he was inconsolable. And now, to keep our peace, we just don’t talk about it at all. He must have seen something on television, or read something in The Wall Street Journal; and as Jesus tells us, no one in a prophet in her own village. Many near-death experiences are deeply exciting, they feel profoundly real to their experiencers, as if they very well could have involved a journey to the afterlife. And no matter what experts might say to them, there are NDE experiencers who will happily tell whoppers and produce real lifelong terrors in people, just to gratify their own egos.

My dear ones, the plain fact is that most people never in their lives have Near-Death Experiences! Until the mid-nineteen-seventies, no one had even heard the term, yet everyone went to the afterlife just fine. Some of those associated with The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), of course, might wish that the truth were otherwise, but they accept and propound the fact that death is always a one-way trip. Anyone who claims otherwise, who insists that he “died and then came back to life”, or that she “was dead for seven minutes and saw amazing things in the afterlife, and then came back to life”, is telling a fabricated story. The evidence is overwhelming that death is always a one-way trip, and it cannot be reversed. Let’s talk about how we know that fact for certain:

• The Silver Cord is Life. If It Breaks, It Cannot be Reattached. Here is the first Biblical mention of the Silver Cord: “Remember Him—before the silver cord is severed, and the golden bowl is broken; before the pitcher is shattered at the spring, and the wheel broken at the well, ⁷ and the dust returns to the ground it came from, and the spirit returns to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12: 6-7). That silver cord is a bluish, shimmery, and highly stretchy energy cord that attaches your material body to the energy body inside it, and keeps your material body alive. During life, the silver cord is infinitely stretchy and tough, and it can be seen trailing behind you whenever you travel outside your body, which you often do when your material body sleeps or while you are having an NDE. Then we especially enjoy traveling in the astral plane, of which the afterlife area is a kind of foyer; but we cannot enter the afterlife and then leave it again. People who are enjoying lengthy periods of astral travel, or lengthy NDEs, will often hear a voice telling them that they are approaching the afterlife area, and they must turn around at once, because if they continue and enter the afterlife, their silver cord will break and they will be dead on earth.
• If the Silver Cord’s Connection to the material body or its brain is Impaired, the Mind Can Seem to be Impaired. But then when the mind begins its process of detachment from the body as that material body begins to die, the mind can seem to become mostly or entirely well. This is called “terminal lucidity”, and it can go on for as much as a few days before the body dies.   
• Many of Those who Were Awake as They Were Dying Have Dispassionately Described the Spiritual Detachment Process From the Inside of the Material Body. It does surprise me that no such description ever seems to feel worrisome to the dying person at all! These people usually have been getting visits from their long-dead loved ones for days by now, with everybody looking and feeling young and happy, and talking with those deathbed visitors about the next stage to come; and by the time the energy body starts to separate internally from the material body, everything is loose and there is no pain at all.The energy body gathers in the chest, it generally exits through the chest wall or through the top of the head, and very soon your silver cord, which had been strong and stretchy enough to take on the universe, simply shreds and breaks.
• Your Dead Loved Ones Are urging You to Come Away with Them Now. Your spiritual energies are rising rapidly, and there is nothing further that you can do on earth; and if your living loved ones are upset to realize that you just have died, they may become upset about that. There is nothing you can do to comfort them now, but once you have gone home you will be able to visit with them, so of course, my darling, go home with your loved ones! The room in which you died will become vague and vapory, and before you the gorgeous afterlife will begin to appear!

Near-death experiences are beautiful, dream-like visits to the third level of the astral plane that are hosted by your spirit guide. NDEs generally happen when your material body is briefly uninhabitable for some reason or another,  The astral plane is the first safe and lovely level of the astral, just above this material reality, and it is indeed extraordinary! It’s love-drenched and full of beautiful and sweet sounds and colors, so those who find themselves briefly there can be forgiven for thinking they have landed for a moment in heaven. But my dear one, look behind you. Are you trailing a silver cord? Well then, you haven’t died, after all. You are having a near-death experience, and you must stay well away from the afterlife and carefully follow instructions!

My dear ones, the most enjoyable thing about continuing to read popular science magazines is seeing how much more flexible the youngest scientists have become in their thinking. Oh, my goodness, every week there are more, and even more new ideas! For one surprising example, we find homo naledi, a human relative with a brain just one-quarter the size of ours. And we learn to our abject astonishment that these little guys lived in South Africa just two hundred and fifty thousand years ago, or thereabouts; at a time when there also were  humanoids in Africa that were pretty similar to ourselves! And, amazingly, these little guys buried their dead deep in the ground, in ways that suggested that they mourned their dead, and that they cared for them, even to the same extent that we might have done, which strongly suggested some level of spiritual of understanding on theil part.  

And we talked last week about intelligent design. Of course, intelligent design that begins only far along the road of sophistication, when a lot f the earliest and most difficult problems have long been solved, seems rather pointless to me; but nevertheless, let’s see where where some of the brightest researchers are on their intelligent-design walk, just for giggles. And Rupert Sheldrake is among our favorite British YouTubers on all sorts of conscious-related topics topics.  Sheldrake on animals – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o2TbJ5YYXx8

 

When Christ shall come,
With shout of acclamation, And take me home,
What joy shall fill my heart!
Then I shall bow, In humble adoration,
And there proclaim, My God, how great Thou art!
Chorus Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, My Savior God, to Thee;
How great Thou art, How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885; 1949)