Roberta Grimes

Timeless

Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 24, 2026 • 4 Comments
Afterlife Research, Death, Human Nature, Understanding Reality

 

Time, time
Rolls the hills along,
Makes the stars go round
To the sky’s bright song.
Time, time
Stirs the endless sea.
Maybe time will bring
You back to me.

The summer was golden,
Their love young and new;
His bold arms, her rendezvous.
But now leaves have fallen.
And tears fill her eyes.
His warm lips a memory,
As she sighs.

Time, time
Rolls the hills along,
Makes the stars go round
To the sky’s bright song.
Time, time
Stirs the endless sea.
Maybe time will bring
You back to me.
– Norman Gimbel (1927-2018), from “Time, Time” (1967)

It may feel somewhat crazy to you to read this fact, but a lot of the fun of doing afterlife research was the way the very recently dead from a full century gone by, who were just idly chatting with their loved ones on earth, would inadvertently say some amazing things about the marvelous place to which they had just arrived home. And then, decades later, way back in the Seventies, I would avidly read what they had said through those wonderful turn-of-the-century deep-trance mediums! I recall one fellow who was asked by his still-alive-on-earth brother how well he could see “up there.” The newly-dead brother, who apparently had been nearly blind while he was living on earth, told his eagerly-listening family who were all still alive, “Well, I’ll tell you how well I can see now. There are snow-capped mountains that look to be about fifty miles away from here, and they’ve got foothills. Now, I can see every vein in every leaf on every tree on every one of those foothills!” OMG. So, our distance afterlife vision is really that amazing? Our vision there is panoramic, to boot. It has been estimated that since we are not seeing with our bodily eyes anymore, but instead the eyes on the astral bodies that our minds construct for ourselves are more or less just for decoration, and what we use instead for vision in the afterlife is a kind of consciousness-based, spiritual seeing, our vision is almost three hundred and sixty degrees around us. And when we put together the amazed fresh observations from the many hundreds of afterlife communications that have been receiving over the past nearly two centuries, the most detailed of which were received through physical mediums in the late nineteenth and the first quarter of the twentieth centuries, we find that the dead are telling us some remarkable things about the structure of reality itself.

For example, those who have gone on ahead of us have long been telling us that reality is energy-based. There is pretty strong evidence now that nothing whatsoever is actually solid. Recall the basic and remarkable fact that 99.9999999% of your own material body while you are on earth is just empty space. As the great physicist, astronomer, and mathematician, Sir James Jeans,     once said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” All the levels of energy-based reality – including this material reality – exist in the same place, and they are separated from one another only by their different rates of vibration. So far, so good!  Incidentally, I saw this analogy of dying to just changing energy vibrational levels first made by a communicating newly-dead woman around 1910, and she made it back then using radio stations. But, radio or TV, the analogy is the same. The channels of your television set all exist in the same place as well, inside your TV set, and that analogy makes it easier for us to imagine what actually happens at death. The dead tell us that when you die, your mind will simply raise its own rate of vibration from this material level of reality to the next, very much as you might change either radio stations or television channels, and there it will pick up a whole new, solid reality. Dying on earth is just that simple!

What seems to be even harder for most of us to grasp than the fact that there is no solid matter is the apparent fact that time and space are subjective illusions. We are so dependent on the notion that space is spacious! In fact, with nothing outside of it, space is both infinite and tiny. Size is simply not one of its characteristics. We think it must be large, because these temporary bodies that we believe we now occupy are so tiny in relation to it. But, the more spiritually developed dead folks tell us that they can travel instantly by mind across the entire material universe.

And time is apparently also nothing like the simple arrow that we imagine it to be. Time is subjective, mind-created, and non-linear. As Albert Einstein may or may not have said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” He also may or may not have said, “The distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.”

The sheer, elaborate, illusory strangeness of our existence as human beings is something that we have to learn to distance ourselves from, and then to wrap our minds around, if we are ever to see it objectively. Because, to understand at last, and then to claim and own and finally stand upon your status as an eternal being is the very foundation of human joy. And our getting ourselves past the notion that time and space are objectively real at all turns out to be the only way that we can even begin to free ourselves from our subjection to them as old, outdated, and mistaken ideas!

For the notion of time, especially, that old thralldom to the notion of simple linear time, and a simple, solid, material universe of a specific size is an especially tough habit to crack. But actually, I have found that it is easiest to further boggle your mind completely, especially where time is concerned, and then to show you what the genuine truth really means; and then, we’ll trace out the effects for you, and see how this all pans out if we consider what our power might be to effect real change. So, let’s begin by saying that there is considerable evidence that each of the following things is true about time:

1)    All our lives are happening simultaneously. There is so much evidence that we live multiple lives that the concept of reincarnation cannot be denied by anyone who has examined the evidence; but rather than progressing from past to future, apparently all our lives are happening at the same time. Very rarely, there will be moments of actual bleed-through from one of our lives to another. A very advanced being has suggested that the easiest way for us to understand reincarnation would be to imagine it as a bucket from which each lifetime is dipped, and back into which each lifetime is poured. So, as we are living each lifetime, we are affecting, for good or ill, all our other lives, past and future; and all of human history, past and future, as well.

2)    Future-life progression is as easy as is past-life regression. More advanced beings tell us that as each of us makes or avoids making spiritual progress in this lifetime, we are affecting, for good or ill, all our other lives, past and future; and all of human history, past and future, as well. Dr. Brian Weiss pioneered techniques for hypnotically regressing people with phobias and other psychological problems to past lives in which some trauma had occurred, and he discovered that simply reliving that trauma could serve to cure the present-life psychological issue. Having been cured of a fear of heights this way, I can personally attest that his technique works well. Dr. Weiss then found that if there was no obvious source of problems in a past life, he could just as easily progress people under hypnosis to a future lifetime, and there he often found the causative trauma!

3)    Matter and energy, time and space are holographic. This means that each unit (how ever you might measure it) of time, space, matter, or energy contains all the information of every other unit. How this fact affects each of our lives as it is happening is difficult for us really to fathom in any given situation. But it is believed now to be certainly true.  

4)     Matter and energy, time and space are Mind-created. Universal Mind is their foundation, and each of us is an undivided snippet of that Universal Mind. Another hologram. So, as undivided parts of the vast, eternal Mind that is the foundation of all creation, our minds are more powerful than we can imagine.

5)    Mind-energy tremendously affects what we see as reality. Think of a horror movie in which when a hate-crazed actor arrives, the castle starts to crumble, the peasants sicken, the grass withers, and the skies cloud over. But then our loving hero comes back, and that castle crisply reassembles itself, the peasants and grass recover, and the sun shines bright. Try to realize that this is something like the effect that our minds apparently have on our surroundings.

Now, let’s consider just one dramatic event in American history, among many such dramatic events. Until now, we always have seen such events as the products of a version of linear time that always ran forward as reliably as the ticking of a clock, century by century, always in only one direction. It is said that Christopher Columbus once ordered the simultaneous burning alive of a hundred Native American tribal leaders. The historian who mentioned this in a History Channel program awhile back tried to soften the shock of it by noting that “the fifteenth century was a barbaric age.” But, wait; when I later looked this up, it was someone else who actually had fried so many chieftains. Columbus had done some other things, that had not been quite so awful.

There was a time when I would have shuddered and changed channels, in any event. Later on, I would have been comforted to know that people dying in pain are soon out of their bodies, anyway, so their actual suffering is limited. Now, though, I hear about the burning of Native Americans, and I wonder whether it might actually have been all our fault.

Please read that above list of five points about time again. Then multiply by every person on earth the insight that whatever we do in this lifetime affects every one of our past and future lives. Temporarily trapped in this time illusion as we are, we cannot fully grasp what all of this means. But, one thing that it may well mean is that we are not just the product of our linear history. We also are the co-creators of it.

This puzzle has been on my mind for years, ever since I first began to wrestle with this whole awful time dilemma. The possibility that our modern evils are creating or worsening evils long past is both appalling and very hard to grasp. But there seems to be no way out of it. The evidence is abundant, consistent, and incontrovertible to anyone with a reasonably open mind.

Imagine how all of this might be working. Stalin and Hitler, racial lynchings, and all the many evils of the whole barbaric Twentieth Century could have worsened the history that came before, created Biblical stonings and Medieval wars, perhaps turned Christopher Columbus’s capture of a few Native chieftains and sternly lecturing them into his burning one or two at the stake. And then ten.  And then a hundred. We, now, looking at what we consider to be “history”, would be none the wiser.

Now, imagine that in this still-new century, we all might begin to practice love and forgiveness. Within families at first, perhaps; and then from house to house, street to street, and then over all the earth. And, gradually – imperceptibly, at first – the world’s bloody history might then turn back toward peaceful. Every book on every shelf in every library on earth records an ever gentler past, until all that evil never happened at all. 

It has long been thought that as modern humans migrated out of Africa, they conquered and destroyed the Neanderthal peoples that then inhabited what is now Europe. It turns out, though, that what our ancestors actually did was to assimilate Neanderthals as they moved north. So, now everyone with European ancestry has Neanderthal genetic material. This wonderful picture was taken at the Neanderthal museum in Germany. It was taken from an article that suggests that as much as 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives in modern humans. It turns out that our earliest fully human ancestors made love with Neanderthals, and not war.

But, somewhere along the way, perhaps becoming “more civilized” began to seem to mean to some of us, becoming more powerful. And now we can see where that has led!  Jesus chose to be born on earth to try to restore in all of humankind our original great Neanderthal gentle possibility. And it worked! For three hundred human years, It worked Until the Romans turned the peaceful Way of Jesus into just one more fear-based religion, it worked!  We began then the ongoing distortion of our own essentially loving natures that led erelong to the climactic evils of a cruel and bloody Twentieth Century. Now, contemplate a hundred Native Americans screaming together as they burn, and the notion that their suffering could be mostly the fruit of humankind’s violent, much more recent actions. If you don’t care to learn to love and forgive more perfectly for your own sake, my very dear one, or even for your children’s sake, then please consider those poor native American chieftains, and the way they had to die. Perhaps consider the possibility that you and I might want to try to begin together, even now, to turn all of humanity’s past history back toward that Neanderthal lovingkindness, so eventually, none of the evils of humanity’s past ever will even have happened at all.

Time, time,
Rolls the hills along,
Makes the stars go round
To the sky’s bright song.
Time, time,
Stirs the endless sea.
Maybe time will bring
– You back to me.Norman Gimbel (1927-2018), from “Time, Time” (1967)