Roberta Grimes

No Matter

Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 31, 2026 • 2 Comments
Afterlife Research, Death, The Fun of Dying, Understanding Reality

there’s nothing you can do that can’t be done
(Love) nothing you can sing that can’t be sung
(Love) nothing you can say, but you can learn how to play the game
It’s easy

nothing you can make that can’t be made
(Love) no one you can save that can’t be saved
(Love) nothing you can do, but you can learn how to be you in time
It’s easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need

 Love, love, love
Love, love, love
Love, love, love

All you need is love
All you need is love (whoo!)
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Paul McCartney, from “All You Need is Love” (1967)

As I was researching death and the afterlife, back in the nineteen-seventies, what made me first realize, to my great delight, that I had discovered something sensible, and solid, and as real as what you and I see around us now, was the way that all that afterlife evidence fit together so perfectly. It was like assembling an amazingly complex puzzle, all aligning precisely in my hands! If you have read every blog post that I have written in the past ten years – which, of course, you haven’t, since why on earth would you? – then you know that back in the nineteen-seventies, I bought and obsessively read old books written by researchers who had been present at seances being held by deep-trance mediums who had been working at the end of the nineteenth, and into the first quarter of the twentieth century. These mediums had developed their skills in long-ago, pre-electric-lighting seances. So, what they could do in terms of facilitating the direct communication of those who had died on earth and were now living in the next life, in those great astral realities, is simply altogether impossible today.

Those extraordinary turn-of-the-twentieth-century seances given by the best deep-trance mediums of which we now, a century later, have assembled the very best records mostly occurred in southern England, and also in southern New England and in New York State. It has been many decades since I have felt the need to read again any of those amazing records! I immersed myself when I was in my eager twenties in tale after tale told by people who were only just recently dead, who now were speaking to their listening relatives and friends about each new decedent’s wonderful and amazing new home. It is, yes, dear Edgar and Charlie, I can assure you right now, it’s just as solid here as where you are on earth! Oh yes, there are trees. Big trees! Big mountains! No clouds at all. Funny colors that you don’t have there. No thrones or harps! Very earthlike, my dear Mildred. Don’t worry. Big flowers! You can garden whenever you get here! And on and on they went, very often in direct conversations. I wasn’t taking notes at the time. I later guessed that I had read maybe two hundred personal accounts, but each was somewhat different; and yet, it was very clear that each of those newly-dead people was speaking from a different part of what had to be the same gigantic place. It all had the same physics, the same process, the same details and dress and so on. There were ways in which the afterlife areas of England and the U.S. were different, and ways in which they were very much the same.      

Before I was thirty, I had altogether lost what once had been a pretty serious fear of  death. Yes, the afterlife is entirely real! All the afterlife evidence that I ever had seen was fitting together perfectly. And, wherever it was, the afterlife was solid, earthlike, complicated, and fascinating enough that it really ought to be seriously studied. But, where was it, for heaven’s sake? That was back in the days when I used to imagine my own dead loved ones, sitting forlornly up there on clouds, swinging their feet and looking down at us wistfully. Even as I soon then married, had babies, went on to law school, began to practice law for closely-held businesses, and in general continued to live my very happy life, I began to subscribe to popular-science magazines, in an effort to try to find some clues as to how the afterlife might precisely fit with the reality that you and I can see. Because, it had to fit in here somewhere! We knew by then how dying happens, with our dead loved ones coming to greet us and to accompany each of us on the quick trip home. And we knew that we each then arrive in a beautiful afterlife that is right here where we are, but just at a slightly higher consciousness vibration, like changing TV channels. When we die and go to the afterlife, our minds change spiritual channels, just that easily! But, I still was forced to wonder, just where is that afterlife? It has to be around here somewhere!

All those popular-science magazines I was reading were an amazing postgraduate science education for someone who never had taken a college-level science course beyond first-year biology. No physics, of course. No math, beyond high school Algebra II. One of the first confusing things that I learned from my new popular-science magazine subscriptions, way back in the nineteen-eighties or so, was that, soon after the turn of the twentieth century, the scientific gatekeepers, the heads of the peer-reviewed science journals and the university science departments, had begun to enforce for all research scientists the dogma that they must study only matter-related phenomena. If some phenomenon was not related to tangible matter in some fashion, then professional scientists would not be paid to study it. Which is why the recent study of consciousness has been largely limited to the spending of billions of dollars in the fruitless search for a source of consciousness inside the human brain. I soon deduced that this odd limiting directive of mainstream science, that professional research scientists must study only what is related to matter, had begun shortly after the turn of the twentieth century, and had been related to a worry that the great Max Planck, who had won the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics as the father of quantum mechanics, had later become fascinated by consciousness, saying in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” So, the scientific gatekeepers had begun to worry that Dr. Planck might be close to discovering the Christian God. Believe it or not, that is in fact how the scientific community’s obsession with the study of matter alone began. 

But I was learning so much! I soon came to respect, and then even to love these people who were making scientific research their careers. I came to know some of the lingo, even to begin to think a bit the way they did, and to see the many ways that scientists were improving people’s lives. Eventually, even the peculiar, and arguably the utterly absurd and ridiculous fact that mainstream science was treating my own personal obsessions, which still were death and the afterlife, consciousness and spiritual growth, all of which are universal to humankind, as if they did not even exist at all because they had nothing to do with matter; well, I got used to that absurdity. It was even okay. Maybe just none of that happened to be the mainstream scientific community’s chosen game.

And then, on my dear God in heaven, one day, at last, there it was! I still was more or less always looking for that last part of my great but unfinished afterlife puzzle, but the rest of it was on my life’s back-burner. I’m a skeptic by nature. You have to hit me pretty hard with the truth from every angle before I can accept it as truth, but all that deeply consistent afterlife evidence, with no inconsistencies at all, had already done it for me. Now I just needed to figure out its location. And then at last the day came, somewhere in the late nineteen-eighties, perhaps; or else, it may have been in the nineties that I noticed an article about dark matter and energy,  and I realized what that article meant. Omigod, of course!There it was. There it was!!

This gigantic fact likely had already been staring me in the face for years. I just had been so busy practicing my profession, being a wife and mother, and living my joyous private life to give dark matter and dark energy the afterlife-related attention that they had long deserved. I did some quick research, and what I learned was amazing. Dark matter looked like the perfect candidate to be the astral realities with which we afterlife researchers, astral travelers, and near-death experiencers are so familiar. It turns out that dark matter makes up an estimated 27% of all of reality, while dark energy makes up an estimated 68%; and what we might call normal matter and energy makes up all the rest. So, what material scientists have been exclusively studying for the past century and a quarter is in reality less than 5% of the known universe!

And, why are dark matter and dark energy referred to as dark, you might ask? Are they evil? Are they perhaps black in color? Well, no and no. But they are not in fact material in nature, so they don’t react with photons of light. And because the inhabitants of this single planet that whirls within this five percent of the whole vast known reality consider our minuscule material planet and our tiny five percent of reality that is material to be important because we are looking at all the rest of reality from inside it, materialist scientists have always assumed that all that dark matter must be made up of nothing but WIMPs, or baryons, or twerps… Or, no. Excuse me. Twerps is what I used to call my own children, when they were small and acting twerpy.   

Dark matter is referred to as “dark”, simply because it does not react with photons of light.  And that means, of course, that it is not material, it isn’t composed of or related to matter, so materialist scientists are forbidden to study it. And so, for the most part, very few scientists have ever studied it.  And that, my dearly beloved, tautology-loving friends, is that. 

But still, 27% – or more than a quarter – is a pretty large proportion of anything. And 27% of this whole gigantic reality is five times the size of this entire material universe, interstellar space and all! That is in fact the actual, relative size of the wonderful and amazingly beautiful astral reality that we re-enter when we die. It’s the reality where many of us astral travel right now, at night while our bodies sleep, and where people travel who have learned to travel out-of-body, with memories of the event; and where near-death-experiencers travel as well. The astral plane does feel enormous to us when we visit there; it feels gigantic and uncrowded. And we understand now that it has very many solid layers of realities, each single one of which may be as large as this reality’s entire universe.

And, well, 68% – or two-thirds – is even a very much larger proportion of anything. And dark energy is two-thirds  of the greater reality that scientists tell us is there. Again, it is deemed to be “dark” by scientists only because it won’t react with photons of light, so it is not made of matter. And when we are in the afterlife, my dear ones, or traveling in the vast and amazing astral plane, there is a beautiful light illuminating everything. That light is understood to be radiating from the seventh level, the highest level, which is known by all as the Godhead level. That light is brighter and more radiant, the more developed our personal energies are spiritually so the higher we can travel. That light, my darlings, the light that will illuminate your endless, joyous astral days, is the pure and gentle light of love.

More recently, mainstream materialist scientists seem to be more interested in studying dark matter. My very dear ones, I have always politely waited for others to discover whatever needed to be discovered. My own role has been to just assemble other people’s discoveries, in putting together this whole perfect puzzle! But, having reached the age of eighty while I was waiting for my beloved scientist friends to at last figure out that, um, you know, we have been spending our entire careers studying only five percent of reality here, and maybe we ought to get past our obsession with matter and follow Max Planck’s lead, and take a look at the other 95%? Dogmas, of course, are the mark of religions. In adopting materialism as a dogma, scientific gatekeepers really did nothing more than to turn science into the religion of atheism. And that really was not a very good idea at all. 

So, to complete my own greater reality puzzle, I now declare that what atheist-materialist scientists have been calling dark matter is in fact what afterlife researchers call the gigantic astral plane. It encompasses our vast, beautiful and amazing eternal home, together with its afterlife foyer, and a great deal more besides! What our friends, those adorable but misguided materialist scientists have been calling dark energy is what afterlife researchers refer to as consciousness, or Mind. And Mind is, in fact, insofar as we know, all that independently exists. 

 there’s nothing you can know that isn’t known
(Love) nothing you can see that isn’t shown
(Love) there’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where you’re meant to be
It’s easy

All you need is love
All you need is love
All you need is love, love
Love is all you need
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Paul McCartney, from “All You Need is Love” (1967)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)