Posted by Roberta Grimes • December 07, 2014 • 0 Comment
Afterlife Research, Human Nature, Letters From Love Series, The Writing Life, Thomas Jefferson, Understanding Reality
This year I have published seven books. Three are reissues of books in print, but four are newly out this year. It seems an 
insane achievement, like the time when I was terrified of heights but still I climbed on an open staircase to the top of St. Paul’s Cathedral dome. I really loved St. Paul’s Cathedral! And who knew when I might make it back to London?
To share with you the joy of knowing that, as with climbing St. Paul’s Cathedral, never again will I feel the need to do something quite so flat-out silly as publishing seven books in twelve months, we have enrolled all my books in Amazon’s Matchbook program. If you ever buy an Amazon copy of any of my books, you can then or later buy the Kindle version of that book for only ninety-nine cents. You might give the paper book as a gift and keep the Kindle version for yourself.
To help you decide whether any of my books is for you, I am going to blog about them. I apologize for this interruption. Next week we’ll return to using what we’re learning from the dead to try to fix the world. Promise!
NONFICTION
The Fun of Dying – Find Out What Really Happens Next was first published in 2010. It just has been reissued with 
updated appendices and a wonderful Foreword by Victor Zammit, the great afterlife researcher who is one of my heroes. We have nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent communications from people we used to think were dead, and when combined with insights from quantum physics and from cutting-edge consciousness research, these communications give us a breathtaking picture of the glorious reality that we enter at death. But even beyond coming to understand death, we are learning so much more! What afterlife researchers have discovered is a whole new branch of science, a third wave of physics that is consciousness-based. We are learning things about human nature, the nature of God, and the nature of reality that are surprising and beyond-belief wonderful.
The Fun of Staying in Touch came out this summer. It details some amazing ways that the dead give us signs of their survival, 
and also the many methods we have for contacting the dead proactively, including some just being developed that are going to make it impossible for anyone to still insist the dead do not survive. This book’s Foreword is by Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D., of the University of Arizona at Tucson, who has done more than anyone else alive to prove that the dead are in communication with us.
MAINSTREAM FICTION
My Thomas was first published by Doubleday in 1993. It is a meticulously-researched 
re-recreation of Martha Jefferson’s journal. Conveniently, Thomas Jefferson’s marriage spanned the Revolutionary War, so My Thomas gives us a close perspective on the formative years of the United States from the perspective of a participant who was married to the author of the Declaration of Independence. This is one of history’s great true love stories! After Martha’s death, the evidence is strong that Thomas never married nor even loved again. He went on to become the first Secretary of State, the second Vice President, and the third President of the United States, but all of that was by his own account a consolation life. Forty years after his cherished wife’s death, Thomas Jefferson still referred to that decade of Revolutionary chaos and war as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”
Rich and Famous is an early-eighties coming-of-age story first published as Almost Perfect by Berkley in the early nineties. At its 
core is the success of a woman from disadvantaged circumstances who by dint of pure determination builds such a successful business that she is a multimillionaire before the age of thirty. And this was back before the high-tech boom: her business delivers gourmet meals! Kim’s love story is a complicated one. There is a lot more going on than moonlight and roses. But like all my novels, this is a love story. People have been asking me to write a sequel because they want to see more of Kim Bonner’s happily ever after!
LETTERS FROM LOVE
Letter from Freedom, Letter from Money, and Letter from Wonder are the first trilogy of a seven-novel series. The only character that appears in all seven novels is Atlantica, an island in the South Atlantic where human life has 
evolved to perfection. This trilogy spans almost forty years of the life of a man named by Time magazine the richest American under the age of forty when he was twenty-six. He owns Atlantica, but it is his star-crossed lover who becomes obsessed with the island, and then their son who helps us understand it. Although this trilogy tells a single story, all the Letter novels are independent of one another. They can be read in any order.
These novels grew out of the fact that what we learn from the afterlife evidence about human nature is stunningly different from what we always have assumed was true. We think of human beings as nasty brutes, Biblically fallen and requiring all the restraints of civilization to keep us from descending into bloody chaos and destroying one another. But the afterlife evidence indicates that each human mind is inextricably part of the perfectly loving and infinitely creative Mind that continuously brings forth the universe. In other words, each of us is part of God. Including Charles Manson. Including Adolph Hitler. But if our minds are at their base pure and 
loving, then how can so much evil exist?
I began to think about this question in 1977, when I was housebound with a baby and fresh from the discouraging tumult of the nineteen-sixties. Already I could see that the religious and secular view of human beings as inherently sinful and in need of restraint was turning out to be inconsistent with what we were learning from the afterlife evidence.
So I began a thought-experiment. Of course, working scientists do thought-experiments. The notion is not inherently mad! We take a set of known parameters and vary some of them and see how that changes things. My thought-experiment was to place people in a culture in which freedom of mind was paramount. The only thing forbidden was laws or rules or anything whatsoever that imposed the smallest restriction upon the human mind. The result was Atlantica. And what amazed me as I observed the Atlanticans going about their lives was that so long as I didn’t play God and interfere, they worked out how to live in freedom. And their culture became amazingly 
stable. The process was fascinating to watch.
What surprised me most was the fact that the people in my experimental world became more and more sensitive to one another. That being perfectly free from coercion might make them more tolerant and kinder made sense, when I thought about it. But that soon they were reading energies and becoming aware of one another’s emotions did not. But then I thought about the fact that civilization itself could be the problem. All its rules might be inhibiting the full development of our mental powers, which evidence suggests must be inherently God-like. If governments and religions are making all the wrong assumptions about human nature, then effectively their rules and restraints are placing humankind in a cage that distorts our nature in ways that might be CREATING problems rather than SOLVING them.
I have come to believe this is in fact happening, based upon all the evidence. And further proof of its truth is the certainty that after ten thousand years of trying, governments and religions have done nothing whatsoever to improve our minds. In fact, when you remove the tech veneer, people might be more barbarous than ever. But if civilization doesn’t work in advancing human nature, then what might work? That is the question that the Letters From Love Series is asking, and is beginning to answer.
I am grateful to you for reading my books and sharing with me your own journey toward a greater understanding of our one reality. Hold onto your hat. Exploring the truth is an exciting ride!
