Posted by Roberta Grimes • February 21, 2016 • 14 Comments
Afterlife Research, Human Nature, Quantum Physics, Understanding Reality
I am coming to think that the leading intellectual challenge of our time, 
and perhaps the foremost barrier to any further human progress, is the insidious notion of dualism in the study of reality. We all take for granted the idea that there is a scientific way of approaching reality, and also a religious point of view, and each occupies a separate sphere. Modern science has devolved into the belief-system of materialism, while Christianity is a belief-system based in the culture of first-century Jews; but these flaws at the core of each approach to the study of reality are ignored by their impassioned advocates. Indeed, both sets of belief-systems have adherents so deeply invested in them that some who now are reading these words are framing indignant rebuttals (bring it on!).
So, even today, we still find ourselves debating which view of reality should be dominant, whether reality arose in some material fashion or whether God must have created it all. There are few who realize that the prevalence of dualism in our study of reality means that neither Christianity nor materialist science is adequate to the task on its own. Ergo, both of them must be wrong.
Once you begin to look for them, you find examples of this dualism everywhere. To choose just one from the handful that my internet grazing produces daily, Christians suggest that the prevalence of religions in history must mean that we are hard-wired to believe, so scientists then feel forced to prove that religions have not been so prevalent after all. And for good measure, they study the brain to try to find the specific defect that causes religious 
notions to arise. Unlike science, Christianity doesn’t look for support for its position in logic or in facts, but rather it defends itself by enforcing its dogmas and by “othering” non-believers. The fierce political divisions now rending the United States don’t come from the dualist error alone, but dualism is making them more intractable. If there are two competing approaches to understanding reality, then of course adherents to each of them will portray the others as beyond the pale.
Afterlife researchers can demonstrate now that both Christian and materialist orthodoxies are wrong. There is no anthropomorphic God. And everything that we think of as “matter” is actually not solid after all, but instead it is a form of energy. We should have seen the end of the dualist fallacy long ago, but our problem is that by now nearly everyone is so emotionally invested in one point of view or in the other that it is assumed that if you are not in my camp you have to be on the other side. If I am a Christian, I will try to convert you to save you from eternal damnation; and if I am a science groupie, I will assume that your skepticism about my science must mean that you hold an entire panoply of Christian beliefs that I can smugly attack.
Dualism is a divisive blind alley. What all of us must start to do if we are ever to find a way forward is to abandon both Christian and scientific dogmas as the discredited false beliefs that they are. What we must begin to do now is to study reality open-mindedly, without dogmas or beliefs in the way.
It is only lately that I have come to see that the hobby that propels my life is going to be
the solution to the dualism problem. Thanks to impending developments in the burgeoning field of afterlife studies, both Christianity and materialist science will fairly soon be going down.
Christianity’s impending fall saddens me. I was a devout Christian for most of my life, and even today I love the religion! It has taken me awhile to accept the fact that Christianity does not follow Jesus, and that its modern-day adherents have carried their religion to a fatal extreme. Here is what is about to happen:
science advances “one funeral at a time.” He said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” And once again, Max Planck was right. According to a recent study of scientific progress, “when a prominent researcher suddenly dies in an academic subfield, a period of new ideas and innovation follows.” For scientific gatekeepers to adopt materialism as their “fundamental dogma” a century ago was a foolish and counterproductive step. Expect funding soon to begin to flow toward the scientific study of reality without reference to the materialist dogma. Expect what follows to be nothing short of the explosion of knowledge and of Nobel Prizes that came with the advent of quantum physics.My weekly podcast is called Seek Reality. I am coming to suspect that it won’t be long before all of humankind will be doing just that! Perhaps then I will have to begin to call my podcast something else….
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/37667416@N04/4074906486″>106299</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/78845880@N06/15530193057″>5 ноября 2014, Литургия апостола Иакова / 5 November 2014, Divine Liturgy of St. James</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Roberta,
Wow! I have to totally agree with you on this! I loved your books: The Fun of Dying, and the Fun of Staying in Touch. I found it so refreshing to find someone thinking along the same lines as myself. I too have had a painful parting with Christianity, which I had given myself to, heart and soul, for the better part of fifty years. I sense the coming explosion of ideas and development as well, and look forward to finding more truth, at last! Keep writing! Its helping people like myself, everywhere!
Oh my dear Joyce, thank you for saying such wonderful things! I am coming to find that you and I are part of a multitude of older people, good Christians who want to serve the Lord, who are finding a deeper calling than simply maintaining in the Christian faith. I have just returned from another speaking trip, and again the audiences were full of gray hair and earnest (if perhaps a bit careworn) faces. We are all being called to put on our sandals and take up our staffs and go out and spread the Master’s teachings to all nations. Finally! Two thousand years after the first request was made!
And who better to do it than those of us who are steeped in Christianity, and who have children and grandchildren whose futures depend upon the transformation of the world that can happen only if we will teach the Master’s truth to all? Humanity’s better future is about to begin!
As a former Christian minister, I couldn’t agree more with you, Roberta.
Hello sir! Thank you for saying this, and please know that the fact that you are a former minister who reads my blog delights me! As I have just said to Joyce, we older people who have been the most earnest Christians seem now to be hearing the Master’s call to be His latter-day messengers and spread His teachings to all the world. Those teachings turn out to be much easier to live than you would imagine that they could be, and they transform us from within. It really is amazing! My next blog post will be on this very topic. Thank you again, dear Spyder!
Can you give us more details on the development of electronic communication with the transitioned?
Hello Tom! It’s great to hear from you. I am not up on all the details, but recently I interviewed R. Craig Hogan on Seek Reality – you can reach it through the box on the left near my picture, on the front page of this site. Craig heads the team on this side that is working on the North American Station. I think you will enjoy hearing what he has to say!
It would seem, Roberta, that the demise of materialism is taking longer than Max Planck envisioned! It will fade eventually, but it’s so interwoven into our culture that it will take longer than he and others anticipated.
I wouldn’t blame all of Christianity, just the fundamentalists, who seem to have the loudest voice, for now, in our society. There are good Christians out there who aren’t dogmatic and judgmental.
And, let’s not let Judaism, Islam, Buddhism(in all its forms) and Hinduism off the hook, either. Those institutions are cluttered with some shopworn dogmas and dusty doctrines that are also centuries out of date. But, then again, there are good people in all those religions, too.
Yes, dear Michael, our poor friend Dr. Planck was pretty frustrated toward the end of his life to be so revered by people who would not listen to what he was saying. To be frank, I think that materialism is beginning to fade even now, since scientists are coming up against more and more of its limitations.
And of course many Christians are wonderful people! Those are MY people, dear; I have been a zealous Christian nearly all of my life. I love them! The fault doesn’t lie with the people at all, but rather the fault lies with a religion that teaches those people to fear the God that they should only perfectly love, and fills their minds with man-made dogmas based in first-century Judaism for which no evidence exists.
No religion that I ever have studied is from God. All of them are based in man-made dogmas. And where Christianity is concerned, I see it as a tremendous example of opportunity lost! Two thousand years ago we were given human history’s most stupendous gift, but we thought the wrappings were the gift when they were only wrappings. We have spent two thousand years playing with and enjoying dogmas that are only wrappings that Paul fortunately used to preserve the words of Jesus. Thank you, Paul! Now at last it is time for us to open your gift….
Hey Roberta; You hit a real winner, I totally agree with all you wrote. People need to become spiritual instead of religious, all religions are invented and run by the negatives or the devil if there is one.
Thank you, Gary! I love the way you get right to the point ;-). I think you’re surely right about where this has to go, and in fact there are encouraging signs that it all is beginning to happen now. I am meeting so many wonderful, spiritual ex-Christians who couldn’t remain in the faith any longer and are thrilled to learn that they can now be closer to the Lord than ever, and just throw all the false dogmas away. Thank you for your insights!
I love the way you write. I just wish I could share your optimism regarding the impending demise of these dualistic belief systems.
All of this talk of belief systems causes me to chuckle. As for me I gave up on this thing called belief years ago. There are things I know, because I have experienced them. There are also an almost infinite number of things I don’t know, but about which I will freely speculate. Belief would fill the gap, accepting as truth some of those things I don’t really know to be true. To do that, though, even if what is believed is actually true, forms an invalid hypothesis, because you are arbitrarily accepting something as fact that you do not actually know to be true. I will stick to what I know, and speculate about the rest.
As for the optimistic time line: I’m not so sure. Humans give up their beliefs slowly, very slowly.
About 5,000 years ago, or so, the story goes, there was man trying to find favor with his deity. He was told (or rather I think decided on his own) that to sacrifice his son would do the trick. Child sacrifice was commonplace back then and was an accepted practice for appeasing a deity demanding obedience. An angelic being, thankfully, stopped his hand and told him to sacrifice an animal instead.
The lesson then was that an animal would be an acceptable substitute for a child. That was a hard concept for this old man, but one that with a little thoughtful effort he could accept – a major paradigm shift indeed. If he was told the whole truth, though, that sacrifice of anyone or any animal or any thing at all was unnecessary would have totally blown his mind. That would have been far beyond what he could accept. and he would have rejected the advise of the angel in favor of his own belief.
Fast forward 3000 years and this whole thing about sacrifice is still very much alive and well in the minds of men. This time, however, they are just using animals and sprinkling their blood all over the place to please their now not quite so belligerent deity.
After the death of a prophet who walked the Earth in those days, his followers decided (although I don’t think they were actually told this) that the sacrifice of this good man, a man beyond reproach, became the ultimate sacrifice and the now even nicer deity would accept this sacrifice instead of requiring the blood of all those poor animals. This they could accept. To be told, however, that no sacrifice was necessary, and was never ever necessary, would have been more than they could accept, and everything revealed by this profit would have been rejected.
So … after 5000 years we humans have made two tiny little baby steps in our understanding of how things really work. To think that in just a few decades that we will suddenly take the rest of the intellectual trip is a bit more that my speculations would be comfortable with. I think it will take a bit longer, maybe a few more millennia at the rate we humans learn stuff. If it takes only one millenia that would be a major improvement.
As for chatting with the departed on the new spirit phone I would speculate we will have two results, which are :
1. Those already free of belief ( a small minority for sure) will learn many new and exciting things.
2. Those still trapped in a belief system will die clinging to their belief and rejecting all else, as will their indoctrinated children, for countless generations.
I could be wrong though. I’m just speculating, and not believing one way or the other. 🙂
Thank you for your thoughts,
Gary
Dear Gary, your historical analysis is phenomenal. I couldn’t improve on it! And I think you’re right about the effects of belief-systems. They hold us in thrall, and unless we are able to exercise a tremendous effort of will, it can feel impossible for us ever to get free of those bounds.
What is different now is the urgency being felt at the highest levels of reality to emphatically restate the Gospels and make following the Gospel teachings the immediate point of as many human lives as possible. I would not be aware of any of this if I hadn’t spent my life studying the afterlife evidence; but as it is, I have been chosen to be one of those who are spreading this urgent message. (I must have volunteered, of course, but we have our interactions with our spirit guides at night, and most of us remember little of those meetings.)
The most advanced dead tell us that transforming humankind in just a few generations is not only possible, but it is essential. What I am going to give you here is a limited, human understanding, but I think you will agree that it is scary and hopeful enough, both at once, to inspire all of us who love our fellow man to resolve to put our whole hearts to this struggle.
Since there is no time beyond this material level of reality, therapists have for decades been progressing patients to explore future lives. And the near future they are finding is uniformly horrendous! Far fewer people, a wrecked planet, almost a return to the stone age. I don’t believe that there is yet a consensus about what is about to go so wrong that it could cause such a major mess, but about a year ago my primary spirit guide met with me through my favorite medium, Susanne Wilson, and he gave us a pretty stark alternative.
The dead can see alternative futures. Because we have free will, they cannot tell us for certain what is going to happen, but they can game out our decisions and tell us what is likely. So in mid-February of 2015, my primary guide, Thomas, revealed to us that in 200 years there is projected to be exactly the sort of riven and destroyed humanity on a wrecked planet that those who are being progressed now to taste their lives being lived then are describing to us. And for the first time (of which I am aware), someone who is in a position to know told us that actually averting this disaster is possible! But if we don’t act now to prevent this calamity, the “so-called Christians” (Thomas’s term) will in 200 years decide to start Armageddon on their own. Given deluded Christian theology, perhaps they will mead this as a good deed – they are bringing the Lord’s return! – but of course Armageddon is the ravings of a madman. A man-made climactic war would do nothing positive. So the highest-level dead have chosen to take charge and act in human history NOW.
The way they have chosen to avert a man-made end-times is to free the perfect teachings of Jesus from Christianity, and to do now what He asked us to do 200 years ago, and put on our sandals and take up our staffs and spread the Lord’s teachings to all nations. JUST the Lord’s teachings! Not Christian teachings, which are a man-made and bogus belief-system.
So for you and me, our choice is stark! If we do nothing, then fairly soon the world will begin to go to hell. Or we can follow the call of the Master (which is what the dead call Jesus) to do each our part to effect a transformation that will avert a disaster here beyond our comprehension. I know that if it were up to only those living on earth now, the task would be hopeless. But there is so much heavenly firepower being directed at this effort that doing it all so quickly actually is possible. And given Who asks this of us, how can we not try?
You are definitely doing your part. In my own little way I am too.
So we shall see in the coming decades how it all plays out.
In my experience with higher beings and channeled sources they seem to be, just like us, overly optimistic about what is possible, given the dark nature of the human will.
In my own vision of the future there is coming, what has happened a number of times already on our planet, a reboot. The planet herself will erase most of the world we now know and recreate it all over again. If you would like to see my vision of the future it is free for anyone to read at http://www.thoughtformation.com. It is fictionalized but contains some interesting things to contemplate.
Gary
Dear Gary, once I would have agreed that you must be right about a coming planetary reboot, but the evidence is overwhelming now that our minds are part of perfect eternal Mind, which means that our wills are not dark in nature after all, but rather are the purest light. Our problem is that we possess free will, and we have also accepted amnesia as part of the process of coming here. We have forgotten who and what we are. But all of that is soon to change!
Having experimentally lived the teachings of Jesus for the past five years (come March), I have found that they work amazingly well in transforming us internally. And they work quickly! I was a different person within the year. I find it difficult to describe this whole experience, but I am going to try describing it in my next book, The Fun of Growing Forever.
What I am becoming increasingly confident is going to happen is that as more and more of us begin to live the Gospel teachings – something that is being done now by a handful of people on all the earth – then, since our minds are all part of Mind, our changing our own minds and hearts will begin to change the world. As they say, you cannot transform the world until you transform yourself. So, dear, that is what we must do!