Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 10, 2016 • 16 Comments
Afterlife Research, Quantum Physics, Understanding Reality
To be a student of the greater reality is to be sitting in sunlight at the top of a mountain, talking with all the joyous people who also have managed to make this climb as we look out wistfully over the clouds that keep in darkness the whole world below. We’ve been sitting up here for so long that we have come to accept the sad cloud of ignorance that buries in gloom whole populations. But now we can see that, here and there, the ignorance is beginning to thin. A few shafts of sunlight are reaching the earth. Wonder beyond wonders, the scientific luddites are beginning at last to ask the right questions!
I date the beginning of this change to late 2012, although the Mayan calendar was likely not the reason. And it was only the fact that The Fun of Dying came out in 2010 that let me notice any change at all. I began to tour at the end of 2010. From then through 2014, I gave dozens of talks about the afterlife in bookstores and at conferences, to Unity Churches and IANDS groups. It was that broad exposure to people’s attitudes that let me appreciate what was going on.
At first, no matter where I spoke, I would see blank faces. When I called for questions, what they asked would be either too basic (But I just covered that!) or entirely off-base (Saints are a religious thing!). I would patiently answer their questions, of course, but after a couple of years of this I thought that I was about to give up.
Then, late in 2012 and almost overnight, I began to notice a change in 
people. I was speaking in many different cities, so it wasn’t that I had taught them anything; but I found that all my audiences now were nodding and smiling at what I said. They were asking wonderfully thoughtful questions. It was amazing. And it was happening everywhere!
We have been given to understand that a massive effort is underway at the highest levels of reality to elevate all of human consciousness before we succeed in destroying the earth. It seems to have begun in the nineteen-forties, at about the time when people first used atomic bombs in warfare. Most of those working in this field were born from the forties through the nineteen-seventies: I was born one year past Nagasaki, and Wendy Zammit just a few months later. Many of my friends are afterlife researchers who also were born in the forties through the seventies, and with me they have sat on that mountain for so long that now we greet the thinning clouds with shared looks of jaded amazement.
How is this happening so fast? I can only assume that every person in each audience of every afterlife speaker is being guided by his or her spirit guides to seek and better understand the truth. What other explanation could there be? And now, dear friends, we are seeing glimmers of the most amazing change of all, as traditional scientists start to open their minds.
I recall the way it was just a few years back. The gatekeepers at all the magazines and journals and the heads of university science departments were sure they were battling Christianity, and if they lost that battle, all the world would go dark. Traditional scientists had no awareness that there was objective afterlife evidence independent of any religious beliefs, since to them it was science against Christianity and 
there could be no third source of truth. I lightly mocked this attitude of theirs in The Fun of Dying, where I remarked that the Opinion editor of New Scientist magazine had told us in February of 2009 that “Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience … Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense.” Oh my. Those darned appeals to common sense have long been scientists’ most implacable foe!
But now comes a surprising poll, conducted by the odd couple of 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair, in which questions that would have been anathema to scientists even a few years back are being respectfully asked and answered. True, it’s not scientists who are asking these questions. And some of the questions are pretty clueless. But – trust me! – even three years ago, a lot of these questions could not have been asked by anyone in the mainstream media in a manner that implied that those being surveyed were anything better than abject fools.
Scientists are beginning to ask questions about our brains that are less than reverential. Information even is being discussed that hints at the amazing possibility that most of the human brain may not be necessary. This is huge! Instead of treating our brains as the far-beyond-precious sources of our minds, it is becoming more acceptable now to think of our brains as just specialized body-parts.
And at last the search for alien life is becoming more open-minded and 
creative. True, the search described in this article is still unfortunately matter-bound; but the authors go on to speculate that one reason why we haven’t detected intelligent life may be that what they term “biologically-based intelligence” is just a brief phase of development, after which “artificial, inorganic intelligence” arises and burrows safely underground. All of this is nonsense, of course, but for scientists to imagine that inorganic intelligence might exist at all is a departure that is quite new. And from it, the leap in insight toward a scientific recognition that intelligence is not and never was organic seems to me to be an easier step.
Even the notion of “creation” can be talked about now in a scientific magazine! You may not appreciate the fact that the C-word has for more than a century been considered an abhorrent alternative to that even more forbidden word, “God.” Any book with “creation” in its title would until recently have been tossed by scientists, while now such a book is being reviewed in my beloved Scientific American. Of course, the C-word here is only part of the title of a book. But there is a new looseness in the language used, a refreshing lack of defensiveness, that is heartening to see and is brand, brand new.
Scientists are even willing now to admit to big gaps in their understanding. Until little more than a year ago, for working scientists to show to the world any difficulty in interpreting results would have been seen as an act of possible surrender to the forces of religious darkness; but now, here comes an article that cheerfully highlights “six baffling results that just won’t die.”
So, have we at last won the battle for truth? Will the physics departments at 
major universities soon make studying the greater reality an essential part of their important work? Sadly, we are not there yet. But for the first time in my nearly seventy years of life I can begin to envision a day when afterlife studies will be treated like every other branch of mainstream science. R. Craig Hogan’s latest breakthroughs in the field of electronic communication with the dead might lead the second segment of your evening news, and my dear Scientific American even might approvingly review Victor and Wendy Zammit’s masterwork, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife.
That day isn’t now. But wonderfully, in January of 2016 we can for the first time in human history believe that it might not be long in coming!
Something ironic is that Terence Mckenna predicted his own death in 2012.
Yes – I’m with you, Roberta, in feeling that this openness to the truth about Life (including so-called ‘death’) is just around the corner . . .
I resonate completely with what you’ve shared here, and love what you’re doing/being/sharing in this world, this seeming ‘reality’ we’re living in.
I THANK YOU hugely for that! 🙂
Thank you for your lovely thoughts, dear Frances! And isn’t it wonderful how quickly this is happening? I don’t think I could have said what I’ve said above even a few months ago, but now in retrospect it seems so obvious. I can’t wait to see what is coming next!!
For those who are interested in further research regarding new advancements in the psychology of grief “treatment” please view this article:
“Induced After Death Communication A Miraculous Therapy For Grief & Loss” at the link below
http://beforeitsnews.com/prophecy/2015/07/induced-after-death-communication-a-miraculous-therapy-for-grief-loss-2470764.html?currentSplittedPage=0
Thank you, dear! Dr. Botkin’s pioneering work is wonderful, and he has inspired others to investigate this hitherto unknown field of human possibilities. For example, R. Craig Hogan has had extraordinary results with his self-guided afterlife connections program that is entirely free – go to spiritualunderstanding.org for more information.
It’s exciting to begin to think about all the ways that a greater public awareness of these powers of the human mind are going to immeasurably improve human life, including a wonderful reduction in the burden of grief!
Oh how I identify with your article here. I, too, have noticed subtle changes in the way afterlife issues and mind-brain dichotomy discussions are handled by SOME mainstream scientists and some media outlets, and I think it’s wonderful. I can’t put a date in my mind, 2012 or other, but it’s that awareness that things are slowly and inexorably shifting the way they must. How wonderful that is to see. I, too, am a ‘child’ of the forties, by the way (1943), and have been interested in life issues and philosophical subjects since about the age of 8, just at the level of internally querying the nature of the universe. I’ve been actively studying afterlife issues since the early 1970s once I’d cleared received religion out of the way. It’s a lifelong study, and of course goes on beyond that.
Hello dear Brian! Given your age and your lifelong interests, you likely came in as part of this overall effort to elevate human consciousness, which is not surprising. Our name is legion!
Heh – you managed to clear religion out of the way forty years ago, while I continued to wrestle with it until the late nineties! And I still do, actually, except that now I begin to see why it’s necessary for me to continue to love Christianity. It’s all part of my particular journey. What is especially wonderful is that each of us is on our own beautiful journey, but all together!
You’re right, Roberta, perceptions and understandings of the afterlife are changing, but it seems much slower from my perspective. Mainstream materialist science still controls 80 to 90% of the funding for research and that paradigm has a tight lock on most, of not all, science publications. Lots of good things are happening on the fringes and these are picking up and making slow inroads, as you point out. Perhaps you have a better perspective on this than I do.
Among the general public, though, the afterlife interest and studies are definitely on the upswing. I notice that at the Los Angeles City Public Library a pronounced increase in the recent books in the “afterlife” and “spiritualism” categories. And even more and additional books are becoming available on amazon and local booksellers on these subjects. And they are popular! This is certainly a hopeful sign.
Oh my dear, I know that the changes have been slow. Until months ago, really, I felt as you do. And I always have known this would be a bottom-up process, with our scientific and religious elites the last people of all to begin to change. But I read several popular science magazines, and the loosening-up there over just this past year has been unprecedented! I am beginning to hear from mainline Christians about Liberating Jesus, and finding them much more open-minded than I ever could have thought possible. That there is any change at all beginning is for someone who has spent a half-century doing this work an astonishing thing! And once the truth gets going, there will be no way for anyone to stop it. Oh yes indeed, dear, the times they are a-changin’!
Great blog Roberta and I agree. I’m in a technical environment surrounded by engineers and one day was talking to someone about shared death experiences. Out of the blue another guy I work with chimed in and recounted how when he was a volunteer EMT one of his patients had an OBE during the resuscitation process. No one made any disparaging remarks about anything.
The poll you mention was an eye opener. Evidently only 14% of the respondents had any interest in real immortality. 31% weren’t interested in it in any way. Wow. I think a lot of these people don’t really believe “death” applies to them. For some strange reason the You Only Live Once (YOLO) philosophy seems to be the default view for these people though I’m sure most of them have never contemplated why they exist in the first place. It’s not a philosophy that can that can be defended in any rational way.
You hear these people say strange things. “ I came from nothing and am going back to nothing….”. Really? Well what happened to nothing that it should just decide to spit you out at some point? How is the nothing before you were born different from the nothing after you die? Why couldn’t that nothing spit you out again? “When I die things will just go black..” Really? Then that means you must still exist to be aware of blackness right?
“I’m my body and that’s it..” Really? What about the fact that your body’s been replaced several times already and you still exist? Last years body is already dead but you’re still conscious right? “I don’t remember anything other then this life so that’s all there is..” Really? Well do you remember every day of your life? Do you remember what you were doing on March 3 of _ _ _ _ (fill in the year). No? So by your logic you didn’t exist on that day.
The nonsense goes on and on.
The philosophy of “nothing” has no explanatory power.
Twenty years ago while going through a crises I had the sudden realization that answered a life long question – why did I seem to have come into existence at the specific time I did? With that realization the knowledge that we are all one consciousness, that the same Experiencer is staring out of every set of eyeballs, hit me like a brick. I had been asking the wrong question my whole life! “I” am not something that just showed up, “I” am something that has always been and my seeming individuality is just an illusion.
Just as in physics we have the wave, particle duality so it is in life. We are the particle (individual) and the wave (unbounded consciousness) simultaneously, and as Allen Watts has said that knowledge is the the source of all compassion.
Hi, Tom. Nice post, but I’m afraid I have to disagree with you on a point you made. Namely, “individuality is just an illusion.” That’s an Eastern Religious notion, and I studied the East for many years. but the Afterlife communication evidence says otherwise. I would say “separation is an illusion, but not an individuality that feels connected to the all and everything.”
I would suggest you check into the numerous Afterlife evidence books,. Roberta has written several excellent ones and others she can recommend, plus her podcast interviews with some of the leading lights in the field. I think it may help expand your understanding of the whole subject and field. It shows that we retail our individual identity into the afterlife realms.
As for Alan Watts, I was a fan of his in the late 60’s and early 70’s. I’ve left his philosophy behind since. He died a tragic alcoholic death in 1973 and never lived in this life to see the emergence of the Afterlife movement. He was skeptical of spiritualism and any life after death and wary of reincarnation, though admitted it was a random chance possibility. He never lived to see the extensive research done on reincarnation by Dr. Ian Stevenson and carried on by his protege, Dr. James Tucker, which probably would have changed his mind on the subject.
Mike I read a lot of afterlife stuff. The term separation may be closer to what I meant. Certainly we seem to be individuals now and there’s no reason why that couldn’t continue as we shift to other planes of existence.
There are also many NDEs reported where though the experiencer still exists they now understand themselves to be everyone and everything versus a single individual. I view individuality to be a combination of pure consciousness taking on a role through a body and experiences. Each individual life is then unique and probably could not be duplicated though some aspects of life are common to all. I try to identify more with pure consciousness then the character I’m playing.
Let’s say I’m in my boat in the south pacific. The boom swings around and smacks me in the head. I fall overboard and wind up washing up on a beach somewhere. I wake up but have lost all memory of Tom. The natives find me, name me Mot, and I start a totally different life. I still exist but playing a new role. Ultimately it is information that gives consciousness the sense of being an individual. The information/history of Tom still exists as some kind of resonance in the One mind. Consciousness shows up as another life form named Mike, say, that is tuned in somewhat to the Tom resonance. Some memories of Tom leak through to the new life form. Mike says “Hmmm I seem to have a memory of being this guy Tom…”
In cases of reincarnation the person has memories of a previous life but obviously is no longer that previous life, he’s playing a new unique role.
To me the One Mind/Consciousness playing all roles makes perfect sense and explains the reality I find myself in. We are all One and all individuals at the same time hence my allusion to wave/particle duality.
Wow, when I’m away for a day some fascinating things can happen! Great discussion, dear beautiful friends – thank you!
I think the question of whether we are separate entities or just one entity with many aspects is a basic and very important one, and where I come down is perhaps somewhere between you. All the research that I’ve done has convinced me that “I” as an awareness am both individual and separate AND also indivisibly part of the Mind of God. I have always existed and always will exist, but even now – when I think I am in a body – my mind remains so tightly part of Mind that from the perspective of the Godhead I have never left it. In sum, I don’t think that it’s possible for us when we are in bodies and our access to our minds is limited REALLY to understand how it all works, but in the eternity that is past our earthbound obsession with either-or, “together” and “separate” are not mutually exclusive concepts.
Oy… now, where did I put that spiked eggnog??
Hi, Roberta, welcome back!
I’m far from an expert on all this, myself, and don’t pretend to know “how it all in the afterlife works.” But, as I stated and you well know better than me, that the afterlife communication evidence through mediums, physical and mental, plus NDEs, shows that individualized personalities exist in the many astral afterlife realms, spouses, parents, relatives, friends, etc., and they can communicate with us and us with them, under certain circumstances.
It’s what goes on in the “higher realms” that language fails us, I think, and that causes the different perspectives.
This is a vast area and would entail a very lengthy discussion to even begin to do it justice, so I’ll sign off here for now.
Blessings!
Did you ever find your “spiked eggnog?!! 🙂
Yes, I did find the eggnog, dear! Back of the refrigerator. There was just a bit more, but now we face an eleven-month eggnog drought :-(.
I feel pretty well reassured that we never lose individual awareness. Years ago, when I did A Course in Miracles, I went through a pretty rough “undoing the ego” phase (your ego makes you panic at the thought of rejoining the Source – what some call the “second death” – and losing awareness forever). Then I woke up one morning and realized that my spirit guide had left a message in my mind. He had said, “You will never lose awareness; you will have God’s awareness.” And that did it for me! Ego = altogether vanquished.
Meeting Mikey Morgan (of Flying High in Spirit) has been wonderfully enlightening about what goes on at the highest levels. Mikey is a modest guy, not prone to bragging, but he admits that he is a mid-sixth-level being. My primary guide, Thomas, has to be at about the top of level five, and when asked about Mikey he points to what looks like a star high above him and says that is Mikey. We’re told that Mikey is so advanced that he seldom bothers to put on a body anymore (just for snowboarding, I guess): when he showed up at a council of my guidance team in Sept where Susanne Wilson presided, he was a big ball of blue light with pink edges.
So Mikey is very, very elevated! But he is also still intensely human, same personality and sense of humor, and with no sign that he is losing awareness.
I like Thomas’s assurance that eventually I will have “God’s awareness.” I have come to believe it means that when eventually all of humankind is perfected, there will be only one “awareness,” and each of the twenty or fifty or however many billion there are of us altogether will experience that awareness as his or her own!
That’s a great, inspiring message, Roberta, thanks for sharing!