Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 11, 2025 • 1 Comment
Afterlife Research, Death, The Source, The Teachings of Jesus
What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)
In our blog post last week, I made what was perhaps a mistake when I used a couple of stories from my early personal life as illustrations. A new blog commenter here then found reason to scoff at me about my tales, since, as a very young adult, I had felt personally wounded by my mother’s telling me that if she could have aborted me when she found herself pregnant out of wedlock prior to Roe v. Wade, she would indeed have aborted me. That commenter said that by my “looking at these subjects so deeply” from what he called “the viewpoint of the ego illusion”, I sounded to him “like a materialist”. He told me that if this body that I am still wearing now had been aborted, I would “simply be associated with” a different body, and I would now be experiencing this reality through that other body. So, no bigs at all! He told me that I should have just stepped back and related to my mother’s revelation not emotionally, but instead “as Consciousness”, and in fact I should have reacted to all of the negative examples in my blog post with no emotions whatsoever. Then I “would not have suffered through the negative emotions” that I felt when I heard what my mother had said about perhaps wishing that she could have aborted me, or my childhood pain of feeling like a boy in a girl’s body, or our shared horror of having witnessed Iryna Zarutska‘s murder on a North Carolina light-rail train. He told me scornfully that my whole blog post was based on what he called “the ego illusion”, which he implied that we can escape altogether by just skating along above the tops of our lives, and never feeling any negative emotions at all. I have to admit that my own first emotion upon reading his comment was shame that, yup, he had caught me out. I had just confessed to all of you that when I was young, I was deeply – well – human. But then my Thomas pointed out to me that our clueless-sounding commenter had just given us a great topic for a now pretty essential-seeming follow-up blog post for this week!
Well, of course, when I was very young, and I was already deeply invested in the lifetime that am living now, I reacted with strong negativity to being told that if abortion had been legal on the day when my mother first panicked, as she realized that she was pregnant out of wedlock, she would have rushed straight to a legal abortionist. Of course, I was horrified to receive this news! I was by then pretty deeply and happily into THIS earth-lifetime! I was in my late twenties, as I recall, when she and I had this conversation. It was very soon after I was married, so I was very young indeed; and I was still in the first flush of love with the absolutely wonderful man with whom I have since shared more than fifty years of three children, five grandchildren, and more joy than I can ever find a way to express to you. But that commenter’s suggestion was that I should only have shrugged and thrown away the thought of my entire investment in this earth-life so far, as if it were only nothing at all, just valueless crap, my childhood and college and the man that I loved, all worth nothing, since I could always start over and begin an entirely different life?
Our commenter friend’s big problem is that he believes it is possible to get what is good and useful from an earth-life by just watching it happen, as if from above, and without actually living any of it. I have never heard of trying that, but who would even want to try it? In none of what he says does he take into account the value of human emotions at all, when emotions really are all that exist. Consciousness IS emotions! From fear, anger, and hatred at the lowest and slowest, to extreme affinity and love at the highest and most rapid emotions, consciousness as you and I feel and express the emotion of it is in fact all that exists. In our real and eternal lives; in the life where no time and space exists; in the life where, as A Course in Miracles tells us, into the mind of the Son of God came a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God forgot to laugh, in that life: it is all so perfect and love-filled in that true eternal life that, really, no further elevation in our personal consciousness vibration is possible there. Just as you and I cannot sit around in a quiet corner of the gym and shout, “Biceps! I will now make BIGGER BICEPS on this body! And, ABS ! Very much BIGGER abs right now! Come on, six-pack! APPEAR! I can do it!” So, in the very same way, you cannot exist in the eternal love of God forevermore, and simply think or say, “Even more LOVE now! I love everybody even MORE now! Come on!” We say to ourselves, while changing not at all. “I’m vibrating even HIGHER now! YESSS”
I am so sorry, my dear commenter friend. It simply does not work that way. If you want biceps and abs, you have got to not only go to the gym while never taking it seriously, just sit around there watching the others work out their material bodies, just as you don’t take your precious life on earth seriously; but in the gym, you’ve also got to actually use those machines in the ways that they are meant to be used! And if you want to raise your personal consciousness vibration further away from the lowest and slowest levels, and even more toward ever more perfect love, you cannot just thumb your nose at what you derisively call “materialism”, even while you are apparently also occupying a material body yourself on earth. But to use earth-life as it is meant to be used, you have to also really get down-and-dirty with the very materialism that is all around you here on this material earth-plane. The very earth-life that you so much disdain!
I am sorry indeed that you disdain so much what could be so useful to you while you are actually here! And it really does amaze and sadden me to find you writing about your own material body such insulting things, when you took that body for yourself, and apparently you now occupy it, and also apparently now you refuse to use it for its intended purpose, even though there are so many beings in the astral plane who wanted to use it for their personal growth, but you cut the line ahead of them and took it from them? And now you say to me derisively, “You are looking at these subjects so deeply from the viewpoint of the ego illusion you sound like a materialist!” And, yup. You do have it perfectly right! While I am in the spiritual gym that this earth very deeply is, that is just what I am! A materialist to the core! And I am workin’ these spiritual abs and biceps for everything that I’ve got. It’s not much, I’ll admit, but I’m workin’ ‘em hard, and every single day. You tell me that if my mother had aborted me, I just could have jumped in another body and “experienced this reality through it.” But I am not just an experiencer, dear commenter friend. I am a down-and-dirty DOER while I am here THIS time, and not just an above-it-all watcher, which is what you tll us that you choose to be. The big difference between us is that I plan to ACE this lifetime, this time around. I do not ever intend to come back!
And the wonder of it is that this earth-plane, and these lives that we live here are carefully designed to give us the opportunity, if we try, to actually live one-and-done earth-lifetimes. Sadly, though, most people don’t use their earth-lives that way. Most people come back repeatedly, over and over again, because they don’t take what Craig Hogan calls “earth school” sufficiently seriously. Instead, they do what our last-week’s commenter suggests that we should all be doing, and they just hang around in the earth-gym, watching, not taking their earth-lives seriously at all, and therefore not growing very much. Or else they do what he also is suggesting, and they live their lives in fear of their emotions, so rather than accepting, and even embracing these earth-experiences, and taking them in and learning from them deeply and growing thereby ever stronger; they instead run from them, learning little or nothing in each lifetime. Which is why they must come back again and again, which Buddhists call turning on the wheel.
So then, what’s it all about, Alfie? Why do we even come to this earth and plan and live these difficult earth-lives at all? And if you finally do know for certain the purpose of your earth-life, how can you actually make this lifetime that you are living now your truly one-and-done life? Believe it or not, managing a one-and-done life on earth is not all that difficult. Jesus tells us that He became so frustrated, after He was Himself perfected six thousand years around, just watching all the follies of humankind from His exalted place, and wanting to help to simplify their long process of spiritual growth, that He planned that additional lifetime born from out of the Godhead as Jesus two thousand years ago as our Teacher. And if we now can follow Jesus’s teachings closely, what will we learn?
Well, Jesus tells us what we can learn, and how quickly we can learn it, if only we will take His teachings sufficiently seriously. His disciples came to Jesus and asked Him who was greatest in the kingdom of heaven, which is that place which is our eternal home. 2 “And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, 3 and He said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you are changed and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea’” (MT 18: 2-6). In other words, my dear ones, spiritual growth is not about our becoming big shots at all! It is not about our rising above this material world, as our clueless commenter of last week would have us try to do; but rather, it is about our becoming as spiritually innocent and loving as children.
So, let us now quickly summarize what the steps are that each of us must take, if we truly want to grow spiritually enough to end our cycle of endless rebirths. The afterlife evidence tells us quite a lot about this process, how it works in the astral plane, and how it works on this side as well And of course, there are exceptions to everything, but in general:
Yes, it is possible nowadays to book-study consciousness, and to feel so very book-smart about it, as our commenter of last week shows us that he does, while he still lives in a meat-suit on earth. But, you know, while you are privileged to live in that meat-suit here, and one that so many people in the astral coveted, but you actually won it, you are here for a very important reason! And feeling smug about simply ignoring that reason, and looking down on the people who take that reason seriously, might make you feel very smart indeed! But still, for you to be doing that is not at all wise.
I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
Just as you and I cannot sit around in a quiet corner of the gym and shout, “Biceps! I will now make BIGGER BICEPS on this body! And, ABS ! Very much BIGGER abs right now! Come on, six-pack! APPEAR! I can do it!”
Well now you tell me! I guess I need to get my weights out and make sure I ride my bike regularly. Not to mention the people staring at me while I was yelling at my body. It all makes sense now. 🙂
You made some great points! One especially that I need to remind myself I am lucky to be here while many of our family members are waiting in line. I was thinking about the lower birth rates after you brought it up before. I do believe it is mainly due to how difficult many are having trying to survive. The lack of jobs and and the feel of insecurity of keeping current jobs are leading people from starting families.
Anyway, I appreciate the reminder that we are blessed to be here even if it is a difficult place. Always good to try and reframe the way we think to more positivity. Something I need to continue working on.
Love you all and feel blessed we are all family.
Thomas