Author: Roberta Grimes

Love is All You Need

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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)

Well, okay then. I woke up last Monday morning, and I realized that, at last and unexpectedly, my Thomas and I seemed to have no more discoveries needed to achieve any further and final truth.  As of now, my dear ones, at last we really do know the whole truth about death, the afterlife, and the greater reality, all of it put together!

So, does this mean that my Thomas and I will have nothing more to write about? After spending my entire adult life researching death, the afterlife, the greater reality, consciousness as the source and ground and proof of it all; and then finally, our Lord Jesus’s crucial role as our Wayshower in all of this, from Alpha to Omega; and then most importantly, the fact that all of this really does fit together perfectly, hand within glove, so each aspect of everything that we have discovered in my life reinforces and makes more certain all of the other discovered aspects of the whole, so there is in fact one great and certain, knowable, beautiful, and gently perfect Whole Truth, and we have now found that Whole Truth.We have at last reached the top of a mountain, my dear ones, from which it is possible to see and describe the whole of our great and perfect Reality. From here, we also can grasp the fact that this is very likely not the ultimate reality. We do know now, for example, that there is indeed a further and ultimate God of All. But it is enough for us now to understand that there is no need for us to know more than this. Jesus, my Thomas, and our frequent Seek Reality podcast guest, the Sixth-Level Being Mikey Morgan have all suggested that, as more of humankind scales this first reality mountain, then there are joys beyond joys abounding that are as yet still far beyond our sight!   

Jesus says: “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and everyone who seeks finds, and for everyone who knocks, the door will be opened” (MT 7:6-8). And, long ago, I took that as an invitation, and also as a solemn promise. The fact that so many people are so terribly afraid of dying weighs this world down with so much fear and pain, and it burdens us as well with the evils committed by all those craven people who expect to die and blink out like a light, without suffering consequences for their terrible actions! Just imagine how all of that might change, my beloved friends, when most of the people now living on earth knows with certainty that human life goes on forever after this brief earth-lifetime ends, and it is impossible for anyone ever to die. The single greatest gift that could be given to this whole sorry world would be to free everyone in it of their perhaps now still understandable, but nevertheless utterly irrational belief in their own future extinction. So, I long ago made it the purpose of my life, and my solemn promise to God,  that I would learn the whole truth about death, the afterlife, and the greater reality, and then I would teach these truths to all the world.

So, how is it possible that a working lawyer with no scientific training at all can have come to understand death, the afterlife, and the greater reality that contains everything that humankind ever has discovered, and all while doing this research as just an engaging hobby? Actually, anyone who was curious and only reasonably open-minded could have done all the same research that I have done, and would have reached pretty much all my same conclusions. Thomas has helped me, of course, but I don’t think that supernatural guidance really was essential. No, but that need for a mind at least willing to consider new ideas would have flummoxed every working scientist on earth, and all religious researchers as well. Which, pretty much, has left you stuck with relying on my Thomas and me. Here has been our research path:

  • Early-Twentieth-Century Afterlife-Related Books and materials. There was a great heyday of interest in the afterlife in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries, that mostly petered out in the nineteen-thirties. Fifty years ago, I found many of the books written around that time in Boston’s used-book stores, and I immersed myself not just in all those amazingly similar but never identical personal afterlife tales received through deep-trance mediums in Boston, London, and New York State that I later reported on in The Fun of Dying and The Fun of Staying in Touch, but also reports of afterlife communication via mechanical devices, amazing tales of astral travels out of body to other planets, just the most mind-bending but still always consistent and believable other-worldly education! By 1975, when Raymond Moody’s Life After Life was published, I knew immediately that these people had not actually died and seen the afterlife, because their experiences were so inconsistent with genuine reported deaths, and so aberrant; although they oddly often seemed to be in an afterlife-like place. And then we began to see in more extensive NDEs a point where the experiencer would hear a voice saying something like, “Stop! Turn back! You are about to enter the place where the dead are, and if you proceed, your silver cord will break, and you will die.” Oh. From that, the researcher in me learned not only that, oh no indeed, no NDE-er ever actually dies. I also learned, and this has since been reinforced by other researchers, that the astral plane has a kind of foyer through which people are processed out to be born into a life on earth, and then we are processed back in through that foyer when we return to our eternal home after an earthly death. So, clearly, now we can see that most NDEs take place somewhere in the astral plane, so no wonder NDE-ers think they have actually died. But, no. Death is always a one-way trip!   
  • Science-Hobbyist Books, journals, and Magazines. I devour them in abundance, and I have done that for decades! Very few people understand just how completely the scientific professions chose to make so many future discoveries impossible for scientists forevermore very soon after the twentieth century began by the simple expedient of turning the entire pursuit of what had been objective science into the religion of materialist atheism. This was done mostly as a panicked reaction to the worry that the inestimable Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, might be coming dangerously close to discovering, you know, the actual Christian God. But turning science itself into just another restrictive religion has turned out to be a terrible way to battle that worry! Just as an aside, in reading older popular science magazines, I have occasionally seen what looked to be a Creator at work, fudging a rapid little universe for us here, just ahead of what we can discover. You be the judge! But long ago, there was a mystified astrologist who wrote a brief piece about how he could make stars appear by pointing his telescope at a heretofore empty span of sky, and then coming back after a year and looking at that same span of sky again; and then there is the well-known phenomenon of punctuated equilibrium, a theory in evolutionary biology stating that species remain stable for long periods of stasis before experiencing brief, rapid bursts of significant change, and then a whole new species appears, followed by another long period of stasis before we get another entirely new species. It is all so amazing! In so many ways, if you look closely enough, and you understand that this universe is not our real life, but it is only what Dr. R. Craig Hogan calls a spiritual school, you can come to see what really is going on.
  • Consciousness Research. The scientific community’s dogma of materialist atheism is still, after more than a century, pretty rigorously enforced by its gatekeepers, by its university science departments and by its peer-reviewed scientific journals, so the many inquiries into the nature of consciousness being made in recent years have had working scientists absolutely flummoxed. No, consciousness is not produced by the human brain. That has been proven, after billions of dollars have been wasted in trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human meat-brain. And since mainstream scientists are literally forbidden to study what is not in some way related to matter, they really have no way to study consciousness while still remaining inside the job requirements for working scientists. Too bad, since trained scientists who choose at this point to move off that very limited job reservation have by now pretty well demonstrated, for example, that life is a fundamental property of consciousness, so no wonder scientists have never been able to figure out how life began on earth! And, for his part, quantum physicist Max Planck, who first discovered the primacy of consciousness, has inspired scores of other curious folks to follow his lead in studying consciousness, many of whom have scientific training, and some of whom have written books about their work, and have been my guests on my fourteen-year-old Seek Reality podcast. In 1944, toward the end of his life, Dr. Planck summarized his work by saying, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such.All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” Just so.
  • The Gospel Teachings of Jesus. When I began more seriously to study consciousness over the past few years (and here, the fact that I have been podcasting weekly for the past almost fourteen years, and I always have an expert-guest, has turned out to be extremely helpful), I found that many of the freest thinkers who have been there before me seemed to be reaching the uniform conclusion that consciousness is probably all there is. And, more than that, the physics of consciousness as they understood it was emotion-based, with fear and hatred at the low, slow and weak end, and love and joy at the rapid, high and powerful vibrational end. I had already concluded, based on evidence from several sources, that we choose to live these lives on earth in order to learn to raise our spiritual vibrations, away from fear and toward love; but, now all this consciousness information was reacting with something. Where had I seen it all before? And then it hit me. My college major had been early Christian history, and I have been a Gospels scholar, off and on, for my whole adult life. So, all of this was sounding a lot like the teachings of Jesus! Oh my God, had Jesus possibly known all of this about reality, consciousness, and the workings of His own teachings in the world a whole two thousand years ago? I went back to studying the canonical Gospels, but now in light of what I had come to understand about reality, and I was amazed to come to see that Jesus very likely had been working with consciousness a whole two thousand years ago. To better understand how this all might work, I advertised and taught a series of courses on how to use the Gospel teachings of Jesus to raise your consciousness vibration enough to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime. My brief courses were amazingly successful in creating a group of beautifully enlightened beings; and my further close study of the canonical Gospels, in light of what we now know about consciousness, convinces me that Jesus knew two thousand years ago what modern consciousness experts are able to demonstrate only today.

So, that is it and that is all, We know now that all of reality is contained within consciousness, with perfect love at its highest and most powerful end and all the ishy emotions at its lowest and weakest end, and with everything always and forever under the perfect care of the infinitely loving Mind that the great and inestimable scientist Max Planck discovered and introduced to us more than a century ago. That true and perfect Godhead is the true Source from which Jesus came as our Teacher two thousand years ago. And that true Godhead, that Holy Spirit, that Mind asks of us no sacrifice, nothing at all but that we live in ever more perfect love.

What followers of the Buddha, perhaps, and other great spiritual teachers, might need to spend a lifetime achieving, my students now use what Jesus knew about consciousness to also achieve in less than a couple of years, and while still living their usual earth-lives. And so, my dear ones, yes indeed, we finally do know the whole of the very greatest, human Truth. All of our greater reality, everything that we know to exist, is contained within what we experience as consciousness; and each of our minds is part of that one great Mind, which is at the pinnacle of consciousness, pure infinite Love, and the Source of all. Each of us is a part of the one great consciousness, and so is eternal, by definition.  Our true home is in the gigantic astral plane, a literal wonderland of increasingly greater delights, all of which vibrates ever higher, and ever more toward perfect love than does this minimal material universe; and all of which, nevertheless, is still contained within consciousness. But this is not your home, my dear one. Your true home, and mine, lies beyond the stars!

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)

 

No Religion

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us, only sky
Imagine all the people
Livin’ for today

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion, too
Imagine all the people
Livin’ life in peace

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Yoko Ono, from “Imagine” (1971)

My beloved friends, before you read any further, I must ask you first, if you are a devotee of any variant of the Christian religion, and happy with your religious choice, please don’t read what we will be writing today. I have no wish to disrupt your religious life! Today, my beloved spirit guide, Thomas, and I are speaking only to those who have once been Christians, but who are now feeling estranged from that religion, in all of its more than forty-nine thousand variations. (We are serious about that number! You can Google it!) Yet when I wrote The Fun of Dying, back in 2010, the number of Christian denominations estimated by Mr. Google was only ten thousand. And according to the article cited above, there will be sixty-four thousand Christian denominations in the world by the year 2050. Christianity is the world’s predominant religion. We take it as a given of human life that since there is a God, a Higher Power, a First Cause, then every society must have a religion, just as surely as it must have a government; and in the battle for sheer numbers, Christianity has long been the winner. But this endless worldwide splintering into pieces over minute doctrinal differences within the body of the faithful is not a sign of vigorous health in Christianity. Far from it. Rather, it is a sign of weakness and despair.

The history of any phenomenon is always written by its winners. And I have studied Christian history. It was even my college major. So I can personally attest, dear God in heaven, that Christian history has been the bloodiest mess that you can possibly imagine, for the greater part of its seventeen-hundred-year history. (And for those who prefer Islam, the story there is no better.) But what if, instead of standing here in 2026 and looking backward, we begin even before Jesus’s birth and consider how His work on earth might look to Him? To do that properly, I think, we will have to go even farther back, to whenever the whole notion of religions first began.

Very primitive people seem to have sensed very early on that there is Something Greater. And we know by the trinkets that they created that they invented or imagined gods that they mostly seem to have seen as being exaggerated caricatures of the most powerful people they could dream up. So, the whole history of humankind’s relationship with our imagined gods is drenched in fear and gore. And that entire miserable religious history continued until even not long before our dear Jesus was at last born on earth. The Middle East was full of fearsome gods, each of which induced terrors in the various tribes. There was Baal, for example, whose priests were sometimes required to burn their own sons alive; and Chemosh, Dagon, even Moloch, who might have had several names; and who required that all the firstborn infants must be thrown alive into the fire in his belly. All were powerful gods, and all of them required unimaginably terrible human sacrifices.

Then along came the twelve Hebrew tribes, who were the world’s first true monotheists, and the first people whose god did not reside in an idol. The Hebrew God also seems to have been the first human-invented god who never required any form of human sacrifice at all; but for this god, Yahweh, only unblemished heifers or other young animals killed cleanly in their temples would suffice. And it was among these people, and following this immediate history, that Jesus chose to be born. We won’t spend a lot of time here demonstrating who Jesus was, and still is, because He is as alive now as He ever has been. We have, after all, amply done that in many earlier posts in this blog’s thirteen-year history. We will simply state that Jesus is an eternally perfected Being Who had been driven to despair back then to see humankind’s suffering on earth down through the ages, but still to no purpose whatsoever, because people did not understand why they had been born on earth in the first place; and they still did not, in point of fact, know anything about anything. We know from Jesus’s teachings, and from His actions as they have been preserved for us in the canonical Gospels, that Jesus came to teach people how to raise their spiritual vibrations away from fear, anger, and hatred and toward ever more perfect love. And I submit to you today that we also know from those same teachings and actions that Jesus came to teach people how to dispense with the need for any religions anymore, and how to relate to God in a beautiful new way, individually and personally.

Jesus called this new way of relating to God “The Kingdom of God”. It was a difficult concept to teach to people who had a history of thinking of gods as basically scary; but easier, of course, for the Hebrew people to grasp, since their traditional God was much more benign than were all the awful gods that had come before. Jesus’s only struggle was with the clergy of the various sects within the Hebrews’ religion. And we see them sparring often during the period of Jesus’s brief public life. Jesus doesn’t go head-to-head with them, but what He generally does is to subtly agree, and then to go them even one better. Just watch Jesus do this beautifully in the masterful exchange that follows.  

At first, the leaders of the two primary schools of Hebrew learning tried to tag-team Jesus, addressing Him as the lay people did, but in their case sarcastically, by calling Him “Teacher”. “When the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered together, 35 and one of them, an expert in the law, asked Him a question, to test Him. 36 “Teacher, which commandment in the law is the greatest?” 37 Jesus said to him, “ ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the greatest and first commandment. 39 And a second is like it: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments hang all the Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:34-40)

Oh my God, how beautiful! That scholar of the religious law was trying to battle Jesus over some petty point within the Hebrew religious laws, and Jesus blew him away by saying that God’s law is Love, and it replaces all your old scrolls put together. Jesus was such a clever debater that things soon got to the point where none of the religious scholars would tangle with Him in public any longer.

But the people loved Him! Soon they were following Jesus, by the hundreds and then by the thousands. And Jesus told them more and more about this new God Who asks for no religion at all, this genuine God, this God of love, and God’s perfect Kingdom, which Jesus always told them was at hand. Jesus talked endlessly about the Kingdom of God, or the Kingdom of Heaven; He use the terms interchangeably. But He clearly was not talking about either (a) some earthly monarchy, or (b) the afterlife, in any conventional sense. “Once Jesus was asked by the Pharisees when the kingdom of God was coming, and He answered, ‘The kingdom of God is not coming with things that can be observed, 21 nor will they say, “Look, here it is!” or “There it is!” For, in fact, the kingdom of God is within you’” (LK 17:20).

Aha, so there it is for us, in plain language. When we read Jesus’s words, not today but back then, when and where Jesus spoke those words, with all of us sitting on a Galilean hillside two thousand years ago, and with our only religious history one of Baal and Moloch and this recent, brief history of the Hebrew God that required only small and bearable sin-sacrifices of animals, we clearly can understand what Jesus is saying to us. This beautiful and charismatic Teacher does not practice any religion at all, not even the Hebrew religion, after all, does He? No, of course not. Because every religion, including even every religion in the year 2026, is fear- and shame-based, and clergy-ruled. No religion ever practiced on earth is only you and God! When Jesus prays, He goes off by Himself and talks with God alone, and he urges each of His followers to do the same. He says, “And whenever you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and at the street corners, so that they may be seen by others. Truly I tell you, they have received their reward. 6 But whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees in secret will reward you” (MT 6:6).

Jesus doesn’t make a big deal about sin, either, when He is talking to His followers, as in this example: “And some people were carrying to him a paralyzed man lying on a stretcher. When Jesus saw their faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Take heart, child; your sins are forgiven.’ 3 Then some of the scribes said to themselves, “This man is blaspheming.” 4 But Jesus, perceiving their thoughts, said, “Why do you think evil in your hearts? 5 For which is easier: to say, ‘Your sins are forgiven,’ or to say, ‘Stand up and walk’? 6 But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins”—he then said to the paralytic— “Stand up, take your bed, and go to your home.’ 7 And he stood up and went to his home” (MT 9:2-7).

Here is another example: “At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath; His disciples were hungry, and they began to pluck heads of grain and to eat. 2 When the Pharisees saw it, they said to Him, “Look, your disciples are doing what is not lawful to do on the Sabbath.” 3 He said to them, “Have you not read what David did when he and his companions were hungry? 4 How he entered the house of God, and they ate the bread of the Presence, which it was not lawful for him or his companions to eat, but only for the priests? 5 Or have you not read in the law that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and yet are guiltless? 6 I tell you, something greater than the temple is here. 7 But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire mercy and not sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the guiltless. 8 For the Son of Man is lord of the Sabbath” (MT 8:12 1-8).

We could go on, but you get the point. Religious rules, and even the very concept of sin, meant little, or I daresay they meant nothing to Jesus. In reading the Gospels closely, in HIS day, I am confident that by bringing “the Kingdom of God” on Earth, Jesus meant to dispense with religions altogether. And one thing should be said here emphatically: Jesus did not choose to die on the cross as a sacrifice for our sins! Nowhere in the Gospels does He tell us that was why He chose to die that way; and in fact, if He had died as a sacrifice, He would have been a pretty poor excuse for a sacrifice, since, after all, every animal sin-sacrifice stayed dead, while Jesus popped right back up, alive. And Jesus insisted to us in A Course in Miracles, which He channeled to us in the late nineteen-sixties, that, “I did not die for your sins. Those are on you.” No, Jesus’s real reason for dying such a public death, and then reanimating that already-decaying corpse three days later, was to prove to his followers that they were immortal. His rising was the whole point! “Ta-DA! See? I didn’t die, and neither will you.”

But what really mattered to Jesus was making certain that His teachings, and especially His elimination of the very concept of religions so humankind’s relationship with the Godhead could truly have a fresh start after the likes of Baal and Moloch, would be spread now over all the earth. He told His followers that the Holy Spirit would remain with them always, saying, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you” (JN 14:26). And then finally, after Jesus was resurrected and before His ascension, Jesus came to His disciples and said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you. And remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (MT 28:18-20).

For three hundred years, which is longer even than the United States has been a nation, Jesus’s followers had no religion, but instead the gentle and beautifully spiritual Way of Jesus spread to millions of eager new followers,  all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. It was all as Jesus had envisioned it, not a religion at all, but rather a spiritual movement that bountifully embraced many threads and ideas, and all of them were based in deep love and charity and immediate forgiveness of every wrong. There was persecution of The Way, but they were used to that. They all loved and blessed the soldiers who were martyring them. And among all the hundreds of thousands of burials in the Roman Catacombs in those first three hundred years, there is not a single depiction of a cross to be found. 

But then, the Roman Emperor Constantine, who is now known as Saint Constantine the Great, if you please, thought that he saw a cross depicted in the clouds one day, and he thought he heard a voice say, “By this sign you shall conquer.” Well, Constantine was really into conquering! So he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, and under his guidance, the religion of Roman Catholicism was born. This is in fact the same Roman Catholic religion that is still being practiced, to this day. Constantine’s religion needed to be structured as an old-style, fear- and guilt-based religion, and turning Jesus’s death on the cross into a sin-sacrifice filled that bill nicely. There were seven more ecumenical councils called during that first millennium A.D., but substantially it has been Constantine’s Catholicism that serves as the theological basis of all of the nearly fifty thousand versions of Christianity, and counting, that are still being practiced today.  

So then, what happened to the original Way of Jesus? Well, really, you know, it simply came to nothing. The Romans wiped out every follower of The Way who would not convert to the Christian religion.  I know about The Way only because I studied early Christian history in college. I continue to read the Gospels; but even the most strictly “fundamental” churches don’t seem to care much about how Jesus saw the world, nor how He intended His teachings to be received. No, for most modern Christians, Jesus’s primary value seems to be not that He taught us how to grow spiritually so beautifully, but just that He ‘saved” them. And I find that fact to be frankly amazing. When Jesus is everything, Christianity seems to want so little of Him beyond His name.

By the way, many people seem to think that John Lennon’s Imagine is a heretical song, but I urge you to read our frame verse today. My goodness, what John and Yoko describe here is almost literally, word-for-word, what the afterlife is like! When our beloved John Lennon arrived in the Summerland in 1980, he likely looked around, and smiled that little smile of his, and said something like, “Finally, here is someplace where they’ve got it right.”

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

 You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one
–John Lennon (1940-1980) & Yoko Ono, from “Imagine” (1971)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Believing vs. Knowing

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses.
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me,
And He talks with me, And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

I still can remember how it felt to be afraid to die. That was back when I was in college, and I only believed in an afterlife, but I put a lot of hope behind my belief; even though I had no way to know for sure whether my vague ideas about the afterlife might be grounded in anything  real. But being in that place of mere belief in vague ideas was so uncomfortable! I had no real idea of what an afterlife might look like, how it might feel, or where it might be; or even how I might travel from here to there. My belief was even vague enough that there was still a good chance that there could be nothing after death at all. I might just blink out like a light. So, I graduated from college, and I moved to Boston, and I found my job of the future, which was programming in Cobol an IBM 360 computer that took up one whole floor of a good-sized office building. (That computer had, parenthetically, just a fraction of the calculating power of your modern cellphone). Boston was a happen’ place in 1970, but I had very little money; so on weekends, I would browse used-books stores, looking for books about the afterlife. That was when I discovered a treasure-trove of books that had been written a half-century before, about the great deep-trance mediums whose wonderful talents had been forged in the reliable darkness that had been possible only before the advent of electric lighting.

It took me just a few quick years of avidly reading accounts of deep-trance-medium communications between the recently-dead and their grieving loved ones still on earth to begin to know for certain that we actually do survive our deaths. Come on! I am, to be sure, a skeptic by nature; but I am rationally persuadable! And during those few years right after college, I read hundreds of accounts – at least two hundred, and probably more – that had been received in southern England, in the Boston area, and in southern New York State, through deep-trance mediums, with the cheeky assistance of each medium’s chatty, disembodied handlers.It was amazing what could come through that way! The handlers would have your newly-dead loved ones right there with them, and sometimes those loved ones would even speak directly, using the body of the medium, who was always very deeply in trance.So, all those accounts were highly evidentiary, and often they were very richly detailed. And in all of those very different accounts, while each held varying small details, every communicating, newly-dead loved one described the same general post-death process of return, the same types of clothing, the same pastimes and vegetation, the same odd colors and quirky details, just clearly the very same kind of place. So, eventually, I nad to be convinced! Okay, so I finally did get it. Obviously, we do survive our deaths.

But knowing only that fact is still not enough, is it?  You go outside, and you look up at the vacant, ice-blue sky, and you wonder. If there truly is an afterlife, then where is it? You listen to the scientists, and they still, willfully, even today, are able to give you no comfort whatsoever. There is evidence of an afterlife, but where is it? How does it work, and how does it fit with this reality that we already know?? Oh, my dearly beloved friends! The gap that yawns between having a hopeful belief that there seems to be an afterlife waiting for us, somewhere, and knowing for certain that the evidence is so strong that, my gosh, there is absolutely a certain eternal life for us, is a canyon as wide as the skies!

For most afterlife researchers, learning as many details as we can find about the next stage, and how our transition to it works seems to have felt like enough. They studied the evidence, and then they taught it, and they helped to ease many people’s fears. But there were a few of us who realized decades ago that, yes, the afterlife is indeed real. And that tells us something meaningful, and indeed it tells us something very important, about the whole of reality itself! To understand what that something was, we became devotees of popular science magazines, and we soon discovered the work of Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of Quantum Mechanics. Our dear Max was a contemporary of the inimitable Albert Einstein. But he ventured beyond Einstein, and he encountered consciousness; and frankly, in their later lives, Planck’s discovery of the primacy of consciousness, with its attendant implications of the great and fundamental fact that consciousness underlies all of reality, seems to have driven our beloved Einstein a bit mad.

Consciousness is in fact the base of all reality. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. If that is not eventually determined to have been the greatest discovery of the twentieth century, then it certainly will be high on the list! But the materialist scientific community is so worried about inadvertently finding the Christian God that for the past century, they have been frantically searching for some way that our human brains might somehow generate consciousness. And that, my dear ones, is the rough equivalent of looking for a source of air inside our lungs.

Max Planck studied consciousness for much of the latter part of his life. In 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particles of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” And for his part, to his credit, toward the end of his own life, Albert Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And he added, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

We have recently written here about the primacy of consciousness in our reality, so we won’t say much more about it again today. But understanding all of this is key to your freeing yourself at last from every possible fear! Religious people make such a big deal of faith, but faith is very thin gruel indeed. Faith and hope are similar in effect, and they are both too easily shaken; as you know, if you “believe” in an afterlife, but then you look up at that empty sky. Jesus has a lot of respect for faith, if you can hold on to it despite every challenge to it! He says, “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you” (MT 17:20). Ah, but how does having faith compare with knowing the truth about the afterlife, dear Wayshower and Best Friend, our best-beloved Jesus? He says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (JN 8:31-32).

In my own experience, what knowing the whole truth really frees us from is every fear! Back when I was a few years out of college, and I had vanquished my fear of death with information, I still had my “but, where the heck is it?” confusion about where the afterlife might be, when clearly the skies were barren. However, as further years passed, and as Craig Hogan and I and others dove deeper into the insights of the earlier afterlife researchers who had also gone deeper, with Max Planck of course leading us all, we finally really did begin to get it. We saw how it all fit together, how the astral afterlife reality is able to be in fact nearly all of reality, and how mainstream scientists actually account for that fact. Well, wow. So, the afterlife is right here where we are, but it is simply at a higher vibration! I can recall the very first time I saw this fundamental truth explained this way, in a book written in the first part of the twentieth century. There, the dead communicator explained that dying is as simple as changing stations on a radio dial.

 First knowing all of that was amazing and wonderful. And lots of the facts were even fortifying other facts, so for a long time I really didn’t need to know more. I even realized one day that I had altogether lost not just my fear of death, but even every one of all my fears put together. I had always been afraid of the dark, but now I found that I could sit and work in the dark all evening long, and not mind that at all. But still, maybe fifteen years ago now, and probably at my Thomas’s prompting, I found that all the afterlife evidence had yet one more amazing thing to teach me.

As I have said elsewhere, our purpose in coming to earth has long since been made clear to us. That purpose is to use the earth’s negative energies, its many fears and angers and hatreds, to push against, so we can much better raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from the ishy low vibrations and toward ever more perfect love. That is the reason why each of us is even here on earth at all! And I have studied the canonical Gospel teachings of Jesus for my whole adult life, to the point where I nearly have them memorized. The more I study them, the more it strikes me that Jesus surely must have understood when He was on earth what consciousness is, and the role that it plays in all of reality. Of course, He could not even begin to explain modern scientific principles to the illiterate primitives that He was teaching, now, could He? So, Jesus used graceful euphemisms. He talked most often about the Kingdom of God, for example, saying that his teachings on love and forgiveness would bring the Kingdom of God on earth, and telling us that the Kingdom of God is within us. And when I read His teachings with what we know now about the role of consciousness as the core of all reality in mind, I am certain that Jesus was referring to consciousness when He talked about the Kingdom of God.

When I realized that the Gospel teachings of Jesus seemed to allow us to directly replace the words “Kingdom of God” with the word “consciousness”, I wondered whether those Gospel teachings would all by themselves be effective in raising people’s spiritual vibrations. So, I conducted a little experiment on close to a hundred unsuspecting souls: I offered a course that promised to raise people’s consciousness vibrations enough to make this their final necessary earth-lifetime. And what still amazes me is how rapidly this all so perfectly worked! Those who stuck with the simple course that I taught them, using only the canonical Gospel teachings of Jesus, raised their spiritual vibrations so efficiently and so amazingly well in just two, or something under three earth-years! I have no doubt at all that this was precisely what Jesus was about when He was on this earth.

So, my dear ones, here is what we have learned:

  • Merely having faith is not enough. Faith without facts is so fragile! I can still recall learning in the third grade how the Soviet conquerors had destroyed the religious faith of the children in all the countries they had lately conquered. First, the children were told to close their eyes and pray to God for candy. They did, and when they opened their eyes, there was no candy on their desks. So then, they were told to close their eyes again, and ask the State for candy. And this time, they opened their eyes to find a piece of candy on each desk. Just that easily, a whole Eastern Europe of fully persuaded little Communists was born.
  • Perfect truth drives out all fear. This is such an important fact! Every significant characteristic of the next stage of life is now objectively known from a number of independent sources, and this is true as well of the transition we make from here to there. Both scientific and religious leaders still retain felt needs to prevent these truths from becoming broadly known. They fear their own sad loss of status. But after a century of blockading these essential facts, all their alternative ideas are being exposed now as mere distracting nonsense.
  • Too many people have returned to earth repeatedly, and still not grown spiritually. Some estimates are that we live hundreds, or even thousands of pointless lifetimes on earth! Some followers of eastern spiritual practices call this “turning on the wheel”, this endlessly coming cluelessly back to earth to little purpose, and going nowhere. But now that we know how reality is constructed, and how our spiritual growth actually happens, it doesn’t have to be this way! Simply by following the Way of Jesus, anyone can achieve sufficient spiritual growth in just a few years’ time, and make this your last necessary earth-lifetime.

Because there was a time when I, too, only believed in a possible afterlife, I know that merely having faith that your life goes on is not remotely going to be enough for you now! There was a time when I had only the afterlife evidence, so I know that is not going to be enough for you, either. What you need is a way that you can carry me around, as an app perhaps, so you can ask me questions as they occur to you. Perhaps a lot of quick videos, too, that you can call up whenever you need more reassurance.  I want to make you feel as certain about your own eternal life as I now feel calmly sure about mine! And I think we’ve found a way. We are working on it now….

  1. He speaks, and the sound of His voice
    Is so sweet the birds hush their singing.
    And the melody that He gave to me
    Within my heart is ringing.

    And He walks with me,
    And He talks with me,
    And He tells me I am His own,
    And the joy we share as we tarry there
    None other has ever known.
    – Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Judgment Day

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know, and so I must go where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me, and no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way and, after the day, the darkness will hide me.

And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you I could learn to, with you what a new day,
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

For people brought up in one of the forty-five-thousand-plus versions of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s old-style Christian religion, the usual post-death judgment ritual is likely to be an amazing surprise. A dear friend of mine who has been reading this series of blog posts about the whole death process said to me last week, “Hey, be sure to talk about the life review!” Oh yes. We can’t forget to talk about the life review! Actually, when we compare the teachings of Jesus with what nearly all varieties of Christianity teach, and Christianity is the religion that is named after Jesus for heaven’s sake, there is not even much similarity at all. And the same problem arises when we try to compare the teachings of Christianity about death and the afterlife with what abundant and consistent communications from the dead actually confirm to us to be true about death and the afterlife. There is not much similarity between Christianity and the teachings of Jesus at all.

The problem is that the Christian religion was designed by a group of men being led by an ancient Roman Emperor, and all of them were living at a long-ago point in human history; so therefore, the modern religion is largely of their time and from their human point of view. Jesus, on the other hand, actually did come to us from out of the Godhead. And we even can understand now that what we experience as human consciousness is the base and substance of all reality. But, wow, I think that it even can be shown that Jesus’s teachings on raising humankind’s spiritual vibration from two thousand years ago also take the consciousness factor into account as well! Jesus’s teachings can be demonstrated to show that He was born two thousand years ago as a twenty-first-century man, or even a Man entirely outside of time. But every significant religion that I can find prior to the religion of the ancient Hebrews had a multiplicity of little godlets, if you will, to govern each major community event, seed time and harvest, perhaps birth and so on; and then eventually, there were more major gods, until we had Moloch, who demanded that every firstborn be thrown alive into his belly of fire. And then, even fallen gods. A devil, to rule over a burning hell.

The Hebrew tribes, who now are considered by many to have been the world’s first true monotheists, were also the first to worship a non-material god, a god without an idol. Their God was a much classier and more dignified guy who didn’t want human sacrifices; but just a few perfect lambs and heifers killed quietly as sin-offerings in their temples now would do. The modern religious era had begun!

But, the human world two thousand years ago was still pretty rough and primitive. And every religion is human-made. Jesus tells us as plainly as He can that He went to that cross by His own choice, and He told me that God actually had forbidden Him to do it; but He felt that He had to do it, because He had no other way to prove to the skeptical primitives of His day that they really were immortal, eternal beings, when it was their long custom to keep the bones of their dead around in bone-boxes, called ossuaries. Jesus insists to us that He never was a sin-offering! He never claims to have been any such thing in the Gospels. He says plainly in A Course in Miracles that He didn’t die for our sins, and He said it again just as plainly to me when my Thomas first took me to visit with Jesus in the astral plane in 2022. And anyway, if Jesus had been the ultimate sin-offering, ending the need for any more sin-offerings in the Hebrew Temple, then He likely would have been a defective sacrifice. All those sacrificed lambs and heifers stayed dead, but Jesus sprang back alive again.

I found all of this to be so confusing, and I became more and more distressed about

the sin question, so one day I just straight-out asked God to tell me how God sees human sin. In all my afterlife research, I never have found even the slightest bit of evidence of an actual fiery hell. And if a Satan exists, he would be like the shadow men, bitter and powerless. Perhaps even more so! Even the tiniest bit of light would be able to knock big, bad Satan out flat. I think I have told this story before in this space, but one morning soon after I asked God my sin question, I had a vivid vision just as I was waking. It was of our living room in Plymouth, back when we had toddlers, all pale blue and white and mahogany furniture, and the God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the long, white beard was sitting on that pale-blue-and-white-striped sofa. God was sitting forward, reaching out, chuckling, and playing with our little one-year-old, blond and curly-haired son, who was toddling about the room and giggling with God. He was holding a full blue plastic cup of orange juice with both of his little hands.

Well, of course you know what happened next. The juice spilled, the baby dropped his cup, and there was orange juice everywhere on that pale-blue carpet! So then, of course the baby dropped right onto his well-padded bottom and wailed. God stood up, laughing, reached for the baby, and cuddled him, snuggled him close in His Godly arms. God was telling me that this is how God sees human earthly sins.  Our sins are like the foolish little mistakes that our most-beloved baby makes as he is first beginning to grow on earth. Our sins are nothing to God. Or, as the voice of Jesus said, surprisingly, in Hid distinctive voice, close to my ear as I was thinking of this vision just the other day: “God is a softie.”

But Jesus is by no means a softie. There is nothing human in God, nothing but wisdom and love unbounded. But Jesus is, as they say, “Fully God and Fully Man”. We see that human side of Jesus in the Gospels primarily in His ability to feel all our righteous negative emotions, too, and to show those powerful and complicated human emotions other than God’s plain and simple, unbounded love. What about when Jesus chose to die a human death on the cross, and then to reanimate that dead and already moldering body, and to do all of this even against God’s will, just to be able to prove to the simple people around Him that human life is eternal? That was a fiercely loving thing that Jesus did for us all; but it was also a remarkably stubborn, willful, and extremely human-like act.

And then there was the time when Jesus just plain lost it at the sight of all that flagrant commerce being carried on in a house of worship, so people visiting the Temple in Jerusalem could purchase doves to sacrifice to God. “Then Jesus entered the Temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the Temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers, and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer”, but you are making it a den of robbers.’” (MT 21:12-14) Now, there you see a truly angry Man! And Jesus works diligently, even today, to maintain His ability to feel righteous anger, to feel the human tension between two opposite ends of the spiritual pole, between love and righteous rage. I know this only because it is my own cherished Thomas, my much-beloved spirit guide, who down through all the ages since Jesus’s first ascension has had the task of assisting Jesus in maintaining what they both call Jesus’s “balance”, helping Him to maintain His fragile human aspect.

So, what then can each of us expect is going to happen on our own eventual judgment day? How will that work? Will it be God who judges us, who basically turns out to be a complete cuddlebunny, a “softie”, as Jesus Himself refers to God, at the very top of the consciousness range, and therefore nothing but absolute love? With that kind of God, absolutely nothing but love, won’t everyone be let off with just a big hug? But what kind of learning would we get from that?

Okay, so then might our judge be Jesus? He seems to be fierce and ardent enough? Well, no. Jesus has no interest in presuming to judge anyone. He tells us that He came to us as our Teacher, and He insists that the Teacher looks now to the Students to do even greater spiritual works than He has done. (editorial comment: fat chance!) Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (JN 14:12-13).

So, if neither God nor Jesus is our post-death judge, who then will judge us after our deaths for any sins that we may have committed during our lives? Many of you already know the punchline to this pretty big joke on each of us. Our only post-death judge is ourselves. And what happens after our deaths is not really any kind of judgment, per se, of any of our specific actions or non-actions; but rather, it is an emotional review of all of the significant events of our lives, either from the beginning to the end of our life or from the end back to the beginning, and from the viewpoint of each of the people that we have affected in each of those situations. Since there is no time as such in the afterlife, these whole-life-reviews don’t seem to take especially long. But they can feel surprisingly devastating! That awkward girl in third grade that you humiliated that day in front of the whole class, because your mom had yelled at you for tracking in snow? You forgot the whole thing, but she then developed a stutter, and she had to have years of therapy. Or the girl you much later thought about marrying, but then you enlisted in the Marines instead. You never knew that your suddenly dumping her that way put her into such a depression that eventually she took her own life.

Or, what about a real-life example? My own father, an accountant, was a weekend drunk in his children’s early years, but he quit drinking cold-turkey when I was eleven. Then, decades after he had died in his late eighties, when I was testing mental mediums so I could find some that I could recommend, he would often show up at those readings and be accurately described by the mediums being tested, but he would always refuse to speak. Even more years later, he appeared at a mental medium reading that one of my daughters was having. All that he said to her was, “Will you please tell your mother and her sister that I am so sorry for messing up their childhoods.”

Now, I have never felt particularly messed-up myself, but each of us handles things differently. I seem to have pretty much floated through my early years, seeing things only as I wanted to see them, while my younger sister, on the other hand, tells me that our father’s weekend drunks made her withdrawn and miserable. But you can see how this kind of deep emotional experience of feeling during your life-review how the way you lived your life affected the lives of others, and especially those you loved most, would  give you the opportunity to reflect very deeply on, and to learn and grow spiritually from how you handled all the events of your life just ended! Nothing so simple as crime-and-punishment and done. But rather, deep emotions, trauma, turmoil, and deep spiritual learning. So, how can you best prepare yourself to face such a life review? Here are some ideas:

  • You right now can forgive everything you can think of that ever has happened to you in your life. Look, nothing that happens on this earth is real. We know that. So, forgive every wrong ever done to you right now, sincerely and from your heart! It doesn’t matter that the people you are forgiving don’t know that you are forgiving them. Forgiving others is the gift that you give to yourself.
  • You can forgive yourself. So, you were young and foolish once upon a time. You are aware of at least some of the things that you may have done then that might have harmed others emotionally. Spiritually. In some of the ways that eternally matter. So, call those people into your heart now and forgive yourself, deeply and sincerely, from your heart, as best you can. Forgiving yourself is so much harder than forgiving others! But do this in advance, sincerely and as best you can, because you know that you are going to need to do it once you get home.
  • You can reach out in love sincerely to people you may have slighted in your past. If you are able to picture who they are, even if you can no longer recall their names, then hold them in your mind, and in your heart, and love them. Reaching out with a phone call just would complicate things to no purpose, so it is probably best not to do that. But, my darling, hold them in your heart and pray for every good thing for them, in Jesus’s name.

My father was older than my mother in this lifetime, and he arrived home at least two decades before she did. With Thomas’s help, I visited him in the astral plane, where he had mind-built a house to share with her that was a precise copy of their home together on earth. But, the light was quite dim there. I really think that his distress over his life-review, and how he now knew that his weekend drunks had affected his family, had made him put himself into level two of the afterlife, the level just above the outer darkness punishment level. When my mother eventually arrived, however, she seems to have had a much more positive life review, and she drew my father gradually higher, to live with her at least at level three.

But you can see how this kind of life-review can be extremely useful, positive, and constructive. As each of us tries to grow spiritually from the events of each lifetime, we then can advance spiritually, my darlings, And it may not seem clear to you while you are here how important that is. But in our real lives, back at home, where we spend nearly all of our eternity, the joy of spiritual growty is everything!

And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you I could learn to, with you what a new day!
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

 

Terminal Lucidity

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I don’t know how to love him. What to do, how to move him.
I’ve been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself, I seem like someone else.

I don’t know how to take this. I don’t see why he moves me.
He’s a man. He’s just a man. And I’ve had so many men before.
In very many ways, He’s just one more.
Should I bring him down? Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love, Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this. What’s it all about?

Don’t you think it’s rather funny, I should be in this position.
I’m the one who’s always been So calm, so cool, no lover’s fool,
Running every show. He scares me so.

I never thought I’d come to this. What’s it all about?
Yet, if he said he loved me, I’d be lost. I’d be frightened.
I couldn’t cope, just couldn’t cope.
I’d turn my head. I’d back away. I wouldn’t want to know.
He scares me so. I want him so. I love him so.
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1970)

My dear friends, when a mere lifelong science hobbyist who has never taken an adult science course is able to explain a death-relate phenomenon that baffles the scientific community, it is time to rethink the way scientists have come to treat all scientific inquiry as limited by their imposed religion of atheism. What threw the once-sane discipline of mainstream scientific inquiry right off the rails a little over a century ago was an actual religion-like panic among the scientific governors, the heads of the leading universities’ physics departments, and also the major scientific journals.They were worried, perhaps mostly because of statements about the primacy of consciousness made by Max Planck, who had won the 1918 Nobel Prize as the father of quantum mechanics. They fretted that quantum physicists might be close to actually discovering God. So, the heads of the scientific community, who then considered, and still consider themselves to be the governors of all acceptable scientific inquiry, decided soon after the turn of the twentieth century that all scientific inquiry must now be matter-based. And furthermore, any new scientific discoveries must be testable and provable in exclusively material terms.They never have quite put all of that into writing for public consumption; but whatever their decision was, this has been its practical result.

As for the actual improvement of the pursuit of open-minded scientific inquiry, the result of this change in focus by the governors of the mainstream scientific community has been decidedly uneven. Whatever is actually material in nature has by now had a pretty good scientific going-over; but working scientists themselves tell us that they still cannot discover where life comes from. And their ongoing search for a source of consciousness inside the human brain likewise still keeps coming up goose-eggs. Outside that mainstream scientific cage, however, some wonderfully dead-on-true ideas are arising. For example, here is a scientist who is propounding an idea that my own research suggests is precisely right: Consciousness is in fact the base of all reality, just as Max Planck said it was almost a century ago! In fact, your own faithful blogger has of late become so disgusted by the fact that, almost sixty years after I proved to myself precisely what death is and how the afterlife works in just a few post-college years, all of that is still not common knowledge, that I am about to do a full-court press to try to make the truth readily available to all the world!

Take terminal lucidity, for example. Here is a long article from no less worthy a publication than the old gray lady herself, The New York Times, in which the author stumbles through the absolutely nonsensical materialist scientific perspective on a phenomenon that is very easily understood by anyone who knows anything at all about the natural death process. There is no woo-woo in this at all! As you will see if you read the linked article, terminal lucidity is the general term for the phenomenon of someone with an absolutely fried brain from Alzheimer’s or some other destructive brain disease suddenly becoming able to think normally, or nearly so, for a brief time shortly before death occurs. Obviously, with the gray matter of the patient’s brain destroyed, scientists assure us that this cannot conceivably happen! And yet, pretty commonly, it does happen. It seems to have occurred to no scientist on this earth to have studied the actual death process for insights into how it might happen; but I have studied the death process deeply and in detail. I can tell you how it likely happens, pretty much off the top of my head.

The beginning of the active death process involves what I think of as the un-velcroing of your internal energy body, which is now leaving, from your material body, which is dying and staying behind. I use the Velcro analogy because some of those who have been awake while this was happening to them have used this analogy to tell us how it feels; it doesn’t hurt, but it does feel funny. And it seems to start with the head, then happen with the fingers and the lower extremities, and it all proceeds toward the chest. So, sure! Once your energy body is even partially clear of your destroyed brain, you feel perfectly mentally healthy again!  And there are a number of reasons why your terminal lucidity might seem to fade as you get closer to death, the most likely of which might be either the wonderful distraction for you of the arrival of your deathbed visitors, close family that you have not seen since they went ahead of you long before, so of course you want to talk with them in your mind! Or else, there might be something about the further disengagement of the rest of your energy body from your material body, making you no longer able to operate your material body in order to speak through it so easily. But in any event, there you have a fully adequate explanation for the whole terminal lucidity phenomenon!

Another question that continues to stump the scientific community is how life began. And of course, the only possible explanation for the origin of life on earth is that consciousness is fundamental, and that life is a ubiquitous property of consciousness itself. This simple explanation of how life might then have gotten started, once that first spark of life hit fertile primary source chemicals, is as good as any. So, what then of plants? Might they be conscious? As I have said elsewhere in this long series of weekly blog posts, the evidence that green plants are conscious, and that they communicate with and support one another, is now beyond question. Materialist scientists for the most part continue to resist this notion, however. Their problem with it seems primarily to be that their experiments don’t yield sufficiently clean and readily replicable results.

And meanwhile, I still happily pursue my lifelong hobby of death and afterlife research. Perhaps the thing that surprises me most is just how much control each one of us actually is given over our own individual death process. Oh, my dear one, each one of us individually is so very deeply loved! My own mother was an independent sort, a very early fully liberated woman, a professional who ran the law department of a large insurance company until they had to force her to retire when she was 70 years old. And she very much loved being alive. When she was 88, she became very ill, and her doctors gave her no chance of survival; I think she had pneumonia, but I cannot recall now what it was. My sister and I took turns sitting beside her bed in the nursing home. Then, one evening when I took over from my sister, Mom woke up, she looked at me, and she told me that her parents, of course long-since passed, had just been there in her room. They had told her that it was time for her to go with them, but she had refused to go. Her mother had said, “Well then, you’d better take your medicine,” and they both had walked back out of the room. Hearing this confounded me! I had never heard of any dying person actually refusing to go with her deathbed visitors!

But what was truly amazing was what happened next. My mother defied all her doctors’ predictions, and she actually began to rapidly recover, so I flew home. Then, when I came back and visited her a few weeks later, she told me, looking rather smug about this, that she was going to live on for another five years.

I said, “You are? How do you know that?”

“The big tall man told me.”

I asked her to describe this “big tall man”, and she accurately described a sixth-level Being, long robe and all. She told me he had walked into her room shortly before I had arrived, and had said, “We have decided to give you five more years here”, and then he had walked out again.

I went right out of her room and quizzed everyone on that floor that I could find, and no one had seen anyone remotely looking like that Being, on that day or on any other day. They told me that my mother had never had any other visitors but my sister and me.

That Being was as good as his word. My mother lived to be 93, and then she died in her sleep. Their problem was solved! But my problem was not. I was plagued by the thought that she had lived for five years beyond her last planned exit point, and by then she had lost all her activities of daily living. She could no longer even hold a fork! I worried that the higher beings had allowed her to do that just to further educate me, this lifelong afterlife researcher, about one more fact: yes, you can indeed refuse to take your last planned exit, but it really is not a good idea. Using my own mother as an illustrative case had not been at all fair to my poor, dear mother!

Our first picture and our frame-verse this week both are topical for me at the moment. The picture, of course, is my mother. And the wonderful news, after that sixth-level dude had toyed with delaying her departure date as he did, is that after she finally transitioned, Mom turned out to be a fairly high-spiritual-vibration Being. Not surprising, given her light and lovely personality when she was on earth.Thanks to my Thomas, I have visited her in the astral plane a couple of times since her transition, while Thomas was with Jesus; but my mother is traveling widely now, just as she did during her early retirement years on earth. And traveling there is even a lot more fun than it is here, because there the sights can be truly amazing!

This frame-verse feels significant, too. Even though it comes from a Broadway show, it expresses pretty much the way it actually feels to meet the genuine Jesus in His third-level astral home-place. I was reminded of that yet again when I woke with a start just after three o’clock one recent early morning, with an overwhelming sense of just having been talking with Jesus, having heard His voice and seen His face. In the astral plane, conversations are nearly always by mind. But Jesus speaks with me, and also with Thomas, in spoken words, in English, in His somewhat musical, lightly accented voice; because He is trying hard now to preserve the human aspects of Himself. He is fully God and fully Man, as the saying goes. But at this point, He has become so spiritually elevated that maintaining any human aspects at all is an active struggle for Him. And the fresh, rich sense of Jesus around me was so strong when I awoke that night, having just been with Him, that even now some soft flavor of Him remains. But Jesus is moving now. Something is beginning. I am meeting with Him, and never remembering the substance of our meetings. I seem to be smiling a lot more, though. It really doesn’t even matter why.

I never thought I’d come to this. What’s it all about?
Yet, if he said he loved me, I’d be lost. I’d be frightened.
I couldn’t cope, just couldn’t cope.
I’d turn my head. I’d back away. I wouldn’t want to know.
He scares me so. I want him so. I love him so.
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1970)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Going Off-Track at Death

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!

 This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,
Age of Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius!
Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust, abounding.
No more falsehoods or derisions,
Golden living dreams of visions,
Mystic crystal revelation,
And the mind’s true liberation,
Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius!

 When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
– Galt MacDermot (1928-2018), Gerome Ragn (1935-1991), James Rado (1932-2022), from “Let the Sun Shine in” (1968)

We talked last week about the natural death that people have been able to expect for countless generations past, just as a commonplace. To help you put our conversation into perspective, I first began to study death back in the early Seventies, beginning with hundreds of wonderful old accounts of readings by deep-trance mediums that had been received around the turn of the twentieth century, and that I happened to find in Boston’s used-book stores. I must have come across those old books at first, I guess, by happenstance. I was just out of college and on my own, living cheaply with roommates and looking for something cheap to read, when I found those books that had been written by people who were studying and documenting the heyday of that much better form of mediumship that had been a sensation in Boston, New York, and London, back before and around the turn of the twentieth century, but that simply doesn’t happen now. Not since the advent of electric lighting. Because it takes too much time and patience to develop the kind of mediumship where the medium develops the ability to go into deep trance, and the medium’s guide then takes possession of the medium’s body, and with your (usually) newly-transitioned loved one right there with her, the guide can help your loved one answer your authenticating questions in deep and wonderful detail. Ah, those were the days!

That was back when I was afraid of death. It’s hard for me even to imagine feeling that way now! But I bought, and I avidly read every one of those books that I could find, and I was astounded to discover how similar to one another those accounts from the newly-dead all were. The easing of fears as death approached; the frequent near-recoveries just before death happened; the disappearance of entire bedroom walls when young people were dying, back in those days before antibiotics, so they could glimpse whole vast, gorgeous, unbelievable scenes of the place where they were going. Then the loved ones appearing in the upper corners of the room; and so on and on. Back then, I read many hundreds of individual descriptions of the dying process that had been received from people who had lately made that journey home, as I was first doing research and convincing myself that our universal human death is a natural transition to a consistent and believable, rather earth-like, and always love-drenched, afterlife. The Bible’s Old Testament tells us that we are formed of a material body from the matter of the earth, and a separate life element from God (see Genesis 2:7), which two parts will separate again at death. The material body then returns to the ground, and the spirit, the life element, returns to God (Ecclesiastes 12:7). And this in fact is just what happens.

It took me two, or perhaps three years of extreme post-college immersion in old books about turn-of-the-century mediums’ readings, and whatever else I could find about death, to at last sit back, sigh, and give up. I had begun that journey as a skeptic by nature. And this was The Big One, after all; I was not going to be fooled where an afterlife was concerned! I mean, really:  life extends after death? What were the odds likely to be about that? But after I had read what I reckoned then were more than two hundred different accounts of individual deaths that had been received in New York, Boston, and southern England, no duplicates, of passings that had happened over the course of maybe fifty years’ time, I had to admit finally that I had proven to myself that the afterlife absolutely had to be real. There was no question of believing in it any longer, but I was certain now that it actually was true. That whole experience had been like reading the accounts of two hundred people’s trips to, maybe, Fiji, for heaven’s sake! All the different accounts I had read had had their own individual idiosyncrasies, of course; but when I put them all together, they were all reporting the same basic after-death process, and the same big and little afterlife details. The same kinds of clothing, the same pastimes, the same scenery, the same everything. I never found even a single account that was an outlier; not even one account where, for example, there were harps and a throne room, or where people lived on clouds and wore wings. I am a skeptic, but I am also a realist. So I knew before I reached the age of thirty that, yes, there is an afterlife, and it seems to be both universal and remarkably earthlike, with actually even a few endearingly silly details.

One thing that struck me from the start was that the afterlife seemed not to be religious, although it definitely was spiritually well-ordered. Others who had studied the afterlife before me had named it all the astral plane, borrowing that term from Greek philosophy; and had learned that it is many-layered, based upon a love-gradient. Fascinating. And perhaps what most had struck me as my endless curiosity was pulling me into  making afterlife research my lifelong, all-consuming hobby is how much each Being is deeply respected, even treasured, as we separately voyage through our eternal existences. We don’t really respect the other eight billion people on earth with us now very much, to be frank. That is just too big a number! But there are many, many more of us who are not living on the earth right now, who are also part of the one great Mind, and who are, with us, as individually precious and unique as snowflakes, each of us is eternal and infinitely best-beloved. Now, please try to get your mind around that!

We have always known that for people to return home after their spirit bodies leave their material bodies and their silver cord breaks so their material bodies die – what they do at that moment is their own choice.  We think of their completing the natural process and rejoining long-lost family and friends is what everyone is going to want to do when they die. But for between five and something over twenty percent of those who begin the natural death process, their progression to the afterlife after their silver cord breaks is not immediate. People generally go off-track at death for one or more of these reasons:

  • Becoming earthbound. This is a catchall category for saying that you just didn’t stick with your deathbed visitors when they tried to take you home. What usually happens when people don’t accompany their visitors back into the afterlife area is that they stay near where they have died, and they mindlessly resume some repetitive task. This is why, for example, you might find some old New England house where a shade of a woman is often seen walking through a wall where a door used to be, long ago.
  • Religious terror. Some hospice workers tell us that the people most fearful at death are ardent Christians. These poor folks will tell those attending them that they haven’t been good enough to make it to heaven, and they are terrified of going to hell. Steeped in fear as they are, some who find themselves alive after death will decide that it seems safer to just stay put.
  • Having been taught to fear the normal death process. Some fundamentalist Christian preachers teach their flocks to fear and avoid at death anything that doesn’t comport with whatever their own religion teaches. When the concept of deathbed visitors coming to take people to the afterlife first entered general public awareness in the early part of the last century, some preachers began to tell their congregations that what might seem to be dead relatives are actually demons sent to lure them to hell. Dying people steeped in fears like these will refuse all contact with their dead loved ones, so many of them will end up earthbound.
  • Being too certain about what comes after death. There are thought-form places to which the most closed-minded people gravitate before they can complete their transitions, the most common of which reportedly are clouds with St. Peter’s Gates and a village surrounding a steepled church. That great astral traveler of our own generation, Bob Monroe, called these places “hollow heavens.” They are bo-o-oring, so those led astray by them are generally happy to be rescued.
  • Believing we are evil enough to go straight to hell. There is at least one thought-form hell into which some people’s fears might put them before they can manage to make it home. It’s a “hollow hell,” if you will. Those whose anxieties put them there generally call for help, and at once they are out of that illusion and safe with upper-level beings who can help them to finish their journey.
  • Being certain that death is extinction. Some people expect to blink out like a light. They are sure they will experience nothing after death, so nothing is just what they get! They might wander alone in a fog of nothing for eons.
  • Being begged by loved ones not to die. A medium visiting an old hospital was drawn to a section of it that was being rehabilitated, and there she found a forlorn little boy still lying in his hospital bed. It was estimated that he had died almost a century before. The last thing his distraught mother had said to him was, “Don’t go until I get back! Wait for me!” And there he was, still waiting. The kindest thing we can do for the dying is to give them permission to let go!
  • Being distracted by the grief of bedside mourners. Newly-dead people are as clueless about what to do next once their silver cord snaps and their bodies die as are infants fresh from the birth canal. Especially when they are dying young or unexpectedly, they can be so alarmed to see the sudden distress of their loved ones as their bodies die that they will often try to comfort these people they love. Doing this is pointless, since no one can see or hear them now; and these efforts can lower the newly-dead person’s spiritual vibration to the point where he or she can no longer see and follow those deathbed visitors. Thereupon, the newly-dead person can become stuck in place and outside of time until eventually rescuers come.
  • Being addicted to anything. Whether it’s alcohol, drugs, sex, or something else, being addicted to anything is a terrible idea! Many addicts will refuse to transition. No one can see them now, so this is their big chance to finally get their fill. It’s playtime! All they need is a body. So they will hang around bars and try to possess living drunks, or in alleys and try to possess living addicts. Reportedly, there even are great pig-piles of naked discarnates wearing astral bodies in various astral spots, all desperately trying to have sex with one another, but never successfully managing it.
  • Being killed in battle. They are in the thick of it, perhaps running across a battlefield, when a bullet kills their body. And they keep right on running! During the two World Wars, some British mediums were singled out by discarnate rescuers as being best able to help these deluded beings to realize that they had died in battle, and to help them then to spot the dead loved ones who had been trying to get their attention so they could take them home.
  • Being executed. I am adamantly against capital punishment. It is the worst kind of pollution there is! Someone is killed at what is not a planned exit point from this lifetime, and at the height of the worst possible negative emotions, including rage and fear, so he is extremely likely to range free as a deeply negative earthbound being who is now bent on terrible mischief. Penal executions are the spiritual equivalent of pouring gallons of arsenic into our public drinking water! Although efforts will be made to rescue these people, some will remain earthbound and dangerous for a very long time. I think it likely that many of the deeply evil, and therefore hopelessly weak but nevertheless troublesome Shadow Men that lurk in dark places trying to scare people are in fact the shades of executed criminals.
  • Preferring to be here rather than there. My wonderful Sixth-Level communicator friend, Mikey Morgan, who is a regular guest on my Seek Reality podcast, considers this to be a particular problem. The death process at our chosen exit points generally includes making our earth-bodies decrepit, after which our beloved dead appear to us in healthy new bodies. Of course, most of us will want to join them! I have never personally heard of anyone actually refusing to go with deathbed visitors because she preferred to stick around here, except for my own always willful and highly gregarious mother, who actually did refuse to leave when she was on her deathbed at about her age 88. Eventually, she was taken in her sleep at the age of 93. Problem solved!

Avoiding going off-track is easy! Simply put, you will be fine if you will:

  1. Raise your personal consciousness vibration. The more loving and less fearful we are, the easier and safer our death process will be. And closely following the Gospel teachings of Jesus is the most effective way to make rapid spiritual progress.
  2. Learn the truth. Death is less scary when we know in general terms what to expect, but it is important that we not become so fixed on details of what the evidence tells us that we might inadvertently create a Summerland hollow-heaven illusion of our own. Just happily know that you are going home and all is well, and you will be fine!
  3. Remain open-minded. The best way to approach our deaths is with nothing more than the certainty that we are about to enjoy an easy and happy homecoming. Then let it unfold!
  4. Ignore your living mourners until after you have completed your transition. Once you have returned home, there will be many things you can do to reassure and comfort them.
  5. Trust and follow your death-bed visitors. The natural death process is a passage back from this illusion to the greater reality that is our eternal home. And the trip will be quick and easy if we will just relax, trust, love, and let it happen!

A very popular guest on my thirteen-year-old weekly Seek Reality podcast is Father Nathan Castle. Father Nathan is a beautiful and very loving priest who was recruited many years ago by Spirit to do rescue work for people who had died traumatically and gone off-track at death, but who now felt more ready for the afterlife. Father Nathan’s books about these rescue cases of his are fascinating, and really delightful to read! Both he and Mikey Morgan, another popular and wonderful Seek Reality guest who is a Sixth-Level being and answers listeners’ afterlife questions from that level of understanding, tell us that the rescue work for those who are not yet quite back home is always ongoing, and almost everyone who goes off-track at death is soon rescued. For my part, my dear ones, I have of late been informally asking random people questions about their own knowledge and comfort concerning the next stage of life. What do they know about death? Are they at all afraid to die? And beyond my little circle of afterlife experts and instructors, all of whom of course know what is going on, and a few people who have taken courses that I’ve taught, I am sorry to say that I cannot find anyone who really more than believes or hopes that life goes on beyond death. Which is a terrible, a really shocking fact! Think of their anxieties, and their entirely unnecessary middle-of-the-night worries. My Thomas agrees with me. So, we are going to see whether we can figure out what we might be able to do to help to ease everybody’s fears….

When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
– Galt MacDermot (1928-2018), Gerome Ragn (1935-1991), James Rado (1932-2022), from “Let the Sun Shine in” (1968)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

How Death is Designed

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise him, for he is your health and salvation!
Come, all who hear; now to his temple draw near,
join me in glad adoration.

Praise to the Lord, above all things so wondrously reigning;
sheltering you under his wings, and so gently sustaining!
Have you not seen all that is needful has been
sent by his gracious ordaining?

Praise to the Lord, who will prosper your work and defend you;
surely his goodness and mercy shall daily attend you.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,if with his love he befriends you.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680) & Catherine Winkworth, English translator (1829-1878), from “Praise to the Lord” (1680

My beloved friends, when you see a silent tragedy happening, and you point that tragedy out to the people who are causing it, and who could so easily end it, but they ignore it, then what do you do? Well, in my case, I have tried reaching out to the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) and telling them that now almost 25% of the dying are going off-track because IANDS is allowing NDE experiencers to talk about NDEs as if they were actual deaths that had been reversed, and the events that happen in NDEs had been real events, so now many of the excited newly-dead folks are looking for that tunnel with a light. But IANDS has never responded to me. I have a little hunch that they really don’t care. Right now, on all the internet discussion sites, I can see from the little research I have done in the past week that the NDE folks have come to reign as “afterlife experts”. Sadly, in a land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king.

Well, then. Here, my dear ones, from a genuine afterlife expert, is the truth about Near-Death Experiences. Near-Death Experiences became relatively common only after about 1960, when people whose mateal bodies had suffered the sudden inability to support life for any reason could be rescued and given life-support to assist them in their survival until their bodies would be able to again support them without medical assistance. In the meantime, their internal energy body – the part of all of us that is in fact eternal – could leave that material body, still attached to it by the silver cord that kept the damaged material body alive; and with the guidance and support of their spirit guides, angels, or whoever was then in charge, they often would have adventures. Very often, the event that had rendered the NDE experiencer’s material body to be temporarily uninhabitable would have been sudden, so to get the experiencer out of harm’s way, his or her spirit guide would effect a rescue by opening a wormhole through layers of low-vibration reality right down to the material body and hoovering the experiencer right up to Level Three of the astral plane. This is the tunnel-and-a-light experience so often reported in NDEs. The only thing in any NDE that even remotely approaches actual death just proves my point that no NDE has anything even remotely to do with death is that some very long-duration NDEs will get to a point where a voice will say something like, “Stop! Go back! You are approaching the place where the dead are, and if you continue, your silver cord will break. It cannot be reattached, so you will die, and it is not your time to die.”

So then, my dear, you can be certain that any living person who is standing before you and saying the equivalent of, “I died and came back to life”, is lying to you. And you should feel free to tell him or her so! The astral plane feels amazingly different in every conceivable way from this earth-reality. The very atmosphere there is nothing but love, and even the colors are different because many of them are beyond the visible-light spectrum. So anyone who goes there during an NDE can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that, wow, they were for sure in the sho’ ‘nuff heaven, even if, technically, they did not actually die first. Well, maybe. But they did not in fact die. So, their NDE has nothing whatsoever to do with death. And when the general public is encouraged  by IANDS itself to use these folks’ NDEs as if what seems to happen in them were genuine death-and-afterlife experiences, and evidence of what likely happens to most folks in general, when it very clearly is none of that; then, Houston, we clearly have a big problem!

Death is a universal and entirely natural part of life, so the level of misinformation and fear that still surrounds it in the twenty-first century is horrifying! So much of what we are told by those we venerate as authorities is scary, silly, and entirely wrong. The scientific community still insists that the death of our bodies will be the death of our minds, while Christian clergymen assure us that after death we might end up in a fiery hell, or in a tortuous purgatory, or sitting around in a boring throne room, or sleeping until we hear an end-times trumpet. When the true information about what actually happens at and after death is so abundant now, and when so much of it has been readily available to us for more than a century, there is no excuse for spreading all this depressing misinformation and plain garbage NDE nonsense! The remainder of today’s post will discuss what is usual when any of us approaches a natural death. Then, next week, we will talk about what can go wrong, and what is going wrong now for the almost 25% of the dying who are being betrayed by the IANDS community.

We plan for our eventual deaths as part of the life-planning process. All the important events of our lives are planned by us in committee, before we are born, and we also plan two or three exit-points that our higher consciousness can choose to take if it determines that for what ever reason it is time for us to leave our current lifetime. Death at any time other than a planned exit point is possible, but it is rare. Almost never do we know at a conscious level that our higher minds have chosen to take an upcoming exit point; but often, after people have died, their loved ones will look back and notice that the decedent had spent the months before death wrapping up details, reconciling with people, finishing projects, settling debts, and in general trying to make things a little neater for those have left behind. This is true even if the death is by an accident, and not a slower illness.

The day of your death is meant to be the happiest and most beautiful day of your life. It’s the day when you are reunited with loved ones you may have thought you never would see again, the day you get to see and hug the guides who have helped you make the most of this lifetime, and the blessed day when you leave this illusion and return to the joy of your true home. For most people, death is every bit that just plain wonderful! But I have lately come to accept the fact that our willful cultural ignorance about death still means that a significant number of people are botching their well-planned deaths, and taking temporary detours to nowhere. We’ll be talking about some of their travails next week. First, though, let’s talk about what actually happens in the sort of well-planned death that most of us can look forward to enjoying.

You will need to keep an open mind! If you can approach your death knowing just in general terms that the process is going to be easy and happy, and that you will at every moment be cared for and supported by loved ones – if that is all that fills your mind as your death approaches – then you will manage it just fine. You might even be one of the fortunate ones, like my own mother, who simply fall asleep here and wake up there. But most of us are awake during at least some part of the death process. And some of what happens during your death is likely to feel odd or confusing to you, and to your survivors around the bed. So it can help if you know what to expect:

  • You will begin the process of separating from your body sometime in the hours before your death. We don’t know exactly when this begins, and it may be variable and personal to you; but for many, the first sign of this separation will be what seems to be a partial recovery. People who had been in a comas might wake up, and perhaps even sit up and speak normally. Those with dementia who might not have been coherent for years might converse with those around them. From your perspective as the person who is dying, it seems that in general both pain and fear are almost or altogether gone, and you feel better, and pretty much matter-of-fact about your dying now. The cause of all these changes is apparently the partial separation of your energy body – your mind, or perhaps your “soul” if you prefer – from the physical body that is about to die.
  • In the hours before death there will be deathbed visitors. The timing of this is highly variable. One or two of these people that we used to think were dead will sometimes appear to the dying person as much as a couple of weeks before the death; but more commonly, these visitors will first begin to appear in the last day or two. From your perspective as the dying person, this is an astonishing experience! You are in the midst of actively dying, not uncomfortable, and not really worried, but still unsure about what comes next; and then suddenly, Dad appears in an upper corner of the room, looking solid and in the prime of life. He starts speaking with you in your mind, and you respond to him mentally. He might come down into the room, or he might stay partially visible in an upper corner; he might be joined by other dead loved ones, all looking great, or even by dead pets. For nearly everyone, this sudden appearance of happy loved ones many years after their own deaths is so thrilling that we will mostly stop interacting with our living visitors. On occasion, too, some of the visitors in the room will also see these deathbed visitors, and they even might accompany the dying person at the start of the post-death journey. Dr. Raymond Moody’s book, Glimpses of Eternity, details this interesting phenomenon of shared-death experiences.
  • Actively dying is a gradual process. From the moment when you see your first deathbed visitor, you will know that you are in fact immortal, wow, son of a gun! So what happens next can be a lot of fun for those who are awake throughout their whole dying process. You might think of your earth-body as something like nested dolls. The outer layer or two will be dying now – the one composed of matter, and also perhaps the energy aura that defended you against negative entities while you were alive (although we aren’t sure about that). But the internal energy bodies that hold your earth-mind will survive your death, so your nested bodies must separate. People who have been awake while this was happening have said that it begins in the fingers and toes and progresses toward the torso, and it feels as if lots of tiny threads are breaking inside your body. I think of it as un-velcroing! The energy part of you that is leaving is un-velcroing from your physical body, and it gathers in your chest. It then leaves through the chest wall or through the top of the head, and it rises in the air above your body. People at the bedside can sometimes see it as what looks like a vague gray mist. Now that it is free of matter, its spiritual vibratory rate rises rapidly, so very soon the living can no longer see it. That gray mist is you! It contains your mind, your awareness, and your perspective, and by some accounts, just that process of leaving the body feels intensely pleasurable. In the air above your body, above and vibrating higher than the view of nearly everyone living, you re-form into a solid-seeming person, still attached to your body by a glowing umbilicus called the silver cord. You happily hug your deathbed visitors. All of you are solid, young, and beautiful.
  • Your material body’s actual death moment is the breaking of the silver cord. It is that attachment to your energy-self that has kept your material body living, so as soon as it breaks, your body’s heart stops. And your energy body, you in the air above, you feel terrific, young and vigorous and thrilled to be free of that old boat-anchor of a body; but living people you love may be around your bed, and very aware that your material body has just died. This is the single most dangerous moment of your entire existence! What you do now is going to be critical, as you will better understand next week.
  • It is essential that you accompany your deathbed visitors. We are as clueless when we emerge from our dying bodies as we were when we emerged from the birth-canal as babies, and this seems to be the reason why our planned deaths include deathbed visitors. Our visitors try to keep our attention, and they coax us to accompany them right away, since for us to remain with our mourners for long puts us at risk of becoming earthbound.

The next stage of life exists right where we are now, but just at a higher vibration. If you will think of your mind as a television set, and your death as simply changing channels, this will make a lot more sense to you. After your silver cord has broken, it will feel as if you are physically moving, but in reality you and those who accompany you are raising your personal vibrations from what we might call the physical channel to the slightly higher afterlife channel. This process does not involve a tunnel and a light! That commonplace from near-death experiences is instead just a rescue device for people unexpectedly out of their bodies, to protect their process of passing through the very negative lowest astral levels.

The way most people experience the transition from the earth plane to Level Three, the entry level of the astral plane, is as something like passing through a brief fog. The formerly solid room where you died becomes vague and vapory, and then it disappears; while in front of you, the fog is lifting to reveal a gorgeous and intensely colored but solid and amazingly earthlike new world. There are a few afterlife channels below it, and many more vibrationally above it, all existing pretty much where we are now; and the Summerland where our families congregate to welcome us back home is gorgeous, and it is enormous beyond our ability to adequately imagine or describe it. From your perspective, having just dropped your material body and been reunited with loved ones you thought you had lost, you now find yourself suddenly young and beautiful and standing on solid ground in earth-like surroundings more gorgeous by far than anything that exists on earth. What may be most surprising is the fact that there is nothing but love and joy in the very air you breathe! And the pure white light that illumines this place so completely that there are no shadows feels like love beyond your ability even to adequately express it. You truly are in heaven now! And for most new arrivals, the shock of joy that comes with this realization can make us need to simply sit down for a while, and look around as we take it all in.

 Jesus is vibrating at this point even above the Godhead level, but He chooses to remain accessible to everyone who wants to meet Him as soon as they come home. So, little pro-tip here, my dear ones: as soon as you arrive back in the astral plane, be sure to ask to be taken to the real Jesus, and that will be done for you. We are told that when “God” or “Jesus” appears in an NDE, that is always the experiencer’s guide or angel, just playing the part for the experiencer’s edification. But the Jesus that you can be taken to visit after your death will be the genuine Lord Jesus Himself.

Your death was planned even before you were born to be an easy and joyous return to your genuine eternal life. Knowing this makes even more tragic the fact that because our culture is so ignorant and fearful, dying today carries many risks of which you will need to be aware so you can better guard against them; and now added to those risks is the terrible and entirely unnecessary risk of being led astray by the entire near-death industry. Stay tuned….

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Near-Death’s Travesties and Lies

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

 “The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.”
       – Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) from Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

If you ever have Googled yourself, then perhaps you can imagine how surprised I was when I tried that, just a few days ago, for the first time in my life. My reason was a practical one. Since I am in the process of publishing three books, and the publisher has me working with a publicity team, the first thing those lovely people said to me was that I had to get my public life together. They told me it was ridiculous that I have a podcast life, a blog life, a Facebook life, a books life, and soon a Praxis many-languages life, all public faces, and none of them is linked to any of the others. I had never even seen my Facebook life, at least not once in more than a decade; but the woman who manages that one does it very well indeed (55,000 people follow me there, as opposed to fewer than 5000 who read this blog). So, we are going to hire her now to help us pull together and manage all these many separate me’s. There is also an Instagram me, by the way, but we cannot even discover who runs that! Now, in writing this blog, I often have Googled experts on various things, and I have found their pictures at various ages spread across the top of the page. Their accomplishments would be interspersed and just below, and their biographical information would be down the right side. And, amazingly, there I also was! Someone had even made me Google-ready. However, what I also found prominently displayed was a link to an article on Reddit.com, whatever that might be, entitled, “Can No Longer Recommend Roberta Grimes For Afterlife Research”.

When I followed the link, I found a discussion-board for Near-Death Experiences. The article itself was nonsense, some fellow saying that Roberta Grimes had loved NDEs, but then I had inexplicably turned against NDEs, so now he refused to follow me. I responded to that article with a comment explaining what NDEs actually are, and especially the fact that they are not afterlife evidence. But having someone who had been attacked by name on their website unexpectedly respond with the truth seemed to horrify those Reddit.com moderators. No, their rules required that I must say that “I believe” this-or-that. I could not state that anything was true or false. Oh please! Here, this fellow had been allowed to list a whole string of lies about me, stating my actual name but not his! How fair was that?Belief has nothing to do with the evidence-based truth, my very dear but completely deluded Reddit friends. It is because of this habit of theirs that NDE-ers’ have adopted of so completely confusing beliefs with the truth which by now has allowed these NDE “believers” to so infiltrate and befoul the essential field of evidence-based afterlife education that we are reliably told by those not in bodies that just very ecently, almost 25% of the people who die normal, planned deaths on earth are not transitioning normally to the afterlife anymore, but instead they are going off-track at their deaths. FOR SHAME, all you irresponsible NDE-pushers! You are causing such tremendous harm!

I apologize, my dear and lovely blog-post readers, but we must talk about this, here and now, and apparently very emphatically. Based upon my fifty years of extensive afterlife research, and based upon the evidence provided within many Near-Death Experiences themselves: Near-Death Experiences never involve any form whatsoever of actual death! The problem is simply that when Dr. Raymond Moody named those newly-discovered phenomena in his 1975 book, Life After Life, he gave them a very confusing name. But if someone is standing before you now, and telling you his or her near-death tale, then there never was even an instant of time when that person ever was in fact briefly dead. It turns out, my dear ones, that actual death is a clearly black-and-white event. Why are we so certain about this? Here are some of the reasons why:

  • Your visible material body is attached to your non-material, internal, spiritual body by what is called a silver cord. Many people actually can see that silver cord in dim light as a thin, shimmery, silver-blue strip. The “silver cord” is first named in the Bible’s Old Testament, at Ecclesiastes 12:16. We are told even there that when it is “snapped”, that is all she wrote. There is no un-snapping it. Your material body is right then immediately and permanently as dead as a doornail.
  • In some of the most extensive Near-Death Experiences, the experiencer comes to a place where a voice says, “Turn back! You are approaching the place where the dead are. If you continue, your silver cord will break, and it cannot be reattached, so you will die.” This phenomenon is so well-documented of NDE-ers being told to turn back when they reach the edge of “where the dead are”, and it is so reliably known by researchers, that everyone who claims to have studied NDE phenomena must have heard of it. And it tells us conclusively that NDEs cannot be excursions to the place where the dead actually are. It insists to us that “near-death” is not actual death, and that death is always a one-way trip!
  • The NDE tunnel with a light is a rescue device. In all the afterlife research that I had done prior to 1975, which was the bulk of my in-depth afterlife studies, I never had seen a single instance of the tunnel that ends in a light until I read Dr. Moody’s Life After Life in 1975. The very lowest-vibration levels of the astral plane are negative. So, when someone is unexpectedly out of his material body on earth, his guides would be likely to hoover him up into a wormhole that conveys him directly to beautiful Level Three of the astral plane.
  • Each Near-Death Experience is peculiar, aberrant, and unique. While on the other hand, planned experiences of dying on earth are generally remarkably the same. The astral plane contains our afterlife, which in fact is our eternal home, and it includes a great deal more besides. That astral plane is precisely where we are, but at a slightly higher vibration: think of your mind as a TV set, now tuned to the vibratory level of this earth; then think of the astral plane as a couple of “channels” higher in vibration. Many of us astral travel easily out of body while our material bodies sleep, always tethered to those mateial bodies by our silver cords, so most NDEs happen in the astral as well. The overall look and feel of the astral plane is so very different from the earth that it is easy for NDE-ers to imagine that they have died briefly, and then have come back to life. But of course, that does not make it true!
  • There is no afterlife hell. And yet, about one in seven NDEs is reported to be negative, or even to feature a fiery hell. A NDE experiencer who finds himself in “hell” can simply cry out, and at once he is out of that illusion; but of course, that does not alter the fact that anyone who thinks that NDEs have anything to do with the genuine afterlife now believes that there must be a genuine hell. There is not. What does exist is an “outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth”, just as Jesus very well described it (see MT 8:12). But only we can put ourselves in the outer darkness, by allowing our spiritual vibration to fall too low. We will have to be rescued, if we wind up there; but of course, NDEs have nothing to do with actual death, so they can tell us nothing whatsoever about any of these afterlife details.

Soon after the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) was formed in 1978, and some of its earliest members were insisting that they had briefly died and then come back to life, so their Near-Death Experiences had in fact been trips to the genuine afterlife, I could see the potential developing for some genuine disasters! Craig Hogan and I had been working hard to educate people about what was going to happen at their actual deaths, and now here came these NDE-ers, spewing their confusing nonsense! I spent time back then with Raymond Moody, including one delightful afterlife conference dinner. Dr. Moody is the author who first coined the in artful and imprecise term “Near-Death Experience”; and clearly, Dr. Moody knew back then, back thirty years ago, that no near-death experiencer ever enters the actual afterlife. That was perfectly clear to him then, back when we all were still attending afterlife conferences together. I also corresponded at the time with the IANDS leadership team about the worrisome fact that some of their members were claiming they had died and come back to life. They assured me that, Oh no! They never would support claims of anyone’s having come back from the dead! But indeed, reports now are that IANDS has supported “I died, and this is what I learned” reports at their conventions. So now, IANDS shares in the shame, and in the blame.   

Near-Death Experiences can happen whenever your body is briefly unable to adequately sustain its life, so it may be on mechanical life-support, or also it might not be. Whatever its situation, during the time when your material body cannot properly sustain itself, your spirit team might take your spirit body on an adventure, most likely into the gigantic astral plane, and still securely connected to your material body on the earth-plane by that silver cord. Your healthy silver cord while you are in your prime is incredibly stretchy! It will allow your internal energy body to safely travel to the edge of this universe, if you spirit guide feels inclined to assist in such a very long-distance adventure.

I should mention, too, the very important fact that what happens during your NDE is generally meant to be between you and your spirit-guidance team, and is meant for your own spiritual edification. You can see a great many things during your NDE, and meet and talk with some truly amazing people. Please understand, however, that we are  firmly told that neither the genuine God nor the genuine Jesus ever appears in any Near-Death Experience. If either religious figure is seen, it is always played by a member of your own spiritual guidance team. God is a spirit-Being anyway, and entirely non-material. I can’t say this for certain, but it is my understanding that God never appears to anyone anywhere as a physical Being. And Jesus reportedly disdains NDEs, but here is a tip for you, my dear one: Jesus does very lovingly greet newcomers to the afterlife who want to met Him. As soon as you arrive home, simply ask to meet the genuine Jesus. The Being you meet then will be the real Jesus, as you will know right away by His amazingly high and strong personal energy vibration; and you will be in for an extraordinary experience of very gentle and highly personal love and light.

But, what can we do about the horrible fact that the NDE movement has apparently so carelessly, and entirely without regard for the countless people they are harming, destroyed all our efforts to educate the world about the beautiful natural-death process? ALMOST TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of people who die natural, planned deaths on earth now go off-track at death! And before this foolish obsession with NDEs, which have nothing whatsoever to do with death, that simply was never happening! There is a one in four chance now that among those off-track, newly-dead souls is your own grandmother, my dear one. Your brother. Your child. People who go off-track this way generally end up in some illusory place.  On a fake cloud, perhaps, with other off-track souls who are strangers to them, and beside fake St. Peter’s Gates that never open. Or they might be drawn to a dim little fake village built around a steepled church that is having a perpetual bake sale. There are a number of these what are called “hollow heavens”, apparently mind-created by deluded dead folks long ago, and now still out there somewhere as traps that lure the off-track newly-dead. They sound unbelievably creepy, even frightening to me! Elevated beings not in bodies are tirelessly working right now to rescue each of these loved ones who have been drawn off-track on the journey home. But I could write a whole new post about why theirs is such a difficult task, with these dead people already so confused and alarmed! I grieve, and I pray for our beloveds in transition, who should have been protected from this completely irresponsible IANDS-sown confusion. But they were not. It truly is incredible to me how feckless these supposed experts can be.

All that you and I can do now is to try our very best to protect the ones we love with a solid afterlife education. The blog links in the paragraph below are seven years old, because back then I was posting far more often about death and the afterlife; whereas now, my interest tends more toward spiritual matters. And some of those old posts’ links, sad to say, have rotted! But because I never read NDE nonsense, the information they contain remains as good as gold.

The actual death process is amazingly consistent over time and across cultures, as are the details of the afterlife to which all of us will soon return to live our eternal lives. And thanks to the fact that before NDEs became a thing, beginning in 1975, the genuine death and afterlife evidence was both abundant and consistent, there is such a detailed consensus now about what happens at and after death that the truth is readily accessible. Fifteen years ago, I wrote the book on death, where I stressed the fact that, wow, our lives are eternal. Then, I established, our wonderful friend Dr. R Craig Hogan and I share the cost of, and he maintains what is the definitive death-and-the-afterlife website, which is seekreality.com. And we are in the process of translating our death-and-afterlife books into as many languages as possible! But, oh my dear ones, far above  anything else, please keep your mind free of NDE distractions. Don’t risk suffering even a moment’s delay on your journey to our joyous eternal home!

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
– Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) from Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

 

 

(Most photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Heretical Cleavages

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, See his banners go!

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
At the sign of triumph, Satan’s host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers, On to victory.

Hell’s foundations quiver At the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices, Loud your anthems raise.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

I wrote The Fun of Dying in 2010, and as part of doing that, just out of curiosity, I asked my  friend Mr. Google how many different versions of Christianity there might be in the world at that point. I was guessing, you know, that there could be as many as, gosh, five or six hundred different kinds of Christianity? It was, after all, fully two thousand years after the Prince of Peace had last walked on earth. But then, I choked and I spit my coffee. Omigod. There were, even back then, which was sixteen years ago now, reported to be an amazing ten thousand versions of Christianity in existence! I found that to be plain unbelievable! What, Jesus taught nothing but love and forgiveness, and here were His followers, squabbling over what must be, given that incredible number, every little tiniest bit of nonsense disagreement? But, if you think that discovering sixteen years ago that there were then ten thousand versions of Christianity was shocking, just have a Google at what that same number is now, just sixteen more years farther on. Depending, I guess, on my Google-buddy’s degree of sulkiness at any given moment, he will claim either that there are forty thousand, or there are fully forty-five thousand different Christian sects today.

Some of these tens of thousands of splinters of Christianity are enormously large. About half of the world’s 2.3 billion Christians are Roman Catholic, for example. Many others, of course, are the size of a single small church building. The differences in teachings, in doctrine, and in practice among these endless myriad churches, which might even stand side by side around the self-same village green, are often so minuscule that you would need a magnifying glass to find them. And Christians’ pious notion that it is super-okay for the followers of Jesus to indignantly break up and never speak to one another again over trivial differences in beliefs and in worship practice, and to heck with whatever Jesus might think about it, is a very ancient one!

The first of these many, and appalling cleavages among Christian religious sects was a big deal, and it was nasty. Two co-equal ruling prelates, one Roman and one Byzantine, just indignantly split and excommunicated one another, which means that they put one another into the fires of hell. Their quarrel came to be known as the Great East-West Schism. A thousand years after the crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, there were two powerful Christian Prelates in the world. One was in the East, the patriarch of Constantinople, Michael Cerularius; and one was in the West, Pope Leo IX in Rome. Their two church centers were far apart geographically, and, oh boy howdy, were their doctrinal differences ever more than worthy, at least in their own eyes, of utter church warfare. The indignant mutual excommunications by the pope and the patriarch in 1054 were not lifted until 1965, when Pope Paul VI and Patriarch Athenagoras I, following their historic meeting in Jerusalem in 1964, at last presided over simultaneous ceremonies that revoked the excommunication decrees that had been pronounced a thousand years before. By that point, of course, Western Christianity, and the Pope’s authority, had been considerably weakened by the Protestant Reformation of the Sixteenth Century.  

But in retrospect, it was that first Great Schism that made of Christianity what in fact it is now, not a rich and flavorfully loving and holy soup of which the whole world could partake, and of which our beloved Jesus would certainly approve; but rather, an appalling bowl full of forty-odd thousand pellets of varying sizes, each of which is inscribed with its own set of minutely varying dogmas and beliefs. And nearly all of those strongly-espoused dogmas and beliefs which caused the Great Schism, and many more schisms thereafter, were about church governance, and specifically about the fact that the Pope was making decisions and issuing decrees without first consulting his Eastern church counterpart. In the end, the worst of the disagreements which caused that first Great Schism came down to whether the procession of the Holy Spirit was only from the Father, or equally from the Father and the Son, since the Roman churches, without consulting the East, had added “and the Son” (Latin: Filioque) to the Nicene Creed. The Eastern churches had also resented the Roman enforcement of clerical celibacy, the limitation of the right of confirmation to just the bishops, and the use of unleavened bread in the Eucharist. All, as you can see, were mere worship and governance details, and not core theological issues at all; and I would argue that this holds true even for the precise wording of the Nicene Creed. Would the Jesus that we know and so completely love have cared at all about any of these stupid details? Still, it was way back then that the precedent of easy cleavage of the Christian Church over trivial matters was set, and it was thereafter endlessly repeated. Authority in the Christian religion came to be accepted as coming not from God at all, nor even from Jesus, but from whomever each Christian sect’s group of followers was accepting as its infallible human rulers; and it was then, and still is today, primarily about rituals and dogmas, and not about what its first spiritual Founders taught. Think about that!  Do Christians really think it is just fine that their religion is based in human ideas, and it is fear-based rather than built with reference to the teachings of Jesus, and therefore love-based??

The final sentence in the paragraph above is appalling, when you read it over again and really think about it. The Christian religion bears the name of Jesus, so wouldn’t you expect it to at least attempt to follow His genuine teachings, even two thousand years later? But that is actually not at all the case! Catholic Churches never freshly dig into the meat of what Jesus taught, in order to consider how the Church’s teachings might be running afoul of those most sacred words; and this is true, too, of even many Protestant Churches. Catchy phrases that were taken from the Gospels, usually many hundreds of years ago, are read in many churches over and over again, year after year, as if they are whole and sufficient, even if they are by now altogether wrong.

Let’s look now at just a few of the things that a by now sadly far off-track modern Christianity teaches, that even a cursory reading of the Gospels, a genuine love of God and God’s Son, and perhaps a bit of common sense will altogether refute. My dear one, I grew up as a very earnest church-child, eager to learn as much as I could and then planning to become a minister! My college major was early Christian history. But the more I ever tried to question anything at all, the more I came to understand that the religion I back then so much adored was a million confusingly fearful and utterly thoughtless miles wide, and barely a tissue’s thickness deep. Here are just three examples of this problem with some of Christianity’s deepest core teachings:

  • Jesus Died for Your Sins. During the Lord’s earthly lifetime as Jesus, His Jewish contemporaries were still sacrificing blemish-free animals as sin-offerings in their Temple in Jerusalem. When Jesus offered Himself to be crucified, it was just so He could then rise from the dead as a way to prove to us that our lives, too, were eternal; His stunt was not a sin-sacrifice. But with  that Jewish sin-sacrifice background, it was not much of a stretch for some of those who later followed His Way to seize on the idea that Jesus had been the pure and ultimate sin-sacrifice! Yup! That must be just what He was! The Roman Emperor Constantine seized on that idea at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 C.E., and he made it central to the Christian religion that he was building there. It was perfect! Especially because it created lots of guilt in the faithful to better lock people into those pews. There were problems with it, though. Traditional Jewish sin offerings were supposed to stay dead, for one thing. And think about what it says about both God and Jesus! God insists that you and I learn to forgive“Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times” (MT 18:21). God insists that we forgive everyone, but God cannot forgive us at all unless God gets to enjoy watching God’s own beloved Son being horribly murdered? Come on! What kind of a disgusting pig is God, anyway? And what does this teaching say about Jesus? He came to us as the greatest spiritual teacher of them all, but His most important role was just to stay perfectly pure, and then to die on that cross for God’s enjoyment? The whole notion that Jesus died as a sin-sacrifice is both horrifying and ridiculous on its face. Moreover, in A Course in Miracles, which Jesus channeled to us in the Nineteen-Sixties, He tells us flat-out, “I didn’t die for your sins. Those are on you.”
  • God Judges You. As a personal certainty, I can assure you as a matter of absolute fact that God does not judge you. Never. No matter what you do. In all my fifty years of afterlife studies, I have never found a single bit of genuine afterlife evidence of God’s ever judging anyone. No, your afterlife judge is far scarier than God as a judge would be, my dear one, because you in particular are God’s best-beloved child, and God is the soul of very deep compassion. No, your true afterlife judge will be yourself. Now, I do understand that there are near-death experiencers who have had vivid experiences of having been judged during their NDEs by a physical God or Jesus, on a throne or wherever, or by Who-Else-Have-You. My dear friend, every NDE is just an out-of-body trip, usually into the astral plane, which is right where we are now, but at a slightly higher vibration. Whatever happens in an NDE is a kind of morality play put on for teaching purposes by the experiencer’s own guides. NDEs cannot involve meetings with the genuine God, since God is not a material Being, and we are told that God never appears to anyone, anywhere, wearing a body. My Thomas tells me that the genuine Jesus never appears in NDEs, either, but yes, your own spirit guide might take on the appearance of Jesus in an NDE, if your guide thinks that doing that will aid in your learning. But when you go home, my dear one, your only judge during your life-review there will be yourself.
  • Accept Jesus as Your Saviour, or You Will Land In the Fires of Hell. Wow, here is another false Christian teaching that is meant to instill terror in the faithful! My beloved friend, there is no fiery hell. It simply does not exist. Jesus did talk while He was teaching on earth about the risk of winding up in Gehenna if you don’t shape up, and He really nailed His description of what that would be like! Gehenna was a valley just outside Jerusalem where trash was burned in Jesus’s day, although in earlier times they also did some appalling things in Gehenna, like sacrificing firstborn royal children. But what Gehenna would have made Jesus think of during His time on earth as Jesus, would have been the lowest level of the astral plane that is our eternal home, what Jesus referred to in the Gospels as “the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). This is the true punishment level of our home-place, and only we can put ourselves there if we allow our spiritual vibration to fall low enough; and it is indeed cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting, with small fires here and there, so it looks and feels very much the way that Gehenna in Jesus’s time on earth would have looked and smelled at night. You can’t get out on your own once you land there, but others have to rescue you; and those rescue efforts are constantly ongoing.

We could go on, of course, to talk about a few small modern-day issues that even now continue to further cleave Christianity, like the misogynistic Apostle Paul’s obsession with the notion that women should not be allowed to speak in church. Any careful reader of the Gospels who sees there how Jesus treated women would know that Jesus would certainly not have agreed with Paul’s idea! Or, what about the Catholic Church’s ongoing insistence that its clergy must be celibate. How many children down through the ages have been molested by the men that they have most trusted, because of that human-made Church-rule? But, suffice it to say, my beloved friend, that Jesus would not, and indeed He clearly does not look with favor upon modern Christianity. When my Thomas took me to visit with Jesus a number of times in the spring of 2022, beside His river in the astral plane, where Jesus enjoys His peaceful views, his tame herd of deer, and His sparkling fish that you can feed with seeds that simply appear in your hand. There Jesus and I talked endlessly between His visits with the newly-transitioned people who would arrive in little groups to be greeted by Him, Jesus would not, of course, say outright that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity is not anything remotely like what He would have designed for His followers. And when you are talking with Jesus, my dear one, His powerful spiritual energy is one extremely high and uniform hum, and always too close to you, even though He politely tones it down by a lot for you. But because of His overwhelming energetic presence, you never for a moment forget who He is, and you don’t, you really can’t ask Him any question that is even remotely personal, such as, “Are You annoyed about the way they have splintered Christianity into forty-five thousand different versions, over basically nothing, Sir? Um, Lord Jesus?”

No, you cannot ask Jesus such a personal question! Instead, what you can do, and with all your heart, is whatever Jesus asks you to do. And what He had asked me to do, a few years before, was to channel two simple books for people who want to follow His spiritual teachings, and no longer practice the Emperor Constantine’s very different religion. And then, as people begin gradually to find the religion less and less satisfying,  we might help them to build for Jesus again His own Way.  So that is what Thomas and I are beginning to do for Him now. Liberating Jesus and The Fun of Loving Jesus are Jesus’s books, to be republished together in the fall as The Joy of Living Jesus’s Way. If all goes well, that joint book will be published both as a paper book and as an audio book, and in a half-dozen languages beyond English. Thomas visits Jesus every night, while I sleep. He tells me that when he lately told Jesus all the things that we are planning now, so we can at last give our Wayshower and Best Friend back His Way, just as he has most wanted it to be, Jesus threw a little more food to His fish. And then He smiled.  

Like a mighty army Moves the Church of God;
Brothers, we are treading Where the Saints have trod.
We are not divided; All one body we:
One in hope and doctrine, One in charity.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Onward, then, ye people; Join our happy throng.
Blend with ours your voices In the triumph song:

Glory, laud, and honor Unto Christ, the King.
This through countless ages Men and angels sing.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

 

 

(Most photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Your Last Necessary Earth-Lifetime

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I don’t know how to love Him. What to do, how to move Him.
I’ve been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself, I seem like someone else.

I don’t know how to take this. I don’t see why He moves me.
He’s a man. He’s just a man. And I’ve had so many men before.
In very many ways, He’s just one more.
Should I bring Him down? Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love, Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this. What’s it all about?

Don’t you think it’s rather funny, I should be in this position.
I’m the one who’s always been So calm, so cool, no lover’s fool,
Running every show. He scares me so.
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1970)

My very dear friend, I have come to realize only now, as I near the end of this very brief earth-lifetime, that I have spent my time here living an intense love for the genuine Jesus. Oh, I know that we all love Jesus! Yes, of course. Loving Jesus is church-sanctioned, to the extent that perhaps it is even church-mandated; and I do understand that. But the Jesus that I have come to know is charismatic the way the very young Elvis and all four of the early Beatles put together were, wow, so charismatic! And with Jesus, His charisma is even much more than we recall the charisma of those rock icons ever to have been, even in their glorious heydays. Jesus radiates light. He speaks in rainbows and laughter and tears and great joy; He is everything that the most star-struck teenage girls ever have dreamed of, only even so very much greater than that. Oh yes, I can fully understand now why, when Jesus was teaching while He wore a body on earth, the crowds soon were followed Him, day and night, all over those Galilean hills, by the tens of thousands, and by the hundreds of thousands. Jesus, back then and wherever He taught, was a rock star.

My college major was early Christian history. And then, as soon as I graduated from college, I spend the next couple of years studying as much afterlife evidence as I could find, mostly in Boston’s quaint used-books stores. That combination together gave me a great grounding. Then, after that, while I practiced law by day, I spent the next fifty years of this lifetime intensely seeking to understand the entire greater reality in which we all are immersed, as what has been a deeply engrossing hobby! It has been an odd way to spend my time on earth, I suppose, especially since it very easily could in the end have all led nowhere. I am just a self-trained scientist at best, and there is no scientific discipline on earth that includes my particular combination of closely studying what is recorded in the Christian Bible; and combines with that the expert conclusions about consciousness that were first drawn by pioneering quantum physicist and Nobel Laureate Max Planck, and then increased by all the subsequent consciousness researchers who, like me, have followed Planck’s lead. And to that basic research, I have added all of what the afterlife researchers of the late-Nineteenth and early-Twentieth centuries learned via their studies of the work of the great deep-trance mediums of their own day. This is, of course, a vast amount of pretty eccentric evidence, is it not? All that the Bible holds, plus Max Planck’s and all his later followers’ legitimate consciousness discoveries, plus the tremendous amount of late-Nineteenth through early-Twentieth-century deep-trance-mediums’ communications with transitioned folks would fill a good-sized, if weird-seeming, library. To my unending delight, and against all the odds, I eventually found that this lifelong treasure-trove of miscellaneous knowledge from so many different sources does indeed all fit together perfectly, like the world’s most gorgeous and gigantic puzzle. Even better, there is nothing in any kind of evidence that I have been able to glean from everywhere that contradicts what I have been learning this way about the truly amazing and gigantic greater reality in which we spend our forever lives!

My dear one, I am going to give you five key points from what we now know is certainly true about the greater reality that we all inhabit. I have been discussing these points as I have taught spiritual workshops, as these points’ certainty, and especially their deep profundity, has gradually become ever clearer to me. The main reason why nearly all of us ever choose to be born repeatedly upon the earth is just so we can more easily raise our personal conscious vibration, because in our eternal home there are not the spiritual stressors that can assist us in doing that. And what is most wonderful about all of this is what we have come to find, as we have ever more worked through and tested these truths. It seems that people who very well learn and apply these points about our greater reality, and then seek to live them in their daily lives, find that they are happier living in better spiritual alignment, anyway. I am going to say that again, my beloved friend, because you just kept on reading as you read those words. You didn’t leap out of your chair for joy!

There is a rapidly-growing body of evidence that the most certain way for someone who is living on earth to make this his or her last necessary earth-lifetime is simply to learn what I am telling you now!  

So, here are those five key facts that I want to share with you about our greater reality. Of course, these are by no means all the facts that flow from what we have freshly learned by studying all the evidence that I have described above! It is important, too, to point out that the words “greater reality” refer just to the reality that we humans now know about and directly inhabit, this material universe and the much greater non-material “afterlife” reality where we live when we are not here in this material universe, living brief life-plans meant to help us raise our spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. Although, of course, we are about to flip many of those words around anyway, as you will shortly see:

  • What we think of as Consciousness is all that exists. This is the most fundamental fact of all. We said it here last week, and the week before, but we really cannot say it often enough. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay, in every version of every reality. I am becoming ever more comfortable with the idea of living eternally in what amounts to God’s thought, primarily because of the second point.
  • Time is an illusion, and it does not ever “pass”, as we believe that it does. All the implications of this fact are so amazing that I am still trying to make sense of many of them! But, my beloved, if you are reading these words, then you are eternal by definition. And your vibration already should match that of the Godhead, as should mine, but in the eternity of non-time that we inhabit, we have gotten off-track somehow. What we are doing now is trying to get back on track, and the reason why it will be easier, rather than harder, is that in fact it is fundamentally an act of remembering.
  • You and I and the Godhead are separate individuals, yet we are all part of this single great thought in the Mind of God. When I was first trying to really get this basic fact, attempting to force my mind around Point Number One above, I said this third point to my Thomas aloud. Really? You’re serious? He thought for a moment. Then he nodded once.
  • Sin is a human score-keeping issue, but not a divine issue. This is another thing that I had a lot of trouble understanding. Perhaps fifteen years ago, not long after I first met my Thomas, I didn’t trust what he was telling me about this, so I went over his head and prayed; and one morning as I was waking up, God gave me a vision. There was the God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel in our living room from when our children were toddlers, which had been all pale blue and white. That God, with His long gray beard, was sitting on our pale-blue sofa, playing and laughing with my one-year-old son, who was running around the sunlit living room, holding a brim-full cup of orange juice in both hands. Well, you know what happened. The baby tripped, and the orange juice was all over that pale carpet. The baby screamed and cried. God laughed, and He reached and picked up the baby and cuddled him in His arms. God was showing me that is how God feels about our earthly sins/mistakes/goof-ups, because now whenever I think “sin”, that image of the Sistine Chapel God cuddling my baby and laughing immediately comes back to my mind.
  • “Size” is only a material and a relative concept. Because matter is made of atoms, nearly all of your body, and of everything else, is empty space. And astral “stuff”, which makes up nearly all of the greater reality, has no atoms in it, so while our minds cannot mess much with the matter on this level of reality, our minds can readily mess with the illusory “matter” in the astral plane; and in fact, in the upper realms there, a lot of the stuff is imaginary. Physicists calculate that most “matter” in the material universe is what they call “dark matter”, and it makes up more than 95% of what exists. Remember our television analogy, where all the levels of reality interpenetrate one another but at higher rates of vibration, like what is broadcast on the channels of a TV set. And recall that physicists say that ordinary matter is less than five percent of what exists, while you and I know that, okay then,the astral aspect of the greater reality must be what makes up the rest, and we guess that those proportions must be just about right.

Before I began to teach Zoom classes on how to more efficiently attain a steady rate of spiritual growth, I had written five books that together teach in simple terms what I have learned in my lifetime of doing all this research; and three of those books, especially, Amazon now claims very often are bought together. I generally use those three books, too, when I teach my beginner’s course in spiritual growth. And I now realize that, for heaven’s sake, those three books really should be just one book! As, indeed, they soon will be, my beloved friend. As Jesus says, “Seek, and you shall find” (MT 7:7; LK 7:9). What is in production now is The Fun of Dying, The Fun of Staying in Touch, and The Fun of Growing Forever published as a single book with a helpful Introduction, all to be called The Joy of Eternal Life. It is scheduled to be released in the fall, and it will be available for the price of a single book. The first third ends your fear of death, so your personal spiritual vibration can begin to rise naturally; the second third then expands your understanding of what our eternal lives are really like, thereby even further easing your fears and further raising your personal vibration; and the final third, once you have prepared yourself spiritually with the lessons in the first two-thirds, empowers you to raise your personal vibration very rapidly! Having now spent time with people even years after they have taken my spiritual courses that were taught using these three books, I can only say that I should have done this years ago!

Of course, spiritual growth can happen even more rapidly for those who are closely following the teachings of Jesus. But sadly, horrifyingly, it really doesn’t happen very well for those who follow the teachings of the close to fifty thousand different versions of Christianity that there are now extant in the world. Wow, amazing! When I first asked Mr. Google how many Christian denominations there are, back in 2010, as I was writing The Fun of Dying, his answer was “Ten Thousand”, and I also thought, even back then, “Wow, amazing!” But in just sixteen years that number has QUINTUPLED, for heaven’s sake! Many of those further divides in the Christian religion have been over doctrinal differences as small and as stupid as whether or not women can be allowed to speak in the church. And that particular nonsense dispute is the fault of that foolish misogynist, the Apostle Paul.

My upcoming three-book anthology is meant for everyone, of every religious background. It will include teaching such added important spiritual tools as prevenient forgiveness, and will be available in a half-dozen languages now, and in even more languages later on, so you will be empowered with all the necessary tools to transform this lifetime into what can be your final necessary earth-lifetime, and all for the price of a single book. So there will soon be no excuse at all for anyone ever to have to come back for further spiritual learning, my dear one! What you are trying to do is to attain at least what is known to afterlife researchers as the top of the Fifth primary astral level. When you can do that, then you can continue your spiritual growth thereafter as a spirit guide, or simply by teaching and learning over there, without ever having to return to what our dear friend Dr. R. Craig Hogan calls “earth school” as still a mere struggling student.  

But if, as with me, your favorite spititual teacher is Jesus, then you should know that we are planning to produce a second anthology of two of my books that we expect will come out in time for Christmas. That anthology will be called The Joy of Living the Lord’s Way, and it will contain Liberating Jesus and The Fun of Loving Jesus. It will be a useful single-volume asset to assist in your rapid spiritual-growth. As is true of all religions, Christianity makes a bludgeon of its notions of sin and guilt, so unfortunately, being a traditional Christian tends to retard and not to assist us in our spiritual growth. All religions teach us to be afraid! But Jesus, wonderfully, taught us to love God and to love our fellow man “with all our heart, soul and mind.” (see MT 22:37, MK 12:30, and LK 10:27).  So if you want to learn the truth from Jesus alone, my second upcoming anthology will be only the beautiful Way of Jesus, as His millions of followers lived it in the three hundred years after His death on earth and His resurrection and ascension, entirely without fear or shame!  It will help you to grow spiritually, and very rapidly. And it will help you to better come to really know Jesus. Those few months in 2022 when Thomas was taking me to visit Jesus in the astral  plane really were, as I said to open this post, a love-fest. Jesus is, I can assure you, very much alive, and He is intensely wise and loving of you, individually, just as you are, as if there were no one else in existence. And He is amazingly charismatic! When you meet Jesus, the experience will blow you away.

My dear one, you realized when you saw God’s answer to my question about sin – the way God laughed when my sweet baby boy spilled his juice all over our living-room carpet – you knew then that the way modern Christianity makes such a big deal about sin is not at all God’s point of view. No, indeed! Sin is mistakes that we make as we learn on earth, and earth is just a school, for heaven’s sake. The only judge  you will face in your post-death life review will be yourself. I must warn you, though: if you have been stuffed full of organized Christian ideas during your time on earth, you yourself are likely to be your toughest judge of all! For the Christianity that the Roman Emperor Constantine formalized at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE to claim that Jesus died on the cross as a perfect sacrifice to God for our sins was in fact a horrific notion. Just think about it. It’s so insulting to God! What, Jesus instructs us to forgive every time someone does us wrong “Not seven times, but, I tell you, seventy-seven times” (MT 18:21); however, God cannot forgive anything that we do, even once, unless God gets to watch His own Son being murdered? And that whole idea is downright humiliating to Jesus. Here He is, the greatest Teacher who ever lived, but the biggest deal that the church that claims to follow Him ever makes of Him is that He is a sinless blood-sacrifice? This is why Jesus tells us plainly in A Course in Miracles, which He Himself channeled in the Nineteen-Sixties, that He did not die for our sins. No indeed! He clearly says there, “I didn’t die for your sins. Those are on you.”

My dear one, perhaps you are seeing by now, as I also am coming ever more clearly to see, that the spiritual growth that we come to earth so eager to attain is a surprisingly simple, and a pretty mechanical process. We have got to jettison every possible cause of fear, anger, and hatred, which is why learning that our lives really are eternal and learning automatic and complete forgiveness are both so important; as is also our need to develop an ever more intense impulse toward love and kindness, which is why following all the non-religious teachings of Jesus is so crucial. And then, Zing! Before we know it, we will be right up there, at the vibrational level of astral Level Five. If you will follow the steps in these upcomimg anthologies, and in their prescribed order so you first escape fear,  and you then joyously embrace love, rapid spiritual growth can happen for you so easily! And then, of course, your earthly transformation, and the true eternal love that Jesus taught, will be for you, too, my darling, my treasure, so easy to achieve. After all, you already are there; you only seem to have forgotten where you already are. You are there, my dear, and you never really have left the very heart of God! 

 Don’t you think it’s rather funny, I should be in this position.
I’m the one who’s always been So calm, so cool, no lover’s fool,
Running every show. He scares me so.

I never thought I’d come to this. What’s it all about?
Yet, if He said He loved me, I’d be lost. I’d be frightened.
I couldn’t cope, just couldn’t cope.
I’d turn my head. I’d back away. I wouldn’t want to know.
He scares me so. I want Him so. I love Him so.
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1970)

 

 

(Most photos are from Vecteezy.com)

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