Pearl of Great Price

Posted on July 9, 2022June 29, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by day” (1971)

On April 6^th I met Jesus in person. And He turns out to be a profoundly complex but amazingly relatable and even actually human Being. He is human not as you and I are human, but He is human because two thousand years ago He studied the elevated Beings around Him who even back then were of lesser rank, the members of the Godhead Collective and the tall and glowing Beings of Light, and He realized that He was about to be subsumed into the most elevated Collective. And once that happened, He would lose His chance to stay in contact with humankind, so He made the decision to take His personal Collective and live separately on the entrance level of the astral plane. And for the next seventeen hundred earth-years He lovingly welcomed and comforted and healed each of the billions of victims of Roman Christianity and many more people besides, and He taught and served on Level Three and in the children’s villages. He never claimed any of the privileges that His ever more exalted rank was earning Him.

Although the night of April 6^th has remained vivid in my mind, it has taken nearly three months for the strangeness of the Lord’s situation to dawn on me. And Jesus is such a remarkable Man! He is in some ways childlike, and as low-mileage as anyone on earth might be who at the age of thirty has lived an entirely solitary life in a forest. But at the same time He is deeply powerful, as if He were an immense engine idling. He is personally smooth, without rough edges, gentle and mild, at the pinnacle of power but nevertheless extraordinarily sweet and kind.

My Thomas never volunteers information, even if something is bothering me. One morning last weekend I blurted to him, “Why did you take me there? What was the point? Now I can’t get Him out of my mind!”

“So it is only now that you bring Him up?”

“Isn’t He lonely? He is all by Himself!”

“He is not lonely. He is never alone unless He wants to be alone.”

“Is John with Him?”

Thomas didn’t answer that question. He threw me a kind of “It’s complicated” thought.

“Doesn’t he visit Jesus?”

Here I got the clear thought that John likes Roman Christianity and nothing more will be said.

But none of this is my business! We each were thinking that same thought at once, which seemed to soften my precious friend. I have come to see that he is in a difficult place. He is sworn to be my spirit guide for this earth-lifetime, and he loves me as all of our spirit guides love us, but at the same time I am coming to see more deeply that he is the close intimate of God Himself. And as we both had that added thought, he seemed to soften further. I can see what an immense relief it is to him that he no longer must keep these two parts of his eternal life separate. And I gather that the separation is ending now only because Jesus wants it to end. Surprisingly, Thomas then said many things in rapid boluses of thought. And as I was trying to take them all in, to my further surprise he told me that it would be acceptable for me to share with you a lot of what he had just told me. I realized as I was hearing him in my mind that of course he was in contact by mind with Jesus as he was talking to me. And he probably is constantly in contact with Jesus. So all of this must be what Jesus wants us to hear. And as I had that thought, I felt the Lord’s affirmation.

Wow, the veil is really thinning now!

Thomas told me that Jesus made the choice when He returned from His lifetime on earth never to rejoin the Godhead Collective. This universe exists as a place for human beings to experience the spiritual stressors that will enable us to better grow spiritually. And The Way that Jesus developed for us to achieve that result required that He maintain His identity as Jesus, and also maintain His personal Collective so He could better lead His new movement. By then He had achieved a status which allowed Him to make these choices. But He still was to remain at the Godhead level. That was His earned status. That was the established order of things, and the Celestial Council was in ultimate control. However, when Jesus realized how rapidly His being at that level was putting Him completely out of touch with the earth, He chose to permanently occupy a lower place. And so, once again He was making waves.

Thomas has long since told me that the Being Who is Jesus, uniquely perhaps among all the beings who ever have been born on earth, loves people. I mean, He really loves people! So to be separated from where He could care for and nurture the followers of His precious Way was unbearable for Him, especially since already the nascent Roman Christian movement was beginning to deliver up its first victims as it assumed control on earth of the followers of the Lord’s Way. The Celestial Council soon found that it could not prevent Jesus from welcoming and comforting and healing those victims. And thus began the Lord’s seventeen-hundred-year ministry that is moving toward its end only now, as the Roman phase of Christianity apparently at last is nearing its end.

I don’t think that I fully understand what I am about to say, but Thomas wants me to try. God is infinitely powerful, infinitely creative, and perfectly loving Consciousness energy. The material universe consists of nothing else. Jesus told us as much when He told us that God is Spirit (JN 4:24). More precisely, God is Consciousness at its highest vibration. The Apostle Paul told us that it is within God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). And loving others, exercising love constantly, is how we all grow spiritually, so as Jesus loved all those billions of damaged Christians into spiritual health over seventeen centuries, He became perhaps more personally powerful even than the entire Godhead Collective combined. It was a byproduct of the way He was ministering, and it was something that Thomas tells me now that he noticed more than Jesus did as Thomas was coming and going, taking repeated lifetimes on earth to do what he could to try to guard Jesus’s teachings as they had carefully preserved them within the Roman Christian Bible. He was with Jesus almost constantly between lifetimes as he watched with Him the development of Roman Christianity, and then its course through all those centuries.

Thomas has repeatedly told me, and he emphasized yet again to me last weekend, that none of Roman Christian theology has anything to do with Jesus. And it has little to do with God! But Thomas tells me that he never has heard the slightest complaint about any of this from Jesus, nor the least bit of resentment of the religion that was named for Him. And my Thomas has seen nothing from Jesus but perfect love for the billions of Christians who have returned home revering Him, although their religion has nothing to do with the Lord’s Own Way.

Jesus’s original Collective is vastly augmented now by a battery of Christian saints and clergy, and all those lay Christians who have returned home as His devoted followers. In the astral plane, Jesus now heads a gigantic spiritual family. So as we talked last weekend, I wondered to Thomas about what role he might still play for Jesus. He is just an earthly brother from the Lord’s final ordinary lifetime that I calculate must have ended maybe seven thousand earth-years ago, even before the Lord’s ascension to the Godhead level. So in practical terms, what might Thomas be to Jesus now? At that, my Thomas smiled. Even though I cannot see him more than vaguely in my mind, I can feel his emotion when he smiles. And he almost never smiles. He said thoughtfully, “He tells me that I am the only one who still outranks Him. I am His older brother, right?” Thomas even chuckled a bit, as if to himself.

I thought about that. Then I said, “He cannot be serious!”

“He is perfectly serious. He loves people with His whole heart, but all He ever gets is worship. The only one who can love Him as a human man seems to be me. So I am His pearl of great price.”

It was most of another day before I said to Thomas, “He really said that?”

“He says it all the time.” Then Thomas added, “He uses that term in the Bible (MT 13:46). And that is also why He loves those fish. And the deer. They don’t know that He is the King of Kings!”

I know what you are thinking now. Jesus can hear us talking about Him. So we shouldn’t talk about Him! We can talk easily in front of my family because our conversations are by mind. But when Jesus can hear us talking about Him, isn’t that embarrassing?

It was. But when I first had that thought, Thomas said, “You wonder why Jesus allows you to share what we are saying. My child, He is not a human man, who has a need to hide His thoughts. His thoughts are your gift! Jesus loves everyone, but He trusts almost no one in a human body because He knows their hearts. He sees how His name is used by clergymen to build their earthly wealth. It is the hardest thing for Jesus to trust anyone in a human body because money is the great human obsession (MT 6:24). When I took you to meet with Him in April, it was by His invitation. He would like you to become more comfortable with Him. But He believes that He can trust you.”

Wow. It may be my Thomas’s new pride in me, which I can feel, even more than the amazement of the Lord’s expression of trust that really makes me smile.

Seeking Sense in Hindsight

Posted on July 2, 2022July 3, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.
With God as our father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Sometimes people try to imagine how the world will look in a hundred years. But what about a thousand years? And have you ever wondered how people living a hundred years from now might look back at us? Or what about people living a thousand years from now? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder how this moment is going to look in hindsight, when viewed from a thousand years from today?

Someone who was interviewing me about Seek Reality Online just this past week asked me what I hoped it might achieve over the next five years. And I miffed that question. Five years isn’t much time. But a thousand years is a whole different matter!

It has lately been estimated, based upon surveys, that close to ninety percent of all the people on earth are still afraid to die. To Craig Hogan and me, that is a horrifying statistic! If only the mainstream scientific community had listened to the illustrious Max Planck when he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And then 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 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.”

Max Planck received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. Just think how the world could have changed back then, if the scientific community had listened to him! Dr. Planck knew that the matrix of matter is consciousness. And at some point in the next thousand years, whether it happens sooner or it happens later, that fact will be seen to be incontrovertible. But meanwhile, as Dr. Planck also said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” But we have already had three generations of scientists grow up since he said those words! And still, even today, more than three quarters of all the people in the world are so ignorant of the fact that their minds are eternal that, tragically, they remain terrified of death. The consequences of their fear are manifold. And they are tragic beyond words, as you will shortly see.

So Craig Hogan and I and our significant others are giving up our dreams of retiring in Tahiti. Instead, we have resolved to work until we take our final earthly breaths, and to knock down that awful ignorance-of-death statistic by using our Seek Reality Online platform to teach as many people as possible the glorious certainty that our minds are eternal, and that the life beyond this life truly is wonderful beyond their fondest imaginings. We don’t want to go home ourselves until we can leave behind a world where at least five percent more of the people on earth are as certain as we are that their lives are eternal!

But, what good will that do?

Well, first let’s look back from a thousand years from now at the world as it is today. I know that doing this is hard to get your mind around! But let’s be as frank as we can. Let’s look at all the political battling, at the wars here and there that cause so much pain, at the vast disparities between poverty and wealth, and at the places in the world where a few hold power and put multitudes in such desperate straits. Let’s notice the soulless power of transnational mega-corporations, although – true – in some parts of the west there is a healthier sense of middle-class ease. Some worry, though, that our middle-class lifestyle carries a risk of causing global warming. My particular gripe is that we are gradually choking the seas with plastic bits. And over us all hovers the minute-by-minute threat of nuclear annihilation! One way or another or in some combination, it seems impossible to imagine that this world and the human species that inhabits it can survive for another hundred years, and never mind another thousand years!

There is one word that describes what unites every one of these problems. From the wars to the multinational corporations carelessly spewing their carbon and plastics, and the plutocrats and dictators seizing power, and frankly every other mess in the world that we despair of ever solving. No matter what is wrong, FEAR is at its base! We know that, of course, because fear is the lowest consciousness vibration. It is fear that drives people and nations to seize and accumulate their money and their power, and yet they never have enough to ever really feel safe enough. Fear is at the root of jealousy, anger, avarice, and every other negative emotion you can name!

So we wallow in all the emotional filth that fear produces, not realizing until in some much more enlightened age it will be pointed out to us that:

All of these problems are loosely related, and they all stem from our existential fears; and
All of them have at their core our nameless terror of death and extinction.

Those looking back at us from a thousand years from now will understand all of this perfectly well. They will diagnose all of our current problems, trace them to their singular source, and justifiably blame the culprit, which is a shortsighted scientific community that barely a century prior to this benighted moment turned itself into a dogma-based belief-system in order to avoid the remote possibility that it might discover a Christian God.

So, no Tahitian bungalows for us! When I explained all of this to the reporter who had asked me that question about where I hoped to be in the next five years, I told him that once we teach as few as five percent more of the world’s population that they will live eternally, then since all human minds are connected, we will raise the consciousness vibration of the population of all humanity enough to stop all wars and immensely reduce the political problems and the oligarchic oppression worldwide. He calculated then that we were going to have to reach and teach more than three hundred million more people. So we had better get busy!

Of course, all we can do is the best that we can do. But apparently wise souls as diverse as Confucius and Eleanor Roosevelt have been quoted as having said that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness! So our candle is lit. And since all that we will have to do is to educate what amounts to the entire population of the United States, we plan to concentrate our efforts here.

Where Roman Christianity is concerned, however, the view from a thousand years from now begins to look increasingly dark. The religion’s stubborn insistence on clinging to its Roman version rather than returning to its roots in the teachings of Jesus seems to be cutting itself off from those roots together, and at a rapid rate: since 1944, when 92% of Americans still believed in God, the percentage of Americans believing in God has now dipped to an appalling 81%. I plan to build a companion website for SRO that will teach the Way of Jesus, but that likely won’t be nearly enough to stop what is an increasingly rapid decline.

It does feel ironic to think that when historians look back a thousand years from now, perhaps the greatest gift that Roman Christianity is likely to be thought to have given to the world during its so often benighted reign will have been its truly remarkable attempts at an open-minded science. Of course, they did it with a motive in mind. In trying to prove that this or that complex biological phenomenon could not have arisen without an active Mind involved, the Christian scientists that will be lauded then for their farsightedness were trying to prove the existence of the Christian God. But nevertheless, while heavily funded twenty-first-century materialist scientists were wasting billions of dollars trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, some really brilliant contemporary scientists with very little funding were doing groundbreaking work in abundantly proving that phenomena like DNA required a Designer. I admire some of these unsung geniuses more than I can say!

And it amuses me to imagine what a laugh those future scientists are going to have when they study these years. Think of it! The supposedly serious scientists of today will look like Luddite knuckleheads, seeking a source of consciousness inside the human brain, when it will long since have become self-evident that consciousness is the base creative force. Consciousness is who we are. It also is the water in which we swim. And the Christians, by contrast, will look like heroes, doing their pioneering work with almost no funding. I have attended a couple of their conferences, and have been blown away by the joyous pioneering scholarship of people who are free to do their science without the burden of that heavy hand of their own self-imposed dogmas.

And so we press on. But it gives you a new perspective on your own life and culture when you imagine the distant future watching you making your decisions, doesn’t it? I can’t think of any generation, with the exception perhaps of the American Founders, who lived with the conscious thought that people a thousand years hence were actively watching them going about their work!

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment now.
With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment and live each moment
With peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995), Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Seek Reality Online

Posted on June 25, 2022June 26, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
– ACIM, Preface.1:1-3

Seek Reality Online goes live officially on Monday, June 27^th. But if you go to seekreality.com before that date, you will find that we are hosting a friends-and-family open house this weekend. Thank you for being its final testers! If you find anything amiss, please send me an email through the green contact block on Robertagrimes.com. This project may not look big to you, but its six months of preparation have felt like getting ready to storm the beaches of Normandy!

It is only now that we realize why no one else ever has attempted to do this. The greater reality to which we will be returning at the death of our bodies is at least as complex as the reality that we will be leaving behind when we go home, and it is immeasurably more enormous. Which means that in order for us to talk about the process of transitioning, we first must understand and teach almost every significant detail of what amounts to a whole new world! Nearly everyone who works in the broad field of death and afterlife research and education is a specialist in only one or a few of the fields of, for example:

Mental Mediumship
Physical Mediumship
Consciousness Studies
Astral Travel
Near-Death Experiences
Life-Planning
Electronic Communication
Orbs and Lights
Signs from the Dead
Post-Death Dreams and Visions

…to choose ten fields of study at random, in each of which experts will typically spend their part-time, or even their full-time careers. There are other fields, too, that are more obscure, where knowledge must be gathered, such as researching the heyday of afterlife communications through deep-trance and physical mediums that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century, when so much good afterlife evidence was received. And each of these fields is fascinating! People go to presentations and sit and marvel at what the speakers have to say. But for Craig Hogan and me, the ten topic areas listed above, and many more besides, all had to be not only mastered, but also smoothly integrated into one unified field of knowledge before we could even contemplate how we might create Seek Reality Online.

Craig and I always have felt that the study of death and the afterlife had to be undertaken as one gigantic whole if you were going to attempt to teach any part of it. We both have thought that to do anything less made no sense. It is impossible to have any realistic concept of what happens at and after death unless you can make sense of that whole other world where these events are taking place! And how does that world fit with this one? I can recall as a child looking up and imagining that my great-grandparents must be sitting on clouds way up there above me, swinging their feet, looking down and likely bored out of their minds.

Our problem in working out how things fit together is of course vastly complicated by the fact that the scientific community always has refused to study any of the afterlife evidence. Their refusal is formal, rigidly enforced, and frankly as stupid as repeatedly hitting oneself in the face with a rubber bat. It dates to the first years of the twentieth century, when the scientific gatekeepers – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – were busy dealing with quantum mechanics at the same time that a flood of excellent afterlife communications received through physical mediums was being presented for scientific review. To avoid also dealing with the dead while they were at the same time having to cope with the quantum physics crisis, someone came up with what they were then calling “the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism.” And they thereby turned mainstream science, which nearly all civilians still naively assume is the open-minded pursuit of the truth, into the closed-minded religion of atheism. To maintain science as the religion of atheism, even a century further on, those gatekeepers to this day have consigned even the study of consciousness to the field of woo-woo, and they continue to insist that our brains must generate our minds, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Indeed, scientists have in recent years sought and obtained research grants totaling more than a billion dollars to try to find a source of consciousness lurking inside the human brain. And they are doing this, even though it turns out now based upon overwhelming and consistent evidence that consciousness is in fact the base creative force that generates all of reality! So you see now why my reference to research scientists repeatedly hitting themselves in the face with a rubber bat is extreme, but nevertheless tragically apt.

But Craig Hogan and I are not daunted! With nothing but the actual evidence to guide us, and with only the genuine truth to pursue, Craig and I and a few other open-minded citizen-scientists are doing the work in the field of afterlife research that credentialed scientists are not allowed to do at this point in a great many fields. With each of us working independently, we have managed to put together what actually happens at and after death. And then eventually we have found one another and compared notes. I still recall the thrill of that glorious day back in 2008 when I discovered Craig Hogan’s Your Eternal Self, which then was newly published. And I realized with a flood of joy that there actually was somebody else in this world who seemed to share my peculiar hobby!

Why more afterlife researchers haven’t undertaken this crucial task of orienting people as to where the afterlife is in relation to this material reality, and how it all actually works, I cannot say. But of course, that step is essential! People cannot fully lose their fear of death until they have some understanding of where the dead go, and how the whole process actually works, in some believable way. A child can think of great-grandma sitting on a cloud and swinging her feet, but no rational adult can accept that explanation as sufficient. So you see, this work in helping to ground people in the genuine truth about the afterlife process is extremely important!

I think it was Craig who first coined the phrase “the greater reality.” But whoever it was who had that insight opened everything wide for us, since we realize now that not only is this universe not the center of all that there is, but it isn’t even a major player. Still, that is a topic for another day. Once we had used an abundance of consistent afterlife evidence, plus quantum mechanics and general scientific principles, to map out at last how everything works, we began to look with increasing interest at what scientists call dark matter and dark energy. Scientists tell us that roughly 68% of the universe is made up of dark energy, and 27% is dark matter, and they are dark not because they are sinister but because they don’t react with photons of light, which means that they are not material. And they are intrinsically part of the universe itself. Hmmm. The proportions do seem to be about right. It seems now to be increasingly likely that scientists have discovered the beyond-gigantic astral plane where we spend our eternal lives, of which the afterlife is only a part. But still, mainstream scientists must obey the core dogma of their materialist religion, which allows them to study just that five percent which is this material universe!

For Craig and me, figuring the last bits out was satisfying, but in hindsight it was where our personal crisis began. We know for a certainty now that all human lives are eternal. But how can we happily take this knowledge with us when we soon go home, and leave a blindly ignorant world behind? Yet how do we sensibly boil down and teach the fruits of our eighty years of combined research to people who have lived their whole lives fearing death?

It has taken us the past five years to work this out. And still, we have settled on a teaching program now with a sense of trepidation. But given our ages, we can’t spend forever fussing over getting it perfectly right, so now we are giving it our best shot. Seek Reality Online consists of:

A ninety-minute summary short-course in audio and video. We strongly suggest that everyone begin here! And for people who are dying, this short-course may be all that they can manage. For most people, though, there are four supplemental educational modules full of Craig’s videos and my own blog posts, videos, and podcasts. Those modules are:
The Design and Functioning of Reality.
Death and the Afterlife.
Communication.
Spiritual Growth.

We ask that you consume those four modules in order! And please, take your time with the first two especially. You are undoing a lifetime of negative conditioning. It is a tragic fact that your first step in learning the truth must be to un-learn the lies that you have been taught by our culture’s most trusted institutions. Science and religions have taught you that you are a sinful meat-robot. All omplete lies. In fact, you are a powerful, eternal being, and it is impossible for you ever to die. What you experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the base creative force that continuously manifests this material reality. There is no cranky Big Guy with a beard to judge you, and you need fear no fiery hell. Best of all, you in particular in all the universe are infinitely loved.

And for so long as Craig and I remain functional, we plan to conduct very frequent Zoom groups and lectures, and to offer a lot of coddling. I don’t know whether we can maintain that afterward into a new generation of managers, but we are going to try. My Thomas tells me that its modest monthly membership fee will allow SRO to maintain itself forevermore. Well, we shall see!

Moving On

Posted on June 18, 2022June 19, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible swift sword.
His truth is marching on!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! His truth is marching on!
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

We really can move on now. As the Roman church continues to crumble, Jesus is planning a return that will be different from what Christians long have expected, based upon the Biblical book of Revelation’s dramatic depiction of a settling of scores. But of course, that makes sense. The Christian Bible was written mostly by men, and men settle scores. Jesus is of the Godhead, and He has instead spent seventeen centuries in the loving healing of all the harm that Christianity long has been doing to so many in His name.

Thomas is even saying now that the whole idea for Seek Reality Online came from Jesus. Silly me. I thought it was my idea, but of course the fact that it has felt so loose and vague for so long was a give-away. When something is your own idea, it dawns on you and then it fleshes out quickly. Our website’s developers worried at first that we were going to be teaching something that very few people would be interested in learning, since we had told the developers that we had no competitors against which they should be positioning us. How then could this be a significant topic? But on second thought, they had to agree that death and the afterlife is something that affects a fairly large swathe of the human population.

Thomas tells me that Jesus has a strategy. He has chosen to attach His website to one that will first teach the world about consciousness as a necessary part of teaching about death, the afterlife, and the greater reality where we spend our eternal lives. So, what SRO will teach will be an important precursor that will prepare people to better understand how Jesus’s Way actually works in raising our consciousness vibrations. And of course, Jesus is exactly right. When He first spent those thirty years studying us two thousand years ago, before He then spent three years teaching us, perhaps He didn’t entirely figure out what consciousness precisely is. But He certainly came to understand how it seems to work in practice! To be frank, His Gospel teachings are genius.

I am so excited for Jesus! Honestly, this feels like watching your dearest friend who has invented something glorious that will absolutely transform the world, and He is for sure going to win a Nobel Prize the minute that His work gets out. And now, at last, after two thousand years, He is finally going to have His chance at fame and fortune! I know how stupid that must sound to you. But that is exactly how this feels! He even has the timing worked out. He, who has lived without time for the past two thousand years, has decided that He wants His website to launch nine months after SRO goes live. I giggle a little as I type these words.

And meanwhile, He has left it to us to bury that old misbegotten religion. I can write no better epitaph for the past seventeen hundred years of Christianity than the Amazon blurb for Helen Ellerbe’s absolutely devastating The Dark Side of Christian History:

The Christian church has left a legacy, a world view, that permeates every aspect of Western society, both secular and religious. It is a legacy that fosters sexism, racism, the intolerance of difference, and the desecration of the natural environment. The Church, throughout much of its history, has demonstrated a disregard for human freedom, dignity, and self-determination. It has attempted to control, contain and confine spirituality, the relationship between an individual and God. As a result, Christianity has helped to create a society in which people are alienated not only from each other but also from the divine. This Christianity – called “orthodox Christianity” – has had a devastating impact upon the whole of mankind, and its study can help enlighten us as to the very core difference between religion and spirituality. When we understand how we have come to be separated from the divine, we can begin to heal not only the scars, but the very alienation itself.

I have read that paragraph repeatedly over the past week. I have tried to argue with it. Having been brought up as I was, in a steepled New England Congregational church that was headed by a pastor I dearly loved, I do have arguments to make! For most of my childhood I refused to go to Sunday school, but instead I attended grown-up church, where I would listen to Reverend Turrell’s gentle sermons about kindness, forgiveness and love while I gazed up from my sixth-row pew at the beautiful stained-glass window beyond him of Jesus with the woman at the well. It was then, as a child, that I fell completely in love with Jesus, with His wise and gentle stained-glass face. Never in that church did I hear hell mentioned. The Roman church never came between us at all.

There are some good things that we take from Roman Christianity! For one thing, Christian schools have taught a thousand generations of impoverished children efficiently and well. Missionaries have likewise helped many people worldwide. And as Thomas has pointed out to me, Jesus is usually first on every list of the most prominent historical figures. Jesus is a household name in nearly every house, which will make it easier for Him to launch His website. (And when my Thomas saw that Thomas Jefferson was tenth on one of those lists, he actually chuckled a bit. He is becoming more relaxed about a connection that until recently always irritated him.) But the core problem with Roman Christianity is that it was ignorant and simply wrong. More specifically, it was:

Rooted in Fear and Not in Love. Now that we understand that all of reality is based in consciousness and really nothing else objectively exists, and that consciousness is in turn governed by what we experience as emotion, with fear at the lowest and slowest vibration, we know that in fact Christianity’s fear-based teachings are especially wrong-headed. There is no hell, so Christianity’s use of the fear of hell to control people down through the ages has been inexcusable.
Based in Teaching Us an Awful Self-Image. Christianity has taught us that we are “fallen” and therefore unworthy of God’s love as another way to keep the masses controlled. In fact, each of us individually is deeply loved and cherished by God! The chasm that Christianity sets up between our imagined sinful nature and what is actually true is unbridgeable. It is too easy for people to imagine that God must hate us, when in fact God loves each of us individually more than we can imagine. The image that Jesus gives us in the Gospel of Luke of the shepherd who leaves his whole flock to find his one lost sheep because he cannot bear to lose even one is much closer to the truth (LK 15:3-5).
Not Built Around the Teachings of Jesus. In none of the more than forty thousand denominations of Christianity that are now extant are the Gospel teachings of Jesus given any kind of prominence. Actually, in no denomination that I ever have found are the teachings of Jesus and how and why they work so well in raising our consciousness vibrations given any seriously attention at all! Don’t you find that amazing, as you think about it? Jesus is the most prominent historical figure by every measure, on every list, and His name is trumpeted by every Christian preacher, but yet what He actually said, and what His words meant to Him as He said them, is nothing that anyone ever has bothered to take seriously?
Not Centered on Bringing the Kingdom of God on Earth. Jesus uses the phrase “the kingdom of God” or “the kingdom of heaven” something like eighty times through all four canonical Gospels. And He talks often of bringing the kingdom of God on earth. Clearly it was foremost in His mind! But it was not foremost in the Romans’ minds. Their fear-based religion was useful as a means of controlling the masses, but they had no interest in what Jesus taught, nor in whatever His own priorities might have been.

So, there you have it. Jesus was a mere figurehead in Roman Christianity for the past seventeen hundred years. But He will be the center and soul of His own future website, where He soon will resume the teaching of His Way as if there had been no intervening detour into Roman Christianity at all!

And what heartens me most is seeing that His followers already are rallying to Him. I have seen this happening over the course of the past dozen years or so in the emails that people have sent to me, and in articles posted by other heretical bloggers. Most people are unaware of the fact that in only the past few years, perhaps hastened by the COVID shutdowns, quite literally the religious ground has been shifting dramatically beneath our feet. We are seeing it happening all around us. I recall that when The Fun of Dying first was published, and that was only twelve years ago, here in central Texas there still were many strict Christians who wanted nothing to do with its message. But, not anymore. This seems to be happening everywhere! It has been estimated that half of the American churches that were temporarily closed in 2020 for health reasons will soon be closing permanently.

And the worldwide need for Seek Reality Online is acute! It has lately been estimated that between eighty and ninety percent of the people now living still have very little idea of what actually happens after death. Even worse, there are some near-death experiencers who are convinced that they died and miraculously came back to life. And there is one in particular who is lately terrifying people by saying that light-beings told her during her NDE that everything that Mikey Morgan reports through his mother is illusion, and that in fact there is nothing after death. Or at least, this is what I am hearing from people who are contacting me now in a panic, seeking reassurance that what this woman is saying cannot be right.

Oh, good grief! What we see on earth is in fact the illusion, and Mikey’s after-death reality, while also illusory, is a lot more real than this reality is! Many NDEs happen in the astral plane, which is so love-filled that NDE experiencers can be forgiven for believing that perhaps they have arrived where the dead actually go. But I will say this yet again. Near-death experiences have nothing whatsoever to do with actual death. They are spontaneous out-of-body phenomena with messages for the experiencers themselves and they can sometimes be lovely, but that is all. And even if we had no other reason for sharing the truth with the world at last, just stopping the spread of such foolish nonsense would be reason enough all by itself for us to be giving you this beautiful evidence-based website!

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His truth is marching on!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! His truth is marching on!
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

His Turn at Last!

Posted on June 11, 2022June 12, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens.
– from The Christian Bible’s Old Testament (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

For most of my life I was one of the most ardent Christians you know. I have read the Bible from cover to cover more than a dozen times. I majored in Christian history in college. I grew up expecting to become a minister, but I married a Catholic so I became a Lector. The first time it occurred to me that the religion has little to do with Jesus, I fully expected a lightning bolt to come right through the ceiling. And I have survived a few nights when I have gone to bed having fervently prayed – on my knees, no less! – for God to take me in my sleep if some manuscript of mine was not supposed to be published. This being a heretic is a hard row to hoe!

But I never wanted to be a heretic. I simply wanted to live the truth. And my experiences of light at the age of eight, and then again at the age of twenty, have made me know that there really is a definitive truth to be pursued. But of course, I know a lot more now. I have always felt devoted to Jesus, but of course everyone is devoted to Jesus. Every time I would read the whole Bible, before I started in over again, I would re-read the New Testament, and then I would read just the Gospels one more time before I started over with Genesis. I never knew who my spirit guide was until February of 2015, and for a long time I associated him with the Founding Father, without yet knowing that Jefferson’s own interest in the Gospels had much deeper roots.

It is only now, in just the past two months, that I fully understand that my spirit guide has always led a double life. While he has been guiding me, and I must say that he has done a decent job of that, in a greater reality where there is no time or distance, he also has often been nipping off to spend some non-time with his eternal Brother. Clearly, it is a relief to him now to bring the disparate parts of his life together. But for me, this spring feels in equal parts exciting and extremely peculiar. I am relieved to at last have Seek Reality Online almost ready to roll! We have been talking about doing this website for going on five years now, so to have it about to go live feels amazing. After my fifty years spent researching death and the afterlife, this website feels like such a useful gift to the world!

And of course, all the Christian websites are full of Apocalyptic rumblings this spring. I won’t link to them. Instead, I’ll link to a couple of my own articles from a few years back, when we also had this same sort of political angst in the air that inspired similar Apocalyptic anticipation. The fact is, of course, that Jesus is never going to come back in a cloud of righteous vengeance, for the simple reason that in a reality based in Consciousness, His doing that would lower the vibrations of all of reality so much that His vengeance would be counterproductive. It would lower the vibrations of all the world! Jesus never is going to return on a white horse and with a sword in His hand. But in fact, apparently He is indeed about to come back now, and in the way that you might expect Him to come back in the twenty-first century, come to think of it. He is about to launch His own website.

Of all the things that I ever had thought could happen in my life, casually chatting with Jesus while we fed His pet fish was probably the least likely thing I could imagine. And now, my Thomas being the low-key fellow that he is, the implications of that meeting that he arranged for us with Jesus are finally dawning on me. That was not just a casual visit. “Come and meet my kid brother from my Neolithic lifetime!” No. It was vintage, classic Thomas. This is how he does things. Welcome to my world! “Jesus has decided that He doesn’t want us just to talk about His teachings as part of the spiritual growth section of Seek Reality Online. He wants us to put them in another website.” Okay. Sure. Then, a few days later: “Jesus wants that website to be His own website.” Oh. Of course. Then, a few days after that: “Jesus has decided that He wants to tell His true story in His new website.” Omigod, really? I thought it was going to be only about His teachings. But, sure. Then: “Jesus wants you to tell His true story in your next blog post.” But we just did that! “No, the whole story.” Oh. Okay. So, that was just last week. It brings us to today. And it is dawning on me now where this seems to be heading. A few weeks ago, one of our commenters asked a question, and Thomas said, sounding oddly giddy, “Jesus wants to answer it. Ask Jesus.” I said, “But I know the answer!” Thomas said, “Go ahead. Ask Him.” So I asked Jesus the question in my mind. “Jesus, is there a hell?” And I heard His distinctive voice say clearly in my mind, “There is no hell. There is only love and light.” Which freaked me out! Now I worry that they might be planning some sort of Mikey-and-Carol question-and-answer thing at Jesus’s new website. With me as Carol. And nobody ever would believe in that!

But with Thomas, nothing ever is random. And I always am the last to know.

The plain fact is that the religion is hollow. And it always has been hollow. It is an abundance of show on the outside. Lots of costumes and buildings, dogmas and fears enough to keep whole nations toeing the line for most of the past two thousand years! I recall as a child how the Catholic children had to fuss and worry about whether or not today was “a Holy Day of Obligation.” Those strictures have lessened, but still I look at the Vatican, which pulls in millions of dollars each year from parishes both rich and poor, and I think of how many children in the world are starving right this minute. Protestants are little better, with some online clergy living like pashas. And both sides have sex scandals galore! And yet, what are they producing? I have been a Protestant and then a Catholic and then a Protestant over again, and I used to travel a lot on business so I have attended services in many different Christian churches over the years. I can personally attest that there are no more cliquish, judgmental people on earth than Christians in their various denominations.

And essentially, they all teach more or less the same awful set of made-up dogmas:

God can’t forgive us for Adam’s sin in eating that forbidden apple, so we are “fallen.”
So then God had to send His own pure Son, miraculously sired by God Himself of a virgin human being, to die as a pure sacrifice to God Himself.
Due to the acceptable sacrifice of God’s own Son to God the Father, a supposedly loving God is willing to forgive us for Adam’s having eaten that apple.
There are other equally creepy refinements, such as the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the physical flesh and blood of Jesus for Catholics’ obligatory weekly consumption.

And throughout, spending eternity in a fiery hell remains a constant threat! If we die without receiving last rites in the Catholic church, or if we die in certain Protestant denominations without having been originally created by God as part of God’s limited Elect, or without having been “Saved” in one magical way or another, then burning alive and aware in eternal fire is our certain destiny.

Where are the teachings of Jesus in any of this? The ugly dogmas listed above all came from the fear-based Roman religion that was established three centuries after the death of Jesus. None of it is based in anything that Jesus ever said! And while in both Catholic and Protestant services someone will read from the Gospel words of Jesus, in all the various flavors of Christianity the actual teachings of Jesus are considered to be too difficult for most people to follow consistently, so they are treated as only aspirational. Nice ideas, but not to be enforced too seriously lest they thin the ranks of the faithful in the pews. The reason that Jesus gives to us for devoutly following His teachings – the eventual advent of the kingdom of God on earth – is generally taken to mean no more than just the spread of the Roman religion itself. So, do you see what I mean? Roman Christianity is, and it always has been, just as hollow on the inside as a gourd.

But the Jesus of the Gospels is a living Being! And back before the hollow religion that bears the name of Jesus, there was a genuine movement built on the actual teachings of Jesus that grew to be millions strong. That movement was so spiritually joyous that, as my Thomas insists to me now, it could inspire people who were nailed to crosses and devoid of breath to sing for two days before they died. Now, that was some deeply spiritual movement!

But then the Romans destroyed The Way of Jesus. After which they gave Jesus seventeen hundred years of deeply personal pain beyond anything that you and I can imagine.

First, Jesus welcomed home and Himself healed the followers of His Way that the Romans had tortured and murdered in their millions. And then Jesus welcomed, comforted, and healed all the victims of the Crusades, on both sides. And the victims of the Spanish Inquisition. And after that, it has been long centuries of the victims of Christianity itself, both Catholics and Protestants, who have died in terror of burning in hell even as late as the end of the twentieth century, each of whom has been stunned to arrive in the beautiful afterlife, alive and whole and into the waiting arms of Jesus. My Thomas tells me that it really is only now that the last of the victims of fear-based Christianity are no longer arriving home needing Jesus’s restorative care upon their arrival. So it is only now that He can plan His genuine Second Coming, when He will begin again freshly to teach His Way to the world through His own website.

So for the past seventeen hundred earth-years, in a reality that is based in Consciousness and where love is all that matters, Jesus has lavished so much love on so many billions upon billions of victims of the religion that bears His name that now Thomas tells me that the extent of the Lord’s temporal power is beyond all human calculation. So, at least there is that!

Oh my dear friends, even after a lifetime of study, and even after this amazing spring, I still feel as if I know so little, and now I understand even less.
I am sorry to say this, but I truly cannot understand how the Jesus with whom I fed fish that night, as powerful as He is and as good as He is, has not mounted that white horse in sheer exasperation a very long time ago! No, but one thing that I do know is this. After all the personal pain that the religion that bears His name has cost Him, if my Lord and Master Jesus the risen Christ asks me to do any least thing for Him now, then I will do it for Him. And with the greatest joy!

a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to
refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
– from The Christian Bible’s Old Testament (Ecclesiastes 3:2-8)

His Story

Posted on June 4, 2022November 12, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

All hail the power of Jesus’s Name! Let angels prostrate fall;
Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown Him Lord of all!
Ye chosen seed of Israel’s race, ye ransomed from the fall,
Hail Him Who saves you by His grace, and crown Him Lord of all!
– Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name” (1779)

Last week we addressed the sad inability of mainstream science to understand reality, or even to know how best to seek it, as we prepare to launch Seek Reality Online. Now this week we are going to talk about what Jesus told me was the real reason why He chose to be born as God on earth. I had intended never to mention this again. But last Sunday morning, as our article about the failures of mainstream science went live, Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation sent out an email in which he detailed how God had taken him on a journey of personal discovery that had led him far beyond the Roman Catholicism of His youth. And as we were reading about Father Rohr’s journey of discovery, Thomas said to me, “Now we will tell Jesus’s story of His own voyage of discovery. He undertook His journey not for Himself, but because He wanted to free mankind. That is why He told you His story. Now He wants His true story to be known in place of the false Roman Christian story! His true story is what His website will be about.” Wow. But at least that makes sense. It never made sense that He would tell His story just to me!

So now Thomas and I will tell you all of what Jesus told me on the night of April 6^th, when my dear Thomas took me to meet his eternal Friend in the astral plane. I have told some of that story from my own perspective, how overwhelmed and how star-struck I was to be unexpectedly meeting Jesus that way. For any who might be wondering, that was not a dream. It was a wide-awake experience. I saw each iridescent scale on the Lord’s pet fish and every blade of grass. I saw His face and His beautiful hazel eyes with almost unbearable clarity, but then I had to look away. It seemed to frustrate Him that I was so ill at ease in His presence. But I could not look upon the face of God.

This is in part also my Thomas’s story. I didn’t realize until my guide filled in for me some of the details of their lives together how close he and Jesus actually are! And for how long they have been so close. Of course, when the Lord’s telling of His story begins, neither of them had their present status….

Six or seven thousand years ago, in what we now call the fertile crescent, a fortress city paid its harvest tribute. The gates were opened, and the Chieftain sent out his sons with wagons full of new-cut grains. But instead of being received as tribute, those wagons were ambushed and the princes’ bodies were displayed on pikes by an army that attacked the city and murdered its inhabitants. And then the Celestial Council determined that one of those princes had achieved all grace. He was now to join the Godhead Collective that cares for humankind. And so the Being that we know as Jesus ascended to the level of the Godhead.

Jesus told me as we sat side by side on an astral riverbank and fed His fish with grain that simply appeared in our hands that He did not at first understand what had happened to Him. Communication in the astral plane is mostly by mind, and He was still in communication with His brothers. He could not understand why they were unable to follow Him. And the more the Celestial Council explained that His natural goodness and His constant kindness had fully earned Him that exalted place, the more upset He became. His brothers, whom He dearly loved, were no less worthy than He was! The brother that you and I know as Thomas was perhaps quieter and more within himself; and His other brother, the one that we know as the Apostle John, was perhaps not as kindly, true, but he was no less worthy! And what were all these rules? Who had made them? Why did nobody tell anyone what the rules were, so people could make a better effort to follow them?

Jesus asked His brothers by mind to remain where they were until He could figure out what was going on. Thomas tells me that he dimly recalls that their requests to remain were a very big deal, and probably the first time that anyone had asked to be allowed to do anything out of order. But their requests were approved, because at the level of the Godhead Collective Jesus was making much bigger waves. He could not bear the thought that His being naturally more loving had given him an advantage that other people didn’t have. Basically, all heck was breaking loose.

With no guidance at all, in such a primitive world human advancement must have been slow indeed! Jesus told me as we sat together and idly fed His fish that the other members of the Godhead Collective were so melded that they couldn’t even comprehend His questions. They kept telling Him in a mental chorus that His brothers would be Perfected Beings soon enough! But Jesus’s vision had become so much bigger. It was even bigger than His other siblings, for His father of that lifetime had many wives. No, what about everyone else in that city? And all the slaves who had tilled the fields? And the traders who had roamed the earth? And since no one knew who had made those rules, why did we need to have rules at all?

You and I know that the “rules” that Jesus was trying to understand were the implacable laws of Consciousness physics. Although at the time, no one could have known that. And when even the Godhead Collective and the Celestial Council seemed to be unable to make sense of the reason for those rules, eventually Jesus decided that He had to live another lifetime on earth so He could study whatever it was that had made Him different from most other people, and figure out how to help not just His own brothers of His most recent lifetime, but also everyone else on the earth. Jesus wanted everyone to be able to achieve the place that He seemed to have achieved naturally. He felt driven to know precisely how this whole system worked! When He sat with me on that April night, He told me wryly that He had been naïve to think it would be easy for Him to break every rule and be allowed to do this. But life on the earth was so hard! And people had no idea why they were even there to begin with, so they made so little progress in each lifetime. There had to be a way to make whatever this process was at least somewhat easier for everyone.

The notion that Jesus might want to incarnate again as a Perfected Being into an entire lifetime from birth through death just so He could study people and give them tips for faster spiritual growth was unthinkable to the Celestial Council. Nothing like that had ever before been done! No one ever had chosen to incarnate on earth again from out of the Godhead Collective, and furthermore Jesus told me that His reason for wanting to do so seemed to be somehow unserious to them. And here you see the problem of conversing by thought, because that isn’t precisely the right word to use, and in trying to interpret the Lord’s thought that night I simply don’t know what the right word would be. But they couldn’t understand why He would care so much about helping the people who were still incarnating. He risked being disrespected by ignoramuses, and even being traumatized to the point where He might fall right out of His exalted status. I gathered, listening to the Lord’s thought-communications between the lines as it were, that the Celestial Council was finding Jesus to be a vast inconvenience, and they were at the same time fascinated and extraordinarily respectful. He was to them a new and exotic bird, a Being so excessively loving that He couldn’t bear to see anyone left behind, or even very much delayed. And as an Ascended Being, Jesus carried weight, perhaps much more than He realized at the time. When He quietly persisted, eventually He was able to negotiate an unprecedented lifetime lived in the area of Judea. He wanted to live in a place of settled cities near where He had lived His prior lifetime, but where war of any kind was unlikely.

There is no time in the astral plane, and in earth-terms a very long time had passed since those three brothers had died. I have reckoned the approximate time and place of their final earth-lifetime by what Thomas has told me about it. And he told me, too, that planning the earth-life of an Ascended Being turned out to be a considerable to-do! While he and John had the usual spirit guidance and guardian angel protection, Jesus had instead a whole new Council of His own for guidance in that lifetime, an array of Archangel invisibles to protect Him, and the Archangel Gabriel to go before Him and announce His impending birth to His future parents. And yes, Thomas says to me now, Jesus did indeed come to earth as the Son of God. He was born on earth from out of the Godhead! How else would you characterize His status?

Jesus told me that “the one you call John” had wanted to stay close to Jesus and became one of His Disciples, but “the one you call Thomas” had been willing to be among His crowd of followers, so he could listen and report on what people were saying. Having those two with Him who had been tight with Him through lifetimes was invaluable to Him.

The reason why Jesus was born on earth is clearly stated in the Gospels themselves. And Jesus told me when I asked Him this question that, yes, He always knew during that lifetime who He was and why He was here, although He never shared that truth with anyone. And repeatedly He says in various ways in the Gospels things like, “I and the Father are one” (JN 10:30). He told me that He found the people to be so fearful of their idea of God that He taught them to refer to their God as their heavenly Father in order to soften that image. Even long before April, Thomas had been telling me that Jesus had come to teach, but first He wanted to “study the people through human eyes” so He could understand them well enough to know how best to teach them. Nothing about Jesus’s genuine story makes the Romans’ God’s-Son-sacrificed-to-God-so-God-would-forgive-us nonsense even begin to make any sense!

In fact, Jesus tells us right in the Gospels that God never judges anyone. He says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).

Oh yes, Jesus did indeed come to save us! He came to save us from floundering in lifetime after lifetime on earth without making much spiritual progress at all by giving us in the Gospels the key teachings that are necessary to help us make the most rapid possible spiritual progress. And in fact, the Gospel teachings of Jesus are the easiest and the most rapid method for achieving spiritual growth that ever has been devised.

Another point that Jesus made to me on April 6^th was that His crucifixion and resurrection had been all His own idea. No matter how He phrased it, He could not convince the primitive people around Him that they were in fact eternal beings, so He wanted to give them a demonstration. He had experimented with reanimating dead animals’ bodies with temporary success in each instance, and He thought that He could do it with His own body as well, and could keep it alive for a few days at least. Then once His point had been made with that body that bore the marks of His crucifixion, He could discard His moribund body and use an astral body until He could make His more dignified exit. Of course, His personal Council didn’t like this idea either. But as we know, He did it anyway. And it worked! I especially enjoy the fact that scientists studying the Shroud of Turin tell us that the amount of energy required to produce the scorch on the Shroud could not be duplicated, even today.

And Jesus’s plan for His life as God on earth worked perfectly. He studied humankind for thirty years as a humble Jewish scholar who made His living as a carpenter, and then for a bit more than three years He was an itinerant preacher so wise and so charismatic that He gathered a considerable following. Then rather than simply disappearing, as had been the plan that He had made with His personal Council, He was crucified and rose from the dead, and in His astral body He made a show of being taken up into the astral plane. And for almost three hundred years after His death, His name and His teachings were rapidly spread far and wide by millions of eager devotees in a host of variations. Unfortunately, however, His nascent spiritual movement caught the attention of Rome, which saw in it the makings of a state religion that could become a weapon of complete control.

Jesus said not a word against Roman Christianity when I met with Him. And when I recently asked Thomas what the Lord’s attitude is toward the religion now, he said just, “Jesus is the most popular person in the world because of that religion, and He has been dead on earth for two thousand years.” But still, as some of the wisest and most thoughtful Christian scholars working today point out, Jesus is just a minor character in a religion that largely ignores the teachings that were the whole reason why He even took that extra lifetime! But to everything there is a season. And the Lord’s season has at last begun….

Let every kindred, every tribe on this terrestrial ball
To Him all majesty ascribe, and crown Him Lord of all!
Oh, that with yonder sacred throng we at His feet may fall!
We’ll join the everlasting song, and crown Him Lord of all!
– Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’s Name” (1779)

Seeking Reality

Posted on May 28, 2022May 29, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

To dream the impossible dream, to fight the unbeatable foe,
To bear with unbearable sorrow, to run where the brave dare not go.
To right the unrightable wrong, to love pure and chaste from afar,
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star,
This is my quest, to follow that star, no matter how hopeless, no matter how far.
To fight for the right, without question or pause,
To be willing to march into Hell for a Heavenly cause.
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) Joseph Darion (1917-2001) from “The Impossible Dream” (1965)

When in June of 2013 I was invited to do a radio program and podcast about death and the afterlife, and I was asked to come up with a title for it, I assumed we would call it something death- or afterlife-related. So when I opened my mouth to say, “Let me think about it,” and instead what I said was “Seek Reality,” I had no idea where that had come from! But by then I was used to these unexpected interventions. Four years earlier, as I was sitting in a pew one April morning and waiting for services to start, I had impulsively given the rest of my life to God. It seemed only fair. But when you do that, God takes you at your word.

Seek Reality has turned out to be the perfect title. It has been broad enough to let us spend the past nine years venturing far beyond just death and the afterlife in our choice of Seek Reality guests. I feel as if even after nine years, we have only just begun! The title was still available in every form when we bought it recently for online use, so it is about to become our title of choice for the website with which we are going to begin to free the world from the fear of death. Of course, now I know that it was my Thomas who spoke up on that fateful day nine years ago. And of late, I have learned a great deal more. Thomas is my spirit guide, and my ceding my life to him as God’s proxy in 2009 was by prior arrangement made before my birth, so his stepping in and making decisions for me as he has been doing routinely since then has all been according to plan. I think this might be happening now to a lot of people, actually. This whole arrangement is informal and voluntary, but when some of us are nearing the end of our incarnations, and when guide and guided are close friends, Thomas tells me that especially now, when there is so much that needs to be done on earth, there are many of us who are willing avatars for guides not in bodies who are trying to accomplish what they could not otherwise accomplish without the help of the incarnated people they are guiding.

And actually seeking a clear and objective reality is an impulse that is in short supply! We assume that mainstream scientists are seeking reality first and foremost, don’t we? Isn’t that what we rely upon our most trusted institution to be all about? Or else, what is its value? But over the past few years, I can tell you for a sorry fact that we have demonstrated both in this blog and with our Seek Reality guests that mainstream science is not seeking what you and I would consider to be reality at all.

Perhaps to be fair about this, we should define our terms. What should mainstream scientists be studying? It seems to me that we expect scientists to be studying reality. Or is using that term in itself naïve? I tried googling “seeking reality,” and found mostly… myself. It was embarrassing! Googling the generic words “seeking reality” actually gets you a page of Roberta Grimes’s podcasts. So apparently “reality” isn’t a word that is very much in current use? I think that we expect scientists to be studying at least humanity and everything that might affect us, right? Or at least the earth? And the solar system? Might we agree upon that much?

But expecting scientists to seek to understand all of reality is as foolish as it would be for us to expect a Catholic priest to seek some objective God. No, a priest is going to seek to relate to the Catholic God. And in just the same way, we can expect a scientist to seek to find only the materialist facts that the leaders of materialist science are directing him to seek and to find. As you will shortly see.

When I first began to study the afterlife in the nineteen-seventies, I found that there were many books by researchers of early-twentieth-century deep-trance-mediums in used-book stores. And over two years of intensive reading, I both convinced myself that the afterlife has to be real, and I uncovered a scandal that was by then half a century old and still continues to this day. What I found was that many of the books that I was reading had been written by eager researchers soon after the turn of the twentieth century as they tried to convince the scientific community that it was time to begin to investigate the afterlife. But physicists at the turn of the twentieth century were freshly dealing with the shock of quantum mechanics. So rather than at the same time also considering the possibility of life after death, the scientific gatekeepers – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – simply took a hard pass on also dealing with the possibility of an afterlife. Such an impulsive decision was probably meant to be temporary. Let’s deal with one crisis at a time! But their decision had a history going back as far as Plato and Aristotle. It long had seemed to make sense that “material” and “spiritual” matters should be handled separately. And the result of their impulsive decision is that even a full century later, mainstream science is at this point absurdly reduced to spending a billion dollars on seeking a source of consciousness inside the human brain.

The level of frank stupidity being displayed now in the scientific community would be amusing, if it were not so tragic. That impulsive decision that was made somewhere around 1910 soon became hardwired into the system as “the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism.” And yes, back then you could find those words in print. Of course, anything with a hard-wired and enforced dogma is a belief-system, by definition. So by now, mainstream science has become what we might call the religion of atheism, broadly construed. It is no longer an open-minded search for the truth, if indeed it ever was. And while this sad transformation was underway, a few of the most senior scientists who were then actively working continued to seek reality, essentially all on their own. So it was the brilliant Max Planck, who in 1918 had won the Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, who finally made the breakthrough that eludes the rest of the whole scientific community to this day when he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Exactly right. We who are not bound by any scientific dogma know now that consciousness is the base creative force. And in fact, nothing else actually exists! But because mainstream science is a belief-system now, and no scientist is encouraged – or, frankly, is even allowed – to seek reality without being declared out of bounds, we can find only fringy-seeming ideas being advanced within the scientific community at this point. Like uploading our minds to the cloud in dyson spheres, for heaven’s sake! Or attempting to regenerate the brains of brain-dead people as if they were salamanders. And actually, I know Ira Pastor personally! He was my guest on Seek Reality four years ago. Ira is a lovely man, a genuinely beautiful human being. But like everyone else, he needs to make a living.

All of this is tragic because it is demonstrably so flat-out wrong. Look, I am no scientist. I am a science hobbyist at best. But the truth is evident, even to me. For the whole past century, ever since that stopgap decision was made to avoid looking at afterlife communications until they could get the inconvenient problem of quantum mechanics sorted out, there have been no big scientific breakthroughs achieved worth noting. Oh, there have been a few ideas tossed around. String theory, and so on. But scientists still have no clue about so many things! We could point out their many deficiencies here that are the fallout from their detour into the materialist weeds, but let’s name just four of the biggest ones:

The Origin of the Universe. It is remarkable that the Big Bang Theory is seen by scientists as sensible. In what other area of scientific thought is the sudden explosion of a whole lot of something out of literally nothing accepted as a satisfactory explanation for anything?
The Origin of Life. Scientists assume that some magical combination of molecules must have been hit by lightning, and Presto! We got DNA, ribonucleic acid, and everything else that makes life possible must have happened all at once. I apologize for putting this so bluntly, but: Fat chance.
The Source of Human Consciousness. Human consciousness is in the same class as life. There seems to be no conceivable way for human consciousness ever to have arisen in the human brain, or indeed anywhere at all without the baseline consciousness energy that Max Planck discovered.
The Makeup and the Actual Uses of Dark Matter and Dark Energy. In a universe of breathtaking efficiency, working scientists are eager to assume that more than 95% of what exists is made up of a useless sludge of gluons and WIMPS without any functioning or value. Making that assumption then leaves them free to study just the material part of the universe that more than a century ago they decided that as materialist believers they could give themselves permission to study almost exclusively.

If those scientific gatekeepers in the early twentieth century had done what they ought to have done, and responsibly and open-mindedly sought reality when confronted with that flood of good afterlife evidence, the world would be quite different today. In fact, Max Planck was right. We cannot get behind consciousness for the simple reason that consciousness is the base creative force which continuously manifests this universe and everything in it, and it is the only thing that objectively exists. Once we know that, we can easily solve all four of the problems given above, and a great many more besides.

In limiting themselves to studying only what they considered to be material, investigative scientists actually chose to limit themselves to knowing pretty close to nothing about anything new at this point. Oh, they think they know a great deal more! They have created many blackboards (or, in recent decades, whiteboards) full of mathematical equations that set forth all sorts of theories. But, to what purpose? When their lack of understanding of what actually is going on is so fundamental, how can they be making much sense of anything now?

Max Planck said in 1944, not long before his death, “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.” And the estimable polymath Nikola Tesla was right, too, when he said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

So when Craig Hogan and I begin to say the same things on Seek Reality Online a few weeks from now, we will be in exalted company. The entire scientific community is wrong. And Max, Nikola, Craig, and I are right! The only thing that independently exists is what we experience in a dim way as consciousness. If it takes an additional hundred years for the scientific community to come to terms with reality, still eventually reality is going to win.

And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest,
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this,
That we four, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with our last ounce of courage
To reach the unreachable stars!|
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) Joseph Darion (1917-2001) from “The Impossible Dream” (1965)

Demons

Posted on May 21, 2022May 22, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

From ghoulies and ghosties
And long-leggedy beasties
And things that go bump in the night,
Good Lord, deliver us!
~ traditional Scottish prayer

This is the first post that I ever have written about something that I never have deliberately studied, I have no interest in whatsoever, and frankly I want nothing to do with. But you can’t do the work that I have been doing for the past fifty years without coming across quite a bit of information about nasties of various kinds. And I keep getting emails from people who think they are outwitting me when they remind me that Jesus cast out demons, so there must be some sort of devil after all. So I guess it’s time. Here is my obligatory demons post.

Jesus was said to cast out demons more than sixty times in all four Gospels. And He seemed to be almost on casual terms with them. For a long time I made up excuses. I told myself that He was using the demons thing as an artifice with these primitive people, who could not possibly understand His sophisticated methods for healing the sick and what-not. We’ll come back to that. But first, let’s deal with the larger overall issue of nasties in general. We should add, of course, that none of what we perceive as nasties are real demons, in the sense of being servants of an actual devil. But rather, they are just invisibles of one sort or another, and usually they are either dead people or the memories or fragments of dead folks who have lost their way temporarily. They are negative, in the sense that they are under negative influences; but you will be relieved to hear that they are not actually evil.

And first, as we always do when we talk about invisible entities, it’s important that we again discuss the fundamental role of Consciousness in reality. What we experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the only thing that actually exists. We must keep that fact always in mind! And I apologize for the fact that whenever the topic of Consciousness comes up, I go through the same song and dance about it. But it is so easy for us to keep slipping back into the illusion that there is solid matter around us, and that our bodies are who we are. If we don’t keep the truth always in mind, we can become so easily sidelined into forgetting the larger implications of what really is going on around us. The plain fact is that we live every moment of our whole earth-lives in what amounts to an illusion. We live these lives in a dream, and Consciousness is both the dream and the dreamer, so whenever we talk about that dream, I do you a disservice if I don’t help you to first immerse yourself deeply again in the basic truth of this illusory reality.

Very simply put, Consciousness is an energy, and it is the base creative force. Like all forms of energy, it vibrates. At the low and slow end of the Consciousness vibratory range are all the awful emotions like fear, anger, hatred, and grief, while at the high end are love and joy. It really is that simple! The material reality in which we live these illusory earth-lives is at the low end of the Consciousness range, and we are told to assume that there is no top. Furthermore, we know that God is love. God is where we live and move and have our being. Wherever we are, God is. If you think of Consciousness as a pail, negativity is the dregs at the bottom of it and the pure love of God fills all the rest, which is why when we briefly leave this material reality in our sleep at night or in a near-death experience, and we travel in the astral plane, the atmosphere there feels so light and love-filled by comparison. The only part of the astral plane that is negative is the lowest level, which Jesus calls the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.

All of this material level of reality is below the astral plane, and therefore all of it is at least somewhat negative. Until we achieve a certain level of spiritual development, we all find it necessary to come here in order to experience these negative matter-based lifetimes which make it easier for us to grow spiritually, although that is a discussion for another day. But that is also why we might encounter nasty entities here, at the bottom of the Consciousness pail. But those negative entities are of no concern to us unless we foolishly make ourselves vulnerable to them.

Many kinds of low-vibration entities exist! A lot of them aren’t even sentient, but instead they are mere fragments of beings, or memories or shadows of beings. There is not, and there cannot ever be any powerful devil for one simple reason: the more evil an entity is, the weaker it is, while the more loving an entity is, the more powerful it is. To cynical human ears that sounds unbelievably corny, doesn’t it? But it is perfectly true. My beloved Thomas tells me that the power of the Godhead Collective is infinite. He thinks, though, that his Friend might be as powerful all by Himself as the whole Godhead Collective put together, after He has spent the past two thousand years deep in loving service to people on earth and in the astral plane. I think Thomas may be allowing his friendship to color his judgment a bit; but on the other hand, I have been near Jesus recently when He wasn’t toning down His personal energy by much, and perhaps Thomas has a point. The Lord’s personal energy is amazing. It is absolutely loving, extraordinarily powerful, yet perfectly sweet and kindly.

The most evil entities are so weak that they are in danger of falling out of existence altogether. Most luckless of all are the shadow men. They are generally seen all in black, at night because they cannot bear any light, and they lurk in closets to scare people because they feed on fear. I kid you not! Shadow men are rare but they do exist, and occasionally they have been spotted at dusk. If they find someone to latch onto in early childhood, they will try to maintain that connection for life. Keeping a nightlight on in every small child’s bedroom is enough to keep them away.

But as I have said above, for the most part what we think of as demons are just disembodied people who have temporarily gone astray. They are among the twenty-five percent or so of folks who don’t manage to transition right away, mostly because of plain ignorance, and they never would deliberately harm you. They might, however, inadvertently give you quite a start! Here are some ways that they can plague the unwary:

Drug and Alcohol Addicts. Each of us has a protective energy shield which extends around us for a foot or two in all directions. Sensitives can see these shields, which glow in various colors depending on our state of spiritual health, and for so long as we maintain our energy defenses in good order it is difficult or impossible for any sort of negative energy to penetrate our defenses. But if we become drunk in a bar, or if we shoot up in a needle alley, our defenses will temporarily tatter, and then we are almost guaranteed to pick up the spirits of waiting addicts, who will be eager to make us ravenous drunks or drug addicts thereafter. My father was a regular weekend drunkard until he quit cold-turkey when I was eleven, and I didn’t realize until much later that the odd greenish glow to his eyes when I was a child and he had been drinking was a typical sign of someone harboring one or more drunken spiritual passengers.
Roving Dead Folks Are Attracted to Ouija Boards. We are told by people not now in bodies that for some reason Ouija boards act like literal magnets to stray disembodied people. There have been cases where lowlife disembodied types have so infested a house that the flesh-and-blood inhabitants have felt the need to vacate it.
Executed Criminals. An execution sets a convicted lowlife free of his body and makes him invisible at the height of his worst and most negative emotions, and with revenge on his mind. Who considers this to be a good idea?
Ghosts. A ghost is simply a disembodied person. Most of them aren’t inclined to wander, but they can make sounds or even be seen in some circumstances. And if you frequent places where people die, you can on occasion pick up invisible hitchhikers.
Impressions and Fragments. People who have suffered extreme emotions can leave impressions, shadows, or fragments of themselves behind where this happened, which is why old houses can have some odd cold places.

So these creatures are nothing for you to fear. They aren’t real demons, in the sense of doing a nonexistent Satan’s bidding. They possess no power of their own to harm you unless you make yourself vulnerable to them. Simply stay away from Ouija boards, avoid taking recreational drugs and getting drunk in bars, and try to stay away from battlefields, unnecessary hospital visits, abortion clinics, or anywhere else where people are dying. And first and foremost, keep yourself sensibly free of superstitious fears! Those cold spots that many old houses harbor might have tales to tell, but they lack the power to harm you.

Now let’s talk about the many times in the Gospels where Jesus cast out demons. This one is typical: At the start of His ministry, Jesus entered a synagogue in Capernaum on the Sabbath, and “In the synagogue there was a man possessed by a demon, an impure spirit. He cried out at the top of his voice,‘Go away! What do you want with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are—the Holy One of God!’‘Be quiet!’ Jesus said sternly. ‘Come out of him!’ Then the demon threw the man down before them all and came out without injuring him” (LK 4:33-35). Note that here the demon is defined simply as an impure spirit. And it wasn’t only impure spirits that Jesus was commanding. Later that day He rebuked a fever in Simon’s mother-in-law so she could get up and make their dinner (LK 4:39).

Jesus’s remarkable power to heal the sick quickly brought Him a large following. “Jesus went throughout Galilee, teaching in their synagogues, proclaiming the good news of the kingdom, and healing every disease and sickness among the people. News about him spread all over Syria, and people brought to him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering severe pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed; and he healed them.Large crowds from Galilee, the Decapolis, Jerusalem, Judea and the region across the Jordan followed him” (MT 4:23-25). We can surmise from the references to demons taken in context that the Lord’s ability to cast out demons was a catch-all term for the various kinds of mental and neurological diseases about which in the Lord’s day they could have had no comprehension. And as we know, one secret to Jesus’s great healing powers was His ability to use His patients’ own minds in the healing process (see e.g. MT 9:22; MK 5:34 &10:52 and LK 8:48 & 18:42).

So the whole idea of demons is one more thing that you can happily purge from your mind. There are no demons. There never have been demons. And as more and more of us learn at last that our lives really are eternal, and that each of us is God’s best-beloved child, perhaps the day will come when everyone will know what happens after death, and we all will transition home as soon as our bodies die in accordance with what is a tenderly planned and universal process. And then perhaps we will stop creating all these pointless fears!

What If Jesus Is Right?

Posted on May 14, 2022May 15, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

Climb every mountain, Search high and low,
Follow every byway, Every path you know.
Climb every mountain, Ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, ‘Til you find your dream.
A dream that will need All the love you can give,
Every day of your life, For as long as you live.
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (1965)

You haven’t asked me what I think is wrong with the world, but let’s assume for a moment that you had asked that question. My answer would be a simple one. In my estimation, too many people are chasing little dreams. Money dreams. Or video game dreams. Or they aren’t even bothering to dream at all. Youth is supposed to be all about starting to shape your life’s big dream. So then you can spend all the rest of your life in loving the process of chasing your big dream! There are great dreams going begging now because too many of today’s young people are mostly living with cellphones to their faces.

My own dream is an enormous one. I want to bring the kingdom of God on earth. I want for everyone that level of love. That degree of peace and joy in all of humankind. Jesus uses the terms “kingdom of God” or “kingdom of heaven” more than eighty times through all four Gospels, and He talks a lot about bringing the kingdom of God on earth. If not now, when?

Of course, I didn’t start out this way. When I was young, I fell in love and got married, so at first I couldn’t dream beyond the usual family dream. Which is a fine dream, I will grant you that, but it peters out long before you do. I had no idea back when I was mothering and grandmothering that I harbored within me a spirit-guide relationship that had been two thousand years in gestation. And my spirit guide’s own great relationship, which was already shaping my present earth-life, went back even thousands of years before that.

I wish there were an easy way to help you find your own big dream! Something you had been working on when you were in your infant twenties, and something that you still could find so compelling that it would have you waking up in the middle of the night with new ideas well into your seventies. A dream to make you joyful for your whole life long! All I can say is that you may in fact have such a spirit-guide relationship dream, and still not know about it even now. All of us are ancient beings! The first thing you should do, if you haven’t yet done it, is to ask your spirit guide to give you a name to use, and also ask your guide to please move outside your head. He or she will go to your dominant shoulder. So now you have a real relationship! Don’t do all the talking, but instead try to listen. Expect answers. Perhaps imagine answers at first. You definitely have a spirit guide, and your guide is a separate person. Your guide may not be as forceful as my Thomas is, but he and I have an arrangement that was made before my birth, and I am his avatar at this stage of my life, so his domination of my life is reasonable. And since what he needs me to do fits my own dream, we are as one person in completing this work.

Well, okay. Perhaps I have cheated a bit in claiming my Thomas’s dream as my own, especially when his Friend’s dream is what he actually is claiming. But his dream feels like mine, so his Friend’s dream does, too, since I am the one who is tasked with carrying it on! And when I picked up my Bible at the age of twelve and assigned myself the duty of repeatedly reading it, I had no idea that I even had a spirit guide who actually had assigned me that task. When I had a moment of doubt in choosing Christian history as my college major – and this I remember vividly – but I overrode that doubt at once, I didn’t know that it was Thomas who was assuring me that my choice was the right one. And when I felt compelled to browse in used-book stores, and I eagerly accumulated old collections that had been compiled by those who were studying deep-trance mediums, again I thought that was my own idea!

Roman Christianity has nothing to do with Jesus. That was the hardest part for me to get my mind around. I have spent my life being so religious! I once was like that poor man in the astral plane, trying to fall to his knees in worship while Jesus held him up. Thomas wanted to get me past my stubborn religiosity, which was why he took me to meet The Man Himself.

Meeting Jesus and hearing Him tell His story was a monumental event for me. I have gone back and read that post repeatedly, and what I wrote doesn’t begin to convey what I remember. I fell in love that night as I never before in my life have been so completely in love. And Thomas assures me that Jesus has that effect on everyone. Some time ago, he told me that he himself died in that First Century lifetime on a cross with a little group of the Lord’s followers, and they sang for two days before they died. I insisted to him when he told me this story that you can’t sing when you are nailed to a cross! For heaven’s sake, you can barely breathe. He told me that’s the effect that Jesus has on people. I can’t get past this sense of what it was like to be in the Lord’s presence, and it has been weeks now since that momentous night when we fed the fish. For the first time, I really get it! Jesus came to us as God on earth, and He so inspired a whole generation that they began a movement that still lives today, even despite its bastardization by the Roman religion. Meeting Jesus has filled me with sufficient love that I no longer for a moment doubt that you can sing for two days without breathing while dying in excruciating pain and nailed to a cross.

The Sudarium of Oviedo and the Shroud of Turin covered Jesus’s face and His dead body when He was taken down from the cross. Those relics were miraculously preserved, and they now without question demonstrate the absolute divinity of Jesus the Christ:

Both relics date to the lifetime of Jesus. The linen of which the Shroud of Turin (Italy) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) are made can be carbon-dated to His lifetime on earth. Each is of a weave in common use at that time and place, and the Shroud includes pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
The blood on both relics is male, and of the same type. That type is AB, which is so rare that only about two percent of modern people share it.
The marks on both relics mirror the Lord’s injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths, and some twenty other points of similarity, make it statistically certain that they both covered the same Man, that He was Jewish, that He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report were inflicted on Jesus.
The Shroud carries a vague image that is the size and shape of a Man. There is no image on the Sudarium, but smudges on the Shroud can be seen. More obvious to a casual observer are smoke and burn marks from a fire in 1532 and another in 1997, together with efforts that were made over time to mend and patch the damaged Shroud.
The image on the Shroud is a photographic negative. It was only when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898 that the clear image of a crucified Man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image of a crucified Man.
No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it doesn’t penetrate at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the Victim happened well after the blood had dried. It was produced by a burst of radiation so powerful that it could not be duplicated by any method known today.

Here is what I have learned as I have studied the afterlife evidence over the past fifty years, and also studied the Gospels while I pursued this dream that for most of my life I have thought was only my own dream. I know now that I have been following a dream that my beloved Thomas has been pursuing for Jesus for the past two thousand years. And I know now, too, after Jesus told me His story, that He first conceived His own dream when He initially understood two thousand years ago that it is possible for each person to raise his or her own Consciousness vibration sufficiently to achieve the vibrational level of the kingdom of God while still on earth. So here is what we now understand:

Every human being of every religion or of no religion goes to the selfsame afterlife.
There is no fiery hell, and there is no judgment by anyone but ourselves.
The death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being, so the Christian dogma was not the reason for the Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection. Those events were instead Jesus’s planned demonstration that human life is in fact eternal.
The Gospel teachings of Jesus which He developed as He studied humankind are the easiest and most effective method for raising our individual Consciousness vibrations.
Once each of us raises our own Consciousness vibrations sufficiently while we are on earth, then the kingdom of God will come, “on earth as it is in heaven.”
Jesus tells us in the Gospels that this will happen, and the plain laws of Consciousness physics independently predict that in fact it will!

To begin to achieve this dream for Jesus, Seek Reality Online is scheduled to go live within the next few weeks. And the website that He requested, the one that will teach His Way, is expected to follow it in about a year. To be perfectly frank with you, I have no idea where this is going. I do it all for Him. And I do it for you. And now I am sitting here reading this over and thinking, wow, it is all so simple! What if it actually works?

One thing that Craig Hogan and I have happily noticed is that as people learn that their lives are eternal, they begin to live in an eternal frame. They become more peaceful, less worldly, more spiritual. So as more and more people lose the fear of death, we can at the very least look forward to a much better and more peaceful world!

Climb every mountain, Ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, ‘Til you find your dream.
A dream that will need All the love you can give,
Every day of your life, For as long as you live.
Climb every mountain, Ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, ‘Til you find your dream!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Climb Ev’ry Mountain” (1965)

The Death Experience (Part II)

Posted on May 7, 2022May 8, 2022 by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd. I lack nothing.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters, He refreshes my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely Your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– David, Third King of Israel and Judah (c.1040 BCE – c.970 BCE), Psalm 23

Until the advent of the radio, it was hard for the not-actually-dead to explain to the living where they were now. I recall when I was first doing afterlife research in the nineteen-seventies, and I came across a dead communicator soon after the turn of the twentieth century who had been among the first to have tried to explain to his living loved ones through a deep-trance medium where he was by using an analogy to the newfangled radio. He said something like, “You know how you can tune the radio to a higher station, and there’s music there too? Well, the same thing happens….” It struck me that his had been a brilliant insight!

In fact, just as there is no time, so also apparently there is no space. For practical purposes, everything that exists is there in the room around you now. So when you die, you won’t be going far! When I used to give seminars, I would explain it by using television as an analogy. I would say that right now your mind is tuned to that body on this level of reality. When you die, your mind will simply tune to a slightly higher level of reality, where it will pick up a new, young body. At, I might add, a slightly higher channel, but in what is otherwise more or less the same place.

That fog that we entered last week from your deathbed soon clears at a slightly higher vibration, and you find yourself in a reception garden. Although we ought to add that traveling awake from your deathbed in the company of your loved ones is by no means the only way to die.

There is a kind of triage that happens as the body dies, an extra assurance that we will get support if we need it. Or on the other hand, various things might briefly go wrong:

When we die awake and in good health, we generally go directly to a reception garden. We’ll return to that discussion in a moment.
When we die with physical or mental issues, we’ll go right to a specialized care facility. There are many such facilities on Level Three of the afterlife, and typically people who die with a physical or mental illness will need to spend some time being nurtured into a comfortable belief in their own good health. This generally takes three or four earth-months. And even people whose ill health may not have been apparent to the decedent’s loved ones may be nurtured briefly in a post-death care home out of an abundance of concern for them, so most mental mediums will suggest that we not try to connect with our recently-transitioned loved ones for the first few months after a death event.
When we die in our sleep, we generally wake up in a Summerland home. My mother was desperately afraid to die. She flat refused to believe a word of The Fun of Dying, so eventually she transitioned in her sleep at the age of 93, and she woke up surrounded by loved ones in one of the homes in my Danish grandfather’s farm compound, which is high on a cliff above an astral sea.
Some will simply go off-track for a time. According to our dear friend Mikey Morgan, who is a frequent Seek Reality guest, between a quarter and a third of those who die will go off-track at death initially, and mostly due to their own plain ignorance. Some will need to be rescued, perhaps by our dear friend Father Nathan, who is another frequent Seek Reality guest.

So there are things that might go wrong, but let’s assume that you have sensibly followed your mother, your spirit guide, and your childhood pet. And soon the fog lifts to reveal a gorgeous scene!

Most of the descriptions that we have of the North American arrival gardens are from the first few decades of the twentieth century. And we have to assume that a lot has changed since then. Please understand the following facts:

Colors in the Summerland go far beyond the visible light spectrum. Just try to imagine that! Actually, you can’t imagine it. The best you can do is to imagine some various shades of purplish-orange. But the grass and vegetation don’t need to be green, and the flowers are mostly in unbelievable colors. The sky, too, is going to be just about any shade but blue!
There is no sun, and the ambient light is white, somewhat paler at Level Three but ever brighter as you go higher. There is no night, no season, no weather to speak of, although if you want weather experiences you can have them.
The North American Summerland has snow-capped mountains in the distance. Don’t think of them as our Rockies especially, but imagine them more as a generic backdrop of mountains that will seem to be nearer or farther away, according to your preference. Bodies of water of varies sizes are around, and since travel is by mind you can travel as you like.
Everything in the Summerland is human-created. That is true of what we see around us here, but it is much more playfully true of the Summerland. For example, the afterlife literature includes accounts of people learning how to create living plants, and also people watching as groups of elevated beings mind-create buildings together. Plans for those buildings are drawn and studied, and then the buildings shimmer into and out of existence before becoming solid.
Everything in the Summerland seems alive-ish, somehow dimly aware, and giving off energy. Many things give off a dim music as well. All of this is true to such an extent that we don’t need to eat, since the plants and the water give off all the energy that we need to abundantly sustain us. The flowers turn their faces to us, and the vegetation caresses us as we pass. And, yes indeed, the water is alive. It caresses us, it feels like silk against our skin, and we can walk into it fully clothed and come out of it dry.

We cannot now know the precise details of the arrival gardens of 2052, or whenever you might make it there. But here is what I am betting you are going to see:

Echoes of Your Youth and Childhood. Thomas Jefferson said when he spoke through Leslie Flint in 1960 that the Summerland when he first arrived looked as rural Virginia had looked when he was a boy.
Your Childhood Pets, and also Birds, Butterflies, and Dragonflies. Many of those who have newly arrived and communicated with us from there have remarked about these lovely details.
Splashing Fountains, Benches, Flowers, Walkways, and Graceful Trees. Many new arrivals have remarked about seeing gigantic flowers as tall as a man.
People Dressed in Various Period Fashions. It doesn’t seem to matter how we dress. At higher levels people often wear spirit robes, or what are sometimes called astral robes, the sort of long-sleeved, floor-length belted tunics in shimmering pastel colors that angels are commonly assumed to wear. But in the Summerland levels, people typically wear whatever they wore in their most recent earth-lifetime.
People Enjoying Single- or Double-Occupant Vehicles. Little cars, boats, and airplanes were being played with even early in the twentieth century, so lord only knows what they are doing now! And these vehicles are all powered by mind, so there is no exhaust.
Our Astral Bodies Are Mind-Created. We may at first feel unaccustomed to mind-creating our bodies, but we soon become adept again at changing our appearance at will. This body that you have worn from your deathbed looks as you looked in your most recent earth-lifetime, but it is likely to be growing younger in appearance as you begin to think younger. Eventually you may even choose to look as you looked in a different earth-lifetime. When Thomas and I visited Jesus a few weeks ago, the Lord wanted to make me comfortable so He first made Himself look like a benign older guy. And then He looked like church-Jesus for the group who had come to receive His blessing; and then finally He became the young olive-skinned Jesus with curly hair that He seems to be experimenting with currently. It has of late been scientifically proven that He did indeed resurrect His body a couple of days after its death two thousand years ago. But even by those standards, I’ve got to say that I thought what I saw Him do a few weeks ago in wearing three different bodies successively also was pretty impressive!

At some point by now, you will have reunited with your vast, eternal mind. Suddenly you will feel freshly brilliant, and you will remember so many things! You will recall some favorite prior lifetimes, and recognize and greet some very old friends who perhaps are quietly coming to join you in this beautiful and colorful garden. So you will sit down with them on a bench for a while in this lovely and deeply quiet place. You never in memory have heard quiet like this, without even distant traffic sounds, no ringing in the ears, and only perhaps the gentle twitter of birds and the lilt of flowers, like barely audible laughter.

Soon you and your primary guide will be moving on to experience your life-review in a great stone building. Then you and your friends and family will gather for your welcome-home party in your family’s ancestral home that could be in an astral city, perhaps; or, as mine is going to be, it might be held amid horses and cows on an old ethnic farm that overlooks the sea. But for now, you have the infinite peace of knowing that once again you are truly at home and forever safe in everlasting arms.

And what does the Lord require of you?
To act justly, and to love mercy,
and to walk humbly with your God.
– Micah of Moresheth (c.737 BCE – c.696 BCE), from Micah 6:7-8

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

Pearl of Great Price

Seeking Sense in Hindsight

Seek Reality Online

Moving On

His Turn at Last!

His Story

Seeking Reality

Demons

What If Jesus Is Right?

The Death Experience (Part II)

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