Author: Roberta Grimes

“Allen”

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Oh, my love, my darling,
I’ve hungered for your touch a long, lonely time.
And time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much.
Are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love,
God speed your love to me.
– Alex North (1910-1991) & Hy Zaret (1907-2007), from “Unchained Melody (1955)

When the beloved actress Betty White died on New Year’s Eve at the age of 99, the last word she spoke was the name of her third and final husband, the love of her life, the jovial game show host Allen Ludden, who had died some forty years before. Press reports tell this story as randomly cute and charming, which fact by itself is tragic, when for the dying to call to their dead loved ones is the most normal thing on earth. It happens more than a hundred and fifty thousand times a day at deathbeds all over the world, and it has probably been happening in much the same way for the past two hundred thousand years. How is it possible that the whole death process has not long since become common knowledge?

When Steve Jobs was dying, he lay surrounded by his family, saying his goodbyes. And then his eyes lifted, he looked beyond them, and he said, “Oh wow! Oh wow! Oh wow!”

Thomas Jefferson died on the morning of July 4, 1826. His good friend, John Adams, died that afternoon. As Adams lay moribund, he murmured, “Thomas Jefferson still survives.”

All these dying people were being met by their dead loved ones as they were preparing to leave their bodies. There is never a tunnel that ends in a light in any normal death! That myth is just near-death-experience nonsense. No, there is an actual planned-death process that more than seventy-five percent of us can look forward to enjoying, and many of our living loved ones will witness it as they sit at our bedsides and support our transitions. The veil between dimensions continues to thin, which means that more and more of this process is going to become ever more transparent. So let’s begin now to get comfortable with it.

What happens in these daily lives makes it feel to us as if they are our real lives. But they’re not. In fact, this entire lifetime is something like a rough excursion into enemy territory; and as each of us dies, this lifetime is going to be treated as something like the hard but necessary duty it has been by our loved ones and our spirit guides as they eagerly welcome us home.

We have talked before about the fact that our lives on earth are carefully planned. We diligently plan challenging lives, stressful and full of hard-duty tasks that might advance our own spiritual growth. The two-year-old blog post linked just above includes a bit of my own story, which I think now is probably more typical than I had realized it was when I wrote that post. I am apparently a somewhat ambitious being whose close friend and guide is more spiritually advanced, and by helping him to complete his development, I also (we hope) can advance my own spiritual development as well. All of us are helping one another by doing this hard-stuff-on-earth thing together!

So, each of us as I write and as you read is living another tough planned earth-lifetime. We are both in the very thick of it! But each of us, on some un-guessable day, will come to what our higher consciousness will select to be our last earth-day. It is very likely to be at one of three exit points that were pre-planned into this lifetime, at a place where our higher consciousness judges that we have wrung as much learning and growth as we can get from the effort that being here requires. Whatever our age at the time might be, we will generally have spent that last year or so in winding things up, perhaps planning a final gala celebration as Betty White just did; or else, as a friend of mine did who died in his fifties, we might take a big trip, heal rifts with old friends, share thoughtful conversations with each of our children, share secret passwords with our husband or wife, and in retrospect we will seem to have known what was coming, even though we didn’t consciously know.

When we are trying to better understand how human life works, it is important that we always remember two things:

  • Each of us has a primary spirit guide. Nearly all of us has more than one guide, with the deputy guides dedicated to targeted duties; so for example, if you have decided to learn to write novels or to play the piano, you will have added guides who have those skills; or if you are trying to quit an addiction, you’ll have a guide who is helping you in that area. But you have one main guide who is always with you, who helped you to plan this lifetime, and who will be with you for your entire life.
  • You spend a few hours out of body with your primary guide most nights. Think of this as when you do your strategizing and your reconnoitering. It seems to happen in the first part of the night, from maybe ten or eleven until one or two; and it’s the reason why things so often tend to look much clearer the next morning.

It has come to seem to me that as people’s lives begin to wind down, this behind-the-scenes counseling becomes especially important. Our guides are steadily counseling us, and also counseling our loved ones, to keep things smooth and tranquil. I have a friend whose toddler drowned at the age of two, and it was clear to us in retrospect that he had been counseled about it beforehand; I also can see in the lives of many people before their death happens that they knew it was coming. I can see it in my own life, too.

My research has yielded many good examples of what can happen as the death process unfolds, but I am going to save most of that to share with you in Seek Reality Online videos and Zoom meetings. You will find that once you stop fearing death and start looking forward to it as the ultimate adventure that it actually is, learning about the fun that other people have had with the events surrounding death, and also are having with them even now, can be quite enjoyable!

As people pointed out to me when The Fun of Dying first was published, getting to the point of dying from a disease like cancer isn’t fun at all. But as death actively approaches, even if getting to that point has been unpleasant, generally most of the pain is past. And for those who have so little pain that they can remain wide awake, within the last twenty-four hours of life on earth, a beautiful moment arrives. Wonderfully, we will begin to notice long-dead loved ones appearing in the upper corners of the room. Why they appear in the upper corners, I have never heard explained, although I have my hunches. And this phenomenon is highly variable. There are reports of afterlife visitors appearing many days before the death. My own mother was visited by her parents five years before she died, when she was in a coma and her doctor assured me that she could not survive; but she refused to go with them, she got better, and eventually she transitioned in her sleep. You could be welcomed by a group of loved ones who will party hearty for days in your hospital room, or your only deathbed visitor could be your beloved long-dead horse. But the usual deathbed visitors are one or a few of the dead people you will most trust appearing in an upper corner of the death chamber less than a day before your departure time, looking young and happy and chatting with you in your mind; and then accompanying you as you leave your body so you and they can exit the room together through the fog, or else through the wall, across the bridge, or whatever your culture has come to expect will be the departure method.

You will be happily focused on your loved ones as you move to the next level; but if you look around, you are likely to notice a little rescue party there. These folks are likely to include your primary guide, an angel or two, and maybe beings of light, all focused on the guest of honor. A seasoned warrior is coming home! I don’t know the percentage of transitioning people who are taken directly to hospitals and care homes for a stay that generally amounts to several earth-months, but I think it could be as many as half. Those who don’t need care will go to reception gardens, life reviews, welcome parties, and so on, pretty quickly; but those whose bodies have been sick or damaged, whose minds have been damaged, and those who in any way are at all the worse for earth-wear are first taken for a stay in the most beautiful and loving kind of restorative care you can imagine.

The hospitals and care homes are true to the period when the patient died, and the care given there is whatever that particular patient needs. The effort the care specialists will put into healing our earth-trauma is extraordinary! Back in the seventies, when I was reading original afterlife evidence, I was doing this research just for myself so I have no idea where this account came from. But I will share with you what I think is the most touching tale of all.

A boy who died in WWI had had his genitalia shot away as part of his terminal wounding. He knew what he had lost, so the body his mind created after his death was missing what to a man is essential, and he was miserable. People taking on the look and clothing of doctors and nurses took him into a vintage-1918 operating room, told him that he had been given a local anesthetic so he would be awake to watch what was happening, and then they sewed on the missing parts. Ta-da! All better! But he didn’t believe their cure would work, so of course the newly attached parts didn’t work, and he was even more miserable. So then they took him to a beautiful bedroom, and they put him to sleep. A woman gave herself the appearance of a gorgeous teenage girl, she slipped into the bed beside him, and she awakened him and proved to him beyond the slightest doubt that everything was working just fine.

That is the only account that I can recall reading of full-fledged physical sex after death, but it shows the extent to which those who operate the post-transition care facilities will go to heal the wounds that life on earth can inflict on our minds. It is impossible for you to imagine the extent to which you in particular are infinitely loved.  

Lonely rivers flow to the sea, to the sea,
To the open arms of the sea.
Lonely rivers sigh, “Wait for me. Wait for me.
I’ll be coming home. Wait for me!”
Oh, my love, my darling,
I’ve hungered, hungered for your touch a long, lonely time!
And time goes by so slowly, and time can do so much.
Are you still mine?
I need your love, I need your love,
God speed your love to me!
– Alex North (1910-1991) & Hy Zaret (1907-2007), from “Unchained Melody (1955)

Pollution?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The road is long, with many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows when.
But I’m strong, strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.
– Bob Russell (1914-1970) & Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

There are many people who email me with occasional questions. We wouldn’t recognize one another if we passed on the street, but each of them trusts that if they have a question, they can send me an email and get an answer. And one of these questions came to me just before Christmas, when I was struggling with writing about what had been born to us two thousand years ago. It was the mildest of three NDE-related questions that arrived within days of one another, and I told my friend that I wanted to make her answer the subject of a blog post. I didn’t think about the fact that of course that meant that I was asking her to wait weeks for an answer! Here is her question. Her name is unusual, so let’s call her Sidney. 

Hi Roberta! Happy Holidays. How are you? Just wanted to ask a question. My friend flat-lined for a few seconds due to Covid. The doctors brought him back a few seconds after that. He says it was the most euphoric feeling, but it was just black and there was nothing. What is the reason he had no NDE? Was it because his spirit didn’t leave the body yet since this was a matter of seconds? He doesn’t really believe anything happens after you die now. I told him death is a physical process and you don’t really die right away. it also takes days for cells to die. I think brain death is the initial and permanent death; although one author did come back from that. Your heart stopping isn’t really the end of it necessarily, right? I’m thinking it was too quick and sudden. I think there are stages of dying…sort of like …when u dream and it’s pitch black and you’re in twilight u see nothing, but it’s so nice. Just needed your opinion. I hope you and your family are doing well. Not sure if you remember me; my hair is different in my profile, but I tend to write you every so often. Any updates on your online classes?  I hope all is well. 

On almost the same day this question arrived, I also received a question from someone who was frantic because he had been watching NDE-related YouTubes, and in one of them the experiencer said that Jesus had told him if he didn’t do something right away – I forget what it was – he would go to hell. A third question that arrived on almost the same day was about an NDE in which a man had met God as his judge.

And as a side-story, three years ago, my eighty-year-old Catholic husband who doesn’t watch YouTubes or read NDE literature had a bit of minor surgery that necessitated general anesthesia. He told me as he was waking up, sounding stricken, that now he no longer believed in heaven because there had been no NDE at all, but only blackness. Even he has been deeply affected by the NDE ideas that pollute our entire culture. I hastened to assure him that general anesthesia prevents NDEs from happening.

Near-death experiences are a cultural phenomenon that is both a blessing and a bane.

  • NDEs are a blessing because they are so universal and so well-studied that they establish without question the fact that the human mind can exist and function at a distance from its associated brain. And people who are blind from birth can see just fine during NDEs. It’s called mindsight, and it’s the same kind of sight that people have after physical death.
  • NDEs are, however, also a bane, because they have nothing whatsoever to do with death. And by now they pollute our entire culture with erroneous ideas about death the same way that microscopic particles of plastic pollute our oceans. Simply put, all the events that occur during NDEs are in the nature of dreams. They apparently happen in the astral plane as we are safely out-of-body traveling, but they are so emotion-filled that many NDE experiencers are convinced that they must have died down dead as a doornail and then come back to life.

For a long time, I wasn’t sure what to think of NDEs. They are, after all, a kind of gateway drug that opens the minds and hearts of people who are first beginning to consider the possibility that we might survive our physical deaths. And people love to hear some of those wonderful NDE stories! A lot of them speak about love and joy and happy things in general. People flying through the air. Meeting Jesus, being judged by God, and witnessing the battle between good and evil. Meeting dead loved ones and long-dead pets. Being told to go back because it isn’t their time. Sometimes being given wonderful, life-changing secrets. But as more and more people come close to dying and are revived, their near-death tales are seeping through our culture. And I am coming to see that near-death experiences might not be an un-mixed blessing to the world. For example, as many as one in seven NDEs are negative:  

  • Some experiencers describe a literal hell complete with fire and brimstone.
  • Some NDE-ers arrive in a void, or in blackness, or they are confronted by non-human beings that look like demons.
  • Even those who meet Jesus or God might be judged, or they are given odd commands which they find disturbing.
  • Some extremely strange characters, scenes, and situations might turn up. They seem earth-like perhaps, but not really of earth, and with beings that are human-like but not really human.

Many of these weirdly negative NDEs are reminiscent of the experiences reported by the most advanced astral travelers. Brave people like Seek Reality guest Cyrus Kirkpatrick report similar events. And indeed, NDEs apparently happen in the general astral plane under the control of our primary spirit guides, so for NDE experiencers to have some of the same experiences that the most advanced astral travelers report would make sense.

Let’s make a few simple facts clear.

  • Those that we used to think were dead tell us that death is always a one-way trip. No one who returns to life ever has actually been to where the newly-dead are.
  • NDEs apparently happen in the general astral plane, which is our eternal home and is many times the relative size of our entire physical universe. Some more extensive NDEs include the announcement that the NDE-er is approaching the place where the dead are. The experiencer is then told that if he continues through that boundary, his silver cord will break and he will be unable to return to the living.
  • The Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings. The Godhead never appears as a physical Guy, even in the actual afterlife. And Jesus is of the highest Godhead. He does appear in the afterlife, but He never, ever says anything scary or alarming.

A couple of years ago I wrote about NDEs. That post is still relevant. And the pictures that accompany it are so charming that I have used some of them again here.

Tomorrow is a happy day for Craig Hogan and me, and for those who share our voyage. Covid delayed it, but it was delayed as much by the fact that for years it was just a vague idea. “Hey! Let’s teach the afterlife and the greater reality online!” Pre-Covid, Craig and I had been running afterlife conferences, and we had learned the hard way that no matter what we did, it was impossible to get more than a few hundred people in the same place at the same time. After a whole year of work? But we wanted to educate thousands of people. If possible, even millions of people. After we have spent our whole lives learning the truth about what happens at and after death, and where it happens, how it happens, all the details about why it happens, we don’t want to graduate and have all that fun before we’ve managed to share these truths with the world!

Yes, there are other afterlife experts. And many are sharing parts of these truths. Of course, Craig and I are grateful to them! But what is now known about the afterlife and where, how, and why it happens is, all together, a complete and disciplined entirely new science that is as vast and complex as any other science! And still, even as late as this moment, eager seekers can’t learn much about it. Even a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century? Yes, there still are gaps in what we know. But not very many. Not anymore! While our oceans die of plastic pollution, and our one great Mind chokes on NDE pollution that is based on knowledge gleaned not from the actual afterlife, but rather from what we have learned via NDEs that happened in the astral plane, there still is no single place where seekers can go and learn the actual truth about the greater reality and the genuine afterlife. And there should by now be such a place. So, you know, you look around at all the other afterlife experts. And then you look in the mirror. And you shrug.

The internet makes it theoretically possible to reach the entire world. And Craig and I have come to see that I am a natural beginner teacher, and he is a natural advanced teacher of all these truths in a complete, thorough, and logical manner that will make sense to anyone who wants to learn what really happens at and after death. We are finding, too, that it is my role to run this school, and it is his role to create the lessons that will make it worth anyone’s while to be an earnest seeker. We haven’t chosen these roles! The roles have chosen us. And so it is.

Tomorrow the work on Seek Reality Online’s website will begin. Then in April, you will be able to take from me a basic, completely free course that can liberate you from the fear of death. As fifteen five-minute video modules, or as a single eighty-minute podcast, or as both: your choice. You can watch or listen as many times as you like, and that might be enough. But if you want to know more, with Craig you can examine every bit of what it has taken us decades to learn, and then to put together as a complete and fully integrated science. Then very soon, together with us you can begin to look forward to going home eternally to the most fun you ever have had in your life!

Then just as all that plastic detritus has been able to pollute the oceans of the world, and NDE-based fears have been able to pollute my husband’s mind and the mind of Sidney’s friend, perhaps soon now the internet will make it possible for the truth about our eternal natures to begin to pollute modern western cultures. Perhaps now we can start to give truth a chance! And then, at last and forevermore, humankind can begin to live together in a peace that truly never will end.      

It’s a long, long road from which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?
And the load doesn’t weigh me down at all!
He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.
– Bob Russell (1914-1970) & Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

 

What Was Born? (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.
For poor on’ry people like you and like I…
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus ’twas in a cow’s stall,
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
And the promise of ages it then did recall.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980) “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)

I’ve wondered whether my title for these two posts might be disrespectful. Aren’t human beings the highest form of material life? We tend to think that to call some phenomenon “Who?” might be more respectful than calling it “What?” Isn’t everything else that might be born into a physical body less important than we are? But what then might we better call the genuine Godhead being born on earth?

This voyage into seeking and finding the ultimate truth that has consumed my life since I was eight has been stunningly successful. It didn’t have to succeed! I realize now how completely the truth has always been governed and controlled from very far above our pay grade. Mindless hamsters in their runs are actually no more completely controlled than you and I are! But the difference is that they are not curious about the fact that their run is nothing more than a run. They never dream that there is something much greater out there beyond those walls.

What I saw when I was eight years old was that out there just beyond my room with its awful purple-cornflower wallpaper was something glorious and blindingly bright. Beyond this mind that is struggling to think is a Mind that is so much greater that I cannot begin to fathom it. Jesus said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). And this much at least, in my old age and after a lifetime of seeking, I have at last triumphantly found:

  • There really is no objective time. There only ever and everywhere is Now.
  • Within our little earthly run, humanity began just 200,000 earth-years ago. We sprang fully formed from nothing in a habitat of a universe that at first was not big and not very much.
  • The Now is continuously being created. And it includes ever more elaborate surroundings as we become ever more curious about who and what we are.

I can see it all so clearly now! Including a lot of its fudges and glitches. Punctuated equilibrium. Cosmological constants that are not actually constant. Once you begin to realize what is going on, you feel like a hamster who has found her way out of the maze and is perched out here on its edge, looking in and watching it happen. It amazes me to see that the scientists are still being so thoroughly outsmarted. But clearly the cleverest of them are not fooled, and they never have been fooled. Max Planck talked about the primacy of consciousness. Albert Einstein told us it is all an illusion, “albeit a very persistent one.”

Even the scientific hamsters who are still in there obliviously running the maze have come to the point of finding a Big Bang at this universe’s fake beginning. Maybe a hundred more earth-years hence, humankind will need to be finding something else that precedes that early event, and so on and on, since we know that something cannot come from nothing. None of it will be real, of course, but since each micro-instant will include every bit of our long-ago-seeming manufactured history, there is nothing about this process that will necessarily raise an alarm. Do you think that perhaps human scientists will eventually ever figure it out? Or will mainstream science continue to play this pointless game for further millennia of artificial non-time to come?

For my part, nothing of this earthly illusion continues to interest me.  I get that it is all illusion, and when you really get the illusion then you are already halfway home. But what I still wonder about is why that highest aspect of the Godhead bothered to show up here two thousand years ago to live a whole lifetime in the person of Jesus. Why was Jesus even born here at all? And now I am coming to think that the question must be even more basic than that. It takes us straight back to the perfect Mind of God at the base of A Course in Miracles. And into the tiny, mad idea of separation at which the Son of God first forgot to laugh, which apparently is what got this whole thing started. There never needed to be a separation at all, or so that is what we are told. We began as part of the mind of God, and we still should be there, even now.

Why have we needed to grow spiritually in this illusory place, when consciousness is one continuous vibration? I still don’t really get why we have needed to bother with any of this. I have accepted the explanation given in ACIM because I kept expecting it to begin to make sense, but it still doesn’t really make much sense to me. What makes sense is my mother telling me from where she is now that, “I’m dead! We’re all dead here!” and laughing. That absurd observation makes sense. Having spent most of my lifetime on earth studying the afterlife, and now planning to spend the rest of my life here teaching it, I laughed with my mother as she expected that I would. She has been there now for a decade, exploring and having the time of her life, and now I am about to spend the rest of my lifetime here trying to eradicate the fear of death all over the world because the fear of death is humankind’s greatest enemy. Fear of death is the root and the base of all fears, so when you no longer fear death you no longer fear anything. And yesterday as my family was sharing Christmas dinner I was explaining to my wonderful son-in-law that Craig Hogan and I are about to start Seek Reality Online to share with all the world the truth about the afterlife so we can end the fear of death everywhere and begin an eternity of peace and brotherhood over all the earth.

So then my son-in-law said to me, “Have you reached all the same conclusions?”

I said, “Yes. Perfectly.”

He took a bite of something as he looked at me with some doubt. And then he said, “Really?”

I said, “Really. You can’t get even a piece of paper between our conclusions. And we reached all our conclusions before we met one another.”

He looked at me with polite skepticism. I don’t think that yet seems possible to him. But the fact that everyone who studies the afterlife evidence reaches all the same conclusions has been the whole point for Craig and me! We long ago began to notice that when people who had independently studied the afterlife first met one another, they soon were completing one another’s sentences. And then as they continued to live their lives, we noticed that they cared less and less about selfish and grabby short-term goals. They began to live their lives in an eternal frame. So we have begun to speculate, Craig and I, that if we can educate enough of the world about the fact that human life is eternal, perhaps we really can bring about an end to every cruelty, and then to all wars. At least, it seems to us that it is time to try.

Last year at Christmastime I still was freshly dealing with the fact that Jesus is quite literally God on earth who came to inhabit a human body. I had fought so hard to avoid having to admit that fact. Please pause now and think about what it means for God to literally walk the earth! For my entire life I had been wondering and wandering out there under the sky each Christmastime with the human religion that I so dearly loved, in the manageable reality where Jesus was only, you know, related to God in some way. But the human Jesus I had been imagined wasn’t ever real at all. He was a part of the illusion, just as you and I in material bodies are part of the illusion. The last vestige of the Jesus I was clinging to was the one that had lived and died in just a material body to redeem us from a human-imagined divine judgment. But when I gave up and accepted the evidence on the Shroud of Turin – and that was maybe eighteen months ago now – I surrendered altogether to  the certainty that the risen Lord is not and never has been in any way just some variant of a normal human being. And He had always been so patiently telling us Who He actually was! “I am an aspect of the Godhead,” He had been saying. “The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work” (JN 14:10). And, “The word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me” (JN 14:24). And even, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (JN 5:19).

But, my dear God in Heaven, WHY? Why did God choose to live a human life?

We may not be given to know precisely why the Godhead came to us in the person of Jesus the way He did, and just when He did, until we ourselves are again at home in those glorious gardens with conscious flowers as tall as a man and in colors never seen on earth.

For now, we are told that a literal aspect of the Godhead came to us in the person of Jesus to study us, because the Godhead could not understand why we were having so much trouble using this artificial habitat to raise our personal consciousness vibrations. If that was the reason, in fact it worked, because the Gospel teachings of Jesus are the simplest and most effective method for raising our personal consciousness vibrations that ever have been given to us by anyone.

But still, I don’t think we really have it right. The genuine Godhead is actually GOD! Surely God can figure it out without having to go through living in a human body for an entire lifetime? But God did enter a human body, and all we can do in the face of that fact is fall to our knees and lift up our hearts in perfect love and adoration. God came to earth in the body of Jesus with the same power that continuously manifests this entire material-seeming universe. And that is an objective, verifiable fact that has nothing to do with any religion.

Oh dear Jesus, genuine Godhead on earth, please let us start over just one more time? We promise this time we will try to do better. And this life on earth is so distracting! Please remind us of what we are supposed to be doing?

 

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
A star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
Or all of God’s angels in heav’n for to sing,
He surely could have it, ’cause he was the King.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980) “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)

What Was Born? (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), translation of an 8th century Latin monastic hymn

At Christmas we celebrate the beginning of the most astounding and mystifying set of events in all of human history. Nothing about any of this is religious, since we know now that religions are man–made. By now, we have grown beyond the need to approach inexplicable events with superstitious terrors that made us need to build religions around them. But when these amazing events took place, religion-creation was still our response, so the religion of my childhood attributes a nonsensical set of ideas to some genuinely amazing facts. Knowing that, it may not surprise you to learn that the core Christian teaching that Jesus died to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins is nonsense.

In all my fifty years of looking for proof of that basic Christian belief, I never have found any evidence at all that the crucifixion of Jesus has made an afterlife difference for a single human being. And the volume of detailed and consistent evidence about the genuine afterlife that is available now is such that if Jesus actually had died for even the sins of just a few of us, we would easily find some confirmation! As I said last week, I love my childhood religion. Since I was eight years old, I have wanted to learn what happens at and after death so I could better understand my experiences of light; but more than that, I have so badly wanted to confirm that my Christian beliefs were real. I didn’t need much evidence. Maybe a single glimpse of a physical God on His actual throne? Some hint that there was a divine judgment? Maybe pearly gates and St. Peter with a list, or maybe even a celestial church with people saying how glad they were to have picked the right denomination? God, Jesus, and Christianity were my personal trinity. If I lost one, I feared that I might lose them all. So when at the age of 51, and after thirty years of earnestly trying, I finally gave up on finding any evidence that Jesus had died for our sins, I just closed my Bible and set it down. I stopped doing further afterlife research, and I spent the next two years pretending that none of that had ever happened.

I have talked here before about the rainy afternoon when I finally trusted Jesus enough to pick up and read my Bible again. In one sitting I raced through all four Gospels, feeling nervous at first because I knew so much by then about what is actually true, and I loved the Lord with everything in me. I couldn’t bear to learn that He had been wrong! But Jesus had been right in breathtaking ways that I never before had noticed. He knew things two thousand years ago about God, reality, death, the afterlife, and the meaning and purpose of human life that I had learned from the afterlife evidence, but that really still can be found nowhere else. For example, Jesus told us in the Gospels at least the following facts:  

  • The Godhead is perfectly loving Spirit and never judges anyone.
  • We come to earth to experience stressors and raise our personal consciousness vibrations.
  • We also come to earth to try to raise the consciousness vibrations of all of humankind (Jesus called the ultimate state of universal spiritual development “the kingdom of God”).
  • The afterlife is real, it includes many places, even the water there is alive, and our close loved ones prepare a place for us to live after death and then come to take us home when it is our time to transition.

There is much more, too. Some of it is subtle or debatable, but these four points were enough on that rainy day to prove to me that the Being Whose words are reported in the Gospels came to earth two thousand years ago knowing things that He could not have known if He had not come directly from the highest Godhead!

Jesus did in fact live on earth. We know that now without question. If my own evidence from the dead is not proof enough, there are Christians who have found and offer proof in abundance! Erick-Woods Erickson is a radio host who just this week spoke again to the fact that Jesus did indeed exist. He said, “If he did not exist, then neither did the Greek philosopher Socrates. We have no writings from Socrates himself.  We only know of his existence through the writings of other people. But no one would doubt Socrates existed. We actually have more eyewitness accounts of Jesus’s existence than of Socrates… The Apostle John was Jesus’s best friend. We know this from scripture. We also know this from Polycarp, Ignatius, and others. They studied under John, recounted his stories of being with Jesus, including stories not in scripture, and confirm John, Peter, Paul and others as eyewitnesses to Christ’s resurrection.” Erickson doesn’t mention the fact that there also are contemporaneous surviving notes of the existence of Jesus in nearby countries.

So Jesus did indeed live on earth. We also know that He was crucified and died on earth, and He was interred in a cave, as was the custom. Then three days later He literally rose from the dead.

And furthermore, the Jewish Law and the Prophets which became the Christian Old Testament contains a series of prophesies that can reasonably be tied to the birth and to the work of Jesus. To mention just three examples:

The prophet Jeremiah said of the Lord’s earthly ancestor, King David, “The days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will raise up for David a righteous Branch, a King who will reign wisely and do what is just and right in the land. In his days Judah will be saved and Israel will live in safety. This is the name by which he will be called: The Lord Our Righteous Savior” (Jer 23:5-6).

From Isaiah comes, “Therefore the Lord himself will give you a sign: The virgin will be with child and will give birth to a son, and you will call him Immanuel” (which means “God with us”) (Isaiah 7:14).

And finally, also from the great Isaiah comes my favorite prophesy of all. Jesse was King David’s father:

A shoot will come up from the stump of Jesse;
from his roots a Branch will bear fruit.
The Spirit of the Lord will rest on him—
the Spirit of wisdom and of understanding,
the Spirit of counsel and of might,
the Spirit of the knowledge and fear of the Lord—
and he will delight in the fear of the Lord.

He will not judge by what he sees with his eyes,
or decide by what he hears with his ears;
but with righteousness he will judge the needy,
with justice he will give decisions for the poor of the earth.
He will strike the earth with the rod of his mouth;
with the breath of his lips he will slay the wicked.
Righteousness will be his belt
and faithfulness the sash around his waist.

The wolf will live with the lamb,
the leopard will lie down with the goat,
the calf and the lion and the yearling together;
and a little child will lead them. The cow will feed with the bear,
their young will lie down together,
and the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The infant will play near the cobra’s den,
and the young child will put its hand into the viper’s nest.
They will neither harm nor destroy
on all my holy mountain,
for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the Lord
as the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:1-9).

I love that passage! I see it as encompassing all of human history from the birth of Jesus to the farthest future. Simply replace the word “fear” with “love,” and know that we are only about halfway there. The beautiful promise of those last four lines sometimes feels like most of what sustains me now.

So even though the proponents of the religion that still bears His name have misunderstood who He actually was, we know now that the Baby whose birth we celebrate at Christmas grew to be a Being truly unique in human history. He knew things two thousand years ago that we can confirm today only by means of the testimony of those that we used to think were dead. And He was an amazingly powerful Being. He even was able to reanimate a body that had been dead for days!

With all of that in mind, it is time for us to ask a new and important question. Since the religion is wrong, and it has always been wrong, what was this gigantic series of events really all about? What was actually born in Bethlehem two thousand years ago? And why?

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), translation of an 8th century Latin monastic hymn

Liberating Christians?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I come to the garden alone, while the dew is still on the roses;
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear, the Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me, and He talks with me, And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share, as we tarry there, none other has ever known.
– Charles Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1913)

 

I love Christianity. I love it desperately, dotingly, stupidly, as an infant loves its mother or a lover cherishes the beloved, and as the center of all goodness and safety. Christianity has been so much a part of my life! From the moment when I first saw the light of God in my nighttime bedroom at the age of eight, I have deeply associated the religion with God, with Jesus, and with everything that is right and just. After I first saw that light as a child, I gave up Sunday school for grown-up church, and my mother had trouble understanding that. I recall her telling me more than once how it amazed her to watch my face in church, a little child earnestly singing the hymns and transfixed by sermons that should have gone over my head. But I was sitting at the literal feet of God! So of course I was in rapture. And when I was twelve, I discovered that I could read the Bible and comprehend it, so I began a habit of reading a couple of pages every night that continued for the next forty years.

Given my history of devotion from childhood, my long fall from belief in Christianity has been painful. It began when I took college courses in early Christian history from a professor who seemed to bear a personal grudge against the authors of the religion. Miss Corwin was close to retirement age when I knew her. And she was ardent! She was my faculty adviser, and my devotion to the religion rather than to Jesus Himself seemed to irritate her to the point where I still recall having to submit to lectures in her office as I resisted learning what she was trying to teach. I didn’t want to look behind my beloved religion’s beautiful façade. I hadn’t realized that was what my choosing to major in Christian history was going to mean, and I could already tell from Miss Corwin’s classroom lectures on the corrupt church councils that I didn’t want to know any of that. If you enjoy sausage, never watch it being made! I am realizing only now that I have blocked her point of view for most of my life as I tried to hold onto my youthful love for Christianity, so it really is only in the last few years that I am remembering much of what she said.

If you’ve been reading these weekly missives for a while, you have seen me fall from my lifelong faith as from the top of a tall tower,  relying on floor after floor of that tower of Christian faith to break my fall; but then falling to the next, and then to the next as each successive floor failed to hold. The poet Robert Frost directed that his epitaph should be “I had a lover’s quarrel with the world,” and I can identify with that. My own lover’s quarrel is with Christianity, the great love of my life that I met in childhood as a burst of nighttime light and a sweet voice of love and the blessed certainty that if I ever again forget that God is real, I can trust Him to remind me. That set of pat religious beliefs was such an easy comfort! Christianity was the package that contained all truth, and it was so simple and so neat. Everything that was important for us to know had been figured out before I was born, so I didn’t need to think about it much at all.

But we know now from the not-really-dead that Christianity is altogether wrong. And it isn’t even just a little bit wrong! In fact, every core Christian teaching is nothing more than human-made nonsense. The Godhead is not a Big Guy with thunderbolts. The Godhead has no human flaws, and It never judges or condemns us to a fiery hell that does not exist. Every person of every faith or no faith at all goes to precisely the same beautiful afterlife. The Christian religion has almost nothing to do with either the Jesus of the Gospels or the genuine Godhead, but rather it is an amalgam of ancient beliefs well-seasoned with the Roman Emperors’ need to control people by inspiring fear. The Christian Bible as it was assembled at First Nicaea and the other Councils is a collection of writings that could not possibly be all the work of a consistent and loving, or even of a sane and rational God. For me, the kill-shot of my Christian faith was the moment when I accepted the fact that after my decades of reading hundreds of different communications from the dead that had been received over more than a century in southern England and in the eastern United States, I never had found one bit of evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross has ever made an afterlife difference for a single human being.       

It strikes me now that my relationship with Christianity can be divided into thirds. I was a Protestant until I was twenty-five, and so filled with conviction that I intended to enter the ministry. Then I fell in love with and married a Catholic, and at twenty-six I converted to Catholicism. I was a Lector, I attended Mass each week, and I sent my children to parochial schools. I was an ardent Catholic while I continued to do my decades of afterlife research, until the lowest floors of my tower of faith eventually were forced to give way beneath the weight of all that I was learning. So in my early fifties I was left bereft, with almost no religion at all. As the title of my weekly podcast insists, I only ever wanted to know what is true! And I have spent this most recent twenty-five years pulling bits of truth from the debris of the tower of my old lost faith, and combining those bits with the afterlife evidence, quantum mechanics, and a lifetime of studying parts of what is one absolutely gigantic truth, until now – within just the past few years – I have managed to replace my makeshift tower of human-created Christian faith with a solid edifice of what I know for certain is nothing but the most wonderful and entirely nonreligious ultimate truth.

But I still love Christianity! As I study the pictures that accompany this post, to this day I yearn for the certainty and safety of my old lost faith. Even though it was a false certainty. Even though now we know so much about what actually is going on that I have established in place of my old religion such abundant bedrock knowledge about what happens at and after death, and where it happens, how it happens, and even a lot about why it happens, that now I look forward to my own transition with a joy that feels like waiting for Christmas. Going home is going to be so much fun! And it turns out that I won’t have to leave my love for Christianity behind altogether. Those that we used to think were dead now tell us that although there is no religion practiced in the afterlife, Christians will sometimes get together to sing hymns for nostalgia’s sake. And wow, do I ever understand that impulse!

So now the jig is up for Christianity. It had a good, long run! Although of course not all of its dominance on earth was positive, what with the Inquisition and the Crusades, the burning of witches and the forced conversions of indigenous peoples here and there. But those embarrassing glitches were by and large the result of cultural influences, weren’t they? Christianity has always been a movement of whatever was its current time and place. So, by and large, Christianity has softened dramatically in the course of the past hundred years.

And the truth about the nature of reality and what happens at and after death is about to become quite broadly known. All the gaps have been filled. There is no need any more for additional theories, no room for further speculation, and Craig Hogan and I are not the only people who are being called to share with the world the beyond-wonderful truth about humankind’s eternal nature and how reality actually works. That old-time religion doesn’t stand a chance! And yes, for Christians the wonderful truth is that we can keep the genuine Jesus. It turns out that Jesus is in fact an aspect of the Godhead, quite literally God on earth, and we can follow Him in undivided joy once all our old religion-based fears are gone.

All of this seems to be such good news! So, why am I suddenly feeling so anxious?

This fluttery feeling of inchoate dread reminds me of the summer of 2010, when The Fun of Dying was about to be published. For the first time I was going to go public with what I had learned about how broadly the actual teachings of Jesus differ from what Christianity teaches. It was to be my first shot across the bow of the religion that I so much loved! I was confident that what I had learned was true, but what if it was supposed to remain secret? Or what if it was supposed to become known eventually, only not just yet?

My anxiety about my perhaps letting some cosmic cat out of God’s personal bag became so acute that one evening about a month before the book’s publication date, I took to my knees. I prayed fervently that if there was anything in that book that was not supposed to come to light now, please God, just take me in my sleep. I had already emailed the publisher that if I were to die, The Fun of Dying should be kept out of print. I prayed so long and so hard that night that God’s will and not my own be done that I was mildly surprised to wake up the next morning to a flood of normal earthly sunlight.

So apparently what is happening now is God’s will. Sooner or later, humanity was going to have to leave behind all its false beliefs and at last grow up! As the Apostle Paul said, “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known” (1Cor 13:11-12). But still, there seems to be tremendous danger in sharing these truths with practicing Christians!

Learning that Christianity’s teachings are at utter variance with the words of Jesus and the testimony of the not-really-dead was what finally wrecked my own faith. I don’t want to put others through that, so I have always thought my ministry was just to lapsed Christians. I have regularly urged people who were happy with their Christian beliefs to just ignore what I was saying. So I worry now that our making these truths a lot more broadly available is going to separate a great many more people from the Christian religion that I still love. I have no idea what to do about that, but Thomas tells me that the time is now, and just as I am so much happier being free from my old Christian fears, so as more Christians liberate themselves from the religion and discover the genuine Godhead they are going to be a lot happier, too. But still, this effort at religious patricide that is turning out to be the theme of my life makes me on some level very sad. Perhaps in some far-future day, when we all are free from superstitious fears, we can return in some way to a few of the comforting trappings of the faith of our fathers. Then I can be again that child who used to look forward to the Sunday mornings when she was falling in love with her Christian faith.

He speaks, and the sound of His voice is so sweet the birds hush their singing;
And the melody that He gave to me within my heart is ringing.
I’d stay in the garden with Him tho’ the night around me be falling;
But He bids me go; thro’ the voice of woe, His voice to me is calling.
– Charles Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1913)

Index Photo Attribution: <a href=”https://www.vecteezy.com/free-photos”>Free Stock photos by Vecteezy</a>

Judging History

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights,
that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), from “The Declaration of Independence” (1776)

I know from the emails I receive that our readership is worldwide. I never could have imagined that one day I would have friends in almost every country on earth! So I understand that this post which is aimed at Americans is going to disappoint some readers. I apologize, but it’s time for a bit of much-needed in-country shop-talk. Too many Americans have come to take for granted the government that was established some 230 years ago by a generation of giants so sensible and altruistic, so wise and so far-seeing that this remains a strong and stable nation still controlled by the world’s oldest continuing government. We can speak our minds and earn and keep our own wealth, and we go to bed peacefully each night under the protection and not under the boot of our leaders! But these gifts from our Founding Fathers have become just the water in which we swim. Not only do we take all our freedoms for granted, but we feel free to attack the long-dead authors of this brilliant experiment in citizen government. It makes sense to far too many Americans to call them out for the sin of not having lived by our twenty-first-century standards. How infantile this is! How inexcusably childish! And how dangerous it is for those who take for granted the incomparable worth of their daily freedoms to play at weakening the once-solid pillars of this nation.

Regular readers here know that I have a special fondness for Thomas Jefferson. The man was a polymath, a profound thinker and a prolific writer. He was barely 33 years old when he became the primary author of the American Declaration of Independence, which is the intellectual grounding of this whole experiment in freedom and self-government. And besides being one of the fathers of the American experiment, Thomas Jefferson was a primary founding American President. He pioneered the establishment of our coast-to-coast country with the Louisiana Purchase and the Lewis & Clark expedition, and he established this young nation as a world policeman when he fought the Tripolitan War and ended the piracy that had resulted in the enslavement of more than a million Europeans on the North African coast. He gave his life to the establishment of this country, from serving as a Governor of Virginia during the Revolutionary War through his diplomacy in Paris and his service as the first Secretary of State and the second Vice President of the United States before he became this nation’s third President. If George Washington was the father of his country, then Thomas Jefferson was its doting uncle. So the fact that in this barbaric age his failure to also abolish slavery is held against him to such an extent that some see it as negating the value of all his service is a shame on us that must be called out.

I have a dear friend who is a professional historian. The only time that he and I ever butt heads is when he shares with me something he has written about the fact that Thomas Jefferson never freed his slaves. My friend calls his complaint a legitimate gripe, while I see it as a clueless demand that people who lived centuries ago had to have possessed all our modern knowledge and sensibilities or everything they ever did is tainted. To me, that is not doing history! How is it possible to understand the actions of anyone, living or dead, without at least making some attempt to empathize with the way that person sees the world, what he actually knows, and his motivations? I have written here about Jefferson’s attitudes toward slavery and race and also the Sally Hemings question, and I’ve written as well about the parity that exists between slavery in Jefferson’s day and abortion in ours, so we need not rehash any of that now. I only would say that until you have done enough research to be able to write about a historical figure with empathetic understanding, you have no business writing about him at all.

We know what Jesus said about judgment. He said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned.” (LK 6:37). Even more pertinently, He also said, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye” (LK 6:41-42).

And the logs in our own eyes are as thick as a forest! From social and economic disparities through criminal justice cruelties and still-ongoing racial issues, modern Americans have no reason to feel superior to our founders’ generation. And the coincidence of the removal of a Jefferson statue from New York City Hall just as oral arguments about an abortion case are happening before the United States Supreme Court gives us an opportunity for some useful reflection.

For those not familiar with the American system, our Supreme Court’s role is to interpret and enforce the U.S. Constitution. And that’s it! The Supreme Court does not and cannot make laws. That is Congress’s role. And the rights enumerated in the Constitution must be safeguarded as the bedrock of our precious freedoms, so we need a Supreme Court that won’t interpret the Constitution according to changing cultural whims. If the Constitution itself ever needs revision, there is a careful process for that. Still, Supreme Court Justices are human beings with personal opinions, and their temptation to bend the rules according to prevailing cultural winds is strong.

Which is why we sometimes get truly appalling judge-made laws like these:

  • Dred Scott v. Sanford was an 1857 Supreme Court decision that decreed by a 7-2 majority that the U.S. Constitution was never intended to confer American citizenship on people of African descent, so a slave taken by his master into a state that didn’t allow slavery was still a slave and could be forced to return home with him. You read that, and your jaw hits the floor. There is nothing in the Constitution that might support such nonsense! Dred Scott was overturned by the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution in 1868.
  • Roe v. Wade was a 1973 Supreme Court decision that decreed by a 7-2 majority that the U.S. Constitution includes the right of a woman to murder her child in gestation. The Justices even managed to find nonexistent wording in the Constitution that includes not only the right to abortion, but also a division of gestation into three trimesters during which the balance of rights shades more toward the child as the pregnancy progresses.

Roe is an example of judge-made law by a Supreme Court under cultural pressure, just as was Dred Scott a century before. And like Dred Scott, it treats the lives of two human beings as if one is more important than the other simply because one is more powerful than the other, which was what I argued as a law student. But just like antebellum Southerners trying to keep their power over their slaves, my fellow law students shouted me down. So I felt somewhat vindicated this past week when Justice Kavanaugh said something similar during the Supreme Court oral arguments on possibly overturning Roe v. Wade. Justice Kavanaugh pointed out how hard it is to do what Roe tries to do, which is to balance the interests of the mother and the child. “You can’t accommodate both interests. You have to pick. That’s the fundamental problem. And one interest has to prevail over the other at any given point in time. And that’s why this is so challenging.”

It is indeed challenging. And it’s dangerous. The United States Constitution is a brilliant blueprint for a government of checks and balances that can truly be of, by, and for the people being governed. This was a radical idea 230 years ago! And Dred Scott and Roe illustrate for us how fragile our Constitutionally-protected rights still are. All those freedoms that we take for granted could be lost in a single instance of bad Supreme Court judge-made law. Just as the right to citizenship of people being held in slavery was arbitrarily taken away in the prelude to the Civil War, and the right to life of people who were in gestation was stomped when sexual freedom became the current fashion. There is an odd flirtation with collectivist government going on now in the United States. If that sentiment builds, and if sufficient people become enamored of some charismatic leader who will take care of us so we won’t need to work and we all can just play videogames, then what is there to prevent some future Supreme Court from finding that the Constitution includes the power of a duly-elected president to require citizens to give up their basic rights for the greater good of the nation, just as Roe took away the rights of fetuses to be protected in utero for the greater good of the mother? The truth is, there is no protection at all.  

The only way we can protect the rights and freedoms that were so brilliantly crafted by this nation’s founders is to support the processes that they set in place for the maintenance and protection of those rights. When Roe falls, as it must, it will be up to the people of each state in their own legislatures to decide when and to what extent the rights of the mother override the rights of the child. And if your own rights matter to you, then you will applaud that result.

Thomas Jefferson hated slavery. He began his public life with a determination to find a way to end it, and in fact his first draft of the Declaration of Independence called out Britain’s introduction of slavery here as one of its greatest crimes against the American colonies. But when his wife died at the age of 33, he was so bereft that he spent much of the rest of his life living away from the problem, returning to Virginia to live in old age.

Having studied Thomas Jefferson extensively, I can attest that he was a thoroughly good man. He didn’t end slavery because he couldn’t end slavery, and meanwhile he protected his slaves from the miseries that most freedmen of his day were suffering while he waited for a safer and more stable time to free them. In hindsight, you might argue that he should have realized how long that would take. Inevitably, his death intervened. But it remains beyond dispute that his service to this nation and to the freedom and elevation of all of humankind is almost without parallel. When we attack a primary author of the American experiment for having been a man of his time, we show ourselves to be clueless philistines. And we place at risk every one of the advances in human freedom and fundamental rights that he helped to foster. For the sake of our children and their children’s children, it is time for all Americans to start to think as responsible and far-seeing adults.  

 

“We the People of the United States,
in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice,
insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense,
promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty
to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish
this Constitution for the United States of America.”
– The People in Congress Assembled, the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution (1789)

Kindness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Three things in human life are important.
The first is to be kind.
The second is to be kind.
And the third is to be kind.”
– Henry James, novelist (1843-1916)

Kindness seems to most of us to be the weak sister in our pantheon of virtues. Love. Forgiveness. Truth. Wisdom. Justice. Mercy. And, um… kindness? And so I also thought it was. Kindness seemed to be little more than an optional nicety of social behavior, a way to grease the wheels of relationships and add some pleasantness to our days. I assumed the kindest people must be wealthy folks throwing off their excess dollars; or else they were elderly ladies, knitting socks for the poor and feeding stray cats.

Then this week I witnessed the most stunning act of kindness I have seen in my life. You may be aware that I am an attorney who advises closely-held businesses, some of which have been part of my life for decades. I love what I do and the people so much that I think it’s likely that I never will retire! So a woman in her forties came to me with a very vexing problem. She had invested a quarter of a million dollars in loans to a friend’s business because she believed in his products, never realizing that he was someone who had great ideas but little business sense. Other people had made the same mistake, and by the time she raised this issue to me the business owner was out of options and facing bankruptcy. She was angry, distracted, feeling used and betrayed, and trying to find a way to get some of her money back so she could move on with her life.

Over forty years of working with the owners of more than five hundred businesses, I have learned a thing or two about business realities. When I investigated this situation, it was obvious that the business’s problems were all the result of an inexperienced owner’s rookie mistakes; and sadly, it was beyond repair. It needed a cash infusion right away, and no one was going to lend it more money. My client was the biggest lender. Her best option seemed to me to be just to foreclose on its assets, pay some debts that were senior to hers, and shut it down. And she was angry enough to do that! She didn’t start out wealthy, but over twenty years of working in tech she had managed to save close to a million dollars. And now she was about to lose a quarter of her whole net worth.

We talked it through. She made her decision. She had the power and the right to put a dying business out of its misery while it still possessed some saleable assets, and she set off last Tuesday morning to personally deliver a notice that she already had told the owner was coming.

I didn’t learn until the end of that day what had happened. Her business-inept friend had been somewhat distraught, but I had prepared her to deal with that. She was planning to give him some personal help, and he had options. He was going to be fine. What she hadn’t expected had been the amazing loyalty of employees who in booming Austin very likely could have found better jobs within days. I’m not privy to how the details went down, but instead of giving a crippled business the kill-shot that might have earned her back perhaps a third of what she had lent, my client had decided by the time she called me not only to forgive every cent of her loan, but also to pay off the rest of the debt, to the tune of another quarter of a million dollars. Not so much for the owner’s sake, but for the sake of employees she barely knew who loved the owner and believed in his dream, she had decided to sign away half of her savings so she could give that business a new beginning. Perhaps even more surprisingly, in the few days since she made that decision she has become ever more at peace with it.

My first phone reaction to her news was shock. To which her immediate response was, “It’s just paper.”

“It’s just paper.” What is important is people! And she earned that paper once. She figures she can earn it again, but unless she steps up right away there are a dozen people who have invested five years of their lives in a dream that is about to die.

Until now, I have never thought much about kindness. I did write about it two years ago, and that post is even more relevant now so please read it as a grounding for our discussion of my client’s gift.  And we ought to talk about that gift! She didn’t ask for stock or a contingent note, just in case the business might take off. No credit on the website. And no credit here, either: when I told her I wanted to write about this, she insisted that I change identifying details. For businesses to fail is a fact of life. More than half of them fail within their first five years. So, why did she save this one? And why was she willing to do it at such a great cost to herself?

Her act feels to me to be something like choosing to adopt a damaged child. You’ve got a beautiful family and a wonderful life! Why complicate and impair your life forevermore? I recall years ago reading about a family that had adopted a child who had been deprived of oxygen at birth, and had been abandoned by her birth-parents while she was still in neonatal intensive care. A couple with two children in the primary grades had read about that baby when she was two years old, by which time she was responsive and becoming verbal although she was blind and nearly quadriplegic. The four of them had talked about it as a family. They had visited her in the facility where she lived. And they had decided together to adopt her. When the reporter telling their story a few years later had asked the mother why she had burdened her family this way for this child when there are so many other damaged children in care, the mother had said, ”This one we can save.”

“This one we can save.”  I think that expresses my client’s impulse as well. We can’t heal the world! But we each can find something kind to do that otherwise will never be done.

And the very thought that anyone might give my client credit for her gift seems to horrify her. She doesn’t want to be thanked. Her attitude puts me in mind of someone who died more than a hundred years ago.

Jesus says, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:3-4). And a woman who died at least a century ago really took His advice to heart. Someone who had recently died and was communicating with his family through a deep-trance medium just after the turn of the twentieth century told them that he had just come from the biggest parade that any of his friends there had ever seen. It seemed that a woman newly arrived in the afterlife had taken Jesus at His literal word, and she had made a point of doing one anonymous kind thing for someone every day of her whole adult life. And if her kindness was discovered, then it didn’t count and she would quickly figure out and do something else. Parades are a big thing in the afterlife when someone arrives whose life has been well-lived, and apparently when this woman got home she was given a Macy’s-quality parade so impressive that it made it into a dusty old book that I then read in the nineteen-seventies.

Jesus also said, “And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:34-36).

I think that many of us read that passage with two simultaneous thoughts. Of course, we hope on a theoretical level that in a pinch we really would lend while expecting nothing in return. Especially if we think Jesus might be watching! But at the same time, we see even making any kind of loan that we expect will be repaid in full to be a pretty big kindness. Just outright giving the money seems to be an unreasonable bridge too far.

But I guess my attitude on that has changed, now that I actually have seen it done. How little fuss she makes about this! She reminds me more and more of the family that found room in their hearts for a damaged child. Kindness is not a showy virtue. Instead, it’s a way of looking at someone else’s problem and really seeing it, and feeling sufficient compassion to then look within our hearts to see whether that problem might be one that we can solve.

And in the past few days I have been unexpectedly seeing kindnesses everywhere. A friend whose parents have recently died and left one aunt as the last in his family of her generation decided last weekend on impulse to spend an afternoon with her and take her out to dinner. Someone with a small plane flew to pick up someone’s lost dog that turned up three states away. A teenager with a friend whose father died last year has been working with her friend to earn money so they can give her two younger siblings their usual gifts from Santa. There is so much kindness now, all around! Is it possible that it always has been going on, and I just never noticed it?

And speaking of kindness, I have just begun a ten-day business trip, so for the next two weeks I will have no time for blogging. But I’ll try! Maybe poetry? Maybe recipes? Who knows? But I’ll write something. And whatever it might turn out to be, I hope that as you read it, you will be kind.

 

“We become great on the backs of those who have loved us into being,
through small, simple acts of everyday kindness.”
– Kute Blackson, author of The Magic of Surrender – Finding the Courage to Let Go (2021)

The Greatest Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity,
Because the greatest love of all is happening to me.
I found the greatest love of all inside of me.
The greatest love of all is easy to achieve!
Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all.
– Linda Creed (1948-1986), from “The Greatest Love of All” (1977)

One of the most important tasks that each of us faces is our need to create a positive and wholly reality-based relationship with ourselves. Until we can know and be comfortable with who we actually are, it is hard for us to have the clarity, the self-confidence, and the daily peace that we are going to need if we are ever to really make the most of our lives. At first, as the song says, this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. After all, since we spend a lot of time with ourselves, we should know ourselves pretty well by now. But for nearly everyone, our adult self-image is built on erroneous information and distorted assumptions that unfortunately have shaped our whole lives to date. For example:

  • Some of us never learn to tame our needy egos. The ego is a primitive instinct for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement that is part of our limited minds at birth, and that seems to be essential if we are to avoid a host of childhood dangers. It functions almost like a separate being that tells us that the ego itself, this fearful and grabby little gremlin, actually is who we are; and if we continue to believe that, we can grow up to be unpleasantly shallow and self-absorbed. Fortunately, though, our ego can be tamed once we reach young adulthood, and then it will no longer much distract us.
  • Traditional Christianity and mainstream science combine to give us an awful self-image. If we believe them, we internalize the fear-based certainty that we are sinful and fallen meat that will blink out when our bodies die, or else we will likely burn in hell forever. Even the best-case possibility that we might be lucky enough to spend eternity playing harps in God’s throne room starts to seem pretty lousy when you envision living it forevermore.
    * Our view of ourselves is heavily shaped by our cultures. We can see this phenomenon most clearly in the lesser status of women in some cultures, and in the way that indicators of wealth and class can affect our sense of who we are. We even are marked for life by subtle details like birth-order and city-vs.-country. Then on top of all that is piled our online culture, which strokes and batters our egos as it grotesquely distorts the way we see ourselves and plays havoc with what might otherwise have been our life’s more solid and well-considered priorities.
  • Our families were the first to tell us who we are, and we still believe most of whatever they said. I see this as the big one! Too many little children uncritically learn to see themselves negatively, and some of them spend all the rest of their lives still knowing that they are clumsy, not smart enough, inconvenient, or even flat-out bad people, simply because they heard words like these from a parent before the age of six. I had the opposite upbringing. My father wanted me to be the first female American President, and my mother wanted me to write the Great American Novel, so from my infancy they were praising me and telling me I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be as they each tried to inspire me with a wish to fulfill their own respective dreams. You would think that sort of upbringing would make me feel like a failure for having missed both goals; but all it did was to make me grow up feeling very positive about myself. My own big dream has turned out to be to free the whole world from the fear of death. And thanks to those two sainted people, I never for a moment doubt that I am going to succeed at doing what I guess I already know is impossible.

So, each of us by young adulthood is essential an amalgam of all the cultural and personal information about who and what we are that has been bombarding us from birth. We may wind up feeling somewhat put together, and we may think we actually know and love ourselves; but in fact, for most of us what has been assembled into our present self-image is very different from who we might have seen ourselves to be if we had grown up with different cultural details and with a different set of parents. And then there are all the psychological pathologies that plague some folks, on top of (and perhaps because of) all these sources of bogus information! How can we even begin to discover and learn to love the eternal being that chose to be born in our physical body?

This problem has of late come to trouble me. I hear every day from strangers who have issues they hope I can help them address. I have neither the time nor the training to give them the kind of help that some of them need; and anyway, I am coming to realize that even the professionals they may have consulted don’t have the training that they would need to help these folks get at all the causes of their lifelong self-image problems. All the bogus information about ourselves that bombards us from birth is pure lies! Please read again the four points outlined above. It’s all lies. What is born in each sweet infant body is a powerful eternal being that is hopeful, bright, and already wise! All children arrive with a careful plan to achieve the maximum possible spiritual growth; but they arrive at young adulthood already battered by their ignorant parents and their degenerate culture. Each being is still, beneath it all, that very same eternal being! But sadly, each of them is now weighed down by a lot of confusing and mostly negative information.

This seems to be a problem as old as human civilization. Everyone is raised by amateurs! And when we grow up with an unpleasant understanding of who and what we actually are, it seems at first blush to be impossible for us to learn to truly love ourselves. Worst of all, a distorted and mostly negative view of ourselves that was built up in childhood from a variety of sources and is now familiar to us might become almost impossible for us to change! That was my first thought when, a week ago, I was dealing with my own emotional fallout from a very troubling counseling call. It was clear that traditional psychological theories and talk-counseling had been of no use to that sadly unstable soul. And with what I now understand about who we are eternally, it occurred to me that no mental-health therapy that is currently being tried is based in any real understanding of who each baby actually is and how it can go wrong. So it is no wonder that so many people now living are feeling so bruised and confounded by life!

And now I can see that Linda Creed and Whitney Houston have given us a potential way forward in their sweetly hopeful song. Two lovely women who died too young had wisdom far beyond their years! Like you, whenever I’ve thought of “The Greatest Love of All” I was hearing Whitney Houston’s voice, but the words seemed to be less important than the sounds. It was just another pop song to form a background for our daily lives. But please read those words! Whether they knew it or not, Linda and Whitney have given us what may be the most important piece of psychological advice of the whole twentieth century:

  • It’s important that we rear children carefully, so as not to impair the precious spiritual beings that they already are.
  • Inside each damaged adult is still that same precious eternal being who was once a newborn child.

Now that we at last understand what hampers so many human lives, what might we do to help each little child to achieve the best possible start, and how can we rescue more damaged adults? The more I think about it, the more confident I am that the best way for us to accomplish both goals will be to make the fact that we are all powerful, eternal beings and deeply beloved of a genuine Godhead the base and the core of our entire culture. That way, we can protect our children from all the worst clueless cultural lies, and we can help parents see their children not as high-grade pets, but as the sacred and joyous responsibility that they are. And we can take each damaged adult straight back to who he was at the beginning, once upon a time, and help him to expand and grow from there.

I can hear what you’re thinking. “Yeah, right. You’re a hammer, so to you everything looks like a nail.” Naturally, someone who was raised and inspired to try to achieve something really great, and who has seized on universal afterlife education, is going to see that mission as the cure for everything! But it’s more than that. I think this really will work, because we already have learned that coming to know the truth about death and about our eternal natures has a number of wonderful effects. Those who already know the truth are:

  • Free from fear. Fear of death seems to be the base fear, so when we no longer fear death, we no longer fear anything.
  • Thinking and living on a universal scale. The “life sucks, then you die” mentality that pervades most modern cultures is altogether gone once someone internalizes the fact that there really is no death.
  • Loving naturally. Since love is the opposite of fear, once we stop fearing death and thereby we lose all our other fears as well, we begin to love everyone more and more, as a bubble rises in water toward the light.

This combination of changes in attitude has been altogether transforming for many of those who have taken the trouble to learn that for certain there actually is no death. The changes we have seen in our earliest students have made me eager to share the truth with all the world!

Silver Birch is a popular disembodied entity who was channeled by a skeptical atheist turned involuntary communicator named Maurice Barbanell (1902-1981). I generally don’t use anything channeled after 1930 as afterlife evidence because the risk that the living might fake these communications for personal gain is simply too great. But I know experts who are as skeptical as I am, and who nevertheless consider Silver Birch to be genuine. And he tells us that from his perspective, we incarnate in order to learn who we are. He said, “Your world is full of millions of people who do not know what they are there for, who they are, what it is that they must achieve whilst they are incarnate on earth. You can help them to realize that they are spirits with bodies, that the real individual is the deathless spirit, that the spirit is there to gain the experience to equip it for its larger life in our world. That is the most important thing that you can do.”

And indeed it is! Even though we cannot yet know the extent to which such knowledge will help people who were sadly damaged in childhood, and how it will help to rescue future children from also being damaged, it certainly will improve many lives worldwide! From birth on earth until graduation, each infinitely precious human being deserves to know the far-beyond-wonderful truth about who and what we really are!

 

I believe the children are our future.
Teach them well and let them lead the way!
Show them all the beauty they possess inside.
Give them a sense of pride, to make it easier.
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be.
– Linda Creed (1948-1986), from “The Greatest Love of All” (1977)

Truth Detector

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.
Match the frequency of the reality you want,
and you cannot help but get that reality.
It can be no other way.
This is not philosophy. This is physics.”
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quotation (1948)

The above quotation from Albert Einstein shows a profound understanding of  what we now know is true. And for good measure, he also said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” There is a lot of evidence now that Einstein was right, but still most working physicists would be forced to deny his words because they violate the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism. And the quotation from Einstein that ends this post explains how he was able to achieve his exalted level of understanding! He was a sufficiently revered scientist that he could investigate reality with an open mind without risking his position in the scientific community. So he did just that. And in daring to explore as far as his mind could reach, he found the same basis for reality that afterlife researchers have independently discovered.

It’s the same underlying reality, too, that the second-greatest theoretical physicist of the twentieth century also discovered. Max Planck (1858-1947) won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was the father of quantum mechanics, and a deeply brilliant man. In 1931 Planck said, “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.”  Then in 1944, near the end of his life, he summed up his greatest discovery, and in fact the greatest discovery of the twentieth century. 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 discovered what materialist physicists call quantum physics, which is a variant of the consciousness-based physics that underlies all of reality. He found that quantum physics underlies reality in this material universe as well, although this universe has an additional overlay of what we might call Newtonian physics that keeps our minds from messing with the reality around us while we are having these earth-experiences.

So the two greatest physicists in history both independently discovered the same physics underlying all of reality that afterlife researchers also have found! And afterlife researchers have made our discoveries using neither math nor experiments of any kind, but simply by closely studying nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. Here is what Albert Einstein, Max Plank, Craig Hogan, and Roberta Grimes have each discovered:

  • Nothing is solid. Everything is energy. This fundamental fact of reality is inescapable at this point, and yet it is unknown beyond the scientific community.
  • The base energy is what we experience as consciousness. Your personal awareness is an aspect of the infinitely powerful potentiality that is all that independently exists, and that gives rise to everything else.

But still, the foolish and clearly erroneous fundamental scientific dogma of materialism persists! It forces scientists trying to earn a living to publish scientific papers that are essentially gibberish; it has physicists still searching pointlessly for a way to unify their two incompatible theories; and it sees the whole scientific community forced to struggle with patently absurd random theories that have been suggested by the results of their nonsensical materialist explorations. Because mainstream scientists are not allowed to consider the most important discovery made by history’s two greatest physicists, they must still ignore the base force that underlies reality. So, ultimately, their theories are going to be nonsense. Even when they make what are actually interesting and important discoveries about consciousness, the rules of their profession require that they talk about them in terms of the material brain!

So you and I are positioned to witness a most peculiar situation. The limitations of materialist science are so obvious by now, and their effects on scientific research are so devastating, that it is impossible for us to imagine that any scientific researcher with even a modicum of sense doesn’t see them! But they can’t buck the gatekeepers. The university departments and the peer-reviewed journals. Academic scientists have families to support, tuitions to fund, and a hope to eventually retire; and any research scientist who even considers investigating the primacy of consciousness will soon find himself flipping burgers for a living. At this point, the entire scientific community is reduced to the position of courtiers forced to exclaim about the beauties of the naked Emperor’s imaginary new clothes.

I should mention at this point the leading crusader against all this scientific nonsense, whose next Seek Reality interview will be posted on November 29th. Craig Weiler is a researcher and entrepreneur who has for decades been fighting disinformation with facts. His book, Psi Wars: Ted, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet, is a must-read if this problem interests you. Craig is the very model of patient open-mindedness, but at this point I am finding it a great deal harder than he finds it to continue to suffer fools!

The fact is that mainstream science went off the rails a hundred years ago, when it turned itself into a belief-system. The only way it can right itself now is to renounce materialism and then turn every working scientist loose with instructions to pursue the truth wherever it may lead. To help to give those newly-liberated scientists a head start, here is a caution about some common methods of modern-day scientific inquiry that are very unlikely to work when we venture beyond this material universe:

  • Mathematics. From what we can tell, mathematical calculations are close to useless in studying the greater reality. Since consciousness there has all the power, it can make anything happen in any way at any time, so there probably are no fixed “laws of physics” to be discovered.
  • Replicable Experiments. We may eventually work out ways to experiment with a consciousness-based reality. But since the minds of the experimenters are going to affect the results of our experiments, we should assume for now that all experimental results must be considered suspect.
  • Commercial Research. We have already found that work in electronic communication that is based in a hope for earning wealth will be doomed. The genuine experimenters are the dead experts, they easily can read our motives, and they seem to be unwilling to work with anyone who is in it for material gain.

What we have learned works best when we attempt to study consciousness and the greater reality is for researchers to take a more deferential approach:

  • Distant Observation. You can learn about the greater reality the way you might study a black hole or a supernova, by staying out of the way and indirectly observing it.
  • Data Aggregation. When you can’t observe something directly without a fear that your own mind will affect your observations, the best way to study it is to collect a lot of testimony from the participants themselves. This is what the early-20th-century accounts through deep-trance mediums have done for afterlife researchers.
  • Trusted On-Site Observers. As we have come to better understand human life in the greater reality, we have encountered upper-level beings who know a great deal about where they are now, and they are eager to help us get our questions answered.

It will help, too, to have a base understanding of the greater reality already in place against which to test future scientific theories. For example, I have found that what we already know about the greater reality has worked wonderfully in testing what Christianity teaches! For the past twenty years I have been using the testimony of the dead to demolish Christian ideas as varied as judgment, hell, damnation, and the End Times prophesies. When we read the twice-translated Gospel teachings of Jesus in modern English, and we compare them with what the dead have said, what we can learn is especially amazing! It’s as if Jesus is Himself explaining and enriching our understandings. And the dead are anxious to help us in any way they can. Some of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century are still actively working today. So perhaps, when the mainstream scientific gatekeepers at last begin to get a clue, dead greats like Albert Einstein and Max Planck can give us guidance and can serve as a kind of Truth Detector for the far more sensible scientific theories that will soon be on the way?

“I want to know how God created this world.
I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon,
in the spectrum of this or that element.
I want to know His thoughts;
the rest are just details.”
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quotation (1925)

Seeing is Believing

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard.
I believe that someone in that great somewhere hears every word.
Every time I hear a newborn baby cry, or touch a leaf,
Or see the sky, Then I know why I believe.
– Ronnie Dunn & Craig Wiseman, from “I Believe” (1953)

The most dangerous word in the English language is “faith.” It seems ironic, doesn’t it, that we hold such a counterproductive word in such remarkably high esteem?

The word “faith” generally refers to an admirable level of religious piety. It is the highest virtue to have complete faith, and especially faith in God; while the inability to have faith is seen as a weakness, and even as a character flaw. Many people consider the fact that so many Christians seem to be losing their faith to be what lies at the root of much of what is going wrong in the world.

And many people would think the foregoing paragraph is just a simple truism.  But in fact, it is nothing of the kind! Far from being in any way admirable, our having nothing more than faith is a sorry admission that our religion of choice is not based in anything real. It would never stand up to objective scrutiny. No wonder so many modern Christians are feeling increasingly set adrift! I submit to you now that it is finally time for us to look frankly at the fact that what once was a rational way for humankind to make sense of an unfathomable world is now not only sadly outmoded, but it is in fact a perilous and unnecessary diversion from what should be our singular and unrelenting pursuit of the truth.

We tend to use “faith” and “belief” as near-synonyms. But in fact, they are near-opposites! The difference between them is, and always has been, evidence:

  • Faith means having complete confidence in someone or something based in little or no evidence.
  • Belief means holding an evidence-based opinion that some proposition or set of ideas is true.

And that difference is a gulf as wide and deep as the sea!

Having faith in something based in little or no evidence never has been a comfortable way to live. Of course, Christians have good evidence in the Gospels that both Jesus and God are real; and if our Christian faith were based only in the Gospels, it could reasonably rise to the level of belief. But beyond what appears in the Gospels, the entire Christian faith is based not in evidence, but instead in a set of human ideas. From the virgin birth through the God who insists that we learn to forgive perfectly, but that same God refuses to forgive us  unless He gets to see His own Son tortured and murdered: the whole religion is based in human ideas. Not only is there no evidence that any of those later Christian notions is true, but there is considerable evidence at this point that all of them are fear-based nonsense. 

Until quite recently, humankind has had to settle for faith alone. The urge toward coming up with gods may have been innate in the first modern humans as they emerged two hundred thousand years ago, and it likely was their best way to cope with a reality that was incomprehensible to them. Perhaps it even was based in part in inchoate pre-birth memories. But for whatever reason, people thought up gods, and we created especially tough and brutal gods to help us cope with a dog-eat-dog and saber-tooth-cat-eat-human world. Our developing the ability to maintain faith in such gods was our only comfort in a pitiless reality. Looking back from here, it seems that our having developed the ability to have faith without evidence was a useful early survival skill.

And until as late as the start of the twentieth century, we can be forgiven for having clung to being satisfied with faith alone. It was really only about that time that both the advent of modern science and our much-improved communication with those that we used to think were dead began to give us a lot of solid evidence of what actually is going on. And that evidence came together and began to make sense! We don’t yet have anything like all the answers. But for decades, humankind has had a sensible and rapidly improving understanding of a remarkable greater reality that includes our afterlife as a tiny part.

Perhaps we ought to pause here and remind any Christians who might be bothered by the thought of using “Jesus” and “evidence” in the same sentence that Jesus Himself urged us to seek and find the evidence-based Truth. He said:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

How could He have made it any plainer than that? He did give some lip-service to the notion of faith, perhaps to placate the listening Temple guards; but then He plunged in and made the most profound call for us to acquire enough evidence for real belief that you ever will read anywhere! He said,

“Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you” (MK 11:22-24).

The only enemy of the kind of mental power that it would take to move a mountain is doubt. And it is impossible for most of us to sustain an abiding and largely evidence-free faith while never once doubting it. That’s especially true when what is required of us is faith in a set of dogmas that with just a bit of critical thinking can be seen to be plain nonsense. There is no evidence for most of what Christianity teaches. And given what Christianity teaches beyond the Gospel words of Jesus, the fact that it isn’t real is actually a good thing. Jesus had something to say about that, too. He said:

“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

And in fact, He was entirely right about that! The Gospel teachings of Jesus are the most powerful and most direct method for growing spiritually that humankind ever has found. They can free us from every doubt and all fears. It is only when we complicate them with foreign ideas that never came from Jesus that we come up with a religion that in too many ways simply defies belief.

But it isn’t only Christians who are betrayed by and drowning in an antiquated faith. Modern mainstream scientists are even worse off! Mainstream science is based in a supreme faith in materialism, a theory for which there is little evidence, and against which the evidence  is overwhelming. Materialism has let scientists down repeatedly! There can be no hope that it ever will lead anywhere. But still, like devotees of some ancient sect whose faith in Moloch always lets them down, but whose fear of losing out to that upstart Christian sect is even greater, the scientific priests cling to their materialist faith and continue to toil away. They even are starting to investigate consciousness. We know by now that consciousness is the equivalent of the Gospel teachings where evidence-based truth is concerned; but still, even when they study consciousness, modern scientists’ materialist faith requires that they find some material connection. No Christian ever born has been so faithfully and so pointlessly dogmatic.

Rather than doing what they both should do, and deciding at last to transition from their faith in human-made, dead-end dogmas to an evidence-based search for humanity’s common truths, our two faith-deluded core institutions are only now wondering whether they might somehow keep their bogus faiths while they search for better ways to somehow get along.

In August of 1964, Lt. Everett Alvarez was the first American pilot shot down over North Vietnam.  After eight and a half years of misery, Lt. Alvarez finally got to come home. When he was asked how he had made it through, he said, “Faith in God, in our president, and in our country – it was this faith that maintained our hope.”

And that is the only rational use that there ever can be for any kind of faith! Faith belongs to the nearly hopeless, and not to Christians in their Sunday pews. Certainly not to scientists who claim to be engaging in the open-minded pursuit of the truth! What is needed now is some kind of truth-detector that can be used by both scientists and religious folks to begin to seek the actual truth. And that truth will of course be common to both disciplines. We’ll talk more about this next week….

I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.
I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle glows.
I believe for everyone who goes astray,
Someone will come to show the way. I believe.  Oh, I believe.
– Ronnie Dunn & Craig Wiseman, from “I Believe” (1953)

Buy the books:

– Categories –

– Subscribe –

Follow Roberta’s blog for inspiration, book news, and updates!

– Podcast –

Join hundreds of thousands of listeners! Tune in to Roberta’s Podcast. Shows posted each Monday.

Listen

– Get In Touch –

Have a question to ask Roberta? Complete the form below to contact her.

Contact

- Archives -