Now I’ve been happy lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come.
And I believe it could be. Something good has begun.
Oh, I’ve been smiling lately, Dreaming about the world as one!
And I believe it could be. Someday it’s going to come.
‘Cause I’m on the edge of darkness. There ride the Peace Train!
Oh, Peace Train take this country. Come take me home again!
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Peace Train” (1971)

If you had found a way to transform humankind for the better in barely a heartbeat of time, what would you do? If you could make every person on every street in every nation in the Western world feel spontaneously less selfish and more loving? More compassionate and kind? If you had a way to actually accomplish the transformation in each human heart that religions over all the earth and throughout human history have been trying to achieve, although without much success?

We are just now coming to realize that immortality may be that magic bullet. And for my part, slow learner that I am, it is only now that I really am able to see how important this awakening is! When I first began to speak and write about the afterlife, I was vaguely worried that if we were supposed to know that we survive our deaths, then for certain we would already know it. I was still enough of a Christian that my instinct then was to follow the herd. Perhaps we were supposed to be ignorant of our true nature and our destiny, to keep us focused on our lessons here? In the summer of 2010, I became so obsessed with the notion that I might be committing a cosmic crime in publishing The Fun of Dying that I did in fact pray fervently that if that book should not be published, then God could please take me in my sleep. But God didn’t take me. That fact surprised me at the time.

Instead, over the intervening decade I have been pulled and prompted to do more. A podcast, starting in 2013. Putting on annual afterlife conferences with Craig Hogan, beginning in 2014. Channeling Liberating Jesus in 2015, which required that my beautiful Thomas become an active part of my daytime life. He assured me that I was following a plan, and that plan was well on course. I had a role to play, but no worries, my child: it’s going to be a tiny role. We wrote more books, but to my dismay he wouldn’t let my favorite of them be published. He told me it was all about timing. Although of course, my actually knowing the plan or any details of how the timing worked would have been information far above my pay grade!

And then, about five years ago, Thomas put into my mind the thought that it was time for “an online afterlife university.” So I talked about it with friends in this field, but I couldn’t really envision it. And frankly, the more we talked about it, the dumber the whole thing started to seem. It would be just a more efficient way to do the annual conferences that Craig and I were already putting on, and each of those attracted just a few hundred people. So, what was the point of going online with that?

It is only now – I mean, literally this week – that I begin to see my Thomas’s plan. The role that I long ago signed up for is apparently starting to unfold, and pretty much everything in my life seems to have been preparation for it. Now, as we are working toward debuting Seek Reality Online, Thomas has begun to give me amazing downloads of information! I’m sure that for years we’ve been talking about this during our nightly guidance meetings, but the difference is that now he is letting me remember some of what he is saying. So I have awakened on some recent mornings with my mind full of ideas and insights that for certain didn’t come from me! Apparently, we are close enough now that Craig and I can be told what’s going on. And of course, I want to share it with you! But I can’t. Not yet. Thomas does, though, want me to tell you more clearly the reason for Seek Reality Online. And the first, essential goal of this project.

We have found a wonderful team to create the SRO website. And they began by insisting that we must treat our new enterprise as a business, which means among other things that we’ve got to position it well against its competitors. And that has turned out to be our first stumper. After a brief period of head-scratching, we had to say, “Um. Sorry. We don’t have competitors.”

That was an amazing fact to confront. And it wasn’t happy news for them, because a business that has no competitors at all is either trying to sell ice in Alaska – something anyone can find for free – or else they’ve come up with some weird product that no one is ever going to want. I think it wasn’t until we had delivered all our initial information, and they could see how well thought out this project is, that they even wanted to help us with it!

And that got us thinking. Do we actually have competitors? Are we overlooking something big? And if we really don’t – and it appears that we don’t! – then how is that even possible? The answer to our question seems to be that our role is to spearhead the first maturation of the whole field of afterlife-related education.

The afterlife-education field is full of experts. Many of them have been Seek Reality guests, or they spoke at some conference that I helped to host, so I know and I often like and admire them.  Every day I get multiple emails announcing that this or that well-known afterlife name is going to be part of this or that event. Even if we discount everything that deals primarily with near-death experiences, there still are wonderful consciousness experts, afterlife-history scholars, and mediums and channels, plus spiritual healers and teachers of every stripe. But all of them remain at what I think of as the gee-golly phase of afterlife education. They are experts at sharing their own kinds of proof that the afterlife is real. That was even what our conferences were all about: just providing ever-better proof of an afterlife!

But this gee-golly phase of any kind of education starts to get old after a while. Okay, so I’ve talked to my Mom through some mediums. I’ve learned about how things look in the afterlife. I’ve discovered there are tricks that I can do with my mind. But, then what? No matter how much you learn about the afterlife from experts in their various fields, you still don’t really know all that much. And you don’t know anything for certain. Even to this day, the whole field of afterlife education is in the nature of a hobbyist’s pursuit. People go to conferences (now online), and they attend online events with famous mediums, but they are collecting bits of information the way a hobbyist collects teaspoons. Or guns. Or hats. Although it’s obvious that even at this level, the spread of afterlife awareness has been useful! The proposition that we survive our deaths is becoming a lot more broadly accepted, and that is helping to lessen people’s fears. But if the afterlife really exists, and if all of us are going to end up there, then shouldn’t there be some kind of available travelogue?

I first met Craig Hogan in the summer of 2008. He had just published Your Eternal Self, which turned out to be – like The Fun of Dying – just a first draft of what was going to become a part of that much-needed travelogue. He and I became professional friends because we shared an unusual obsession: we both felt driven to understand the afterlife as an actual place, and to figure out how it precisely fits with the place where we are now. Neither of us needed to see any further proof that the afterlife is real! But we were bored with simply teaching the proofs. So we each had set out to try to make sense of every aspect of what really is going on!

And Seek Reality Online is going to be the full-fledged afterlife travelogue that the world so desperately needs. In fifteen short videos, or in a podcast that will be just eighty minutes long, it will tell you what Craig and I have spent decades learning about how reality actually works and your own place in it. There will be a members’ section, too, where you can review evidence, watch videos, attend classes, ask questions, and network. This isn’t about giving you comforting hope. It’s a grounding in your eternal reality that can help you become as certain that your life is eternal as you ever have been sure about anything. I have heard from hundreds of Seek Reality listeners. I invite their emailed questions, so I have learned what it is that people need to know in order to lose their fear of death. And I have learned that it takes a year. Maybe two. But once those predictable questions are answered, with education and counseling the fear goes away.

And Thomas tells us now that teaching the certainty of universal  immortality is the reason for Seek Reality Online. He says its purpose is to deliver immortality on an epic scale. He even tells us who its first target audience will be, but in fact I should have realized this before he pointed it out!

Craig and I were both born at the start of the baby boom that followed the Second World War. We can see now that was likely by design! For seventy years, the outsized Baby Boom generation has led every major cultural trend in the Western world, from suburbia in the fifties through the youth quake of the sixties and disco and nesting in the seventies, to the eighties and nineties go-go quest for success; and then on to the aughts, and our gradual downshifting toward a vigorous old age. There were so many of us that we treated every stage of life as something we were free to reinvent. And now, what is the next stage of life for Baby Boomers that is ripe for reinvention?

Thomas refers to us as “the gray army.” As he points out to me, when we were young, we were sure we were going to transform the world! And he tells me now that is about to happen. He says that the generation of freedom marchers, women’s liberation, and Woodstock that went on to pioneer disco balls, big hair and shoulders, and then the active senior lifestyle, now is about to pioneer immortality. Well, we’ll see. He has given us the plan that we are to follow for the next five years, and we can see that the outcome he wants is possible. And it even looks like fun! At least, it’s a more exciting way to spend our old age than senior centers and shuffleboard.

Is writing The Fun of Immortality in my future?   

I had thought that today we would be explaining why immortality might be the magic bullet that can transform the world for the better almost right away. But apparently, we’ll be talking about that next week….

Now I’ve been smiling lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come.
And I believe it could be, Something good has begun.
Oh, Peace Train sounding louder, Glide on the Peace Train!
Come on now Peace Train!
Yes, Peace Train, holy roller! Everyone jump upon the Peace Train!
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Peace Train” (1971)

I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) from “Ozymandias” (1817)

New Scientist is a British popular science magazine. It’s charming and plucky and delightful in the way that a blind and deaf friend of yours might be: not entirely functioning, true, but always determined despite its limitations to do its utmost best. I read New Scientist always knowing that if only those earnest but blind-and-deaf scientists could see and hear what I can see and hear, they would be running rings around me!

This sense I often have that my beloved little mag that tries so hard could do wonders if only it could properly function was triggered in force by its November 20^th edition.  The title was simply, “Why?” And on its cover it asked thirteen questions that ranged from Why do we exist? And Why is there something and not nothing? Down to Why are we conscious? Why does time only move forward? and Why is the universe just right? If I had been an editor, I also would have wanted to ask Why is there all this dark matter and dark energy? But perhaps that question is still beyond the pale, when there isn’t yet a reasonable matter-based approach to answering it.

Of course, the scientists who write for New Scientist are neither blind nor deaf. They are just self-handicapped by their decision to work as part of the deliberately blind-and-deaf scientific research community. For them to fill that role requires, even to this day, that they obey the fundamental dogma of materialism; and that means that every popular-science publication is still a humor magazine. To read serious scientific articles and repeatedly come across problem after problem that even I can solve is laughable! But still, those of us who are free to do open-minded research have been able to do a great deal of building on what little the dogma-hobbled mainstream research scientists have been allowed to learn. And also, of course, this past century has been a heyday of matter-based technological research, which has had a fabulous hundred-year run. Only look at the fact that billionaires can now confidently talk about colonizing Mars, and you know that matter-based technology is indeed the science of the future!

But those who have chosen to chase Nobel Prizes as research physicists and astronomers have had a pretty dismal century. The materialist dogma that was imposed on them just over a hundred years ago has reduced them to doing the equivalent of trying to study just the walls and floor of a room, having had the ceiling declared off-limits because it is composed of a material which arbitrarily they are not allowed to see. And then, if they hope to make a living, they must stolidly spend their entire careers in attempting to discover some non-ceiling source for all that water on the floor. Therefore, we get scientists who are repeatedly forced to scratch their heads over inexplicable findings, like a universe that keeps behaving nonsensically.

Just over a hundred years ago, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals chose to codify into a dogma what had been an informal separation between material and non-material fields of inquiry going back as far as Plato and Aristotle. They instituted “the scientific dogma of materialism.” And yes, at the time you could find those words in print. Adopting a dogma made sense, of course, back twenty-five hundred years ago, when people were first trying to separate out their earliest attempts to understand the material world without reference to the prehistoric religions that humans had invented as a bulwark against their superstitious fears. Back then, nothing was understandable and everything was magical, and placating the gods that we ourselves had created was our one slender hope against the howling dark. But then in the 1600s came the dawning of the Age of Enlightenment, which was an intellectual and philosophical movement that gave birth to a flowering of good ideas as varied as modern scientific inquiry and our American Declaration of Independence.

The answers that New Scientist‘s contributors offered to its thirteen questions in that November edition are as pathetic as you might expect them to be. In fact, you or I could largely answer most of those cover questions with one word: 

CONSCIOUSNESS

If the editors had allowed the scientists trying to answer those thirteen questions to consider consciousness as the base creative force, then most of their questions would have been well answered. In perfect fact, it’s all extraordinary! Discovering the primary role of consciousness feels like turning on every light. You free scientists to study consciousness, and suddenly even a lot of seemingly unrelated phenomena begin to fit together and make sense. But when you insist that what is obviously primary and pre-existing must be just an artifact of the human brain, you create nonsense on a massive scale. Our dear New Scientist has so completely confused itself that it cannot even define consciousness. It calls it “something it is like to be,” which somehow arises in the brain. New Scientist has trouble defining reality, too, which ought to be more of a red-flag to the magazine itself than it seems to be.

How is it possible that there still is no working scientist in the Western world who is able to grasp how deadly stupid it is for them to handicap their work this way?

In point of fact, that century-old materialist dogma has already done humankind incalculable harm. It’s one thing for scientists to have to keep fudging their supposed cosmological “constants”. But to this day, their dogma requires that our minds must die when our bodies die, so scientists impose a ghoulish fatalism on all of humankind that turns out to be an outright lie. It even can be seen to be the likely cause of most of what is wrong with the modern world. Do you think that’s a stretch? We’ll talk about it next week.

And still, the scientific community continues to actively fight the possibility that human life might continue after our bodies die! As recently as 2016, New Scientist could do a whole special issue on death without considering the possibility that anything might follow it. And in 2020, it did an article suggesting that the only kind of immortality that ever might be possible would require artificially preserving some aspects of a dead person’s personality. Bill Nye, the reputed Science Guy, has just weighed in heavily against the possibility of an afterlife, even despite the fact that any actual scientist could tell him that it is impossible to prove a negative.

It’s time to call out and humiliate all this scientific nonsense. Researchers working for the past fifty years with a trove of abundant and consistent evidence have discovered with abject certainty not just that human minds are eternal, but also in complete detail not only what happens at death, but also where it happens, why it happens, and how it happens. We know a thousand times more about life after death than mainstream scientists know about black holes, non-terrestrial planets, and all the suns in the universe combined; and the only reason why the scientific community is ignorant of all this good evidence is its flat refusal to look at it. They were wrong to start this game a hundred years ago. At this point, they are worse than wrong: they are purveyors of evil as they continue to fight for the lie in the face of so much evidence that a bald-faced lie is what it is. The fact that after a hundred years there is no graceful way to end the scientific love affair with materialism doesn’t change the fact that it must end now.

But it didn’t have to turn out this way. That dogma was a bad idea, right from the start! Some of the greatest scientific thinkers of the twentieth century knew or strongly suspected that quantum mechanics had revealed that there was a great deal more to reality than what a study of matter alone could tell us. And they said so! If only the wisdom of our greatest scientists had been given even passing consideration!

In 1931 Max 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.” 

And Nikola Tesla wisely said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

   What the scientific gatekeepers should have done was to skip all their faculty-lounge fantasies and firmly keep their fingers off the scale! Why were they so afraid to allow an open debate in the arena of ideas? Let all the various ideas about consciousness, death and the afterlife, whether there might be some sort of creator, and whatever humanity truly is gradually sort themselves out with the help of the greatest scientific minds, now immersed in research and free of all constraints. Had they just let that happen, we could as a whole have enjoyed a very productive and not a largely wasted century. Every idea in the end must rise or fall on its actual merits alone! This hundred-year detour into the scientific weeds didn’t have to happen. Eventually the truth was always going to win. And the longer they still wait to start to open their own minds and clear their consciences, the worse their reckoning will be. 

Just as a side note, I have never before disputed Thomas’s frame-verse choices, but I was shocked by this one. Humiliating the pretentious is not our style! But he said that Shelley wrote his poem for precisely this situation, as a mirror for fools who think they can impose their self-important ignorance on the world. I suppose that to people who are still alive but are being summarily dismissed as dead, this fight with modern scientific lying about death might feel like a personal grievance.

I blurted to him, “What? Do you know Shelley personally?” After all, they were earthly contemporaries! He just smiled.

And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
– Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) from “Ozymandias” (1817)