Author: Roberta Grimes

Eternal

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Now I’ve been crying lately, Thinkin’ about the world as it is.
Why must we go on hating? Why can’t we live in bliss?
Oh, Peace Train take this country, Come take me home again.
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Peace Train” (1971)

I still can vividly recall how it felt to be afraid to die. I was fourteen when my grandmother died. I saw her body at her funeral, and I can never forget the smell, that chemical spent-flowers funeral home smell. She had been impaired by a stroke for her final six months, but still there was a world of difference between my sweet Grandma and that ugly lump of nothing in the casket. My sister and I were so appalled that we opted for closed-casket funerals when our parents died.

So I had seen death and been horrified by it at a rather impressionable age, but it was only when I was in college that the fear of dying first really hit me. It became a kind of awful fascination. I always had in the back of my mind the certainty that each next instant could be my last, and I wouldn’t even know that I had ceased to be. So, I really owned nothing. I could count on nothing. What even was the point of having lived in the first place? I was terrified of darkness, of heights, of being anywhere that I couldn’t easily escape; and I thought at the time that nobody else seemed to feel as hopeless as I did. But of course, they all were hopeless! All the beer and partying and finding things to laugh about were their coping mechanism against the howling void.

I really did feel this way at twenty! From the viewpoint of my present certainty, I can tell myself that my experiences of light at eight and at twenty had made me always sure about the realities that I have spent my life discovering, but of course that isn’t true at all. At best, those two memories seemed when I was twenty to be the dimmest bits of candle-flame. I was so terrified of dying that I had to do something to alleviate the fear and make my living bearable, and trying to figure out where that light had come from seemed to be my only way of coping.

I’m very glad that I can still remember how it felt to be afraid to die! Because it helps me to identify with the people that I can help today. I hear almost every day from folks who at fifty or sixty or older are still in that awful place where I was at twenty, having coped for their whole lives as I would have coped if I hadn’t followed those bits of flame: they have made their lives bearable by grasping at beliefs. Using Christian promises, NDEs, family stories, and the comfort of being young, they have built what felt like a place of safety and simply tried never to peek outside it. But now, inevitably, the years have passed. And someone close to them has died – a spouse, a child – and the horror of that loss has blown away their twigs of faith. They don’t understand why, but they are terrified of death for what feels like the first time in their lives! Their emails usually begin by saying that they just have found some YouTube of mine, and they generally will mention a recent loss, and then they ask some vague question. Often it’s nothing more than, “Will we still be married when I go to heaven?” When I respond, they are amazed and relieved, and they often will ask more specific questions. Their confusion about suddenly being so afraid is obvious to me! And beyond answering their written questions, I try to give them help with what I can see is really their central problem. Fortunately, I know how they feel!      

I promised to tell you today why the world “Immortality” is our magic bullet to end all the problems that are now in the process of destroying the Western world. But first, we ought to mention why talking about “immortality” makes no sense!

In what other field do we talk about a beautiful and perfectly miraculous truth just by reference to its negative opposite?  “Not-mortal” is a pathetic term. Among other problems, it implies that death might actually exist! When in fact, we know now that nothing dies. Even matter can be neither created nor destroyed, but it only changes form. And the gigantic astral plane teems with herds of every kind of transitioned animal that ever has lived anywhere. We are told by some transitioned communicators that the only exception to the no-death rule is insects, but I am skeptical about that. No one who has gone ahead of us knows everything! And knowing how tender and perfectly loving our reality is at the highest levels, I would not be at all surprised to discover that every insect that ever has lived anywhere is in fact still alive. Somewhere, there may be clouds of post-death mosquitoes, now forever free of the need to suck blood and the curse of flyswatters.

We’ll be talking here in terms of immortality, since that is the term we use in this benighted place. But please, if you can, try to replace it in your mind with the more accurate word that is the title of this post. And now, let me make to you just two points:

  • Fear of death is the base fear. When you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything. Being afraid of death makes you obsessed with many other fears as well, since it lowers your personal consciousness vibration so much that it makes an overall miasma of fear your set-point. My fear of death gradually eased as I got through my twenties while avoiding dying, and also because I was reading whatever afterlife evidence I could find (which in those days wasn’t much). I can vividly recall that when I was thirty, Raymond Moody’s Life After Life was published, and it helped the balance in my mind to shift from “hopeful” to “actually seems possible.” And with that, my mood began to lift! It took me another couple of decades before I was as certain as I am now about what actually happens at and after death, and of course then I went through a couple of years of religion-based terror because I also had discovered that there is no actual hell. I was still a strict Christian, so that discovery seemed to be one that you might be sentenced to hell for having made! I had to take a brief break from doing afterlife research. But once I got past that final bit of fear, I embraced at last the certainty that life is in fact eternal. As a result, for good or ill, I have lost my ability to feel any kind of fear at all, even in cases when feeling some fear might be prudent. And fear of privation, fear of other people, and fear of a life-sucks-then-you-die existence are what lie at the base of every form of evil that ever has been known to man!
  • When you know it is impossible for you to die, you begin to live in an eternal frame. This happens tentatively at first. The loss of your fear of death is a gradual process, and at first it just feels like a lessening of fear, while that fragile construct of faith and hope that you’ve been living in so you could find some peace still protects you. But as you learn even more, you begin to feel constricted by your old cage of beliefs. Or at least, that is how it happened for me! Then my crisis of faith in my early fifties seems to have blown away all my old beliefs, so by the time I confronted the Gospels squarely, I was ready for the beyond-incredible discovery that Jesus had actually told us two thousand years ago a lot of what I had learned in doing all that afterlife research. My certainty about eternal life was cemented on that day forevermore! So for the past twenty years I have been helping others who also wanted to get past the fear of death, and I have learned that it seems to take only about two years for those who sincerely study the evidence and truly want to lose the fear of death to fully adopt and occupy the truth. And for them, as it did for me, that new certainty makes of eternity a glorious and far distant new horizon! Their beginning to see the afterlife as a continuation of their present lives comes first. But then, very soon, most of them begin to think in terms of eternity. Once they are used to looking forward to the next stage of life, they soon find themselves looking far beyond it. And they happily transform their lives to embrace their glorious certainty that the more loving they are on earth, the more eternal fun they will soon enjoy!

So, that is why I am confident that “Immortality” is the magic bullet that has the power to solve all the world’s current problems. How else can we both vanquish the fears that have us always at one another’s throats, while at the same time we lift humankind’s aspirations so at last we are looking beyond the stars? Western mainstream culture leads the world, but at the moment it is severely burdened by a dogma-based science that insists that our minds must blink out when our bodies die, and by a fear-based Christianity that makes us see ourselves as venal and unworthy. We have no choice now but to override both of our most trusted institutions so we can remove from every mind the fears that are behind the evils that men do, while at the same time we give to all of humankind these powerful and glorious new certainties about who and what they truly are!

The fact that there is only one way to halt the Western world’s desperate slide is the reason why Craig Hogan and I are starting Seek Reality Online now, and never mind the fact that we are geriatric! If there were another way, or if someone else could lead it, then we might be tempted to pass the baton. But there is no other way and no one else. Although we know that we have a long climb ahead!

At the moment, death and the afterlife are not taken seriously as legitimate investigative pursuits on any level. But we’ll get there! As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, “If you can’t fly then run, if you can’t run then walk, if you can’t walk then crawl, but whatever you do you have to keep moving forward.” And we will, with his perfect example to follow! Mahatma Gandhi said, “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

We hope to raise a sufficient fuss to at last move from the “ignore” to the “laugh-at-us” phase. And with the help of the internet, that phase shouldn’t last long. Then finally, the fight for the truth will begin! And we are starting to like our odds…. 

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!
Come on, come on, come on, Yes, come on, peace train.
Yes, it’s the peace train!
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Peace Train” (1971)

Magic Bullet

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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)

 

Why?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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 20th 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)

“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)

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