Author: Roberta Grimes

Tread Lightly

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Under a spreading chestnut-tree ⁠the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long; his face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat, he earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face, for he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night, you can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge, with measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell when the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge, and hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly like chaff from a threshing-floor.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), from “The Village Blacksmith” (1840)

So now we are left with a withering Christianity, failing worldwide at a rapid pace. I fought the decline of my beloved religion until the very recent moment when I realize that this entire process might well have been by divine design. Please follow this along with me! 

It is an historical fact that the Christianity we practice now is not the Christianity that Jesus taught. This Christianity was created by the Romans some three hundred years after the death of Jesus, and it was originally codified by the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 A.D. Six more Roman councils are recognized to have followed First Nicaea, and all seven church councils self-importantly declared themselves to have been “inspired by God.” Together they built a fear-based religion around four dogmas that gave Roman Christianity a way to tightly control its world. None of those dogmas is any part of what Jesus actually taught. And yet all of them are central to the Christian religious message, even today. Briefly, they are:

  • Sin and Judgment. Jesus told us that He was replacing the Old Testament’s focus on sin with a focus on love. And He said, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). “Do not judge so you will not be judged” (MT 7:1). Yet Christianity remains obsessed with sins of all descriptions. And in far too many churches today, Christianity’s focus on judgment extends even through all the pews and into the secular community.
  • Hell. We know now from those that we used to think were dead that in fact, no fiery hell exists. Instead, the lowest-vibration afterlife level is what Jesus very accurately described as “the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.” That lowest level is where we end up if we cannot forgive ourselves after death for something we have done in life. In that event, our consciousness vibration gradually slows until we cannot achieve any higher personal vibration than that very lowest level. We are the only ones who can put ourselves there; and when we are vibrating so low that we end up there, we cannot raise our vibration on our own. At that point, we will have to be rescued..
  • The Apocalypse. The final book of the Christian Bible was added by the Council of Nicaea in 325. It was the very worst of a set of revenge-porn literature then in circulation that was produced in a time of Roman persecution of every nonconforming Christian sect. Those who are not dead after all tell us that Jesus will never return to earth that way, since His doing so would spread terror and destroy His efforts to bring the kingdom of God on earth. Thomas does say, though, that there has been a small risk that adherents of the present false Christianity might attempt to trigger an apocalypse in an effort to force Jesus to return. Fortunately, he tells me that danger is receding now.
  • Penal Substitutionary Atonement. The whole notion that Jesus died for our sins is the heart and center of modern Christianity. Remove that, and you have little of traditional Christianity remaining. And to show you that the earliest followers of the Way put zero emphasis on His mode of departure from that lifetime, we might mention the fact that in the first three centuries after the Lord’s death, among the millions of Christian burials in the Roman catacombs there are reportedly no depictions of crosses to be found.

None of these dogmas came from Jesus. All four of them are dead-end ideas based in fear and not in love, but they served manifold essential purposes. For the Romans, and for all Christian tyrants and kings for the past two thousand years, they have created an efficient means for controlling the masses. And for the Godhead, they have preserved almost entirely unmolested the name and the teachings of Jesus inside their protective Christian shell. For a long time, I considered the Romans to have been the great usurpers of Christianity. But my dear Thomas has helped me to see that the Christianity of the Romans has been a wrapping which has protected the pure teachings of Jesus from forces which could otherwise have corrupted and destroyed them.

Until now. It is only now, in the age of the worldwide internet, that it is safe for the protective wrapping of the Roman Christian religion to gradually shred and fall away, and for the true Way that Jesus came to teach to begin to spread as it always has been intended to spread, peacefully and from heart to heart. It is only now that it will be impossible for any force, however powerful it might be, to kill those precious teachings. The wings on which they will fly will be the same ones that Jesus spread for His disciples on that first Easter morning. They will fill all hearts with the triumphant certainty that, after all, there is no death. And once the world hears from its best-known personage the eternal truth that there is no death, it is going to be open to hearing Him as He shares His spiritual teachings with the world!

The first vision of my life was a happy lark that happen in August of 2011. I had spent a year making appearances to promote The Fun of Dying, and by then I was tired of it. Enough! So one morning, just as I was waking up, I saw a glow of light. In it was what I have thought of forever after as the four dancing clergymen.

When I was writing The Fun of Dying in the summer of 2009, a friend with mediumistic gifts called and told me she had been prompted by her guide to let me know that there were five dead clergymen helping me to write that book. She is a sweet and saintly person, and we both were astounded by what she had to tell me. She said that one clergyman was a very advanced being who had been so long away from the earth that “I’m surprised he’s still in contact with it.” Three were good men of God, very recently dead. And one, she was astonished to say, was one of my ultimate personal heroes. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I gasped at the name and asked her why the saintly Dr. King would bother to be helping me! She said, “He wants to set the record straight. They all do.”  

So then, on that August morning in 2011 I woke up to a vision of a colorful astral garden in which four beautiful young men in astral robes were singing and dancing in unison. And laughing. The very advanced clergyman was above such foolishness, but apparently Dr. King was not. And he wanted to show me his participation, so the young man on the left was very slightly more beige. What they were singing was this:

“You’ve got a wonderful story to tell!
Life goes on forever. And there is no hell!
So go out there and share that beautiful sto-ree!

I have never seen my Thomas so upset as he has been this week. To see someone falsely claim to be Jesus returned, and claim not to have risen from the dead at all? (see last week’s comments) Instead, this imposter claims to have lied to, cynically tricked, and betrayed his own followers? Thomas is a being of such integrity that he has been unable to process that level of deceit. And then, for the imposter to have ascribed such deceit even to the Lord Jesus Himself, who is an aspect of the genuine Godhead? And this, after Jesus had planned and in fact had delivered His actual death and successful resurrection with much added trouble to Himself, in an effort to convince His followers that we all do indeed live eternal lives? I ached for my precious friend, but you can’t physically hug with your spirit guide so all I could do was just to let him be. I told him on Monday that we needed a frame, and I suggested maybe a Longfellow poem, and what about “A Psalm of Life”? He insisted instead on “The Village Blacksmith.” And it had to be the whole poem! Then on Friday, I thought of telling you about my happy vision of the four dancing clergymen. He thought that was okay. But there had to be more of a point to this post. When I said that, he gave me the two words that became its title.

“But, what does that mean?” I asked the question respectfully. He said, “Take things always by their smooth handle.” That’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson. I could tell he meant it as a joke. Which told me he must be feeling better. Then he added a bolus of thought.

“The blacksmith is your template for living on earth. Whether you are high or low here, you are all of one status where I am now. You must neither attack nor attempt to protect Christianity as it dies, for just as it was the Godhead’s strategy to allow Roman Christianity to form as a protective wrapping for the Lord’s Way, so now you must accept the Godhead’s strategy to allow Christianity to dissolve as The Way of Jesus emerges. And now that the name of Jesus has become the best-known in the world, you have only to do your part as it is given to you to share with the world the teachings of Jesus, and the kingdom of God will overspread the world in the Lord’s own time and in the Lord’s Way. From your perspective, this is all happenstance. But the Godhead thinks in millennia of time, and from the Godhead’s perspective all of this is happening in the perfect Now.”

I said, “I’ve learned in this lifetime that if there’s any fear in something, then Jesus didn’t teach it. That’s how you can tell what He said.” That’s when I learned that spirit guides can hug with us in our hearts, after all.

He goes on Sunday to the church, and sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach, he hears his daughter’s voice
Singing in the village choir, and it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother’s voice singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more, how in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes a tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin, each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done, has earned a night’s repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped each burning deed and thought.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), from “The Village Blacksmith” (1840)

Jesus Deserves His Own Way

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
– David (1010-970 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Psalm 23

It has taken me a lifetime of practicing Christianity, and also studying and loving Jesus, to develop the conviction to say out loud that the Lord really does deserve His own Way. The Religion and the Man are entirely different. I have been so blind. But now I see!

Christianity has had a remarkable run. Only consider all the elements of its history, which began three centuries after the death of Jesus when the Romans seized a vibrant spiritual movement and ruthlessly remodeled it into a religion that was based in fear rather than in love so they could use it to intimidate and control. Then once you get past the unpromising start of Christianity, you’ve got to contend with the appalling nature of some of Christianity’s anti-spiritual dogmas. The notion that God might need to watch God’s own Son being murdered before God can forgive us for being human is insulting to a perfectly loving God! The idea, as the modern Christmas hymn has it, that Jesus came just “to die for poor ornery people like you and like I” is humiliating to Jesus. And it gives short shrift to the Lord’s precious three years of teaching us how to more perfectly live so we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. Perhaps even worse, it is past time for us to look frankly at the hideous nature of some of Christianity’s actions over the past two thousand years that have tainted the religion for a great many people who otherwise might be its ardent followers.

Christianity has seemed to me to be ever more awful the more I have studied it, from its earliest persecution of the remnants of the Lord’s own flock right through the Inquisition and the Crusades and down to the sadistic nineteenth-century priest who became for me its final straw! That nasty man told parents who hadn’t managed to get their babies baptized in time that their children would be allowed to leave Purgatory once, and for just long enough to watch the baptized infants happily playing in paradise before those unbaptized babies would be cast into hell, where they would roast alive forevermore. And this man was supposed to be working for Jesus? But still, I never have been able to say it. Not right out loud. It was not for me to say!

But now, at last I think I can accept it. Human-made Christianity has had its run. And my dear Thomas insists that it is finally time for us to lay the whole religion to its well-earned rest!

Thomas is the backup author of our weekly posts, as I think by now you must realize. All alone, I never could be so prolific! He gives me the topics a week or two ahead in the form of an article linked from the Internet, or a Bible passage, or maybe just a title; and then I plug away at doing the writing while I work at other things and live my life, and he occasionally looks in. By sometime on Thursday he is always standing directly behind my left shoulder. I don’t know why he is on my left, and he even is there when I sit against a wall. If I’m getting nowhere, by Friday afternoon he’ll heave the sort of exasperated sigh that people who don’t need to breathe will sigh, and he might give me a clue or two. If I’m still not getting it, he will step in on Saturday morning and finish the writing, even using my voice. In truth, we work pretty well together. But you hate to disappoint your spirit guide, so I try to finish these posts before then.

My Thomas has been fed up with Christianity for at least a couple of hundred years. I don’t know for how many lifetimes this feeling goes back, but now is when his patience ends. He wants to begin to give Jesus His Way while I am still young enough to do it in this lifetime. But still, I’ve been holding back because, to be frank, I don’t see how you can build a new religion without some fear behind it to drag people out of bed and put them in the pews on Sundays. We wrote the book four years ago, but then he didn’t want to publish it quite yet. He seems to be ready to publish it now. I can feel his swelling agitation, but this isn’t really my movement at all! I’m not feeling it the way he feels it. He tells me dismissively that it’s not a religion. “Stop calling it just another religion!” Well, okay. It’s not a religion. So, what is it then? Give me some kind of clue! And then, on Tuesday morning of this past week something extraordinary happened.

You know that we consult with our guides most nights, but we have amnesia for the experience. Before last week, I’ve been allowed to remember just a few minutes of only one meeting with my spirit guides, which was the one that Jesus attended following my two weeks of channeling Liberating Jesus. It was held in a paneled conference room where every seat at the table was taken, and I sat across the table from The Man Himself. He was an overwhelming presence, of no particular race and with brown eyes and dark-brown shoulder-length hair. He was the only one who spoke, but I was too starstruck to register what He was saying. He looked stern, and He glanced at me a couple of times but He knew that I was overwhelmed by Him so He did me the kindness of not seeming to looking at me directly. A lot of people talk about their cozy relationships with what I think of as friendly Jesus or chatty Jesus, but the only Jesus I knew before this week was this overwhelming God-version of Jesus who was in my mind for two weeks in April of 2015, when He used me as a rapid word-processor. And then a few weeks later He let me sit in as He met with my spirit guides. Beings who have achieved His spiritual level can show themselves to us in whatever way they choose to show themselves, and clearly Jesus knows that I see Him as a formidable aspect of  the literal Godhead.

Then as I was waking up on Tuesday morning just before dawn, a bright light appeared in the darkness, and then a vision began to appear. It was Jesus, wearing a glowing spirit robe in an astral garden full of tall flowers. It was a gorgeous scene! He was standing there with His arms folded maybe twenty feet away from me, looking just to my right and smiling tenderly. I realized then that directly to my right was Thomas, although I didn’t look at him because I couldn’t look away from Jesus. Thomas was making some sort of loud racket with something in a shed. And Jesus had such a beautiful face! His smile was radiant! He seems to really love my Thomas. But then almost right away the vision was fading, even as I tried to hold onto it.

What the heck was that about? Thomas whispered in my mind that Jesus had wanted me to see that tableau. It was mine to think about and come to understand. The vision grew more vivid as I thought about it all that day, but I couldn’t make the least sense of it. My vision of Jesus had been radiant, gorgeous, and it had very much softened the Lord’s image in my mind after my experience with channeling Liberating Jesus. His face had been especially clear, a neatly bearded young man perhaps in his late twenties with playful eyes that were brown with flecks of gold. Brown hair with a bit of a curl and olive skin. He looked like the same Jesus who had overwhelmed me in the meeting that night in 2015, but very subtly different: now his expression was friendly. He looked like the star of your college class, the one who would tutor the slowest students for free and take the shyest girl to Homecoming. But what had Thomas been doing so loudly? And why had Jesus’s arms been folded?

It was only when I woke up on Wednesday morning, after probably talking it over with Thomas, and – who knows? – maybe also with Jesus, that I understood what that vision had meant. They had been acting out a buddy-show for me. Thomas had been tinkering in a garage with his friend Jesus’s old jalopy while Jesus watched him indulgently, bemused and delighted by Thomas’s determination to fix Jesus’s very antique vehicle and get it running again. The Lord’s arms were folded to show that He had done His part a very long time ago. The Lord’s face was loving, grateful, entirely approving. And smiling! I was realizing by Wednesday morning that my own view of Jesus had become so distorted by my reverence for Him that I had forgotten that even though He has ascended to the highest aspect of the Godhead, Jesus remains one of us. The first time on Wednesday that it occurred to me that Jesus actually had been smiling just for me, tears filled my eyes. I was embarrassed to have needed that attention from Him. And touched to my heart more than I can say that He had wanted to give me that reassuring smile!

And for the rest of the week I kept noticing more details. Thomas wasn’t seen because without a body, he can’t do this work. So it is just mine to do. And when that scary thought began to panic me, he said at once that at my age, I can only begin it. With Seek Reality Online, Liberating Jesus, and The Fun of Loving Jesus, most of my part already is done or is about to be done, and very soon others will be carrying it on. And as for him, this project to replace Christianity with The Way of Jesus seems to be the primary reason why he agreed to be my spirit guide, and it seems to be most of what he has seen to be his own unfinished work on earth.

Perhaps I never have mentioned the fact that people in the real life to which all of us will very soon return speak with one another mostly in boluses of thought. Thomas and I communicate that way when we have a lot to say, and it really is more efficient! So as he was reassuring me, he showed me a vast sweep of many thousands of years. There is no way to summarize it all, beyond saying that what we think of as Christianity is apparently what was born for to die, and what Jesus came to teach two thousand years ago is now safely past the period of history that could have killed it. So now as the old Christianity withers away, the true Way of Jesus is about to begin to overspread the world. Over the next few millennia of earth-time, it will indeed bring the kingdom of God on earth, just as Jesus promised it would do. When I was twelve, like many twelve-year-old girls I went through a period of writing some extremely bad poetry. I also wrote one poem that I thought at the time was weird, but it stuck in my mind and I know now that it must have been channeled. It was something about just doing your work, “and one day when all at last is done, you will see the little puzzle-piece that was your work and joy.”

So, here at last is my puzzle-piece. I have wondered about it for a lifetime! One of the six segments of Seek Reality Online is being built around Liberating Jesus, and now it also will include The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. This is the Lord’s own movement! His arms may be folded, but His heart holds us all.


Your rod and your staff,  they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– David (1010-970 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Psalm 23

 

Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), from Sonnets from the Portuguese #43 (1850)

Perhaps by now you might assume that I don’t much care for the Christian Bible. It is obvious to anyone who has studied the Bible without a religious bias that, far from being all God’s inspired word, a lot of it is man-made ramblings. But there are parts of the Bible that came directly from the genuine God, speaking through God’s chosen prophets. And there are parts that are preserved from the time when God walked the earth as Jesus, who studied us through human eyes and thereby came to better understand us so He could give us the Gospel teachings that will help us bring the kingdom of God on earth. And then God in the person of Jesus chose to have His body die, not to save us from God’s wrath because of course no such sacrifice was needed; but instead, God in the person of Jesus chose to die a very public death so He could then reanimate His dead body and thereby prove to us that death is an illusion. And when the body that God had used was murdered, He left proof of His body’s having been truly dead so He could rise from the  dead in a resurrection which can be scientifically proven only now, in this much more cynical age, to in fact have been a real resurrection. It was a demonstration done two thousand years ago, but intended for the twentieth century and beyond!

The fact that the Bible is not a magic-book doesn’t mean that it is not God’s Book. I spent forty years of my life reading the Bible over and over again, a couple of pages every night, from the age of twelve until the age of fifty-two. I read that Book from cover to cover what was probably as many as twenty times, and the New Testament twice as many times. And in many parts, the Bible is beautiful! There are portions of the Christian Bible that are God’s love song to humankind. You cannot be me reading the story of Moses, imagining him staring at that burning bush that was not consumed, and not recall the way God called to me, too, from out of a light when I was eight. Or reading about Joseph of the coat of many colors, who was sold into Egypt so he could save the Hebrew people, and then seeing photos of the recently-unwrapped mummy of that very same Joseph who had the face of a Hebrew man, with his features well-preserved so I could see God working in the world, and not flat-out grin! Omigod, there was Joseph’s actual face! These were all real people! I had spent so much of my life reading about them, and I could see now that they had all really lived thousands of years ago! You could not read about David as a boy, and then King David as a man, and read all his beautiful, heartfelt Psalms, and not fall in love with the adorable human imperfections of him! And Isaiah the Great, whose words were the perfect words of God spoken seven hundred years before Jesus quoted those very same words! All those people were real, and they made God real. Oh no, my dear friends, I don’t despise the Bible! I love the Bible as I love my life!     

How could you not love the written record of such an amazing time? Over a period of sixteen hundred years, God spoke to the world’s first monotheists through a series of prophets, and Jesus spoke, and then the crusty but endearing and indispensable Apostle Paul wrote, and many of their words were miraculously preserved. As the American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson memorably said of the words of Jesus – and he was a farmer who had known dunghills in his time! He said that those genuine words of Jesus are as distinguishable in the Bible amid all that human-made dross as are “diamonds in a dunghill.” And so they are. But that dunghill holds so many words! You could use your Bible as a doorstop. If you then hit it with your foot, you could stub your toe. My New International Version of the Bible contains some 727,969 words. That is more than three million individual letters! I have read it over and over again over forty years of my life and on more than fourteen thousand evenings, so I am very familiar with it now. But you aren’t. And I can ask you please to trust me when I opine about the Bible to you; but still, the Bible is never going to mean to you what it means to me. I do so wish that there were a former Christian in the world who was as familiar with the Bible as I am, with whom I could discuss what I am seeing now. Because I can see something beginning to develop between clueless humankind and an infinitely loving God, and I am joyous about it! The dawning glimmer of understanding on our side. The effort on God’s side to proclaim love over and over again. And finally, the channeled proclamation on God’s part so beautiful that you cannot read it without feeling your heart soar. As we work on developing Seek Reality Online, we have decided to add a sixth segment for members that will be built around the Bible, and Thomas is really pleased about that! There isn’t room here to say very much, but I will share with you three samples taken from the Bible that illustrate what seems to be starting to  happen in the world.  

In my New International Version of the Bible, the word “love” appears 686 times from Genesis through Revelation. Micah was a contemporary of the great Isaiah, but he was a “minor” prophet, and one of twelve at that. Micah was just a simple, down-home guy. I loved him as a child because what he said was always sensible and to the point. At a time when there were different kinds of burnt offerings prescribed by fearful humankind for different kinds of sins, Micah kind of threw up his hands and said,

“With what shall I come to the Lord
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-9).

When I was ten, one day I cut from somewhere the last four lines of Micah’s plaint above. I taped them to the wall above my desk, where they remained for the rest of my growing-up.

And then we come to Jesus, who spent three years delivering a Ph.D.-level course in spiritual growth, not all of which survives. He summed up the entire Old Testament in the twin Commandments that we love God and love one another.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (JN 13:34).

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (MT 22:37-40).

And finally, one Saturday morning in May of 2019, when I had a blog post due tomorrow but I was running  on empty, I woke up with 1Cor 13 playing in my mind, and with Thomas saying over it that most of Paul’s letters were Paul’s own words, but this chapter had been channeled. I opened my Bible, and that fact was obvious: the chapters before it and after it are in Paul’s voice and on other topics, and between them comes this magnificence:

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. 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.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1Cor 13).

The parts of the Bible that were channeled by God are about love, and only about love! No one who claims to be following the Bible will ever less than perfectly love anyone. Yet so often, people will split hairs about who they are willing to love, and who has wronged them so they can’t love them anymore. In 1943, a father watched as his wife and children were led away to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. And he still loves the guards who murdered his family, to the point where right now he is in the Outer Darkness trying to rescue those guards. True story! In fact, multiply it by the hundreds of thousands and you will understand why the Outer Darkness today teems with fathers lovingly trying to rescue hundreds of thousands of wailing concentration camp guards. You also will understand why I have no problem with sincerely forgiving and loving the woman who was arrested last April for having stolen most of my retirement savings. Now, please tell me again what anyone ever can possibly do to you that could be worth your refusing to forgive and love everyone?

I love thee with the passion put to use
in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), from Sonnets from the Portuguese #43 (1850)

Mathematics

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.

Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

The fact that mathematics is used in creating the structure of material reality is such a gigantic weirdness that it’s difficult to even get our minds around it. Of course, the first question to be asked and answered is what mathematics even is. Is math a natural science or an invented science? If you are sure that it’s natural, then please feel free to skip the rest of this post. But if you suspect, as I did when I was sixteen, that math is as human-invented as a screwdriver, then read on….

I still can vividly recall the moment when I stood in line after Algebra II class and asked my teacher whether math is a discovered or an invented science. She told me, sounding impatient, that math is an invented science. And she moved on to the next student in line. It was a nothing moment for her, but it was a monumental moment for me! People just dreamed it up? Well, who needs that? I never took another class in math. Then there was a moment twenty years ago when I was watching a PBS special on the universe. A young physicist was narrating it. He said in what was clearly a throwaway line, “For some reason, math can be used to study the universe.” And his “for some reason” caught on my mind.

The more I have learned about the greater reality over the past ten years, the more I have come to realize that my insight at the age of sixteen might have been one for the ages! What I am going to write for you today is a doodle. I’ve been doing these every year or two, just taking some concepts that make sense individually and putting them together to see whether a stretch of an idea that seems to be almost unimaginable can begin to make sense when separate sensible ideas are combined. Here are some things that we know are true:

  • Mathematics as a system is human-made. No one has ever found a piece of slate with calculations in primordial chalk and deciphered them in the same way that the genetic code of DNA was first deciphered. And the fact that human beings invented mathematics and mathematics actually orders the universe is gigantically weird! It’s like finding a precambrian refrigerator.
  • The entire material universe is less than 5% of what scientists tell us exists. Scientists call all the rest of reality “dark matter” and “dark energy” because it won’t interact with photons of light. And scientists assume that the more than 95% of the universe that is “dark” must be full of nothing useful, which fact is absurd on its face! We know that in nature everything that has no function soon atrophies and withers away, and yet scientists assume that fully 95% of the universe is made up of random exotic particles that do nothing useful? Why aren’t scientists even a little bit curious about what makes up 95% of reality? We know what it is. Dark matter is the non-material astral plane, which teems with life. And dark energy is Consciousness energy. Which is life.
  • Time does not run in the more than 95% of reality that is not material. And contrary to what we have been told to expect, living in an endless Now works just fine! In fact, you are living in an endless Now right now. Now is all that exists for anyone. We remember having read the first sentence of this post, but it is only that memory that we ever can own.

All right. So now let’s look at the clockwork material reality that mainstream scientists tell us is where we live. Scientists say this universe began when something came from nothing 13.8 billion years ago in a Big Bang, and it still carries on from there unassisted and within unimaginably tiny tolerances. For the past nearly fourteen billion years, and with no help at all, it somehow has managed to avoid either collapsing in upon itself or blowing apart. Scientists assure us that they are still in the process of figuring it out. Or as the great Rupert Sheldrake tells us they are wont to say, “Just give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” But it is going to take a whole lot more than just one free miracle to make sense of the scientific creation story that has to cover fourteen billion years and counting! It is past time for us to accept the fact that the whole scientific fairy tale of creation is impossible. And imagining a religious God Who just says “Presto!” and makes it all happen and keep on happening isn’t really a whole lot better, is it? The plain fact is that both the scientific and the religious creation stories are so vastly unlikely as to beggar belief. They are both myths from a much more primitive time when myths were all that human beings could muster. But we know for a fact that creation must actually have happened. Demonstrably, this universe exists. So, what might we get when we demand a creation theory backed up by some actual evidence?  

When I first asked Thomas about creation a year ago, he drew my attention to three popular-science magazine articles that indicate that modern humankind and about ninety percent of all the other animals and plants first came into existence at about the same time, around 200,000 years ago. I blogged about it then. That seems to be astoundingly recent! Whenever he throws one of these ideas at me, I reel with it at first, as I did when he first hit me with his Godhead idea, and with his filmstrip ongoing-creation idea. But I am becoming used to all of it now. And I have come to realize that he is probably right! So let’s juxtapose what I think of as Thomas’s creation story against the theist and atheist creation stories. Part of the evidence we find in that overlooked valley between the theist and the atheist hills is the boggling certainty that material creation is based in and governed by, and can therefore be studied using… human-created mathematics?

And the more I think about it, the more that fact seems to be a kind of magic bullet.

More even than punctuated equilibrium and so many other glitches in creation that you can spot if you look for them, the fact that the universe is based in mathematics seems to show us its actual creator’s hand. And astoundingly, that hand is our own.

Before you laugh, please follow this through with me.

  • Consciousness is the only thing that is real. Consciousness is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality that exists outside of space and time.
  • Two hundred thousand years ago as we reckon earth-time, something happened. A Course in Miracles, which we are told was a project led by Jesus, tells us that “the Son of God” had a momentary thought of separation, and since Consciousness is infinitely creative and infinitely powerful, separation happened in that micro-instant. Maybe so. But whatever made it happen, this universe was then created.
  • The universe wasn’t much at first. Think of it as having been nothing more than a dot of Namibian plain that contained the first modern people and ninety percent of the first modern plants and animals lit by the white light of Consciousness itself.
  • Together with that first universe was probably also human-created both the earliest form of mathematics and also its associated Newtonian physics. With no better explanation, we can assume that Newtonian physics was created so our minds couldn’t mess with this reality, and we also can assume that quantum mechanics is the plug that connects this reality with the other 95% of what exists. We do know that in most of reality, even moderately developed minds can easily create stable objects from consciousness alone. We can speculate that Consciousness worked with the most advanced of the beings in that earliest cut-off bit of Itself to fashion the earliest Godhead of our Brothers and Sisters who then could work with the parent Consciousness to rescue the rest of us.
  • Creation in this bit of material universe is not one-and-done, but rather it is an ongoing process. So as people have become more curious over the past two hundred thousand earth-years, it was a simple matter for each new micro-slice of our continuously-created reality to remain ahead of our curiosity. And since this reality includes an artificial past, it has been easy to create that past as well. I have lots of ideas about how our ever more negative present may be creating an ever more negative past, but since that is not the subject of this post we can save all of that for another day!
  • This version of a creation story seems to solve the something-from-nothing problem as well. It’s all circular! And there is an ever more complex  history rich with proto-human, proto-mammal, and dinosaur bones to constitute a fabricated evolutionary history and satisfy our curiosity about our past.
  • And as each of us raises our own conscious vibration with the aid of our own spirit guides, we come ever closer to the parent Consciousness, the Spirit, what Jesus teaches us to call our Father. The history of the planet and the universe may be fabricated, but our spiritual growth is a genuine effort. It is only our own ignorant rebelliousness that ever has come between us and God!
  • As you better make sense of how this all has been happening, you should find yourself able to read the Gospel words of Jesus now with more understanding. In truth, I think that our clearing away both the theist and the atheist creation stories may be the biggest steps that we need to take toward finally finding our way to rejoin the Godhead so at last we all can go home.

Okay, so it’s a doodle. It’s a third version of the creation story that has been harvested from the valley of real information between those two false beliefs-based hills. It’s a creation story based in the astounding possibility that we ourselves are the genuine architect of all that we see. We ourselves are the part of God that was separated two hundred thousand years ago, and now we are rescuing one another and elevating one another spiritually so that one day, at last and forevermore, the kingdom of God will overspread all the earth, as if the separation never had happened. Mathematics may be a more important clue than we ever could possibly have known.      

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning,
Born of the one light, Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

 

The Valley

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and you.
And I think to myself, What a wonderful world!
I see skies of blue and clouds of white.
The bright blessed day. The dark sacred night.
And I think to myself, What a wonderful world!
– Bob Thiele (1922-1996) & George Weiss (1921-2010), from “What a Wonderful World” (1967)

Perhaps a decade ago, I attended a conference headlined by creationist scientists. I was curious, but I was also hopeful! My focus of study had by then become an effort to put together all that I had learned in forty years of research, and to make some beginning sense of our whole reality as it actually is. So I was very briefly hopeful that trained scientists who were not bound by mainstream science’s materialist constraints might have begun to undertake the same huge task.

As you know, mainstream science reduced itself a century ago to studying only what can be seen as material. This foolishness seems to have begun as a protection against their inadvertently finding God, so I was sure that creationist scientists wouldn’t share their hang-ups. And of course they did not! There were wonderful presentations on the complexities of eyes, cells, and DNA, and other kinds of evidence of the fact that blind evolution is not sufficient to explain the rapid development and complexity of the staggering variety of life on earth. But by the end of the second day, I was struck by a horrifying realization. These good folks’ insistence on working from a Christian perspective was handicapping them in much the same way that materialist scientists are handicapped!

The attendees were a friendly group. Between sessions, I talked with some of them about this problem. I said something like, “You’re right about mainstream scientists. They’re over here on this materialist hill. They won’t study anything that’s not on their hill! But don’t you see that you’re over on this other hill that has a lot of evidence that materialist beliefs are wrong, which to you means the Christian God must be real? But if you limit yourselves to just that hill, you still are ignoring the enormous valley between those hills that contains a lot of useful information about reality that both you and the materialists are ignoring because it doesn’t fit either of your agendas?”

I soon felt like the skunk at their garden party. No matter how much I praised what I was hearing at their conference, and no matter how mildly and respectfully I spoke, reactions ranged from blank looks to outright hostility. Most of them seemed to be unable to comprehend my analogy involving the two hills and the information being ignored in the valley between them. Even worse, those few who got the analogy seemed to assume that I was anti-Christian.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t see any value in beliefs-based science of either kind, whether atheist or theist. There is ONE REALITY! It’s a complex and surprising reality, true, and most of it is not accessible to the senses, but it is the reality that we all share. And it doesn’t exist as convenient blocks of curated and readily accessible information! Instead, it is mostly densely interwoven non-material dimensions, and each affects and is affected by the others. So you can’t study just limited aspects of it if you hope to make sense of any of it!

Both hills harbor well-meaning scientists who are devoting their entire careers to doing research inside artificial and arbitrary limits. And if even this hobbyist researcher can see that, it surely must on some level be obvious to the scientists who are working on the hilltops!

A similar phenomenon exists in afterlife research. Nearly every expert in this field has made a career of studying and talking about communication with the dead, or physical mediums, or astral travel, or life-planning, or consciousness studies, or spiritual-growth techniques, or any of a half-dozen other fields that are genuine and useful, to be sure. But by themselves, these fields are all anecdotal. They are yet more evidence that the afterlife is real, but when the evidence is so fragmented by source and by method of study it is immensely less convincing! And yet, a hungry world is desperate to know the truth. The human death rate is one hundred percent! Multitudes are eager to know for sure that physical death is no big deal, and that what comes next is glorious. Hints are better than nothing, of course, but people would so much rather have it all put together for them in some fashion. And yet, in a world of nearly eight billion people, I know of only two rather eccentric folks already in their seventies who feel driven to investigate all the evidence for the afterlife and the greater reality, and to try to make sense of how it fits together. I comfort myself that there must be more than two. We just can find no sign of them. But at least there are two! Craig Hogan and I have done most of our work independently, so we can compare and discuss our conclusions now. And we are excited by the fact that in every significant detail, we have both reached precisely the same conclusions.

If it were only me, I’m not sure I would attempt to do Seek Reality Online. Even though there is a desperate need for it! But Craig has reached my same conclusions at a more sophisticated level. And as we work with the developers now, I can see that his vision for the website is also greater than mine. As an aside, this is turning out to be a lot of fun!

It is important to stress the fact that all scientific ideas are presented as theories. Even gravity is a theory! Nothing in any scientific field is assumed to be a proven fact about which nothing further can be learned. The scientific method requires the observation of some phenomenon, and then its investigation and the positing of explanations and details until a testable theory develops that can be even further refined. And that works fairly well for the scientists on both hills, with a couple of caveats:

  • What each set of scientists can study is limited, so all their theories are going to be constrained. Mainstream scientists have to come up with theories that don’t need an intelligent designer, while Christians assume a designer who must be the Christian God. That valley between their hills is full of information that rather forcefully suggests that both of their basic suppositions are wrong.
  • Mainstream scientists use mathematics as a primary tool. But in fact, math is a human invention. And what is in that valley of ignored information strongly suggests that reality is not math-based beyond the fact that it is Mind-based, and Mind uses mathematics to create an artificial physics in this material five percent of reality in order to give us a learning environment that our own minds cannot easily mess with.

Just as examples, here are four basic questions for which no scientist on either hill can form a viable theory without recourse to information from the valley that lies between their hills:

  • The Nature of Reality. Mainstream scientists continue to seek a source of consciousness in the human brain. Reportedly, they are now committed to spending a billion dollars more on this fools’ errand! I don’t know precisely how creationist scientists feel about consciousness as the source of reality, since I haven’t managed to make it to another of their conferences; but their public-facing work suggests that Christian deism remains central to their worldview. In fact, however, the valley that scientists of both persuasions still ignore is miles-deep in evidence that the two most illustrious scientists of the twentieth century were right when Max Planck said, “Mind is the matrix of all matter,” and Albert Einstein said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Any scientist who persists in studying reality only through the lens of his own beliefs will find it forever impossible to develop a workable theory of what reality even actually is!
  • The Nature of the Godhead. I was a zealous Christian into my fifties, so I understand wanting the Christian God to win this war of potshots being taken from opposing hilltops! But that valley full of information that scientists of every strips are still ignoring is full of evidence that the creationists are on the right track, but the genuine creative force that continuously manifests our reality is not in fact the Christian God. Instead, it seems to be a Collective of Perfected Beings many thousands strong. In a reality without time, apparently the Godhead is effectively… US?
  • The Origin of Life. Mainstream scientists cannot come up with a theory to explain the origin of life beyond the notion that just the right primordial soup might have been struck by lightning. Creationist scientists just assume that their Christian God must have made life happen. But in fact, the evidence in that valley between them very strongly suggest that the animating force that we experience as life is a property inherent in the base creative consciousness which turns out to be the only thing that is real. The evidence for this theory is abundant, and its implications include the possibility that everything may be somewhat conscious. Once both theistic and atheistic scientists accept the unavoidable fact that what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force, every aspect of the genuine reality is suddenly going to open wide for them!
  • The Reason for the Universe and the Purpose of Human Life. Materialist scientists are too deep in their self-imposed weeds to spare much thought for wondering why the universe exists, or why we are here, beyond assuming that it all is entirely random. Creationist scientists seem just to assume that whatever happens is part of God’s plan. But what Craig and I have found as we assemble one theory of reality from the evidence that is on both hilltops and also in the valley between is that, once again, both sides are wrong. And instead, the probable answers to these questions are more glorious than either side can imagine!

What independent researchers have discovered in the valley that is still being ignored between the province of materialist science and the province of creationist science is a gigantic trove of information! There is so much evidence available there in so many different fields that once people with scientific credentials feel intellectually free enough to study it, they might well fairly rapidly more than double humankind’s store of knowledge. Or as the great polymath Nikola Tesla 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.”

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,
Are also on the faces of people going by.
I see friends shaking hands, saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying “I love you.”

I hear babies cry. I watch them grow.
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.
And I think to myself, What a wonderful world!
– Bob Thiele (1922-1996) & George Weiss (1921-2010), from “What a Wonderful World” (1967)

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)

 

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