Author: Roberta Grimes

What Good Is a Crisis?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Disaster is the mother of good fortune.
There is so much comfort in the usual, and so much risk in anything that’s new,
That our lives plod into the grave without our noticing their passage
Unless some fortunate tragedy blunders in our way.

One of the loveliest things about humankind is our zesty adaptability, our vast creative optimism that can make crises into opportunities. A recent Seek Reality guest is a very successful woman who told us that a dozen years ago her life had seemed to be over. She had been unemployed, in a failed marriage, plagued by health problems, financially bereft, and altogether without hope. To see her now, it is impossible to imagine that she ever has been less than a star! And there are so many stories like hers. As I think back, I realize that lots of our most inspiring Seek Reality guests have shared with us tales of dead-ended lives upon which the guests had built great successes that would not have been possible if some tragedy or other hadn’t cleared their former lives away.

The poem that begins and ends this post has no attribution because it is one of several that apparently I wrote in my teens. By now, I don’t recall most of them. But I loved this one, especially the counter-intuitive wisdom of “salutary calamities” and “the reckless despair of misfortune.” I still recall it more than fifty years later. Of course, no teenager has the depth of understanding nor the breadth of experience to write something like this! I had of late become convinced that I am misremembering having written it. I assumed that instead I must have read it somewhere, but I did a search and found nothing. The only other poem from that time that I recall is even more sophisticated than this one, so I realize that if in fact I wrote them, all those poems must have been channeled. Thomas was gearing me up to undertake the future that he and I had planned.

Covid-19 could be a nothing-burger, or it could be a long-term plague. It still is impossible to know. We do know, however, that the massive worldwide effort being made to address the illness is forcing us out of our established ruts. Just as efficiently as would a serious war or a good-sized meteor hitting the earth, measures being taken to deal with the pandemic are disrupting Western civilization. So now we are living through a hinge in history. A new and much better modern world is seeking to be born from the ashes of the industrial age that is dying now before our eyes. The process of this death and rebirth is likely to vary by country, but here are eight quick U.S. examples of the creative destruction that is now underway:

  • Working from home is a new normal. Our younger daughter and her husband are saving so much commuting and work-kibitzing time that they are getting a lot more done. Our older daughter lives in Seattle, an early hotbed of contagion, so she came to visit for a couple of workweeks in March that seemed to be mostly online meetings. She was surprised to see that her actual location made so little difference; and now many others are making that same discovery. A business-savvy friend is urging people to sell their office towers. She says the future for even the biggest non-factory businesses is going to be much smaller buildings and most employees working off-site.
  • Better alternatives to public schools are going to be a lot more common. Our public education system is a relic of the early-twentieth-century factory age, when workers needed a place to park their children and prepare them for the boredom of becoming factory workers, too. Public schooling is highly restrictive. It enforces a stultifying conformity, and it teaches our cleverest children to hate the whole idea of school. Its demise is long overdue! Many parents had already begun to use more exciting online schooling methods, and now many more are trying them and are becoming comfortable with them.
  • Most post-secondary education will be moving online. Our extraordinarily expensive and increasingly trivialized college system was already dying. Now, as even elite schools are being forced to educate their students online, more and more people are coming to see that much more and better information can be imparted more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost of old-style, four-year, on-site programs. Look for this nation’s second-tier colleges and universities to move toward becoming mostly or entirely online, and expect downward pressure on the absurd prices of even our first-tier institutions.
  • Many churches that have closed temporarily will before long close for good. My husband must be the eighth or ninth most religious Catholic in the United States. Now even he happily heads to his computer on Sunday mornings and attends Mass online. Whatever their denominations might be, very religious people are getting used to the fact that they don’t need to go to a church building every Sunday morning! And less religious but spiritually sincere people are devoting more of their Sunday time to reading and watching YouTubes, to experimenting with prayer and meditation, and to finding other ways that they can seek and relate to God more directly. The manifold positive effects to come as we free more people from fear-based preachers so they can come to know the God of love will contribute to our swelling spiritual transformation! Two thousand years ago Jesus said, “But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:6). Thanks to the present crisis, more Christians than ever are happily heeding the Lord’s call that we free ourselves from religious regimentation and relate more directly to the genuine Godhead.
  • Very big cities are now being seen to be cumbersome, risky, and probably unsustainable. As more people move toward working from home and enjoying ever better alternatives for shopping, socializing, education, and worship, our present felt need to live close together is going to decline by a lot. And the dispersal of communities over the countryside will be an advantage if a big crisis comes, a more deadly pandemic or a meteor strike. In the event of a war, it will be harder for an enemy to subdue a widely dispersed and well-armed U.S. population.
  • The global-government idea is dying, while U.S. federalism is thriving. It is simple common sense that the closer a government is to the people it serves, the more responsive it is going to be. The notion of moving toward a global government made sense fifty years ago, but now it is starting to look as weary and antiquated as a horse and buggy. Even the vaunted European Union has not been aging very well, and U.N. institutions like the World Health Organization are not covering themselves in glory. On the other hand, the fifty U.S. states have done a much better job for their citizens as they have worked to address our health crisis than have any of our bloated federal institutions that are trying to back them up.
  • Support for national borders and immigration controls has been revived. When people coming into your country might be carrying some deadly disease, of course you want to be careful! For every sovereign nation to defend its borders and admit just healthy folks who are not carrying drugs or contraband is being seen by more people as a needed precaution.
  • Our personal lives have been invigorated. I have worked from home for many years so my life hasn’t been much altered by this social-distancing program, but there is something about being made to stay home that makes you soon want to rethink everything! For example, late in March I began to do what is called “intermittent fasting.” Now I eat only between noon and six, and supposedly my body goes into ketosis each night. It’s a healthier way to live, and my clothes are getting loose! Then ten days ago I began to walk for half an hour each morning. Far from tiring me, regular walking seems to be giving me more energy.

Thanks to this fortuitous crisis, we are rapidly coming to see that a lot of our twentieth-century habits were in the process of dying anyway. Some of them were moribund even well before this year began. What our present restrictions have done has been to put a lot of ancient habits and weary institutions into a simultaneous spiral of creative destruction, and to clear away most of the resistance that would otherwise arise to trying fresh ideas. Thanks to our current crisis, we are entering a period of rapid change! The institutions of the twenty-first century already were being put into place, and now we are finding that they work a lot better, they are scalable, and they allow for a new age of personal freedom and opportunity that is unprecedented in living memory. Thanks to the wisdom of America’s forefathers in crafting our founding documents, all these changes are showing themselves to be positive, in the U.S. at least and probably in other developed nations as well.

And they will not be going away! In fact, this hugely disruptive pandemic may come to be seen in long retrospect to have been the dawning of a very much healthier, freer, entirely rethought, and far more glorious modern world.

Disaster is the mother of good fortune.
There is so much comfort in the usual, and so much risk in anything that’s new,
That our lives plod into the grave without our noticing their passage
Unless some fortunate tragedy blunders in our way.

There are many excellent disasters.
Bereavement is a wonderful one, and so is unemployment. Divorce. A major illness.
All salutary calamities for allowing new directions.
All tall, clear-headed moments of life
From which we can get high enough above the trees to see
All those other paths not taken.
And in the reckless despair of misfortune
We can leave our dead, familiar ways
And venture something new.

 

Eagle air show photo credit: Thomas James Caldwell <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/81643710@N00/29368739514″>Air Show</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lady Liberty photo credit: Brian Auer <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/29814800@N00/445626502″>Liberty Close-Up</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lovebird eagles photo credit: marneejill <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7675787@N06/48226903356″>eagle pair</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Eagle face photo credit: howzey <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10614970@N07/30382071174″>Bald Eagle</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Bring On The New Day!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
                    – (Isaiah 11:6) Ascribed to the Prophet Isaiah (8th Cen BC)

We have talked at length about what Jesus told us was His primary mission in coming to us as our Teacher two thousand years ago. He mentions the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven no less than eighty times through all four Gospels! We know from people that we used to think were dead that both phrases refer to what we call the sixth level of the afterlife, which is the level just below the Godhead. And Jesus makes it clear that His teachings are meant to bring to all humanity that perfect divine kingdom. He tells us that if we will follow His teachings, we can sufficiently transform humankind that we will create a literal heaven on earth!

A year ago we talked about what it might be like to at last bring the kingdom of God on earth, and thereby help to complete the Lord’s mission as He began it two thousand years ago. Every interpersonal and political problem, every source of strife would be gone! Community life over all the world would be a symphony of kindness, harmony, and love so complete that all the social ills that plague us now would at last be no more. Since every human mind is part of one mind, it has been estimated that if as few as five percent of all the people on earth were to substantially raise their consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, then every other human mind on earth would begin to elevate as well, and we would thereby start a benevolent cycle that would make the advent of God’s kingdom over all the earth just a matter of time. So, let’s get right to it!

That is where I was a year ago. But after another year of watching humankind wallow in ignorance and fear, sadly my enthusiasm for this task has waned. There are seven and a half billion people on earth! To sufficiently elevate the minds of even one percent of all those people would require a public education campaign on an unprecedented scale; and then, once enough people had become convinced that spiritual growth was needed, it would require that they all work hard at raising their own spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. It seems to be clearer than ever now that if we continue to teach just a few at a time to begin to work at spiritual growth as we battle the dead-weight negativity of both clueless science and fear-based Christianity, at this rate we are going to have to spend at least a thousand years – and it might take us even longer than that! – just to raise the consciousness vibrations of enough of humanity to the point where we can even begin to affect the vibrations of everybody else on earth. And then what? Will it take us a further thousand years before we have raised the consciousness vibrations of all of humanity enough that we really can begin to transform the world?

I have been thinking of late that there has to be a way to get this done in less than two thousand more years! And I may have found one. See what you think.

We have talked endlessly about the fact that the primary problem underlying all our other problems is the fact that our lives and all our institutions are so deeply based in fear. To even begin to raise our personal consciousness vibrations toward love, and thereby begin to address the epidemic of fear and rage that has overrun this planet, each of us must first throw away all the awful anchors of fear that we have carried from our childhoods spent in atheistic science classes and in fear-based Sunday schools. And since the fears that we have carried from childhood are daily reinforced by all our religions and by the battering of worldly cares that distract us throughout our lives, helping people get rid of all their spiritual anchors is a heavy slog! I know that. I spend a good part of most of my days simply answering questions and giving advice to people who are now in the midst of battling their individual culture-based fears. As I work to help them, I have come to see that the fact that I haven’t had such fears for as long as I can remember likely stems from the fact that I have not since my first experience of light at the age of eight had much fear of death. Then in my twenties and thirties I did sufficient reading of the afterlife evidence that I became convinced that there really is something behind the curtain! To the point where my research then shifted to figuring out exactly what is going on and what the greater reality is like.

Fear of death is the base fear. When you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything. I have been making that observation for years, but it is first now that I really get what it means!

It takes effort to ditch your fear of death to the point where you look forward to dying the way you look forward to your next vacation. Most afterlife researchers aren’t there yet, and very few psychic mediums are there, although all these people believe that there is some kind of life after death. To be certain that a glorious eternity awaits you takes more than having just a mere belief! To be certain that your personal life continues, you need to know in detail what the steps will be to get you to the afterlife, how it will look and feel to be there, what will happen first and what comes next, and above all just what your own place in eternity really is going to be. This is why keeping NDE illusions from polluting the evidence-based truth is so essential! It is only since the start of this century that the last details of all of this have become widely known, so it is only in the past fifteen years or so that there have been researchers who could honestly say they were looking forward to dying without reservation. These few lucky folks get up each morning and say cheerily to one another, “Well, one day closer!” They know that their lives are eternal just as surely as they know the sun will rise. This is the first generation in all of human history that has developed sufficient good information that being certain that life is eternal is possible.

Really knowing that you cannot die and you have a wonderful eternity ahead changes everything! There is no other event in anyone’s lifetime that can make such an amazing difference, since the fact that this certainty kills all your fears is only half of its transformative effect. What may be even more important is that once you are certain your life is eternal, you begin right now to live in eternity. It was only when I really got there – which was less than fifteen years ago – that I relaxed into the perfect goodness of living forever in the arms of God. It was like being again in my parents’ arms, but with the added certainty that the perfect love of God goes on forevermore! And when you live now in God’s eternal love, before you even actually die, the things of the world matter so much less. You forgive more easily. You realize that no thought or deed of yours is private anyway, so you tidy up your mind and open it to constant close communication with the Godhead.

And there is something else that I have just realized. As we have said in this space, people who have substantially elevated their consciousness vibrations are easy to spot. These people are:

  • Happy. Whenever you meet someone whose core happiness setting seems to be unusually high, you are dealing with someone who is more advanced spiritually.
  • Peaceful. They don’t seem to process events as threats to themselves, but rather they do what they can to address them and quietly allow the will of Spirit to prevail.
  • Humble. They have no interest in personal attention, beyond perhaps how they might use it in the service of others.
  • Slow to anger. People who are vibrating higher cannot be near people who are angry. When attacked, they won’t fight back, but they simply love and bless and withdraw.
  • Not interested in wealth. The people I know who are more developed spiritually prefer to live simply. If they have more, they want to devote their own surplus to helping others.
  • Loving and supportive. I have never known a spiritually advanced person whose first instinct was not to think well of people, and even of those who were bent on doing harm.

I am realizing now that these same traits also characterize those who have lost their fear of death! The reason why people who have no fear of death soon begin to think and act like people who have worked to raised their consciousness vibrations is predictable and easy to understand. Once they have lost their fear of death and thereby lost all their other fears as well, their consciousness vibrations just begin to rise naturally.

Everyone wants to be certain of a wonderful afterlife to come, so it seems to me that all we must do to begin the process of bringing the kingdom of God on earth is to offer abundant and efficient afterlife education to everyone. So we can right now begin the process of raising people’s consciousness vibrations! By my calculation, that ought to cut at least a thousand years from this task. Don’t you think?

Jesus seemed to be exhorting us to change all our behaviors, when in fact what He was doing was simply telling us how humankind will be be once we have brought the kingdom of God on earth. He said, “Do not worry … but seek first His kingdom and His righteousness” (MT 6:25-33). “Do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (MT 5:39). Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted” (MT 23:12). “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (MT 6:19-21). “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return… Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:48). And “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom!” (LK 12:32). As we grow past the fear of death, we expand into a very much happier life. And once enough of us have ditched our fears, Jesus at last will say to us, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (MK 1:16). Then there will be joy on earth forevermore!

And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.
                – (Isaiah 11:7-9) Ascribed to the Prophet Isaiah (8th Cen BC)

 

Lamb with doe photo credit: Cruise-Pics.com <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31354286@N00/48390305941″>Hammy Lamb</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Resting lioness photo credit: Cloudtail the Snow Leopard <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/57256462@N07/49469922152″>Lioness</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Wolf photo credit: Mark Dumont <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/23661161@N02/49337080531″>G08A8517.jpg</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Mother and baby goat photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8070463@N03/4384817853″>Baby kissing the mother</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

What Do We Celebrate at Easter?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn,
they came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared.
And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb,
but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus…
Behold, two men suddenly stood near them in dazzling clothing;
 and as the women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground,
the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living One among the dead?”
– Jesus’s Resurrection, from the Biblical Gospel of Luke (LK 24:1-5)

To be a human being is to live in fear. Like fish adapted to polluted water, for all of human history we have accepted the howling horror of knowing that each of us will soon cease to be. On top of that fear, we enter these lives with a powerful drive toward spiritual growth, and with an innate curiosity even despite our need to distract ourselves from our own mortality. Humankind’s spiritual restlessness has for all of our history demanded that we find ways to confront and address the terror of our imminent demise.

So, hundreds of thousands of years ago we began to try to bargain with death. And to do that we needed imaginary ways to personify the unknown. Modern humans came into being about two hundred thousand years ago, but evidence suggests that the idea of having gods is older by another hundred thousand years. It was then that hominins like Homo neanderthalensis began to formally bury their dead, often with jewelry and household goods or weapons, and with offerings of food and flowers.

Our relationship with the gods we had created was contentious. We envisioned powerful gods who were able to protect and provide for us, and it took us awhile to begin to trust them. Once we had developed the notion of bargaining with invisible entities, we would have experimented, giving them offerings as we prayed for good mammoth-hunting or a good run of fish. As nomadic groups shared their experiences, the gods that had seemed to be most successful would gain followers, while those that hadn’t performed well would fade. The only evidence we have now of prehistoric gods is respectful treatment of the dead, but those burials tell us so much! Valuable grave goods buried with the dead give us evidence of a developing belief that invisibly life goes on; and offerings of food and flowers show that human-made gods must have had a meaningful role in the imagined post-death process.

It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture about twenty-two thousand years ago that people settled in long-term communities with their powerful and whimsical gods. By then, most human leaders had learned to use stoking fear of the gods’ disfavor as an essential base for their own power. And as the tensions in our lives increased, our gods were soon demanding more. One indication of our societal stress as we became more civilized is the fact that the practice of human sacrifice soon was adopted worldwide. The earliest solid evidence yet found of an organized religion is Gobekli Tepe, a stone temple that dates to twelve thousand years ago. It was buried after a couple of thousand years in what may have been a dispute with its gods, so it has been well preserved.

Polytheism was the norm worldwide until shortly before the birth of Jesus. We think of the ancient Jews as monotheists, but references in their scriptures and excavations in Israel suggest that the original Yahweh probably had a wife and companions. The devotion of the Jewish tribes to a single powerful deity seems not to have been fully formed until the Babylonian exile that ended in 538 B.C. It was then that the genuine God chose to be born to the Jewish people. Their imagined deity was still human-made and fear-based, but in learning to relate to a single god the Jews had proven to the Godhead that they were ready to leave their man-made religion and begin to know the Un-Caused Cause.

It was to help us discover and begin to relate to the genuine God that an aspect of the Godhead was born two thousand years ago in the Person of Jesus. We can see in His Gospel teachings what He meant to do; and now that we better understand His mission we can contemplate its staggering importance! Jesus’s mission was apparently five-fold:

  • To experience being human so He could better understand how to help us use human life to grow spiritually. Thomas has told me it was important that God “could look through the Lord’s eyes” as a human being. Just as Mikey Morgan took a brief lifetime some four hundred years after his last necessary incarnation so he could communicate with us on our terms, so also apparently God was trying to better understand the stark human condition.
  • To use Jehovah as a way to introduce the Godhead to humankind. This is why Jesus told His followers that His mission was to the Jews. To be frank, that never made sense before, since the Lord’s teachings really are universal.
  • To transform the Jews’ understanding of Jehovah into truths about the genuine Godhead. He told us that God is Spirit (JN 4:24), that God never judges (JN 5:22), and that God’s only commandment is the Law of Love (MT 22:37). He also tried to get his listeners to drop all their human-made religious traditions (MK 7:8) and develop a personal relationship with God (MT 6:6). To this day, both Jews and Christians ignore all these revelations and continue to worship a modernized but nevertheless still fear-based deity of their own imaginings. But the tremendous effort that God made to reach out to us in the Person of Jesus still survives in the Gospels as a beautiful expression of the Godhead’s infinite love and amazing patience.
  • To teach us how to raise our personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. Jesus refers to this as “bringing the kingdom of God on earth.” The kingdom of God is what He calls the sixth level, the region just below the Source level, where there is only love and joy; and He told us that as we move away from fear and toward more perfect love, the earth will come more and more to mirror the love of heaven’s highest aspects.
  • To teach us that life is eternal. Fear of death burdens our lives with a host of anxieties and terrors. But once we conquer the fear of death, we no longer fear anything! Since fear is the opposite of love, eradicating the fear of death was then and still remains today our essential first step toward raising this planet’s consciousness vibrations.

Jesus was not the Godhead’s first emissary. The Old Testament indicates that God was reaching out to the Jews from at least the time of Moses, trying to better shape their human-made concept of God. There were many Old Testament prophets who carried out this task, including Micah of Moresheth, who delivered an early version of the Gospel message more than seven centuries before the birth of Jesus. He 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 6:6-8).

So now we understand why Jesus was born, and why He taught us as He did. But why did He choose to die in public and so horribly? And why did He re-animate His dead body?  

Thomas has told me that the Lord’s original life-plan didn’t mention how He would die. Its focus was on His mission. But even though He was trying to wean His followers away from their religious traditions, He was well aware of the impact it made when He fulfilled prophesies. He was having trouble convincing His first-century followers that our lives are eternal, so Thomas has told me that shortly before Jesus died, He decided in concert with the Godhead to alter His life-plan. He would die publicly so He could rise from the dead as a kind of “Ta-da! See? I didn’t die, and neither will you!”
(I offer this explanation with the caution that Thomas is only one reporter.)

Actually, there is some textual evidence that the Lord’s crucifixion decision may have been last-minute. Throughout the Gospels He is calm and confident as He repeatedly courts death by breaking religious laws; but on the night of His arrest “He knelt down and began to pray, saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done” … And being in agony, He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground” (LK 22:41-44). Even on the cross, after nine hours He blurted, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (MT 27:46). So He seems to have been less confident through His crucifixion ordeal than He ever had been before in His lifetime as Jesus, which makes sense if He was winging a last-minute plan. But He carried out the plan so well that I imagine Him now smiling to recall it.

At Easter we celebrate the fact that two thousand years ago God came to earth in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ and began a new stage of human development in which we can abandon all religious superstitions and live in the love of the genuine God. Humankind was growing up! We also celebrate the fact that by going through a public death and then re-animating His dead body, Jesus gave us indisputable proof that God is real and we are immortal. It matters little whether the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial cloth of Jesus. The Shroud bears on it signs that we could not have recognized for almost two thousand years, and that we still cannot reproduce. It is God’s message given two millennia ago and meant to open our hearts today. The Shroud of Turin is the greatest token of perfect love ever given!
This Easter each of us can celebrate our joyous newfound certainty that we are the Godhead’s best-beloved child and forever safe in Everlasting Arms.

“He has risen. Remember how He spoke to you while He was still in Galilee,
 saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men,
and be crucified, and the third day rise again.”
And they remembered His words, and returned from the tomb
and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest…
Peter got up and ran to the tomb. Stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings;
and he went away to his home, marveling at what had happened.
           – Jesus’s Resurrection, from the Biblical Gospel of Luke (LK 24:6-12)

 

Three eggs photo credit: Theen … <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/57768536@N05/17035096001″>Egg Hunt</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Early man photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 48 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/17077752421″>Early Man</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Neanderthal man photo credit: edenpictures <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10485077@N06/45609419484″>Neanderthal Man</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Old Neanderthal photo credit: Allan Henderson <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/88019192@N00/29080690335″>Neanderthal</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Baby bunny photo credit: jjjj56cp <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/25171569@N02/48205155122″>1057ex garden muncher</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Happy baby in bath photo credit: whateyesee13 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/71309382@N00/48374964001″>Rub a Dub Dub</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Easter Miracle

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One of the criminals who were hanged there was saying,
“ Save Yourself and us!” The other was saying,
“Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”
And He said to him, “Truly I say to you,
today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”
– Jesus’s Crucifixion, from the Gospel of Luke (LK 23:39-43)

A question often asked at this time of year is whether the Easter story is true. Most people who ask the question consider the Resurrection to be the unbelievable part: they are sure Jesus cannot have died on a Friday and come alive again on Sunday. Actually, though, there is good evidence that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. No, the part of the Easter story that turns out to be unbelievable is the Christian idea that Jesus died for our sins.

Jesus told us long before His death that God never judges anyone. For Him to speak against the prevailing religion was a capital crime, so He had to use some clever tricks to get the truth to His followers without alarming the Temple guards who were often nearby. For example, He used three different events to tell His flock what the dead now universally confirm to us is true about judgment, since the guards changed often but His followers were constant. And to further confound the Temple guards, He buried these essential truths in a blizzard of words! One day He inserted a potentially fatal statement into what the guards must have heard as just preacher-blather. He said, “For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will marvel. … For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (JN 5:20-23).

That underlined statement that God doesn’t judge us went unremarked, so then on a different day Jesus elaborated on it by added that He never judges us either. He said, “He who sees Me sees the One who sent Me. I have come as Light into the world, so that everyone who believes in Me will not remain in darkness. If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:45-47). It was just more of what the guards would have heard as the ramblings of an itinerant preacher, with again that nugget of truth that Jesus doesn’t judge us slipping past their notice. Of course, at this point we can hear some ardent Christians saying, “Aha! So He did say He came to save the world!” But since Jesus has already told us that God doesn’t judge anyone, we can be sure He didn’t come to save the world from a divine judgment that never happens. No, it is clear from the Gospels that what Jesus came to save the world from was fear-based religious traditions. For example, He said, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).

Jesus even told us that each of us will be our own afterlife judge! Different day, different Temple guards, He said something that also failed to alarm them. Deep in His Sermon on the Mount He said, “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (MT 6:34-7:3). We now understand that after our deaths no religious figure will judge us, but instead we will face the sternest possible judge. Each of us will judge ourselves.

The notion that Jesus had to die to redeem us from God’s judgment – what Christians call “penal substitutionary atonement” – is not based in anything that Jesus said. Indeed, it directly contradicts the truths that He shares with us in the Gospels! Even worse, it is a disgusting teaching. Try asking yourself which of your own children you would most like to watch being horribly murdered so you can forgive the rest of them for messing up your living room. And still, God insists that you and I must forgive every wrong ever done to us? Jesus tells us to forgive “not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:22). So God insists that you and I forgive, while at the same time God demands that we participate in the sacrifice of His Son to Himself or else God will not forgive us?? I had a lot of trouble with this teaching even when I was an ardent Christian, and the emails I receive suggest that the repellent Christian teaching that God cannot forgive us without the murder of God’s Own Son is the single biggest reason why people are leaving Christianity now. The theory that God is unable to forgive us unless God first gets to watch His Son being murdered is an insult to the genuine God, Who in fact is infinite love. And the notion that the greatest Teacher Who ever lived was born primarily to be sacrificed is humiliating to Jesus!

Who is Jesus, anyway? When my primary guide came out to me in February of 2015, the first thing I asked him was whether Jesus really was the Son of God or in some other way unique, or whether He was only a wise prophet. Thomas told me that Jesus is a great deal more than just the Son of God! He said Jesus entered that lifetime from the highest aspect of the Godhead. So since the evidence suggests – and both Thomas and Mikey Morgan confirm – that God is a Collective of Perfected Beings, my beloved Thomas is telling us that God actually walked the earth in the Person of the historical Jesus. The Lord hints at His divinity in the Gospels, although those who heard Him speak and then passed His words down orally for a couple of generations before they were written down may not have fully understood what He was saying. He would say things like, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:9-10). The fact that few of His listeners seemed to grasp the fact that God had actually incarnated on earth in the Person of the Lord is not surprising.

I am a skeptic by nature. I began researching death and the afterlife in the nineteen-seventies in an effort to understand my childhood experiences of light, and it took me more than a decade to accept the fact that hundreds of perfectly consistent communications from people that we used to think were dead – received on two continents over nearly a century – did make it pretty much statistically impossible for the afterlife that they all talked about not to be real. And although I was very familiar with the Gospels – and always uneasy about the fact that Christians mostly ignore the Lord’s teachings – it was only when I realized at the end of the nineties that the dead were actually confirming what Jesus had said, and in detail, that I was able at last to abandon Christianity and give my whole heart to the Lord.

So for a long time I have doubted the claim that the burial shroud and sudarium (face-covering) of Jesus still exist to this day. But here, too, I am a skeptic no more! As was true of all that afterlife evidence and the evidence confirming the Lord’s words in the Gospels, the modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant and irrefutable. Here is what has persuaded me:

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

So there you have it. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being and lived among us for thirty-three years, and then He was tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a shroud, and laid in a tomb. Three days later He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy, and He showed Himself to His disciples. But why did He go to all that trouble? Next week we’ll give some thought to this question….

And a man named Joseph, a good and righteous man from Arimathea,
 this man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.
And he took it down and wrapped it in a linen cloth,
and laid Him in a tomb cut into the rock, where no one had ever lain.
– Jesus’s Crucifixion, from the Gospel of Luke (LK 23:50-53)

 

Shroud of Turin image photo credit: omnos <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/93625510@N00/10249668″>the Shroud of Turin</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Shroud on a stand photo credit: magro_kr <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8704943@N07/1414129408″>Kościół Zwiastowania NMP</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Preserving the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“If you hold to My teaching,
you are really My disciples.
Then you will know the truth,
and the truth will set you free.”
– Jesus, from the Bible’s Gospels (JN 8:31-32)

You may be surprised to see me fighting so hard to safeguard the evidence-based truth about death and the afterlife from efforts to “augment” it with NDE information. But the stakes in this could not be higher! As we said last week, near-death experiences (NDEs) have nothing to do with actual death. But they are such extraordinary personal experiences that of late more and more experiencers are claiming that they actually “died and came back to life,” which is flat impossible. They are then telling their aberrant stories of what they think happened during their NDEs as if they are giving us evidence of what happens at and after a genuine death.

This determination on the part of a few NDE-ers to muddy the truth with their own ideas is a direct existential threat to the dawning enlightenment of humankind. For the first time in our history, soon after the start of this century we at last amassed sufficient consistent and reliable evidence of what happens at and after death to be able to demonstrate the certainty of universal human survival! For the first time we had a vast store of truth about what actually is going on that fits together and makes sense.

We had already had to fight long and hard to protect more than a century’s worth of truth as it was being assembled. Even as recently as the first decade of this century, there still were occasional direct assaults by professional skeptics on anyone claiming to have real afterlife knowledge; and the brunt of those attacks fell on two intrepid Australian researchers, Victor and Wendy Zammit. Victor and Wendy are long-term fighters for the truth in the field of afterlife education. At one point they even posted a million-dollar challenge to anyone who could refute the evidence in their book, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife. By 2010, the Zammits had won for us the last of the battles we ever will need to fight against the fading advocates of atheistic materialism. They deserve a world of thanks!

So by the start of this century’s second decade, we had at last assembled a pristine pool of information in the field of human survival that is consistent, sufficient, and irrefutable. The truth turns out to be eternal life and perfect love beyond our greatest imaginings! And just as we were able to begin to broadly share this glorious truth and all the evidence that supports it, a few NDE-ers began to dump their random and aberrant experiences into what had been an amazingly consistent pool of evidence-based information. These experiencers’ understanding is so limited that their contributions have begun to act on the truth like acid on a pearl of great price (MT 13:45). Unless we can soon find a bright-line way to insulate the truth about death and the afterlife from all these NDE falsehoods, NDEs will soon have muddied what we now know to the point where our present clarity will sink back into becoming again just conflicting opinions in a sea of confusion.

Oh, some people still will care about maintaining and sharing the literal truth. Books like the Zammits’, the work of people like Michael Tymn, Stafford Betty, Mikey Morgan, and Sandra Champlain, and my own books will remain immune to obfuscation. But far too many well-meaning people are going to assume that the lies are true and spread them even more; and in doing so, they risk sharply setting back humankind’s spiritual progress. So now, while it still is possible to protect the truth that has been so hard-won, let’s peek ahead and speculate about what human life on earth will be like when most of us at last have managed to know and love and live the truth.

Helping to bring the kingdom of God on earth is everybody’s main task now! The consciousness vibrations of this planet’s inhabitants have sunk so deep into negativity that unless we can turn things around pretty soon, we risk witnessing the earth’s destruction in the fear- and hatred-based swamp of pain that already is causing us so much harm!

And the easiest way for anyone to raise his or her consciousness vibrations and grow spiritually is simply to apply the Gospel teachings of Jesus. No need to learn to meditate, do yoga, chant, or even really pray; just follow three simple steps as you go on living your life:

  • Defeat your fear of death. Fear of death is the base human fear. Until we conquer it, our minds remain mired in negativity; but once we no longer fear death, we find that we no longer really fear anything. And Jesus told us flat-out that there is no death! He said, “Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you … I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also (JN 14:1-3). Until enough of us have read sufficient consistent evidence to get past all our remaining doubts and entirely vanquish our fear of death, we won’t be able to raise our consciousness vibrations enough to materially lift the vibrations of this planet.
  • Master prevenient forgiveness. The core of what Jesus taught was our need to forgive, and our need not to judge anyone. When Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). Jesus also said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you … For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38). Forgiving only after you have already suffered a wrong is so hard! But reprogramming your mind to forgive everything that ever might happen for the rest of your life actually is pretty easy. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so wisely said, “Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.”
  • Master universal love. When the Lord was asked to name the greatest commandment, He gave us God’s new Law of Love: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). Once you have defeated the fear of death and learned to forgive everything before it happens, your mind’s vibrations will rise so much that really loving everyone on earth is going to come to you naturally!  

So this program to raise our consciousness vibrations that is based in the teachings of Jesus is a straightforward process. It can be completed within a few years at most, and it works amazingly well. But defeating the fear of death is its essential first step, and becoming sufficiently certain about universal human survival that you altogether lose your fear of death is so hard! It isn’t enough to believe in an afterlife. Hoping for the best doesn’t work at all. No, what you need is the kind if certainty that your mind will survive your death that you feel about the rising of the sun each morning. You also need the same easy familiarity with what the afterlife is like that you have with the landmarks of London or New York. Even with an abundance of consistent afterlife information now so available, it takes real work for each of us to altogether vanquish our fear of death!

By the late nineties I had spent decades researching whole reams of amazingly consistent communications from the dead received before 1940, enough to be able to construct a believable model for what the afterlife is like. I had begun as a skeptic, but by then I believed that life does continue after physical death; but I was seeing, too, that even a deep and sincere belief still is nothing like knowing! Belief just gets you through the night and to another day of trying to know for sure. When people at last become certain that their lives will indeed go on after death – and even before they have mastered forgiveness, or focused on learning how to love – they begin to live and think in an eternal frame. I am such a skeptic that I wasn’t really able to give up all my doubts until the end of the nineties, when I discovered in the midst of a religious crisis that those that we used to think were dead were confirming what Jesus had said in the Gospels, even in minute detail. That was the day and hour when I became certain at last that human life is eternal. And my mind began to live in that moment as part of a timeless forevermore!

My reaction to becoming certain that I never will die was just what seems to happen to most people. I fell in love with Spirit! The God I found in the Gospels was reinforcing what I had learned from studying communications from the dead, and I knew for certain that God is perfect love. I knew that Jesus is an aspect of the Godhead. That was when I started to live my life with an open prayer-line, and I cleaned up my spiritual living room. Within a decade, in a bout of joy I gave the rest of my life to God, and the first fruit of that was a craving to share what I knew was true about death. So then I wrote The Fun of Dying. I developed a hunger for growing spiritually, and I turned to the Jesus of the Gospels for help so within another year I had figured out forgiveness. Within two more years I had discovered that the process of spiritual growth outlined above seems to work for anyone, provided that those applying it have first mastered a certainty about life after death.

So the linchpin of humankind’s entire future is our need to maintain the purity of the evidence for life after death. And this is true because only when we are so certain about humankind’s immortality that we begin to live in an eternal frame are we able to materially raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward perfect love. When we are certain that we will survive our deaths, our vibrations begin to rise naturally!

It will be fun to begin to explore how a general certainty about life after death in only ten or twenty percent of the human population is going to transform our lives as we now live them on earth. But our thinking about that will need to wait until after we have spent a couple of weeks considering the Easter season. Easter turns out to have been the Lord’s great effort to teach us about immortality. And it is time now for us to move past the fear-based nonsense that is Christianity and listen to what Jesus actually said….    

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

 

Astral pond with geese photo credit: Rusty Russ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10159247@N04/49528222682″>New England in October</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Heavenly mountains photo credit: joncutrer <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/47121680@N00/49305982407″>Sierra Blanca Peak at dawn</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Near-Death Is Not Real Death

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.”
       – Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) from Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

The death process is amazingly consistent over time and across cultures, as are the details of the afterlife to which all of us will soon return. And thanks to the fact that the evidence has long been so abundant and so consistent, there is such a detailed consensus now about what happens at and after death that the truth is accessible to everyone! For the first time in human history, each person on earth can apply a little investigative effort and soon be confident that the awareness that each of us has now easily will survive our deaths.

I get lots of emails from Seek Reality listeners. I’m excited to see how much progress so many eager seekers are making now! But in recent months I have noticed a problem that is tripping up too many people, and after I have just answered two more emails from folks in anguish over it I think it is time to be frank. A great many lay researchers are being misled into thinking that near-death experiences (NDEs) are in some way related to actual death. So they read a lot of NDEs, thinking they are seeing the first part of what a normal death would be like; and since near-death experiences have nothing to do with death and they are highly individual, for anyone to use them for research leads only to distress and confusion. Here is the sort of email I am getting (received days ago, and quoted with permission):

“There are many cases of people worldwide who have died and survived, who say that they were met by Jesus and he showed them both Heaven and Hell and that there were people in Hell who they didn’t expect to see there. Another scenario is people who have died and survived but when they died, they found themselves in total darkness, in fear surrounded by demons, prodding them, poking them, swearing and yelling obscenities at them only for that person to call out to God and/or Jesus for help and they were then saved. They were then shown Heaven and were told to go back and spread the word of what they had witnessed of both scenarios. There are many cases on YouTube on people’s experiences of this as well as in books I have read over the years. These scenarios seem to differ from what you have talked about and I would love your thoughts on many of these scenarios which I know you have stated you have not experienced in your years of studying near death experiences. How can so many people have experienced this when you state there is no hell? The confusing part for me is hearing different scenarios and trying to figure out which one is true.”

Nothing this seeker has seen or read about in an NDE account ever has happened to anyone who actually has died! NDE accounts are so prominent in our culture now that more and more people simply assume that they are a source of information about death. But in fact, nothing that happens in an NDE can be taken as evidence of what happens at death or in the genuine afterlife. And this NDE-related confusion is brand-new! I cannot recall receiving any such emails even as recently as six months ago. I have interviewed many NDE experiencers and experts in the course of seven years, and all of them have told us that of course no one who comes back from an NDE has actually died during the experience.

So it is time now to set the record straight. NDEs have nothing to do with death. The only thing a researcher can take from the NDE phenomenon is the fact that our minds can easily exist apart from our bodies. Oh, and also the fact that a disembodied mind can travel in an endless variety of wonderful realms in the greater astral plane and have some amazing adventures. But that is IT! Near-death experiences can tell us nothing about actual death, and nothing about the afterlife either. Here are ten important points:

  • Natural deaths are planned. When we are planning an earth-lifetime, we plan into it two or three exit points that our higher consciousness can choose to take when we and our guides decide that we have gotten the most that we can from this lifetime. Truly accidental deaths are possible, but they are very rare: even nearly all “accidental” deaths are planned.
  • Death is always a one-way trip. Those that we used to think were dead tell us that the place where they are now is off-limits to people who are still attached to their bodies. Indeed, I have had the estimable Raymond Moody himself as a Seek Reality guest, and he told us that of course NDE-ers don’t actually die. “That’s why I called them near-death experiences!” So there is the truth, coming straight from the man who actually coined the term; but if only he had instead called them something like “Spiritual Adventures” in Life After Life, we likely wouldn’t have this confusion today.
  • The silver cord is life. Our energy bodies are part of our eternal minds, and they are attached to our physical bodies by an energy cord which is the only reason why our material bodies are alive. When we are out of our bodies for whatever reason, that cord can be seen as a dim streak of bluish light between our physical and astral bodies: the Jews of three thousand years ago called it the silver cord. And they were well aware that the breaking of that cord is the moment of irrevocable death. They said, “For man goes to his eternal home while mourners go about in the street. Remember (God) before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed… then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” (Ecclesiastes 12:5-7).
  • Some NDEs include mention of the boundary that limits the afterlife area to the actually dead. In some more extensive NDEs, the experiencer is told that he is approaching the place where the dead are, and if he continues into it he will die and be unable to return to his body. Most turn back there, but if the experiencer ignores the warning and proceeds past that boundary into the afterlife, his silver cord breaks and that is all she wrote.
  • Natural death is a carefully managed and highly uniform process. But NDE-ers just pop out of their bodies! I have written  about the death process, during which we are lovingly supported through what is a gentle and amazingly consistent transition.
  • Near-death experiences are highly individualized. Genuine deaths are consistent, and reports about the genuine afterlife are so consistent that we can now study the afterlife almost as if it were a foreign country. But a near-death experiencer is going to come back from his astral adventure, so his experiences are tailored to what is in his mind. If he is a strict Christian, he might see God; if he thinks he is evil, he will end up in a fiery hell; and so on. In reality, God never appears in material form and there is no fiery hell.
  • The astral plane is stratified by consciousness energy vibrations. As is true of the genuine afterlife that is a small part of it, in the astral plane our spiritual vibrations determine how high we can travel. Most NDEs and OBEs seem to happen at about Level Three, and there are areas in the astral plane that mimic the afterlife from the lowest to the highest realms.
  • The tunnel with a light is a rescue device. In all the research I had done, I never had seen an instance of the tunnel that ends in a light until I read Dr. Moody’s Life After Life in 1975. The lowest-vibration levels of the astral are negative, so when someone is unexpectedly out of his body his guides might choose to hoover him up into a wormhole that conveys him directly to the bright middle astral levels. This never happens in a planned natural death.
  • The afterlife area is a kind of foyer to the vast astral plane. At death we leave our bodies and are conveyed to the third afterlife level, and there we spend our initial post-death period doing certain specific things. Eventually we can choose to go into the astral plane to meet with the out-of-body living, travel widely, take classes, and play. When we want to go back for another earth-lifetime, we prepare for it in that between-lives foyer that no living being can enter without shedding his connection to his earthly body.
  • The astral plane is our likely eternal home. Out-of-body explorers in the astral plane have found that it teems with people going about their eternal lives in fascinating and sometimes very strange ways. And those who have recently died and are talking to their loved ones on earth might mention doing some amazing traveling! They might take piano lessons with Mozart. Learn to paint with Michelangelo. Travel to a thousand astounding planets or watch the pyramids being built. A lot goes on in the astral plane! It seems to me to be the leading candidate to be humankind’s eternal home.

I know from having helped others through this NDE confusion that you may be resisting my explanations. Please continue to believe your own NDE was briefly fatal if that makes you happy, but stop suggesting to others that an NDE can tell us anything about death! NDEs are wonderful, extraordinary experiences, but there is no NDE experiencer who can use what happened in his NDE to tell us anything about natural death or the genuine afterlife.

Although for now they are less problematic, there also are two other sources of potential misinformation that people will occasionally mention. These sources give us wonderful evidence that we are going to survive our deaths, and they give us a slice of specific evidence that can be useful when it is fitted with the larger whole. But independently, neither source can tell us anything specific about death and the afterlife. They are:

  • Books channeled through loved ones. Most people who die on earth return to the third or fourth level of the afterlife. No one can go above the vibrational level that he has spiritually earned, but the dead are so eager to please that many will guess at what might be above them. The only accurate book by a recently-dead reporter is Mikey Morgan’s Flying High in Spirit.
  • Reincarnation confusion. Some of the best evidence for survival is Dr. Ian Stevenson’s wonderful books about reincarnation in the narrow case of an unplanned violent death. Of late, though, I have on occasion seen his work used as if these aberrant events tell us how reincarnation normally occurs, which is emphatically not the case.

The transformation in human life that will come when most people know for certain that they never are going to die will be so profound that it is difficult for us even to imagine the details of it now. But let’s keep our eyes on that ultimate prize! Next week we will begin to consider what it is going to mean for all of humankind when most people have moved past mere beliefs and begun to live on earth in the glorious certainty that they never will die….

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
– Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) from Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

 

Annotated Alice photo credit: MartinaYach <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/53720296@N08/5474625900″>”In My World, The Books Would Be Nothing But Pictures”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Alice’s adventures (blue) photo credit: Toronto Public Library Special Collections <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43021516@N06/4383187870″>Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (Illustrator: Rountree: 1908) cover</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Alice & rabbit photo credit: Toronto Public Library Special Collections <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43021516@N06/4382428945″>Alice In Wonderland (Illustrator: Winter, 1924) cover</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Alice & hatter photo credit: Toronto Public Library Special Collections <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43021516@N06/4382428977″>Alice in Wonderland (Illustrator: Tarrant, 1916) cover</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Duchess & croquet photo credit: Toronto Public Library Special Collections <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43021516@N06/4382428611″>Alice in Wonderland (Illustrator: Hudson, 1922?) Croquet with the Duchess</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Alice meets rabbit photo credit: Toronto Public Library Special Collections <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43021516@N06/4382428505″>Alice in Wonderland (Illustrator: Tarrant, 1916) Alice meets the White Rabbit</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Alice’s tea party photo credit: Toronto Public Library Special Collections <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/43021516@N06/4408113761″>Alice in Wonderland (Illustrator: Winter, 1924) Mad Tea Party</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

What Is Humankind?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

So God created mankind in His own image;
In His own image God created them;
Male and female He created them.
God blessed the humans by saying to them,
“Be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth, and subdue it!”
– (Gen 1:27-28) Ascribed to the Prophet Moses (?-1273 BC)

For all of human history our religions have called us guilty and unworthy, our governments have treated us as basically evil, and our sciences have told us we were sacks of cells about to face oblivion. We always have fought these characterizations, but we haven’t fought them very hard. You and I had no present inclination to become thieves and axe-murders, true enough; but given the consensus view of humankind among those in authority – and especially given all the evidence in our daily news and in history books that some people must be evil incarnate! – we have on the whole accepted these expert views that we are in need of restraint. After all, until very recently we had no other source of information.

To my mind, the most important result to come from our decades of open-minded and broad-based research into the greater reality is that now we have independent evidence of who and what we really are. And what seems to be more and more certain now is that humankind is not only made in the image of God, but humankind is the very center and the crowning height of all creation, and the sole reason why this universe exists. The truth is so much the opposite of what we have been taught to believe that it may be hard for you to grasp it at first. But please try to get your mind around what is the most perfectly glorious fact!

The reason why there is so much evil is that all the negativity piled upon us by our religions and our governments has drastically depressed the consciousness vibrations of all of humankind. It is as if our most trusted institutions have chosen to pile rocks on our heads to weigh us down and make us more amenable to being subjugated by human leaders. In point of fact, we have discovered that when we free individuals insofar as we can free them from all this awful negativity, each of them begins to rise toward love as a bubble in water rises toward the light.

What we will say here is closely built on what we said last week, so please re-read that post before you tackle more of this one. Then please suspend your disbelief enough to entertain the possibility that our institutions have been wrong about humanity all along.

The evidence being developed by those who objectively study the greater reality is that:

  • What we dimly experience as human consciousness is the base creative force that continuously manifests this universe, a force of which each of our minds is an integral part.
  • The infinitely powerful entity wielding this force is a Collective of Perfected Beings, some or all of Whom once lived on earth.
  • The universe exists as a place that can offer sufficient negativity to enable conscious beings early in their development to rise in vibration enough for them to continue their development in the astral plane, which is humankind’s eternal home.

These three facts are demonstrably true, and they obliterate all religious, governmental, and scientific notions about what is going on. Just making sense of these facts and watching them as together they manifest our reality helps us explain so many things! Human beings are the reason why this universe exists, and it is quite literally designed for our benefit. Only when we are able to understand and accept that certain fact can any of what we are learning now make much sense! Let’s look at how this universe manifests according to the points given above.

CREATION

No-time and no-space turns out to be reality’s default condition. In most of reality we can choose to experience earth-time or some other kind of time, but time is optional. The only place of which we are aware where objective time and space exist is in this material universe, and we know this universe encompasses less than five percent of what demonstrably exists. So in the greater reality – which is to say, in nearly all of reality – there is no objective space or time, which fact requires us to rethink everything! For example, here are some relevant implications of the lack of time when we seek to understand creation:

  • If something ever exists, then it always exists. Without time, there is no “before” and no “after.”
  • So creation cannot have happened as we imagine it. The very notion of creation requires a timeline that moves from nothing to something.
  • There is only Now. Of course, how Now works when people in the greater reality seem to lead happy timeless lives is hard for us to get our minds around!

How could the universe have come into being in the first place, and what keeps it going? The universe’s embedded time will let us notice the fact that it continues, but what is it that keeps time going, when the action of time is not a default condition? There seems to be just one explanation for how creation happens, and it is a doozy! Creation is an ongoing series of Nows. Last week we likened it to a film strip in which each Now is a present moment that includes its own constructed past. Without time in the greater reality, there cannot of course be an actual past; but in the ongoing creation of a material universe which includes objective time as a characteristic, a memory of a constructed past and its effects can readily be built into each sliver of Now and changed according to humanity’s changing needs.

… AND THEN WE COME ALONG

It is likely that no universe existed before the advent in it of humankind. We live as eternal beings in the timeless and spaceless Now of the vast, non-material astral plane; and for reasons that we can only guess, a need for us to better develop spiritually led to the creation of a material universe that was almost certainly at first quite primitive. Why bother to create an elaborate past that includes a Big Bang, evolution, and galaxies of stars for people who were busy hunting and seldom lived past the age of thirty? At first, what we now call the universe didn’t need to be more than one planet with its associated atmosphere. And it needed the following characteristics:

  • An artificial physics. In the astral plane our minds are powerful. We can manipulate our surroundings by mind alone. If this universe is to be a suitable school for us, it needs a math- and particles-based physics that our minds cannot so easily mess with.
  • Sources of negativity. Our nature when we are at home in the astral is entirely love-based. What we need here is a hard world full of challenges that stress our patience, our ability to make wise choices, and our determination to reject fear and anger and always choose love.
  • Ignorance on our part of what actually is going on. For nearly all of material time, we have had such limited access to our greater minds while we were in bodies that we have had no way to notice or fathom the notion of anything existing beyond this hard school.

THE CREATOR’S ONGOING CARE FOR US

There is no better evidence of the fact that you and I are the deeply beloved entire reason why this universe exists than the manner in which the Godhead devotedly enriches our material school. As we have become more sophisticated, we have needed an ever more extensive universe so we never would find a troubling edge to it. Since we were given time as a characteristic of this school, we have needed a history built into each micro-sliver of created Now; and as we grew more sophisticated, so was that history required to expand enough to satisfy us. For a Godhead of Perfected Beings to always remain a step ahead of us is a challenge that will make you smile as you come to better understand what is going on, and as the Godhead’s efforts become more apparent! Even though all of history can be rewritten in a micro-instant of non-time, it still has to take us all the way from an imagined start some billions of imagined years in the past through to the moment when you are reading these words. It also has to show how something arose from nothing. And so far, all that the Godhead is doing is pushing that core problem farther back and building in ever more complexities and endearing little fudges. As you become used to spotting them, you will see what I think of as God’s fudges everywhere! To get you started, here are three:

  • The origin of the universe. The Godhead can take us farther and farther back, even to before the Big Bang, and It can maintain a stable universe by tweaking what are supposed to be universal constants; but so far the Godhead still has not shown us how matter could arise without the actions of an Un-Caused Cause.
  • The origin of life. The problem isn’t just that matter acquires the property of being alive in some manner that remains a scientific mystery, but maintaining life requires some complex structures that could not have been achieved by the random and incremental trial-and-error evolution long assumed by scieniists.
  • Evolution. The whole notion of evolution is full of puzzles and gaps that are not much publicized, and the more you study it the more it looks to be rigged primarily for our amusement. I mean, dinosaurs? Rhinoceroses? Orangutans? The Beast of Baluchistan? Modern humans and most other modern species came into existence almost simultaneously just 200,000 years ago, as if the Godhead became bored with giving us all those preliminaries and decided to get down to business.

Dr. Freeman Dyson (1923-2020) was a somewhat iconoclastic theoretical physicist and mathematician who said in his book, Imagined Worlds, “The laws of Nature are constructed in such a way as to make the universe as interesting as possible.” His insight is precisely right! Material reality is a love-song to us from our precious Elder Brethren.

For humankind to ever better understand the truth about what is going on will be essential to our further spiritual development. And the most dangerous obstacle we face in our ongoing effort to seek what is true may surprise you. It is time now for us to deal with what is a rapidly growing problem….

 You anoint my head with oil. My cup runs over.
Truly, goodness and love will pursue me all the days of my life,
and I will live in the Lord’s House forever.
– (Psalm 23:5-6) David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC)

 

Man in our image photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/21750528440″>Man and Woman</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Adam & Eve stained glass 2 credit: amandabhslater <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/15181848@N02/48848393787″>St Chad, Far Headingly, Leeds 1922</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Adam & Eve painting photo credit: www.ilkkajukarainen.fi <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/130333033@N08/41963999232″>6Q3A8287</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Adam, Eve, Serpent photo credit: Can Pac Swire <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/18378305@N00/16706761820″>Healthy Adam and Eve</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Adam & Eve & Animals photo credit: Nicolas Vollmer <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/91094471@N02/15459050983″>Rome – Adam et Eve au Paradis Terrestre, par Wenzel Peter</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Adam, Eve, Apples photo credit: jaci XIII <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/34700343@N08/14006794221″>The End of Innocence</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Ongoing Act of Creation

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Then God said, “Let the waters teem with swarms of living creatures,
and let birds fly above the earth in the open expanse of the heavens.”
God created the great sea monsters and every living creature that moves,
with which the waters swarmed after their kind,
and every winged bird after its kind; and God saw that it was good.
                         – (Gen 1:20-21) Ascribed to the Prophet Moses (?-1273 BC)

Last week we talked about what modern evidence tells us is true about our one reality. Now let’s look at some important questions. How did all of this come into being? How is it maintained? And what can we learn about the Un-Caused Cause that has to be behind it all?

This reality is all of one piece. Our human predilection to study aspects of it from different perspectives, using different methods and even fundamentally different terms, has fooled us into thinking it even is possible to study anything this way! We long have assumed that all the aspects of reality that we were studying separately were going to fit seamlessly and make perfect sense whenever we tried to put them together. But this whole way of thinking is nonsense. There is not a physical reality and a spiritual reality, a chemical, biological, and physics reality, a psychological reality, a mental reality, a secular, cosmic, and divine reality. Whole books could be written about why this doesn’t work and how none of the pieces now fits with all the others, but here are just four quick examples of the mess that our habit of studying reality in fragments has created:

  • Origins. The whole notion that this universe exploded into being 13.8 billion years ago and proceeded to work itself out and grow from there has become a part of our cultural knowledge. But even if the Big Bang theory is right, there is a lot about it that doesn’t make sense according to current scientific understandings. And more importantly, the Big Bang cannot explain how so much matter sprang from nothing! As the eminent Rupert Sheldrake has said, the scientific approach to the origin of the universe is “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” As an aborigine who believed the world rides on the back of a turtle said when someone asked him what the turtle was standing on, “It’s turtles all the way down.” The Big Bang theory describes just part of a process, and it does not explain how or why that process began. How did so much something come from nothing?
  • Physics. The advent of quantum mechanics set off an academic scramble to unify the world of Einstein with the world of Planck. The problem is that quantum mechanics violates some laws of physics as they have long been understood, but it was the basis for some of the twentieth century’s most important developments so it cannot be ignored. Let’s be blunt here. If we must work from within traditional physics to try to understand quantum physics, a unified theory can never be found.
  • Dark Matter. The fact that 95.1% of what scientists now believe exists is demonstrably not material because it neither emits nor reflects photons of light is a scientific conundrum only because physicists insist that dark matter must be made of particles. Putting aside the fact that “dark” matter cannot by definition be made of material particles, the notion that inside a material universe that is breathtakingly efficient and highly calibrated, 95% of what exists is random particles with no discernible function is nonsense. To a hammer, everything looks like nails. To a particle physicist, everything looks like particles.
  • Life. Watching the scientific community try to figure out how life emerged from some chemical mix struck by lightning would be humorous if it didn’t feel so tragic. What they are doing makes no sense! But they must follow their set protocols, so this is all that they can do.

There is just one reality! The fact that our human limitations make it easier for us to break up that reality and try to study it piecemeal doesn’t mean that such fragmentation is useful. It is the intellectual equivalent of looking for our car keys under the street lamp even though we dropped them in the dark, simply because the light would make it easier for us to spot them… if they were there. It may have been necessary over the centuries to study reality using separate disciplines because our knowledge and our tools were limited. But we know enough now to be able to use the bits of apparent truths that humankind has gradually assembled and demand that they come together and make sense or else be thrown away. If we put together what open-minded researchers have learned in just the past few decades, here is how we might solve the four puzzles given above:

  • Origins. There is no objective time beyond this material universe that is only 4.9% of what we know exists. And one implication of a lack of time is that if something real exists now, then it always exists. We are used to the objective time that is a characteristic of this material universe, so we look for a beginning and we imagine an ending; but from the non-time perspective of most of reality the universe never began and it never will end. If this notion makes your eyes cross, you are not alone!
  • Physics. Quantum physics is a variant of the physics that governs 95.1% of reality. In that 95.1% that we return to at death, all creation is by mind and there is neither time nor space. Quantum physics is a kind of plug that connects the free-form physics of most of reality with the numbers-based and particles-based physics that exists only in this material universe.
  • Dark Matter. Dark matter and energy are just the non-material astral plane that is our true home. The enormous astral is entirely consciousness-based, relatively much larger than this material universe, and in precisely the same place as the universe but existing at different rates of consciousness vibration. It is full of a kind of mind-created and solid-seeming matter… but that astral matter contains no detectable material particles.
  • Life. This one will make you slap your forehead! The characteristic that we identify as “being alive” is a primary property of the consciousness which continuously manifests this universe. The bodies of living creatures possess the designed-in genetic and structural abilities to make animating use of the life-force that is inherent in consciousness, and they are alive for so long as their bodily structures needed to support life remain sound. It is that simple.

(Feel free to hold me to these predictions. We won’t know if I was right until long after I have graduated, but if I have hit one of these nails on the head you will hear me cheering in the bleacher seats!)

Unless we will seek reality with as much objectivity as we can muster, we never are going to make the smallest bit of sense about anything! And unless we can really make objective sense of what actually is going on, just the fact that the universe exists and has apparently been stable for 13.8 billion years can tell us nothing certain about how it is going to behave in just the next five minutes. Which is not to say that those deeper and more sensible answers that address the whole of reality can never be found. When we put together lots of random bits of evidence from many disciplines and study it all with an open mind, we find sensible answers to a great many questions, including the ones that began this post. These answers violate many longstanding assumptions, but since those assumptions are based on our limited experiences as human beings and are heavily dependent on sensory input, that is a good thing!

Here is what appears from the evidence to be the current state of play:

The Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings, so God understands us and loves us because God is us. In a reality without objective time, God continuously manifests everything that we believe is real, including what is “in the past,” since in a reality without time there is only Now. The easiest way to envision this is to think of the fact that a filmstrip is individual pictures, but when we run it through a projector our minds will register it as one continuously moving picture. And so does the reality around us seem to move seamlessly even though it is in the nature of a filmstrip, a continuous string of separately created realities! What we call the “astral plane” is most of our reality. The astral exists in probably infinite consciousness gradations, from fear on up to perfect love, and for convenience we divide it into seven general levels with the “outer darkness” at the lowest and the Godhead at the highest level of vibration. We come to earth to grow spiritually up through what amounts to the grade-school level, and we continue the process of elevating ourselves in the astral plane after we have reached an acceptable level of spiritual development here. So it is a reasonable working assumption that the greater reality exists as it does to give us a place to grow spiritually. And according to our wonderful Mikey Morgan, our process of spiritual elevation goes on forever, even beyond the level of the Godhead. But we are urged not to think about that now!

If we are ever to understand what actually is going on, we are going to have to get past the idea that this material universe is important in and of itself. It is useful, yes, but it is only a spiritual classroom constructed in the astral for a limited purpose, and if it ceased to exist then another way for us to begin to develop spiritually would replace it. We will talk next week about the role of the universe and why its physics is so different; but for now, only try to see our greater reality more as it is seen by the people who have gone home ahead of us. They consistently tell us that where we are now is not our real life! Instead, there is a much greater love-based reality that is our eternal home. As we ever better come to know the true Godhead, let’s also seek to better understand how the Collective maintains this universe as a school for Its less advanced brothers and sisters. Next week we will explore our own role in the ongoing act of creation….

Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
             – (Psalm 23:4-5) David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC)

 

Striped rocks photo credit: mypubliclands <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/91981596@N06/27704787035″>#mypubliclandsroadtrip 2016: Places That Rock, Vermilion Cliffs National Monument</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lion in water photo credit: chiaralily <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/26870279@N04/25675554538″>Learning to Swim</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Waterfalls photo credit: Thomas James Caldwell <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/81643710@N00/49490096238″>Pennell Falls</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Sea cave photo credit: slworking2 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/18548283@N00/49524568222″>The Sunset Cliffs Sea Cave At Twilight</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Fire & ice photo credit: michi_s <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/32864130@N08/4541565729″>fire and ice</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Peeking Behind the Curtain

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

In the beginning, God created the universe.
When the earth was as yet unformed and desolate,
with the surface of the ocean depths shrouded in darkness,
and while the Spirit of God was hovering over the surface of the waters,
God said, “Let there be light!” So there was light.
– (Gen 1:1-3) Ascribed to the Prophet Moses (?-1273 BC)

One of the fruits of our learning that all human minds are part of one eternal Mind is a developing craving to know and understand what actually is going on. Where did all of this come from? Is there a God, and what is God like? How extensive is the non-material reality? How does it work? How can we know who and what we truly are? This is the first generation to have access to facts-based answers to all these questions, and those answers fit together and make sense.

When I had my first experience of light at the age of eight, I thought of it as peeking behind the curtain. Then when I much later first understood that all the afterlife communications over the past two centuries reveal to us a single consistent and detailed post-death reality, that felt like watching the curtain tear and glimpsing many more of the wonders behind it. Since then, open-minded researchers have further rent the curtain between us and the truth, until by now that curtain lies in tatters. Reasonable answers to all our questions are before our eyes and plain to see! But I have of late come to realize that my piecemeal sharing of these truths has made it harder for you to grasp the larger picture. In an effort to remedy that, we are going to briefly summarize here what seems to be true about our one reality.

The greater reality now revealing itself is gigantic. It is at least twenty times the relative size of this material universe. And it all fits together perfectly! Researchers have sufficient solid insights now for us to begin to understand a great deal more than we could have understood even just a few years ago, and our learning continues apace. Please consider this post to be a stick in the ground, a marker that celebrates how far we have come but that we can be sure is going to shift and change as our knowledge continues to grow.

Here is what we now know about the greater reality that includes this universe:

  • The only thing that objectively exists is what we experience as consciousness. It has already been abundantly shown that the human brain does not and cannot generate consciousness, nor can it perform even the basic functions that science long has ascribed to it. Still, most scientists continue to equate the mind with the brain, and funding for brain research continues, which means that brain-studies that can only lead us nowhere still will blunder on. Even the new study of “panpsychism,” which posits that consciousness pervades the universe, turns out to be just more foolishness. One expert on panpsychism calls consciousness “the intrinsic nature of matter. There’s just matter, on this view, nothing supernatural or spiritual. But matter can be described from two perspectives. Physical science describes matter ‘from the outside’, in terms of its behavior. But matter ‘from the inside’ – i.e., in terms of its intrinsic nature – is constituted of forms of consciousness.” No idea is offered about where that consciousness comes from, what service it performs, or why it exists as they propose that it does. Only more nonsense. Even most scientists seeking to understand consciousness itself are trying to do it in terms of mathematics in order to remain in the materialist mode. Sadly, the scientific community still refuses even to ask the right questions!
  • Consciousness gives rise to everything that we think of as real. Very little is known about the base creative force, but I will give you the best definition of it that I have seen. “Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, infinitely powerful and governed by emotion so it is probably self-aware.” Every human mind is inextricably part of that single Consciousness, so it is reasonable for us to say that there is only one of us here.
  • Some 95.1% of the reality of which we are aware is not material. Scientists have determined that less than five percent of the universe is composed of ordinary matter and energy. The rest is what they call dark matter (26.8%) and dark energy (68.3%) – and they are dark only in that neither of them sheds or reflects material light. It is a reasonable guess that these gigantic non-material aspects of reality are the astral plane, which is a bit like an inconceivably large, endlessly varied, and happily love-based and rollicking wild west.
  • This material universe is the only place where there are laws of physics. In all the rest of reality, numbers are meaningless; and insofar as we are able to tell, every element of that non-material reality is readily manipulated by more advanced human minds.
  • This material reality is the only place where time and space are fixed. In that non-material 95.1%, we can choose to experience the passage of time or we can live in timelessness. We can travel to the edge of the universe in an eye-blink.
  • Everything is energy; nothing is solid. No matter how solid things might seem to us, both in this material reality and in the astral, we must never forget that, as Albert Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And all the apparent matter and energy that exists, whether it is light or dark, is tightly intermingled. We live eternally in one gigantic energy-soup.
  • Everything vibrates. We have talked about the fact that these vibrations exist at a range of vibratory rates, from fear at the lowest to love at the highest rate. The easiest way for you to visualize all of this is as TV signals in the room around you, where your mind can tune in to a specific signal at a certain vibratory rate and pick up a single specific reality.

So this is the basic greater reality that encompasses everything that we think exists. It probably is not all that exists, but for now it defines our limits. And over and over we can see it working! Near-death and out-of-body experiencers leave their earth-bodies and travel in the endless astral; and when we die, we follow our deathbed visitors as we raise our personal vibrations sufficiently to be able to reach the afterlife area that is located in the astral. As is true of the TV signals around you, all these different reality signals exist at different frequencies but in precisely the same place. It all works. It is consistent with quantum physics. And it makes sense! Please read and internalize the points listed above until the truth defeats your own lying eyes. Once you are used to knowing the truth, you will find that you function just fine in this material illusion but you never lose sight of what is really going on!

God is harder to understand, although there is a lot of consistent information to support what I will tell you. We begin with the certainty that there has to be an Un-Caused Cause! Here are just a few reasons why:

  • Fine-Tuning. This universe is so finely-tuned that it exists on the edge of instability, always about to fly apart or collapse. And as the great Rupert Sheldrake has pointed out, some of those finely-tuned values that scientists call “constants” are in fact continuously adjusting, apparently all on their own!
  • Final Causality and Other Quantum Puzzles. Quantum mechanics gave us the final insights that researchers needed to at last make sense of the greater reality. In the same vein, some important quantum physics experiments now strongly hint that there has to be a prior cause beyond this physical universe.
  • Human Yearnings. A close look at human history and cultures going back for tens of thousands of years shows that the urge to seek and interact with a higher power has always been a core human characteristic. Until recently, human beings were living on the ragged edge of survival, so all this effort spent over thousands of generations to seek and interact with unseen beings is a human need that seems to be as thoroughly hard-wired into us as is a newborn infant’s need to suck.
  • Human Experience. That urge toward a closer walk with Spirit remains in the human psyche to this day, and before the age of fifty more than half of us have had at least one extraordinary experience of Spirit. Having had two such experiences myself, and having talked with many people about their own such spiritual interactions, I will tell you flat-out that these experiences are consistent, transformative, and emphatically not imaginary!
  • The Afterlife. Based upon abundant and highly varied evidence, there is no doubt now that human minds are interconnected and are eternal. How or why this should be the case is a core question whose answers all point to the existence of an Un-Caused Cause.

Religionists want to refer to the Un-Caused Cause as “God,” and they give it all the attributes of their various human-made gods. But in fact, all such religion-based gods are just part of humankind’s long history of seeking to satisfy that hard-wired human craving for Spirit. The evidence strongly suggests that the genuine Godhead is in fact a Collective of Perfected Beings Who all have matured spiritually just as you and I are maturing, and have reached a point of such spiritual perfection that together They order all of reality. I can hear your protests now! If I am right about this, then among other head-scratchers is the question of how the universe could have begun before there were Perfected Beings, and why it even happened at all. And indeed there are answers to these questions. Next week we’ll explore the genuine Godhead’s apparently ongoing process of creation….

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.
– (Psalm 23:1-3) David, Third King of Israel and Judah (1035-970 BC)

 

Theater curtain photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo – 69 Million Views <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/49499410251″>Cleveland Ohio – Playhouse Square – State Theatre – Interior Auditorium – KeyBank State Theatre – Postcard</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Staircase photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo – 69 Million Views <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/49291478948″>State Capitol of Montana ~ Helena Montana ~ Grand Staircase</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Moving Beyond Faith

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly
Day by day.
 – Stephen Schwartz and John-Michael Tubelak, from the 1971 musical “Godspell”

We have spoken at length about the fact that mainstream science and mainstream Christianity are our two greatest barriers to discovering and making sense of what actually is going on. Each of them holds a worldview that gives careful attention to just its own preferred aspects of reality, and each requires the exclusion of any study of many other aspects of reality that are equally real. For example, Christianity concentrates on what people many hundreds of years ago thought was true about the mental and spiritual aspects of reality, while mainstream science works at making sense of only reality’s physical aspects. Each has a set of established dogmas – statements that adherents are required to believe – which means that neither can be considered to be an open-minded search for the truth. What may be even worse is the fact that a lot of the dogmas they adopt are very hard to believe! For example, nearly all versions of Christianity insist that a perfectly loving God needed the bloody sacrifice of God’s own Son before God could forgive us for Adam’s sin; while science still requires that consciousness must be generated by the brain, when more and more that proposition is being shown to be unlikely, if not impossible.

It is becoming ever more restricting for us to continue to live in the twenty-first century with our two mutually exclusive sources of truth still stuck behind ancient barriers. This artificial division between material and non-material realities goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle! Still, as recently as half a century ago our balancing of these two incompatible approaches to understanding reality was the best that we could do, since no better sources of information were available. It has long been common for us to switch from one approach to the other in our minds, and even to hold incompatible beliefs simultaneously. There once were lots of Christian research scientists! But recent advances in a variety of fields are bringing us to a place where we can see how all these disciplines readily interact, and indeed how both material and non-material fields of study access the same reality.

At last we are able to study one consistent, complete, and up-to-the-minute reality that makes sense across the board! So for us to continue this artificial division between two incompatible ways of approaching only certain parts of the truth has become counterproductive and plain silly. Furthermore, holding to old-style scientific and religious approaches to the study of reality means that:

  • We must take some things “on faith.” To pursue science as it is presently practiced, we must take it on faith that there is no non-material reality, our material brains generate who we are, and at death we will be extinguished. Those who pursue Christianity also have a raft of arbitrary beliefs to swallow, many of which are frankly incompatible with the Gospel words of Jesus.
  • We must ignore a lot of evidence that each of these approaches is wrong. For example, it has been estimated that by the time we are fifty, more than half of us have experienced at least one extraordinary event. Near-death experiences are becoming commonplace, and nearly every day I get emails from people who have had vivid after-death communications. Science has to call all these NDEs and post-death communications just brain-tricks, and the various strains of Christianity will similarly explain them away as something like God-tricks. But neither of those explanations gives us any better understanding of what such events might tell us about how reality actually works!
  • We are subjected to unnecessary fears. We have talked at length about how deeply fear-based Christianity really is. Science has a similar problem, since science teaches that there is no God, that we are a random accident on a planet in one of billions of solar systems, and that our self-awareness is just a brain-illusion and will die with our bodies. A lot of the reason why the consciousness vibration of this planet is now so debased is that the two institutions that we most trust give us all these tremendous fears.

There is another problem, too, that is caused by our acceptance of this bifurcation into two independent sources of truth, each of which insists that we believe in its dogmas. In cultures where the established worldview requires that we believe as truth some things for which there is little or no proof, having faith without proof has long been seen to be a virtue. But even a moment’s critical thought will show you that until we begin to demand at least some evidence before we will believe, humankind can never make any progress! Please think about this. If the ability to believe things uncritically because some authority tells us to believe those things is celebrated, and if we even train our children to “just have faith,” then people will soon be believing anything. And a populace that is able to hold beliefs without evidence can be led into untold horrors! Recent history tells us that authorities can create beliefs in their followers’ minds that Native Americans are savages, that darker skin is a mark of inferiority, or that Jews must be eliminated. Current history tells is that children can readily be taught to believe that murdering for religious reasons brings sainthood! And these are only a few examples of the dreadful horrors that can arise from people’s gullible willingness to believe things for which there is no evidence.

Some of this confusion comes from the fact that the word “faith” has two meanings. Its dictionary definition is sometimes given as “a strong belief in something, even without proof,” which is the kind of faith that religions and mainstream science expect us to have in their dogmas. This first kind if faith, I submit to you, is both negative and counterproductive.

But Jesus spoke of a different kind of faith. When He used the word “faith,” He was talking about “belief in the power of the mind to accomplish some specific act.” For example, when His disciples asked Him why they had been unable to remove a demon from an affected boy, He said, “Because of your lack of faith. I tell all of you with certainty, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you” (MT 17:20).

Jesus made it plain that in healing people He was using their beliefs in the powers of their own minds when combined with the power of his own to accomplish these healings. For example, when a woman who had long suffered from bleeding touched His garment, expecting that her doing that would heal her, Jesus said to her, “‘Have courage, daughter! Your faith has made you well.’ And from that very hour the woman was well” (MT 9:22). Two blind men approached Him and told Him they believed that He could heal them, and “He touched their eyes and said, ‘According to your faith, let it be done for you’” (MT 9:29). A woman told Him she believed that He could heal her daughter. “Then Jesus answered her, ‘Lady, your faith is great! What you want is granted.’ That very hour her daughter was healed” (MT 15:28). More open-minded modern researchers already have determined that the sort of faith that Jesus asks of us is a way to vastly empower our minds, and it is especially helpful in healing our own bodies. In a more enlightened age, the further empowerment of our minds this way will be seen as a first step toward any kind of healing.

To have faith for the sake of “having faith” – whether it’s faith in an ancient human-like God, or faith in an exclusively material reality – is useless, lazy, and counterproductive.

My fifty-year voyage of discovery began with a search for afterlife evidence, but soon I was led to do wider-ranging investigations which led to the realization that in fact there is just one reality. It all fits together, and it all makes sense! Then in 2013 I was invited to begin a podcast. We all assumed its title would somehow relate to the afterlife; but when I was asked to propose a title, the words that Thomas put into my mind were “Seek Reality.” I was mystified! Eventually, though, I came to see that when our most trusted sources of information are still so profoundly failing us, then each of us is responsible for assembling the evidence and figuring out what is true. We are left to Seek Reality on our own.

Fortunately, there are of late increasing signs that mainstream science and many versions of Christianity are modulating their insistence on what must be believed by their adherents. This is brand, brand new! For the first time, just in recent years mainstream scientists are showing humility about whether their whole approach might be wrong, and whether their assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain might have been in error all along. They are seeking new ways to get around what long had been seen as insoluble problems, and a few scientific disciplines are even beginning to look beyond their rigid, long-established parameters.

There are people with scientific training, too, who are exploring the non-material aspects of reality, and some of what they are learning is flat astounding. We have talked here about Dr. Bernardo Kastrup, the brilliant young man whose work on the primacy of consciousness may earn him a Nobel Prize. Scientists affiliated with The Discovery Institute have been leading the way in the scientific study of the non-material aspects of reality. And meanwhile, it is estimated that between six and ten thousand churches are closing in the United states each year, while the most optimistic religious prognosis seems to be just that the rise in the number of Americans with no religious affiliation may be slowing. The most ardent evangelical movements are either dying, too, or they are taking fresh root in the buildings being vacated by all those dying churches! And an idea that would have been unthinkable even a decade ago – that our being spiritual requires that we move beyond faith and embrace both science and common sense – is now being openly espoused by one of our greatest spiritual leaders. After I have spent half a century working on both sides of the iron barrier that used to exist between the study of the material and the study of the non-material, I am astonished by this easy and rapid breaching of that ancient barrier.

A new day really is dawning! It is ours to help to shape and ours to love, but it is not of our creation. To see it happening is to watch with wonder the work of Spirit moving in the world. We begin to greet with joy our ultimate sunrise.

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.
                                        – Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965), 1931, from “Morning Has Broken”

 

Woman with microscope photo credit: Asian Development Bank <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/58037435@N08/49519045612″>46346-001 and 46346-002: Ebeye Water Supply and Sanitation Project in Marshall Islands</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Jesus as Savior photo credit: babasteve <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64749744@N00/48847821451″>Jesus. On the set of the feature film “The Savior.”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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