Author: Roberta Grimes

Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name is called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).

Six or seven years ago I started to loathe Christmas. When I was a child it was a magical time, with all the cousins on their best behavior and my father and uncle in the same room together for an entire day without much bickering. Like you, I revel in memories that I took for granted at the time, including my grandmother baking pies and making dinner in a black-iron range that her sons would tend as she cooked. A wood-fired kitchen stove in the fifties! Other children’s grannies were cooking by then on electric stoves in pink or turquoise, but never since those days has there been a more perfect turkey or a better apple pie. And then, of course, I reared my own children and we made our own Christmas memories; and when I tell my grandchildren now about their parents’ childhood Christmases, all of it feels as ancient to me as does my grandmother’s wood-fired range. But so the generations turn!

My sudden aversion to all things Christmas astonished me at first, when for so many years the day had made me happy. A lot of glitter for a few weeks of time, the hectic pressure to buy and spend, the cards, the foods, and the decorating of an evergreen that would spend our Christmas season dying in the living room. One seemingly random year was the final year when I did it all and enjoyed it; but then as the following December approached, I realized I simply couldn’t do it again.

For awhile I thought my Christmas revulsion was the product of my mother’s recent death, or perhaps it was a reaction to the fact that our grandchildren were outgrowing the toy orgies that had so delighted us. It might even have sprung from the sense of futility I long had felt about the fact that you no sooner got that tree set up than it was time to strip its corpse. Even shopping had begun to seem pointless, since our growing grandchildren were happier now if we just gave them money. For years I felt alone in my dread of Christmas, but I have lately come to suspect that this feeling is becoming almost mainstream.

If you are starry-eyed about being deep in the wonders of the Christmas season, then please accept from me a loving hug and a cheery “Merry Christmas!” But if much of the heart and purpose seems to have left your Christmases, too, then let us reason together about why this has happened so we can think about what might come next.

Why are so many Americans of late beginning to dread the Christmas season? I can see two main reasons:

  • As the Christian religion declines, its signal celebration comes to feel less meaningful. When I was small, the Catholic children went to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve while the Protestants went to their candlelight service, and it was with this grounding that all of us went to bed feeling cleansed and holy and with minds well primed to be joyous as we rose to open our gifts the next morning. Christmas was about the Greatest Gift, and it was magical! But as Christianity fades, we are left with a hollowed-out orgy of obligatory foods and gifts that feels like just a sad attempt to recapture a little of what we have lost.
  • Christmas has become part of a universal winter celebration called “The Holidays.” It is no longer especially linked to Christianity or to the Jesus of the Gospels, so now what really is the point of it?

Without an uplifting spiritual core, an old-style Christmas is too much effort. It seems to have become over the past few decades little more than a food-and-merchandise binge that leads to a crashing emotional letdown. So for the past six years I have not done Christmas. No decorations. No carols. No tree, and only gifts that could fit in envelopes. My husband and I still cooked the feast, but we served it at my daughter’s house so we even avoided any Christmas mess! I had thought I was well over Christmas, but I have just begun to realize that these past few years may have been a cleansing. I may be growing now toward something new.

My astonishing sense of Christmas uplift began only a week ago, with “fall on your knees” singing in my mind. “O Holy Night” had been my favorite carol, but of course I hadn’t heard it in years! So when it became my sudden earworm, I had to look up the actual words:

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;
Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born.
O night, O holy night, O night divine.

“O Holy Night” was composed in French in 1841 and translated into English in 1855. Just read those lyrics! Each time I read them I am freshly stunned by the momentousness of what we should be celebrating. Two thousand years ago God chose to be born as a human being so He could bring us eternal truths to uplift and transform humankind. Jesus tells us in the Gospels what He came to do. And while the Christian religion by and large ignores what the Lord says in the Gospels, “O Holy Night” puts His Gospel words front and center as the reason for the season:

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;

Jesus is indeed our Saviour! But what this Christmas carol makes clear is that He didn’t come to save us from God’s wrath. What He came to save us from was hopeless ignorance. Read on…

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.

His came to free us from erroneous religious nonsense, and from the very notion of sin. His teachings help us to grow away from fear and toward love, and thereby we begin to know our true worth!

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;

“Yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!” A new beginning for humankind that is based in awareness of our own divinity is born for us at Christmas in the Son of the living God.

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born.

For us to fall on our knees in wonder as God’s angels above us sing for joy is our only possible response to the heavenly import of that night. Humanity had been steeped for all its history in grievous notions of sin and shame and in the sad weariness of daily confronting our own ultimate worthlessness. And then God came to earth in the same way that all the rest of us come to earth, and He taught us that our minds are forever one with the infinite Mind of God.

All these musings over the past week have sent me back to read the Gospel story of the Lord’s birth, which is given to us in Matthew and Luke as the well-known tale of the shepherds to whom an angel revealed the birth of Jesus (LK 2:8-14), and the story of wise men who arrived in Jerusalem in search of the newborn “king of the Jews.” The star that announced the birth of that king “went ahead of them until it came and stopped over the place where the child was…  After they went into the house and saw the child with his mother Mary, they fell down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasure sacks and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (MT 2:9-11).

In every modern Bible translation, the wise men are said to give the infant Jesus the same three gifts, and that fact soon started me wondering whether the gifts themselves might have some meaning. It turns out that both frankincense and myrrh are the dried sap or resin of specific trees, and both can be used in making incense and perfume. Both also have strong medicinal properties. So just as gold symbolizes wealth, so frankincense and myrrh symbolize beauty and healing. The gifts of the Magi are in celebration of the dawning awareness of God’s perfect love that was born to us in that holy child. Those gifts are the prosperity of spiritual unity and the healing sweetness of spiritual growth that will culminate in the eventual arrival of the kingdom of God on earth.

When we look again at the words of the Prophet Isaiah foretelling the birth of Jesus almost a millennium before the event, we find that the words that follow them are, “Of the growth of his government and peace there will be no end. He will rule over his kingdom, sitting on the throne of David, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore” (Isaiah 9:7).

It’s an ancient perspective on what Jesus called the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth, and as we abandon the false dogmas of Christianity and we begin to closely follow the Gospel teachings, we start to fulfill that ancient promise. Christmas was never about gifts and glitter! Instead, the source of all human joy is the fact that God was born on earth to teach us to choose love over fear so we could claim at last our divine birthright. We are only infinite, perfect love! And three thousand years after the Prophet Isaiah foretold God’s arrival on earth, we begin at last to understand what that means. To quote Paul, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways. Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:11-12).

As we ever more closely follow Jesus, and we ever more perfectly embody God’s love, we will begin to celebrate that holy night without a need to add glitter and gifts to make it feel more special. I am suspecting now that Christmas isn’t over. Instead, it seems to be just beginning.

 

Poinsettia heart photo credit: Bennilover <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75885098@N05/49213443636″>Poinsettia Heart</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Christmas gold photo credit: Bennilover <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75885098@N05/49210198733″>Silver and Gold</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tree with gifts photo credit: Bennilover <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75885098@N05/37868004735″>Happy December!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Stained glass angel photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/48831005952″>Guardian Angel</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Blue jay and cardinals photo credit: COLORED PENCIL magazine <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/61446950@N06/23420261844″>January 2016 Art Challenge Photo “Birds of a Feather”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
2020 Cookies photo credit: shixart1985 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/156445661@N02/49138856926″>2020 cookie Christmas decorations.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Evidential Mediumship

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One question that is often asked is whether there are any good mental mediums. People ask the question in various ways, inquiring about honesty or native talent, but what they really want to know is whether we know of a medium who can clearly demonstrate to them that a loved one has survived. Having had test-readings with dozens of mediums and been disappointed almost every time, I have concluded that most professional mediums are honest, and many have considerable talent; but few develop their abilities to the point where it is impossible to deny that they are talking with our own dead loved ones. That certainty is what we crave! We don’t want, “Your grandmother is here. She says you should eat your vegetables.” Instead, what we hunger for is something like, “Your grandmother is here. She wonders if you remember the day when you let Grampa’s goat into her henhouse and it chased the chickens and upset them so much they didn’t lay for a week.” Now, you might remember that ancient day when you were only six, or you might not. But this message is specific and detailed, and it is the sort of intimate and trivial thing that no amount of research could find. So if it clicks with you, it will transform your life! Never again will you be able to believe that dear ol’ Granny is not alive somewhere.

A good evidential mediumship reading is the Biblical pearl of great price (MT 13:45-46). Every working medium knows it! So, why is it that so few mediums will deliver what everyone is desperate to hear? There seem to be a number of reasons:

  • Mental mediums are mind-reading with dead people. Pause for a moment and let that sink in! Since all human minds of both the living and the dead are part of the one eternal Mind that continuously manifests reality, it should be as easy to communicate by mind with the dead as it is with the living. But that doesn’t make it a walk in the park!
  • Mediums rely heavily on the help of their guides. Nearly all mediums’ guides have ceased to incarnate, so they must be at least somewhat advanced; but still, they might not know as much as you and I would wish they knew about how to help our loved ones think about and then produce the deeply personal and very specific bits of evidence that we all crave to hear.
  • People who are spiritually sensitive can be easily attacked by negative entities. Good mediums are at special risk, so most will practice rituals. Some might burn sage, recite mantras or incantations, and surround themselves and the person being read with “a white light” or “a bubble of protection.” But rituals and chants are not enough, when what is needed is an adamant refusal to have any contact with dark entities. I know of a talented medium who began to see negative entities around her, and she seemed to think of them the way you might think of wild animals you had managed to tame. The next thing I heard was that her personality had been dramatically transformed overnight: now she was sharp, enraged, irrational, and impervious to anyone’s reason. And since these fear-based demons partially supplanted the work of her love-based guides, her mediumship abilities declined.
  • Maintaining mediumistic skills in top form requires dedication. Being a genuine medium is more physically and emotionally draining than most of us realize! The best mediums have to be obsessive about everything, from what they eat and how they exercise through how they maintain themselves spiritually, how they keep negative beings away, and when and how often they feel able to do readings. Some are so stressed by the pressure to perform for individual clients that they drift toward doing mostly group readings.
  • Even very good mediums will have “off” days. This is the opposite of an exact science! What a medium should say if she isn’t getting much information is something like, “The spirits aren’t cooperating. My guides and I sometimes have a bad day. Would you like me to refund your fee, or shall we just reschedule?” But mediums also need to eat, so we seldom hear of one of them giving a refund when a reading has not gone well. Some will even try to convince us that what we are hearing is evidential, and the fact that it isn’t clicking with us is our own fault. One medium who offered me a free reading in hopes that I would recommend her to others described some people and events of which I had no memory. When I told her I didn’t have a brother who died in Vietnam (nor did I have any brothers at all), she told me hotly it was someone I thought of as a brother. Maybe it was a cousin. “Keep listening to the recording of the reading and it will all come back.”
  • Arranging for key words and phrases with the dying won’t work. I don’t know of a single instance where a dead person remembered the desired key phrase and delivered it through a medium. One early researcher is recorded as having brought up the fact there was something he was supposed to remember, but now he couldn’t retrieve it. The leading expert on early-twentieth-century mediumship, the venerable Michael Tymn, gives us a good explanation for this problem that I will quote below, but we should note that other kinds of spiritual testing also routinely come up empty. Some operating rooms have signs that can be read only from ceiling-height in order to test whether people who claim to have left their bodies actually have done so; and to my knowledge, that has never worked, either. Spirits flat refuse to be tested! You can almost see a gang of them sitting around some celestial bar drinking nectar and sharing a laugh about all these silly earthlings who keep trying to catch them out.
  • The problem might be you. Twenty years ago I spent thousands of dollars having readings with well-recommended mediums. All those readings were disappointing, and the most famous and expensive medium I tested was awful! It has taken me most of the intervening two decades to realize that for someone as skeptical about mediums as I am to have a reading or two every week over months of time is a guaranteed way to get nothing. The medium who did best was the one who read me first, perhaps primarily because a lot of my dead loved ones were happy to show up; but after the first few months, it was only my mother-in-law and brother-in-law, both recently dead, who loyally continued to answer the call. Don’t make my mistake! To hire a medium while assuming she will be a dud is a sure way to make your most pessimistic views into self-fulfilling prophesies.

I enjoy reading Michael Tymn’s blog posts, and I urge you to read them too! Michael is the greatest living expert on the heyday of physical mediumship, now more than a century into the past, and the author of some terrific books, including his essential The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die. Two other enjoyable must-reads from Michael Tymn are Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. He recently quoted what Sir William Barrett (who coined the term “deathbed visions”) told his wife through a medium about one big reason why the dead have so much difficulty in communicating through mediums.

Sir William told his wife that he had needed to learn how to slow down his vibration in order to communicate. He said, “Sometimes I lose my memory of things from coming here (he means closer to the earth’s vibration). I know in my own state, but not here. In dreams you do not know everything, you only get parts in a dream. A sitting is similar; when I go back to the spirit world after a sitting like this I know I have not got everything through that I wanted to say. That is due to my mind separating again.”

Sir William told his wife a century ago something that now is commonly known. When we are in an earth-body, our subconscious mind is separated from our conscious mind. As you and I know from abundant evidence, when we transition back home, our two minds come together again and make one complete mind that knows and remembers everything. So apparently Sir William is telling his wife that when we lower our mind’s vibration and bring ourselves back into the physical sphere so we can communicate, our conscious and subconscious minds will again naturally separate just as they separate when we first enter an earth-body. So we immediately forget a great deal, and we can’t recall it again until we leave the earth’s influence and the two parts of our minds rejoin. (This is fascinating!)

When Lady Barrett asked Sir William to elaborate further, his interesting explanation was that we have a fourth-dimensional self that cannot make itself exactly match our third-dimensional self. He said, “It’s like measuring a third dimension by its square feet instead of by its cubic feet, and there is no doubt about it I have left something of myself outside which rejoins me directly I put myself into the condition in which I readjust myself.” He told her at a later sitting that when he was in his own sphere he would remember a name, but when he rejoined her through a medium it would slip his mind. “The easiest things to lay hold of are what we may call ideas. A detached word, a proper name, has no link with a train of thought except in a detached sense; that is far more difficult than any other feat of memory or association of ideas. If you go to a medium that is new to us, I can make myself known by giving you through that medium an impression of my character and personality, my work on earth, and so forth. Those can all be suggested by thought impressions, ideas; but if I want to say, ‘I am Will,’ I find that is much more difficult than giving you a long, comprehensive study of my personality.”

The dead are used to communicating with one another by thought, so apparently ideas are easier for them to share than are specific words! But fortunately, a good evidential medium doesn’t need many words to give you the certainty that those you have loved in life have survived. Five years ago, a medium described a scene to me in which two important things occurred:

  • My mother pointed at her eyebrow. The medium said, “Why is she pointing to her eyebrow? Oh. She says she doesn’t have to paint them on anymore.” My mother had virtually no eyebrow hairs, which fact was a private bane to her that she covered up by painting big eyebrows onto her face every day. Her assuring me that she didn’t need to do that now was my mother’s loving confirmation that after I had spent my whole early life chatting with her while I watched her go through her morning ritual, she knew that this particular bit would be highly evidential for me. It was the most significant post-death communication from a loved one I have ever received.
  • My grandmother displayed an oyster shell with both hands. I had no idea what that was about! She was a simple farm wife; I was sure she had never even seen an oyster. When I said she couldn’t possibly be holding an oyster shell, the medium said, “But that’s what it is. And she insists it’s important! Maybe it will come to you later?” And so it did. Within a few days it occurred to me that my mother’s maiden name was “Ostergaard.” As Sir William tells us above, specific names are hard for beings in spirit to convey! And how else could my mother’s mother have given me some approximation of that name?

Two brilliantly evidential details had been coaxed from my loved ones by that medium’s guides. Few words were needed, and both communications involved such odd and obscure facts that it is hard to see how any medium could have independently discovered them. If I had not already known that human life is eternal, these two ideal bits of evidential mediumship would have sealed the deal for me forevermore!

 

Oysters with pearls photo credit: Max Garçia <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/62474890@N04/18739862869″>Oysters with pearl</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Pearls photo credit: elluckyphoto <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/65186576@N07/23501502621″>Artificial pearls</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Operating room photo credit: H.KoPP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/39715972@N00/398025084″>Butchers workbench</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Oyster shell photo credit: Upupa4me <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40650891@N02/8672972177″>white ~ 22 oyster shell</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

We Need Fresh Ways to Study Reality

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

 Perhaps my wanting to study reality seems to you both naïve and quixotic. I have never taken a course in advanced math or physics. Instead, over half a century I have read broadly and with an obsessive purpose. Afterlife communications, quantum mechanics, cosmology, biology, consciousness research, and even the Bible’s Gospels: whatever has seemed pertinent to the study of reality, I have read it and tried to understand how it fit with everything else that I was learning. All of this could have led to nowhere. But instead, before long I was delighted to see that all these disparate sources of information were beginning to construct one gigantic, complex, and highly comprehensible reality! Eventually it became obvious to me that quantum mechanics had to be the junction between matter and consciousness; and, well, what do you know? I found that the father of quantum physics, the immortal Max Planck, had taken the strictly physics route and come to the same conclusion. Almost ninety years ago he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Even Albert Einstein recognized that, “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.”

Rather than giving any thought to the wisdom of the greatest modern physicists, mainstream science as a united discipline has stuck with the Luddite notion inherited from the ancient Greeks that matter is basic, and it generates consciousness. As a result, it is clear from a recent perusal of my beloved Scientific American that the core scientific discipline of physics has gone so far off the rails by now that at this point it is just going through the motions. From a Scientific American article entitled “The Search For Truth in Physics“ and published in September of this year comes this embarrassing admission: “(i)f physics strikes most people as truth seeking at its purest, it doesn’t always seem that way to physicists themselves. They sometimes seem to be struck by a collective imposter syndrome. Although they may presume that the truth is out there and they are capable of finding it—they have to, or what would be the point?—they have their doubts, which surface in informal discussions, at conferences devoted to the broad direction of their subject, in renewed efforts to reach out to philosophers for help, and in books and blogs for the general public. These worries are most acute in fundamental physics, which is not the entire subject but does play an outsized role in it. Many fret that the Large Hadron Collider has yet to turn up any new phenomena, giving them nothing to work with to derive the next level of laws. They worry whether proposed unified theories, such as string theory, can ever be tested. Some deem their subject overly mathematical; others think it mathematically sloppy. Truth can be elusive even in the best-established theories. Quantum mechanics is as well tested a theory as can be, yet its interpretation remains inscrutable.” My own thought after having talked with disillusioned physicists is that sadly this passage is too optimistic. One physicist actually said to me, “Don’t let them kid you. We can make the math say whatever we want it to say, so in fact it tells us nothing.”

Yet despite all their private uncertainties, as the year 2020 approaches, science writers still can cheerily deliver such highly dubious nonsense as, “Reality is constructed by the brain, and no two brains are exactly alike.” At the same time they also can admit to “The delusion of scientific omniscience,” while noting that as recently as the nineteen-eighties physicists were sure they were right on the cusp of figuring everything out.

It seems from what I have read that many physicists now suspect that consciousness has to be primary. They suspect, but those with reputations to protect are speculating only privately. Physics is a system of hypotheses that are tested using mathematical calculations and replicable experiments, and if you have a theory that cannot be investigated in the traditional way, there is no point to mentioning it and thereby putting your career at risk. But as physicists start to run out of materially testable ideas, the disconnect that already exists between experimental and theoretical physics will grow wider, until at some point some open-minded young scientist will step forward and present a workable consciousness theory of everything. Then not just physics, but all the sciences will enter a more productive post-material world.

Meanwhile, it will be important for people who can see the primacy of consciousness and are not hampered by scientific limitations to pioneer some new methods for studying reality. Here is why:

  • Consciousness probably cannot be studied using mathematics or replicable experiments. The value of this material school lies in our taking its lessons seriously, and that value would be diminished if we could prove we are eternal. There is no way around this problem. In any battle of wits against the Big Wit, we lose.
  • Much of the evidence for what is really going on comes from glitches in an almost perfect system. Mistakes happen. The amnesia that seals off previous lives is imperfect in the first few years of life; people who die suddenly or in fear will sometimes stick to earth in a ghostly twilight; and now and then real miracles happen. If we understand the importance of these glitches, then we can begin to learn a lot about the true nature of reality. But of course this is thin gruel for physicists who have spent their careers working in the comforting solidity of mathematics-based replicable experiments.
  • Other evidence comes from the chance development of some highly subjective skills. Through the ages there have been people who developed some amazing consciousness-based skills – astral travel, afterlife communication, divination, and so on – none of which have much been studied because those who study them are ridiculed. Once we realize that these rare consciousness-based skills have a lot to tell us about reality, we can develop fresh ways to study them in a disciplined environment.
  • Apparently dead scientists are trying to help us learn what is true. Electronic voice phenomena (EVP) and instrumental transcommunication (ITC) make up an amazing body of evidence, the best of which cannot be explained away if you have even a half-open mind.
  • The bad news: much of the “evidence” is faked. Many “mediums” are cold-readers, most EVP and ITC is static, and ghosts are almost always illusory. Here scientists could be a big help, but instead of trying to sift real from faked so the bits of genuine evidence can be studied, nearly all the scientific effort so far has consisted in hurriedly drowning the baby and throwing it out with the bathwater. So for now, the sifting of evidence is left to amateurs like you and me, and that means we are going to have to do a lot of patient and meticulous work.
  • More bad news: for now, we’ve got to ignore the woo-woo stuff. At least at first, we builders of a new paradigm will have to concentrate with ruthless precision on those few areas where a lot of good evidence of how reality genuinely works can be found. We’ve got to stay away from some phenomena that later might be seen to fit, including fortune-telling, Tarot, mind-reading, Astrology, demons, angels, ancient gods, Akashic records, and extraterrestrials. If we are studying everything indiscriminately, then in fact we really are studying nothing.

All of this being said, some recent evidence for the primacy of consciousness is very good indeed. It cannot be studied by the scientific method that has worked so well in studying matter, so until physicists can liberate themselves and begin an open-minded search for the truth, the leaders in this field will be lay researchers. And there is a lot of work for us to do!

  • Some people will collect and patiently seek to authenticate the “glitches.” Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia spent much of his life collecting thousands of examples of children who seemed to remember previous lives, and “solving” these cases whenever possible by finding the living family of each child’s previous personality. One such anomaly is merely curious. Many hundreds of such well-documented cases give us overwhelming evidence that human consciousness survives physical death.
  • A few will find ways to conduct replicable experiments. Dr. Gary Schwartz of the University of Arizona at Tucson has conducted triple-blind experiments with mental mediums. He calculates the odds against achieving some of his results by chance to be in the multiple millions to one.
  • Some others will find ways to collect and assemble strange and useful statistical data. Dr. Helen Wambach first studied reincarnation in an effort to prove it was nonsense, and one of her methods involved the mass hypnotic regression of thousands of people to certain specific historical periods. When she compiled the details of all the lives that her thousands of subjects claimed to have lived, she found that their distribution by gender, class, location, occupation, food, clothing, and other details so perfectly replicated historical fact that to have achieved these results by chance would have been nearly impossible.
  • And some will become their own experiments. Robert Monroe learned almost by accident how to leave his material body, and once he had satisfied himself that this was a real phenomenon and it didn’t seem dangerous, he spent forty years expanding his own boundaries and carefully documenting the results. He was not a scientist, but his model will be followed by later adventurous souls who have scientific training. Once you completely understand that reality is in fact both infinite and benevolent and your own mind is eternal and indestructible, no boundaries to your explorations exist.

It is going to be up to you and me to help humanity assemble a fresh paradigm that will let us study all of reality, including its non-material aspects. And wonderfully, some individual scientists and other researchers are pointing the way by doing ever more sophisticated work in the field of what is called “intelligent design.” This research began as an effort to refute Darwin, but the evidence for design in nature is abundant and the intelligent design movement is happily free of dogma-based constraints. We disciplined amateurs with nothing to lose can comfortably join these researchers, patiently seeking and sifting through the evidence as we build an ever more complete picture for all of humankind’s edification. The day will come when the mainstream science materialist house of cards will fall. And when it does, the work we do now can become a solid beginning for a genuine scientific search for the truth.

 

Sunset on clouds photo credit: verchmarco <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/160866001@N07/48824727437″>Magischer Himmel – Orange, blau, lila und pink begleiten den Sonnenuntergang</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Albert Einstein photo credit: oneredsf1 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/112345594@N02/24237007187″>Albert Einstein 1879 – 1955</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: Rusty Russ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10159247@N04/4653635735″>Massachusetts Fields of the California Mountains</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Seeking a Material Eternal Life

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It is deeply tragic for everyone living that the mainstream scientific community still insists that what we experience as conscious awareness arises from unconscious matter. A full century ago, the great quantum physicist Max Planck found that notion preposterous; and many other thoughtful physicists, including the deathless Albert Einstein, have said or hinted that they also understood that consciousness must predate matter. The scientific dogma of materialism which was codified at the turn of the previous century has taken mainstream science on a hundred-year-long detour to nowhere! Scientific investigation must be an open-minded search for the truth if it is to be of any value at all, yet the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals still continue to insist that reality must be studied from the viewpoint of matter alone. Belief-systems are religions, by definition. And like all religions, materialist science is as frozen in time as a fly in amber, stuck now a century into the past.

Meanwhile, research scientists need to make a living, so they must find ways to do funded research that fits within their materialist restriction. And with the scientific community still insisting that at death we blink out like a light, you may not be surprised to learn that there are gullible and desperate people who are eager now to fund research into creating a material eternal life. This research is of course unnecessary. The scientists and their funders are already immortal! And their research is guaranteed to lead them nowhere, since the materialist limits imposed on the process of figuring out a material immortality are making it impossible for researchers to learn enough for their efforts to amount to anything.

Are you thinking that with so much evidence against it, surely no one still believes in materialism? You may be right, but the pressure to conform remains strong. With the start of the year 2020 barely a month away, a man who is “the chief scientist and president of the Allen Institute for Brain Science in Seattle” and serves on Scientific American‘s board of advisers still feels required to pen these sentences: “There is little doubt that our intelligence and our experiences are ineluctable consequences of the natural causal powers of our brain, rather than any supernatural ones. That premise has served science extremely well over the past few centuries as people explored the world.” Dr. Christof Koch is to be pitied. This poor man had to write those demonstrably absurd sentences as a sop to the materialist thought-police, and his article itself refutes them, as presumably does his recent book, The Feeling of Life Itself: Why Consciousness Is Widespread but Can’t Be Computed. As he points out, no matter now rapidly and well a computer is able to calculate, it still doesn’t develop what he calls “experiences.” He is referring here to awareness. Emotions. Nuanced understandings. A living sense of self.

Because they are not allowed to study anything except from a materialist perspective, mainstream scientists still cannot define what consciousness is, figure out how or where it originates, or even describe how it might work. Nor, for that matter, can they define death. And their insistence on what is called “monism,”  which is the primitive belief that the mind cannot exist apart from the brain, means that they must remain resolutely unaware of every bit of all the amazing and consistent evidence about consciousness that exceeds their materialist theories.

Many scientists are coming to see that what some call “feelings” are a missing ingredient in all their attempts to create artificial intelligence. Whatever they build lacks emotions, empathy, a sense of self, and all else that makes up a human being. As one of them puts it, “Fiction is full of robots with feelings… But in real life robots have no more feelings than a rock submerged in novocaine.” And all the ideas now being proposed to begin to bridge that gap depend upon consciousness being spontaneously generated in the robot, just as they still are forced to assume that human consciousness is generated in our brains. One researcher suggests that if robots are programmed to recognize perils to their own existence, perhaps that will instill in them a will to survive, and from that might come a sense of selfhood, emotions, and then consciousness and all the rest. Which seems to be a pretty big stretch!

Many scientists aren’t so much concerned about robots’ feelings, though. They just want to create advanced robots that can infinitely improve their own ability to learn.  And all of that is well and good, but among scientists there is not even a consensus on whether artificial intelligence yet exits at all, or what needs to happen before it can be said to exist. Do the functions performed by a computer even qualify as “artificial intelligence”? The plain fact is that no matter how many calculations a computer can do at once, and no matter how rapidly it can do them, there is no relationship between those activities and the complex array of attributes which make up the individual awareness that we experience as human intelligence.

And even if scientists could create an intelligent and self-aware robot, it still is hard to imagine how that robot could become a fully intelligent and self-aware YOU when your body dies. So, inevitably, scientists who are trying to develop a workable material immortality are turning to seeking some way to mechanically perpetuate each human being’s awareness. They need to find a way to “upload” our minds. After all, as one researcher says, “According to the first law of thermodynamics, the energy that powers all life continues on and can never be destroyed.” Since consciousness seems to be a form of energy, they are trying to find a way to work with that; but they ignore the fact that the first law of thermodynamics actually states that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. So if consciousness really is energy, then by definition it cannot come from the brain! Still, all that immortality funding is there, so scientists are exploring what they call “the gray zone between life and death,”  and they are trying to understand how Near-Death Experiences might be generated by the material brain. They are hoping to find ways to detect consciousness in matter, and to measure whether and the extent to which some material thing is conscious; and they are working out how they might establish some form of mechanical communication between brains.  To add to the stress of these pointless efforts, there is a growing suspicion that preserving your awareness may not be possible after all, and a rising doubt that your uploaded mind still would really have the same awareness that it did when your material brain was alive. But the funding is there, so they press on.

Yet all of this research combined is not bringing the mechanical immortality of your personal awareness any closer. Even worse is the fact that the mainstream scientific community’s absurd insistence that reality must be only material despite all the contrary evidence just further deepens the worldwide negativity which is rooted in the fear of death. As young Americans turn away from Christianity, they then face the scientific certainty that they will be extinguished when their bodies die. And this surge in them of existential fear is especially tragic when a lot of evidence suggests that in the face of death, and even unexpected death, the truth takes over and fear is gone. This ambient negativity rooted in false science has created what is an otherwise inexplicable uptick in Americans’ midlife mortality, in what are called “deaths of despair.” Scientists use that term, and then they attribute these deaths to a wide variety of problems, with no awareness that our rapid nationwide secularization and a concomitant surge in the fear of death is a primary underlying cause.

The silly scientific dogma of materialism is doing humanity incalculable harm! We must find a way to put it behind us. But, how?

Robot Photo by Franck V. on Unsplash.com https://claudeai.wiki/
Coffin with Mourners Photo by Rhodi Lopez on Unsplash.com

What About the Children?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Nearly all the people who ask me questions are past the age of fifty. They are trying to deepen their spiritual life, and they aren’t finding ways to do that in their lifelong Christian beliefs and practices. Often they have been seeking for years, trying out different spiritual options like meditation, yoga, New Age, and various Eastern religions, but never feeling satisfied. By the time they reach out to me, many of these people are frustrated and even angry. Some have come to think that good answers to their spiritual questions will never be found.

Fortunately, I think the spiritual questions that are being asked by cradle Christians have satisfying answers, but that is primarily because they have a grounding in traditional Christianity. As is true of a bush that has become overgrown, if we can prune away the misshapen branches that are based in fear and negativity, we often can help them get back to their childhood Gospel roots. But this sort of fix will not be possible for the so-called Millennials, close to half of whom claim to have no religious affiliation. And for Generation Z, those born between 1995 and 2015, present trends suggest that when they are adults few of them will have any spiritual roots at all.

Western Europe is at least a generation ahead of the United States in losing its Christian grounding. The ultimate result of this spiritual falling-away in Europe cannot yet be assessed, but even in the United States we are seeing some pretty appalling results as the religiously affiliated percentage of this nation continues to decline toward 50%. Since Christianity is based in fear, this result seems to be counterintuitive; but fear and negativity are rising here exponentially! Whether it is political warfare, violent entertainments, or panic that every weather event will soon make this planet uninhabitable: the fact is that the United States has become dramatically more fearful and angry. It is time to step back a bit from the fray and try to understand what has gone so wrong and how we might begin to repair it.

We talked here a couple of weeks ago about the reasons that most lapsed Christians give for outright leaving the faith:

  • They can no longer believe many of Christianity’s core teachings.
  • They love the Jesus they first met as children, but they don’t find Him in the pews as adults.
  • They find many of the Christian faithful to be cliquish, judgmental, and “un-Christian.”
  • They find in modern Christianity only rules and dogmas, not spiritual food.

As was said above, we can address these issues for people who grew up in Christianity. But in a couple of decades the number of American adults who are not cradle Christians easily will pass fifty percent! And there is probably nothing we can do at this point to change that result. What we can do, though, is to think about how we might best replace the highly problematic Christianity of Constantine, Calvin, and Torquemada with the gentle Christian Way based in universal Gospel truths that Jesus came to earth to begin.

Recent surveys suggest that for younger Millennials, the first and fourth of the reasons for leaving Christianity that their elders give are the primary reasons why so many young American adults are not religious. They find many Christian teachings to be intolerable, both unloving and hard to believe, which indeed they are! But understandably, most Christian leaders are not prepared to consider the fact that the religion’s decline is a direct result of the unpleasant and antiquated ideas at its core. The Wall Street Journal has just run an article by Timothy Beal, a professor of religion at Case Western University, who reports that in the youngest Millennial cohort (those who are 18 to 29 years old), 44% are so-called “Nones,” those who choose to declare no religious affiliation. He speculates that “Maybe it’s because their idea of faith is too narrow.”

Dr. Beal believes the young are leaving Christianity because of secular social pressures, because many of their parents are in mixed marriages or are otherwise less religious, and because more traditionally religious functions are being performed by “alt-religious” communities, many of which are online. But he admits that the answers that young people themselves give for having abandoned Christianity suggest that, just like their elders, they are turned off by the religion itself. According to a 2018 Pew poll, young Millennials “question a lot of religious teachings” (60%) and “don’t like the positions churches take on political/social issues” (49%).

Dr. Beal’s proposal for addressing the fact that almost half of the youngest Millennials reject the very idea of religion is to engage them in discussions. He says, “I find that when my students, including the majority Nones, are given access to religion not as a set of teachings and positions but as a space for active engagement with enduring questions, they lean in. Indeed, they find this way of thinking about religion a refreshing change from their generally polarized political interactions and personalized newsfeeds.” He adds, “What we need is sustained conversation in a context that allows and even welcomes different experiences and points of view. What do you mean when you self-define as religiously None? What is the story behind that box you checked? What are the teachings and positions that you question? Did you always question them, or did something in your life lead you to think differently?…When it comes to religion, Nones are almost never nothing at all.”

A thoughtful Catholic layperson wrote a lengthy article on the religious website Patheos.com in which she refuted every Catholic talking-point given by the auxiliary bishop of Los Angeles, who is considered to be “one of the hip bishops that has a better understanding of the plight of young people.” Her article is full of zingers, my favorite of which is this: “Our teaching is hard. But don’t you see the irony in insisting that married lay couples never use a condom and that homosexually oriented lay men and women remain celibate for life, when priests and bishops acted like libertines, predators and pimps?” And not to be outdone in the sinning department, Evangelical churches nationwide are being roiled by sex scandals of their own. To quote an excellent Patheos article about sexual abuse in the fundamentalist Evangelical community, “Billy Graham’s grandson Boz Tchividjian … has been ringing a similar alarm. … He’s been telling Christians for at least five years that they need to quit being so ‘very arrogant when pointing to Catholics’ because what they’re facing is ‘worse’.” An appalling number of Christian leaders have used their positions of power to sexually abuse the very people they claim they have been called by God to serve. To the unpalatable nature of Christian dogmas and the cruelty of some Christian social teachings, we might add as a reason why many of the young are leaving Christianity the moral hypocrisy of so many Christian leaders.

This rapid falling-away from spiritual pursuits by the very young might be seen to be a crisis. It is happening more slowly in some places than in others, but fear-based religions are losing their hold worldwide; and while getting rid of the fear is a good thing, for young people to be abandoning the very idea of spirituality is not. I don’t have a pat answer to this problem, although it preoccupies me more and more: the thought that in a century or less most children may be growing up without a glimmer of a spiritual grounding seems tragic! But it also gives us some wonderful opportunities, if we can take advantage of them. As the great French Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin  so brilliantly said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” The urge to be a spiritual seeker is at the very core of each newborn child, and the fact that for more and more such children that urge will not be filled by Christian dogmas gives us the wonderful opportunity to fill their needs with the Lord’s true words and the urge to follow His genuine Way.

I have been thinking through how we might begin to offer the Lord’s Way to everyone, with an emphasis on the very young. If we focus on the young, their elders will follow! We should welcome everyone’s ideas, but for now it seems to me that the Lord’s true movement should be:

  • Without dogmas. Our only scripture will be the genuine words of Jesus in the Gospels, and there can never be any core idea that anyone is required to believe.
  • Unstructured and organic. Jesus stressed that He and His disciples were servants. And so also must we be servants! No Pope, no bishops, no priests. Just equals helping one another.
  • Grounded in social justice. Not the angry, shouting kind, but instead a gentle and love-based outreach that honors and supports each person as the eternal beings that we are.

And above all, we must forever grant to God the right to give us new revelation!

As we prepare to share the teachings of Jesus with the young in entirely spiritual ways, my second children’s picture book (about the death of a pet) will be out next year. Meanwhile, I am hearing from parents who tell me how much their little ones are enjoying The Fun of Meeting Jesus. I bless the lovely artist who created these books’ beautiful illustrations!

Having taken Christianity’s current pulse, let’s check in now with another dogma-based belief-system as it tries to come to terms with the idea of human immortality….

 

Little girl photo credit: Kevin Celedón <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/81465146@N05/14645990944″></a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Baby photo credit: FrankGuido <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/70973526@N00/9234165795″>Newest Addition</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Baby eyes photo credit: Neticola <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/29413803@N00/172696141″>Alejandro</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Adigrat boy photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/47978257952″>Adigrat Boy</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Losing the Franchise

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“In June of 1995 the Chicago Tribune reported that Pope John Paul II had urged the Roman Catholic Church to seize the ‘particularly propitious’ occasion of the new millennium to recognize ‘the dark side of its history.’ … he asked, ‘How can one remain silent about the many forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the faith—wars of religion, tribunals of the Inquisition and other forms of violations of the rights of persons?’” So begins a book that must be read by every Christian who loves Jesus and hungers to discern the will of God. Helen Ellerbe tells us in her 1996 expose, The Dark Side of Christian History, that “My intention is to offer, not a complete picture of Christian history, but only the side which hurt so many and did such damage to spirituality. It is in no way intended to diminish the beautiful work that countless Christian men and women have done to truly help others. And it is certainly not intended as a defense of or tribute to any other religion.”

When I first read Ellerbe’s book, soon after the start of this century, it helped to precipitate the worst marital crisis of my life. If you doubt that Spirit has a sense of humor, please note that when I was in my twenties I was prompted to fall in love with and marry a man who had attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college, who for years would go to Mass twice a week, and who to this day loves Catholicism with everything in him. So when it was no longer possible for me to enter a church that had a life-size, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above its altar, he fought me for the salvation of my soul. He couldn’t win, but I love him all the more for his having cared so much! The title of this post comes from an epithet that I would fling at him whenever he tried yet again to persuade me to come to Mass. When Christianity was co-opted by Roman Emperors and warped into an instrument of bloody control, it lost whatever franchise it might have had from God. And no amount of Papal contrition can ever win that back again.

What I will share with you here is meant to complete the messages of the past two weeks. Knowing as we do now that what we experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the only thing that exists, that it is the creative force that continuously manifests this universe, and that at its highest love-based vibration it is the Godhead, we can see what terrible harm has been done by Christianity in its fostering of fear in its adherents and its refusal to make the teachings of Jesus preeminent. All of that would be bad enough! But for most of the past two thousand years, Christianity has also been almost unbelievably barbaric, making terror and pain near-sacraments, and often considering human life to be of little value. It is only the passage of time that has spared you and me the same ghastly fates that were endured by millions who revered Jesus Christ just as we revere Him! If it were not for their personal devotion to the Lord, and their conviction that the religion was deeply enmired in the errors that now are plain to see, many of those whose lives the Church destroyed might simply have recanted and been spared. What strikes me most as I re-read this book is the incredible devotion of so many people to professing and living the Lord’s Gospel truths even as they were being torn with pincers, broken on the rack, and eventually burned alive. Oh, to have even a tenth of their love, their fortitude, and their courage!

Helen Ellerbe’s well-written and scholarly book can be read for free online. In only 188 large-print pages, she makes a compelling case that Christianity’s greatest sin against humanity might well be the fact that it has warped the very meaning of what it is to be human. She says, “Ignoring the dark side of Christian history perpetuates the idea that oppression and atrocity are the inevitable results of an inherently evil or savage human nature. There have been… peaceful cultures and civilizations, however, which functioned without oppressive hierarchical structures. It is clearly not human nature that causes people to hurt one another. People of gentler cultures share the same human nature as we of Western civilization; it is our beliefs that differ. Tolerant and more peaceful cultures have respected both masculine and feminine faces of God, both heavenly and earthly representations of divinity. It is the limited belief in a singular supremacy and only one face of God that has resulted in tyranny and brutality.” And she notes that, “The Christian church has left a legacy, a world view, that permeates every aspect of Western society, both secular and religious. It is a legacy that fosters sexism, racism, the intolerance of difference, and the desecration of the natural environment. The Church, throughout much of its history, has demonstrated a disregard for human freedom, dignity, and self-determination. It has attempted to control, contain and confine spirituality, the relationship between an individual and God. As a result, Christianity has helped to create a society in which people are alienated not only from each other but also from the divine.”

In Ellerbe’s learned view, all of Western history was shaped in awful ways by the power of the Christian Church. “As it took over leadership in Europe and the Roman Empire collapsed, the Church all but wiped out education, technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce. The Church amassed enormous wealth as the rest of society languished in the dark ages. When dramatic social changes after the turn of the millennium brought an end to the isolation of the era, the Church fought to maintain its supremacy and control. It rallied an increasingly dissident society against perceived enemies, instigating attacks upon Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Jews. When these crusades failed to subdue dissent, the Church turned its force against European society itself, launching a brutal assault upon southern France and instituting the Inquisition.”

Then came the Protestant Reformation and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. “Only during the Reformation did the populace of Europe adopt more than a veneer of Christianity. The Reformation terrified people with threats of the devil and witchcraft. The common perception that the physical world was imbued with God’s presence and with magic was replaced during the Reformation with a new belief that divine assistance was no longer possible. … It was a three hundred year holocaust against all who dared believe in divine assistance and magic that finally secured the conversion of Europe to … Christianity.” In Ellerbe’s view, the distant God of monumental power that Roman Christianity invented in order to establish and maintain its control of society became the model for modern human hierarchical dominance. And every Christian position on any topic was calculated primarily to enhance a rigid control of human society that is contrary to humankind’s essentially spiritual nature.

It was my initial reading of Ellerbe’s book that made me first understand that Christianity is deliberately antithetical to the Gospel teachings of Jesus on love, forgiveness, and spiritual growth.

My college major meant that my focus had long been on the first five hundred years of Christianity. So Ellerbe’s illumination of the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, and the Reformation was a revelation for me! Let’s look here at three summary conclusions very relevant to our present day that are the product of Helen Ellerbe’s work:

  • Throughout Christian history, Jesus has been used but not studied. Fear and suffering were the religion’s means of control, so the Lord’s suffering to redeem us from God’s perfectly justifiable wrath was all that was taught. I have long been struck by the fact that nearly all Christians are amazingly ignorant of the Lord’s Gospel words. Now I understand that His teachings are irrelevant and frankly inconvenient to Christianity as it still is practiced.
  • The worst aspects of modern society are the result of Christianity’s deliberate design. Christianity’s hierarchical nature during most of its history and its strict division and ranking of people by sex, race, age, class, and occupation, together with our modern materialist sense that if a God exists, He is separate from and even indifferent to the world, are all rooted in the Christian hierarchical and power-based model.
  • Our awful tolerance of brutality and war is a product of longstanding Christian practices. It has been estimated that more than twenty-five million innocent people have suffered death by torture and massacre at the hands of people who professed to be ardent followers of Jesus acting in obedience to God. And if you can read that sentence without distress, then you have made Helen Ellerbe’s point.

I feel compelled to say here, as Ellerbe also says, that in spite of it all there have been many good Christians who have done some wonderful things. But of course, then we must also add that if Christianity had always concentrated on sharing the Gospel teachings of Jesus and never been seduced by worldly goals, then perhaps the many more love-based works of His followers as they lived His Gospel teachings could long since have brought the kingdom of God on earth.

Ellerbe sums up her discoveries by saying, “The dark side of Christian history has been and continues to be about the domination and control of spirituality and human freedom… Christians built an organization that from its inception encouraged not freedom and self-determination, but obedience and conformity. To that end, any means were justified. Grounded in the belief in a singular, authoritarian and punishing God, … Christians created a church that demanded singular authority and punished those who disobeyed. During the Dark Ages, civilization collapsed as the Church took control of education, science, medicine, technology and the arts. Crusaders marched into the Middle East killing and destroying in the name of the one Christian God. The Inquisition established a precedent in the Middle Ages for the systematic policing and terrorization of society. The Protestant and Catholic Counter Reformation sparked wars where Christians slaughtered other Christians, each convinced that theirs was the one and only true path… In 1785 Thomas Jefferson wrote: ‘Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support error and roguery all over the earth.’” Amen, my precious friend.

 

John Paul II photo credit: Beyond Forgetting <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/23342600@N00/8226888″>POPE JOHN PAUL II</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Requiem Mass photo credit: Catholic Church (England and Wales) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/27340278@N03/49033160962″>Deceased Clergy Requiem Mass in Westminster Cathedral</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Conflagration photo credit: SebastianBartoschek <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/50192230@N07/40694870523″>Beim Osterfeuer</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Burning buildings photo credit: John Westrock <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/13639387@N05/48804446556″>For All The Quiet Times We Shiver</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Creating a Monstrous God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christianity is deeply rooted in fear-based ideas that have nothing to do with Jesus. Indeed, nearly every Christian notion is an active repudiation of the Lord’s Gospel teachings! We have talked about awful elements of Christianity that came out of the first-millennium councils, while so far ignoring the rotten fruit of the sixteenth-century Protestant Reformation.

This lapse has been my fault. I grew up in a cozy Protestant church with a much-loved minister who preached the Lord’s words, and then I went off to college with the goal of becoming a minister, too. There I studied Christianity’s beginnings, and I was often horrified at what I was learning. If you like hot dogs, never watch them being made! By the time I fell in love with and married a Catholic, I no longer trusted the religion enough to give my life to it. My conversion to Catholicism for my husband’s sake was sincere. And my twenty-five years as a Catholic were for the most part ardent and heartfelt, despite the fact that by then I was so steeped in the Gospel words of Jesus that much of Catholicism seemed nonsensical to me. I was sure the scholars must know more than I did! And my childhood minister had so well succeeded in making me see his Protestantism as the gentler flavor of Christianity, the vanilla to Catholicism’s chocolate, that returning to all those first-millennium details, to confessions and genuflecting and crossing oneself, to incense and to priests in brocade, felt for a long time like simply taking Christianity as seriously as it was meant to be taken.

I have been reluctant to talk about Protestantism. I haven’t much studied the Reformation, and my gentle childhood religion has for most of my life made me think the cruelest edges had long since been worn away. Surely no one still believed all those awful fear-based lies? The occasional fire-and-brimstone ministers whose words I read out of curiosity were only the sincere but misguided ending to a long chain of human-made horrors. But then recently I read an article which suggested the centuries-old battle between Calvinism and Arminianism still is underway! And if there is even a whiff of John Calvin’s movement polluting any modern church, then Protestantism remains the enemy of Jesus and the awful defamer of the one true God.

Calvinism demonstrates the fact that the human dogmas which formed Christianity from the founding of the Roman Church four centuries after the Lord’s crucifixion then continued to ever more warp the religion. We have talked about the worst of these first-millennium errors, including Adam’s original sin, God’s judgment and our possible damnation, and the idea that Jesus died to save us from God’s wrath. None of this comes from the teachings of Jesus, and in fact all of it contradicts those teachings. And Jesus foresaw the likelihood that His divine movement based in love was going to be corrupted by man-made ideas. He said, “Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them, may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall” (MT 7:24-27). He warned us that clergymen preaching human lies that were meant to advance mere human goals would seek to use His movement for their own purposes. He said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

The sand of false and fear-based dogmas on which the Roman church was built could not help but to grow around it trees whose only product was thorns and thistles. Modern Calvinists refer to “The Five Points of Calvinism” as “T.U.L.I.P.” Alas, among the thorns and thistles that were already thick on those Christian trees, the Protestant Reformation later proceeded to grow one ungodly flower. I will summarize the five Calvinist points below, but my few words cannot do them justice! I urge you to follow this link and read about T.U.L.I.P. in the words of an ardent believer. Behold the monstrously evil God that is Calvinism’s grotesque creation:

  • TOTAL DEPRAVITY: Every human being is dead in sin, and at the root of our state of sin is Adam’s original sin. Only God can save us, and without that effort on God’s part we cannot even choose to do anything good. We can never be worthy to earn God’s grace.
  • UNCONDITIONAL ELECTION: Before the world was made, God chose to give eternal life to just a few of the people He created, and He eternally rejects the rest. God did not seek or find anything good in His chosen few as a reason for saving them.
  • LIMITED ATONEMENT: Christ’s death on the cross paid for our sins, but it did that for only those few chosen people that God had decided to save before the earth was formed. The atonement is limited to God’s Elect. And, “That is the only Gospel because that is the Bible.”
  • IRRESISTIBLE GRACE: The Elect are saved and will go to heaven, whether they want to go or not. God’s will is stronger, and it will prevail. Apparently, though, if we happen to be among the few that God created to be saved, we will enjoy being in heaven in the end.
  • PRESERVATION OF THE SAINTS: God preserves those that He created as the Elect. “Once you are saved, you are always saved.” This is true even if you do the most evil things! But we are hastily assured that the true Elect simply cannot be evil.

No more sadistic, depraved, and vehemently anti-Jesus set of teachings can be imagined. Read that list again. Read it with further elaboration written by a man of God who ardently believes it. What the Calvinists did was to decide that their early translations of the Bible were the literal, complete, and inerrant Word of God for all time, and they ranked every word in their Bibles as equal in importance to the Gospel words of Jesus. Then they found some words in their Bibles that they read as supporting these appalling ideas, and they formed an explicitly fear-based theology based upon a barbaric human-made God. They have poisoned Christianity with this nonsense for centuries! But you and I have sat at the feet of Jesus. We have listened to His genuine words in a modern translation of the Gospels. Please, if you can, help me to see what any of this has to do with Him?

And these are not fringe ideas! Many modern Protestant denominations are still based nominally in Calvinist thought, including my cozy childhood church, which is part of the United Church of Christ. The fact that I never heard a whiff of Calvinism throughout my growing-up was an accident of the fact that the minister who baptized me spent the next quarter-century serving my church. Reverend Stephen Turrell of blessed memory taught us to love and to follow Jesus; but given his denomination, he could as easily have taught us the terrors of Calvinism.

Fear and love are polar opposites. You cannot love what you fear. No one who believes the lies of Calvinism can ever come to love its monstrous God. And in fact, believing T.U.L.I.P. is an active bar to their learning to love the genuine God, and even to their ever coming to know and love Jesus.

Within a century after John Calvin and his followers had codified them, these doctrines had begun to spur a sharp reaction, led by a movement generally referred to as Arminianism. Under this more relaxed doctrine, each of the five points of Calvinism is softened enough to allow for the possibility of universal salvation. But still, we all carry Adam’s sin, and Jesus still must die to save us from the judgment of a wrathful God.

I hadn’t intended to write about Calvinism. I had a different post half-written when Thomas dropped this topic in my lap. At first I resisted it in the whiny way that sometimes you’ve got to resist when you don’t want to do what a boss or a parent is making you do, and you know you’re going to have to do it but you won’t do it without a fight. I’ve never studied the Protestant Reformation! And I hate this topic. Give me a break! But even though forty-eight hours ago I was sulkily staring at a blank page, I realize now that this post is an essential follow-up to what we said last week. All of Christianity is fear-based and tainted. When the Bishops at the Council of Nicaea in 325 officially took over the Lord’s gentle Way that had prospered in many different forms for centuries after His crucifixion and made of it one fear-based religion, they were building on human sand. The Romans were false prophets in sheep’s clothing, to be sure! They were vines and trees so corrupted that their only fruit could be thorns and thistles, and then eventually John Calvin’s poisonous T.U.L.I.P.

But thanks to the gift of eternal revelation and renewal granted by the living God, we are able to look at the evidence freshly and see what is false and what is true. As the veil between worlds continues to thin, we are in good enough contact now with those that we used to think were dead that we are no longer dependent on the false Christian prophets and all their old fear-based lies. At last we can go back directly to Jesus! And His Gospel teachings are the only way to ever build a movement based in love that can be God’s long-planned instrument and help to bring the kingdom of God on earth.

It is time for a brand-new Reformation. We can rebuild God’s house upon the rock of truth, and plant around it vines and trees that will bear the Lord’s perfect love-based fruit. As the Jewish scholar Hillel the Elder more or less said two thousand years ago, “If not us, who? If not now, when?”

  

Red tulips photo credit: nikontino <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/61136163@N07/13600910425″>20140403-SPR_2405</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
John Calvin photo credit: Abode of Chaos <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40936370@N00/9932970573″>Jean Calvin, painted portrait DDC_8750</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tulips with trees photo credit: Steve Walser <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/93693827@N00/28446697239″>Around the Bend</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

What Is The Gospel?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Nearly all the people now living who profess to love and follow Jesus have no awareness of who He is and why He chose to be born on earth. That fact is heartbreaking, when the truth about Jesus and His mission is so glorious! The only evidence we have now of the Lord and His mission is His genuine words as they are given in Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, the four books of the Bible which are commonly referred to as the Gospels. And to be frank, I am a skeptic when it comes to strictly believing the words of someone who lived two thousand years ago and whose words were passed down orally for two generations after His death, then translated through two more very different languages before you and I first got to read them! But the greatest discovery of my life has been the fact that those that we used to think were dead uniformly confirm that the Gospel teachings of Jesus are the most essential core human truths of all.

I have shared with you what Jesus actually tells us in the Gospels, and how it is that Christianity has managed to get the Lord’s mission and message so wrong. For its first few centuries, Christianity was a movement based in the teachings of Jesus, and there were many variations on those teachings that were accepted under that movement’s broad tent. Ideas that are central to Christianity now were very much minority views for the first five centuries after He died! For example, more than six million Christian burials were conducted in the Roman catacombs up until the early fifth century C.E.; and in all that time, according to the nineteenth-century scholar John Ruskin, there is “Not a cross as a symbol in the Catacombs. The earliest Latin cross is on the tomb of the Empress Galla Placidia, 451 AD. No picture of the crucifixion until the Ninth Century, nor any portable crucifix until long after. To the early Christians Christ was living, the one agonized hour was lost in the thought of his glory and triumph. The fall of theology and Christian thought dates from the error of dwelling upon his death instead of his life.”

Jesus tells us in the Gospels that His teachings were meant to begin the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth. The fact that instead Christianity soon became a deeply fear-based religion is due to the fact that Roman Emperors adopted the Christian movement and imposed upon it their own orthodoxies to help them better control the faithful. Over the next millennium, the Roman Church stamped out more than three dozen differing interpretations of the Lord’s Gospel words at a cost of more than twenty-five million mostly brutal deaths. Even worse from the long perspective of history, the religion they erected in the name of Jesus has almost nothing to do with Jesus.

Let’s look briefly at a few of the false Christian teachings that don’t have roots in the Gospels, and in fact are entirely untrue according to those that we used to think were dead:

  • Jesus died to save us from God’s judgment for our sins. But the Lord directly tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges us, and the dead tell us that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being.
  • If we don’t accept Jesus as our personal savior, we will burn in hell for eternity. The not-really-dead tell us that in fact there is no fiery hell. There is what Jesus called an “outer darkness,” but that is just a temporary banishment. More to the point, our own refusal to genuinely forgive and love is the primary reason why we might end up there.
  • Those who are not Christians cannot go to heaven. Not true. Everyone makes it to the same afterlife, no matter what religion they professed on earth or even if they followed no religion at all. There is no Christian ceremony that makes any discernible afterlife difference.
  • Merit in the afterlife is based on avoiding sin, and on God’s forgiveness of our sins. But the dead say that “sin” is just a human concept. In fact, there is evidence in the Gospels that Jesus came to abolish the very notion of sin! No, the dead tell us that our advancement in the afterlife is purely based upon the extent to which we become ever more perfectly loving.
  • Sinning separates us from God. Those that we used to think were dead say that sin is the breaking of human rules, when in fact with God there are no rules beyond the law of perfect love. After our deaths we will be judged by ourselves alone, and entirely based upon whether and the extent to which each thing we did in our lives was loving.

There are other false Christian dogmas, too, that are not derived from the teachings of Jesus as they are expressed in the Gospels and affirmed by those that we used to think were dead. But these five bogus human ideas are the core teachings of modern Christianity! All of them are intensely fear-based, and all of them flat-out contradict the genuine Gospel teachings of Jesus. Fear is the polar opposite of love. You cannot love what you fear. And for so long as these five teachings are included in the dogmas of modern Christianity, the religion will continue to debase and defile the very people Jesus came to serve.

This travesty is further complicated by the fact that the Christian leaders who most ardently preach fear-based falsehoods like the five listed here will generally claim that in doing so they are “preaching the Gospel.” They exhort their flocks to go out and share these human lies as “the Gospel of Jesus Christ,” when in fact they are no such thing!

What does the word “Gospel” actually mean? Here is one dictionary’s definition: “The word gospel comes from the Old English word god meaning ‘good’ and spel meaning ‘news, a story.’ In Christianity, the term ‘good news’ refers to the story of Jesus Christ’s birth, death, and resurrection.” When used most strictly, the word “Gospel” refers to just those first four books of the New Testament which detail the words and the life of Jesus. “Gospel” doesn’t refer to the rest of the Bible, and it certainly doesn’t refer to any later-established Christian ideas! The genuine story of Jesus as it is set forth in the Biblical Books of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is Good News indeed! It is arguably the greatest news that ever has been given to humankind, but almost no Christian preacher on earth is currently sharing that good news with anyone. Even worse, many Christian clergymen have so misused the word “Gospel” that it has become for many a term based in fear. To quote one of these well-meaning but deluded men of God: “There is no other issue as important as how to be saved. That is why the Gospel, the ‘Good News,’ the death, burial, and Resurrection of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ must be taught without compromise.”

This terrible sullying of the term “Gospel” is at the root of Christianity’s current decay. In the United States, only 65% of adults now identify themselves as Christians, a decline of twelve percentage points over just the past decade. And during that decade I have heard from many who are in that twelve percent, all lifelong Christians who have fallen away in desperation and despair. The reasons they give for leaving Christianity generally boil down to these four:

  • They can no longer believe Christianity’s teachings, and especially the five points outlined above that are not based in the teachings of Jesus and are also said by the dead to be false.
  • They love the Jesus they first met as children, but they don’t find Him in the pews as adults.
  • They find many of the Christian faithful to be cliquish, judgmental, and “un-Christian.”
  • They find in modern Christianity only rules and dogmas, not spiritual food.

When clergymen claim for their bogus use of the word “Gospel” a divine provenance that does not exist, they are polluting the Lord’s sacred message. To use a term that many of them are quick to apply to those who follow Jesus, these preachers are doing the Devil’s work.

This confusion about what is and what is not the genuine Gospel of the Lord is greasing Christianity’s slide toward oblivion. In simpler times, people were easily led to adopt the fear that lies at the heart of modern Christianity, and to accept with it the relief of knowing that they had a Get Out of Hell Free Card by virtue of the Lord’s sacrificial death. Even as late as a few decades ago, this false “Gospel” was widely believed; and if hell was real, then warming pews was a reasonable price to pay to escape it. Now, however, the abundance of afterlife information and its easy dissemination via the Internet, when combined with the fact that twenty-first-century Westerners are generally more sophisticated, means that the old trick of “scare ‘em, then lure ‘em to church to save ‘em” that maintained Christianity for two millennia simply cannot work anymore.

But the coming fall of Christianity can be a great opportunity for Jesus! The only way to fight errors and lies is with the truth. Those who are being driven away from Christianity still retain a positive opinion of Jesus, who has an approval rating in the United States that stands at 90%. Even God’s approval rating in the same survey is just 52%! The Gospel teachings of Jesus are precisely what we need if we are ever to break humankind’s eternal cycle of fear, rage, and despair. Jesus has the answer, and He is much beloved; all He needs is a more efficient way to bring His true Gospel to humankind. And fortunately, that is an area where you and I can help!

My next book, The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught, is due out early next year.

 

Jesus with children photo credit: Lilmsmrtas <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/38792568@N04/7445853274″>Stained Glass</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

Where Is Up?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It is hard for us to understand how there could be an afterlife that is full of all the people who ever have lived on earth. After all, we can’t see it. We can’t even really imagine where it is. And until we are confident about how the afterlife physically fits with what we know, we cannot be certain that we never will die.

We have talked here about details of the greater reality. We even have turned our search to better understand it into a weekly podcast that stands at 345 episodes and counting. But no matter how researchers have tried to make it easier for you to envision the greater reality, the truth is so different from what you are being given to believe by science and religions and your own lying eyes that I have lately been seeking an easier way to help you get your mind around what is true. Let’s try it again. And let’s make it simple!

Imagine you are sitting in a boat in the middle of the ocean. As you focus on all that endless water, your eyes assure you that you are alone. Then suddenly, a whale breaches right in front of you. Your eyes see it, but it appears and then right away it disappears. Unless you understand the nature of water, you have trouble believing in that whale; and you certainly flat-out cannot believe that he swims now right beneath your feet with billions of his closest friends!

The empty-seeming air around you similarly teems with living beings. Your eyes can’t perceive them, so when one of them breaches into this material reality – perhaps as a spirit glimpsed or a survival sign, or perhaps as a friend’s near-death experience – you see that event as isolated, and not as a further concrete demonstration of a complex reality even greater and more complex than that endless depth of ocean lying beyond what your eyes can see.

When we examine nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from thousands of people that we used to think were dead, and we then combine what they tell us with a raft of amazingly consistent insights from quantum mechanics and other scientific disciplines, we get a wonderfully detailed picture of a complex greater reality that might be twenty times the size of this material universe. Let’s sum up in ten basic points what researchers have so far learned is true:

  • Consciousness is all that exists. The only thing that objectively exists is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality that we experience in a limited way as human consciousness. Everything else that seems to exist is manifested by that base universal Consciousness (which we often capitalize now, since at its highest vibration it is the genuine God).
  • Consciousness exists in a range of emotional vibrations, from fear and rage at the lowest and slowest to perfect love at the highest and fastest vibrations. So human emotion is immensely important! Far from being just an artifact of our individual minds, what we each experience as human emotion turns out to be the literal energy that powers the base creative Consciousness. The higher consciousness vibrates, the more positive and more powerful it becomes, so controlling human emotion on the personal and also on the aggregate level is going to be essential to our ever being able to control anything!
  • Everything that we perceive to be real and solid is continuously manifested by Consciousness. We have talked here about the fact that God is not a Big Guy with a beard and thunderbolts, but rather the evidence indicates that God is a Collective of Perfected Beings. And since there is no objective time, reality was not created once and left to develop on its own, but rather reality is being repeatedly manifested, together with all its apparently past timeline events.
  • Matter that seems solid is not solid at all. Matter is composed of “particles,” which are in fact just minute vortices of energy encompassing empty spaces. If you could put a tiny camera inside an atom, you would find nothing for it to photograph since even the tiniest subatomic particles are only whirling vortices of energy.
  • This universe which is composed of matter is less than five percent of what physicists know or have come to surmise exists. They call the rest of reality “dark” matter and energy, but only because it doesn’t produce or react to photons of material light. And physicists haven’t much studied that ninety-five percent of what they believe exists, because they freakishly consider their mandate to be just the study of whatever is material. So they randomly guess that dark matter must contain particles in the form of hypothetical quarks, gluons, neutrinos, leptons, or some other random material rubbish of no real importance. But the fact that dark matter and energy don’t interact with photons of light suggests that they don’t contain material particles, which means that all those scientific guesses must be wrong. And the economy of this material universe is breathtakingly efficient and precise! That fact pretty much guarantees that whatever dark matter and energy are, they are probably not made of just rubbish particles.
  • This material universe is the only part of reality where objective time and space exist. What we experience as space and time is associated only with particle-based matter, so in the 95% of reality that doesn’t contain particle-based matter, the notion of time’s passage and the concept of distance are both optional and flexible. This means that it is reasonable to say that the non-material greater reality beyond this material universe is at once both infinitely large in size and smaller than a pencil dot. It also probably means that if anything ever exists, then it always exists.
  • The ninety-five percent of reality which exists beyond this material universe is almost certainly what those who study the greater reality call the astral plane. The astral is not matter-based, and it seems to be much greater in relative size than this whole material universe. The astral is humankind’s true home! It’s an inconceivably vast and mind-bogglingly complex wild-west sort of assembly of experiences, places, ideas, and states of mind that is as varied, astonishing, and teeming with life as is that silent ocean beneath your boat. And except at its lowest reaches, it is far more love-based than is this material universe. Out-of-body experiences and near-death experiences are adventures which occur in the astral plane, and what we who live in this material reality call “supernatural phenomena” are simply instances where events occurring in the astral areas will “breach” into our awareness and out of it again.
  • The astral is precisely where we are now, and it is stratified into nearly infinite levels (or channels, or dimensions) by its limitless vibrational frequencies. This entire material universe is just a limited vibrational sub-set in a vast energy-based spectrum of Consciousness vibrations! The easiest way to envision how the greater reality works is to think of the fact that all around you now are hundreds of TV signals, each at a slightly different vibrational frequency. If your mind were a TV set, it could pick up one of those channels and there tune in to a solid-seeming reality. And the plain fact is that right now, your mind is tuned to that body you believe is you in this material level of reality (which is at or near reality’s lowest vibratory rate). This is why you are unaware of all the other vibratory levels of Consciousness which exist in precisely the same time and place!
  • Each eternal human mind, whether it operates for now in a material body or in a non-material astral body, is tuned to its own vibrational frequency on the range between abject fear and perfect love. And while our minds easily can tune to lower frequencies than whatever their preset set-point is, we find it unbearable to try to go higher because the consciousness energy above our present natural set-point batters us unbearably. But we want to go higher! So most of us are trying to raise our personal set-point farther away from the fear end and closer to the perfect-love end of the consciousness spectrum. Researchers believe that this is why the material universe even exists. Matter gives us a level of reality that our minds cannot so easily mess with, so we can experience much more negativity here than in nearly all the rest of reality, and we can push against it and thereby raise our personal spiritual vibrations. The process is a bit more complicated than that, but not much! This is why we plan our lives on earth. This is why our learning to recognize our own spiritual growth while we are in bodies even matters!
  • The minds of people who die on earth return to a limited area of the astral plane that we call “the afterlife.” You might think of the afterlife as a kind of portal between this material universe and the vast non-material realities; and like the gigantic astral of which it is a part, the afterlife exists precisely where we are now. Like the rest of the astral, it consists of stratified Consciousness, from the lowest vibration (which is abject fear) to the highest (which is perfect love). Once back in the afterlife, we pick up beautiful bodies which are non-material and mind-created but still solid, and we can move freely from the afterlife into the greater astral and back again. We can travel to the ends of the material universe and through the whole vast astral instantly, and by mind alone! But people attached to bodies on earth and having a near-death experience or otherwise traveling in the astral cannot enter the afterlife area and then leave it again. The dead tell us that death is always a one-way trip, and there is evidence that this is true.

I had hoped to make a quick course in the greater reality only part of what we would discuss this week! But this is a gigantic topic – it’s the most gigantic topic there is – so even condensed, it takes a lot of words to help you begin to get your mind around it. Please read these ten points several times. Think about them; envision how they fit together; ask questions if questions occur to you; then wait a day and read them all carefully again. Rinse and repeat. As you ever more thoroughly internalize them, try to notice that you are beginning to inhabit all of reality now, and not just the tiny part that your sensory organs tell you exists!

Those of us who have by now learned to fully inhabit the greater reality are not surprised, and in fact we are delighted when occasionally a whale will breach. Just this past week, someone sent me a picture she had taken while she was photographing fall foliage. There was a smudge on the road, so she enlarged it. OMG, what was that? She enlarged it again. Our expert friend, Dr. R. Craig Hogan, has confirmed that this is the way photos of genuine beings often present themselves. Susan Stewart and David DeLattre saw nothing remarkable when they took the picture, but they happened to catch someone (who may have been Susan’s mother) briefly breaching into our energy-level of reality. A picture snapped a split-second before or after this one might have shown more defined features, perhaps a solid and detailed form, or else perhaps nothing but a barren road. This is just the way our true reality works.

 

Tranquil ocean photo credit: TylerFrost Photography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/163162514@N05/45722763821″>Tranquil Sunset</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Whale breaching photo credit: Quick Shot Photos <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/48583839@N07/48708440683″>Breaching Whale</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Whale’s tail photo credit: denisbin <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82134796@N03/48900547522″>Hervey Bay near Fraser Island. Close up detail of the tail of a giant humpback whale.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
School of fish photo credit: Phuketian.S <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/124790945@N06/48610828341″>Surin and Similan archipelago, yacht cruise and underwater photos IMG_2488PSC</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Sea turtle photo credit: TarikB <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/37996583025@N01/49089662″>Green Back Turtle, West Coast Barbados</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Reef life photo credit: zsispeo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/14486836@N06/38163509322″>Pictus Coralblenny – Ecsenius pictus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Spirit photographs photo credit: photo taken by Susan Stewart and David DeLattre on the afternoon of Sunday, October 13, 2019 near Allegheny State Park in southwestern New York State, and enlarged.

Planning For Spiritual Growth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

This universe exists to give us a place where we can begin to grow spiritually. It may serve other purposes too, but I haven’t seen good ideas about that; and it is clear now that this material universe is key to the process of helping us all to embark upon an eternity of ever more glorious spiritual growth. The material universe is a spiritual nursery. That fact is enough purpose, all by itself!

The spiritual development that happens on earth is at a basic level. We talked last week  about the process of moving away from fear and toward more perfect love, so as our vibrations rise we come to see that the separations among us are artificial. Then, bingo! We have learned our first great lesson – we now understand that we all are one being! – so we have finished elementary school. We are ready to move from long division on to algebra, as it were, and from there to the ever more esoteric schools in the greater reality that can take us through the spiritual equivalents of trigonometry and advanced calculus, and then far beyond to ever greater spiritual levels that we cannot now imagine.

Coming to earth to grow spiritually, even at this basic level, is a careful process for each of us. First comes considerable planning, and that planning will make up the bulk of this post; but I thought you might like to know what happens for each of us once the planning is done. The person about to enter a new earth-lifetime then goes through the non-material and non-time equivalent of the following steps:

  • We strip down to our limited earth-minds. Just as we would strip down to shorts, T-shirt, and sneakers if we were heading for a physical gym, so as we prepare to go to the spiritual gym that is a life on earth, we strip down to just the parts of our minds that are conducive to rapid spiritual growth. We leave behind as much as eighty percent of our vast, eternal minds, so we leave there beyond our conscious reach a great deal of reasoning power and vast stores of learning and our memories of multiple lifetimes. Scientists call all of that our subconscious mind, but in fact it is our superconscious mind.
  • We shrink ourselves. No one seems to know quite how this happens, but we go through a process of infantilization that further reduces our minds to the conscious awareness of newborns. We do keep some greater awareness, though, even though at first we lack a way to express it. I vividly recall the infant moment when I happened to be naked, so I checked out my body for what may have been the first time. And something important was missing! My thought was, “Oh. I’m the other kind this time.” What I recall most of all is how devastated I felt that I was going to have to go through an entire lifetime as that other gender!
  • We go into a peaceful holding state. Once our process of life-planning and all these preparatory steps have been completed, we wait in a separate limbo for the conception of our body to happen. Then at the moment of conception, or soon thereafter, we attach to the resulting zygote. And our new life in a physical body begins.

Two quick reminders:

  • Very few of us will return home and right away start to plan another earth-lifetime. Nearly everyone relaxes for awhile in the endless wonderland that is the afterlife, since this is playtime, R&R on steroids, and more fun than you ever have had in any lifetime! Nearly everyone stays in the afterlife at least until all those who were important in the lifetime just completed have made it back home again.
  • Since objectively there is no time, the new lifetime being planned is not necessarily later in earth’s timeline than was the lifetime just completed. We are told that we sometimes choose to incarnate into an earlier or a much later time if the spiritual lessons we hope to learn can be most easily experienced there, and if a body to accommodate us can be found. We don’t know the extent to which this “reincarnating out of time” occurs, but the notion does tend to make your eyes cross!

It is only in recent decades that those who study the afterlife have come to understand the extent to which our lives on earth are planned. This is an area where I claim no expertise, but there is one generally acknowledged expert, so if your interest is piqued by what I say here, you might want to read Robert Schwartz’s Your Soul’s Plan. I am told his book is excellent, but I haven’t read it myself because – as is true of many books in this field – my primary guide will not allow me to read it. His dissuading me from reading a book means that its information includes some ideas with which he disagrees, and here my hunch is that the mechanism of the life-planning process outlined in Schwartz’s book may be more uniform than the process actually seems to be if you pick it up from many afterlife communications. Or Schwartz might use the religious term “karma,” which Thomas thinks is too simplistic. In any event, I am going to share with you how I understand this process to work, and I’ll also give you our own planning process for this lifetime as an atypical example. The steps outlined here don’t have to happen in this order, and in fact they are usually somewhat simultaneous; but here is what is routinely reported:

  • The life-review that happens when we return from a lifetime is often our springboard to another eventual earth-lifetime. We ponder what we have learned and where we have fallen short, and we discuss it with our guides and some of the key people from our lifetime just ended. We might take classes, and in general we start to shape the kinds of lessons that we most need to learn in order to grow beyond the need to keep coming back.
  • As we begin to shape a new upcoming lifetime, we network with friends and contacts who might join us. People with whom we have incarnated before, especially people with whom we have shared troubled lifetimes, generally are the ones most likely to want to give it another go with us. We also choose and are chosen by a primary guide who is attracted to and best suited to helping us with the most important of the lessons we are planning.
  • As we assemble our team, refine our needed lessons, and narrow down our options for entry to earth’s timeline, we begin to flesh out the life-details. All the people who will be important to us in the lifetime we are planning also will need their own spirit guides and their own key players; and all those key players also will need their own key players and their own guides, so our meetings for working out our life-details can soon become gigantic. Some of our key players are already in bodies, so many of these meetings will occur during earth-nights and in the general astral. For whatever reason, I have long imagined these meetings occurring outside, under trees and around enormous tables. An interested Sixth-Level Elder or two might have been invited to give advice and set the tone; and there soon are multiple deals being done as all the players work out their own lives. You might think of this process as something like gaming out the planned role of each separate piece in a hundred-dimensional game of chess.
  • As we grow spiritually, we tend to want to attempt more difficult earth-lives. Life on earth is rough duty! The more we can grow in one lifetime, the fewer times we will need to come back, so many plan lives that are too difficult rather than too easy. In fact, the most ambitious life-plans generally require approval by a Council of Elders.
  • We modify our plans throughout our lives. We meet frequently with our guides as our bodies sleep, tweaking our life-plan as things go well or poorly and as new opportunities arise. By the time we die, those well-thought-out life-plans often are nearly unrecognizable!

Some who are nearing the end of their needed incarnations will plan to live a life for the greater good. My primary guide was one who planned such a lifetime. As I understand it now, he came into what should have been his last earth-lifetime resolved to do three things: he would set the record straight for Jesus, abolish slavery in the New World, and help to develop a society based in personal freedom and empowerment. And for various reasons, although he tried, Thomas Jefferson never managed to achieve any of these goals to his own satisfaction. Looking back after his death, his conclusion was that he had had too much power and he hadn’t used it well, so he was one of the few who choose to plunge right back into a new earth-lifetime. He lived an additional life as just some guy in Wales so he could get himself “back into balance.”

With his three big goals as Jefferson still unmet, once his Wales persona died, my primary guide turned to an old comrade with whom he had shared seventeen lifetimes. His comrade was not as spiritually advanced, but still he was eager to stop incarnating, so he agreed to incarnate under Thomas’s guidance with three similar big goals in mind. Thomas was a rookie as a primary guide, and his protégé was a rookie at trying big things; but as the twentieth century began, and as the effort to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet got well underway, they began to assemble that protégé’s next earth-lifetime. It was Thomas who made all their big decisions:

  • His protégé had almost always been male, but this time he was going to need to be female. As they roughed out their plans, it became clear to Thomas that a man doing and saying these things would attract more opposition than a woman would. Especially an elderly woman!
  • His protégé would need to incarnate outside their shared soul group. Most of us plan to incarnate repeatedly as part of the same vast clan, but Thomas’s junior friend needed to come in at a specific time and place. A same-soul-group body at the right time and place would not be available, so we gave up the need for familiar parents. In the end, I was conceived by what to us was a random unmarried couple and born to them seven months after their wedding.
  • Thomas wanted to distance himself from his famous incarnation, so he tried to keep me from consciously remembering our Jefferson connection. But then the opportunity arose for me to channel the Master Himself. Thomas got me selected, and he shepherded me though two decades of preparation; but when the time came, I refused to channel Jesus. I thought I was completely unworthy. So with a sigh, Thomas broke into my daytime life, told me who he had been, and hit me upside the head with the fact that this was an assignment I could not refuse. Channeling the Lord was the greatest experience of all my many lifetimes!

Your comments and emails over recent weeks suggest that I haven’t sufficiently shared with you how the greater reality seems to us to work. We will try to remedy that failing next week….

 

Old plans photo credit: Omar Omar <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51186333@N00/28905442170″>Old Plans_2251</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Man working out photo credit: A&A Photography Services <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/76186789@N02/8731894600″>Pain is temporary, Failure is forever.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Round table photo credit: jonas_k <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/67715696@N00/2311309574″>Staatsrat (round table)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Planning meeting intro photo credit: UK Prime Minister <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/49707497@N06/48188003242″>No 10 Pride reception 2019</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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