Author: Roberta Grimes

Am I Growing Spiritually?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

As we continue to talk about spiritual growth, I have been hearing from more and more people who ask how they will be able to tell when they are growing spiritually. I used to wonder about that, too! But having worked at my own spiritual growth and been amazed both by how easy it is and how very different it makes you feel, I can answer this question now with confidence. And I know you really need to know! But my problem in sharing what I have learned is that everything else that I write has been assembled in the course of extensive research. Today, though, I will be sharing what is arguably the most important thing that I ever will write for you, and of necessity it will be based primarily on my own experience.

This universe exists to give us a place where we can push against negativity in order to raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. The process of spiritual growth at our level is actually no more complex than that! No matter how hard this might seem to us, we are not talking spiritual graduate school here. Nor even spiritual college. Nor high school. This universe is a good and rigorous spiritual elementary school. We come here to get ready for what amounts to spiritual junior high, at which point we can cease to incarnate because we will no longer need negativity to foster what will be our eternal adventure of ever more glorious spiritual growth.

And here is why raising your personal spiritual vibration must be your main goal now:

  • What we experience as human consciousness is a limited subset of the base creative force that continuously manifests this universe.
  • Consciousness exists in a range of vibrations that we experience as abject fear and hatred at the lowest and slowest up to perfect love at the highest vibration.
  • Consciousness is infinitely creative! On earth, fear and rage in too many minds will create wars, cruelty, hatred, oppression, and their correlate disasters in the natural world; while enough love in our individual minds can bring the kingdom of God on earth.

YOUR SPIRITUAL VIBRATION IS WHO YOU ARE. You cannot do acts of cruelty or kindness, but rather you are those acts. If showing forgiveness and love in any instance feels as if you are struggling with a conscious choice, then you are acting in contradiction to your lower rate of spiritual vibration. The whole purpose of your having entered this lifetime is the transformation of your mind. And if you have to think about it, then you haven’t yet completed that transformation: you still are vibrating at a lower grade level. You are trying too hard, trying to “fake it until you make it.” And if you hope that faking it is good enough, then you won’t be making it. Not in this lifetime.

We all had a test of our personal consciousness vibratory rate only this past week, when an 18-year-old publicly hugged and forgave the murderer of his older brother. Watch this young man give his speech, then watch him beg the judge for an opportunity to hug the woman who had shot his brother to death in his own home. If you can witness young Brandt Jean’s beautiful act with anything but joy in your heart, then your spiritual development still needs work! And tragically, the reactions to what he did have been decidedly mixed. That fact horrifies me. No one who is a follower of Jesus can consider what Brandt Jean did to be anything but spiritual common sense! It is past time for people who call themselves Christians to sit and listen to the Lord Himself:

When Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23).

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

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.

The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

“You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48).

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).

“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).

“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).

Jesus gives us in the Gospels the easiest and most effective method for achieving rapid spiritual growth ever devised! All I did when I decided almost a decade ago to really try to grow spiritually was to take the Lord’s teachings as seriously and strictly as He means them to be taken. You will notice that He never says try! Always and forever, Jesus says DO.

I was an excellent experimental subject! I had been appallingly self-important, at the top of every class in school, expecting to be the winner in each contest, as impressed with myself as I could be. And I used to have a hair-trigger temper. I saw slights and reasons to feel annoyed in many of my interactions, so I was irritated a lot of the time. I didn’t realize how bad it was, since I had been that way for my entire life! I just thought my being so prickly was normal.

(As an aside, I suspect that spiritual growth is easier if you are already comfortable with thinking in an eternal frame, so I urge you first to study the afterlife literature and convince yourself your life is eternal. Then, go for it! No matter your age, you can make this your last earth-lifetime.)

I have spoken elsewhere about my process of applying the Lord’s Gospel teachings, which at first was just me messing with ideas and without real expectations. So I was amazed when, about six weeks into my experiment, I noticed a profound internal change. Something happened that should have vastly annoyed me, even blighted my entire day, and I noticed it, but now it didn’t bother me at all. It was as if there had been levers on the outside of me that people could fiddle with and make me crazy, but now those levers had been disconnected on the inside. No matter what happened from then on, I felt only peace. I continued to practice radical forgiveness proactively for a few months more, but before long doing that started to seem like overkill so I stopped bothering. And a few years later my primary guide, Thomas, unexpectedly announced to me that I am now living my last necessary earth-lifetime. Wow! What, me?? I still have trouble believing it, even though more and more I am coming to see that what he said may be true.

Growing spiritually feels like a peaceful distancing from every possible source of stress! It feels like a softening, a blissful deepening so complete that at this point I can’t even recall the agitation with which I saw the world before. As I think about it, here are the biggest differences that beginning to grow spiritually has made in my life:

  • Now I feel empathy and love for everyone. This is true even of people who consider themselves to be my enemies. I love each of them very much, and I am saddened for them when their bitterness separates us.
  • I am never upset or angry. I might have a kind of mild “darn it” feeling about heavy traffic or human strife, but nothing that muddles my internal peace. All those rages that used to take me over so easily are wonderfully gone.
  • I can’t be near people who are negative. This is something I had noticed about spiritually advanced people, even long before I began to share their aversion to negativity. If people try to fight with me about anything, I don’t fight back. Now I bless them and withdraw.
  • I am so happy! What they don’t tell you about spiritual growth is that it feels delicious! It gives you a kind of joyous baseline, so nothing ever again is as bad as it used to be.

The reason why spiritual growth is so easy at our basic stage is because it consists entirely in remembering who we already are! Thomas Merton was an extraordinary twentieth-century Trappist monk whose youthful autobiography, The Seven Storey Mountain, was seminal for me. Merton’s early death was by accident or by assassination. As he spoke to an audience on the day he died, he summed up the reason why growing spiritually at our stage is so easy. He said, “My dear brothers, we are already one. But we imagine that we are not. What we have to recover is our original unity. What we have to be is what we are.”

Last week a reader asked me how we plan our earth-lives for spiritual learning. What a great question! It made me realize that when the universe exists as our spiritual school, talking about how that purpose fits with the process of life and death is basic information. I have been remiss in not discussing it much before now! Let’s see if we can remedy that mistake next week.…

 

Guardian angel stained glass 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>
White peonies photo credit: cseeman <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7702423@N04/48033760702″>Visit to the Peony Gardens With Runyon, Nichols Arboretum (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) – June 8th, 2019</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Red mountain photo credit: Charles W. Bailey, Jr., Digital Artist <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/96802003@N07/48559315646″>Digital Pastel Drawing of Walter Peak by Charles W. Bailey, Jr.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Thomas Merton center photo credit: TheNoxid <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/9602574@N02/10719158563″>Bill McKibben – P1060096</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Life in the Afterlife

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We enter these lifetimes on earth to experience negativity and learn how to rise above it so we can more effectively grow spiritually. Fear is the most negative emotion, so at our stage of development, growing spiritually means raising our personal consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. Since the base fear is the fear of death, the most effective thing we can do to improve the lot of humankind is to share with as many people as possible the certainty that human life is eternal. And every one of us is perfectly loved! I can recall when I was very small looking up and envisioning my great-grandparents sitting on the clouds, wearing wings and swinging their feet, looking down, so sad to be out of the action. What I didn’t realize until after I had done decades of research was that the people who have gone ahead of us are happier, busier, and much more alive than anyone on earth is now!

We have learned a great deal about the afterlife to which all of us will soon return. Every open-minded researcher of whom I am aware has reached essentially the same conclusions, and there are not at this point any more significant questions to be answered. Not only do we survive our deaths, but our lives once we have dropped our bodies turn out to be nothing but a glorious playtime! Last week we shared an overall view of what the afterlife is like in terms of physics, geography, and basic details. Now we are going to move into that world where love is the light and the air we breathe, where the weather is perfect and night never falls, where money and scarcity cannot exist, where travel and creation are largely by mind, and where the various kinds of fun to be had are limited just by our own imaginations.

The Fun of Dying by Roberta GrimesAs we said last week, nearly everyone enters the afterlife at Level Three, which is the lowest of the beautiful Summerland levels. Level Three includes the family compounds where most of us reunite with loved ones, and it includes the great public buildings where many of us will have our life-review meetings. Level Three also includes hospitals, some of which look like traditional hospitals but most of which are open-air pavilions, beautiful retreats surrounded by flowers where we can receive whatever help we need to heal whatever damage we may have incurred in our lives just ended.

Those who begin their post-death lives in theses hospital oases of love-based care might have died of a long-term illness, in battle, under torture, or simply in the throes of some negative emotion. They might have been distorted by some cult or hardened by criminality; or for any reason, they might have been especially battered by their recent earth-lives. Whether we will need to do this sort of post-death recuperation and counseling is something our guides will decide for us, and while we are hospitalized this way we won’t be able to communicate with our loved ones on earth. Fortunately, though, outside of time our healing should take a few earth-months at most. And then, when we are fit and ready, we will embark upon the post-death events that those who hadn’t needed such help were able to begin as soon as they arrived.

Four things predictably happen for each of us quite soon after death. Their order might vary, but in general we will:

  • Rejoin our greater minds. By most accounts this happens almost at once, and often even before we re-enter the Summerland. When we chose to enter this earth-life just ended, we stripped down to just a bit of our vast, eternal minds, a remnant designed for rapid spiritual learning. So we return home still living in our same old limited earth-minds and feeling confused about what is going on, being met by people who look familiar but not sure why that might be so. Then in an instant, our minds expand enormously! We are at once inconceivably brilliant, we recognize people we knew in other lives, and we remember where we are and so many details, so many people, just a dazzling mental expansion that puts us right back into this greater life that we had forgotten about altogether.
  • Sleep. Even if we died without particular issues, many of us will fall asleep soon after we arrive. Then we will wake up raring to go, and never need to sleep again.
  • Experience a life-review. Whether it happens in a public building or more intimately in our heavenly home, we will join with our spirit guides and perhaps with some who had shared this lifetime with us, and we will re-experience our whole earth-life just ended primarily from the viewpoint of those we affected. We will get to feel how we made other people feel. Those who have been through a life-review often say that it wasn’t so much the big things they did wrong that upset them to re-experience, since they had remembered and been prepared to face those big things. But rather, most of us undergoing a life-review are stunned to realize how many times we treated other people shabbily, we shamed an overweight classmate or disrespected a dignified older person, acted selfish and grabby, or simply ignored an easy chance to do some little kindness. Even with guides and loved ones to help us analyze the events of our lives just past, a life-review is always tough! Then once we have re-experienced the lifetime just ended from the viewpoint of everyone whose life we touched, we are asked to forgive them all. Believe it or not, that’s the easy part! We know now that none of it was real and everyone is fine, so of course we gladly forgive them all. Family murdered before our eyes? No problem! But then we are asked to forgive ourselves for the harm that we did to all these others, and many people have trouble with that. We find the way that we behaved so disappointing! Forgiving ourselves is essential, though, since otherwise our consciousness vibrations will gradually drop, and we could end up putting ourselves into the Outer Darkness levels. There is lots of counseling and help available, and those that we wronged in life are there hugging us, so fortunately most of us do manage to forgive ourselves. But it’s not easy. When I first understood that, believe me, I really cleaned up my act!
  • Party hearty. Soon after we arrive, we are feted at a gala party. Although we live widely scattered, there is a kind of mental Internet in place, so you will be amazed to find almost everyone you knew in your lifetime showing up. And believe me, the dead know how to party! You’ll expect food and drink, so it is going to be served. You might hope for some of the music you loved, and for me early-Elvis himself will perform. John Lennon will sing “Imagine,” and when he comes to “Imagine there’s no heaven,” everyone will laugh. You will recognize your greatest enemies of this lifetime as actually close eternal friends who had played those negative roles in your life as their gift to help you better grow spiritually. Your party might be held in a public building, or perhaps at your extended family’s compound. I am told that mine is going to be held at my grandfather’s farm overlooking the sea, with all my extended family’s homes nearby.

Now begins an infinity of time in which we can do an infinity of things! What we call the afterlife is a kind of foyer to the gigantic astral planes, and outside of time there is no limit to how long we can spend living based here and venturing into the astral, just happily playing. These are some of the kinds of activities that we have heard about from those who live there:

  • Doing rescue work. When we first arrive, our personal consciousness vibrations are still rising, so we might be invited by an advanced being to venture into the Outer Darkness and try to get the attention of someone there who can’t see our lofty companion, but who probably can see us. We then try to make the connection between them as a first step toward helping to rescue someone who has been deemed to be ready to rise.
  • Satisfying our curiosity. There are great libraries full of human knowledge stored as scrolls, libraries where we can re-experience all our other earth-lives, and opportunities to sit at the feet of humankind’s greatest masters, including Jesus.
  • Learning new skills. We can study music, art, and just about anything else. A hundred years ago, many who were poor in life were eager to learn from Mozart how to play the piano, and happy to learn to draw from Michelangelo and learn to paint from Rembrandt and Rubens. Children born as prodigies probably learned their skills this way, between lives and under the greatest experts!
  • Having earth-like fun. We talked last week about all the weird mind-fueled vehicles some people enjoy, even though all real travel is by mind. Mikey Morgan snowboards to this day! And my mother’s sister, who on earth sewed her own clothes, now teaches sewing on crystal machines that are, of course, powered by their operators’ minds.
  • Building things. Although stick-building things is possible there, almost no one ever does it. If we want to build something, we design it in collaboration with more advanced building teams, and then we watch as those teams simply think our new creation into shimmery existence that then becomes solid before our eyes.
  • Working out earth’s future advances. People with special expertise are given laboratories where they can create, and then they channel in to people on earth the next great advances to be made. For example, it is said that Steve Jobs is now working on a mind-powered iPad.
  • Attending and performing in concerts and plays. We can hear and see all the greats perform, and we even can perform ourselves if we like! All concerts and plays are performed in great open-air coliseums where every attendee is front-and-center in the first row. Our hearing in the afterlife is much enhanced, and when orchestras play, people can actually see the music as glorious colors and shapes appearing above the players. Many recently-dead entertainers perform, especially including John Lennon, Frank Sinatra, and Elvis Presley (in early, later, and Las Vegas versions).
  • Cultural fun. One recent fad is re-experiencing great cultural moments. For Americans, attending the Continental Congress, visiting a wild-west town, and re-creating the nineteen-fifties are three that have been mentioned.
  • Hanging around with the greatest thinkers. My wonderful spirit guide, Thomas, enjoys observing as people like Plato and Aristotle debate how to fix the modern world’s problems.
  • Lots of traveling! We can go to the ends of the earth, the edge of the universe, and even almost infinite other dimensions, all instantly and entirely by mind. We can visit the Summerlands of the great civilizations, and there we can – for example – watch the pyramids being built.

There are technical advances happening there, too. Some of our greatest dead scientists are working together to create a reliable method of electronic communication between there and here. And one recent advance is a kind of television hanging like a painting on the wall through which our loved ones can look in on all the events of our lives. Having learned that, now I just always assume that my mother and grandmothers are watching me. I try to live in a way that makes them proud!

The more you have grown spiritually on earth, the higher you will be able to go and the more fun you can have in the greater life that you will return to at your death. So, how is your spiritual growth coming along? How would you be able to tell? Let’s talk about that next week….

 

Thatched cottage photo credit: e r j k . a m e r j k a <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/24842486@N07/3947897287″>England | Stratford-upon-Avon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>   (9/26/19)
Ancient Palace photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/42004978072″>Replica of Dusit Maha Prasat Palace in Muang Boran (Ancient City) in Samut Phrakan near Bangkok, Thailand</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Early Elvis photo credit: Yuya Tamai <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/76758469@N00/21726179630″>coca cola elvis presley</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
John Lennon photo credit: PVBroadz <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/46343706@N03/4960500958″>John Lennon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Ancient Siam photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/17362328895″>Pavilion of the Enlightened in Muang Boran (Ancient Siam) in Samut Prakan province, Thailand</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

What’s a Heaven For?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, Or what’s a heaven for?
(from the poem “Andrea del Sarto” in Men and Women by Robert Browning, 1855)

We have so much good evidence of what happens at and after death that it’s tragic that so few people are at all familiar with it. We have talked about how a natural death happens, and what can go wrong in the process of dying, so let’s talk now about what is the best news anyone ever has received in all of human history! Religions insist on sharing vastly inferior and often frightening fables about death, and scientists for the most part refuse to consider even the possibility that we might survive our deaths, but none of that can any longer keep the truth from being generally known. And now that we have been made to see the vast damage that ignorance of the truth is doing to so many people at death, it is time to make the truth available to everyone on the face of the earth.

Before we move on to consider the infinite wonders that await us all, let’s first set the general scene and clear up some common misconceptions. Those who have completed their transitions tell us consistently that:

  • Every set of religious beliefs has God wrong. The only genuine Source turns out to be in reality all that exists. It is Mind, or to put it differently it’s what we experience in a limited way as human consciousness. Mind fills the genuine afterlife as an ambient pure white light, and as perfect love so intense that the dead tell us the experience of it is indescribable.
  • Every set of religious beliefs has the afterlife wrong. There is no religious practice to speak of in the afterlife. Everyone shares the same afterlife, and our level in the afterlife depends on the degree to which we have managed to raise our consciousness vibrations. There is no post-death judgment by anyone but ourselves, and the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being. So whatever religious or cultural preconceptions you might have about the afterlife, you can now with happy relief drop them all!
  • No living person has been to the afterlife. Those who reside there consistently tell us that death is always a one-way trip. So no NDE account, no account from an astral traveler, and no dream or vision can tell us much about the afterlife details. In fact, the general astral plane in which NDEs and OBEs happen is enormous. It may be as big as the entire universe, and it includes some wonderful mimics of the post-death realities where astral travelers and dreamers can meet with the dead and share some wonderful experiences. So it is all good! But it is not the afterlife. To really understand what the afterlife is like, we are dependent exclusively on post-death accounts.
  • To those living there, the afterlife seems endless. One of the things that really strike new arrivals after our earth-lives spent squashed together on this planet is that the afterlife is not crowded at all! Both size and time are subjective once we leave this material universe, so the afterlife is at once infinite in size and smaller than a pencil-dot. It has no actual size, but we experience it as gigantic.
  • The matter in the afterlife is different from the matter in this material universe. It’s solid but without a cellular or atomic structure, and in some lights it is somewhat translucent. Think of colorful living alabaster. The colors there go beyond the visible light spectrum, so there are many that we cannot imagine; and there is no death or decay, so no leaf or petal falls and even ancient buildings look brand-new. Everything is at least somewhat conscious, so flowers will turn their faces to us and trees will caress us as we pass. The water looks like water but it feels like silk, it’s dry, and it is alive: it was Jesus’s mention of “living water” to the woman at the well (JN 4:10) that first convinced me long ago that He must be a supernatural Being! The water in the afterlife gives off subtle music and an astounding rejuvenating energy, so people routinely walk into it fully clothed and leave it with their clothing dry and feeling nourished and refreshed.
  • Our bodies there are young and beautiful. Most of us prefer to look as we did in our most recent earth-lifetime at the prime of life, but that is up to us. Some prefer to look as they did in a different lifetime, or they choose another appearance altogether; or if they are very advanced, they might choose to appear as a ball of light. We recognize one another by our personal energy signatures, so it doesn’t much matter how we look.
  • Our sensory abilities there are much stronger. Our mind-sight is nearly 360 degrees, and it is perfect even at vast distances. One man who had been almost blind at death told his children when they contacted him through a medium that he could see every separate leaf on every tree on a hill that he estimated was fifty miles away. And our post-death hearing is similarly enhanced.
  • Post-death communication is by mind almost exclusively. Not only does this ensure that we can communicate with people who on earth spoke different languages, but also apparently communication by mind is more precise. When Thomas Jefferson, who on earth was a great wordsmith, communicated through direct-voice medium Leslie Flint in the early sixties, he complained that having to speak words again was hard! He said, “Aligning with vibration, tuning in, remembering things that one wishes to say, transmission of thought into sound, words, words, often words which don’t indicate anything clearly at least what one feels, I find extremely difficult.”
  • Weather there is optional and night never falls. Although there is evidence that if you want darkness or rain or snow, you can have it in your localized spot just by wishing for it.
  • There are infinite consciousness gradations, but we talk in terms of seven overall Levels. The lowest two are what Jesus calls “the Outer Darkness, where there will be wailing and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). Levels Three through Five are the beautiful Summerland. Level Six is what Jesus called “the Kingdom of God” (MK 12:34), which is attainable only by almost-perfected beings. Those who reside there teach in the lower levels and also on earth as they finish their learning and prepare to join the Godhead at Level Seven.
  • The Summerland is so earthlike that some who die in their sleep have trouble believing they have died. Nearly everyone seems to return at Level Three, which is apparently the level at which most incarnates routinely vibrate. If we die in our sleep, we may wake up in a mimic of our familiar earth-home, so the only way to convince us we have died might be to urge us to go outside and see that its neighborhood is gone. The more advanced we are spiritually, the higher we can venture, and by the top of Level Five the scenery becomes quite fanciful. The picture that heads this post is the sort of view you might encounter there.
  • The Summerland areas are culturally specific. Most of the good evidence is at least a century old, and back then the British and North American Summerlands were quite similar. There were formal gardens and beautiful buildings, flowing water and fountains, and lots of gorgeous trees and flowers. In North America, though, there were some modern buildings, and in the North American distance there were snow-capped mountains. If you died in a foreign culture back then at what was not a planned exit-point, you could actually find yourself in that culture’s Summerland! Someone talked through a medium about having died in China and arrived in a Chinese Summerland that included pagodas and Oriental details. (If this happens to you, just call for your loved ones and they will arrive to take you home.)
  • Love is all there is. In the genuine afterlife, love is the intense white ambient light and the very air we breathe. Except in the miserable Outer Darkness levels, there is no negativity in the afterlife at all, and until we reach the top of Level Five, without negativity to push against we cannot grow spiritually unless we enter yet another earth-incarnation. By contrast, the gigantic astral plane is structured something like the afterlife, but it contains a mix of negative and positive energies. It is for this reason, along with others, that it is important to keep reminding people that no one living ever has been to the genuine afterlife! But there are many afterlife-mimic areas in the astral where our dead loved ones come and meet with us, and where we also meet with our spirit guides. The astral plane is wonderful and amazing, and there is much that we can learn from those who have visited there; it just is not the actual afterlife, and it tells us very little about what the actual afterlife is like.

Please go back and thoughtfully re-read this list. Use its details to build a picture of the afterlife in your mind. Then let’s imagine that we have just died, we have eagerly hugged our deathbed visitors, and with them we have raised our personal vibrations as the room where we have just died becomes vague and vapory and we are briefly engulfed in a warm gray fog. We feel as if we are moving, but in reality we are about to arrive in roughly the same place where we began, but just at a higher consciousness vibration… to the extent that talking about “place” means anything.

Many who are awake and reasonably mentally healthy at death will find when the fog begins to clear that they have arrived in a gorgeous formal garden. There are bright-green trees and grass, fountains and benches, and lots of brilliant flowers in colors never seen on earth. And the sky might be any color or mix of colors, but it is rarely just blue! Many people talk about seeing gigantic flowers as tall as a man. There are no shadows at all, and there are small animals and birds but no insects beyond butterflies and dragonflies.

The people around us may be in modern clothes, in period costume, or in shimmery floor-length, long-sleeved robes of the sort that angels wear. No one cares how we dress. There are very strange vehicles on the street nearby, in the air above, and on a more distant lake, all of them propelled by mental energy so they make no sound. Beyond the formal gardens are scattered public buildings of ancient or modern design, all looking brand-new; and on the far-distant hills there are homes of all shapes and vintages, most of them far away from their neighbors because travel here is instantaneous and by mind.

The afterlife that we enter at death seems intended to help us recover from what is seen by our spirit guides as our difficult and stressful labors in the negative jungle that is life on earth. There is so much more to do in the afterlife, and everything about it is so much more wonderful than anything you or I might imagine from our present positions in this awful place! It is going to take a separate post to even begin to do the afterlife justice….

 

Swan lake photo credit: ihave3kids <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/9012854@N05/19829034518″>Swan Lake</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Snow-capped mountains photo credit: WanderingtheWorld (www.ChrisFord.com) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/44028103@N07/5592643838″>’Picturesque’, Argentina, Patagonia, Mt. Fitzroy</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Yellow cottage photo credit: carolyngifford <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/61013449@N07/48101781742″>Selworthy</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Wilderness house photo credit: Zach K <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/98411817@N00/48298187011″>Maine House</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cottage & garden photo credit: scrappy annie <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/14903992@N08/48712258923″>Cottage flower garden</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Red peonies photo credit: cseeman <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7702423@N04/48033777692″>Visit to the Peony Gardens With Runyon, Nichols Arboretum (University of Michigan, Ann Arbor) – June 8th, 2019</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

What Can Go Wrong?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It has been almost half a century since I first began to read old communications received through physical mediums from people we used to think were dead. Soon after I began reading what was a rich trove of detailed accounts that have by now been almost forgotten, I was noticing an account or two, just here and there, of someone who had gone off-track at death. As enchanted as I was by the beautiful system that was then revealing itself to me, I flat-out could not believe this gentle process of returning home could have flaws that might let us complicate our trip! So for decades I tried to ignore all the evidence I found of dead folks going off-track, even though I was seeing more and more of it. By the time I wrote The Fun of Dying – Find Out What Really Happens Next, I knew enough to warn people there about some of the things that might go wrong. Still, I thought these problems were rare.

But then, soon after The Fun of Dying was first published, I met Carol and Mikey Morgan. Their book, Flying High in Spirit – A Young Snowboarder’s Account of His Ride Through Heaven, is a must-read! Mikey has been answering afterlife questions through his mother on afterlifeforums.com, and recently he was asked what percentage of the newly-dead might be said to go off-track at death. He told us, incredibly, that those who go off-track, even briefly, approach 25% of the newly-dead. That was when I realized it was time to talk frankly about this problem! So I have of late gained a better sense of what might possibly go wrong, and I furthermore begin to see that this problem may not be a bug in the system. It might instead be a feature, since in learning how to solve the problems that can cause people to go off-track at death, and in learning how to reach and rescue these stragglers, we will powerfully raise our own consciousness vibrations. And that, of course, is the entire point of our even entering earth-lives at all!

Most religions foster beliefs about what happens at and after death, and from what I have seen, all traditional religions get the process and the facts all wrong. Christianity, in particular, teaches nonsense that has nothing to do with the words of Jesus or with what researchers learn from studying the evidence, and most of what it teaches is scary. Even worse, there are now some forty thousand versions of Christianity, and many of them claim to be the only true version. So not only are Christians confronted by a confusing plethora of possible ways to practice their religion, but they also are told that they risk hellfire if their hopeful guess at what might be the right version of Christianity turns out to be wrong!

What may be Christians’ most intractable problem is the fact that many versions of Christianity claim that the entire Bible is the Inspired Word of God, but yet nearly all modern Christians reject what the Bible says about the afterlife. Believe it or not, if you are a Christian who insists the entire Bible is God’s Inspired, Inerrant Word, then God is telling you flat-out that when you die you will lose consciousness and go into hibernation in Sheol/Hades until some eventual group resurrection. And if there is a scarier thought than being sent to sleep in hell for the next thousand years, I have trouble imagining it!

Fortunately, the evidence of what actually is going on is so abundant and so consistent that we can now say with certainty that everything Christians believe about death and the afterlife is wrong. No worries! But for Westerners, the errors of Christianity cast a long shadow. A significant number of those who now go off-track at death will do so because of Christianity’s false teachings. We are going to look here at all the reasons of which I am aware that some people lose their way at death, and then we’ll look at how people who are approaching death can best guard against these delays.

People generally go off-track at death for one or more of these reasons:

  • Religious terror. Many hospice workers tell us that the people most fearful at death are ardent Christians. These poor folks will tell those attending them that they haven’t been good enough to make it to heaven and they are terrified of going to hell. Steeped in fear as they are, some who find themselves alive after death will decide it seems safer to just stay put.
  • Having been taught to fear the normal death process. Some fundamentalist Christian preachers teach their flocks to fear and avoid at death anything that doesn’t comport with what their own religion teaches. When the concept of deathbed visitors first became prominent in the early part of the last century, some of these preachers began to tell their congregations that what might seem to be dead relatives are actually demons sent to lure them to hell. Dying people steeped in fears like these will refuse all contact with their dead loved ones, so many of them will end up earthbound.
  • Being too certain about what comes after death. There are thought-form places to which the most closed-minded people gravitate before they can complete their transitions, the most common of which are clouds with St. Peter’s Gates and a village surrounding a steepled church. The great astral traveler, Bob Monroe, called these places “hollow heavens.” They are           bo-o-oring, so those led astray by them are generally happy to be rescued.
  • Believing we are evil enough to go straight to hell. There is a thought-form hell into which some people’s fears might put them before they manage to make it home. It’s a “hollow hell,” if you will. Those whose anxieties put them there generally call for help, and at once they are out of that illusion and safe with upper-level beings who can help them to finish their journey.
  • Being certain that death is extinction. Some people expect to blink out like a light. They are sure they will experience nothing after death, so nothing is just what they get! They might wander alone in a fog of nothing for eons.
  • Being begged by loved ones not to die. A medium visiting an old hospital was drawn to a section of it that was being rehabilitated, and there she found a forlorn little boy still lying in his hospital bed. He had died perhaps a century before. The last thing his distraught mother had said to him was, “Don’t go until I get back! Wait for me!” And there he was, still waiting. The kindest thing we can do for the dying is to give them permission to let go!
  • Being distracted by the pain of their mourners. Newly-dead people are as clueless about what to do next as are infants fresh from the birth canal. Especially when they died young or unexpectedly, they can be so alarmed to see the distress of their loved ones that they will try to comfort them. This is pointless, since no one can see or hear them now, and these efforts can lower the personal vibrations of the newly-dead to the point where they can no longer see and follow their deathbed visitors. Thereupon they can become stuck in place and outside of time until eventually someone rescues them.
  • Being addicted to anything. Whether it’s alcohol, drugs, sex, or something else, being addicted to anything is a terrible idea! Many addicts will refuse to transition. No one can see them now, so this is their big chance to finally get their fill. It’s playtime! All they need is a body. So they will hang around bars and try to possess living drunks, or in alleys and try to possess living addicts. Reportedly there are great pig-piles of naked discarnates all desperately trying to have sex with one another, but never successfully managing it.
  • Being killed in battle. They are in the thick of it, perhaps running across a battlefield, when a bullet kills their body. And they keep on running! During the two World Wars, some British mediums were singled out by discarnate rescuers as being best able to help these deluded beings to realize that they had died, and to help them then to spot the dead loved ones who had been trying to get their attention so they could take them home.
  • Being executed. I am adamantly against capital punishment. It’s the worst kind of pollution there is! Someone is killed at what is not a planned exit point, and at the height of the worst possible negative emotions, including rage and fear, so he is extremely likely to range free as a deeply negative earthbound being bent on terrible mischief. Penal executions are the spiritual equivalent of pouring arsenic into our drinking water! Although efforts will be made to rescue these people, some will remain earthbound and dangerous for a very long time. I think it likely that many of the deeply evil and therefore weak but nevertheless troublesome Shadow Men that lurk in dark places trying to scare people are in fact the shades of executed criminals.
  • Preferring to be here rather than there. Mikey Morgan considers this to be a problem, and it is for him that I include it. The death process at our chosen exit points includes making our earth-bodies decrepit, after which our beloved dead appear to us in healthy new bodies. Of course nearly all of us want to join them! I have never heard of anyone actually refusing to go with deathbed visitors because she preferred to stick around here except for my own mother, who eventually was taken in her sleep. Problem solved!

With the world now steeped in such ignorance that nearly a quarter of those who die will go off-track, it is imperative that everyone on earth become very well informed about the whole death process. Learning and teaching the truth is the most important work that we can do!

Avoiding going off-track is easy! Simply put, you will be fine if you will:

  • Raise your personal consciousness vibration. The more loving and less fearful we are, the easier and safer our death process will be. And following the teachings of Jesus is the most effective way to make rapid spiritual progress.
  • Learn the truth. Death is less scary when we know in general terms what to expect, but it is important that we not become so fixed on details of what the evidence tells us that we might inadvertently create a Summerland hollow-heaven illusion of our own.
  • Remain open-minded. The best way to approach our deaths is with nothing more than the certainty that we are about to enjoy an easy and happy homecoming. Then let it unfold!
  • Ignore your living mourners until after you have completed your transition. Once you have returned home, there will be many things you can do to help and comfort them.
  • Trust and follow your death-bed visitors. The natural death process is a passage back from this illusion to the greater reality that is our eternal home. And the trip will be quick and easy if we will just relax, trust, love, and let it happen!

If you and I will work to spread the truth, then very soon the tragedy of people going off-track at death will be no more than a distant memory. And that’s good, because what awaits us at death is more wonderful than all our fondest hopes! Next week we’ll take a closer look at the glorious greater reality that is our blessed eternal home….

 

Weathervane photo credit: Charos Pix <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/98609459@N08/48684898386″>Waiting for the murmuration</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Winter lighthouse photo credit: Tom Gill. <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10199807@N00/46519645394″>South Haven Light</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Brick lighthouse photo credit: Markus Schinke <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/14005798@N00/40478459233″>Holtenauer Leuchtturm</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lighthouse with stars photo credit: Roberto Steinert <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/150915483@N07/40371213303″>La Palma</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Night lighthouse photo credit: Tiomax80 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/69062568@N02/48045577021″>Ooops I photographed it again</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Okay light photo credit: _Hadock_ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7992704@N05/32484578406″>Everything is going to be OK</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Happy Process of Natural Death

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Death is a universal part of life, so the level of misinformation and fear that still surrounds it in the twenty-first century is horrifying! So much of what we are told by those we venerate as authorities is scary, silly, and entirely wrong. The scientific community still insists that the death of our bodies will be the death of our minds, while Christian clergymen assure us that after death we might end up in a fiery hell, in a tortuous purgatory, sitting around in a boring throne room, or sleeping until we hear an end-times trumpet. When the information about what actually happens at and after death is so abundant now, and when so much of it has been readily available to us for more than a century, there is no excuse for all this depressing misinformation and plain nonsense!

We plan for our eventual deaths as part of the life-planning process. All the important events of our lives are planned, and we also plan two or three exit points that our higher consciousness can choose to take if it determines that for what ever reason it is time for us to leave this lifetime. Death at any time other than a planned exit point is possible, but it is rare. Almost never do we know at a conscious level that our greater minds have chosen to take an upcoming exit point, but often after people have died their loved ones will look back and notice that the decedent had spent the months before death wrapping up details, reconciling with people, finishing projects, settling debts, and in general trying to make things a little neater for those left behind.

The day of your death is meant to be the happiest, most beautiful day of your life. It’s the day when you are reunited with loved ones you may have thought you never would see again, the day you get to see and hug the guides who have helped you make the most of this lifetime, and the blessed day when you leave this illusion and return to the joy of your true home. For most people, death is just that wonderful! But I have lately come to accept the fact that our willful cultural ignorance about death still means that far too many people are botching their well-planned deaths and taking temporary detours to nowhere. We’ll be talking about some of their travails next week. First, though, let’s talk about what actually happens in the sort of well-planned death that most of us can look forward to enjoying.

I have written extensively about the death process, but now as we talk about the need to help our children better deal with death we ought to say a bit more about it. Not only do we all need to be prepared to help the children in our lives better deal with the possible deaths of loved ones, but also every one of us will before long be making the trip ourselves. And unless we know what to expect, and also how to guard against the many things that might go wrong, it can be hard for even the more knowledgeable among us to transition happily when our time comes. Five years ago I gave you a standard overview of the death process here, and now I will be building on that so I hope you will read that post again before you tackle the rest of this one.

You will need to keep an open mind! If you can approach your death knowing just in general terms that the process is going to be easy and happy, and that you will at every moment be cared for and supported by loved ones – if that is all that fills your mind at your death – then you will manage it just fine. You may be one of the fortunate ones who simply fall asleep here and wake up there, but most of us are awake during at least some part of the death process. And some of what happens during your death is likely to feel odd or confusing to you and to your survivors, so it can help if you know what to expect:

  • You will begin the process of separating from your body sometime in the hours before your death. We don’t know exactly when this begins, and it may be variable and personal to you, but for many, the first sign of this separation will be what seems to be a partial recovery. People who had been in comas might wake up, and perhaps even sit up and speak normally. Those with dementia who might not have been coherent for years might converse with those around them. From your perspective as the person who is dying, it seems that in general both pain and fear are almost or altogether gone, and you feel better and pretty much matter-of-fact about your dying now. The cause of all these changes is apparently the partial separation of your energy body – your mind, or perhaps your “soul” if you prefer – from the physical body that is about to die.
  • In the hours before death there will be deathbed visitors. The timing of this is variable. One or two of these people that we used to think were dead will sometimes appear to the dying person as much as a couple of weeks before the death; but more commonly, these visitors will first begin to appear in the last day or two. From your perspective as the dying person, this is an astonishing experience! You are in the midst of actively dying, not uncomfortable and not really worried but still unsure about what comes next; and then suddenly, Dad appears in an upper corner of the room, looking solid and in the prime of life. He starts speaking with you in your mind, and you respond to him mentally. He might come down into the room, or he might stay partially visible in an upper corner; he might be joined by other dead loved ones, all looking great, or even by dead pets. For nearly everyone, this sudden appearance of happy loved ones long after their own deaths is so thrilling that we will mostly stop interacting with our living visitors. On occasion, too, some of those in the room will also see these deathbed visitors, and they even might accompany the dying person at the start of the post-death journey. Dr. Raymond Moody’s Glimpses of Eternity details this interesting phenomenon of shared-death experiences.
  • Actively dying is a gradual process. From the moment when you see your first deathbed visitor, you know that you are going to be fine, so what happens next can be a lot of fun for those who are awake throughout. You might think of your earth-body as something like nested dolls. The outer layer or two will be dying now – the one composed of matter, and also perhaps the energy aura that defended you against negative entities while you were alive (we aren’t sure about that). But the internal energy bodies that hold your earth-mind will survive your death, so your nested bodies must separate. People who have been awake while this was happening have said it begins in the fingers and toes and progresses toward the torso, and it feels as if lots of tiny threads are breaking inside your body. I think of it as un-velcroing! The energy part of you that is leaving is un-velcroing from your physical body, and it gathers in your chest. It then leaves through the chest wall or through the top of the head, and it rises in the air above your body. People at the bedside can sometimes see it as a vague gray mist. Now that it is free of matter, its vibratory rate rises rapidly, so very soon the living can no longer see it. That mist is you! It contains your awareness and your perspective, and by some accounts, just that process of leaving the body feels intensely pleasurable. In the air above your body, beyond the view of nearly everyone living, you re-form into a solid-seeming person still attached to your body by a glowing umbilicus called a silver cord. You happily hug your deathbed visitors. All of you are solid, young, and beautiful.
  • Your actual death moment is the breaking of the silver cord. It is that attachment to your energy-self that has kept the material body living, so as soon as it breaks, your body’s heart stops. And you feel terrific, young and vigorous and thrilled to be free of that old boat-anchor of a body; but living people you love may be around your bed and very aware that your body has just died. This is the single most dangerous moment of your entire existence! What you do now is going to be critical, as you will better understand next week.
  • It is essential that you follow your deathbed visitors. We are as clueless when we emerge from our dying bodies as we were when we emerged from the birth-canal, and this seems to be the reason why our planned deaths include deathbed visitors. Our visitors try to keep our attention, and they coax us to accompany them right away, since for us to remain with our mourners for long puts us at risk of becoming earthbound.

The next stage exists right where we are now, but just at a higher vibration. If you will think of your mind as a television set, and your death as simply changing channels, this will make a lot more sense to you. After your silver cord has broken, it will feel as if you are physically moving, but in reality you and those who accompany you are raising your personal vibrations from what we might call the physical channel to the slightly higher afterlife channel. This process does not involve a tunnel and a light! That commonplace from near-death experiences seems instead to be just a rescue device for people unexpectedly out of their bodies.

The way most people experience the transition is as something like entering a brief fog. The formerly solid room where you died becomes vague and vapory and then disappears, while in front of you the fog is lifting to reveal a gorgeous and intensely colored but solid and amazingly earthlike new world. There are a few afterlife channels below it, and many more above it, all existing pretty much where we are now; and the Summerland where our families congregate to welcome us back home is gorgeous and enormous beyond our ability to adequately imagine or describe it. From your perspective, having just dropped your body and been reunited with loved ones you thought you had lost, you now find yourself suddenly young and beautiful and standing on solid ground in earth-like surroundings more gorgeous by far than anything that exists on earth. What may be most surprising is the fact that there is nothing but love and joy in the very air you breathe! And the pure white light that illumines this place so completely that there are no shadows feels like love beyond your ability even to adequately encompass it. You truly are in heaven now! And for most new arrivals, the shock of joy that comes with this realization can make us need to simply sit down for awhile and look around as we take it all in.

Your death was planned before you were born to be an easy and joyous return to your genuine eternal life. Knowing this makes more tragic the fact that because our culture is so ignorant and fearful, dying today carries many risks of which you will need to be aware so you can better guard against them. Stay tuned….

 

Grave Marker photo credit: Tjflex2 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/78128495@N00/30468693942″>Robert Dunsmuir</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Military cemetery photo credit: MudflapDC <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/46347505@N05/5199817229″>Funeral Service</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Heavenly autumn photo credit: chasedekker <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/87288449@N08/16767264402″>Explosion of Autumn</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Explaining Death to a Child

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

When I first understood that death is a minor transition in someone’s eternal life, I stopped thinking much about the prevailing view of death as something negative. My foremost failing has become the fact that my first thought now on hearing about a death is actually happiness for the decedent. What else can you expect of someone who once wrote a book called The Fun of Dying?

After a few embarrassments, I have learned to keep my joy for new decedents to myself. Now I focus on empathizing with the survivors. I will say, “I’m so sorry.” If the one with whom I am commiserating is someone I think could be receptive to more, I might remark that the loved one who has transitioned is now healthy and happy and waiting for us in our beautiful homeland where love never ends. At this point, I am hearing from grieving people nearly every day, and the fact that they are so distraught has become a sore point for me. When the truth about death is so wonderful, the fact that both mainstream science and mainstream religions still make such an effort to keep it from becoming more widely known is inexcusable!

I should add that many of the grieving people who contact me have lost a companion animal. In February of 2015, I wrote a blog post called “Pets in the Afterlife,” and just over a year later Google picked it up. At one point it was a first-page suggestion for people who asked about an afterlife for pets, so by now it has hundreds of comments and I still hear often from people for whom the loss of their pet is a fresh, raw wound. It’s a lucky thing indeed that the post-death news about our furry companions is actually even better than is the news about our human loved ones!

What brings up the topic of death right now is the fact that I have lately had a Seek Reality guest who talked about aspects of the period soon after death that I have never wanted to think about, but that you deserve to be forewarned about. I’ll have more to say about this in coming weeks. And then Michael Tymn, a friend who is one of the world’s leading experts on the afterlife, wrote a blog post in which he talked about how we might explain the death of a parent to a young child. His post was great, and it reminded me rather forcefully that my original calling was to study and teach about the afterlife. By now, you and I have ranged far afield! So, might it be time to get back to our knitting? Many children below the age of reason, which is generally seen as six to eight years old, are going to experience the death of someone close, most likely a grandparent or a pet. And since a parent’s first instinct is to comfort and protect, helping young children deal with death and loss can be hard for parents who may be grieving, too.

Michael Tymn says in his post, “I can still remember the anxieties and fears I experienced 76 years ago when my step-grandfather died. My parents didn’t know what to tell me, and I, just six at the time, didn’t know what questions to ask.  It was all hush-hush. The trepidation multiplied 100-fold when we visited the crematorium and I struggled with grasping that what was left of my grandfather was now contained in a little metal box, one surrounded by hundreds of other little metal boxes with ‘people’ in them.” It’s not much of a stretch to imagine that Michael’s years of afterlife studies which have so greatly benefited humankind might have had their origins in the mind of that confused and frightened six-year-old boy.

If you have a young child in your life, it is important that you prepare to help that child to better understand what death is and how to process a loved one’s death, or even the approach of that child’s own death. Remember that you will be fighting the ghastly misinformation about death that is pervasive in our culture!

  • Western religions teach falsehoods that can frighten children. In Christianity, for example, God is a scary judge who punishes people and even sends them to hell. The Christian heaven is generally a throne room where we will sing and play a harp forevermore, which notion is unlikely to appeal to children any better than it appeals to us. In Christianity, too, animals don’t go to heaven, so if the dead loved one is the family pet there generally is not much comfort to be offered in a strictly Christian home.
  • And mainstream science teaches that death is extinction. For scientists, our personalities are artifacts of the meat between our ears, so when our brains stop functioning, each of us will simply blink out like a light. There is no possibility that any aspect of us might live on.

Each of these notions is altogether wrong! There is no element of truth in either the strictly Christian view of death, or the mainstream scientific view of it, but since children learn these lies in school and in church, you and I must be prepared to confront them directly. Here is what I suggest that you do:

  • Learn the truth for yourself. It will be difficult to help a child you love become comfortable with death if you are still uncertain and fearful yourself. At this point, there is plentiful information available, and it is entirely consistent! In only a year or two of effort, you can become as certain about death and the afterlife as I was after I had spent four decades of research and putting the truth together on my own.
  • Prepare your child in casual ways to feel comfortable with the afterlife basics. My grandchildren knew by the time they could read that Grandma had written The Fun of Dying, and they were encouraged to ask questions whenever questions might occur to them. As a result, the deaths of pets along the way have been occasions for less sadness than you might think, and more of a sense that we will see them again. Perhaps I should add, too, that my second children’s book, due out this fall, will deal with the survival of a beloved pet.
  • Especially encourage questions about whatever the child finds troubling. Each child is a unique individual in terms of sensitivities, and they all have different experiences. It is impossible to tell what might trouble a child, so it is essential that you keep the door wide open and never express impatience or disgust, no matter what the child might say.
  • Don’t give children too much information at once. Remember that we are talking here about ages eight and under! If I were doing it, I might say something like, “I’m very sad that Grandpa (or Fido, or Fluffy) had to leave us for a little while, but there is no such thing as death so they are healthy and happy now, living where we all will go when our time on earth is done. We will for sure be with them again!” For some children, that will be plenty. For others, they might think about it for a while and then come back with a question or two. It’s fine to let children see your sadness! If you maintain a strong conviction about the fact that our loved ones do live on, the children you love will learn that sadness over the separation is normal, but that ultimately death is not a tragedy. It is just a brief and natural separation.

When a young child is diagnosed with a life-threatening condition, the same general suggestions apply, but with some caveats. Many counselors suggest that you not bring up the subject of death to young children, since that discussion might frighten them; but when a child is hospitalized and his health is failing, the child may be even more frightened if there is a conspiracy of silence around him. If I had a very young loved one who was dying, I would offer to answer questions. If no questions were forthcoming, I would wait a while and then make the offer again. Some children don’t want to be told straight out what their ultimate fate might be, but over time you may be able to impart information in ways that feel less personal to the child. For example, when you and the child’s uncle are visiting the child together, you might briefly mention in an aside to Uncle Dave what a wonderful pet his cat was, and how happy you are that she is now healthy and happy again in a wonderful place. Or you might mention to Uncle Dave that Grandpa is clearly happy where he is now, since he sent you a butterfly just this morning. But that’s it! Sub-adults are especially well attended when they actually transition, so it is less important that they know what to expect than it is in the case of adults.

Another point to consider is the fact that very young children might retain some memories of where they came from, and they also may be receiving visits from dead loved ones. My oldest granddaughter had frequent visits from one of her great-grandmothers for several years; and when I was small, I briefly retained some pre-birth memories. If your beloved child seems to have any awareness of what came before, or awareness that the dead survive, it can be easy to add a little more information to that core understanding.

Death is meant to be an easy and joyous process, but there are things that can go wrong. And it is finally time for us to talk about that! But first, next week let’s summarize how things can go superbly right….

 

Flowers photo credit: Joe Shlabotnik <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40646519@N00/48254330702″>Flowers For Uncle Jack</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cross with Red Tree photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 44 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/46851184554″>The Cross and the Tree</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

Being of Service in the Modern World

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What does it mean for you and me to altogether live the teachings of Jesus? It means a lot more than we might imagine ever could be asked of us. Let’s ask the greatest American of the Twentieth Century what it means to him. He often wrote and spoke variants of these words:

“To our most bitter opponents we say: ‘We shall match your capacity to inflict suffering by our capacity to endure suffering. We shall meet your physical force with soul force. Do to us what you will, and we shall continue to love you. We cannot in all good conscience obey your unjust laws, because noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good. Throw us in jail, and we shall still love you. Bomb our homes and threaten our children, and we shall still love you. Send your hooded perpetrators of violence into our community at the midnight hour and beat us and leave us half dead, and we shall still love you. But be ye assured that we will wear you down by our capacity to suffer. One day we shall win freedom, but not only for ourselves. We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory.’” – Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in his essay, Loving Your Enemies

Many people seem now to know that following Jesus requires that we learn to live in forgiveness and in love. When His disciple Peter asked Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And He said, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (MK 12:31). More and more of us at last are trying to forgive completely and love perfectly! But it turns out that forgiving and loving this way is only spiritual kindergarten. If we intend to follow Jesus with sufficient zeal to help to bring the kingdom of God on earth, we must make these next Gospel passages, too, the center of the way that we work and live:

“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41).

“But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).

“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that he lay down his life for his friends” (JN 15:12-13).

Until we can say what Dr. King says above, and mean it, and accept whatever comes from it, we cannot call ourselves entirely committed followers of the Son of the Living God. But when we can do that – when we can sing Dr. King’s words and live them, no matter what the cost – then after our few minutes on earth are done, you and I can have the joy of hearing Jesus say, “Well done, good and faithful servant” (MT 25:21).

Of course, few of us expect to be called to make the ultimate sacrifice. But when you read about the lives of Dr. Bonhoeffer and Dr. King, you can see that the notion that they were fighting the most monumental evils of their time armed only with radical love and kindness, and these struggles might easily cost them their lives, seems seldom to have occurred to them, either. Or if they thought about it, whatever fear they felt was dwarfed by their perfect love for everyone, including their tormentors, and by their finding it unbearable to stay away when there was work they felt called to do. It is this need these young men felt to serve, no matter what the personal cost, that should most puzzle us.

Dr. King, especially, had so much to lose, but still he never wavered! When he had barely turned 27, at the height of the Montgomery bus boycott, he was giving a speech before two thousand people at First Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, when someone bombed his house. Dr. King rushed home to make sure his wife and infant daughter were okay as a boisterous crowd assembled outside. These people were infuriated, some were armed, and all of them were bent on revenge. Dr. King stepped out onto his bomb-ravaged porch, and the angry mob quieted to hear him. As quoted by some who were there, this is part of what he said:

“We believe in law and order. Don’t get panicky. Don’t do anything panicky at all. Don’t get your weapons. He who lives by the sword will perish by the sword. Remember that is what God said. We are not advocating violence. We want to love our enemies. I want you to love our enemies. Be good to them. Love them and let them know you love them. I did not start this boycott. I was asked by you to serve as your spokesman. I want it to be known the length and breadth of this land that if I am stopped, this movement will not stop. If I am stopped, our work will not stop. For what we are doing is right. What we are doing is just. And God is with us… Be calm, as I and my family are. We are not hurt, and remember that if anything happens to me, there will be others to take my place.”

These words were spoken by a man barely out of his teens who was educated through the Ph.D. level. He had no duty to be in Montgomery, nor to answer the call to lead this boycott that really was no part of his own. He didn’t even have to live in the South: he could have staying in Boston and ignored it all. But out of love for the desperate downtrodden who were at that moment mobbing his porch, and also out of love for their oppressors, he had put himself and his family at the mercy of haters who just had come scarily close to murdering his wife and child.

Just who was this amazing new man? How, in a world full of self-involved people, does someone so young think first of all in such a desperate situation about loving and protecting his tormentors? What is it in Dr. King and Dr. Bonhoeffer and the few other people like them that makes this impulse toward perfect love and forgiveness not something they have to strive for, but the very core of who they are?

I have been wrestling with our present urgent need to elevate sufficient people spiritually that we can raise the consciousness vibration of this planet and thereby bring the kingdom of God on earth. We have known for years what needs to happen, and I am trying to help you do it for yourself, but there has been a crucial missing piece. I can teach you how to raise your consciousness vibration, and I can tell you why doing that is so important; I even can begin to tell you, based upon a few people I know whose spiritual vibration already is high, how people living with an elevated consciousness vibration are likely to feel and to act. But all of that still feels vague and rudderless, and it is only now that I can see why. What we have needed was a concrete goal, and in the beautiful lives of Dr. King and Dr. Bonhoeffer, at last we have precisely that!

What these modern saints demonstrate for us is the result of their having entirely internalized the Gospel teachings of Jesus. We can see that they aren’t only trying their best. They don’t have to think about struggling to forgive the cruelties being inflicted on them, nor puzzle over what would be the most loving thing to do in each situation, but rather their ability to forgive completely and to love universally springs in abundance from the core of who they are. When it comes to fighting Nazi evil or the cruelties of the Jim Crow South, there are no participation trophies. No, what we see in Dr. Bonhoeffer and Dr. King is confirmation that the Gospel teachings of Jesus can actually, literally, and completely transform us into a new creation!

These two lives are the proof we have needed that if we will learn to live the teachings of Jesus, and if we will teach others to live those teachings, then first one by one and then hundreds by thousands we can begin to make for all of humankind an altogether new beginning. One based in perfect kindness this time, where more and more each person’s impulse, springing from every deepest heart, is to empathize even with those who hate us, to earnestly seek and then to do not what will be best for ourselves and our families, but what seems to be best for all. Dr. King didn’t love his family less than any of us loves our own families. But rather, what he said from his bombed porch that day came from the fact that his being so steeped in the Gospel teachings had elevated his spiritual vibration sufficiently that the love he would naturally feel for his family had become for him a universal love.

And I begin to know how that feels. Years ago, as I was first applying the exercises given in The Fun of Growing Forever, I began to think that perhaps my love for my family was cooling. I no longer saw them as quite so special in the panoply of humankind. It took me awhile to realize that I wasn’t loving my husband and children and my beautiful grandchildren any less, but rather I was loving millions of strangers much more than I ever had before. I can see now that each of these modern saints was living at such an elevated spiritual level that they were loving every stranger around them with such a mighty love that they would have given their lives for anyone passing on the street without a second thought. As Jesus said, “To the extent that you do something to one of the least of these brothers of Mine, you do it to Me” (MT 25:40). That truth is the height of spiritual growth. “You shall love your neighbor as yourself” (MK 12:31).

Whether you are going to go all-in on being of service to God and to humankind is a matter between you and your guides alone. Each of us is on a different journey. But no matter who you are, no matter what you want to do or how you feel called to serve or not to serve, it is essential that you now make a point of raising your personal consciousness vibration! You needn’t give your life for others to know the joy of living with nothing but love and kindness in your heart. You can serve without doing anything more than so internalizing the Gospel teachings that you are contributing your own elevation of consciousness to the universal human consciousness, and thereby you are helping the Lord to at last bring the kingdom of God on earth.

 

King bust photo credit: Pictoscribe <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/70414856@N00/38794662845″>Make America Dream Again</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
King drawing on yellow photo credit: medium as muse <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/21564533@N00/362318943″>Martin Luther King Jr.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Pencil Dr.King photo credit: Wasfi Akab <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/38837659@N06/6446274201″>I have a dream</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Silence is betrayal photo credit: Daquella manera <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/62518311@N00/626040972″>Un momento cuando el silencio es traición</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Swan heart photo credit: Pamela P. Stroud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138014685@N08/26385800867″>On the Fifth Day, Life of Varied and Diverse Forms Exhibits the Authority of the Creator in Different Ways</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
 

Being the Light

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Many earnest Americans believe they can fight evil with angry chanting, venomous signs, and even physical attacks on others. And our social media has become a literal breeding-ground of self-righteous rage, where if you disagree with those shouting the loudest, you risk being obliterated altogether! Yet, even with all these well-meant efforts being made by many to right great wrongs, it can be argued that there is more bitterness and rage in this nation now than there ever has been in the worst moments of our history, including in the depths of the Civil War. And apparently even the vitriol of that darkest of times is now being recycled! It has just been announced that The New York Times is going to work to make slavery the permanent center of this nation’s view of its own founding. I have studied and written about America’s founding, and also about the roots of our racial problems; and based on my research, I can tell you that The New York Times’s 1619 Project, how ever well-intended it might be, can only create even more pointless rage while it does nothing good for any living soul.

The immutable laws of spiritual physics ensure that any attempt to further sharpen America’s racial divisions will just be the source of more anger and pain. As we have said here at length, both the work of physicists and the witness of those that we used to think were dead agree that what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force. It was the great quantum physicist and Nobel laureate Max Planck who made this discovery, and no other explanation of reality has anything like so much supporting evidence; so the jury is still out, but its verdict seems sure. And the base consciousness that generates reality is an energy-like potentiality that exists in a range of vibrations, from the lowest, which is fear and anger, to the highest, which is perfect love. So, far from being just personal and private, what you and I experience as emotion turns out to be the fundamental force for greater evil or for more perfect good that powers all of reality! Therefore, anything that promotes more fear or anger is going to make every social problem that burdens this nation and the world still worse.

It is this fact that lies at the core of the teachings of Jesus, and also at the root of every successful nonviolence movement worldwide. All our efforts to battle evil have only made things a great deal worse, so Americans have no choice now but to espouse what can be demonstrated to ease our divisions while we all work to foster greater working harmony. And fortunately, there are encouraging signs that this sort of positive easing is happening. Americans are weary of political fighting! And proactive groups which are designed to bring peace to our political process are beginning to make some headway. Even the scientific community is paying attention to aspects of our need to sow love and kindness, as is evidenced by the fact that of late Scientific American has been exploring such emotions-based issues as how we might use social media to increase our level of kindness, and even the thorny but fundamental question of how we can better learn to love our enemies.

All of this is hopeful. But it doesn’t go far enough!

We have lately discussed two martyred heroes of the worldwide nonviolence movement, Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. And as we’ve talked about them here, we have come to see how similar they were to one another, both in their terrible historical moments and in their radically love-based approach. Not only did they renounce the notion that violence in words or deeds could be helpful to their causes; but far beyond that, each of them used the Gospel teachings in which their lives were grounded to demonstrate a radical love for humankind that seems almost inconceivable to us now. Dr. Bonhoeffer was battling the Nazi effort to eradicate millions of innocent people, while Dr. King was striving to help his country transcend its appalling racial past. But neither of them actually fought at all! Instead, they worked to ease people’s suffering without head-on tackling the evil that produced it, since they knew that those who fought the evil were only further inflaming it. Instead, each used the quiet power of the love-based message of Jesus and their own beautifully loving examples as the levers by which they worked to move the world. This is an essential lesson that we must internalize as deeply as they did, or we will never be able to accomplish anything of lasting value.

Dr. Bonhoeffer and Dr. King lived and died by the words of Jesus, and it was because they did that so well that their work lives on! The Lord said, “But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41). And He said, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). They never showed rage or hatred, not even in the face of their own martyrdom. In this, also, they closely followed the Lord!

Jesus was anxious to ensure that the fools who were pounding nails into His flesh would not be blamed. As it was happening, He said, “Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:24).

In the same vein, Dr. King said on the night before His assassination, “Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And He’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the Promised Land! I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the Promised Land. And I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!”

And Dr. Bonhoeffer said cheerfully to his fellow prisoners from the gallows, “This is the end. For me, the beginning of life.”

It feels hard to say this, but the basis of human society worldwide seems now to be dominance and rage, to the point where even the language we use to plead with one another to be more peaceful is grounded in the problem, and not in the solution. This sadly occurred to me as I was doing additional research before writing this piece. Everything I could find to read talked about promoting “nonviolence” as the goal, as if “violence” were the human normal so that was where our efforts at improvement must begin. But violence is emphatically not the human normal! Every human mind is inextricably part of the Godhead, the base creative force. And in order for us to ever make a difference in the world, we first must ground ourselves in that certainty, and in the Gospel teachings of Jesus as Dr. King and Dr. Bonhoeffer  both did so well. We must love everyone, without reservation!

As Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy’.  But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous (MT 5:43-45). And we must be peacemakers. As the Lord said, Blessed are the peacemakers; they shall be called the sons and daughters of God (MT 5:9).

Our work must not be defined as simply a lack of violence! Instead, it must be proactively grounded in nothing but perfect, eternal love. Jesus tells us, “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (MT 5:13-16).

Dr. King and Dr. Bonhoeffer can make our need to learn to live the Lord’s love-based truth much easier than it could have been! They can be our spiritual leaders now, our lodestones, our beautifully true examples. Next week we will look at how you and I and all the kindred spirits around us can learn from them how to be the light that this nation and the world now so desperately need….

 

Sparklers photo credit: verchmarco <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/160866001@N07/47005329394″>Nahaufnahme von zwei Wunderkerzen in Frauenhänden, die leuchtende Funken sprühen</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
MLK Stencil photo credit: Perfectance <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/77395664@N00/11980906396″>MLK Stencil</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Metallic Candle photo credit: cordeliasmom2012 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/100813531@N04/45813669675″>A Single Candle to Light the Night</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Crowd with Candles photo credit: etanliam2019 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/163076751@N04/48013456213″>46</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

A Saint For Today

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One of the biggest changes I’ve seen in recent years has been the number of people I hear from now who are feeling a call to serve Spirit. Often they don’t understand this urge, this inchoate itch they feel compelled to scratch, nor even are most of them certain that it really is an itch at all. Are they imagining things? Do other people ever feel this way? I haven’t much mentioned this development here because the ways people have been describing their histories and their calls to serve have been so varied, and because even a year or two ago there were just occasional requests for advice about how best to begin. It is only in recent months that I realize that these requests are coming more often! As I write this, I have before me a wonderful plea from someone very young who tells me that it is my work that has inspired her to seek to spend her life serving God… and hers is the second such email I have received this morning. It is dawning on me now that these messages are not random, even despite the fact that all these people’s backstories are so different. This is not random. And it likely is telling us that something profoundly important is happening at the level of human hearts.

If you also are feeling called as apparently so many others are being called now to do God’s work in today’s immensely troubled world, I would like to introduce to you a modern saint whose words can guide your path much better than mine ever could! Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a German Lutheran pastor who radically opposed the Nazi movement, worked to help Jews escape extermination, and was martyred at Flossenburg, a Nazi death-camp, at the age of thirty-nine. His was such an epic life lived in radical submission not to any religion, but rather to the living God, that if he had been born a Catholic, he would long since have been declared a saint. He died just a year before I was born, so he was better remembered when I was young than he is remembered now; but I am coming to realize that Dr. Bonhoeffer’s ideas have shaped me so profoundly that reading his words again feels like coming home.

The only way to genuinely follow Jesus is to step outside all conventional religions and meet God in the words that Jesus actually spoke to us long ago. You and I have been working at doing this together over the past year. And I realize now that Dietrich Bonhoeffer likely has been my inspiration! Many German clergymen welcomed the rise of Adolf Hitler. For Dr. Bonhoeffer, though, the antisemitism of Nazism was such anathema that he opposed Hitler almost from the beginning. He soon therefore also opposed the complacent theological ideas that made supporting Hitler even possible for Christians; and his became a radical new theology that required that Christians must stand resolutely righteous in a world gone wrong.

I can give you just a flavor of Dr. Bonhoeffer’s wisdom here. Much of his most brilliant writing was done from prison and smuggled out as letters that he may not have imagined might ever be published. But like Martin Luther King, Jr., who also was martyred at the age of thirty-nine, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a man shaped by his times and by the radical teachings of Jesus into a greatness that transcends time. And like Dr. King, Dr. Bonhoeffer is one of the few who are best fit to teach and lead us as we seek to better serve the Lord today. Let’s spend a few moments sitting at his feet as he shares with us the kind of wisdom that comes only from a life deeply grounded in Jesus and lived in radical service to God in the face of human evil.

“We are not to simply bandage the wounds of victims beneath the wheels of injustice, we are to drive a spoke into the wheel itself.”

“Silence in the face of evil is itself evil: God will not hold us guiltless. Not to speak is to speak. Not to act is to act.” 

“We live by responding to the word of God… since this word is addressed to our entire life, the response, too, can only be an entire one; it must be given with our entire life as it is realized in all our several actions.­”

“How wrong it is to use God as a stop-gap for the incompleteness of our knowledge… We are to find God in what we know, not in what we don’t know.”

“I should like to speak of God not on the boundaries but at the center, not in weaknesses but in strength; and therefore not in death and guilt but in life and goodness… God is the beyond in the midst of our life. The church stands, not at the boundaries where human powers give out, but in the middle of the village.”

“It was the error of Israel to put the Law in God’s place, to make the law their God and their God a law.”

“God loves human beings. God loves the world. Not an ideal human, but human beings as they are; not an ideal world, but the real world. What we find repulsive in their opposition to God, what we shrink back from with pain and hostility… this is for God the ground of unfathomable love.”

“‘Blessed are they that mourn, for they shall be comforted’…  By ‘mourning’ Jesus, of course, means doing without what the world calls peace and prosperity: He means refusing to be in tune with the world or to accommodate oneself to its standards. Such men mourn for the world, for its guilt, its fate, and its fortune.”

Christian love draws no distinction between one enemy and another, except that the more bitter our enemy’s hatred, the greater his need of love. Be his enmity political or religious, he has nothing to expect from a follower of Jesus but unqualified love. In such love there is no inner discord between private person and official capacity. In both we are disciples of Christ, or we are not Christians at all… The disciples realized that they too were his enemies, and that he had overcome them by his love. It is this that opens the disciple’s eyes, and enables him to see his enemy as a brother.”

“The extraordinary never merges into the personal. That was the fatal mistake of the false Protestant ethic which diluted Christian love into patriotism, loyalty to friends, and industriousness, which in short, perverted the better righteousness into mere civility.”

“When we judge other people we confront them in a spirit of detachment, observing and reflecting as it were from the outside. But love has neither time nor opportunity for this. If we love, we can never observe the other person with detachment, for he is always and at every moment a living claim to our love and service.”

“Love for the sinner is ominously close to love of the sin. But the love of Christ for the sinner in itself is the condemnation of sin.”

“By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

“If when we judged others, our real motive was to destroy evil, we should look for evil where it is certain to be found, and that is in our own hearts. But if we are on the look-out for evil in others, our real motive is obviously to justify ourselves.”

“The Church is the Church only when it exists for others… not dominating, but helping and serving. It must tell men of every calling what it means to live for Christ, to exist for others.”  

“We pray for the big things and forget to give thanks for the ordinary, small (and yet really not small) gifts. How can God entrust great things to one who will not thankfully receive from Him the little things?”

“It remains an experience of incomparable value that we have for once learned to see the great events of world history from below, from the perspective of the outcasts, the suspects, the maltreated, the powerless, the oppressed and reviled, in short, from the perspective of the suffering.”

“We must be ready to allow ourselves to be interrupted by God.” 

“The ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world that it leaves to its children.”   

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a young man full of promise who was called by the Lord as many people are now being called, to live the deepest Gospel truths in radical service to God. He submitted with grace to a death that came for him just as the fullness of his life was beginning! To read the best of his private words is to commune with the likes of Dr. King, with kindred non-Christians like Mahatma Gandhi, and in particular with the Lord Himself. We are being called now to use the Gospel teachings as these modern saints are leading us to use them, by putting them into practice in this world gone wrong so we might together become the heart and conscience of a better world yet to be born. Next week we will begin to look at how you and I might build upon their pioneering work. Now is when it begins….

 

Stained-Glass Bonhoeffer photo credit: sludgegulper <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/28179929@N08/3904027037″>Dietrict Bonhoeffer Stained Glass,St Johannes Basilikum, Berlin SW29</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Flossenburg Memorial photo credit: Hawk Eyes <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/80115102@N00/3736234653″>Flossenburg Concentration Camp</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Religious Nazis photo credit: Nick in exsilio <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/33563858@N00/40054157401″>Reich Church in Wittenberg</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Uniform photo credit: Inventorchris <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/41694433@N08/4883991693″>Jewis concentration camps uniform</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Bonhoeffer photo credit: depone <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/66576200@N00/2551556500″>Details Büro</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

When Our Faith Betrays Us

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus has some wonderfully positive things to say about faith! He sees it as the engine that empowers our minds. For example, when His disciples have trouble driving out a possessing spirit, they ask Him why they are unable to do it. And He says, “Because of the littleness of your faith; for truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you” (MT 17:20). The dictionary definition of “faith” is “Complete trust or confidence in someone or something.” The reason why Jesus can tell us that our having even the smallest speck of confidence will enable us to move a mountain is the fact that our minds actually are that powerful. Having faith in what is true is a reliable way for each of us to maximize the power of our vast, eternal minds, and thereby to supercharge our lives!

But having faith in something that is not true is worse than useless. A false faith that is eventually betrayed can bring on such deep disillusionment that it can put its victims off ever again having faith in anything. We are seeing this problem play out now in modern Christianity. For centuries, Christians have been taught to have faith in a host of things that are not grounded in the Gospel teachings of Jesus, but instead are just the fear-based theological whimsies of the religion’s prior adherents. Thanks to the fact that in recent years we have been able to judge these Christian dogmas against the truths we have begun to learn from those that we used to think were dead, we now can objectively determine that most of what modern Christians believe is not true. Here, from my forthcoming book, The Fun of Loving Jesus, are a few beliefs held by most modern Christians that we can now demonstrate are false:

  • God is a human-like individual who judges us.
  • Satan is a powerful evil entity.
  • God might condemn you to a fiery hell.
  • Only Christians can get into heaven.
  • Jesus will return to wage an end-times war.
  • Jesus died to atone to God for humanity’s sins.
  • The whole Christian Bible is the Inspired Word of God.
  • Jesus established the Christian religion as it is practiced today.

As you can see, a lot of what Christians believe is sadly from man and not from God.

We have spoken at length about some of the reasons why the forty thousand modern versions of Christianity are failing all together now, but the bottom-line reason is the simple fact that having faith in something that is not true leads to disillusionment. More and more, Christians worldwide are finding their faith in Christianity’s human-made dogmas so badly shaken that thousands of churches are closing each year in the United States alone. By contrast, of course, those of us who reject modern Christianity in favor of sitting at the Lord’s feet as He speaks to us two thousand years ago have no trouble establishing the kind of faith that Jesus urges upon us, since what Jesus tells us in the Gospels is abundantly confirmed to be true by so many of those who are not now in bodies, but in wonderful fact are not dead at all!

So the cure for the worldwide crisis of faith that is disheartening so many Christians now will be the rise of the genuine teachings of Jesus in the public mind. While Christianity has declined in popularity, Jesus retains an approval rating above ninety percent in the United States, and He is known and loved worldwide. So the only restriction that exists on how quickly the crisis of faith in Christianity can be addressed will be the speed at which those whose faith lies only in the genuine teachings of Jesus can manage to share the Lord’s truths with the world. Our Christian crisis of faith is maturing to the point where soon it can be resolved.

Our scientific crisis of faith, however, remains a stubborn and destructive problem.

The greatest scientific challenge of the twenty-first century is no longer the search for a theory of everything. That naïve old twentieth-century notion had held that surely it must be possible for physicists to unify quantum mechanics, general relativity, and all the other well-established theories into a single overarching theory in physics that would let them explain everything. The search for a theory of everything was doomed to fail in any event, because modern science as it was being developed during the early twentieth century had foolishly transformed itself into just another faith-based belief-system. The bogus faith that now has governed mainstream scientific inquiry for a century is materialism. And as was true of the old, false versions of Christianity that held sway for centuries, this false version of science that is based in a whimsical human dogma eventually must die. The only question is how much more damage it will do before its adherents give it up!

We are seeing the first encouraging signs of a weakening of faith in their materialist dogma in the working scientific community. Some wonder whether we have come to the end of physics, while others hopefully seek to redefine science – or at least the study of the mind – as the art of not knowing. Contributing to this loss of faith in science is the fact that a key scientific tenet is the proposition that reported and peer-reviewed experiments can be repeated to yield the same results; but it turns out now this is not true at all, so those who adhere to the materialist faith are seeking a way to fix this problem by rethinking experimental research altogether.

In their growing despair, the most faithful believers in science’s failed materialist dogma are in the process of attempting something that would be the equivalent of diehard Christians using the Shroud of Turin to reconstitute a living Jesus. For their faith in materialism to be right, scientists will have to discover a mechanism by which the human brain generates consciousness. So the search for a theory of everything seems to many to be less important now, as more and more researchers undertake an ambitious new effort that also is doomed to fail. No one has come up with a reasonable theory of how matter could give rise to consciousness, so some consciousness researchers have lately decided to just go ahead and declare victory anyway.

A mind-bogglingly clueless article was published in the July, 2019 issue of Scientific American with the title “How Matter Becomes Mind.” Since nowhere do the authors do more than to drill down on the brain’s complexity and hint that consciousness must come out of that somehow, the article’s title has been backed down a bit in the magazine’s online archives; but still, it reeks of un-seriousness. To give you a flavor of this faith-deluded nonsense, here is the article’s third paragraph:

“What has been missing from this account of human brain function is how all these distinct regions interact to give rise to who we are. Our laboratory and others have borrowed a language from a branch of mathematics called graph theory that allows us to parse, probe and predict complex interactions of the brain that bridge the seemingly vast gap between frenzied neural electrical activity and an array of cognitive tasks—sensing, remembering, making decisions, learning a new skill and initiating movement. This new field of network neuroscience builds on and reinforces the idea that certain regions of the brain carry out defined activities. In the most fundamental sense, what the brain is—and thus who we are as conscious beings—is, in fact, defined by a sprawling network of 100 billion neurons with at least 100 trillion connecting points, or synapses.”

(Quick translation for non-scientists: This is really extremely complicated! But we are true scientists. Our faith sustains us.)

Meanwhile, the fundamental truth that the great quantum physicist Max Planck first outlined for us a century ago – the fact that what we experience as consciousness is primary, and it pre-exists matter – continues to be abundantly validated. For example, afterlife researchers have known for decades that as death approaches and our minds begin to detach from our bodies, many people whose brains have been destroyed will briefly become lucid and mentally normal. Working scientists don’t yet feel free to talk about the materialist-faith-destroying implications of terminal lucidity, but at least they are finally noticing it! And we who are watching can have renewed hope that perhaps the scientific community’s liberation from its century-old false materialist dogma might not be much longer in coming….

 

Jesus with globe photo credit: Andras Fulop <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/101240316@N03/46517047184″>Christ with the Globe from Tizian Workshop 068a</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Brain circuits photo credit: Genista <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/50457550@N00/3432987963″>signaling (animated)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Light-head photo credit: atercorv <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/182475920@N08/48187491151″>lighthead2018</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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