Author: Roberta Grimes

Conscious Awareness

To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

A time to be born, a time to die.
A time to plant, a time to reap.
A time to kill, a time to heal.
A time to laugh, a time to weep.

To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

A time to build up, a time to break down.
A time to dance, a time to mourn.
A time to cast away stones,
A time to gather stones together.
– Peter Seeger (1919-2014), from “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (1965)

Last week I witnessed one of the most shocking exhibitions of willful scientific and spiritual ignorance that I ever have seen, or that I could have imagined. My dear ones, it never is our intention here to name and shame those who have no way of knowing better. But we have always respected the Institute of Noetic Sciences (“IONS”), which was founded by the illustrious astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth person ever to walk on the moon, and who had a spiritually transformative experience on his way back from the moon. I have understood that IONS truly does intend to foster creative and leading-edge approaches to the scientific investigation of human consciousness,” as its own promotional materials proudly proclaim. So, wow, when I learned that IONS was about to award prizes for Breaking the Boundaries of the Brain: Exploring Pioneering Theories of Non-Local Consciousness, I was eager to learn a lot more about that!

The IONS promotional materials for its awards presentation for a set of three prize-winning papers went on to say, “The finalists will share highlights from their award-winning reviews, and expand on leading non-local theories grounded in empirical evidence. The IONS science team will be on hand to discuss the profound implications.” And, “Whether you’re a scientist, practitioner, or simply curious about the mysteries of consciousness, this is a special opportunity to explore revolutionary ideas that could reshape our understanding of human potential and the very nature of reality.” The three prize-winners then presented papers to their online audience that amounted to nothing more than compilations of old guesses about how and where in the brain consciousness might be produced, and how these individual brain-produced consciousnesses might intermingle. Or it was something like that. To tell you the truth, all their trumpeted “leading-edge theories” would decades ago have been seen as nonsense among most modern researchers who have any clue. I lost interest in the whole thing pretty quickly.

The human brain does not produce consciousness. The brain is something in the nature of a transmitter and receiver, but nothing more. There is no evidence that the human brain produces consciousness, and there is so much good evidence by now that consciousness is primary and pre-existing that I was shocked to see such outmoded ideas being considered noteworthy by IONS. The fact that what we experience as consciousness is primary was first discovered by the father of quantum physics, Max Planck, more than a century ago. And it was certainly the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century. In 1931 Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Then he said in 1944, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Albert Einstein eventually came to agree with him. Einstein is quoted as having said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” All of this is pretty heady stuff! And many people were increasingly confident that before the end of the twentieth century, mainstream science’s brief flirtation with its false religion of atheistic materialism would be at an end. But all of this is still not broadly known even now, when we are already 25% of our way into the 21st century, only because even though matter is 99.9999999% empty space, materialist science as a discipline remains simply unable to cope with the concept of (gulp!) an entirely non-solid reality.    

Consciousness and individual awareness are not the same thing, anyway. This seems to be a part of why the folks at IONS are so hung up on the gray matter inside the human skull. But then, of course, even plants are aware. Oh, yes indeed, the flowers by your garden bench are aware of you as you sit down beside them, and as you then sadly might confide in them that you and your beloved are having a tiff. It is becoming possible for us to imagine now that on some level, even individual cellular life might well be to some extent aware. Indeed, since consciousness is so basic, we might now be coming to see that individual awareness might be one of the features of life itself. And incidentally, I should make it clear that I don’t like doing this naming-and-shaming. In point of fact, doing it horrifies me. But IONS is a prestigious nonprofit organization! And if any such institution holds itself out to the public as being on the cutting edge of consciousness research, but then it refuses to hold itself to a standard of pursuing the objective truth wherever it may lead, then those who are dedicated to pursuing the truth break the public’s trust if we fail to call them out.

Speaking of the truth about consciousness, perhaps the most transformative book that I ever have read in this field is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first read it in 1973, and I didn’t realize until much later the way that book had formed a basis for my ongoing afterlife research. It opened my eyes to a deeper awareness that nothing really is as it seems; it primed me to later on accept the evidence that what we experience as human consciousness really is primary; and it showed me, too, how sadly closed-minded and unable to accept even basic truths about reality mainstream scientists really still are!

That book’s core insight from my perspective was that even plant-fragments are conscious, in the sense that they are aware, and they actually are able to communicate. What a revelation that was! Consider only the work of Cleve Backster, who back in the nineteen-sixties was America’s foremost expert on lie detectors. One morning in 1966, he randomly decided to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached to one of its leaves a galvanometer, which is the part of a polygraph machine which registers human emotions. And he found to his surprise and delight that the plant was reacting very much as a person would react who was having transient thoughts. Wow, that was interesting! He soon found, too, that the most extreme reactions in his plant were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves. But the plant’s reaction was less if he only imagined burning the leaf, without intending to actually do it; surprisingly, the plant could tell the difference. Or it reacted differently if he outright burned a leaf, without thinking about it beforehand. His plant also would react if other living things in the room were credibly threatened with harm. Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants even can read the minds of their familiar keepers from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing revelations are now almost sixty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in human history!

This discovery that even living plant-fragments are not just conscious and able to communicate, but that they actually seem to be aware in the same way that human beings are aware, despite the fact that plants have no brains at all, still fills me with wonder. And of course, it further demonstrates the frank silliness of our clueless friends at IONS, who still continue to look for a source of consciousness inside the human brain, almost as if they are a group of Australian aborigines, perhaps, clustered  around a radio and trying to find inside it all the little instruments making the music that is emanating from it. Many years ago, Cleve Backster’s pioneering work formed a basis for my own growing research-based awareness that what we experience as consciousness has to be primary. There is no other explanation that fits all the evidence. So when in 2011 I read that ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and I found that the greatest of all quantum physicists had many decades before reached the same set of conclusions that I was reaching now, I had a joyously ultimate eureka moment.

All of this came to mind again when I read a wonderful article in Smithsonian Magazine back in 2018, which is unfortunately paywalled. It was called “Do Trees Talk to Each other?”   Well, of course they do! Peter Wohlleben is a German researcher now popularly known as the “Tree Whisperer” whose book, The Hidden Life of Trees,  is now available in English. If you subscribe to the Smithsonian Magazine so you can read the article, or if you buy and read his book, you will forever after see each forest of any size as a thriving community of sentient individuals in constant and heavily involved communication with one another, caring for their young, and even caring for their old and for the stumps of those felled by people. They are caring, too, for other benevolent creatures, and fighting off anything that means to do them harm. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again!

What you and I experience as human consciousness is the base creative force. And consciousness is all that objectively exists! Consciousness is how each of us relates to God. Consciousness is the water in which we swim, it is the air beneath our wings, and in point of fact, there really is nothing else. So it should not really surprise us much to find that every living thing is in some way conscious. And in fact, that may be true of even what we now consider to be non-living things. If consciousness is the base creative force, then perhaps even rocks might be somehow conscious? One of the things that we generally do when we first return to our eternal home after each earth-lifetime is sightseeing, on other planets and even in other realities. I recall long ago reading an early-twentieth-century account received through a deep-trance medium from someone who had been enjoying doing his post-earthly-death touring. And he talked about a planet where the life was not carbon-based, but instead it was silica-based. He told his listening loved ones through that medium that the entire planet he just had visited had turned out to be teeming with life! But you didn’t realize that for a while, because all that life moved ve-e-e-ry sl-o-o-o-wly. And you know, come to think of it, the rocks on this planet are moving very slowly, too….

More and more, it is becoming clear that accepting Max Planck’s genius insight that consciousness is primary is going to be essential if scientists are ever to end their now more than century-long materialist muddle. As incredible as it now seems to us, the scientific community has of course known for more than a century that Max Planck and Albert Einstein and many of mainstream science’s other greatest historical heroes were sure that consciousness is primary, and materialist scientists are coming to see at this point how their dogma-hobbled research is stalling out. And yet, they still have been unable to drop materialism as their fundamental dogma. A Nobel Prize awaits the first truly open-minded physicist who is brave enough and smart enough to finally and forever remove his own materialist chains and come up with a viable Consciousness Theory of Everything!

To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

 A time of love, a time of hate.
A time of war, a time of peace.
A time you may embrace,
A time to refrain from embracing.

 To everything turn, turn, turn,
There is a season turn, turn, turn,
And a time to every purpose under Heaven.

 A time to gain, a time to lose.
A time to rain, a time to sow.
A time for love, a time for hate.
A time for peace, I swear it’s not too late!
Peter Seeger (1919-2014), from “Turn! Turn! Turn!” (1965)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

The New Explanation

If you’re going to San Francisco,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
If you’re going to San Francisco,
You’re gonna meet some gentle people there.

For those who come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.
In the streets of San Francisco,
Gentle people with flowers in their hair
.

All across the nation, such a strange vibration!
People in motion.
There’s a whole generation with a new explanation.
People in motion, people in motion.
– Scott McKenzie (1939-2012) & John Phillips (1935-2001), from “San Francisco” (1967)

To be a young member of the American generation that was born in the first two decades following the Second World War was an absolutely confounding experience. And we who were young then knew at the time how disruptive it all was for us. We were being whipsawed by history in ways that felt exciting, perhaps, but also it seemed to be so unfair! And in some ways, being young in the nineteen-sixties felt like falling off the end of what we were pretty sure must have been millennia of stability and gradual progress into what felt like the end of a reasonable and orderly world. We were falling from there into chaos, and with no floor anymore, no rules at all, no concept of where the new floor might be, and no idea about even whether or not there ever was going to be a new floor.

My goodness, do you want to hear about stability? I’ll show you some stability. My grandparents were subsistence farmers in the nineteen-fifties in the United States, and their simple ancestral way of life had not changed much for centuries. When I was small, the bane of my daily existence was a rooster that was almost my own height and weight, and he would chase me whenever I helped my grandmother go into the chicken-coop to gather eggs. My grandfather taught me how to hand-milk a cow. Every holiday turkey of my young childhood was cooked in a black-iron, wood-fired range, and I still will swear to you that you never have had holiday turkeys and pies as good as what that gigantic wood-fired range could produce! Until I was maybe five years old, my grandparents’ telephone was not only a rotary, but it was actually one of those old wooden boxes that were screwed to the wall and had a black cone receiver, with a separate cone to hold to your ear at the end of a cord that hung looped by its side. My grandmother wore work-dresses that she had made from printed cotton chickenfeed bags. Her idea of a small child’s special treat was half a slice of buttered bread. She had lived through the Great Depression, after all.

But I digress. My point here is that until the late nineteen-sixties, things in society really didn’t change quickly, or even change much at all, through world wars and national economic depressions and whatever else might happen in the world, and nor did anyone expect things to change. Social assumptions stayed comfortably the same. Girls still were mostly wearing dresses to school, and they prudently still saved themselves for marriage. The world was still carefree and simple, and I look back now, and I try to pinpoint the precise moment when everything in the world began to change. And for me, I think that it must have been one late-fall Saturday afternoon when I was a college sophomore. We were sitting around the parlor in Northrop House at Smith College and talking with the boys that they were always bussing in on weekends, because Smith was an all-female school. I got to arguing with this guy about politics; and forever after, that one afternoon has stuck fast in my mind. I was insisting to him that the U.S. had wised up now, and we were never again going to become involved in another stupid war. But he said, “Oh, no no! You watch Vietnam! There is going to be another war. You mark my words!” That was the first time that I think that I ever had heard anyone say the word “Vietnam.” And I vividly recall that moment. I can remember where we were and what he said, to this day.

That must have been in the fall of 1966. By that next spring, that nameless Yalie was proving that he had been as good as his word, because the country of Vietnam was starting to headline most evening news programs. There still was a legal draft in place as a legacy from WWII, so we were beginning to see on many nights the riveting image of helicopters landing half a world away so dying boys that we might have known in high school could be loaded into them while the long grass around them blew in the wash from the helicopters’ blades. Omigod, there was an actual war going on! We had no idea why that war was happening, and it never occurred to anyone in authority that it might perhaps be a good idea to help America’s youth build some sort of patriotic sense around this new war. Not until it was very much too late. The war in Vietnam was right there in our living rooms, it was killing our own friends and brothers, and it made no sense to us at all!

For the supersized and pampered Baby Boom generation, the Vietnam War landed smack on our heads like Defcon One. Conditions were perfect for this situation to become downright explosive. If there had been some actual threat to our country; or if there had not still been a draft, so only volunteers were being harmed; or if the Baby Boom generation were not so young and frisky; and also if it were not a generation more than three times the size of the Silent Generation conceived in poverty that had come right before it; then perhaps young America’s overall reaction to the Vietnam War might not have been so explosive. And also, I think, if the Vietnam War had not been happening in every living room, our reaction might not have been so extreme. But by the summer of 1967, Vietnam death counts and fresh videos of our own dying friends and brothers headed each night’s evening news. And almost right away, crowds of angry and chanting teenagers began to march in the streets.

Transistor radios were another problem. Now we could carry our music with us. And our music was transformed from rock ‘n roll and the Beatles shyly wanting to hold our hand to full-blown war rage so fast that it made your head spin. By mid-1967, we were hearing Country Joe and the Fish singing “… and it’s 1, 2, 3, what’re we fighting for? Don’t ask me, I don’t give a damn. Next stop is Vietnam! And it’s 5, 6, 7, open up the pearly gates. Well, there ain’t no time to wonder why. Whoopee! we’re all gonna die!” By the start of 1968, war protests had taken over most college campuses, and that included my own. Smith College closed early in the Spring of 1968. We didn’t even hold a graduation.

Yet despite all of that, as early as the summer of 1967, there was a glimmer of change in the thinking of many young Americans. Our frame-verse is evidence of that change. It’s an invitation song about the 1967 “Summer of Love” in San Francisco, which was a gathering of young people who were already beginning to reject the very idea of wars, and they also were rejecting even the idea of protesting any wars. They were rejecting as well America’s entire culture of wealth and plenty existing side by side with and shockingly carelessness of America’s pockets of poverty; and they were appalled, too, by America’s racist past that still dominated the southern states. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his brethren had to march there for their personal freedom, even while the Vietnam War was at its height.

The Boomer generation was beginning to call for a whole new society to be built from the ground up in the United States, and one that was based on nothing but mutual love and peaceful understanding. There are newspaper photos from this period that show young people sticking flowers into the barrels of the rifles of young soldiers who were headed for Vietnam. And of course, there are all those pictures of Dr. King’s marches and his speeches. All of this was happening simultaneously, and it  was fertile ground for the always-failed nuttiness of Marxism to take root in America; but most of these young people were too unfocused for any kind of unified movement ever to begin. More and more of them instead were becoming hippies and druggies, individually turning on and tuning in and dropping out. The San Francisco Summer of Love led to Woodstock two years later; after which, Vietnam soon wound down. And soon thereafter, most of the Boomer generation grew up, sobered up, and began their adult lives. Although San Francisco really never has managed to get over that 1967 Summer of Love. And nor, I think, has Roman Christianity.

Almost everyone who emails me with spiritual-crisis questions, to this day, is a member of that gigantic Baby Boom generation. Oh, once in a while I will hear from someone in her thirties or forties who has lost a pet, or from someone in his late twenties who wonders if there really is a God. But those are much less common crisis questions. No, as I think about it now, I am realizing that the Vietnam War that caused the brief but violent Sixties youthquake and shook loose forever the Baby Boomers’ trust in every governmental institution, basically began the fall of my whole generation’s trust in every other once-sacred institution as well. And that especially includes Roman Christianity.

What the Vietnam War really did was to give to the Baby Boom generation at a very impressionable age not just the freedom to question authority. Even more importantly, it delegated to each Baby Boomer as an individual, and for the first time in human history, something that was a lot more crucial. It gave to every Baby Boomer the clear responsibility to question all authority! That is what the “new explanation” mentioned in our frame verse is. That is why the Baby Boom generation in the United States became a New Man because of the Vietnam War. It freed most of us forever from a belief that any organized government might ever be able to do anything really right.

I can remember how that felt when it hit me, when I myself first realized what a gigantic and altogether profoundly stupid mistake the entire Vietnam War venture had been. Fifty-eight thousand American boys and men my age died in Vietnam for absolutely nothing! And seventy-five thousand more were disabled and had their whole lives’ dreams destroyed. Pause here and roll those gigantic numbers around in your mind for a moment. And nearly all of them had been drafted into that war, so it is not as if they went to Vietnam by some patriotic choice. I can recall watching all of this gradually dawn on the members of my generation around me. So many young lives destroyed, and all for nothing! We saw then that the governmental emperor truly has no clothes at all. Never again will we be so stupidly trusting! Nor will we ever again be fooled.       

Of course, I had already been primed by Jesus to give up on Roman Christianity, but my doing that was made far easier by this great, profound Vietnam War lesson. Governments of every description are composed of fallible, flawed, and often variously stupid, self-involved, and in some ways perhaps almost venal people. And that includes the people who govern religions as well. Most of those who email me now with spiritual questions are Baby Boomers, and it is remarkable that so many of them frame their first question nearly identically! They say some version of, “I can’t take the church anymore, but I still love Jesus. So, what do I do?”

And wonderfully, Jesus has had His answers ready for them for two thousand years in the pages of His Gospels. I can send them PDFs of my books to read, and then I can directly answer their more specific questions, and by now the old Roman religion that does not remotely teach what Jesus taught is falling away. While, more and more, I see people teaching, promoting, and living Jesus’s teachings, even when many of those doing the teaching are claiming Jesus’s teachings to be their own. Jesus really loves that! His original Way is being revived again in so many places, and by so many people, and it begins to feel more and more like the spontaneous people’s movement based in love for all of humankind that those first fed-up young Baby Boomers wanted to begin long ago in San Francisco as their horrified initial reaction to the Vietnam War. Perhaps this is the way that Jesus’s Way always from long ago was supposed to begin?

Meanwhile, the shop where I now have my nails done is staffed by friendly young Vietnamese ladies. They are lovely, and they speak good English, although they chat together in their native tongue. They seem to bear us no ill will for having destroyed their country with shells and napalm and then abandoned it to the Vietcong. Of course, I tip those girls especially well! And I really think that I ought to apologize to them. But I never can find the words.       

For those who come to San Francisco,
Be sure to wear some flowers in your hair.
If you come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there.

If you come to San Francisco,
Summertime will be a love-in there!
– Scott McKenzie (1939-2012) & John Phillips (1935-2001), from “San Francisco” (1967)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

His Way?

And now, the end is near, and so I face the final curtain.
My friend, I’ll say it clear. I’ll state My case, of which I’m certain.
I’ve lived a life that’s full! I traveled each and every highway.
And more, much more than this, I did it My Way.

Regrets, I’ve had a few. But then again, too few to mention.
I did what I had to do, and saw it through without exemption.
I planned each charted course, each careful step along the byway.
And more, much more than this, I did it My Way.

Yes, there were times, I’m sure you knew, when I bit off more than I could chew.
But through it all, when there was doubt, I ate it up and spit it out!
I faced it all, and I stood tall, and did it My Way.
Paul Anka, Giles Thibaut (1927-2000), Claude Francois (1939-1978), from “My Way” (1968)

My dear ones, msny of us will recognize “My Way” as the signature song of the beloved and now transitioned singer and actor, Frank Sinatra. Ah, but the personal pronouns are capitalized! So, are we saying here that it also might be Jesus’s signature song? Well, yes, perhaps it might as well be sung by Jesus. If we were writing a kind of pop opera about the life of Jesus, we could imagine our Hero, after He has sung a song about His retreat into the wilderness to commune with God at the start of His ministry (MT 4), and then He might tell us musically that God wants us to love the Lord our God with all our heart and soul and mind, and call for us to love our neighbor as we love ourselves because in that consists the whole Law and the Prophets (MT 22:36-40); and then after He has confidently sung the Sermon on the Mount (MT 7-9); and then in the end, as He is preparing for His ordeal and death on the cross so He can then rise from the dead, our Hero might well sing for us a song that is very much like our frame verse for today. Don’t you think?

Or in fact, might this even be our own life’s signature song, yours and mine? After all, each of us is the shining hero of our own glorious and well-lived life! Each of us does the best that we can with the cards that we have been dealt, and with the decisions that we each have made, whether those decisions were all carefully considered, or whether a few of them were made in the desperate heat of the unexpected moment. And each of us is going to feel in retrospect that we have done some inadvertent harm to others, and perhaps that we have fallen short of some carefully thought out and well-aimed goals; and of course, we all are going to have regrets. And we will all feel the need nevertheless to stand tall and speak well for ourselves at the end of our lives, in spite of everything. Each of us is going to want to feel as we approach our transition that we have tried to live in the best way we could.

But, have we lived our lives in our own way? And what does our claiming now that we have lived in our own way even mean? What, really, is a well-lived life? Are we even meant to live in our own way, or is there some other, greater, and more objective standard by which we are being called now to live, each one of us, our own best lives? And if we can find and hold to that ultimate standard, can we live our own lives with the fewest regrets? This is not a trick question, although I will admit that it does sound like one.

When I was meeting with Jesus in the summer of 2022 to talk about creating a website for Him, and then one night He told me His genuine story, I was stunned to hear that His was such a human story! Here it is again, And I urge you to read it again, since I wrote it as a blog post only two months after I had first heard it from Jesus. He told me that He wants people to have His true story made available to them now. Because it turns out that just as the Roman Christian religion is not Jesus’s religion at all, so the Roman Christian Jesus is not  remotely who Jesus actually is. But in neither case does the genuine Jesus seem to be fighting the Roman version. He doesn’t seem to care about the fact that the Roman Christianity that has dominated the world for the past seventeen hundred years is peddling an erroneous version of Jesus’s teachings, and also of Jesus Himself. If you prefer Roman Christianity and the Roman Jesus, then Jesus does not seem to mind at all if you prefer the Roman versions of each to the true versions. He just intends that eventually, the truth about who He is and who He always has been will prevail.

It did amaze me at first to hear Jesus say that He once had been a regular human being. And He seemed to be so glad to be saying it now! As if it had been a secret that had felt too heavy to carry and had been too long kept. It is easy for us to think of Jesus as, hey, He is just God anyway, right? So everything is just plain easy for Him? But in fact, when Jesus was born on earth as Jesus, it was the first and probably the final time that anyone ever  has been born from out of the Godhead Level that way. It took Him what was apparently four thousand earth-years after His last earth-lifetime as a regular person to convince the Councils whose approvals were necessary to even allow Him to be born again from out of the Godhead Collective, and He was born knowing only what His goal was, and not really in detail how He was going to accomplish that goal. So, just as you or I might have done, as extremely bright as Jesus is, once He was here again, He had to figure it all out as He went along.

Jesus told me as we sat there on the riverbank two summers ago, feeding His fish, that frankly, people in general with all their selfishness and their petty cruelties had never made much sense to Him, anyway. Thomas tells me that he himself barely remembers the last earth-lifetime that they shared six thousand years ago, but he does recall how abnormal his younger brother who was reborn as Jesus always was, how preternaturally loving, and how unable his brother had been to fight. He simply could not fight at all, not even in His own defense, so as his city’s general, Thomas had been forced to assign soldiers to protect Him. And here Jesus was, four thousand years later, only love and peace to the very marrow of the bones of his new material body, and born out of the Godhead this time, so He was physically protected by invisible archangels. But Jesus still was pretty perplexed by people! So, until He was thirty in His lifetime as Jesus, He was glad to humbly study people from his basically invisible viewpoint as a simple village carpenter, in an effort to comprehend them well enough to know what words might best move them. And He prayed. He deeply communed with God. Jesus was building for Himself His own Way, so He could then share that Way with all of humankind.  

My childhood experience of light was a great gift to me from Thomas for several reasons. Not only did I know from the age of eight that there is something behind the curtain, but also I took it as a comforting working hypothesis that what was behind that curtain was God. And in addition, I began at the age of eleven to read the Bible every night, from cover to cover and over and over. I read it once; then I would read the New Testament again, and then just the Gospels an extra time; and then I would start in again with Genesis. I kept up that routine until I was fifty years old. After that, I have concentrated on just the Gospels, so by now I can almost recite by rote the whole life and the teachings of Jesus. So I know how fallibly human Jesus still was when He was born from out of the Godhead two thousand years ago. Was He loving back then? Oh yes! But He still was human enough to have His moments. He could crankily curse forever an innocent fig tree for being out of season when Jesus happened to be walking by it and wanting a snack (see MK 11:12-14), and He could spew pure venom at the clergymen that He despised, calling them a brood of vipers (see MT 3:7). Two thousand years ago, Jesus was already divine; but also, He was still human, with His own little array of forgivable human flaws. But the Jesus of today that you will encounter in the astral plane when you meet Him after you transition home truly is God, and only God, quite literally. After He has spent another seventeen hundred years healing what were hundreds of millions of victims of Roman Christianity, this Jesus who once long ago was as human as you and I are is now so divinely powerful, and so beautiful! There is nothing fallibly human left in Him at all. I cannot imagine the Jesus of today ever feeling or showing impatience with anyone or anything, or ever cursing any living thing!

And so, Jesus created His Way when He was last on earth, and He gave it to us as a set of teachings that live in the four Canonical Gospels. He had come back to earth with just an idea, which was that He wanted to teach all of humankind how to elevate ourselves to the Godhead level, just as He had done naturally. And by the time He was ready to leave this earth, He had created and shared His own Way, which perfectly fits what He had come to earth to do. He then charged His Disciples to go forth and spread His Way to all nations, just as He was preparing Himself to die on a cross and then rise from the dead in order to teach His one last great earth-lesson, which was that our lives, like His, truly are eternal! So before Jesus went to the cross, He said to his Disciples, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. 19 Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, 20 teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age” (MT 28: 18-20).

All right, so what then of you and me? What might perhaps be our own best Way, by which we each can live our own best earth-lives? Well, actually, perhaps Jesus’s Way, based on His teachings on forgiveness and love, might be our own strongest and truest Way as well? That made sense to me, so I said it to Thomas. As is usual for us as we work together, this frame verse was one that Thomas had found in my mind and proposed to me, and I thought that was why he had proposed it: I thought the whole point of this post was going to be that he and Jesus want Jesus’s Way to be the Way for each of us to live our own best lives. How easy and neat that would have been!

But just as I was about to write that, Thomas said, “Not so fast.” And I knew by the way he said it that it was really Jesus who was saying it to him. Often when we write about Jesus, these posts are a three-way collaboration. And apparently, Jesus doesn’t want us just to adopt His Way of living blindly, without thinking about it for ourselves. Thomas has just said, “He isn’t asking you to turn yourselves into more Jesuses, doing it only His Way. That is not why He came!”

Oh. Well, then what? What Jesus is asking of us is that we first learn to understand and live His teachings on forgiveness and love, that we truly make His  teachings our own as we begin to work to raise our own spiritual vibrations. It was to give us those core teachings that He came to earth to live that lifetime as Jesus, after all, and He wants each of us first to internalize those teachings. Oh, but then, my dear ones, Jesus wants us to know how very much He loves each of us for who we each are uniquely! He still wants us to live our own lives on earth as our own very deeply precious selves! And to be the very best examples of ourselves that we can be. I smile to think of that. A more extremely perfect you, and now radiant with forgiveness and love, will be you, truly doing you, in the very best way that you can!

I’ve loved, I’ve laughed and cried, I’ve had My fill, My share of losing.
And now, as tears subside, I find it all so amusing.
To think I did all that, and may I say, not in a shy way.
Oh no, oh no, not Me! I did it My Way.

For what is a Man, what has He got? If not Himself, then He has naught!
To say the things He truly feels, and not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows. And did it My Way!
Paul Anka, Giles Thibaut (1927-2000), Claude Francois (1939-1978), from “My Way” (1968)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Going Home (Part Five)

Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality. 

We slowly drove – He knew no haste
And I had put away
My labor and my leisure too,
For His Civility –

We passed the School, where Children strove
At Recess – in the Ring –
We passed the Fields of Gazing Grain –
We passed the Setting Sun – 

Or rather – He passed Us –
The Dews drew quivering and Chill –
For only Gossamer, my Gown –
My Tippet – only Tulle – 

We paused before a House that seemed
A Swelling of the Ground –
The Roof was scarcely visible –
The Cornice – in the Ground – 

Since then – ’tis Centuries – and yet
Feels shorter than the Day
I first surmised the Horses’ Heads
Were toward Eternity –
– Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), from “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” (1863)

Oh, how I loved this famous poem when I was a  child! I even was able to recite parts of it when I was maybe ten years old. I could so well envision that Victorian lady who had been about her prim, Victorian life when this mysterious carriage pulled by black horses with black plumes on their heads had stopped for her, so she had stepped up inside, as a lady back then would have obediently done, since ladies then had no control of their lives. When I was a child, this poem was my first interested realization that, of course, you would discover wherever you were going when you noticed wherever the horses’ heads were pointing. And I wondered then over all the things that she passed, the elements of her life that she was seeing from centuries after her death. A Victorian lady had imagined that eternity would be just an endless carriage ride.

But was that how death really was going to work? That was what this poem had made me wonder. I was then just a child, after all. There were two generations of my family ahead of me in line, and I had had that experience of light when I was eight years old, so I was not at all afraid of death, although having so lately seen that amazing light, I was plenty curious about it. Which must have been why this poem seized my mind so deeply when I was so young.  

By now, though, and quite wonderfully, we have had many reports from Miss Dickinson’s near-contemporaries about what her eternity had held in store for her, once she later disembarked from that funeral carriage. If you are still a bit hazy about the geography and the physics of the Greater Reality, perhaps your taking a moment now just to quickly skim through our past two weeks’ posts might help you to keep things straight as we follow some recent afterlife arrivals through all the gloriously dazzling things that there are to do for fun in our eternal lives once we have shed these material bodies. And then we finally, joyously, will arrive back to our infinitely wonderful eternal home!

We are assuming, of course, that those who are dying on earth have closely followed their deathbed visitors straight home. And they have had their post-death nap that lasted for an earth-day or two; and their life review, during which they forgave everyone, and especially themselves; and also their wonderful welcome-home party, during which they discovered that even some of their enemies during this most recent earth-lifetime were actually beloved eternal friends just playing those parts, to aid them in their spiritual learning. They might have needed to spend a couple of earth-months of non-time in the spiritual healing gardens. If they wanted a post-death meeting with, and also a blessing from Jesus Himself, of course they have met with Jesus in His Level Three glade beside the river and had that happen for them as well. Many of us spend as much as a year or two of post-death non-time in these semi-serious, semi-joyous formalities, and in trying to send messages back to our loved ones on earth, to assure them that indeed we have survived.

But, then what? Well, once we are at home and reacclimated, we are spiritually healed and feeling great and at peace, we have spent time with our oldest and dearest friends and family from our most recent lifetimes, and we are settled in and used again to a home base somewhere that makes us feel grounded in eternity, there soon is a cheerily expectant “Okay, what’s next?” kind of feeling that settles in for us. And there is so much there that we can do for fun! Let’s first consider our overall situation:

  • Nearly Everyone Returns to the Greater Reality Vibrating Somewhere at Collective Levels Three Through Five. Those are the three Summerland collective levels, and for most of us, the lower vibrational half of that range is where we spend endless ages of incarnations! As you know, we always can go lower than wherever we are vibrating; we just have trouble going higher. So nearly all of us, when we go home, will be able to do a lot of traveling around the Level Three and perhaps some of the lowest-vibration Level Four attractions. But in trying to hit some of those lower Level Four or higher hotspots, unless we have a friend who can come with us and can shield us with their personal higher-vibration auras, we will be so beaten up by the higher vibrations at the upper-Level-Four level that we will have to turn back. So, if we assume that for now, we cannot go above Level Three, what is there for us to do for fun?
  • We Can Ski, Snowboard, Swim, Boat, Hike, Climb, and Otherwise Enjoy Vigorous Outdoor Lives. Mikey Morgan, who is an upper Sixth Level Being, tells us that he still comes down to the Third Level and he enjoys snowboarding on occasion. And since the snow isn’t cold and our astral bodies cannot be damaged, he says that he can now snowboard like an Olympian!
  • There is a Mental Hotline at the Third Level That Announces What Performances are Now About to Happen. At the turn of the twentieth century, everyone was hungry to see and hear great orchestras perform. And perform they did! You would simply put out your intention to hear Mozart or Tchaikovsky or whatever, and whenever an orchestra would be playing that composer’s music anywhere in the world, you would know it. You would think yourself there, and instantly you would be in an open-air coliseum in the Greater Reality over Paris or Moscow or Kiev or somewhere, sitting front-row center as the orchestra started to play. As it played, not only would you hear it more beautifully than you ever heard it on the material plane, but also you would see the music in clouds of colors over the performers.
  • Many Transitioned Earth-Performers are Performing at the Third Level. We don’t know about every recently-deceased star who is performing, but I imagine that a great many people do perform at least occasionally. The names most commonly mentioned are Frank Sinatra, John Lennon, Early Elvis, and Las Vegas Elvis. Reportedly, Elvis is a higher-level being, but he has resolved to continue to perform on Level Three for so long as anyone wants to see him perform. And again, same process: you mentally put out your intention to see some performer, and the next time he or she performs anywhere, you are made aware so you can be front row center.
  • There Seems to be a Vibrant Level Three Amateur Performance Scene. Apparently, a lot of people who never performed on earth are performing there in plays and as singers and dancers, and they enjoy doing that. You can, too! They are taught by people who have taught some of the greats on earth, and their performances are well-attended. Children born as talented prodigies likely first learned their skills this way.
  • We Can Take Instrumental Lessons from Some of the Greats. The thing is that with our vastly augmented minds, we can learn skills far more easily there than we ever could have learned them here! Many of those who are being born in the early part of this century were likely transitioning into the afterlife maybe a century and  a half ago, too poor ever to have learned to play the piano or the violin or the cello back then, but very eager when they transitioned home to learn to play those instruments, and to learn to play from Mozart! They are being born again now, and they are the children who now are piano and violin prodigies. My Aunt Ruth was a gifted seamstress on earth who made her own clothes, and she dressed like royalty. Once recently when I was speaking with my mother through a medium, she showed me my Aunt Ruth teaching a fairly large sewing class using mind-controlled crystal sewing machines.  
  • There are Dress-Up Play Villages. We don’t know how many of these there are, but we know of at least two. I suspect that there soon will be more. The first two that we have become aware of are the Wild West village and the Dickens village. If you feel like playing at being a character in a western movie or in a Dickens novel, you simply think yourself into the appropriate village, you mentally clothe yourself appropriately, and you go to it! I think there soon will be villages for some other novel series as well. Harry Potter, anyone?
  • We Can Do Library Research. The cities are few, and they contain mainly public buildings, including libraries. All the libraries contain mainly scrolls, and their scrolls are reportedly duplicated so you can do your own research on your own background in the library nearest you. Many people ask me if they will be able to research their past lives in the afterlife. Well, of course you can! Just climb those great stone steps of the library in your nearest city and ask a friendly librarian to help you get started.
  • Travel to the Afterlives of Ancient Peoples. Since there is no time and there is infinite space in Level Three of the Greater Reality, apparently you can find every aspect of the earth’s past still happening now, just by thinking yourself there. In browsing one of the many old books that I bought during the nineteen-seventies, I found an account by someone who had visited the afterlife of the American plains Indians. It was an active plains encampment surrounded by thousands of buffalo. While he was there and conversing by mind with a chieftain, the sky opened, and a sixth-level Being appeared, carrying a woman, He deposited her in a teepee, then left the teepee, nodded to the chieftain, and disappeared the same way that he had arrived. The chieftain explained that sometimes when people die with extreme spiritual damage, these Beings will bring them here to be healed, “since my people are especially strong spiritually.” A few of the things on my post-death to-do list are to travel to the ancient Egyptian afterlife and watch the Pyramids being built, and to travel to Philadelphia in 1776. And what about sitting on that hillside and actually hearing the Sermon on the Mount? (Note that conversations being held by mind are in a universal language.)
  • Travel to the Edge of the Material Universe. Not only can we travel by the power of our minds anywhere we might like to go in the material world, invisibly; but we also have the ability to travel to the edge of the material universe by mind in an instant. And some people do that, just to say that they have been there; although they generally ask a higher-vibration friend to accompany them. And since there is nothing there to see, they will just float around for a bit and then come back.
  • Travel to Plant, Animal, and even Mineral Minds. There are far-distant planets in the physical universe where the life is not recognized by us as intelligent, and yet it is quite intelligent. I have  been taken by Thomas to visit three such planets while I was lucid-dreaming, to try out inhabiting the different life-forms on each. On one, I tried out being pond-scum. That felt meh. On the second, I was a creature very like a horse, running with its herd, which felt great! On the third, I tried to think myself inside of and actually tried to become what seemed to be a piece of reddish sandstone, but I couldn’t stay inside it. The thing was moving S-o-o  V-e-r-y  S-l-o-o-w-l-y.
  • Travel to Level Two. In the whole Greater Reality, the only accessible negativity at all seems to be on Level Two, the second aggregate level, the level just above the punishment level that Jesus called “the Outer Darkness where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (see Mt 8:12; 22:13; 25:30). Visiting that Second Level is really the only dangerous thing that you can do in the entire Greater Reality. It seems to be populated by lowlifes of various sorts who may be up to doing nefarious things: think of that cantina described as a hive of scum and villainy in the original Star Wars movie. I once knew someone who was just a normal person living on earth, who astral traveled as a hobby, and he was fascinated by the Second Level’s lawlessness. But he got into some kind of trouble there, and he never was heard from on earth again.

Well, there you have it. An eternity of endless entertainment awaits us all, and my goodness, this is only what we can know about from here! And you can do all of it without traveling any higher than Level Three in vibration! So, why would you want to bother with vibrating higher? Because there is even more to do, and everything is even vastly more beautiful, the higher in vibration you are able to go. Believe it or not! Finally, my dear ones, to answer the question that I have been teasing you with: Why does this eternity full of endless fun, perfect joy, and boundless happiness exist? It turns out that YOU, and ONLY YOU, are the reason why anything at all exists! The earth. The Greater Reality. Anything at all. In a lifetime of seeking, I never have been able to find any other reason. It is impossible for you to comprehend how very much you in particular are loved.

 

(This is the fifth of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what our eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Going Home (Part Four)

Bless this house, O Lord we pray; make it safe by night and day.
Bless these walls, so firm and stout, keeping want and trouble out.
Bless the roof and chimneys tall, let thy peace lie over all;
Bless this door, that it may prove ever open to joy and love.

Bless these windows shining bright, letting in God’s heav’nly light;
Bless the hearth a’blazing there, with smoke ascending like a prayer;
Bless the folk who dwell within. Keep them pure and free from sin;
Bless us all that we may be fit, O Lord, to dwell with thee.
Bless us all that one
day we may dwell, O Lord, with thee!
Helen Taylor (dates unknown), “Bless This House” (1927).

It is difficult for you to conceive of, or in any way to possibly imagine how incredibly different is the greater reality that we enter at death, when we compare it to this sad, pale, and puny material universe that is all that we know. Here, this little matter-based reality is all around us, and we think of it as something real, something that seems to be even grand and amazing. But the greater reality that we enter at death is at least, oh, fifty, or perhaps it is even a hundred times the relative size of this whole material universe. Think of that! And much of the astral reality that we return to at death is dazzling in its beauty, beyond wonderful in all its heart-stopping details, just so far beyond anything that we ever have dreamed of in all our wildest imaginings. So, to begin our tour, please first pause here and re-read last week’s post. We are about to paint for you on a canvas that is so much bigger and grander than anything that you ever before have imagined, and in colors that you cannot conceive of in your wildest dreams. It will be easier for you to stretch enough to put your mind around it if we can begin from where we left off last week.  

So, have you reread last week’s post? All right, then let us here further define what we can know about our greater reality from this earthly viewpoint. We must warn you in advance that what we know now is not nearly as much as we would love to know! Not surprising, of course, given the size of it all, and given our necessarily limited perspective from here. A few astral travelers out of the body have written about the little bits that they have seen, enough so I think that we can be sure about what we know in general terms. But even just the sheer size of it means that all of it is still a great unknown, just as most of the earth was a great unknown when Christopher Columbus first set bravely out in the earth-year 1492. But there is a first time for everything, isn’t there? And here is what we do think we know:

  • Travel and Creation in the Astral Realities are Mostly or Entirely by Mind. To enter the astral plane is to enter a universe exclusively of the mind, and the higher we can go in vibration, the more completely and obviously that is true. We merge at death with the sixty percent or more of our minds that we had left behind here when we were born on earth; and with that added consciousness power regained, we soon can travel even unimaginably long distances instantly, or we can materialize at once whatever objects we might miss from our earth-lives to furnish our new astral homes. So, while there are some cities in the astral with grand municipal buildings, most people in the afterlife and in the general astral plane live very widely scattered, since they can be anywhere so easily and right away.
  • We Have No Need for Money. My dear mother-in-law lived through the Great Depression on earth, so she really knew how to “pinch a penny twice,” as she used to say. The first thing that she was eager to tell me through a medium after she died at the age of ninety-four was, “You can have whatever you want here, and you don’t need money!” The astral hierarchy, to the extent that there is one, seems to be of our degree of goodness and saintliness on earth, so we find a story in the literature from the nineteenth century of a man who had devoted his earth-life to helping others, and this man rejected the astral mansion of gold that he had been given in the afterlife as too grand and uncomfortable. He preferred to mind-build for himself a cozy thatched cottage to live in instead.
  • Levels Three and Above are Lit and Warmed by God’s Love Alone. There seems to be no starlit universe with planets to be seen at any of the fifty to a hundred or more astral sublevels which are perhaps each the size of this whole material universe, but instead there seem to be just endless vistas of unimaginable size and height and depth created by mind, where the only light and warmth is God’s love. So of course, compared to the earth, it all feels vast and beautiful, and up through about collective level five it seems to be amazingly solid and uncrowded! But although clearly it feels very different from that lowest material level, it all does still feel entirely real. Reportedly, none of it feels vague or artificial. You easily move up or down in vibration by mind simply by wanting to be somewhere else, and you are not aware of the change in vibration until you hit your own vibrational ceiling. Let’s say you are vibrating near the top of Level Four, and you try to move higher. Unless you are moving with a Level Five or higher friend who can shield you in his or her energy aura, then once you hit your own vibrational ceiling, you at once become aware of a sense of being terribly battered by that more intense energy. You simply cannot go higher than your own spiritual development allows, unless someone who is vibrating higher will come with you and shield you. But otherwise, you can travel anywhere, and at once! And of course, the higher you go, the brighter it is, when God’s love is the only light.

Of course, to yet again reinforce what is true, our silver energy cord which connected us to our earthly body has broken well before we entered the afterlife. During our earthly lives, it was easily possible for us to travel from the earth into what we think of as the “public” parts of the astral plane, those parts which are open to astral travelers from the earth-level, wearing astral bodies and with our silver cords still attached; and then to return to the earth again. And when this happens for us during awake out-of-body experiences or near-death-experiences, we will have some amazing and aberrant memories of those experiences! But if those who are astral-traveling during NDEs or OBEs might enter the afterlife area, even for an instant of time, their silver cord which keeps them attached to their material body back on earth will instantly snap, and their body then dies on earth. Death is always a one-way trip.

In fact, it may surprise you to learn that nearly all of us while we are living on earth will travel to the open-to-the-earth-level parts of the astral plane on many nights! And, why not? We might have no conscious awareness of it while we are living an earth-lifetime, but we still subconsciously think of the gigantic astral plane as our true eternal home. And one important fact about our minds is that they almost never need to sleep. About the only time that our minds ever sleep is shortly after our bodies die, when we first return to the afterlife. Then, we will generally have a good, deep sleep that typically lasts for an earth-day and -night, or even two, after which we will not need to sleep again until after we have just completed another earth-lifetime. But for now, during the phase of deep sleep that usually occurs before or around midnight on each earth-night of our lives and can last for a few hours, nearly all of us will leave our bodies for a while. Some of us will just hang around our bedroom, or perhaps around our house. But many of us will astral travel; and we might then meet with our deceased loved ones or with our spirit guides. We might do other things too, take classes and play tourist and so on. We will have no memory of any of these excursions unless our guides allow us to have such memories.

Since it is my beloved guide Thomas’s responsibility to help Jesus to maintain His divine-human balance, Thomas has been taking me along with him on his nightly excursions to visit Jesus in the astral plane ever since I was an infant. But Thomas never has let me remember anything about these experiences until early April of 2022, when for that one summer, he let me remember perhaps a dozen adventures that we took together to meet with Jesus by His astral river on Level Three of the astral plane, where Jesus greets an endless parade of Christians who have only just died. There Jesus personally welcomes home every person who has requested that Jesus welcome him or her home. Of course, Jesus Himself is not, and He never has been a Christian. That is the Roman Emperor Constantine’s religion. But Jesus deeply loves all Christians, just as He loves every one of us! And as the Roman religion dies at last, Jesus has asked Thomas and me to begin to prepare for Him a teaching website on earth. So far, Jesus has approved the name teachingsbyjesus.com, and He has approved His new website’s content, such as it is, but we all know that this is just the beginning. He tells us that He wants us to do something to it now with AI. So we await His further instructions.

When I was spending all that time with Jesus in the astral plane two summers ago, and I was for a change very much aware of being there, I was mostly just raptly listening to Jesus. But I also learned quite a lot about what it is like to be on astral Level Three. For one amazing thing, the astral atmosphere is altogether different from what it is like to be outdoors anywhere on earth! The outside air does not move at all, for one thing. There is no weather, which makes it feel almost as if you are inside a building. And the very air that you breathe smells and feels like love; well, actually, it smells a lot like flowers, and it feels warm and moist and gentle on your astral body’s skin. This is even on the lowly third level, where the light is dimmer than it is on the material level, since there is no sun, and we are so far from Level Seven. It seems to be always perhaps just before sunrise, although when I would look at Jesus, He has a glow about Him so I saw Him clearly. The sky always looks bright, and it is full of those non-earth colors that are indescribable. And Jesus Himself has such a strong personal energy, even when He is remembering to tune it back for His companions by a lot, since if He does not tune it back, it is painful for normals to be anywhere near Him. His personal energy is uniquely just one strong, high, pure and absolutely overwhelming Note. Thomas tells me that after all Jesus’s additional service in healing people who have been damaged by Christianity over the past seventeen hundred years, Jesus now vibrates even higher than Level Seven, so of course He can go anywhere in the astral now that He likes, and even above the Godhead Level of this reality.

But for most people, the fact that we can travel instantly anywhere in the astral plane, but we cannot go higher than our own level of spiritual development will allow us to go, becomes such a great frustration for us! People will ask me why, when our astral lives are so perfect, why on earth do we ever choose to come back here again and be reborn into earth-bodies and suffer over again all this earthly stress and pain? Well, this is why. Until we have attained somewhere near the top of Level Five in spiritual development, at which point we can become spirit guides for people on earth and thereby continue to grow spiritually, until then we keep bumping up against that frustrating ceiling of painful buzzing if we ever try to travel to the higher, more beautiful and interesting places. And we cannot grow much, if at all, spiritually in the lower astral plane because there is nothing much there that is negative, so there is nothing to push against, nothing really in the afterlife or in the lower astral plane but God’s pure love.

So, reluctantly at first perhaps, we begin to get together with old friends and new, we choose our spirit guides for this next lifetime, and we start to meet regularly with sixth-level teachers to plan our next lifetime on earth. (Or even conceivably on a different planet, but I don’t know enough about that process to say much about it.) These planning meetings happen in conference rooms perhaps, or outside under great leafy trees, and they feature whiteboards and diagrams. My own planning for this present lifetime was done in a big paneled conference room that was windowless and lit by skylights. And I was allowed to recall bits of one meeting that Jesus and some formidable sixth-level Beings attended with Thomas and me.

Of course, one problem for anyone wanting another incarnation on earth nowadays is the more limited availability of suitable bodies. Thanks largely to modern elective abortions in Western countries, the available bodies in places where people would most like to live in order to be able to learn whatever it is that they most need to learn spiritually, the demand now much exceeds the supply. We prefer to reincarnate repeatedly into the same general culture, to avoid having to learn whole confusing new cultures each time that we return to earth. So we are competing now for fewer bodies that are about to be conceived and are likely to be taken to term; and we fret over choosing among them as to gender, location, possible defects or illnesses, genetics, and so on.

But, let’s say that you and those planning to be born to share this next lifetime with you make compelling appeals to the Powers for the right set of bodies at the right times and places, and you all get your go-ahead together. Now you all enter the afterlife pre-birth launch area, and you go through the process of being prepared to be born on earth. There are some descriptions in the literature of what this process entails, and apparently it does involve an actual shrinkage, the giving-up of most of your eternal mind into some sort of storage, and the attachment of the limited aspect of your mind that remains to the just-conceived zygote inside your mother-to-be’s material body on earth by its new silver cord. And while we generally do attach to and enter our newly-conceived body at the zygote stage or soon thereafter, we are generally out of our growing new body inside our mother’s uterus most of the time until the second, or even the third trimester.

It is important to understand that this new infant about to be born is a whole new being! It is not the same person who died on earth and entered the afterlife perhaps a hundred years ago, and then eventually decided to reincarnate in order to attempt to grow more spiritually in order to be able to explore higher astral levels. This new being will have a genetically different makeup, has different characteristics to allow for different kinds of learning, will have a different family and different experiences on earth, and might be of a different gender. There is in fact abundant evidence that each new incarnation is a whole new being altogether! Oh. Really? Oh dear. So then, why reincarnate at all? Good question. We will talk about the answer to that next week.

In the fifth and final segment of this series, we will answer your remaining questions.  We’ll talk about many of the glorious and very enjoyable things that there are for you to do in your busy eternal life in the astral plane. And is there anything that might go wrong? If there is, what might you do to fix it? What is likely to surprise you most? And we will try to answer what is really the most important question of all. Why do we get to enjoy our whole glorious eternal lives so much? Just, Why??   

 

(This is the fourth of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what our eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Going Home (Part Three)

Somewhere over the rainbow, way up high,
There’s a land that I heard of, once in a lullaby.
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue,
And the dreams that you dare to dream really do come true!

 Someday I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me!
Where troubles melt like lemon drops,
Away above the chimney tops, that’s where you’ll find me.

 Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh, why can’t I?

– Harold Arlen (1905-1986) & Yip Harburg (1896-1981), from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1938)

My Thomas and I became so distracted last week by our need to debunk the spurious notion that near-death experiences have anything to do with actual death that we ran out of space in which to finish describing what the afterlife is like. And Thomas said afterward that we cannot have that! He pointed out to me vast sets of topics that you will need to understand if you are ever to make any sense at all of this whole gigantic afterlife picture. He insisted that if we hope to be able to claim that we have even halfway discussed the afterlife in a respectable way, then this will have to be a four-part series. So, okay then. A four-part, or even  a five-part series this will be!

In fact, the aspects of life in the afterlife that have been bumped now into an extra week or two are some of the most enjoyable parts to talk about. After you have left your earthly body and been escorted home by your deathbed visitors; after your life-review and your need to forgive everyone who ever harmed you on earth, and your need to forgive yourself for harming everyone that you yourself have ever harmed; and after your big welcome-home party, where John Lennon sang “Imagine”, or Early Elvis sang “All Shook Up”, or perhaps most of the Beatles together sang that they would be happy just to “Hold Your Hand”; and then your spouse from this most recent earth-lifetime took you home to show you that he or she had constructed here a copy of your house from this lifetime just ended, and with the lanai overlooking the ocean included that you both had wanted to add to your earth-house, but that you never could have afforded on earth… So then, what happens next?

When you have an enjoyable eternity ahead in which to have an infinity of whatever is your own idea of fun, then you know that you really are in heaven, for sure! But, what kinds of fun are possible for us there? Back in the Seventies, I was mostly taking care of babies and doing afterlife research, and I was particularly fascinated then by this question. And fortunately, in the dusty old used-book stores in Boston and in Worcester, Massachusetts, there were still to be found some of the books that had been written maybe sixty or more years earlier about the work of the great physical mediums who had been esspecially active  in Boston and London around the turn of the twentieth century, and who had received precisely the kinds of information that I was most eager to find. And oh, how eagerly I devoured those books!

We will talk next week or in the following week about all the things that there will be for you to do for fun, for education, and even as part of your efforts to better understand earth-history in depth. For now, though, you will need first of all to be able to envision what we are coming to understand about the gigantic astral realities themselves, just the whole environment in which our eternal lives continue to unfold forevermore. Of course, we can indeed venture beyond this nearby environment, and in a reality in which travel seems to be instantaneous, it is likely that many of us do undertake some extremely far away travel on occasion! But for the most part, we seem to remain largely around our more familiar eternal places. Let’s talk now, though, about what this unimaginably enormous astral reality truly seems to be like!

Of course, all of reality exists within and is composed of Consciousness. By now, this fundamental truth feel comfortably certain to most of us, although the very concept of consciousness is still something that materialist scientists are having a hard time wrestling with, so it is difficult for them to make sense of the notion that there really is nothing else but consciousness. As we have said here in various posts, this is a problem for old-style  materialists that is somewhat akin to a fish’s efforts to get a handle on the difference between water and not-water from his fully-submerged-in-water perspective. But consciousness in one form or another actually is all that there is. In fact, nothing else exists.

We understand that consciousness is energy, so it vibrates. And the easiest way to envision our astral reality as we experience it is as hundreds of layers of energy vibrations of graduated strength within consciousness, each of which is a separate reality. These different realities really are very much like the ascending numerical channels on a television set, with your mind as that TV itself. But, my dear friends, the greater reality to which we return after we die really is gigantic! As best we can determine from here, that greater reality may be more than a hundred times greater in relative size than is this entire universe. Think of this material-seeming universe as vibrating the lowest and slowest, with the non-material astral aspects of reality all graduated in strength and vibrating higher and higher. For convenience, afterlife researchers group all the many layers above this material reality into seven collective levels. Level One is what Jesus calls “the Outer Darkness, where there will be weeping and wailing and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). Level Two is the recovery level just above; and Level Three is the Entry Level, where nearly all the family compounds are located, and where most of us return home. Levels Three through Five are what the Vikings called the Summerland, very earth-like, and increasingly beautiful the higher you go. Level Six is the Causal or Mental Level, with universities but mostly not very earth-like; and Level Seven is the Source Level, or the Godhead Level. Until recently, we believed that once you entered the Seventh Level, you would merge with the Godhead Collectives and your individuality would disappear, but we have lately come to understand that this happily is not true.

As best we can determine, each of those hundred or so vibratory layers is divided from the others only by its rate of energy vibration, and the layers are all of about the same size, to the extent that “size” means anything. In other words, each of the astral realities in the collection of realities to which we return after we die on earth is probably independently as large as is this entire material universe. It is hard for us even to conceive of so much astral space, so very many material-universe-sized slices layered one above another in vibration and separated from one another only by their different rates of vibration. But still, of course, all inside your TV/mind, and all in the same place! Because remember that even solid matter is just empty space. And, yes, a murmured “Wow” would be appropriate here. The spiritual progress that we are called to make is for each of us to gradually raise our own spiritual vibration as high as to the Fifth, the Sixth, and finally even to the Seventh consciousness vibratory level. So then eventually we, too, can merge with the Godhead.

The type of matter that exists in all these astral realities is of a different, finer nature than is the matter that we are used to here on earth. I recall that when I was devouring everything that I could find to read about the afterlife, one thing that frustrated me was that no one who was interviewing these people who all had died decades before had ever thought to ask them what the matter of their bodies was like! Wouldn’t you have thought that would have been the first question their interviewers would have thought to ask? Good grief. For years, I could not be sure that they even had solid bodies at all, and they were not just wraiths, like shimmery ghosts. But then one day, and even fifty years later I still recall it vividly, someone asked a woman who had lately transitioned what her new astral body was like. Was it solid? And she said something like, “Oh yes. But it’s finer than your body. It’s smoother. Nicer. You can almost a little bit see through it in some lights.” Bingo. That seemed to open some sort of floodgate, and soon I was finding other descriptions as well. By now, of course, I have spent the summer of 2022 often visiting Jesus in the astral Third Level, so I have trailed a silver cord while I wore an astral body myself. I know what she was talking about. Compared to these material bodies, an astral body is something like warm and soft alabaster that is infused with color. It lacks internal organs, so if you eat or drink, whatever you ingest simply disappears.

Astral water is not actually wet. It flows and kind of splashes like water, and you can walk into it as if it were water, but you will come out of it with your skin and clothing dry but feeling charged with energy by having been touched by the energy of that astral water. Jesus even called it “living water” (JN 4:10-11). Not only that, but the astral water gives off a subtle radiance, and a faint sort of hum of music that you can barely hear. Water is everywhere in the astral plane, but most of the bodies of water are not very large. Sometimes you will see someone in the yacht that he had always wanted in life, but in a pond that isn’t a whole lot bigger than the yacht is itself.

Foliage and the sky in each of those astral realities will come in all colors, except for the standard earth-related colors that we might expect. This fact seems to be playful, freaky, and kind of wonderful to people who have just arrived back home and had forgotten this little detail. Most of us enjoy it, actually, and we especially like the fact that not a leaf ever fades, and not a petal ever drops. Those big and often elegant-looking astral trees seem to be aware of us, and they will casually caress us with a branch as we pass. Flowers will turn to us as well. Many astral flowers are gigantic, even as tall as a man, and we can put our face into a blossom and inhale and receive not only the flower’s lovely smell, but also its life-giving energy. The energy that we receive from the plants and from the water fully nourishes us, which is why we never need to eat.

Colors in general will amaze you at first. In this material reality, our colors are limited to the narrow visible light spectrum. In the astral plane, however, many of the most common colors are beyond the visible light spectrum, so they are colors that are never seen on earth. This is especially true of flowers, and of rippling shades in the sky. There, the gorgeous random colors can make you gasp with delight.

The afterlife at its entrance level is very culturally specific. For example, the North American afterlife entrance is mostly lovely formal gardens with flowers and trees, pathways, benches, splashing fountains, and the snow-capped Rocky Mountains in the distance. The British afterlife entrance is similar but more formal, with no mountains and instead a more Victorian look. There is a story in the literature about an American man who died accidentally in China at the turn of the previous century, and when he turned up at the Chinese arrival gardens, what he saw around him was beautiful pagodas with fancy turned-up roofs and everybody looking Chinese! He right away did what I guess that we all should do in such a situation: he called out for help, in English! And at once, his guides came running. They took him home to the North American arrival gardens, where his family welcomed him home. These cultural differences gradually disappear the higher you go in vibration in the afterlife, and they are largely gone by the top of Level Five.

Many insects and wild animals are forever, just as we and our beloved pets are forever. There are butterflies and dragonflies in the astral realities, but there is nary a mosquito to be found. There are cute squirrels, and birds galore who can be coaxed to come and perch on your finger; and there are great wild plains full of bison beside the teepees of plains Indians who no longer need to hunt them. And of course, I have fed Jesus’s iridescent pet fish with Him, and patted His herd of tame pet deer. The deer and bison still graze because their instinct to graze remains, and the fish still eat their grain; but I assume, as is true of people in the afterlife and in the greater reality, that these animals all lack digestive organs.

Everything in the astral plane is made by Sixth-Level Beings. We call Level Six the Causal Level for a reason! There are stories in the literature of how people who have achieved the exalted Sixth Level are now learning how to become a part of the Godhead. One woman told her family through a physical medium about her many frustrations in learning how to craft a perfect flower. And while living in a house is not essential in the greater reality because there is no weather unless you want weather, and we never need to sleep; but many people there still prefer to have a house. I recall reading about a man who was having a house built for his daughter, who was about to die on earth. He drew up the plans, and then he called in four Sixth-Level Beings, who first studied his plans. Then they concentrated their minds together, and as they did, the house began to shimmer into being until there it stood, solid and ready for occupancy! It is possible to stick-build buildings in the astral, of course, but why would you bother with doing that?

What we call “the afterlife” is a kind of foyer between this lowest material level and most of reality. We already think of the whole greater reality as a stack that is a hundred, and maybe even more than a hundred astral layers tall, with each layer vibrating just a bit higher, and with this material reality at the bottom, and with the Godhead – Level Seven – at the top. Right? So now let’s cut a tall sliver like a tall slice of cake right through it, from bottom to top, and call it the afterlife, since that is how things seem to work. That whole stack itself is our greater reality. It is where we live our eternal lives; and insofar as we know, it is all that exists. But, maybe not. We will talk more about that question next week.

Next week and then the following week, we will talk briefly about the process of preparing to enter a lifetime on earth, and the process of later on coming home again and consolidating what we have just learned on earth. We also will talk about all the far beyond glorious things that there are to do in your beyond-wonderful eternal life! And, we will try to answer what may be the most important question of all, and the most difficult question of all for us to answer: Why?? 

We understand now that the earth, and probably the whole material universe, all seem to exist just as a place for us to have the spiritual hard knocks that enable us to raise our personal spiritual vibrations. Because while we are at home in the greater reality, our eternal lives are much too perfect for us to grow very much spiritually at all. We have come to understand that by now. But, why then does the Greater Reality exist? And, why even do we exist? Why??

Somewhere over the rainbow, bluebirds fly.
Birds fly over the rainbow. Why then, oh, why can’t I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow,
Why, oh why can’t I?
Harold Arlen (1905-1986) & Yip Harburg (1896-1981), from “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” (1938)

 (This is the third of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what our eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Going Home (Part Two)

Most people live on a lonely island, lost in the middle of a foggy sea.
Most people long for another island,
One where they know they would like to be.
Bali Ha’i may call you, any night, any day.
In your heart you’ll hear it call you. Come away, come away.
Bali Ha’i will whisper on the wind of the sea.
Here am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Your own special hopes, your own special dreams
Loom on the hillside and shine in the Streams!
If you try, you will find me where the sky meets the sea.
Here am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Bali Ha’i” (1949)

The quirkily lavish, oddly earthlike, and entirely solid-seeming reality that we enter at death, having just left a bland, familiar, and also solid-seeming earth-reality that is right in the very same place can be easily explained. As you and the few loved ones that you had thought were dead, but who are still quite alive after all and look to be amazingly less than thirty years old, step together into a patch of gray fog that invites you to leave the scene of your earthly death, you all are still giggling a little with the joy of being together again. You are stepping, but mostly it feels as if that fog is moving you right along. You look back, and you see that the room in which you have just died and all the people in it are growing vague and vapory; and then it all disappears.  And very soon, right ahead of you the fog begins to lift; and as it does, there appears all around you a scene of the most confounding beauty. At first, you think, Huh? How is this even possible? How can two solid realities exist in pretty much exactly the same place? But then you remember what Roberta and her spirit guide, Thomas, used to say about matter all the time. Earth-matter is somehow 99.9999999% just empty space!

And now, in this amazingly beautiful, new but somehow strangely familiar place where everything seems to be erroneously colored – perhaps red grass and a yellow river beneath a brilliant green-and-orange sky – you and your mom sit down together on a solid stone bench, while your childhood cat leaps into your lap. Now your new body is young and lovely, too! In the distance, you can see people playing with odd sorts of toy vehicles that never have been seen on earth, small one-seater planes and helicopters and an in-line two-seater car, none of which vehicles makes a sound or gives off exhaust because they all are powered by mind. There are advanced Beings nearby as well, very tall and wearing long dresses and various hats and insignias of rank, but none of them approaches you. They know that you have just died on earth and arrived with your loved ones in this arrival garden, and you need a little time to re-acclimate yourself. Yes, you are breathing, but that seems to be optional. The very air feels and tastes like flowers, like love, like everything beautiful. And wow, there even are snow-capped mountains in the distance!

Right about now, or even before now, your more limited earth-mind will re-merge back into the sixty to seventy percent of your vast, eternal mind that was left behind when you took that last incarnation, just completed. Suddenly you are incredibly brilliant again and you remember very many things, including old friends that you realize you had missed very much, and prominent past lifetimes. This moment oddly seems to be no particular time, and there is no sun, and while the sky is streaked with colors, there don’t seem to be clouds. At some point, whether it is a minute or days later in earth-terms is immaterial, an advanced Being or a few advanced Beings approach and sit down beside you, and you know that these are spirit guides of this lifetime that you have just completed. If you are vibrating at a higher level than the Level Three entrance level, now is when they will invite you to join them at that higher level. Truly, you have at last come home!

This has been a typical description of the sort of post-death trip to an arrival garden as it has happened from a normal North American death on earth at any time during the past century and a half. If you had died instead in England, or in China or Japan, or in Serbia or Australia, your post-death surroundings would have looked culturally different, but the process afterward that we are soon to describe would have been about the same. Sadly, though, it is much harder in recent years for those who are nearing death to know beforehand what is going to happen to them after they die. And one of the reasons for that, I am sorry to say, is all the people who have had near-death experiences (NDEs) over the past fifty years, and who are now convinced that they have been briefly stone-cold dead and been to the genuine afterlife and then miraculously come back to life, and that now they have big news to reveal to the world. It is too bad, really. NDEs are interesting phenomena, although they are of limited educational value. And actual death, or even near-death, NDEs certainly ARE NOT.

There are a few genuine scholars, of whom I am one, who have spent decades studying more than two hundred years of abundant and consistent true afterlife evidence. The best of this evidence was produced in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries via deep-trance mediumship, which is a very advanced and much more accurate form of mediumship than is mental mediumship. For reasons that we needn’t pause to mention now, it barely still exists today. Here are three fundamental facts which are true beyond question:

  • Death is always a one-way trip. What maintains the life of your material body during the frequent out-of-body experiences that all or nearly all of us enjoy during our lives on earth is an amazingly stretchy energy cord which was first named in the Bible “the silver cord” (Ecclesiastes 12:6), which connects our material body with our energy body. Near-death experiences are a type of out-of-body experience that generally happen in the astral plane, of which what we call the afterlife is a tiny part: we will be talking about the whole greater reality next week. But the silver cord cannot be reattached, so once yours breaks, then your material death must occur. Many of the more extensive near-death experiences will come to a place where the NDE-er will be warned that he or she must turn back because the afterlife area is just ahead, and if they continue forward, then their silver cord will break and they will die. No one who is alive on earth now and able to tell the story has ever actually died.
  • Normal deaths are in large part remarkably consistent experiences. The afterlife is surprisingly, although quirkily, earthlike, having been created by minds that have interacted with the earth. And soon after we first return to the afterlife, we are loved and supported through a very consistent love-based welcoming and decompression process that is designed to help us to make the most of what we have leaned during our time on earth. I will briefly describe that usual process just below. NDEs often contain some of these usual post-death elements, especially versions of the life review, but generally in NDEs these are mixed with odd dreamlike events.
  • “God”, “Satan,” and strange mythic creatures don’t appear in the genuine afterlife. For example, I have never seen any credible report of God appearing anywhere in physical form, and both Thomas and Jesus have told me that God never takes a physical form. Jesus does appear, but in His own places and for His own teaching purposes. There is no hell, yet it has been reported that as many as one in seven NDEs is in some way hellish. And our minds are unfortunately very powerful! People who trust that some famous NDE-er’s story is a real report of what they themselves can expect to experience when they die risk letting their adherence to that story lead their own actual death process far astray.

What is alarming to me is that many people who leave their bodies at death will nowadays go off-track for a time. For many, it will be just a few earth-days or earth-weeks of confusion; but for some, it will be much longer than that. Mikey Morgan and my Thomas both tell us that the percentage of people who today do not smoothly transition to the afterlife may be close to twenty-five percent of those who die on earth! Think about that! Almost one in four! Just between the exit from their body that we reported on last week, and the arrival in the afterlife that we have described this week, almost one-quarter of those who die on earth will now go off-track for days, or even for years. And some of them will go so far off-track that one-by-one they will have to be sought and found and rescued before they can be taken to that reception garden.

Is the recent broad fascination with NDEs to blame for this problem? Not for all of it, but I think that it likely contributes to some of it. I hear from people about NDEs all the time, and the people that I hear from assume without exception that NDEs depict actual deaths! That fact absolutely horrifies me. If you have fixed in your own mind the NDE dream that was experienced by Eben Alexander, or by another famous NDE-er, as if those people really had died and then come back to life, and if you let your expectation that his dream-experience during his NDE will be your actual post-death experience, and if that expectation then leads you astray at your death, you are going to have a really big problem. But if everyone who is going to die one day were simply programmed to stick with the deathbed visitors who are going to come to take them home, then many more people will likely make that simple journey home unscathed.

But let’s assume here that you have made your afterlife journey home with the help of your treasured loved ones. You have arrived! What generally happens after your brief rest with your loved ones in a reception garden is that, depending upon your mental state, you might spend some further time simply unwinding with your close family and friends, in a family compound perhaps. Or if you have arrived home mentally or physically damaged, you might spend as much as three or four earth-months in what are called the healing gardens, being nursed back to full spiritual health. It is this possibility, that you might have been judged to be in need of healing, which is the reason why we recommend that your loved ones still on earth generally wait for a few months after your death before trying to reach you through a mental medium.

Okay, so now you have been welcomed home by your spirit guide or guides, and by those closest to you from this most recent lifetime. You also have been healed, if necessary. Next will come two big events which can happen in either order, although the order given here seems to be the most usual one. You will have your Life Review, and you will Party Hearty!

  • Your Life Review can happen in many different ways and locations, from privately in a mimic of your earthly home, right through very publicly in a gothic stone castle before a three- to five-person council of elders. I have seen the review described as appearing instantly within a holographic orb, and running either forward or backward, with key people from your lifetime just ended right there beside you, or else with no one there other than your spirit guides. In any event, your guides seem always to be there. And in one way or another, almost right away, every significant event of your life just completed seems to be somehow reviewed again in what seems to be little more than an instant; although, as we have learned by now, in the afterlife there is no real time. And what is important is that we are experiencing every event of our lives from the perspective of the people that we most affected. We are then asked to forgive each one of those people. And then – hardest of all! – we are asked to forgive ourselves. And we must do that! Your guides and others will give you lots of help and support, but if you find that you really cannot forgive yourself for something that you did in this life, then your vibration will slow until you wind up in what Jesus called “the Outer Darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth” (see e.g. MT 8:12). So please learn prevenient forgiveness right now, for heaven’s sake, while it is very easy to learn and, yes, you can take it with you!
  • Your Welcome Home Party will be for you the time of your afterlife! And mostly because of all the people who might well show up. After all, remember that many of the greats are also in the afterlife, as are people you loved and still resonate with from as far back as your childhood of this past lifetime, and even loved ones from some of your most important previous lifetimes. These bodies lack internal organs and we don’t need to eat or drink in the afterlife, but since you are used to eating and drinking whenever things get festive, of course food and drink are going to be served. Whatever you consume will simply disappear. The joyous call is put out by mind that your welcome home party is going on now and all your special people will be invited, so for what might feel like forever in an eternal heavenly afternoon, they will keep on showing up! Even enemies of this lifetime, who will hug you as you realize that this enemy is a great eternal friend from two lifetimes back. And my goodness, your first girlfriend, a high school teacher, and now here comes John Lennon with his guitar, since you were a big John Lennon fan in life. He speaks quietly with your friends, and then he sits down by the fireplace and he sings Imagine. Of course, everyone knows that there is a laugh line coming, so even before John Lennon sings “Imagine there’s no Heaven,” everyone’s joyous laughter fills the room!

But might Jesus show up at your party, too? We recognize people in the afterlife by their personal spiritual energies, and not so much by the way they look. And our vastly treasured, so very precious Friend Jesus has personal energies so powerful that for the rest of us who are not nearly so spiritually advanced as He is, even to be very close to Him can be uncomfortable. So instead, before our party began, perhaps we  went with a few friends to visit Jesus on His riverbank, to receive His blessing. And wonderfully, He invited us to stay for a while to feed His fish with him, to pat his deer, and to tell Him how we are enjoying our having lately come home. And wow, then we did truly feel blessed indeed!

Someday you’ll see me floating in the sunshine,
My head sticking out from a low flying Cloud.
You’ll hear me call you,
Singing through the sunshine, sweet and near as can be.
Come to me, here am I, Come to me!
If you try, you’ll find me where the sky meets the sea.
Hear am I, your special island! Come to me, come to me.
Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i, Bali Ha’i!
Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Bali Ha’i” (1949)

(This is the second of five blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com) 

Going Home (Part One)

Amazing grace! how sweet the sound,
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now am found,
Was blind, but now I see.

’Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed!
 

The Lord hath promised good to me,
His word my hope secures;
He will my shield and portion be
As long as life endures.
– John Newton (1725–1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

I had thought that talking about what happens at death, and how it actually feels to die, has been pretty much done to death here by now (please pardon the pun). But people in the class that I am currently teaching have suggested to me that, oh no, the death process from the perspective of those who are making that universal journey is something that we haven’t talked about here nearly enough. So if those who have requested this post feel that way, then we ought to talk again about death, because unless you know all about this process, you are likely to feel apprehensive about it. And really, you shouldn’t worry about death at all! Because the fun of dying is the most glorious time of your life. And other than being born, the whole precious rite of passage for each of us back into eternity is the most universally human thing that is going to happen to us all.

Fortunately, thanks to some gifted physical mediums who lived around the turn of the twentieth century, at this point a great deal is known about the usual death process, about the genuine afterlife, and also about the very few things that might go wrong in what is supposed to be an easy and natural process. Let’s call these possible problems “traps for the unwary”, because if you learn in advance what is supposed to happen, you should be able to avoid nearly all of these problems. And thanks to the pioneering twentieth-century work of Dr. Max Planck and our visionary friend, Nikola Tesla, and then also special thanks to the painstaking research of such modern notables as Dr. R. Craig Hogan and a number of others, a lot is known now about the greater reality that we all are going to re-enter at death, and in which we spend most of our eternal lives. So, yes indeed, I guess that it really is time! Let’s all talk again about humankind’s great universal journey that happens at the end of this life on earth.

The first thing for all of us to realize is that almost nothing about our lives on earth is random, and that includes the timing and the manner of our deaths. When we plan our lives before our births, we also plan into them two or three possible exit points that our higher consciousness can choose to take, once we have wrung as much value as we can from our days on earth during this brief lifetime. For most of us, our primary purpose on earth will have been to have achieved as much spiritual growth as possible. For some, though, there may also have been a teaching component for ourselves planned into this lifetime, or a mentoring component, or a writing component, or something else that we came to earth to do; but in any event, once all your purposes have been completed, or else once your higher self has determined that it will not be possible to achieve any more in this lifetime, then your higher consciousness will decide that it is time to go home.

That “higher consciousness”, by the way, is the sixty to seventy percent of your eternal mind that you left behind when you entered this lifetime. You stripped down to just a subset of your eternal mind that is designed and energized for rapid learning! But you will reunite with the rest of your mind almost as soon as you return home, and you will be amazed to discover how much smarter your eternal self actually is.  Please note, too, that you are unlikely to be consciously aware at first that your higher self has made the big decision that it is time to go home.

Your higher self can choose almost any mode of weakening or damaging your body so you can exit this lifetime, some of which causes of death may not obviously look to anyone to have been a planned sort of bodily exit at all. For example, we are told that even nearly all “accidental” deaths are in fact deaths at planned exit points. But certainly, to fall ill with cancer or another rapidly fatal illness is the sort of exit that your higher consciousness planned into this lifetime. Dying in your nineties because your body cannot support life any longer is also kind of a no-brainer pre-planned exit. But, one way or another, about one calendar year before your pre-planned death, your life will begin to wind itself down. You are likely not to be much aware of this fact on a conscious level, but those at the celebration of your life held afterward are likely to be full of stories about how they heard from you suddenly two months ago, after many years apart. Or a spouse will recount that a few weeks before your fatal auto accident, you sat him down and told him where your household cash drawer is and where your jewelry is hidden; or the week before your fatal heart attack, you handed your wife a sheet of paper with all the bank account numbers and the safety deposit box combination and secret codes to whatever your family owns written on it. I hear these surprising winding-up stories from people all the time.

So, the period leading up to your death is likely to be orderly and well-planned, even whether or not you are consciously aware of planning it. And your material body has an instinct for its own survival, so it is going to fight to avoid declining in health; which means that your decline will likely be gradual and sporadic, especially if you are younger, and with periods of reprieve built into it. And of course, if your death is not at a planned exit point, if it truly is an accident like a drowning, a death in war, or a murder, then most of what happens in a natural planned death is unlikely to apply in your case. In most such unplanned deaths, you are likely to find yourself just unexpectedly alone outside your body and feeling immaterial, perhaps looking dazedly at your inert material body. If this happens to you, call for help! Those who have been there and done that will report to us that right away, a tall and glowing being comes running. He or she apologizes for not having been there to help at once, and often others will join that first being. Then you will be whisked away to the third level of the astral plane, which is the entrance level to the afterlife, and there you will be joyously welcomed home.

But if yours is a more regular death at a planned exit point, your material body will likely need to go through a process of weakening over months, or even over years of time before it will be willing to give up its non-material inhabitant. Your material body might be barely functional by the time your actual planned death approaches, but eventually there will come a day when your body no longer can hold on to you. So then at last your death can begin.

The first thing that you will be likely to notice, a day or two or even as much as a week or more before your body actively begins to die, is the presence of beloved people that you used to think were dead, simply appearing in the upper corners of the room. Sometimes they will speak, but perhaps at first they just will be there; and perhaps one or more of them will step down and join you, but just as often they will simply stay where they are in the room’s upper corners and they will begin to talk to you in your mind from there. One or more of them might even be treasured pets! These have been judged to be the deceased loved ones that you are most likely to trust, and to follow. And the first sight of these loved ones, looking to be no more than in their twenties now, healthy and happy and solid, is going to banish every remaining fear from your mind. If you are at a dying loved one’s bedside, you might enjoy sharing some of these wonderful moments as the deathbed visitors first arrive; more often, though, as these visitors arrive, the dying cease to communicate with the living altogether.

We know, too, that a dying patient who might even have been comatose, perhaps for years, can sometimes now become alert and aware and even talkative again. This amazing phenomenon is called “terminal lucidity,” and it can include some extraordinary phenomena, even a full awakening, sitting up in bed, and normal or nearly normal communication with those who are at the bedside. When a dying person has been in a coma or has a severely damaged brain and has been unable to communicate for many years, for that person suddenly to seem normal, even for many hours, in the period just before death seems impossible! And yet, it is thought now that terminal lucidity likely happens in most cases when people with damaged brains, or people who were comatose before death begin the active dying process without much sedation in their systems. So, why does it happen?

The planned natural death process is highly predictable. Our bodies while we are on earth are built like a set of nested Matryoshka dolls. The outermost layer is a transparent energy shield that protects us from various kinds of negativity, and can actually be seen by sensitive people to barely shimmer and glow with one or more colors. Then comes the material body, which is dying now and will be left behind; and finally, there is the inner energy body. That inner energy body is you; it is who you actually are, and is what is about to go home. That body at first begins to separate from the head and the extremities of your material body. As it does that, you become free of your material brain, et voila! If your mind has been trapped by a damaged brain, you might enter a brief period of terminal lucidity as your energy body separates, when you will be unexpectedly able to interact with those around your bed. Meanwhile, your inner energy body is gradually continuing to separate from inside your material body, in a process that feels like a lot of tiny threads breaking. It doesn’t hurt at all, but it does feel funny.

Once your inner energy body has entirely separated from your material body, it gathers inside your material chest. By now, you have stopped communicating with those around the bed, and your personal vibration is rising rapidly. Then your energy body rises from your material body, occasionally from the top of the head but most often from the chest, and some sensitive people at the bedside can actually see this as what looks like a gray mist rising for a couple of feet and then seeming to disappear. What actually happens is that the mist, which is you, simply rises in vibration higher than what any living people can see, and it reforms into a naked body in the air which is still attached to your material body by your silver cord. There is no pain in any of this. Nothing about dying is painful, or has much sensation to it; in fact, sometime in the final days or even weeks before actual death, and even for cancer sufferers, pain seems to largely disappear altogether. The only strong sensation reported is that many who have died report a sensation upon first  leaving that boat-anchor of a dying body of almost unbearable joy. Your dead loved ones who have come to take you home all gather around to hug you now as your body reforms in the air, and everyone is happy and laughing, while you of course now notice your lack of clothing, and you hurriedly mentally clothe yourself. This is such a joyous time!

Meanwhile, your silver cord, which during your life on earth has been stretchy enough t0 let your energy body travel to the edge of the universe while your body slept if you ever had a mind to do that, has begun to fray. And then it breaks, and your body on the bed breathes its last. This is a moment of danger for you, since your instinct might be to try to comfort your loved ones around the bed who are distressed at your material death. But you cannot help them now, since it is impossible for them to see or hear you! And if you try to get their attention to show them that you have survived, you will lower your own vibration so you will no longer be able to perceive those who have come to take you home. That is how we make ghosts! No, instead you must resolutely join your mother, your aunt and uncle, and your childhood pet dog, as together your vibrations rise even more.

(We might just note here that the silver cord is a faintly bluish energy cord that was first mentioned in the Old Testament Book of Ecclesiastes. It connects your material body to your inner energy body, viz: “Remember Him before the silver cord is broken and the golden bowl is crushed, the pitcher by the well is shattered and the wheel at the cistern is crushed; then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it” [Eccl 12:6-7].)

The most amazing thing about entering the afterlife at your death is that you will find that it is right in the same place where you died! But it’s just at a slightly higher rate of vibration. So, dying is as simple as changing TV channels. As your joyous loved ones surround you and your childhood dog licks your hand, all of you together are entering a brief gray fog. You glance back at your deathbed scene, and you can see that it is all looking vague and vapory now. And as you watch, it simply disappears, and that gray fog briefly surrounds all of you. But ahead of you, things are growing brighter and brighter. And to your amazement, as the fog around you thins, what dawns ahead and around you is the most glorious possible whole new world.

When we’ve been there ten thousand years,
Bright shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we first begun.
– John Newton (1725–1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

(This is the first of fice blog posts which together help to explain the death process, how the greater reality works, and what eternal life is like.)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

God and You

I will lift up my eyes to the mountains;
From where shall my help come?
My help comes from the Lord,
Who made heaven and earth.
He will not allow your foot to slip;
He who keeps you will not slumber.
Behold, He who keeps Israel
Will neither slumber nor sleep.

The Lord is your keeper;
The Lord is your shade on your right hand.
The sun will not smite you by day,
Nor the moon by night.
The Lord will protect you from all evil;
He will keep your soul.
The Lord will guard your going out and your coming in
From this time forth and forever.
Psalm 121 (A Song of Ascents; A Psalm of David), ca 1000 BCE

For much of my life, I never could find a way to feel close to God. I think my problem was mostly that the God that we meet in Christian churches is so distant, so gigantic, and so frankly scary. That Christian God gave us strict rules that he had delivered to Moses on stone tablets on the top of a mountain. And omigod, we had better follow that Christian God’s rules, or else our eternal destiny will be to fry alive and screaming in a literal hell forevermore! Please pause and think about this for a moment. What Christianity actually seems to be telling us is that human reality before the sacrifice of Jesus was something like a kind of pre-electronics video game being played by some sadistic being with a long, white beard. Isn’t that the way it actually seems to you, too? The Christian God created all of us, and he also made the rules for us to live by. Very strict rules, those Ten Commandments! Then when anybody breaks a Commandment, he gets a black mark against his name in God’s book, called a “Sin.” So then as soon as our body dies, if we have committed a bad enough Sin during life, God picks us up in two gigantic fingers, and God drops us, alive again and screaming, into a gigantic lake of fire. Isn’t that how the Christian deal with God’s rules and hell before Jesus eventually became involved appears to have worked?

My experience of light at the age of eight probably made all of this feel especially real to me. I knew that none of it was just a story, but like that light, that scary God was real! But to put a better face on this, I also knew that the Christian God had sent Jesus. The Jesus in the stained-glass window below was actually quite large and vivid, and I clung to Him every Sunday of my childhood. And I know now that it was my spirit guide, Thomas, that I was always feeling in my life when I was a child, and I was very fortunate in that way; because without Thomas always there and loving me and talking to me in my mind, I think my fear of God in childhood would have been crippling. But as it was, I always had Thomas’s comforting hand to hold.

So in any event, as Christianity tells the story, God was merciful to God’s creation and sent us Jesus. God’s only begotten Son took upon Himself every one of our Sins, past and future, and then died horribly on the cross as our ultimate sacrifice to God for all our Sins, once and for all. So now, thank God, we hopelessly unworthy souls are cleansed and made worthy, and we feel miserably guilty and indebted forevermore. But at least, provided that we choose the right one of the forty-thousand-odd versions of Christianity which are now extant, and also assuming that we obey the rules of that right version of Christianity, we will not be going to hell after all. Of course, with Catholicism at least you can always buy your way out of hell. Rumor has it that Frank Sinatra paid the Vatican ten million dollars to ensure that his elevator would be going up and not down. Fortunately he was not a Calvinist! For Calvin, since God knows everything, God must always know even before we are born who is going to be saved and who is going to be damned, and your elevator’s direction is predetermined before you are born so you can’t even buy your way out. What does that Christian doctrine alone tell you about the way the made-up Christian God is imagined to pervertedly think?

And yes, of course the Christian God was human-created and designed to be terrifying, but that is true of every god that has been imposed upon humankind by every religion. From very ancient times, religions have been human-created and then used to control the masses, so all the gods always have had at their base the power that an angry god needs so it can properly punish us. Horrific punishment and eternal reward are every god’s imaginary tools. Of course, over time Christianity has enhanced the hell that it invented, first making that hell eternal, then adding features such as condemning unbaptized infants to it, and then later even allowing those unbaptized infants to ascend from hell for a moment in order to see the happy eternal lives in heaven that are enjoyed by baptized infants, and all so grieving parents would bestir themselves and hurry to pay their priests to baptize their newborns that were about to die. Fear has been at the center of every religion since humankind first invented the notion of having any kind of god at all.

So it is no wonder that Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago. Jesus came to free us from religions altogether, and to free us from even the very concept of religions so He could at last introduce to us the Genuine God. Funny, isn’t it, that the Christian religion that was invented by the Roman Emperor Constantine three hundred years after Jesus rose from the dead made nothing of the two real reasons why Jesus actually tells us that He came to earth? Far from starting yet one more religion and creating yet one more false god, Jesus insists that He came to earth to end all religions, and to introduce to us the one true God. But the genuine God would not have been of any use to the Roman Emperor Constantine, since except for naked power, the genuine God has none of the attributes that we always have ascribed to any of our human-created gods. The genuine God is never angry, never judges, never punishes, and never plays games with our minds and our lives at all. The genuine God treats each one of us with infinite love and with a kind of awe, with a reverence and respect that it is difficult for anyone who ever has set foot inside any Christian church even to imagine. And I only know this because I have spent so much time in studying the afterlife, which actually is what amounts to our true eternal home, and is so dense with the love of God that God is both the air and the light.

It has for a while been clear to me why Jesus came to earth when He did, and also what He came to earth to accomplish. But I have not until lately been really sure until I studied a bit of Jewish history that the God who seemed to be calling to and working with humankind so long ago, who spoke to David and Elijah and some of the other greats back then, actually was indeed the Genuine God.  But it does seem quite clear to me now that, yes, that period of Hebrew history a thousand years or so before the birth of Jesus was in fact the true God’s earliest appearance to humankind. Which was why Judea and the area around Jerusalem was where Jesus later chose to be born. Then at last Jesus could introduce to us the one true God!

To recap for emphasis, here is some of what we know is NOT true about God, and also about Jesus’s mission on earth:

  • The true God is never angry, petty, jealous, or judgmental. Jesus Himself tells us that God never judges us when Jesus says, “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).
  • The true God never appears in human form. The fact that God never appears as a human being is true even in the astral plane, and in the afterlife, which is one reason why Jesus refers to God as “the Holy Spirit.”
  • Jesus did not die for our sins. No, Jesus’s death on the cross had an entirely different purpose! Think about it. If Jesus had come to us to die for our sins, then He would not have needed to bother to rise again from the dead, now, would He? No, of course not! Merely His death would have been enough to complete the sacrifice. No, but Jesus died on the cross and then rose from the dead in order to prove to His contemporaries, and to us, that human life really is eternal, and that our own deaths will not end our lives. No one would have believed Him otherwise.

If you understand what Jesus actually was doing during His life on earth, the evidence for Jesus’s genuine mission is everywhere in the Biblical Gospels! To cite a few examples:

Jesus despised clergy and religious leaders. Among many other things, He said:

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

“Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52).

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13).

Jesus hated religious traditions. To give you just two examples, He said: 

“Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9).

“Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).

Jesus was disgusted by displays of religiosity. He said:

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So, when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).

In all things, Jesus was speaking for the Genuine God! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of those old Ten Commandments. Right? Instead, He said, “‘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). Since “The Law and the Prophets” was how the Hebrews of Jesus’s day referred to what we now call the entire Old Testament, in one splendid stroke Jesus hereby replaced the entire Hebrew holy book of His day, and arguably also that whole ancient god’s grotesque video game notion of Sin as well, with one singular, glorious command: Love God, and love your fellow man with everything that is in you!

We know that when Jesus spoke of “the Holy Spirit,” He was not speaking of some separate Being. No, the Holy Spirit is just the spirit of God indwelling in each of us. This was made clear when Jesus repeatedly said things like, “If you then, being evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask Him?” (LK 11:13) And, “Everyone who speaks a word against the Son of Man, it will be forgiven him; but he who blasphemes against the Holy Spirit, it will not be forgiven him” (LK 12:10), which proves that the Holy Spirit dwelling in each of us is indeed the genuine God, while Jesus, the Son of Man, tells us that He is not God. Not quite. But, can it really be so simple?

Oh yes, indeed it can! Earthly Christian leaders speak of a “Trinity”, but God is nothing so complicated as a Trinity. God is Everything and All There Is. Because the Genuine God is Consciousness, there is in fact literally nothing that God is not. But since God understands that you and I have such a strong sense of our own littleness while we are encased in these material bodies, God has conceived for us the concept of the Holy Spirit, which is in fact all of God but just human-sized and able to dwell within us for our earthly lives. Of course, God is within you now and God has been within you for your entire life, since there is nowhere that God is not. But perhaps the Emperor Constantine’s Christianity has convinced you that you are a Sinner. Perhaps you worry that you might have driven God away from you by something you ever might have done?

Well then, it is time right now to invite God back into your life, to stay! Simply close your eyes, take a hopeful breath, and with Jesus right there with you, where Jesus always is for you whenever you simply speak His name, just say, “Dear God, I love You with all my heart, and I receive from You now the Holy Spirit.”  

6 With what shall I come to the Lord,
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?
Micah of Moresheth (Micah 6:6-8), ca 700 BCE

God and Science

There was a time in my life
I thought I had to do it all myself.
And I didn’t know the grace of God was sufficient,
And I didn’t know the love of God was at hand.

But now I can say, If you are discouraged,
Struggling just to make it through another day,
You got to let it go, let it all go,
And this is what you have to say:

I release and I let go, I let the Spirit run my life,
And my heart is open wide, Yes, it’s only up to God!
No more struggle, no more strife, With my faith I see the light.
I am free in the Spirit, Yes, it’s only up to God!
– Rev Michael Beckwith, from “I Release and I Let Go” (1990).

My father-in-law died of Alzheimer’s disease in 1998. My mother-in-law used to visit him every day, but one day she was arrested and taken off the road because she had eluded four police cars in a long and very low-speed chase on a two-lane road with roof lights blazing, which is actually a funny story: she later told me that she didn’t stop for them because she was so sure that she had done nothing wrong, so then they had to force her off the road and they took away her license. At that point, I began to visit Dad daily on my way home from work. He was comatose and very near death, he no longer knew who any of us was, so we thought he wouldn’t mind not having her visiting him every day. But late on one afternoon, to my surprise, I stepped into my father-in-law’s nursing home room, and I found him lying there wide awake and looking right at me. I sat down at his bedside, and I spoke to him slowly and clearly. He locked his eyes on mine. Amazingly, he was fully awake and aware! He said to me, “Bobbi, you know I’m still in here, right?” I about fell off my chair. Two days later, my father-in-law died.

What was happening to him was actually a well-recognized phenomenon called “terminal lucidity.” And it is surprisingly common among people like my husband’s late father, whose  brains have been fried by disease or damage. They will often come fully to their senses again as they approach their deaths, when they will then be able to speak quite normally. Scientists have no explanation at all for terminal lucidity, other than to try to claim that of course it is impossible, so that proves that it must never happen. But you and I realize that of course terminal lucidity makes perfect sense. As our bodies are dying, our internal energy bodies will begin to separate from the material bodies that we will be leaving behind, in a process that can take many hours to complete. And as this happens, our energy minds will blessedly separate first of all from the material brains which once served us well, but which now are badly damaged. And as our energy minds separate from our damaged brains, we can have a blessed few hours, or even as much as a day or two while our energy bodies are still separating from our material bodies. It is then that dying people’s energy minds can interact with the living and they can speak quite normally.

This is a fact that only an afterlife research scientist really can understand. To no other scientist does it make such clear sense. I guess it is past time for us to accept the fact that we are at an odd juncture in world history, when by default we have divided the field of scientific research into three categories, based upon the limiting dogmas that we have long since senselessly imposed upon some research scientists, who of course should have no limiting dogmas at all. A dogma is defined as a principle or set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true.” And currently, there are three groups of research scientists working worldwide who are trying to understand major aspects of reality, and who can be divided by the dogmas which stupidly limit how some of them are required to operate:

  • Mainstream Scientists are trying to understand everything about reality, but their work is to this day nonsensically limited by the dogma that they are not allowed to discover that there is any divine intelligence at all involved in the creation or in the maintenance of reality.
  • Christianity-Funded Scientists also are trying to understand everything about reality, but they are ideally supposed to discover that the intelligence that is by now clearly and incontrovertibly obvious behind the creation and maintenance of reality will turn out to be the Christian God.
  • Afterlife Research Scientists are not formally trained scientists and are governed by no dogmas, but those few of us who exist have developed considerable scientific knowledge and understanding in the process of studying more than two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence.

For trained scientists in the first two categories, of course, their sources of funding are their primary limiters. If you want to work in association with any  university or other funded research institute, then you must hew to that research institute’s governing dogmas, or else you cannot work at all. So scientists in the first category are not allowed to even imagine the possibility of any sort of life after death. Their “core scientific dogma of materialism,” which was informally but rigidly put into place soon after the year 1900 in all the leading university science departments worldwide, will not let traditionally-trained and -funded research scientists consider even the possibility of life after death, even if they might find some tantalizing evidence in favor of the possibility of life after death and they might want to pursue that evidence. More and more, that core materialist dogma restricts them as severely as an artist would be restricted if he was forced to spend his entire career avoiding using the color yellow. And terminal lucidity is a great example of how their materialist dogma restricts their work! Terminal lucidity clearly does happen, and it happens very frequently. Some estimates now suggest that it is a nearly universal phenomenon when people with damaged brains are in the process of dying without heavy sedation. It is therefore highly embarrassing for mainstream scientists to be prevented by their utterly nonsensical materialist dogma from admitting the frank truth of terminal lucidity.

It is only in recent years that we who do any work in the field of afterlife research have come to realize that we are scientists, but indeed scientists is what we are. Although we are scientists of the very old school, perhaps, and entirely self-taught. But there is such an overwhelming amount of afterlife evidence, and in order for us to make sense of any of it, we have had to do a lot of related fill-in research as well. Where is this gigantic and entirely consistent greater reality that we are discovering, to which we all seem to return at death? How does it actually work, and how does it fit with the very limited material reality that we perceive around us during our brief earthly lives? My goodness, it turns out that you really cannot know anything at all until you are able to figure out pretty much everything, so for Craig Hogan and me and a very few others, making sense of all of it eventually by about 2010 or earlier became our obsession. We did finally figure it all out; but wow, doing that has not been easy!

It has, however, been extremely rewarding. For one thing, we have had tremendous help from people like Max Planck and Nikola Tesla, the great quantum physicist and the legendary polymath respectively of the first half of the twentieth century. Without their insights in particular, we never could have figured it out at all! And the scientists driven by a Christian calling at the Discovery Institute in Seattle, Washington, are our brothers from another mother, as our dear inner city kin might say, in that the Discovery Institute’s scientists are hoping to find specifically a Christian God behind it all; but still, in seeking an Intelligent Designer, they are heading in our same direction. I read their newsletters with avid interest, and I find a lot there that we can use.

One big problem for scientists who are forced to spend their entire materialist-dogma-squashed careers in that first category listed above is the fact that we few afterlife scientists, together with many in the second category listed above, are now blowing solidity away altogether, as you will shortly see. When you do your scientific research with a fully open mind, it is amazing what you can discover! It was somewhere before 2010 that we scientists in the third category listed above came to realize that all of material reality is Consciousness. The afterlife evidence, when taken all together, will admit of no other explanation. And as Max Planck said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And as Nikola Tesla said around the same time, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” We truly do follow in the footsteps of Giants!

But then by about 2020, mainstream scientists were coming to very strongly (but sadly) suspect that they never are going to figure everything out. How can their brand of science in the end ever amount to much, when more than a century ago their establishment of their materialist dogma turned it into nothing more than the useless religion of atheism? I have not seen any article in any popular science magazine where they seemed to be considering overtly admitting that holding to materialism ever was a stupid idea. Oh no. Just, now they think that perhaps not everything in reality is going to be discoverable by scientists. And, you know, that still seems to be okay with them, even now.

Around 2020 was also the year when the illustrious young free-minded Dutch scientist Dr. Bernardo Kastrup was delivering his wonderful second Ph.D. defense, on philosophy of mind and ontology. See also his book, The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument For the Mental Nature of Reality. Like the illustrious Dr. Kastrup, the more we afterlife researchers have come to understand how life after death actually works, and how this reality and the many separate but closely interrelated afterlife realities all fit together, the more we have come to realize that all the realities, including this one, are actually non-solid! Moreover, against all the odds, this particular universe turns out to be actually and amazingly finely tuned for life. And more amazingly still, as the great Rupert Sheldrake tells us in his famously banned Tedx talk called “The Science Delusion”, all the “Cosmological Constants” that keep this universe stable are constantly and minutely adjusting. And then there is the further curious fact that all of what even is supposedly “solid” matter is 99.9999999% empty space. The more we study the greater reality, the more fully we come to understand that all the hundreds of solid-seeming levels of what we understand to be the realities that we enter at death, all of which vibrate ever higher than this entirely illusory non-material and only material-seeming reality that we think we are experiencing around us now, are simply aspects of Consciousness. Indeed, our only possible conclusion becomes inescapable. What we think of as human Consciousness really is all there is. We afterlife scientific researchers have discovered the genuine God.

During all the decades that I have been doing afterlife research, there have been more and more situations like that moment when my hopelessly fried father-in-law looked at me, and he was normal. And so then I have found yet one more impossible thing which was confoundingly true. Now, please understand that I am a skeptic by nature! I cannot believe anything without first fighting it. But I also emphatically refuse to hold to anyone’s dogma in doing my research, which has often made it possible for me to figure something out where trained scientists would find just another dead end. And to be frank, I find this whole situation to be increasingly amazing and utterly confounding. Or to use the only word that really seems to fit, I find the whole field of eternal human life research to be absolutely miraculous.   

And the most miraculous thing is that, I swear, it all fits together in a puzzle far greater than the size of this universe, and so perfectly that not a single piece is out of place. And it never had to turn out this way! Not at all! When I first began to do afterlife research more than fifty years ago, I knew that the odds were long against our finding from here a perfectly detailed picture of a genuine afterlife so true and real that we could be certain about each detail of it, from the way the grass would look and feel in the astral plane, right down to the pattern that would be on the genuine God’s astral teacup. Of course, a non-material God does not drink tea; but otherwise, we are pretty much there.

I remember now that when I was four, we learned in nursery school to recite our home address in case we might ever get lost. And as that school was teaching me each morning to memorize my home address, in the empty lot next to our house, there was a tall and friendly man with long hair wearing a long robe who would walk with me sometimes in the afternoons, holding my hand and also teaching me things. My beloved Thomas tells me now that of course he was that man, and he adds that no one else could have seen him. I recall, too, that as we walked, he was adding to the home address that I was learning to recite in school each morning, “the world, the universe, and the Mind of God.”  

I release and I let go, I let the Spirit run my life,
And my heart is open wide, Yes, it’s only up to God!
No more struggle, no more strife, With my faith I see the light.
I am free in the Spirit, Yes, it’s only up to God!
– Rev Michael Beckwith, from “I Release and I Let Go” (1990).