Author: Roberta Grimes

The Extinction of the Ego

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I am coming to see that until we each can find a way to vanquish our ego, achieving very much spiritual growth may be difficult or impossible for us. And our inability to grow spiritually would be calamitous for all the world! Growing spiritually is the reason why we even come to earth at all, so this may be the most important message that I ever will share with you.

For most of my life I thought my ego was me. I would be flooded often with fear and rage over trivial things that on a different day might not bother me so much; but I never for a moment in nearly six decades thought that being that way was a problem. Everyone I knew was plagued just as much by all the same petty fears and rages! So it must be normal, right? Then about thirteen years ago I joined an A Course in Miracles study group, and I pursued the Course for more than a year before I reached what my study group called “the extinction of the ego.”

As an aside, I should note that A Course in Miracles was channeled in the 1960s by a group that Jesus led, and effectively it is His Gospel teachings delivered at the Ph.D. level. My study group helped me fight what for all of us is an essential battle, and the death of whatever that nasty thing was has been such an amazing improvement in my life that I want now to share it with you! And in order to do that, I thought I should first do a bit of background research. What is the ego? Do we even need it? Might it be a part of our eternal minds?

What I have found has been just a mess of confusing interpretations of what the word “ego” means, and a hot insistence by various experts that either the ego is good or the ego is bad, or perhaps the ego simply is who you are. Sigmund Freud used the term in constructing his model of the human personality, and in my younger life we used to say that someone who had “a big ego” was too proud, and someone who needed “an ego boost” had been beaten down by life. The rather fanciful definition of the ego used in A Course in Miracles comes down to this: “The ego is idolatry; the sign of a limited and separated self, born in a body, doomed to suffer and to end its life in death. It is the ‘will’ that sees the Will of God as enemy, and takes a form in which it is denied.” (Do you see why you will need a study group?)

While the ACIM definition comes closest, no definition I have found can entirely match my understanding of the ego. Perhaps we have been using the word “ego” to cover a number of unrelated things? But in the area of achieving spiritual growth, the word “ego” has a specific meaning, and unless you learn how to spot your ego and eventually learn how to take it down, that pesky nonentity will forever keep you from becoming the perfect being based in love that you already are! So let’s begin by stating our best definition of the word “ego”:

“The ego is a limited and separated entity that pretends to be a part of yourself. It was born as an accessory to your body, and it will die when your body dies. The ego is a guardian of the body and of its own survival, focused on making you fear and fight every threat to itself that it perceives. To operate successfully, it tricks you into believing it is a part of your own mind. It is what you perceive as your personal ‘will,’ and it makes you distrust and fear God and also fear whatever might help you grow spiritually because your ego knows that your spiritual growth will eventually bring about the death of itself.”

That is a working definition for now, but as I read it again I think it works fairly well. And you can right away see our problem! The ego has priorities of its own that are contrary to the very reason why you chose to live a life on earth. It is your enemy, but it pretends to be a crucial part of who you are.

I have tried to understand why we even are born into a body that comes with an active ego, since we live much better lives without it! I can think of only two reasons why having an ego might be necessary, neither of which is relevant to our own lives now:

  • The earliest human beings must have needed the ego’s vigilant help. When we had to fight and dominate others in order to survive and mate, and when a moment’s carelessness easily could have transformed us into what’s for lunch, having a paranoid guardian repeatedly alarming us into fight-or-flight probably was an essential element to our remaining alive for one more day.
  • Young children still retain some attraction to and memories of our eternal home. Without this paranoid entity sharing the body of a young child and instilling grabby selfishness and bodily fears, perhaps many more little ones would better recall and yearn for home, and more of them might choose to boogie right on back there.

For whatever reasons the ego ever might have been of use to us, it is of no value to modern adults. Submitting to it after the age of three is like having a nuisance vestigial limb, or perhaps a very cranky appendix that repeatedly becomes enflamed. The extent to which your ego has plagued and diminished your life until now will not be apparent to you until you have managed to free yourself from it, but suffice it to say that its entire purpose has been to make you feel and act crazy. At least, that was all that mine did for me!

Then in one night a little over a decade ago my life was altogether transformed. I had begun via the Course to learn to love and forgive more perfectly, which apparently had threatened my ego sufficiently for it to do what I am told that everyone’s ego does when we begin to grow spiritually: it summoned up my deepest fear. That fear was of what we used to call “the second death,” where we become spiritually advanced enough to merge with God. My ego made me focus on and fear the horror of believing that my merging with God would be the extinction of my individual awareness. I cannot sufficiently express to you how scared I was. And it went on for weeks! Why try to grow spiritually, if all it will get you is an ultimate fall into black oblivion? After more than a month during which my study group supported me but I was in terror, I woke up one morning feeling calm. Then I heard the voice of my treasured spirit guide say, “You will never lose awareness. You will have God’s awareness.” And that was good enough for me! From that moment on, my ego was squashed and silent. I never again feared anything.

Being without a robust ego has felt so natural to me, so healthy and joyous, that it is only in the past few weeks as my guide has been nagging me to talk about the ego that I have come to see how important that fifteen months or so spent steeping myself in ACIM has been to my better living my life. It was only when my nuisance ego was gone that I began my closer walk with God and my deeper study of the teachings of Jesus, until ten years ago this coming April I felt moved to give my life to God. And that was when my deeper and richer life in Spirit really began!  

My first Fun book came out a year later, and in 2016 the third in this series was The Fun of Growing Forever – We Can’t Transform the World Until We Transform Ourselves. It’s a book about using the Gospel teachings to help you to better grow spiritually, and I am realizing only now that those teachings likely worked so well for me precisely because I had already given my ego its big kick in the head. For a few days I was muddled by this, wondering whether my easy success in applying the Gospel teachings might have been just the result of my prior extinguishment of my ego. And that was an advantage you likely won’t have! So, was it the prior banishment of my ego that had made the Gospel teachings work? Had my book been steering you wrong?

I am just now realizing that my extinction-of-the-ego experience made it easier for me a few years later to use the Gospel teachings to elevate my spiritual vibration, but in fact it did no more than that. It was those precious Gospel teachings that did all my spiritual heavy lifting! My dear friend and primary guide now asks me to warn you that if your ego is robust, you are going to find it harder to grow spiritually because your early growth will make your ego feel the need to scare you half to death. But forewarned is forearmed. Here are three of the biggest fears that a desperate ego will inspire:

  • Fear of God. If you are a traditional Christian who is coming to question that dying religion, all the worst fears are right there in your mind! So all your ego has to do is inspire you with a panic over judgment and hellfire, or whatever might be your own worst religious fear, and unless you have made yourself entirely certain that God is only perfect love, soon you will be scurrying back to those pews in terror.
  • Fear of Death. Your ego’s death is its own core fear, so this is an easy one for it to inspire. But fortunately, if you will learn enough to share my excitement about what death really is, you can make yourself proof against ever fearing it. Your death day will be the greatest day of your life! Trust yourself to know and live the truth, and soon the thought of death just will make you smile.
  • Fear of Personal Disaster. Each of us has a few fears so basic that we may not even really know what they are, but they are there. And your ego knows every one of them. All you can do when any such fear attacks you is to be prepared to know that nothing about whatever you are being made to fear is real.

The only way to vanquish your ego is to stand strong in the face of all fear. If you will stare it down as I stared mine down, your ego soon will cease to be. Immerse yourself in eternal truth until that nasty gremlin shrivels and dies! All that exists is one perfect and all-powerful eternal God, and you in particular are God’s best-beloved child. As A Course in Miracles gently assures us, “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God” (T-In.2:4).

 

Thai baby photo credit: Alessandro Colalongo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/59086578@N04/36688007435″>#BeautifulThaiBaby</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Man with waterfall photo credit: Navaneeth Kishor <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31798490@N08/42031636474″>Monsoon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Brain-Hacks

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One astonishing byproduct of the bogus scientific theory of materialism and its correlate certainty that consciousness has to be generated by the brain is the fact that so many scientists have become obsessed with developing brain-hacks. They are certain that your brain creates “you,” even though they have no idea how that happens; so now no effort can be spared as they struggle to find the very best ways to preserve that brain-created “you” forever!

Dying people obsessed with the idea of immortality began in the sixties to have their brains frozen, but even if we can find a way to successfully defrost and reanimate those brains they still will be vulnerable and mortal. So by now those who feel truly inspired to keep our brain-created minds alive have come to focus on how we might upload our consciousness to a computer, while at the same time other scientists are trying to upload information to our living brains. Some of the hacks being seriously considered turn out to be quite literally to die for!

And of course immortal minds will need immortal bodies, so scientists are figuring out now how to hack our bodies too. Modern mainstream science is so far off the rails, so dead-ended by its adherence to the thoroughly discredited dogma of materialism, that the only hope it can think to offer to all of humankind is a possible eternity as computers in the heads of robots? Scientists call this “the mind-body problem,” and while they talk a good game, they still have made precisely zero progress on any of these fronts!

I have subscribed to Scientific American for going on two decades now. In those earlier, more hopeful days, scientists were so certain they were going to figure out how the brain creates consciousness that it seemed to be only a matter of time. As recently as a few years back, scientists still were confident that their materialist theories about the origin of consciousness absolutely had to be right. Very recently, though, these hopeful articles so full of the certainty that matter creates mind have faltered in their optimism, to be replaced in the popular scientific literature by the possibility that we may never discover the origin of consciousness unless we dare to venture beyond traditional physics and consider religious notions too. But of course we can never do that!

Close to twenty years into the twenty-first century, theories of how the brain creates consciousness seem to have reached such a fanciful level that they are mostly expounded on places like Quora, while my beloved but deluded Scientific American has reduced its ambitions to attempts at learning how to tell if a comatose patient is aware, and how we might explain the astonishing fact that some people with “acquired savant syndrome” can gain unbelievable talents overnight. What passes for exciting consciousness news in the popular science literature is just expositions of older studies that focus on parts of the brain that seem to be in some way involved in manifesting consciousness. From what I have seen, these studies are nothing more than possible evidence of how and where an eternal non-material consciousness might attach to and work with our material brains.

The century-old scientific certainty that matter is primary and consciousness is generated by our brains is on its pathetic last legs. And for everyone who cares about truth and understanding, that is wonderful news! This whole bogus contest between scientists and religionists is based on a fallacious assumption that goes back at least as far as Plato and Aristotle, who loosely divided all human knowledge between what is material and what is spiritual. This divide never made any more sense than it would have made to divide the study of liquids from the study of solids, but for nearly all of human history the fact that the whole idea was stupid didn’t much matter because people had so little understanding anyway.

And that division between physical and non-physical studies always was collegial and informal. But then a little over a century ago those struggling to integrate quantum mechanics into their Newtonian physics model didn’t want to have to also consider the flood of well-documented communications that were then being received through deep-trance mediums from people that we used to think were dead. So in desperation, the scientific gatekeepers of the day – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – turned what had for nearly two millennia been a largely theoretical division between the study of matter and the study of spirit into what became an iron wall. From then on, the study of material facts and any non-physical speculations had to be rigidly separated! And working scientists who refused to respect the wall between the two killed their own careers.

But there is just one reality. Surely that is common sense? The early-twentieth-century scientists who first dubbed materialism “the fundamental scientific dogma” could not have understood that nothing is solid, that religious dogmas are no threat to the truth, and that in fact there is a glorious greater reality based in consciousness of which our universe is just a part. Scientists through all of human history could not have understood any of this, but more and more working scientists are beginning to suspect it now. And they should be speaking out! But of course they have children to educate and retirements to fund. And by now there has been a century’s worth of scientific work done based on a lie, so at this point it will be hard for any respected scientist ever to point out the fact that the materialist scientific emperor is in fact buck-nekkid. Being the first respected scientist to speak the truth is going to be hard! But still, shame on every scientist at every level who suspects the truth but still lives the lie.

All those brain-hacks meant to give us eternal physical life are laughable. It isn’t only that they turn working scientists into the equivalent of tribal primitives trying to figure out how to hack a radio so it will produce the voice of Frank Sinatra, but eternity is our birthright. It is the essence of who we are! Every human mind is inextricably part of the Mind that continuously manifests this universe, safely beyond the matter-related illusions of time and space and therefore eternal by definition. Please pause for a moment and savor that fact. You never began, you never will end, and eternal is the essence of who you are!

Still, working scientists and clueless others continue to double down on silliness. The author of The DaVinci Code imagines that we will create and worship an artificial God. As we become ever better at detecting the fact that awareness persists after physical death, there also are people who wallow in the horror of imagining that human awareness must be trapped for long enough for the dying to be driven mad as they contemplate their imminent demise. Efforts even are being made to program computers to teach themselves to play chess in order to awaken in machines some of what might look like aspects of the mind, specifically intuition and creativity. According to those carrying on these studies, “With the advent of powerful machine learning techniques we’ve seen that the scales have started to tip and now we have computer algorithms that are able to do these very human-like activities really well.” To what purpose this is being done is difficult to say, since conscious awareness is the source of intuition and creativity, and not a product of it. Even the most creative and intuitive machine cannot go from learning how to develop hunches to ultimately becoming self-aware!

So the beat goes on. But fortunately, those that we used to think were dead are working intensively now to invent such strong and incontrovertible methods of communication between their world and ours that soon scientists will be shamed into venturing into the study of what is not physical. And as the great physicist and polymath Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

 

Philosopher photo credit: Mike Licht, NotionsCapital.com <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/9106303@N05/26752965593″>Aristotle with Mobile Phone, after Francesco Hayez</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Growing Spiritually

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

You may wonder why an afterlife researcher would write so ardently about the teachings of Jesus. Until recently I would have wondered about that, too! I have likely spent as much of my life studying the Bible as I have spent studying the afterlife evidence, but until a few years ago my two intense hobbies seemed to be unrelated. It is only now that I can see that they always have been parts of one whole!

Studying the afterlife and discovering that human minds really are eternal naturally leads us to seek and then to discover the purpose of human life. And once we realize that we come to earth in order to achieve rapid spiritual growth, many of us want to better understand both what spiritual growth actually is and what the best methods are for achieving it. All I can tell you is what I have learned as I have undertaken my own voyage! Fortunately, though, spiritual growth turns out to be a largely mechanical process that has nothing to do with any religion. And it can be achieved surprisingly easily.

Those that we used to think were dead consistently tell us that spiritual growth is humankind’s core need. And in the United States now that need is desperate! Growing spiritually helps us to thrive both individually and in communities, but this nation in particular is rushing headlong toward ever more dysfunctional isolation. No one living in our nation’s present climate can doubt that America is suffering an epidemic of loneliness that apparently is at the root of much of our political battling. And that loneliness traces at least in part to the rapid disintegration of the family. If ever there were a place and time in this world where spiritual growth was needed, then that place and time is right here and right now!

We have talked in previous posts about America’s insane political climate, and about the fact that even in its present sorry state the United States remains the world’s best hope. I have shared with you, too, the strong probability that the religion named after Jesus Christ has nothing to do with the mission and message of the genuine historical Jesus, and in fact the religion that bears His name even acts as a barrier between believing Christians and the teachings that Jesus came to earth to share with all of humankind. I hope you won’t mind if I assume that you are familiar with those earlier posts?

All the divisions among people that we perceive are artificial. And this is especially true of our racial divisions! There is much more genetic diversity within the continent of Africa than there is between east Africans and Europeans, who apparently lost the melanin in our skin via a specific set of genes introduced into Europe so recently that civilization was already beginning. In fact, it looks increasingly likely that human beings went nearly  extinct so very recently that all of us are descended from common ancestors who lived less than 200,000 years ago.

So every human being on earth is your cousin! We all belong not just to one human race, but even to one extended family. Yes, our lack of understanding of what spiritual growth is and why it is important has allowed us to do terrible things to one another. Humanity’s past has been horrible in every generation since civilization began! And if we don’t change course, it seems clear now that our future is going to be even worse. But the wonderful truth is that we know now for certain that there is no barrier to our uniting every member of the human race in the joy of perfect love. All of us are One! And we can live as One. But only spiritual growth can accomplish this trick. No fanciful hope or prayer for unity can be of any help at all. No worldwide government can do anything but make our present problems worse. You and I alone possess the power to uplift and unite the world! And the fastest way to make that happen will be for us to make our personal spiritual growth our first priority.

What is spiritual growth, anyway? We understand now that the only thing that objectively exists is the base creative force that we experience in a limited way as human consciousness. The pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck understood this very well, and in fact he may eventually be credited with having discovered the genuine God! He 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.” Exactly right! And every human mind is part of the one Consciousness that continuously manifests this universe. (Since now we better understand what God is, that word deserves a capital C).

Consciousness might best be described as an infinitely powerful and highly emotional energy-like potentiality. As is true of other kinds of energy, it vibrates. At its lowest vibration it manifests as abject fear and all the other ishy emotions, while at its highest vibration it is what we would experience as perfect love. The higher it vibrates, the more powerful Consciousness is, and at its highest vibration its power is infinite. When we are in the afterlife levels we understand this, and we so much crave to raise our personal vibrations that we sign up to leave our beautiful eternal lives to come here to earth and work out briefly in this spiritual gym. Our entire purpose in coming to earth is to learn how to raise our personal vibrations farther away from fear and toward ever more perfect love.

The key to making sense of spiritual growth is to understand that it is based in what we might call the physics of consciousness. And as is true of every form of physics, if we take the right steps we can expect our consciousness to respond in largely predictable ways. Eastern religions have pioneered a number of processes that can prepare us to grow spiritually, including meditation, yoga, chanting, and the esoteric teachings of great mystics. All of that can help, but for the most part it just quiets and tunes up the mind. No Eastern religious practice by itself can do much to raise our spiritual vibration because these practices attack the symptoms of low-vibration consciousness without ever attacking the cause.

The Gospel teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, are the simplest and most effective method for achieving rapid spiritual growth that ever has been devised! As I say in The Fun of Growing Forever, strictly following the teachings of Jesus can raise your spiritual vibration in a matter of months without the need for you to meditate, do yoga, chant, find a guru, go to church, or really do much of anything beyond using those teachings to reprogram your easily-reprogrammable mind! The Gospel teachings do this by removing the barriers to love, since when those barriers are gone your level of consciousness rises naturally toward love as a bubble will rise through water.

 All of this is simple physics! And the most amazing thing about the Gospel teachings is that when you follow them strictly and begin to feel their positive effects, those teachings become remarkably self-reinforcing. The key for me was to learn what we are calling prevenient forgiveness, the trick of forgiving today everything that ever might happen in the rest of your life. Resentments and angers of every kind are very low-vibration emotions, so they act as ballast. They keep your consciousness vibrating at the lower end of its possible range. Get rid of your impulse toward petty angers, and soon you will have risen spiritually to such a level that nothing ever will bother you again!

 Even if you don’t feel a pressing need to raise this planet’s consciousness vibration before it altogether self-destructs, and even if you weren’t thinking about trying to achieve a higher afterlife level, the little effort that growing spiritually will take you now is going to reward you richly, and pretty much right away. Spiritual growth feels wonderful! It means a life removed from stresses, a joyful love for each new face you see, and perhaps above all a certainty that you yourself are supremely and eternally loved. Whatever it is that you think you are seeking, growing spiritually is going to help you find it.

It is both sad and silly that even despite insights from Dr. Planck and other important scientists, the scientific community at large still refuses to accept the fact that all of our minds are part of one eternal Mind. The scientific community remains willfully clueless, but that fact need not hamper us at all! You and I are eternal beings being invited by the Lord Himself to live in the perfect peace of God. As Moses said almost 3500 years ago, “the eternal God is a dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27).

 

Loaves and fishes photo credit: Roland J. Sims <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138015205@N08/36062936861″>Jesus Feeds the Five Thousand.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lonely woman photo credit: manolo guijarro <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/46887768@N03/29380568037″>baywatch</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Man with waterfall photo credit: Navaneeth Kishor <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31798490@N08/42031636474″>Monsoon</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Lord’s Christianity

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Those that we used to think were dead tell us that achieving more rapid spiritual growth is the reason why we are born to live brief lives in this spiritual gym. They also tell us that Jesus is genuine, and they confirm that He told us the truth about God, reality, death, the afterlife, and the meaning and purpose of human life almost two thousand years before we could have received this wisdom in any other way. For my own part, I can confirm that the Gospel teachings of Jesus are the simplest and most effective short-course in rapid spiritual growth that exists! When those teachings are seriously applied, they can be effective in only months.

Another thing the dead are telling us is that the level of consciousness vibration on this planet has fallen so far away from love and toward fear that a concerted effort is now being made by beings at the highest levels – including of course the Lord Himself – to elevate us away from fear and toward love just as rapidly as possible. Historical hindsight may eventually suggest that our now being able to confirm the truth of the genuine Gospel teachings of Jesus is a literal miracle that has occurred at almost the eleventh hour.

The fear-based religion  that claims to be based in Jesus has nothing to do with Jesus. This is obvious to anyone who looks at the religion’s dogmas and then reads the Lord’s canonical Gospels with even a half-open mind! And especially now that the dead are abundantly confirming that Jesus is genuine, it seems to be extremely important that we give the Lord a second chance to enlighten and uplift the world. Jesus never meant to start what we now call Christianity. And nothing that Christians are taught is true.

So if Jesus didn’t come to start a religion, and He certainly didn’t come to die for our sins, then why on earth did He come at all? Jesus plainly tells us that He came to teach us to relate to God on our own. His words are so clear that even as a devoutly Christian child I came to suspect this might be true. It is no wonder that Christian leaders forbade the reading of the words of Jesus by laypeople for more than a thousand years, and the first translation of those books into English was not done until the 16th century!

The Lord told us that He came from God, and He said that the words that He spoke were from God. The Gospel of John is the most spiritual of the four canonical Gospels, and there He says, “Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works.  Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves” (JN 14:10-11). “For I did not speak on My own initiative, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak” (JN 12:49). Those that we used to think were dead confirm that Jesus is from the highest aspect of the Godhead, so elevated that God could “look through His eyes” and relate directly to those living on earth. Our own amazing confirmation of the divinity of the eternal Christ is that He knew and said things two thousand years ago that we are able to confirm only now! Please pause for a moment and savor that fact.

Jesus came to us as God on earth in an effort to free us from all religions, to teach us to relate to God on our own, and to teach us how to elevate ourselves spiritually to the point where we can bring the kingdom of God on earth.

Toward the end of His earthly life, Jesus gave His disciples what is called the Great Commission, sending them out to share His Gospel teachings with the world. He said, “All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations… 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). But this extraordinary movement that Jesus founded to begin the process of effecting the rapid spiritual growth of all humanity soon was turned into a fear-based religion that all but ignores the Gospel teachings and treats Jesus as just a blood-sacrifice to an imaginary God that needs a blood-sacrifice. Similarly, every subsequent effort made through willing people on earth by love-based beings not now in bodies to further the work of God on earth was foiled by the very religion that had co-opted and defiled the Lord’s mission. But we are told now that a fresh effort is being made by those at the highest levels to reintroduce the Lord’s Gospel revelation!

Their effort begins with the withering of the false religion that otherwise would continue to stand in the way of our sharing of the Lord’s Gospel truths. You and I are not alone in throwing off the husk of a moribund religion; in fact, many Americans now freely say that as they move farther away from Christianity they are becoming ever more spiritual. The field of our hearts is being cleared for fresh seeding. And gloriously, as this post-religious but more spiritual world finds its footing in the West, we can begin to speculate about how much better our lives and the world are going to be once everyone knows these perfect truths!

The Lord has been calling us all along to look behind false religious dogmas and seek His perfect eternal truths. He says things like, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

The more you study the Gospel words, the more you will become convinced that Jesus actively despises religions! He says in frustration, “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46). And, “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). “Truly I say to you that the tax collectors and prostitutes will get into the kingdom of God before you!” (MT 21:31)            “I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:11-12).

Jesus especially urges us to keep religions from interposing themselves between us and the only God. He says, “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). How is it even possible that for two thousand years religious people have been claiming they were following Jesus, but then they would read His Gospel words and altogether ignore them?

And here is an amazing piece of scripture that never made sense to me until now. Jesus foresaw false Christianity’s rejection of Him, and He foresaw as well the genuine Christian movement that eventually would take its place! He said, “Did you never read in the Scriptures, ‘The Stone which the builders rejected thus became the chief corner stone; this came about from the Lord, and it is marvelous in our eyes’? Therefore I say to you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people producing the fruit of it” (MT 21:42-43). He was quoting Psalm 118:22-23, which was written by David three thousand years ago. There is no objective time in eternity. Was the rise and fall of false Christianity and the flowering at last in the twenty-first century of the Lord’s eternal Gospel truths foreseen by David even so long ago?

The altogether secular movement that Jesus came to earth to begin is the only true Christianity. Rather than the bloody, fear-based religion that even today hides His teachings from the world, for millennia humankind could have enjoyed a flowering on the earth of forgiveness and love, an ever closer walk with one another, an intimate union with the only true God, and worldwide spiritual growth as a species that could have made it possible for us by now to be looking back on centuries of peace and reveling in a twenty-first century in which the kingdom of God overspreads the earth. But God will not be mocked. The Lord’s truth will win. As that false religion shrivels and dies, at last we can begin the Lord’s great work of elevating and transforming all of humankind!

 

Jesus with Peter photo credit: Pamela P. Stroud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138014685@N08/41277070530″>How Peter Came to Know Jesus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
David statue photo credit: _perSona_ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/22627749@N08/25985015238″>el david</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Am I an Atheist?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My first blog post was made five years ago. Wow, time flies! I shared with you then my transformative experience at the age of eight that has so profoundly shaped my life, and looking back now at that rookie post makes me smile. I didn’t even add pictures!

Extraordinary experiences like mine remain forever present in our minds. Even more than sixty years later, it feels as if that experience of light just happened yesterday! And I realize now that forever after I have lived in the perfect love of Spirit, and my primary urge has been to magnify for you the Gospel words of Jesus. By Christian standards, though, I am an atheist. The plain dictionary definition of the word is “unbeliever in God or deities,” and I know for a fact that the cranky and judgmental Christian God does not exist. So I am an atheist. Who knew?

That Christian insistence on faith and not facts makes the existence of God just a matter of taste, so it is surprising that so few Americans will come out and actually claim to be atheists. The venerable Pew Research Center’s 2014 Religious Landscape Study found that only 3.1% of Americans would self-identify as atheists, while another 4% called themselves agnostics. In Europe the landscape is quite different! A current Pew study of European Christians found that 46% of Europeans are non-practicing Christians, while just 18% say they attend church regularly. Across fifteen European nations, only 27% of the population said that they “believe in God as described in the Bible.” So almost three-quarters of Europeans contacted have been willing to flat-out declare that they do not believe in the Christian God. Clearly Europeans are far more comfortable than Americans are with being atheists!

Helping us to better understand atheism is the venerable afterlife scholar, Michael Tymn. Now in his eighties, Michael is an expert on the heyday of communications received in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries from people that we used to think were dead, and his books have taught me so much! Michael’s latest blog post is about people who say to him, “You don’t really believe in this stuff, do you?” He tries to enlighten them, but most are hobbled by that insidious scientist/religionist dualism. He says, “It has been my experience that most atheists are stuck in the muck and mire of scientific fundamentalism and will have none of it, just as much as evangelicals are stuck in religious fundamentalism. Over the years, I have developed a profile of the typical hard-core atheist. He or she may not have all of the characteristics indicated below, but here are 21 fairly common characteristics I have observed.” He or she:

  • was likely brought up in a religious family, quite often in an evangelical family;
  • had problems with parental authority when young, and was often rebellious;
  • while in school, adopted science teachers and professors as substitute parent figures and quickly divorced religion in favor of the “intellectual” reductionist approach of the teacher or professor;
  • cannot now believe anything that can’t be replicated and validated by science;
  • believes that it is necessary to prove the existence of God before considering the evidence for an afterlife;
  • believes wars, famine, poverty, premature death, etc. are evidence that there is no God, as a benevolent God would not permit such things.  No God, no afterlife;
  • had an inferiority complex most of his or her life, but now sees his “intellectual” atheism grounded in science as making him/her better and smarter than all his/her friends who still suffer from religious superstitions;
  • has never really studied the evidence for the survival of consciousness but finds it convenient to parrot people like James “The Amazing” Randi and Michael Shermer by saying it is all fraudulent;
  • assumes that celestial ways and means must meet terrestrial standards, thereby further assuming that science has it all figured out;
  • attempts to put on a courageous front in his or her belief that life is nothing more than a march into an abyss of nothingness, but is really shaking in his or her boots, especially in his/her old age, when the courage turns to bitterness and despair, i.e., the pretend courage is really bravado;
  • doesn’t fully grasp the difference between evidence and proof;
  • assumes that the afterlife is nothing more than angels floating around on clouds and strumming harps for eternity;
  • fails to recognize that the evidence coming to us through psychical research and parapsychology is not always consistent with religious dogma and doctrine;
  • thinks that television “ghost hunting” programs are what psychical research and parapsychology are all about;
  • accepts the debunker’s explanation that all psychical phenomena are the result of fraud, hallucination or self-delusion;
  • believes everything he/she reads concerning paranormal phenomena at Wikipedia is the straight scoop;
  • assumes that psychics, if real, should be able to pick winning lottery numbers and be totally correct in everything he or she says;
  • stresses the “misses” in the testing of psychic phenomena, while ignoring the “hits,” even though they are far beyond chance;
  • assumes that if spirits exist, they should be all-powerful and able to more effectively communicate;
  • says we should “live for today” and not concern ourselves with what happens after death;
  • fancies him- or herself as a self-appointed guardian of truth in the war on superstition.

 I am amazed to report that none of these twenty-one characteristics applies to me! So perhaps I am not an atheist after all? What Michael Tymn has produced for us is a gross indictment of Christianity’s insistence that a petty, judgmental, fear-based, first-century bogus notion of a God must nevertheless be taken on faith to be the genuine God that manifests this universe. But that creepy version of God was outmoded as soon as Jesus spoke His first words!

And then there is the horrendous fact that dogmas based on a bogus God cannot improve even our religious leaders. In response to recent appalling revelations of the sexual abuse by Catholic priests of thousands of American children, Pope Francis produced just a modified limited hangout. A concerted effort by American bishops to better respond to this crisis actually has just been quashed by the Vatican, and the Pope’s deliberate laxity in controlling Catholic clergy for the sake of the children is at last causing some American Catholics to arrive at the end of their long patience. But it isn’t only Catholic clergy who so often betray our trust! The news in recent years has been full of the revelation of protestant ministers who also were caught behaving badly.

Jesus warns us about this very problem. He says, “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). Add the suffering of thousands of children at the hands of modern priests to the whole long history of Christianity in the world, especially the Crusades and the Inquisition, and you see still standing in our midst the Lord’s archetypical poisonous tree!

Of course you and I are not atheists. My friend Michael Tymn’s twenty-one characteristics of atheists are instead both judgment and verdict against a tragically failed Christianity. You and I have responded to the Lord’s invitation that we “ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you.” (LK 11:10). As followers of Jesus, we are seekers! And what we have found is the gloriously factual and infinitely perfect eternal God. When Christianity insists that we give our faith to a made-up God that many find repellant, the religion is making atheists-by-definition out of every genuine seeker. Most Americans are not ready to admit it yet, but surveys of European Christians show us clearly where this will be going.

It is time for us to come together and plant the seed of the Lord’s own tree! The number of those who follow the Gospel teachings may be tiny now, but Jesus told us long ago how His truth will blossom in the world. He said, “How shall we picture the kingdom of God, or by what parable shall we present it?  It is like a mustard seed, which, when sown upon the soil, though it is smaller than all the seeds that are upon the soil, yet when it is sown, it grows up and becomes larger than all the garden plants and forms large branches; so that the birds of the air can nest under its shade” (MK 4:30-32). Now at last the Lord’s work can begin!

 

Little Girl photo credit: ::: M @ X ::: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/71337499@N00/45094419112″>Mora</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Atheist Sign photo credit: onnola <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/30845644@N04/25434321218″>ATHEIST</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Fake God photo credit: Halloween HJB <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/72185053@N00/42068844605″>River God-bust</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Church Interior photo credit: kimmy aoyama <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/148997126@N03/41026982651″>Washington National Cathedral (March For Our Lives prayer and vigil)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Is There a God?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The worst barrier between humankind and our ability to understand reality is the fact that we cannot ask the greatest of all questions factually. If we ask that question as it is asked in the title of this post, and even if we assume the question refers to the Christian God and not to Vishnu or Amun, no one attempts to give a factual answer!

The Christian God’s existence is presented to us as something we must take on faith. Now, I am open to the idea of a God – I really hope a God exists! – but I am unable to content myself with taking anything on faith. So since I won’t take God’s existence on faith, I am an atheist. There is no God. And where science is concerned, this problem may be worse! Since I am a scientist who wants only facts, I refuse to believe in a Christian God that cannot be considered factually. Which means, of course, that there is no God and everything arose by chance. Now, true, we haven’t yet figured out how consciousness happens in the brain or how life could have begun or why the Big Bang happened, but our believing that none of it needs a God that must be taken on faith alone is a more than sufficient negative answer to make us certain that no God exists.

Neither Christianity nor science is willing to consider the possibility of a factual God. So even if we want a God so badly that we force ourselves to “have faith in God,” every one of us by definition is a factual agnostic. But, good grief, whether there actually is a God has to be the most important facts-based question of all time! Even my believing with all my heart that I have cured cancer or won a major lottery cannot affect either my bank account or whether I will win a Nobel Prize; and even my absolute certainty that no Creator God exists is going to make it one whit more likely that I will be able to figure out how life arose on its own from some primordial goo.

I have written about this problem from various directions as a battle between science and Christianity, as religious nonsense vs. scientific folly. I have laid out arguments, poked fun, and torn my hair out in frustration! I have reported on the work of extraordinary researchers and devoted my life to presenting the evidence. But now I realize I am missing the mark. Since the ongoing battle between science and Christianity is a conversation about beliefs alone, even if one side somehow wins, their millennia-long struggle cannot settle anything!    

I suffered this disheartening epiphany as I read a recent article in The Washington Times called “Science’s Godless Problem.” Right up my alley! It begins, “Cosmologist Stephen Hawking made headlines from beyond the grave this October when, seven months after his death, his presumed last book was published bearing these words: ‘There is no God.’ And with that, the already wide gap separating science and religion, physical from spiritual, got a bit wider.”

My first thought was, “Who cares?” Then I realized that is the entire point! If Dr. Hawking had said, “I now can demonstrate based upon extensive evidence that there is no base creative force,” and if he then had made a factual case, that would have been another matter; but it makes no difference to you or me what the person sitting next to us might believe. And Dr. Hawking agrees with me! It turns out that what he had said in his new book – in a section called “Brief Answers to Big Questions” – was this: “We are each free to believe what we want, and it’s my view that the simplest explanation is that there is no God. No one created the universe and no one directs our fate.” Thank you, sir! You have made my point.

This article concludes by saying, “A science world with a default premise of No God is a disservice, in the end, to true scientific inquiry.” Well, of course that is perfectly true! But what about a spiritual world that still holds up a “default premise” of an entirely beliefs-based Christian God that has changed not at all in two thousand years? How does that advance the understanding of the seven billion people on earth who need real spiritual advancement now a great deal more than they need another planet or a better cellphone?

Neither science nor Christianity is willing to see this problem, so certainly neither of them will address it. To be frank, their truce suits them both just fine! Each can bash the other for being beliefs-based and closed-minded, while at the same time the enforced ignorance that each of them espouses serves to protect the enforced ignorance of the other. Plato and Aristotle are said to have been the first to divide human inquiry between the spiritual and scientific realms. And so long as the intellectual descendants of those worthies still refuse to call out one another for maintaining this artificial division that frankly never made a lick of sense, their ancient gig can continue. The religion-biased author of that Washington Times article says, “Researchers with the Religion and Public Life Program at Rice University in Texas reported in December of 2015 the state of biologists’ and physicists’ spirituality in eight regions of the world and found: ‘Scientists are indeed more secular — in terms of beliefs and practices — than those in their respective general populations.’ Specifically, 35 percent of U.S. scientists told researchers they were atheists. That’s a third of the researching, teaching, publishing, fund- and grant-receiving scientific population of America — and it comes amid findings from Gallup in 2016 showing about 90 percent of Americans believe in God, and amid a survey from Pew Research in 2017 revealing a third of Americans read the Bible at least once a week. Call it a great divide.”

But it is not a divide. It’s a mutual support system! And the rest of us are left out in the cold.

How might we begin an objective attempt to factually answer that greatest of all questions? All I can tell you is how I answered it. Once scientists are allowed to really go for it, I am sure they will do a much better job! But since my facts-based research has yielded a factually certain God more wonderful than any Christian’s fondest imaginings, I will give you here a brief summary of how I found the genuine God. I used three primary sets of data:

  • The testimony of those that we used to think were dead. I began with intensive reading of nearly two hundred years of recorded afterlife communications, concentrating on those received before 1940. I did this as an on-off switch, since if the dead were all reporting different nonsense there must be no afterlife and therefore no God that matters. I recall to this day my utter wonder at finding that the more of these communications I read, the more I was discovering this gigantic and absolutely consistent post-death reality! There were never any outliers. As I say in The Fun of Dying, it was like reading hundreds of communications from two centuries of travelers to Fiji. They all had gone to the same wonderful place!
  • The Gospel teachings of Jesus. Christian teachings are man-made nonsense. But we have the recorded words of someone who walked the earth two thousand years ago claiming to know things that he could not have known if there were no factual God. And the testimony of Jesus agrees with the testimony of the dead in sometimes extraordinary detail!
  • Quantum-physics-for-dummies books. Even when I had become convinced that there had to be a factual God, none of it was sufficiently real until I could make sense of how God might fit with the reality that seems to be around us. And it turns out that the implications of quantum physics provide a gateway to that understanding.

God is factually real! God is the only thing that is real, and your own mind is inextricably part of that all-powerful and perfectly loving God. And if someone so scientifically clueless as I am was able to find the factual God, then it is time for both Christianity and mainstream science to advance intellectually beyond Plato and Aristotle.

History’s greatest scientists have cared more about facts than scientists do now. Both Albert Einstein and Max Planck found the same God that I did! Planck said, ”I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” Even poor Dr. Hawking said in a younger, more hopeful day, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe?… Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” And the great scientist and polymath Nikola Tesla, said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

It is past time for scientists and Christians to stop their game of keep-away that continues to hide from us the factual answer to this greatest of all questions! God is real, but the genuine God is nothing like the Christian God so in finding the truth they each will lose something while at the same time they both will win. And you and I and all of humankind for ages to come will be the biggest winners!

 

Icons photo credit: marcoverch <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/149561324@N03/43023752735″>Heiligenbilder in einem Geschäft gegenüber der Kirche Hagios Demetrios</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Hawking photo credit: EpicFireworks <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/30048753@N05/19012579073″>Professor Stephen Hawking Held A Pluto Party</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Sovereignty photo credit: Pamela P. Stroud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138014685@N08/42434499704″>Christian Documentary “The One Who Holds Sovereignty Over Everything” Testimony of the Power of God</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Evolution Evolves

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The consequences of scientists’ need to believe our material brains create consciousness are manifold and ridiculous. It is not much of an exaggeration to say that scientists’ obsession with materialism has so hobbled scientific inquiry as to make any further progress impossible! So why do they still cling to their materialist dogma? More and more, their problem seems to be that for the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals this has become a binary contest. Either reality is a great machine that spontaneously arose from a dot in what they envision as a Big Bang, or Jehovah hand-created the universe six thousand years ago in less than a week. For scientists, it is one or the other. And since the other is obviously wrong, they must pursue their matter-only version of reality despite its cost in time and treasure.

The most peculiar example of the endless blind alleys this stubbornness has created for them is the question of whether human beings have free will. For scientists to maintain their certainty that consciousness is created by the brain, they are required to treat as settled science the theory that human free will is impossible. You cannot believe your lying eyes! You didn’t actually choose what to wear this morning or what to have for dinner tonight. No, every decision of every kind made by each of the more than a hundred billion human beings who ever have lived has been not the product of individual thought, but instead each decision has been an inevitable consequence of the Big Bang. Scientists even are figuring out in which part of the brain our stubborn illusion that we possess free will must be located.

You are laughing now. The notion that people who have been educated through the Ph.D. level could be sure that such nonsense is true is ridiculous! But their problem is that if we have free will, then their whole materialist assumption is wrong. And that would mean that a century of scientific research must be re-evaluated, and a lot of it will go out the window.

As I report in The Fun of Dying, it has repeatedly been demonstrated that our brains begin the muscular and nervous preparations to move a digit about 350 milliseconds before study subjects report having made the decision to move that digit. Of course, this fact is yet more evidence that our nonmaterial minds make these decisions and send them to our material brains, which begin to act and only then make us consciously aware of our intention to move. There is a simple explanation if our brains receive consciousness. If they generate consciousness, no explanation seems possible.

This blind insistence by scientific gatekeepers that consciousness must be created by the brain despite a growing body of evidence that something very different is going on has gradually tied mainstream science into knots. The century-long battle between scientists and religionists has largely come down to their disparate theories on the origin of species; and it is here that scientists have begun to confront important new information that may at last require them to question their foundational materialist theory. We know that the Biblical notion of a six-day creation has to be wrong! And it appears now that the same can be said of the mechanical theory of Darwinian evolution.

Let’s first summarize here once again what open-minded researchers have come to understand about consciousness:

  • Consciousness is all that exists. It is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware.
  • Consciousness includes every human mind. We are inextricably part of Consciousness itself! Pardon the capital letter here, but in fact the greatest discovery of the 20th century belongs to physicist Max Planck. Inadvertently, he found the genuine God.
  • Consciousness continuously manifests reality from outside of time. What exists within time is temporal. What exists outside of time is eternal! Our minds are part of Consciousness and outside of time, so we exist in an endless Now. In whatever form your mind exists, by definition it always has existed and it always will exist.
  • Consciousness continuously manifests this universe. Consciousness didn’t create a Big Bang, wind up the machine and walk away, but rather Consciousness continuously manifests the Now in which you believe you live, including what you perceive as “the past.”
  • Consciousness exists outside of time, but scientists and researchers do not. And there is evidence that as our efforts to make sense of things have become more sophisticated, Consciousness has simply created more universe, more past, more satisfying details to keep scientists busy and to prevent their finding any borders to this illusion.

So everything that scientists believe is material and imbued with a past possesses neither of these characteristics. As Nobel Laureate Albert Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” Einstein also said, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” Einstein died more than sixty years ago! He and Max Planck discovered what independent researchers are only now confirming. Yet even today, the mainstream scientific community that reveres both Planck and Einstein refuses to acknowledge the implications of their three most important discoveries: that consciousness is primary, that nothing is material, and that time’s arrow is an illusion.

This ongoing scientific insistence that consciousness is created in the brain, even despite a century of evidence that consciousness must precede matter, has led to an ever-increasing inability of mainstream scientists to understand much of anything. The century-long battle between scientists and religionists has largely come down to their disparate theories on the origin of species, and it is here that scientists have begun to confront important new information that may at last require them to question their foundational materialist theory. We know that the Biblical theory of a six-day creation cannot be true! And it is clear now that the same must be said of the mechanical theory of Darwinian evolution.

Darwin’s theory of evolution is so weak that an industry has sprung up to poke holes in it, perhaps with the thought on the part of Christians that once Darwinism is discredited we will be left with just Jehovah and the Book of Genesis. That is nonsense of course, but these religion-inspired attacks on a weak scientific theory have been useful to independent researchers who are trying to understand how reality works! And by now, even scientists can see that Darwin’s insight that species do evolve was only an inkling of what is turning out to be a very complex process.

The upper-level dead have consistently told us that the universe is not nearly as large nor as old as scientists believe it to be. They say it has been fine-tuned as a place for eternal minds to inhabit bodies so we can push against negativity in order to better grow spiritually; and now, amazingly, a new scientific discovery has revealed a crucial moment in that fine-tuning process. “In a massive genetic study, senior research associate at the Program for the Human Environment at Rockefeller University Mark Stoeckle and University of Basel geneticist David Thaler discovered that virtually 90 percent of all animals on Earth appeared at right around the same time. More specifically, they found out that 9 out of 10 animal species on the planet came to being at the same time as humans did some 100,000 to 200,000 years ago. ‘This conclusion is very surprising,’ says Thaler, ‘and I fought against it as hard as I could.’”

Of course he fought it! After what scientists believe was at least three billion years of separate evolution by natural selection of the more than eight million animal species that now inhabit this planet, we have just learned that nine out of ten of those species achieved their modern forms in a very recent eye-blink of time, and just as we humans achieved our own modern form. Absent some scientific explanation that is not apparent and seems unlikely, this is one development that could not have happened unless indeed we were seeing Consciousness preparing the earth as a place for you and me to grow spiritually. We will reserve final judgment. But for those of us whose minds are not stuck in failed materialist science nor in ancient Bible stories, the wonder of seeing concrete evidence that what the dead tell us really is true feels like beating back millennia of ignorance and beginning at last to glimpse a rising sun.

 

Skulls photo credit: classroomcamera <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/155535822@N07/25491402327″>IMG_0715 1</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Shells photo credit: amcuervo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10051694@N02/38925214725″>Fósiles en fachadas</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Scientism vs. Religionism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It has been a little while since we last took a swipe at the Luddite field of scientific inquiry, but I keep finding on-point articles. Please indulge me while I share another of them now.

The reason why I call my radio show and podcast Seek Reality is that everyone should be doing just that! Of what value are our attempts to make sense of things unless we conduct open-minded research and we don’t just look for evidence that might support our preconceived beliefs?

Amazingly, a full century after the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals first adopted materialism as what they then called “the fundamental scientific dogma,” scientists remain bound by materialism. And incredibly, the pointless battles over the nonsense beliefs of both science and Christianity that began more than a century ago still continue! Both disciplines are sure that their two sets of beliefs cover the range of all the possible ways that people might look at reality, and the battle between these two sets of beliefs – you might call them materialism and theism – would be laughable if it were not so ridiculous. Rather than battling over whether or not evolution happens, wouldn’t it be more productive for both scientists and religionists to share information and attempt to better understand reality together?

There is in fact a gigantic and readily available body of evidence of what actually is going on! We talk about pieces of that evidence here, and also on Seek Reality, and nearly all of it is both scientific and spiritual – indeed, matter is in fact spirit – so all this information is off-limits to science. And since it doesn’t fit the Christian dogmas, religionists won’t touch it either. But it really is possible for us to figure out what actually is going on! And many researchers already have figured it out, to the extent that we can make sense of things with the limited minds that we bring into these bodies. So many people do indeed know the truth, and that makes watching the battle that continues between two failed and clueless ideologies a spectator sport that has moved beyond sad toward becoming ever more ridiculous.

Let’s look in particular at what we experience as human consciousness, which is the core energy that continuously manifests this universe. Independent researchers have learned quite a lot about consciousness, and we would be happy to share! But scientific dogmas still preclude that. Scientists have spent the past century trying to figure out how the brain generates consciousness, which is the rough equivalent of a gaggle of primitives clustered around a radio trying to figure out how those tubes and wires generate the voice of Frank Sinatra. Consciousness used to be called “the hard problem,” and for a long time scientists seriously sought a source of consciousness in the brain, without success. So of late they are just winging it.

For example, two purported researchers have authored an article in the current issue of Scientific American entitled “Unlocking the ‘Mystery’ of Consciousness” that they claim will explain consciousness while requiring neither “supernatural intervention” nor “any new fundamental physics.” So they claim to have beaten the religionists – “Take that, Christianity!” – while at the same time they are respecting a physics that is grounded entirely in materialism.

I began to read this article with some enthusiasm! Could this be the long-awaited breakthrough? Alas, no. It is eighteen paragraphs of unsupported nonsense. After an introduction that uses big words but says nothing, the authors go on to claim that “consciousness and the creation of feelings are fundamentally grounded in general life functions. Just look at all the basic commonalities between life and feelings. For instance, both rely on complexly organized chemical and physiological processes, and both are embodied; that is, each living thing has a body with a boundary from the outer world. So just as life requires a bounded body for survival, consciousness requires such a body for the creation of a personal (first-person) point of view.” Even if this statement were supported by evidence, it still brings us no closer to understanding the origins of consciousness in the brain. Comparing the origin of consciousness with the origin of life is particularly useless when scientists don’t understand that, either!

The authors go on to say, “to these general features are added numerous and neurobiologically unique special neurobiological features of complex nervous systems, especially of complex brains, that all together create consciousness. The special neurobiological features that we identified include an explosion of senses (eyes, good hearing, keen smell), a multitude of new neural processing subsystems, more combining of information from the different senses, more levels of information processing at the top of the brain, more back-and-forth communications between brain levels, and more memory. From these neural features arise consciousness in a way comparable to how the complex property of life naturally arises from the interactions of its chemical and cellular components.” Since these authors show no interest in understanding how our sensory organs relate to conscious experience, and since scientists still have not figured out how life arises, all of this means precisely nothing. It is the equivalent of saying, “Whenever you have tubes and wires you are going to give rise to somebody’s voice, whether it’s Frank Sinatra’s or Kanye West’s. But we don’t know why!

And there is even more of this blather. The authors go on to say, “So the solution to the ontological aspect of the explanatory gap is that all feelings are both uniquely personal via their connection to life, and they have a unique neurobiology through the special features. And the two in combination create the unique feature of conscious feelings. Note this explanation requires no supernatural intervention nor any new ‘fundamental property’ or principle of physics.” It seems that for them the entire point is to figure out a way to support traditional physics while excluding “supernatural intervention”!

And without offering any support for their theories, the authors insist on making the point that how ever consciousness might arise in the brain, the ability for the brain to generate consciousness must have evolved. They say, “We support our natural solution to the ontological subjectivity of primary consciousness by showing that there is no gap in the evolutionary sequence that led from life to feelings.” “Take that, all you religionists who don’t believe in evolution!” They add, “However, while there was a seamless and natural evolution of consciousness, we also find that feelings and their neural substrates are extremely diverse and widespread. This is true within a brain: in mammals, for example, the brain areas for the many kinds of perceived images (cerebral cortex) largely differ from those for the many kinds of affects or emotions (subcortical areas).” Again, not a bit of scientific evidence or insight into how any of this is even relevant to our core inquiry about how the brain gives rise to consciousness. Or how a primordial goo gives rise to life.

These authors’ conclusion is perhaps their most amazing bit of nonsense. They simply say, “We conclude that the “mystery” of consciousness and Levine’s “explanatory gap” and the “hard problem” can be naturally and scientifically explained. Our theory hinges on the propositions that consciousness and subjective feelings can be ontologically subjective and neurobiologically unique yet scientifically explainable, and that this creates an unbridgeable yet scientifically unproblematic divide between first- and third-person knowledge of the brain. At the same time, it continues to explain how while subjective experience is unique in nature, there is no need to invoke unknown forces, either physical or nonphysical, to account for its creation.” To this day, scientists cannot even explain what consciousness is, nor can they come up with a workable theory of how it arises in the brain. But rather than allowing such baseline quibbles to trip them up, these authors have gone on to assume that consciousness must somehow arise in the brain and then constructed a whole set of nonsense theories that use multi-syllabic terms but are supported by no evidence and explain nothing. This is what passes for scientific rigor today!

Open-minded people have known for a century that consciousness is not generated by the brain, but rather it is the base energy which continuously manifests this universe. In a more enlightened future day, credit for this most important discovery of the twentieth century will go to Max Planck, who in 1918 won the Nobel Prize in physics as the father of quantum mechanics. Back in 1931, 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.”

There were other twentieth-century physicists, too, who saw in the implications of quantum mechanics the fact that consciousness has to be primary! Physicist Euan Squires said, “Every interpretation of quantum mechanics involves consciousness.” Physicist Sir James Jeans said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” And the evidence for the primacy of what we experience as human consciousness is by now so incontrovertible and complete that it is hard to see how it might be disputed by anyone who has access to objective facts. If only scientism and religionism would at last declare a truce in these battles that neither of them can win, then perhaps we all might seek reality together and share the objective truth with all of humankind.

Meanwhile, these nonsensical battles between scientists and religionists go on! Next week we will consider their ongoing major bone of contention, which is the theory of evolution vs. the theory of creation. There is in fact an evidence-based way to make sense of how things happened, and brand-new evidence suggests that this third way may well be right….

Thank you!!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I don’t say this often enough, but I love you. I cannot get over how wonderful it is to have you in my life! Just seeing an email from you with a question to answer makes me smile. Reading your personal story that leads to how you found me – and how I was able to help you – lifts my heart! I am long past retirement age, but I feel more energized now than I ever before have felt in my life. I have you to thank for that. So… Thank you!

Seek Reality has passed its five-year mark, and in celebration we are again attempting to do the program for a live audience. Especially when I was still practicing law, I found it hard to keep to a fixed schedule; and since I wasn’t taking calls, going on live didn’t seem to matter. I had learned early on that taking even good questions would interrupt the flow of what my guests and I were trying to teach you, so that was when I began to urge you to email me through this website if you ever had a question. And for years that has worked well! But recently W4CY contacted me, and as I usually do when such things happen, I saw it as another door opened by Spirit and experimentally I went through it. Being on live last week for the first time in years turned out to be a lot of fun! And even though we weren’t taking calls, there was a chat room where people could ask questions. We’ll be posting the answers to their questions from last week in the chat room as our new live Seek Reality episode begins next Tuesday at five eastern time, but I thought you might enjoy seeing these questions and answers now:

Are they one in the same? God, Jesus and the Holy Spirit?

The idea of a three-in-one deity was hot in the early part of the first millennium A.D., so it was easy for the early Christians to say, “We’re up to the minute! We’ve got that too!” The Council of Nicaea in 325 seems to have adopted the trinity idea whole-cloth, but the notion of a triune God emphatically DID NOT come from Jesus!

In order for you to understand anything Jesus says in the Gospels, you must never forget that when He was teaching on earth, for Him to have said anything against the prevailing religion would have brought him an immediate death sentence. So He could not come right out and say, “The cranky Jehovah you used to think was God does not exist. Instead, God is loving Spirit!” No, He had to use some clever devices to stay alive and teach for more than three years: 

  • He would teach in parables – little stories with a deeper message – then say something like, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (MT 11:15).
  • He would give some passage from the Law and the Prophets – what first-century Jews called our Old Testament – and then He would add something as a seeming afterthought that changed the meaning of the Old Testament passage and made it actually true.
  • He would give us pieces of a truth over days of time, expecting His followers to put it all together while knowing that the Temple guards would change frequently and therefore they never would figure out what it was that He was actually saying.

He told us repeatedly that God is Spirit! For example, He said:

“The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

“God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24).

“It is the Spirit who gives life; the flesh profits nothing; the words that I have spoken to you are spirit and are life” (JN 6:63).

The genuine God is Spirit – and Spirit alone! – just as Jesus said. There is no Trinity. Instead, all that is real is infinitely loving and infinitely creative eternal Spirit, which is what we all experience (to a limited extent) as human consciousness. You can rest in the peaceful certainty that your mind is inextricably part of the perfect eternal Mind of God!

What are you then?

After 46 years of marriage, my husband is still trying to figure that out!

But I think what you want to know is how I came to know what I know. I began to try to understand reality in childhood, following my first experience of light. I majored in early Christian history in college, and I read the whole Bible from cover to cover repeatedly. Then in the late seventies I began to read hundreds of communications from the dead that were received in the heyday before 1940. I studied quantum-physics-for-dummies, and I read a great deal about consciousness. The wonderful, beyond-amazing fact is that all these different areas of research fit together perfectly! If that were not the case, I could not be teaching the truth to you today.

How much study goes into this?

For me: half a century and still counting. For you: perhaps two or three years.

There are others, too, who have done a lot of the work so you won’t have to spend your life doing it, and I share them with you on Seek Reality. But please do the short-course research on your own, and don’t just rely on what we say! You will not find the perfect peace and joy that is your birthright unless you do the last stages of this research for yourself.

Wait, what did you say? Are you saying there is no God?

I am saying that God is all that exists! But the genuine God is not remotely like the cranky and judgmental guy on a throne with a beard and thunderbolts that Christians are generally taught that God is. Instead, God is infinitely loving and infinitely powerful eternal Spirit, and your mind is inextricably part of the perfect Mind of God that continuously manifests this universe. God is just what Jesus tells us God is! But of course, none of the 40,000-odd denominations of Christianity seems to care much about what Jesus actually says….

Are you and this person married?

I believe you are asking about Dr. R. Craig Hogan. No, we aren’t married! He is an extraordinary researcher who is in my view the greatest living expert on what actually is going on, but ours is just a very supportive friendship. It has been so affirming to find someone else who also has devoted his life to this work, and to discover that what he has learned is exactly what I also have found. Whenever we talk about anything, we repeatedly complete one another’s sentences!

How can nothing be bad news?

For many years I asked myself that same question! It took me decades to put all of this together, and repeatedly I would come across amazing new things that flabbergasted me. I would think, “What? We get everything I have already put together, and now I find out that we get this TOO?” Especially for someone steeped in the fear-based Christianity that governed most of my life, it seemed impossible that there wasn’t a hook buried in this somewhere! But there is no bad news at all beyond the fact that if you refuse to grow spiritually you can end up putting yourself into what Jesus called “the outer darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12). The outer darkness is all too real! But it is we ourselves and not God or Jesus or any other judge who ever puts us there. As Jesus also tells us in the Gospels, the only post-death judge you will face will be the sternest possible judge: yourself.

Please know for certain that you are God’s best-beloved child! If you will try to follow the Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness, and even if you never enter a church or even hear the name of Jesus, then you have nothing whatsoever to fear. For you, it really is all good news!

How does one find the answers?

Spending time with us each week on Seek Reality is one way that you might begin. We feature as guests some of the leading experts in the various broad fields that make up the study of our one reality. My Fun books also might be of help to you, and each of them (except The Fun of Living Together) has a seventy-odd-book annotated bibliography that can help to guide your further reading. Simply reading the few books on each of the Fun books’ short reading lists, then reading further from the larger list if anything still is unclear to you, should help you get to know what I know in just a few years’ time. I have done most of the work for you! And if you ever have questions, you can ask them through the Contact block on this website. I used to be able to say, “If you don’t hear within 24 hours, send flowers,” but now I am getting so many emails that it can take me up to a week to answer them. I still do answer every email personally!

If you would like to listen to Seek Reality live, simply go to w4cy.com at 5:00 eastern time on Tuesdays and click on “Listen Live.” And thank you again for being part of my life! You are giving me so much more in the simple joy of serving you than I ever can give to you in return!

Becoming Good Citizens of the World

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A friend who often comments here has asked me why in this series of posts I have talked about the United States alone, when in his view it is time for Americans to become good citizens of all the world. He is precisely right! Imagine a world that has become one neighborhood, everyone watching out for everyone else, where all of humankind is united in love and we are far beyond any kind of war. But if that is the goal, how on earth can we get there?

Ever since the end of World War I, well-meaning people have wanted to put into place some sort of worldwide governance that might be able to end all wars. Not only have these efforts come to naught, but a case can be made that they actually have sharpened existing divisions among nations. The problem with our attempts to unite the world has been the fact that every one of them has been top-down! Uniting the world’s governments can be of little help if our real goal is to unite the world’s people.

 The United Nations is typical. The U.N. is an assembly of governments, many of which are frank dictatorships. No attempt is made by the U.N. to lessen the depredations of the world’s worst rulers, so far from uplifting the people of the world, the United Nations gives legitimacy and support to tyrants who oppress and destroy. The U.N. might prevent a war or two, but in refusing to insist on basic human rights it makes the conditions of many still worse.

As is true of politics and religion, coalitions of governments are primarily about controlling and impoverishing people. No matter the good intentions with which political, religious, and world organizations might begin to do their work, soon they are all about funneling power and money into the hands of a few. All you need to know about Christianity is that the Catholic Church is worth at least $130 billion now, the Mormon Church is worth $200 billion, and even the Church of England is worth $7.8 billion. In America, successful politicians routinely amass great personal wealth; and even Yasser Arafat, the Palestinian hero, died a billionaire! Every bit of all this money gathered into hands at the very top came from the labor of masses of people who had been coerced into yielding it up. Thomas Jefferson memorably said that no government should “take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned,” but these numbers make a mockery of that wish! No assembly organized on the top-down model can be of any use to us as we work to build a healthier and more sustainable future for all the world.

So to answer our friend who wonders why I keep talking about the United States and I never mention our need to be good citizens of the world, I say this: Unless we can perfect and spread the Founders’ brilliant governmental model, we are going to have no hope at all of uplifting the rest of suffering humankind.

The world over the past two hundred years has been a wondrous laboratory! Alternative forms of government have been extensively tried, so it is easy now to say what works fairly well and what cannot work at all. To judge the relative success of governmental models, we will need some objective measures. I propose these four:

  • Responsiveness to the people being governed;
  • An emphasis on person freedom;
  • Broad-based economic prosperity; and
  • Long-term internal stability and peace.

When considered in these terms, there never is going to be a perfect government. What we are seeking, therefore, is a governmental design that will make good government possible, and in that sweepstakes there is one clear winner! Any form of class-based, non-elective rule is destructive of prosperity for the masses, which is why for most of human history nearly all people have lived miserable lives. A century ago we might have thought that the high ideals inherent in collectivist models like communism and socialism stood some chance of doing better, but in practice collectivist governments have been disastrous whenever they have been tried. Just the process of collectivization in the 20th century resulted in at least a hundred million deaths, and the sort of top-down planning that collectivist governments depend on is anathema to personal happiness and an absolute barrier to real prosperity! It is only governments directed and controlled by the people being governed that make universal happiness and prosperity even possible.

And of all historical attempts at establishing government by and for the people, none has approached the long-term success and stability of the American model. Our Founders’ core insight was the fact that, as later was said by British historian Lord Acton, “Power tends to corrupt; absolute power corrupts absolutely.” So the American Founders put all governmental power into the hands of the people, and they designed a stable, universally responsive, and remarkably resilient governmental model. The federal government of the United States has withstood every abuse that power-hungry politicians could heap upon it over the past two hundred years! It has become bloated and distorted to the point where the Founders would be appalled to see it now, but it retains at its core that perfect model that Thomas Jefferson described as ideal. He called it a design for “a wise and frugal government, which shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned.”

After two hundred years of imperfect management, the American model still has produced a level of unprecedented individual prosperity. The U.S. Gross Domestic Product is now in the $20 trillion range, which is larger than the next three largest GDPs combined (China, Japan, and Germany). And of course, considering population differences makes our success even more dramatic. The median annual household income in the United States is just over $62,000, while in China it is about $1,100. In historical terms, modern middle-class Americans are as rich as once were kings.

The American Founders’ governmental design based on personal freedom and empowerment has been proven to be by far the greatest engine for producing the most prosperity for the greatest number that ever has been tried! That being true, it would be unconscionable for us not to be willing to to share it now. Let’s clean it up and tune it up, work out a few remaining bugs, and make it our gift to all the world!

The American people still retain the power to wrest control of their government back from politicians who use dishonest tactics like inspiring righteous indignation to keep us at one another’s throats and distract us from their manifold failures! You and I can see past that now. Once we calmly demand all the facts about every issue in contention, the political charades that are currently tearing this nation apart are going to sputter and die. Then the people will be back in control. And once we have reclaimed our nation, we will be able to make of it the shining example to the world’s oppressed people that our Founders long ago hoped it would be. Then over time, with our help, all the people on earth can begin to live in their own free and prosperous republics based upon the only governmental model that ever has been shown to produce stability, prosperity, flexibility, resilience, and the protection of the weak against the strong.

The Founders very well understood that a free and empowered people were going to need a solid spiritual grounding. John Adams said, “Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious (sic) people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.” Benjamin Franklin said, “[O]nly a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.” And Thomas Jefferson was two centuries ahead of his time when he said, “To the corruptions of Christianity I am indeed opposed; but not to the genuine precepts of Jesus himself. I am a Christian, in the only sense that he wished any one to be; sincerely attached to his doctrines, in preference to all others; ascribing to himself every human excellence; & believing he never claimed any other.” It is those perfect non-religious teachings of Jesus that will provide the solid spiritual grounding that can make uniting all the world even possible.

Abraham Lincoln memorably said in the midst of a crisis that also split this nation, “We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last best hope of earth.” Unless we will resolve to focus now on what is really important, and stop allowing political squabbling to keep splitting us apart over trivial nonsense, we are going to find it impossible to be of any use to a desperate world. So we have our work cut out for us! It is only all Americans together, reared from birth to be comfortable with personal freedom and empowerment, who have the means and the will to form that ultimate worldwide neighborhood. Billions of people are even now turning their hopeful eyes to us. And we can do this! Let’s roll!                        

 

photo credit: Jason K. Scott-Taggart <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/49585574@N08/44970347131″>Brooklyn Bridge westward view New York 2001</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

 

 

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