Material Consciousness?

Posted on February 9, 2016February 9, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

People tell me that my approach to scientific cluelessness has been too harsh. I’ve got to cut these people more slack! Fair enough. The fact that almost a century has passed as we waited for scientists to realize that the study of matter is a dead-end game may not be reason enough for me to be calling modern science a failed belief-system that has wasted what could have been a productive century.

My problem with science has been less the fact that it ran off the rails in about 1910 when scientific gatekeepers adopted materialism as a “fundamental dogma.” No, it’s more the fact that even today, scientists continue to hold to materialism, despite the fact that we long ago learned that in reality nothing whatsoever is solid! Reality turns out to be energy-based. And materialism implies solidity, right? Or else, what does “matter” even mean?

The base of all of reality is an energy-like potentiality that we might think of as consciousness, since human consciousness turns out to be a part of it. The great quantum physicist, Max Planck, told us all of this decades ago! In 1931 he said, ”I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

He said in 1944, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Planck’s insight that consciousness must pre-exist matter is the greatest scientific discovery in history. But since it refutes the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism, to this day it must be ignored by anyone who hopes for a scientific career. Even in the twenty-first century, if you want to study consciousness as a scientist you must find a way to reduce it to mathematics and study it as a “state of matter.”

So scientists are beginning to do just that. According to the subtitle of a recent post in a prominent physics blog, “A new way of thinking about consciousness is sweeping through science like wildfire. Now physicists are using it to formulate the problem of consciousness in concrete mathematical terms for the first time.”

Of course, as Max Planck knew, consciousness invents math. It’s not the other way around! In the greater reality that we enter at death – which is to say, in most of reality – mathematics turns out to be irrelevant to a physics that seems to be entirely consciousness-based. So, am I wrong to say that the use of numbers to try to study consciousness might be called the very definition of insanity? Dear friends, if anyone still doubts that science’s problem is that it has become a belief-system, please indulge me and read this post! Or in case you worry that reading it might make you as sad as it has made me, I will quote a bit of it for you here.

“Max Tegmark, a theoretical physicist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge, sets out the fundamental problems that this new way of thinking raises. He shows how these problems can be formulated in terms of quantum mechanics and information theory. And he explains how thinking about consciousness in this way leads to precise questions about the nature of reality that the scientific process of experiment might help to tease apart.

“Tegmark’s approach is to think of consciousness as a state of matter, like a solid, a liquid or a gas. ‘I conjecture that consciousness can be understood as yet another state of matter. Just as there are many types of liquids, there are many types of consciousness,’ he says.”

So his theory is that first we must come up with numbers that can define the shape of a living energy inherently without size or form, and then we can subject it to the “scientific process of experiment.” Good luck with that! The article goes on:

“Take for example, the idea that the information in a conscious system must be unified. That means the system must contain error-correcting codes that allow any subset of up to half the information to be reconstructed from the rest.

“Tegmark points out that any information stored in a special network known as a Hopfield neural net automatically has this error-correcting facility. However, he calculates that a Hopfield net about the size of the human brain with 10^11 neurons, can only store 37 bits of integrated information.

“‘This leaves us with an integration paradox: why does the information content of our conscious experience appear to be vastly larger than 37 bits?’ asks Tegmark.

“That’s a question that many scientists might end up pondering in detail. For Tegmark, this paradox suggests that his mathematical formulation of consciousness is missing a vital ingredient. ‘This strongly implies that the integration principle must be supplemented by at least one additional principle,’ he says. Suggestions please in the comments section!”

Oops! This new way of studying consciousness has come up against the dogma-based problem that it must of course include the certainty that human consciousness is generated by our brains. Max Planck’s discovery that consciousness pre-exists matter seems to make that impossible, but scientists still soldier on:

“At the beginning of the 20th century, a group of young physicists embarked on a quest to explain a few strange but seemingly small anomalies in our understanding of the universe. In deriving the new theories of relativity and quantum mechanics, they ended up changing the way we comprehend the cosmos. These physicists, at least some of them, are now household names.

“Could it be that a similar revolution is currently underway at the beginning of the 21st century?”

Oh, yes indeed. There is a revolution now underway that within the next couple of decades will sweep away the scientific dogma of materialism and will at last unify all of physics in a theory of everything that is consciousness-based. It likely would have happened by the middle of the previous century, but science’s fundamental dogma of materialism entirely shut off such areas of inquiry. Thanks in part to some of the same “household names” alluded to in the cited blog post, many of whom have continued to do their work in etheric laboratories, the ill-fated detour of science into materialism is about to end. Now things really are going to change!

Out With the Old!

Posted on February 1, 2016January 30, 2021 by Roberta Grimes

Christianity buries the eternal teachings of Jesus in first-century Jewish beliefs. The root of this problem lies in the councils which decided which books to include in the canon that became the Christian Bible. Having majored in early Christian history in college half a century ago, I can tell you that my study of the Council of Nicaea that was held in 325 A.D. felt like watching sausage being made.

The whole Christian Bible is not the Inspired Word of God. Thanks to nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence, we can independently confirm that fact. The dead uniformly insist that neither God nor any religious figure ever has judged anyone; that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made any afterlife difference; and that you don’t have to be a Christian to get into the highest heaven.

But we also can confirm now, wonderfully, that two thousand years ago Jesus told us things about God, reality, death, the afterlife, and the meaning and purpose of human life that the dead abundantly validate. So Christianity is wrong, but Jesus is right!

The teachings of Jesus are of extraordinary importance. I have been amazed to find how well they work in aiding our spiritual development, and it is only very recently that I think that I begin to understand why. In strictly following the teachings of Jesus, we are not learning anything new. Instead, we are un-learning cultural errors and beginning to remember who and what we are.

So it is time now for professed Christians to put the teachings of Jesus FIRST. If you love the Lord, then listen to Him! This should be simple common sense, but sadly, for most Christians the church fathers’ decision to call the whole Bible the Inspired Word of God makes our following the teachings of Jesus all by themselves a Christian heresy. Even eighteen hundred years later, Christianity remains stuck in the fourth century.

There is good evidence in the Gospels that Jesus intends His teachings to stand alone. Someone asks Him one day whether what He is doing with these new teachings is really just abolishing the Law and the Prophets, which is what the Jews of His day called the Christian Old Testament. With one eye on the listening Temple guards, Jesus says, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

What does Jesus mean by that? Different day, different guards, someone asks Him what is the greatest commandment. Jesus says, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

Do you see what He is doing here? He is saying that when He said earlier that He had come to fulfill the Old Testament, what He meant was that now that we have His teachings, we don’t need religious rules anymore. Jesus takes the entire Old Testament and replaces it with the beautiful directive that we love God and love one another.

The Lord begs us to keep His precious teachings separate from religious texts! “But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results. Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17). He told the clergymen of His day that even though His teachings were a new philosophy, Jewish clergy still could be disciples of God’s law of love without abandoning their old religion. “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old” (MT 13:52).

Sadly, though, few Christian leaders consider the Gospels to be uniquely important. Instead, for them the teachings of Jesus are equal to the other sixty-odd Bible books, which in many places contradict what Jesus says. And the result is a mess! It’s a mess on every level. Since this post is already overlong, I will give you just one example.

Jesus tells us that we must never judge anyone. “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).

But since the rules-filled Bible beyond the Gospels is all seen by Christians to be God’s Inspired Word, Christians believe that they have been given a mandate from God to be highly judgmental. A fundamentalist minister whose blog I read gives a great example of how these folks get lost in a whole vast Bible forest and thereby miss the Lord’s precious trees. It is this fellow’s stern contention that Christians must judge Donald Trump because the Apostle Paul says in 1 Corinthians 5, “I am writing to you not to associate with anyone who bears the name of brother if he is guilty of sexual immorality or greed, or is an idolater, reviler, drunkard, or swindler – not even to eat with such a one….”

Our fundamentalist friend blithely announces that this pronouncement by an Apostle who never met Jesus or heard Him speak modifies the passage from Matthew quoted above. He tells us that God demands that we judge a fellow Christian, and thereby he has God altogether negating the Lord’s Gospel teaching.

All of this has nothing to do with Jesus. Nor does it have anything to do with God. And for so long as clergymen continue to use the rest of the Bible to obfuscate the most perfect set of teachings that God has ever given to humankind, the whole world will continue to flounder.

Christians needn’t abandon Christianity in order to follow Jesus. We can keep the rituals and music that so many of us dearly love. But Jesus insists that we put Him first! We all pray, “Thy Kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven,” and indeed with His teachings we have the power to bring God’s Kingdom to all the earth. Jesus is saying to us, then and now, “If you hold to My teachings, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (JN 8:31-32)

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/25187937@N05/5067430864″>Grapes</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Missing Something Big

Posted on January 22, 2016January 22, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

The foolish adherence of mainstream science to the false dogma of materialism is now more than a century old. And materialism has brought us so much pain! It has forced brilliant scientists to waste their careers in pursuing baseless dead-end theories while it continues to keep humankind in unnecessary ignorance and fear.

The damage caused by that dogma of materialism is evident across all of scientific inquiry, from the diagnosis and treatment of disease through our efforts to better understand the cosmos. But perhaps the field in which it is most patently ridiculous is neuroscience, were yet more careers are being wasted in the expensive study of nothing much.

The fact that the human mind can function independently of the brain is at this point established beyond question. There are so many well-documented cases of out-of-body travel that include observations that would not have been possible if the mind had not been separate from its brain. Every scientist must by now be aware of them! Near-death experiences? The pioneering work being done at The Monroe Institute? Prominent NDE-er Eben Alexander is himself a neurosurgeon, for heaven’s sake! The fact that every neuroscientist must know that evidence has been reported which suggests that the mind is not generated by the brain has to be our ironic backdrop as we consider two examples of what passes for modern scientific inquiry:

* Do You Have Free Will? If we study only the brain, then it is obvious that free will is an illusion. To quote an article that sums up recent experimental results, “our minds appear to be making decisions before we’re actually aware of them — and at times by a significant degree.” Well, sure. As afterlife research abundantly indicates, and as quantum physicist Max Planck said a century ago, human minds must necessarily pre-exist matter. When you take a brief stint in a material body, you leave most of your eternal mind behind as a kind of super-consciousness that your awareness cannot access while it is attached to a brain. The extent to which your decisions are made beyond your awareness for efficiency’s sake is a topic for another day, but it is patently clear that most bodily decisions are made beyond our conscious ken. Imagine how inefficient our lives would be if we had to consciously deliberate about which muscles to activate, and in which order, every time we wanted to stand from a chair and go and fetch a book from a bookcase! There are important inquiries to be made into the ways in which our super-conscious minds interact with our brains, but scientists can do none of that research while they still willfully mischaracterize the mind.

* Where and How Are Our Memories Stored? Perhaps the strangest scientific pursuit of all is the hesitant study of the brain itself. As befits mainstream science’s fundamental dogma, all such research must be matter-based, so a typical article begins

with a bald assertion like, “The human brain has a capacity that is ten times greater than first thought.” Then we read the rest of the article, and we find that this assertion is based on math and speculation and has nothing to do with the actual measurement of memory storage. To prove that they aren’t straying from materialist rules, the authors assert without evidence that “our memories and thoughts are the result of patterns of electrical and chemical activity in the brain.” They do admit, though, that the very brain synapses they are studying “are still a mystery, though their dysfunction can cause a range of neurological diseases.” Of course, the fact that our minds survive our deaths and are greatly enhanced once our awareness merges with our super-consciousness soon after death gives the lie to this whole field of inquiry. And the fact that our memories from past and future lifetimes are accessible to us after death is further proof that our brains are not for storage. At best, scientists might be able to figure out how our brains sort and encode our more important new memories for storage “in the cloud” (as it were), but that kind of productive brain-research must wait. For now, what is being reported is investigations that are fully as foolish as it would be for us to reverse-engineer our television set in an effort to find that guy who reads the six-o’clock news.

A decade ago, I read articles like these and found them funny. Now, though, all I can see is another decade sadly wasted. At its core, a belief-system is just a religion! Until mainstream science stops worshiping matter and returns to open-mindedly pursuing the truth, it can be of little further use to humankind.

Watching the World Change

Posted on January 10, 2016January 10, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

To be a student of the greater reality is to be sitting in sunlight at the top of a mountain, talking with all the joyous people who also have managed to make this climb as we look out wistfully over the clouds that keep in darkness the whole world below. We’ve been sitting up here for so long that we have come to accept the sad cloud of ignorance that buries in gloom whole populations. But now we can see that, here and there, the ignorance is beginning to thin. A few shafts of sunlight are reaching the earth. Wonder beyond wonders, the scientific luddites are beginning at last to ask the right questions!

I date the beginning of this change to late 2012, although the Mayan calendar was likely not the reason. And it was only the fact that The Fun of Dying came out in 2010 that let me notice any change at all. I began to tour at the end of 2010. From then through 2014, I gave dozens of talks about the afterlife in bookstores and at conferences, to Unity Churches and IANDS groups. It was that broad exposure to people’s attitudes that let me appreciate what was going on.

At first, no matter where I spoke, I would see blank faces. When I called for questions, what they asked would be either too basic (But I just covered that!) or entirely off-base (Saints are a religious thing!). I would patiently answer their questions, of course, but after a couple of years of this I thought that I was about to give up.

Then, late in 2012 and almost overnight, I began to notice a change in people. I was speaking in many different cities, so it wasn’t that I had taught them anything; but I found that all my audiences now were nodding and smiling at what I said. They were asking wonderfully thoughtful questions. It was amazing. And it was happening everywhere!

We have been given to understand that a massive effort is underway at the highest levels of reality to elevate all of human consciousness before we succeed in destroying the earth. It seems to have begun in the nineteen-forties, at about the time when people first used atomic bombs in warfare. Most of those working in this field were born from the forties through the nineteen-seventies: I was born one year past Nagasaki, and Wendy Zammit just a few months later. Many of my friends are afterlife researchers who also were born in the forties through the seventies, and with me they have sat on that mountain for so long that now we greet the thinning clouds with shared looks of jaded amazement.

How is this happening so fast? I can only assume that every person in each audience of every afterlife speaker is being guided by his or her spirit guides to seek and better understand the truth. What other explanation could there be? And now, dear friends, we are seeing glimmers of the most amazing change of all, as traditional scientists start to open their minds.

I recall the way it was just a few years back. The gatekeepers at all the magazines and journals and the heads of university science departments were sure they were battling Christianity, and if they lost that battle, all the world would go dark. Traditional scientists had no awareness that there was objective afterlife evidence independent of any religious beliefs, since to them it was science against Christianity and there could be no third source of truth. I lightly mocked this attitude of theirs in The Fun of Dying, where I remarked that the Opinion editor of New Scientist magazine had told us in February of 2009 that “Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience … Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense.” Oh my. Those darned appeals to common sense have long been scientists’ most implacable foe!

But now comes a surprising poll, conducted by the odd couple of 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair, in which questions that would have been anathema to scientists even a few years back are being respectfully asked and answered. True, it’s not scientists who are asking these questions. And some of the questions are pretty clueless. But – trust me! – even three years ago, a lot of these questions could not have been asked by anyone in the mainstream media in a manner that implied that those being surveyed were anything better than abject fools.

Scientists are beginning to ask questions about our brains that are less than reverential. Information even is being discussed that hints at the amazing possibility that most of the human brain may not be necessary. This is huge! Instead of treating our brains as the far-beyond-precious sources of our minds, it is becoming more acceptable now to think of our brains as just specialized body-parts.

And at last the search for alien life is becoming more open-minded and creative. True, the search described in this article is still unfortunately matter-bound; but the authors go on to speculate that one reason why we haven’t detected intelligent life may be that what they term “biologically-based intelligence” is just a brief phase of development, after which “artificial, inorganic intelligence” arises and burrows safely underground. All of this is nonsense, of course, but for scientists to imagine that inorganic intelligence might exist at all is a departure that is quite new. And from it, the leap in insight toward a scientific recognition that intelligence is not and never was organic seems to me to be an easier step.

Even the notion of “creation” can be talked about now in a scientific magazine! You may not appreciate the fact that the C-word has for more than a century been considered an abhorrent alternative to that even more forbidden word, “God.” Any book with “creation” in its title would until recently have been tossed by scientists, while now such a book is being reviewed in my beloved Scientific American. Of course, the C-word here is only part of the title of a book. But there is a new looseness in the language used, a refreshing lack of defensiveness, that is heartening to see and is brand, brand new.

Scientists are even willing now to admit to big gaps in their understanding. Until little more than a year ago, for working scientists to show to the world any difficulty in interpreting results would have been seen as an act of possible surrender to the forces of religious darkness; but now, here comes an article that cheerfully highlights “six baffling results that just won’t die.”

So, have we at last won the battle for truth? Will the physics departments at major universities soon make studying the greater reality an essential part of their important work? Sadly, we are not there yet. But for the first time in my nearly seventy years of life I can begin to envision a day when afterlife studies will be treated like every other branch of mainstream science. R. Craig Hogan’s latest breakthroughs in the field of electronic communication with the dead might lead the second segment of your evening news, and my dear Scientific American even might approvingly review Victor and Wendy Zammit’s masterwork, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife.

That day isn’t now. But wonderfully, in January of 2016 we can for the first time in human history believe that it might not be long in coming!

My Thomas

Posted on December 27, 2015February 22, 2019 by Roberta Grimes

(The final week of December is for reruns, so I hope you’ll forgive me if instead I write a paean to my favorite book. We’ll be back to seriousness next week. Promise!)

It has been nearly a year since my spirit guide, Thomas, broke into my daytime existence and began the process that led to Liberating Jesus. I found it all to be a harrowing experience, and then I went through a summer of angst because the book is so extreme. It was only when Liberating Jesus was received so well that I really believed that Jesus was pleased with it!

Meanwhile, toward the end of the summer my eternal friend, Thomas, lightened up. He had made allusions to his having “helped” me write my Doubleday novel about Thomas Jefferson’s marriage, and finally in September he flat-out told us that My Thomas is a channeled memoir of Thomas Jefferson’s life during the Revolutionary War.

Well, of course it is. I feel foolish that I ever imagined I could have written it myself!

The idea for My Thomas came out of the blue, but the notion of writing it soon compelled me. Thomas Jefferson was married in 1772 and widowed just over a decade later, so his marriage spanned the Revolutionary War period. And what a marriage it was! Jefferson was so bereft at Patty’s death that he burned all their letters to one another. He never married again, and even in his old age he referred to his long-ago wife as “the cherished companion of my life” and to his marriage as “ten years of unchequered happiness.”

After a year of doing intensive research that felt like a treasure hunt, easy and joyous, I sat down to write, and I found the story already forming into scenes in my mind. Writing it was easy! I could hardly type fast enough. It came out all in a single draft – even written in Elizabethan English! – and when my agent sent it to Doubleday’s head acquisitions editor, she bought it at once and insisted that I not change a word. That she soon found a better job so My Thomas was orphaned and largely ignored seems now to have been a part of the plan. It was essential that I not become a novelist!

Thomas Jefferson was immensely private. His only “memoir” is a dry account of aspects of his public life. So why would he have channeled in 1990 an intimate account of the most private part of his whole lifetime as Thomas Jefferson?

Thomas now has me on a need-to-know basis because he has learned that whatever he allows me to remember from our nightly meetings I will blab. But by September 15^th, Liberating Jesus was at last on track toward publication, and when I had a reading with a medium that day, a relaxed and very cheerful Thomas told us some remarkable things. He said that:

Jesus decided in the nineteen-eighties that He was going to write His definitive book. Thomas volunteered me to be the Lord’s scribe. Eventually I was the one chosen.

But before I was chosen it was important that they demonstrate that I could do spirit-assisted research, and also that I could channel. So Thomas guided me in researching and writing a beautiful story from his Jefferson lifetime of which he knew there would be lots of evidence. My Thomas was written as a demo.

The team around Jesus has been preparing me to write the Master’s book for more than twenty years. I have wracked my memory to try to figure out what it was that they were doing!

I passed those decades in extensive and very disciplined afterlife research as I perfected my understanding of the greater reality. And apparently, night after night as my body slept I sat at an astral table where I was coached in interpreting the afterlife evidence, coached in understanding the Gospel red letters, and coached in channeling The Fun of Dying and The Fun of Staying in Touch. I see now that I have done none of this on my own!

My Thomas was reissued in December, to warm reviews. I really can take none of the credit!

Liberating Jesus is not my baby. When I read it, I find beautiful truths and extraordinary phrases that I did not write. But even after Thomas’s confession that, you know, he channeled this one, too, My Thomas remains the child of my heart. It is a glorious love story, a meticulous account of daily life at America’s founding, and the most beautiful thing that I ever will write. That it is the youthful memoir of America’s ideological Founding Father actually makes me love it more! Whatever you might think of Thomas Jefferson now, at one time even he was young. And he fell into a love so perfect that ten years of it lasted for the rest of his life.

Remembering Who You Truly Are

Posted on December 20, 2015December 20, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

The Fun of Dying was first published in 2010. It includes an appendix that demonstrates the many ways that the dead affirm in detail the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Eventually someone asked me whether the teachings of Jesus actually work. Wow, what a great question! I thought I ought to find out.

So as an experiment, early in 2012 I set out to live the Gospel teachings as strictly as Jesus intends that we live them. What astonishes me almost four years later is that the teachings are so easy to follow. And they effect a rapid transformation! Strictly following the Gospel teachings soon begins to transform your mind into a haven of peace and light and swelling, deep-seated joy. It makes you happy! And from what I can now determine, these changes in our minds are permanent.

The Master’s core teaching is this:

“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

Seems simple enough! I soon came to understand, though, that there were many people and situations that I could not love until I first had forgiven them. This seems to be why our need to learn to forgive is so central to the Gospel teachings: no matter how many times someone does us wrong, we are meant to forgive without a thought. Every time. When someone asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). So by the summer of 2012 I was beginning to practice a variant of what is called “radical forgiveness.” Silly me: I thought I had invented it!

Radical forgiveness is so simple and effective that it ought to be taught in kindergarten. Each time something irritates you, you physically gather up the whole situation, people and events all mixed together, and you wad it into a nice, tight ball with your hands. If there are people in that ball, you say aloud (and really mean) “I love you and I bless you!” Then you push it away with both hands as you say (and mean) “I forgive and I release!” When I first began to do this, often the darned thing would come right back so I had to do it a second time. I cannot recall now whether there was anything so vile that I had to do this more than twice.

I don’t know why radical forgiveness works, but it works beautifully! It seems to have been no more than a month before I was noticing a difference in my attitude toward everything. Our minds are efficient. If we are willing to court resentments, our minds will be delighted to dish them up; but if we refuse to give resentments mind-space, very soon our minds won’t bother to notice whatever used to bug us before. Perhaps the reason radical forgiveness works is nothing more complex than that.

Soon I was living with an astonishing lack of interest in things that used to wreck my day. It was as if there had been levers on my mind that would be flipped and result in extreme irritation that would be very hard to get past; but now those levers had been disconnected. Things still happened, and I noticed them, but now they had no effect on my mind. It has been a good two years since I have had to package up and forgive and release anything! In place of what used to be resentments that were easily triggered and slow to heal, there now is a vast internal peace. It’s as if you have forgiven, now and forever, all the negative things that might ever happen to you in all the rest of your life.

Once you have mastered radical forgiveness, it begins to be possible to learn how to love. Loving God comes first. To do that, you’ve got to stop fearing God, since fear is the opposite of love; so that was when, reluctantly, I had to stop being a practicing Christian. It is difficult for me to admit, even now, that Christianity is based in fear of God, but I found that once I was no longer subjected to crosses laden with their Sacrifice whenever I dared to enter a church, I was able largely to heal that fear and begin to develop with my Source the gentle and trusting relationship to which every one of us is called.

Dear friends, learning to love God truly is the secret to loving everyone else! Until you are loving and trusting God “with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind,” as Jesus suggests, I don’t believe that you even can see your fellow human beings clearly enough to be able to love them as we must learn to love them.

There are many tricks that I have found to be helpful as we expand our ability to love, but they will have to await a later post or my 2017 book, The Fun of Growing Forever. The bottom line is that once you have mastered forgiveness and learned to love God without fear, you will begin to see God in everyone. As you better strengthen your ability to love each person without reservation, you will find that love becomes the air you breathe and every beautiful thing you see. Soon your mind knows no other emotion.

It was only as I saw the fourth anniversary of my experiment approaching that I thought to wonder WHY following the Gospel teachings seems to be so easy. How was it possible for someone almost seventy years old who had been more or less a self-absorbed crank to transform within months into someone whose only emotion is the joy of ever more perfect love?

It was just days ago that the answer hit me with the kind of thud that makes you slap your head. The afterlife evidence abundantly reveals that each of our minds is inextricably part of the infinitely powerful and perfectly loving Spirit which is all that exists.

So in truth, I hadn’t been learning anything! Following the Gospel teachings of Jesus is a process of joyously REMEMBERING who and what we really are. It is a simple unlearning of the falsehoods that our matter-based culture inflicts on us. Following the Gospel teachings is coming home to truths so central to our nature that as we do it, we find a joy of wholeness and centeredness unlike any other.

As you make perfectly following the Gospel teachings of Jesus the center of your life, you will with joy and gratitude begin to remember who you truly are.

Billionaire Victims

Posted on December 12, 2015December 12, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Some of the richest people on earth are spending their fortunes in search of ways to halt and reverse the effects of aging on our bodies, and to find a way to transfer human personalities to metal bodies so they can be earthbound for centuries. These wrongheaded notions are gaining steam; one recent article calls this “the year we decided to live forever.” There even is a name for this foolishness. It’s called “transhumanism,” the notion that we can escape the constraints of being human and live forever as perfected material beings.

It is tempting to call all this nonsense laughable, just the byproduct of willful scientific ignorance, and in fact it is all of that. But sadly, the scientific cluelessness that has trapped modern mainstream culture in materialism can no longer be seen as innocent. The toll it is taking on regular people who are only trying to live their lives can be tragic.

Recently I read an article in The New York Times that brought tears to my eyes. A lovely young woman was dying of cancer at the age of twenty-three. And because she had been persuaded by materialist science that her only hope of immortality would be for her to pay to freeze her cancerous brain, she wasted what should have been a beautiful time of transition from this life to the next in preparing to preserve the meat inside her skull. I couldn’t bear to read what her boyfriend went through at the dramatic time of her physical death, when he said goodbye to his beloved’s face before technicians harvested her brain. This article is full of the absolute fact that scientists know nothing about how the human brain might generate who we are, nor how that bit of frozen meat might ever again be a human being. But this whole idea of preserving brains as if they held who we are is becoming a materialist obsession. Those doing this to themselves admit that there is no evidence that our brains generate who we are; and indeed, there are creepy hints in some of the articles that I’m sharing with you here that some individual university scientists already suspect that they are in a blind alley. But the scientific establishment holds the line against peer-reviewing or funding any research that might lead someone to conclude that the mind may after all be eternal.

Of course, beautiful Kim is fine. As they were buzz-sawing her skull, she was out of her body and thrilled to be in the arms again of loved ones she had thought were dead. She must have wanted to let her boyfriend know that she was perfectly fine, but because he also is a victim of the Luddite conspiracy that is modern science, whatever poor Kim might do to help him realize that she has survived will likely be put down to his imagination. Or to mere coincidence. Or to creeping insanity.

These star-crossed young people are only two of the numberless folks whose lives have been damaged by scientists’ refusal to investigate anything beyond their dogmas-bound, materialist bailiwick. The scientific gatekeepers – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – are doing the equivalent of inviting earnest scientists into a room where there keeps appearing a puddle of water. These researchers are told that we must at all costs determine the elusive source of that water; and to do that, we can examine the floor. We can exhaustively study the walls. But we will lose our careers if we consider the ceiling.

Sadly, I do not exaggerate.

The insistence of mainstream science on materialism has kept the news media in ignorance, too, so many people now share Kim’s desperation about prolonging their material lives. And this is going on all over the world! Money is being poured into trying to understand the workings of the human brain out of all proportion to that organ’s value. Whenever possible, theories are propounded to reassure us of the brain’s importance. You come to sympathize with billionaires who have bought the bunk that scientists dish out, since some of them are being taken now for tens and hundreds of millions of dollars. For so long as the wealthy will fund this nonsense, the gatekeepers will shore up ignorant hopes in order to keep their income flowing. Ridiculous research will carry on.

Indeed, the very billionaires whose contributions are incentivizing universities to keep humanity in ignorance may be the greatest victims of the materialist science that they are perpetuating. Rather than living spiritually productive lives, these folks are instead accumulating material wealth as if doing that were the point of living. Who can blame them? They are winners in the game that science and our culture have insisted to them that they are playing. But these winners of life’s lottery will sadly learn at death that they were its biggest losers.

The entity who once was Thomas Jefferson communicated as Jefferson through direct-voice medium Leslie Flint in the early sixties. Having extensively studied both the afterlife evidence and the man himself, and having further been helped to recall actually knowing Jefferson in his old age (when I was his young male protégé), I can attest that this communication is genuine. It comes from someone who once had considerable wealth and power, and who learned after his death just how valueless it was. He said:

“Unfortunately the world worships material things; puts a false value on them. Man’s got to realize that the only things that matter are the spiritual things. They are the things that do not rust, do not decay. Important though these things may be when on Earth, such as wealth and position, they are infinitesimal in themselves. One should realize that one has got to progress mentally and spiritually, and if you’re blessed with worldly things, to realize their only link is, they’re there for you to use and to share among those less fortunate than yourselves. But to do as the majority do, to struggle from birth to grave for money and position and then have to leave it and accomplish nothing in consequence, seems to be a pointless and foolish attitude towards life.”

Buddhists talk about the risk of “turning on the wheel” of repeated fruitless reincarnation. A life lived without spiritual growth is a life that is altogether wasted, and its only result is that the one who has lived it will soon be planning another life without the distractions of wealth and power in hopes that this time he will get it right.

Religion is Hazardous to Your Child’s Moral Health

Posted on November 27, 2015November 27, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

A recent study of more than a thousand children in six countries shows a

strong negative correlation between religious practice and altruism. The study found that family religious identification decreased children’s altruistic behaviors and reduced their empathy and their sensitivity to perceived injustices. Children from religious households also tended to be more judgmental, and harsher in their punitive tendencies.

Many Christians are shocked by these results. But are they so surprising? When we teach our children that their own family is “saved” while other people are not, that their particular denomination is the one God loves, and that people who engage in behaviors the Old Testament condemns are going to be damned by God, then they are learning from the cradle to disdain most of the human race. Christianity as it is practiced today teaches the opposite of altruism. It teaches self-satisfied superiority. And if there is any flavor of moral poison the world needs to be rid of now, it’s that one!

Of course, it isn’t only Christian children who are being harmed by their religion. Seeing how Islam can turn even young Westerners into killers presents a cautionary tale for us all. Not only is it no longer possible to argue that religion is a force for good, but the argument certainly can be made that religion as it is practiced today is something that we might be better off without. How much of the callousness of modern society comes not in spite of religious practice, but in part because of it? I never have given that question much thought, but now I wonder. I really wonder.

Christian practice in western countries is falling off dramatically. Young adults are leaving the faith in droves. Modern Christianity comes in an estimated forty thousand different flavors, all competing for a declining worshipper pool, so one result of the decline of American Christianity is a tendency toward war among the various sects. The linked article is from a religious-right author. I’ve chosen it because he both states the problem and gives us half of the solution: he quotes from the Gospel words of Jesus, but he cannot step outside the first-century Jewish sect that Christianity still remains and propose to his readers that the solution might be that they begin at last to concentrate their religious practice in the teachings of Jesus alone.

Many Christians talk about the Bible and the Gospels as almost interchangeable. They are not. The Gospels are four books out of the sixty-six books in the Christian Bible (or the seventy-three books, if you are a Catholic). Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the only books of the Bible where the words of Jesus are reported, and they are so different in tone and meaning from the whole rest of the Christian Bible that Thomas Jefferson said they were as distinguishable in the Bible as “diamonds in a dunghill.” And an eighteenth-century gentleman farmer knew about dunghills! If modern Christians would begin right now to follow the Gospel teachings of Jesus, then a future survey like the one above should show Christian children to be less judgmental and a lot more loving and altruistic. Having professed the religion for two thousand years, isn’t it time for us to start to practice it?

My new book, Liberating Jesus, begins to appear in stores this weekend. Astonishingly, rush orders have been placed by distributors in places as disparate as China and the United Arab Emirates. None of this has anything to do with me! It has everything to do with a desperate spiritual hunger that is overspreading the world. And Jesus can feed that hunger. The teachings of Jesus have the power to set every problem of the world to right, if only we will give Him the chance to try!

Reportedly Mahatma Gandhi once said, “I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.” As the survey above demonstrates, sadly, Gandhi was making a telling point. But we have the power to transform ourselves spiritually if we will take the teachings of Jesus seriously. After all that He has done for us, is that so much for Him to ask in return?

New Wineskins

Posted on November 15, 2015November 15, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

Dear friends, here is someone I want you to meet!

Brian D. Smith recently contacted me to say that my Seek Reality podcast introducing Liberating Jesus had inspired him to “finally let go of the label ‘Christian,’” and to write this post on the blog that he began earlier this year following the transition of his lovely 15-year-old daughter, Shayna. Brian grew up as a fundamentalist Pentecostal. His grandfather was a prominent pastor, so he says that “it’s been a difficult journey of giving up a lot of family tradition.” What he writes here parallels my own journey, although Brian’s escape from Pentecostal Christianity has been an especially harrowing experience. And the loss of his breathtakingly beautiful daughter, pictured below, was more than anyone should have to bear. You can get to know Brian at his blog and at his business. This is the most moving spiritual testimony that I have ever read. Thank you, Brian! Your generosity in sharing these intimate thoughts with us is such a precious gift.

New Wineskins

Guest Post by Brian D. Smith

After 50 years it’s time to stop calling myself a Christian. I’m 54 years old and I’ve been wrestling with Christianity from the very beginning; literally for as long as I can remember. The notion that God created me as a flawed being and wanted to destroy me for being the way He created me kept me awake crying in my bed many nights. Why did He hate me so much? The idea that in order to save me, God had to murder Jesus bothered me. I felt bad for poor Jesus. Sorry, you have to die because I’m so bad. The idea that God still didn’t really like me, He just couldn’t see my sins since they were covered over in Jesus’ blood, made me feel dirty and unlovable. I envisioned myself tiny standing before the throne of God, Him sitting way up high looking down on me. Here I am dripping in the blood of Jesus as God reluctantly grants me entry into His Kingdom. The idea that we are saved by “faith” alone boggled my mind. Why is faith, especially faith in the impossible to believe otherwise, so darned important? It wasn’t until many years later that Marcus Borg would explain to me that faith wasn’t believing in the impossible, faith was a deep abiding trust. But, how could I trust a god who was a monster? It never really added up for me.

I’ve always believed in God. I still do. I’ve always loved Jesus. I still do. I just don’t believe in the religion of Paul any more. I even still like Paul. Paul wrote a lot of good stuff. Paul tried to take the teachings of Jesus, which were meant to be radical and blow the lid off of religion, and stuff them in the trappings of Judaism. Paul created Judaism 2.0. He did a pretty good job, but as the Master said: “No one sews a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; otherwise the patch pulls away from it, the new from the old, and a worse tear results. No one puts new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wine will burst the skins, and the wine is lost and the skins as well; but one puts new wine into fresh wineskins.” (MK 2:21-22) Paul went against Jesus’s own words when he tried to take the teachings of Jesus and put them into the wineskins of Judaism. Jesus didn’t come to revamp Judaism or to start Christianity. He came to free us from all of that. He came to show us the direct way to the Kingdom, not through religion but through right thinking and right action. Paul’s efforts helped preserve the teachings of Jesus. For that we should thank Paul.

However, for me, as I’ve been outgrowing the Sunday school teachings of my youth, I’ve been trying to put the new wine I’ve been producing into the old wineskins of modern Christianity and the bags keep bursting.

I need to thank Marcus Borg, Daniel Helminiak, Thomas Talbott and many others for helping me to make the transition from Christianity to spirituality a relatively smooth one. I had many crises of faith along the way. And some of them were pretty scary. I can recall many steps along the way when my mind was blown. I remember when I gave up on the idea of a young Earth and a 6-day creation. I remember the very moment sitting on my deck in Lexington, KY about 25 years ago. I recall looking up from the book I was reading about this and seeing the entire universe in a new light and God as being bigger and more powerful that I had ever imagined. Creating the Earth in six days was pretty impressive, but creating the universe over billions of years. That’s a whole different perspective. I remember when I gave up on the idea of penal substitutionary atonement (the idea that God needed blood and took Jesus’ blood instead of ours). Wow, did that give me relief. God wasn’t such a bloodthirsty monster after all. Giving up on those things freed me from so many mental gymnastics. However, holding onto the label Christian kept me doing all kinds of others. I studied so many theories of atonement trying to figure out which one made sense. Well, no more. There was no need for atonement, except our own need because we felt distant from God. God never moved away from us.

As I told my wife about my revelation, a couple of days ago she asked me why labels are important anyway. I know a lot of people reject labels, but labels are useful and necessary. Labels should never define us. Labels shouldn’t tell us who we should be. But, labels are useful for describing us. For years though when I would say “Christian” people would get this image of me and I’d end up explaining that 60-90% of those things they thought didn’t apply to the type of Christian I am. I hate the phrases “I’m not a Christian, I’m a follower of Jesus” and “I don’t have a religion, I have a relationship.” They’ve been played out to the point of being trite. I don’t know what I’ll call myself or how I’ll describe myself. Right now there isn’t a label that fits. We’ll see. But, I can’t keep up the futile effort of putting new wine into old wineskins.

Giving Your Life to God

Posted on November 9, 2015November 9, 2015 by Roberta Grimes

I’ve been telling everyone that sincerely giving your life to God will transform it altogether. Perhaps it isn’t surprising that some people are taking my advice. And I love them for that! But one reader has just reminded me that it isn’t quite that simple. She said in a blog post comment:

You write “I urge you to give your life to God. And mean it! When you do that, God will give you things to do that are more wonderful than anything you can dream up yourself.” This sounds very convincing – I’d love to experience that for myself!

So what if you do give your life to God, surrender, try to be as open as possible – but things seem to get worse than they were before … ? What does that mean? I feel a little discouraged at the moment.

I realize now that the joy that began for me when I gave my life to God has made me portray the process as easier than it actually is. And I’m sorry about that. For this beautiful seeker who reminded me that giving your life to God can be complicated, and for everyone else who is thinking about giving the rest of your life to God, I should share with you what our beloved Paul Harvey might have called “the rest of the story.”

It’s important to remember that your life is not random. Each of us came into this lifetime with a spiritual lesson-plan, and our spirit guides are going to keep us focused on completing all the lessons in our plan. Since these plans vary so considerably, it is difficult to make a blanket statement, but it’s likely that most of us will be still working on completing our spiritual lessons until we are at least middle-aged. This doesn’t mean that no one younger can make a gift of his life to God; but it does mean that working hard to Ace our spiritual lessons should be first in our minds.

So, let’s suppose that you have decided sincerely to give your life to God. Why might you not be feeling the changes in your life that some others have experienced when they made their own gifts? There are so many possible reasons that I’m sure this list is not complete, but let’s look at a few of them:

You may be afraid to trust God with your life. If you want to serve God but you are afraid of the judgmental and rigid God that is at the core of the Judeo-Christian religions, then you are likely to hedge the gift as you make it. “I’ll really try, God! I want to do it, God!” you might be thinking as you make your gift, and swallow hard. God loves you too much to let you make a gift of your life that is based in fear.
You might still be deep in working on planned life-lessons. If your life is in the midst of crises that you planned before birth for your spiritual growth, God will not begin to use your gift until after you have handled and resolved these crises. For our sake, God puts our spiritual development first of all.

You might misunderstand what making the gift of your life means. Giving your life to God doesn’t mean that God is going to take it over. It doesn’t make God your driver. It doesn’t even mean that you will initially recognize your perfect task from God even when it is right in front of you. As I will demonstrate below, the gift’s first effect must be an immediate difference in you.

You might be hoping to do something big. For you to tell God that you are devoting the rest of your life to God’s service is a big gift indeed! But you must realize that what God will give you to do is going to be a tiny stitch in a great eternal tapestry. And does doing just that little bit make you joyous? Oh, yes. Indeed it does!

You might be keeping your thumb on the scale. You want to do God’s work. But what you really want is to find a job in your home city where you can do God’s work writing computer programs for nonprofits. You want to give your life to God, but on your own terms.

Let’s look now at my situation, since it is the only one that I know well. I have friends who have made the same gift, but I respect them too much to inquire about the intimate details of their lives.

I gave my life to God one morning in April of 2009 as I was sitting in a pew of a Unity Church that I then attended. It seemed in that moment to be the only way to get as close to God as I was craving to be. I pray in gratitude affirmations, so what I prayed was, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it.” I recall thinking through the words as I was saying them that first time, and then deciding that I had nailed it. I have prayed those two lines every day ever since.

I didn’t know how to give my life to God. I never had discussed it with anyone! I spent that first giddy afternoon thinking about how someone as psychic as a post might possibly be able to discern God’s will, and eventually I kind of thought, “Okay, God, now I’m Yours. Whatever you put in front of me I will think must be a sign from You.” From that day forward, I have pursued everything that felt as if it might be from God until it seemed no longer to feel right. I still live that way. Every day.

At the time, it never occurred to me that God might not accept my gift. But I realize now that giving their lives to God doesn’t work as well for everyone as it has worked for me, and as best I have been able to discern the reasons why, they were some combination of those listed above. As I think about it now, here is why it seems to have worked in my case:

I was no longer afraid of God. I had stopped attending the Catholic Church that had a life-size, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above the altar. I had begun to call myself an “Originalist Christian,” which meant to me that I followed just Jesus. I had begun to think through what it would mean to really, strictly live the Gospels. And the God that I was discovering beyond Christianity was one of infinite and perfect love.

My life was newly stable, which suggests that I had finished most of my planned spiritual lessons. I was sixty-two years old. My once-rocky marriage had been solid for awhile, my children were at last well-launched, and my career was winding down.

I didn’t expect an immediate change in my life. In retrospect, the first event that seems to have followed my gift came four months later, when I felt prompted to offer a course in that Unity church. My course materials kept growing even after the course ended, and eventually they became The Fun of Dying.

I had no hopes and no expectations. I cannot recall ever thinking that my giving my life to God was a big deal. It seemed to be only fair, when I thought about all that God had done for me! All I wanted for myself was a closer Walk. And the fact that every day thereafter I looked at everything that happened in my life as perhaps a call to action from God kept the Divine front and center in my mind, and kept all of God’s people foremost in my heart. It is that transformation of my life from inward and selfish into outward and loving that was my real answer from God. And it seems to have come at once!

I think I really would have done anything. I’m not sure. But the point is that my love and trust in God were so complete by then that it never occurred to me to worry that perhaps God might want me to do something awful. My closer Walk made me know at once that God’s love for me is infinite and perfect. From that first moment, I trusted God to make me ever happier in doing my little bit of work to add one stitch to God’s perfect tapestry.

I have come to understand just in recent days that it was my primary spirit guide, Thomas, who prompted me to give my life to God. He did it because he was about to put the series of tasks in front of me that I had agreed before my birth would be the purpose of this lifetime, and he wanted me to be on the lookout for them. Had I known from the first that a world-changing experience like giving birth to Liberating Jesus was six years away, I might have been more circumspect about telling everyone that giving your life to God will be a certain ticket to joy. It has been that for me! But might it be that for you?

We all live many earth-lives. I have seen estimates from the hundreds into the thousands. We come into each lifetime with a plan that we ourselves have carefully drawn to assist us, over millennia of time, in perfecting ourselves spiritually. But a life-plan is not a rodent’s maze! We have the power to take control; we can transform our lives while we are living them. If, after reading this, you still want to give your life to God without reservation, then I urge you to tackle the five potential obstacles to God’s being able to use your life that I have listed above. Get them out of the way. Then, when you have freed the rest of your life to be useful in God’s service, begin to pray my gratitude affirmation. From then on, seek every day and in everything that happens in your life the call of God to begin your new work. Even if you didn’t come into this lifetime with a pre-planned job to do, the work of transforming the world that God has only now begun is going to have a use for your gifts! And let me hear from you. I am glad to help you find the perfect role that God is calling you to play.

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

Material Consciousness?

Out With the Old!

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/25187937@N05/5067430864″>Grapes</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Missing Something Big

Watching the World Change

My Thomas

Remembering Who You Truly Are

Billionaire Victims

Religion is Hazardous to Your Child’s Moral Health

New Wineskins

Giving Your Life to God

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