Thinking About Reincarnation

Posted on January 6, 2017March 16, 2021 by Roberta Grimes

One of the most confounding things about studying the afterlife is getting our minds around the fact of reincarnation. And it is a fact. Much as I have tried not to think about it, given my traditional Christian background, the evidence is overwhelming and consistent that each of us lives many earth-lives. Jesus taught it, the dead affirm it, and those who are so inclined can undergo past-life regressions or future-life progressions and meet their own past or future selves.

The actual mechanics of reincarnation are impossible for us to get our minds around while we are in earth-bodies. This is partly because while we are here we can consciously access perhaps as little as ten percent of our vast and powerful eternal minds; and partly because we still lack a deep understanding of the non-material realities. We are left to try to put a sense of it together, while knowing that what we envision isn’t likely to be quite what happens. You will see what I mean!

Here are eight important elements to aid you in thinking about reincarnation:

* Our minds are part of the infinitely loving eternal Mind which is all that exists. We are of the very stuff of God! And since that is the case, our eternal minds are more complex and powerful than our limited earth-minds can imagine.

* Time is not objectively real. It exists only in this material universe, which is less than five percent of what even mainstream scientists know is real. Getting my mind around all that it means for time not actually to exist is for me the hardest part of this process.

* Since there is no time, in most of reality there is only Now. Effectively, everything is happening at once, including every one of our lives and all of human history. This is a concept that is nearly impossible for most of us on earth to grasp!

* After each earth-lifetime, we spend as much non-time as we like in what some call the Summerland. It is earthlike, beautiful, quite literally heavenly. We take courses and lessons there, travel, enjoy family and friends, and generally relax for what seems to be an eternity.

* Family groups generally gather in the Summerland before anyone decides to reincarnate. So in nearly all cases, your relatives going back for a couple of generations will still be there when you arrive. And even if we reincarnate early, in some manner that we cannot understand apparently we leave a presence there.

* Periodically for most of us the craving for further spiritual growth becomes unbearable. We then plan and undertake another earth-lifetime in conjunction with our chosen guides and with those who will be important in that new lifetime.

* What seems to us to be our next lifetime might be in earth’s future or in earth’s past! There truly is no time. We might surmise from the non-existence of time that past and future must be happening at once, but what is astonishing is that we can actually demonstrate this. Past-life regression therapists have found that it is just as easy to progress people to earth-lifetimes in this planet’s future as it is to take them into the past.

* Each of our lifetimes apparently is a separate existence that also is part of our vast eternal mind. It might be better to think of yourself as an enormous collective. And yes, each of those identities also is you! Each of your individual earth-lives contributes learning and attributes to the whole of your being. A very popular post-death activity is researching our most prominent past lives, although something that I don’t know is whether we also have access when in the Summerland to our lives that are being lived in the earth’s future.

All of our individual earth-lives seem to be recognizably related to one another, although we are not quite the same person in each lifetime. For example, my primary spirit guide, Thomas, once was Thomas Jefferson, and even before I ever met Thomas I knew the historical Jefferson pretty well. Thomas has a lot of Jefferson’s characteristics: both are intense and intellectually restless, profoundly honorable, and idealistic to a fault. But Jefferson had more of a soft side than Thomas seems to have. He was lighter and more optimistic. My Thomas, on the other hand, is a spiritual warrior more adamant and intractable than Jefferson ever was. He does not suffer fools! I can see that they are something like different aspects or views of the same person, and I find that really fascinating.

In 1960 Thomas Jefferson spoke through Leslie Flint, the great direct-voice medium. At the time, my Thomas was guiding a 14-year-old girl and likely bored out of his mind. Thomas was able to assume his Jeffersonian demeanor, and he even talked as Jefferson did in his old age (I was in his life then as a young male protege, and I recognize the voice in the Flint recording – what an amazing experience!). Everything Jefferson said through Leslie Flint, including his wish not to talk about his presidency and his advice about loving everyone and finding a way to end the cold war, all was presented in Thomas Jefferson’s characteristic gentle style. But every bit of it was just what my Thomas would have said!

This having heavily researched Thomas Jefferson, and now coming to know my Thomas so well, has closed the reincarnation loop for me. Thomas says that he and I have shared seventeen lifetimes, and always in more or less the same roles: he was a warrior for truth, while I (nearly always a male, incidentally) variously assisted him in that effort. I still don’t really get reincarnation, but this much I know to my core to be true.

Each of us is one vast and powerful mind that takes on many earth-lifetimes with various aspects of ourselves as we learn and grow spiritually. Just as the little child grows and changes but is always an aspect of the adult that he becomes, so each of those lifetimes is loved by us and familiar to us but is seen by us once we graduate to be only one aspect of our glorious eternal selves!

It’s Time For a Second Christian Reformation

Posted on December 19, 2016August 1, 2020 by Roberta Grimes

It has been half a millennium almost to the day since Martin Luther issued his Ninety-Five Theses that attacked some of Christianity worst excesses. Whether he actually nailed his Theses to the door of All Saints’ Church in Wittenberg, Germany, is unclear; but just the publication of his complaints began what is known as the Protestant Reformation.

What Martin Luther began was a great step forward. It pruned away some of the most appalling practices of the overbearing Church hierarchy, from the sale of indulgences as tickets out of hell through the refusal to allow Christians to read the Bible in their mother tongues. It helped, but it didn’t go far enough. So even centuries after the Reformation, the religion that nominally follows Jesus remains steeped in irrelevant dogmas while it all but ignores His Gospel teachings.

Among my whole life’s biggest surprises was my first read-through of Liberating Jesus. I had no time to read while the Master was using my hands to write: the whole book was written in fourteen days. So it was only when I was left with the finished book that I understood how radical it was! And I was appalled. Was it possible that Christianity had been so altogether wrong about everything from its earliest days, but still the Lord had let well-meaning Christians live in error for two thousand years?

Apparently it was possible. Both testimony from those we used to think were dead and the Gospel words of Jesus themselves abundantly confirm that most of what Christianity preaches is contrary to what is true. Here are the core dogmas of mainstream Christianity that turn out to be wrong in light of the Gospel words of Jesus and in light of what the dead now tell us:

There is no human-like God with human-like failings. The genuine God is loving Spirit. Jesus tells us this in the Gospels, and the dead have been saying it for hundreds of years, yet Christians still worship a Jehovah God who is jealous, judgmental, and quick to anger.

There is no powerful being in opposition to God, no fiery hell, and no damnation. According to the physics of Consciousness (which is all that exists), the more loving an entity is, the more powerful it is. The less loving and more negative an entity is, the weaker it is. If Satan existed, he would be powerless.

The death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being. Since God doesn’t judge us, sacrificial redemption from God’s judgment is an irrelevant concept. Indeed, the life of Jesus is an extraordinary gift to humankind, but not for the erroneous reason that lies at the core of Christian teaching.

Religions are based in human-created dogmas that separate us from God, so Jesus came to end the influence of religions and teach us to relate to God individually. I recall that when I read the Gospels as a child I would wince to see how sharply Jesus condemns religious leaders and religious traditions. He meant it then. He really means it now!

Jesus came two thousand years ago to teach us how to raise our spiritual vibrations so we can bring the Kingdom of God on earth. He flat-out says this in the Gospels! His Gospel teachings are the most efficient system for achieving rapid spiritual growth that ever has been revealed to humankind. And since all our minds are part of the one universal Mind that is all that exists, if as few as ten percent of us will sincerely follow His Gospel teachings, we will raise the spiritual vibration of every human being and bring the Kingdom of God on earth. We will fulfill at last what we ask for in the prayer that Jesus taught us to pray: Thy Kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” (MT 6:10)

It ought to come as a relief to Christians to learn that God loves us perfectly and never judges us. Yet most of the Christians I have heard from about Liberating Jesus are not relieved by its message, but instead they are annoyed to be told that the death of Jesus is not a spiritual shortcut. Jesus actually does require that His followers take His Gospel teachings seriously!

I find this attitude confounding. Liberating Jesus isn’t out on a limb, but rather it simply restates what Jesus tells us straightforwardly in the Gospels. But the problem is that despite the fact that the Bible is available in countless languages, very few Christians actually read it. Even fewer take the Gospel teachings of Jesus as seriously as He means them to be taken. Most Christians seem not even to know nor care that their religion and their Bible would be foreign to the living Jesus! Instead, too often Christians will go after the superficial emotional highs of their religion, and not seek the spiritual work and the deeper rewards that come from actually following the Master.

We tend to think of faith as a virtue. Faith means believing in something, which seems to be better than believing in nothing. For most of my life I thought faith was a virtue, but now I am coming to understand that what Christians call faith is comforting pap, a diversion from any real pursuit of the truth, and the single biggest obstacle that Jesus faces in bringing His teachings to the world.

So it’s time for a second Christian Reformation. And this time, for the sake of a world that desperately needs what the Lord came to teach us, let’s really work to get this right!

Martin Luther – photo credit: rs-foto <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/50402151@N00/4768475053″>Dresden_2010_07_ 091</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Translating the Bible in 1532 – photo credit: Roy’s World <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/44586788@N00/23934666583″>Translating the Bible in the year 1532</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Butterfly

Posted on December 4, 2016December 4, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

I was very close to my mother-in-law. She lived with us for the final decade of her life, and she often confided in me things that at the time I could neither understand nor imagine. This wizened little lady with the wrinkled face and the artificial hip had been a dancer, a balletic skater, and a pianist, bright and beautiful, and she would show me pictures and tell me with wonder that she felt no older at ninety than she had felt at less than half that age. This woman shaped by the Great Depression who had been widowed before she was forty years old talked about how sometimes her lawyer husband who had an office in the Empire State Building had to be content to be paid with a chicken because nobody had any money, and she marveled at how little any of what had been tragedies at the time had really mattered at all.

I turned seventy in August. I understand her better now. To my own wonder I am finding that old age actually is the best part of life! I hear Bertha’s voice in my mind so often as I realize that I feel even younger now than I ever felt when I was thirty, and I can look back at what at the time had been calamities and see them as nothing, or even as blessings. Perhaps my greatest source of amazement is this sudden awareness that life is so brief! It seems to have been yesterday that I saw my life on earth as stretching into forever, time and possibilities without end, while now I see perhaps one more decade of health, another decade of decline, and then graduation. How brief is each human life! How precious is every day that dawns and each blessed chance we find to be of some use.

When I was in my teens I wrote bad poetry. I wanted then to be a writer, but my father wanted me to be a lawyer so I could, you know, actually make a living. I did go to law school, and I’ve had such a wonderful career advising small-business owners that now I hope never to retire; but still, for my whole life I wanted to write. If it occurs to you wonder why an afterlife expert and Biblical scholar who loves to teach these glorious truths also is writing a seven-novel series that is shockingly racy in spots, perhaps now you’ll see that the teenaged writer I was is finally having her say.

At sixteen I wrote a two-stanza poem that expressed the frustration that I was then feeling. Many years later, as we cleaned out my mother’s house I came across that poem and wanted to complete it. Here, dear precious friends, is what I thought when I wrote the third and fourth stanzas is my whole life in one poem. As I enter old age, I realize that actually it is all our lives.

I paused to watch a darting speck
That flickered in the yellow breeze
And came to taste my daisy bed
And touched with gold my lazy trees
And blessed all I had done.

Although I had to turn my head,
I watched it as it fluttered by.
And though I had to work instead,
I ached to be a butterfly
And frolic in the sun.

Now fifty years have come and gone
Between that butterfly and me.
I’ve done what I set out to do,
But still my fondest memory
Is what I wouldn’t try.

I’ve had enough of cheap success
And superficial days and hours.
Now what I want is gentleness,
The joy of decorating flowers
And trembling in the sky.

Cargo Cult Science at Harvard

Posted on November 24, 2016September 11, 2021 by Roberta Grimes

In the last century there were isolated tribes on remote Pacific islands that tried to keep the bounty of Western goods coming by building wooden replicas of cargo planes. They maintained their jungle runways, and when explorers later visited these islands they were dumbfounded to find that a whole system of pseudo-religious beliefs had grown up around these islanders’ naïve misconceptions about reality.

Those cargo-cult delusions were the first thing I thought of when I read that similarly deluded scientists based at Harvard University have – Ahem! – begun to figure out how the brain generates consciousness. They have determined by looking for areas of damage in the brains of patients in comas that three specific areas seem to be essential in order for people to be conscious and aware. They consider this to be a great first step, but the article’s authors cheerfully add that “Independent teams will also need to confirm their results before we can say for sure that these three regions are the physical source of consciousness in our brains.” Of course, the brain doesn’t generate consciousness any more than runways generate trade goods, but the scientists – like their Melanesian brethren – are so caught up in their bogus understanding that they cannot envision a reality that might exist beyond their intellectual island.

Even scientists who have come to understand that consciousness can exist apart from the body are often stuck in the materialist paradigm. Sir Roger Penrose, an eminent British mathematical physicist, believes that consciousness is “just a packet of information stored at a quantum – or sub-atomic – level… Sensationally, he claims to have found evidence that this information, which is stored in microtubules within human cells, leaves the body after a person dies.” According to the article, Sir Roger even speculates that if the body “dies temporarily, this quantum information is released into the universe, only to return to the body’s cells if the host is brought back to life.” Thereby he fits his theory of consciousness stored in cellular microtubules with the phenomenon of near-death experiences, without apparently the slightest curiosity about what NDEs actually are or what consciousness really is.

And apparently there are physicists at the ironically named Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, who share these views. Dr Hans-Peter Dürr, former head of the institute, has said, “What we consider the here and now, this world, it is actually just the material level that is comprehensible… The beyond is an infinite reality that is much bigger… The body dies but the spiritual quantum field continues. In this way, I am immortal.”

We can only sputter, “But what does that mean? How does it tell us one blessed thing about what consciousness is, where it comes from, or how it works? Does ‘in this way, I am immortal’ mean that I will be myself and aware forever?”

This is the kind of thing that can make you pull your hair out in frustration. Looking for a source of consciousness in the brain is like disassembling your laptop to try to figure out how it generates the Internet! The evidence for the fact that the relationship between your mind and your brain is essentially the same relationship that the Internet has to your laptop is so abundant now, and so consistent, that the fact that research like the Harvard study mentioned above still continues in the twenty-first century is as jaw-dropping for us as was that first discovery of the Melanesian cargo-cults.

The big insight that all these bright people miss is that everything is energy. Nothing is solid. They must have learned this in their physics classes, since it has been well known for nearly a century! More than seventy years ago the great quantum physicist Max Planck said, “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.” And Albert Einstein said at about the same time, “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.”

Why is this fact so difficult for physicists to get their minds around? Everything is energy. There is no solid matter. What makes your chair seem to be not the same type of phenomenon as electricity is the fact that it is energy vibrating slowly enough that your senses perceive it to seem solid. As Einstein said, “It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing — a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.” But these Harvard researchers are supposed to have minds that are pretty far above average!

Not only is everything energy, but what we think of as human consciousness is the base creative energy. Max Planck realized this as much as a century 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.”

So we have had for as much as a century this kernel of truth, this enormous insight that scientists could have been using to study a reality based in fact and not in science’s fallacious “fundamental dogma” of materialism. But reality has become an abstract concept to scientists. Discovering objective truth is no longer what they are about! Rather than pausing to reconsider their dogma, they continue to stumble blindly along, looking for “the special something that makes the human mind unique” and marveling at how odd it is that dying people “hallucinate visions of their deceased mothers.”

The great Serbian-American inventor and polymath Nicola Tesla summed up the problem well when he said, “Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality.” He also said, “The scientists of today think deeply instead of clearly. One must be sane to think clearly, but one can think deeply and be quite insane.” And he said, “The present is theirs; the future, for which I really worked, is mine.” Tesla’s future cannot come soon enough!

photo credit: philipp.richter <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/80134144@N05/14473601243″>vaycay</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

To Whom Do We Pray?

Posted on November 12, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

Recently someone asked me what might be the most important question of all. I no longer think much about prayer for reasons that will become clear to you below, but Denise’s question wonderfully captures the conundrum that many sincere people face:

“Angels, spirit guides, dead loved ones, God. If we need help, to whom do we pray? Sometimes I think God is pretty busy and maybe I shouldn’t bother him but I worry if I don’t do it right, it won’t work out. Frankly, most of my praying is begging which I know is the wrong way.”

We are taught to think of God as a religious figure, and of prayer as a religious act; and since religious are fear-based superstitions, we tend to fret that we might do it wrong. We don’t want to use incorrect words, to irritate or harass a busy God, or even to offend some spirit we should be praying to instead of directly to God. And if we do it wrong, what might happen to us then?

Before we can begin to talk about prayer, we first must set the stage. Just what is God, anyway? And what is prayer?

God is all that exists. We know now based upon abundant evidence that the only thing that exists is an infinitely powerful energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, intensely loving and therefore probably self-aware. That is what God is! And nothing whatsoever except God exists. Everything else that we think of as real is an illusion being continuously manifested by God, and that includes space and time. So God is eternal, by definition. And fortunately, each human mind is part of God, so our minds are also real and eternal (Whew!).

God acts in our lives through God’s minions. Each of us has one or several spirit guides who also are part of God, and we each have at least one guardian angel. Every person you see is a walking crowd! We are told that God never takes human form. As best I have been able to determine, God acts in our lives through guides and angels and through direct contact with our minds.

Then, what is prayer? In a very basic way, our contacts with God and with God’s minions are not supplications and thanks offered from outside of God, but rather they are communications that originate from within the very Mind of God.

What does all of this suggest about how we should be praying? Here are my thoughts:

Every prayer is an internal conversation. It is time for us to get past the thought that God is in any sense outside us.

We probably pray to God and to God’s minions simultaneously. I have seen communications from spirit guides that suggest that they won’t “eavesdrop” if we want to talk to God alone, but the evidence is strong that they are aware of our prayers in the same way that they are aware of our thoughts. It’s their job!

Rote prayers are not the most effective prayers. This is true for several reasons. First, if we are saying a memorized prayer we tend not to give it the same level of attention. And a rote prayer is unlikely to contain precisely the things that we are trying to say. Then too, nearly all religious prayers are directed to an external God, which is something that we know now does not exist. I still pray the Lord’s Prayer daily, but I don’t think of that recitation as more than a nod to the religion that I still love.

Asking for things will make it harder for us to have them. Our minds are powerfully part of the Mind of God, continuously co-creating all that we see around us, to the point where our saying “Please make my child get well” may actually be a way to create illness in the child. Instead of claiming the lack, claim the gift! And since gratitude seems to supercharge our prayers, the most effective prayers are likely to be gratitude affirmations. Pray “Thank You for making my child healthy and happy!” Then go about your life with the certainty that your mind is assisting in bringing that gift into being.

What will happen will be what is in your best interest and in the best interest of others. Remember that all of us are living wonderfully complex eternal lives! From our very limited perspective here, it is impossible for us to know what is best. For example, we are told that every child who dies is an advanced being who didn’t need to live a whole lifetime, but whose brief life and death are meant as a gift to you in order to assist you in your spiritual growth. That being so, then even the child’s death can be seen as God’s loving answer to your prayer.

My own belief is that the best way to pray is by living with an open prayer-line. When I first realized that my mind is entirely open to God and to God’s minions, I kind of shrugged and resolved to live in prayer, since in effect I was doing that anyway. It feels to me now as if the top of my head is always open, day and night, and a beam of light is constantly beaming upward while a cascade of love is pouring in. I’ll admit that when I first deliberately opened my mind to God to this extent I was actively policing my every thought, but I don’t feel the need to do that now. God knows me thoroughly and loves me as I am, with every failing and every flaw. I pray to God every day the same gratitude affirmations, saying “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it.” I might chatter to my primary guide, but for the most part I simply feel his presence. Whenever something comes up, I assume God’s help in bringing God’s Own will into being, so I never feel the need to ask for an outcome. And a wonderful benefit to continuous prayer is the fact that when your mind is always open to God and to your guides in such a literal way, you feel so much more connected with them! You feel loved and accepted and empowered in ways that I never could have imagined before.

You are God’s best-beloved child. So long as you always keep that fact in mind, whatever prayer method seems best for you will be right!

We Live in a Matrix

Posted on October 27, 2016October 27, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

The greatest scientist in the history of the world was Max Planck. He won the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics as the father of quantum mechanics, but that was not his greatest achievement. The most important thing Dr. Planck ever did was to demonstrate based on quantum principles that human consciousness is primary and it must predate matter. 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.”

What we call afterlife research has advanced by light-years beyond demonstrating that the dead survive. I have been in the thick of this for forty years! And it has been thrilling to watch what is in fact the most comprehensive genuine science advance beyond investigating life after death toward figuring out where and how it happens and then toward eventually coming to comprehend what all of this tells us about the nature of reality. With the help of people we used to think were dead (including the immortal Dr. Planck himself), we can now offer compelling evidence that Max Planck was exactly right. Mind is indeed the matrix of all matter!

It turns out that the only thing that objectively exists is an energy-like potentiality without size or form, infinitely powerful and highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware. We experience this potentiality as consciousness. All of our minds are part of that one overriding Mind, and everything else that we experience is an artifact continuously manifested by Mind.

So in point of fact, nearly a century ago Max Planck discovered the genuine God. But by then the scientific gatekeepers – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – were deep in establishing materialism as “the fundamental scientific dogma.” Which means that Dr. Planck’s greatest discovery has been ignored for most of a hundred years.

The sorry result for scientific investigation has been a largely wasted century. To put it plainly:

For the past hundred years we could have been exploring the genuine greater reality, instead of emphasizing the search for ever tinier subatomic particles. These “particles” are largely beside the point when they are in fact just vortices of energy, and when all of what we call “matter” is an artifact being continuously manifested by Mind.
During most of the past hundred years most of humankind could have known that our lives are eternal, which fact would have made for a vastly different twentieth century! The difference that knowing the truth seems to make in people’s lives was the subject of a recent blog post, but suffice it to say that there is good evidence that if science had open-minded begun to investigate Dr. Planck’s insight in 1931, the First World War could have been our last world war. And probably our last war of any kind. And by now, we all could be living in a literal heaven on earth.

The waste over the past century in lives destroyed, in misspent scientific careers, and in treasure thrown down the rat-hole of trying to validate the lie of scientific materialism is beyond all human calculation. And the waste continues! As with many big bogus ideas, materialism has many wayward children that become brief fads as people of good will try to follow the lie to its inevitable conclusions. Among the latest of these fads is the notion that technology can somehow make us immortal.

Let’s really get the flavor of this. Scientific materialism insists that our minds are produced by our brains and will die with our brains. But because there are billionaires fondly hoping to make their minds immortal, working scientists will happily take their money and pretend to figure out a way to make what they insist are mere artifacts of matter somehow independently real and eternal! This bogus project has in turn spawned the needless worry that uploaded brains might take over the world.

And now comes a new nonsensical project for billionaires to fund so scientists can waste their careers on it. This one is, if possible, even weirder than the thought of preserving forever what scientists keep insisting is just a product of our meat-brains. There has been a recent flurry of interest in the notion that we are living in a matrix that was probably created by a more advanced future civilization. And being trapped in somebody else’s computer game simply is not fair! So the billionaires who pay the bills now want us to break out of this simulation. Amazingly, the possibility that the matrix might in itself be the grounding of reality seems never to occur to them.

Meanwhile, traditional scientific inquiry is becoming ever more worthless. Having failed to find a particle explanation for dark matter, rather than going back to the drawing board and reconsidering their original premise that dark matter has to be only junk, scientists are doubling down on failure. Science is becoming ever more unscientific!

Yes, we do indeed live in a matrix. And nothing that scientists and billionaires can do is ever going to change that fact. Because fortunately, the Matrix is God.

Resisting Enlightenment

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

The reason why all of humankind is not already certain that our minds are eternal rests on two inconvenient facts:

Each of us cultivates a worldview upon which we build a personal identity. So to be asked past the age of maybe forty to take our worldview down to base and accept a different understanding of the truth is the equivalent of being asked at midlife to assume a new identity. It is embarrassing and frightening.

We have to make a living. And usually our career choices spring from identities based on our cultivated worldviews. So to adopt any big new idea at midlife can mean losing the ability to provide for our families.

As a result, the leaders in every field will mightily resist new foundational ideas. They cling to old certainties with everything that’s in them.

I have a lot of sympathy for today’s leaders in mainstream science and mainstream Christianity. They have built good careers based in erroneous views of reality and of God respectively, but they had no part in creating those views. They received them early in life, and since the truth was not available to them they built their identities and their careers on what amounted to outright lies. They are victims, just as you and I are victims.

Unfortunately, though, in continuing to cling to old fallacious certainties, these scientific and Christian leaders are doing the world incalculable harm. They won’t look at the evidence for a greater reality, and they refuse to wonder about anything beyond the edges of whatever ideas they find comfortable. While this reluctance of theirs to disrupt their long-held assumptions is understandable, it also is the greatest obstacle that you and I face as we attempt to arrest humanity’s slide into barbarism and we struggle to build a more humane world. Let’s look at just two examples of people who are fighting the truth out of a simple fear of venturing beyond their own erroneous understandings.

In the scientific field, Susan Blackmore bills herself as a parapsychologist and a skeptic. She claims to have begun her career as a believer in the paranormal, and then to have conducted experiments that convinced her that all claims of phenomena that might suggest that consciousness can exist apart from the body were “only wishful thinking, self-deception, experimental error and, occasionally, fraud. I became a skeptic.” I remember her early career somewhat differently. In the eighties and nineties I was reading debunker literature as part of my research, and Susan Blackmore was a prominent member of that dishonorable clan. If memory serves, she spun people in a centrifuge and found that before they blacked out they might experience a narrowing of vision and spots of light that could be something like the tunnel ending in a light seen by some NDE-ers. She concluded that therefore all NDEs were the product of stressed or dying brains. She didn’t open-mindedly investigate psi phenomena. Instead, she looked for ways to explain some small aspect of each phenomenon so she could declare the whole thing to be bogus. And her claim to be a former believer whose experiments have proven psi phenomena to be false has given her a great career! At this point, questioning her own assumptions is the last thing she is prepared to do. Here is the text of an email that Susan Blackmore wrote to afterlife researcher Michael Roll on September 25, 2016, reprinted with his permission:

“Dear Michael, How many times do I have to tell you that I do not believe that Crookes and Lodge discovered evidence for life after death. I may be wrong, and I could be proved wrong, but as the evidence stands I am very far from convinced. In addition, everything I have learnt since about the nature of self and everything I have learnt from my 30 years of meditation all lead to the same conclusion – that selves are ephemeral constructions made by brains and when those brains die so does the self. So of course I am not going to try to promote Crookes’ and Lodge’s work. Also I do not think it has ever been suppressed. It is just not good enough to convince scientists and so they ignore it. If they turn out to be wrong and you are right then things will change but I personally doubt this will happen. Sorry – but that’s it as far as I am concerned. with best wishes, Sue”

Now in her sixties, she is not about to turn her skepticism toward her own beliefs!

In the Christian field we face not just erroneous beliefs that feel hallowed after having been passed down for two thousand years, but also a superstitious fear of God that is the antithesis of anything spiritual. If you attempt to point out the flaws of Christianity – they are abundantly explored in other posts on this site – then you are a heretic, un-chosen, and damned. This example is from an email sent by a prominent televangelist, abbreviated for length:

“It is ONLY faith in Jesus Christ that saves you because it was Jesus Christ who God sent to die for your sins! He was God’s perfect sacrifice to give fallen man a way back into everlasting fellowship with Him. So if you accept THAT, then you have to accept the ENTIRE BIBLE as God’s inspired, inerrant Word. It can’t be only part right! The reason is God cannot lie. The Bible is an all or nothing proposition, it is either ALL true, or NONE of it is true… Does this mean your Jewish friend who is a “good person” but never accepts Jesus is going to hell? YES! Does this mean that the family member you love but rejects Christ is going to hell? YES! Does this mean those kind people you work with that embrace Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, or some other false religion are going to hell? YES!”

And Jesus weeps.

If we hope to open the minds of scientists and religionists who resist any open-minded search for the truth, we first must understand why they fight so hard to avoid considering fresh ideas. Their livelihoods, their prestige, and their very sense of self depend on keeping everything new at bay! As Max Planck said almost sixty years ago, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”

A couple of generations of scientists have come and gone since Dr. Planck made that observation. Cracks in the materialist wall that mainstream scientific gatekeepers long ago erected are beginning to appear, but slowly. And where religion is concerned, the fact that attitudes like the one quoted above have emptied churches is beginning to open some minds. The process of enlightenment is agonizingly slow, but it is beginning to accelerate. As Rene Descartes said four hundred years ago, “If you would be a real seeker after truth, it is necessary that at least once in your life you doubt, as far as possible, all things.” His advice is more essential now than it ever was!

Faith vs. Transformation

Posted on October 1, 2016October 1, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

Believing in God in a world that worships mainstream science has become so hard that the latest Pew Research Center survey has found a remarkable surge in people who no longer believe in God. Pew has in recent years found more and more folks who were disenchanted with religions; and now, apparently, Pew is discovering an astonishing surge in outright atheism! For so many people to have become atheists is appalling. For the first time in human history we are able to demonstrate that God is real, but now Pew informs us that our culture is racing headlong in the wrong direction.

I am seeing some troubling stresses among my own correspondents as well. Only this week, someone emailed to me a longer version of the following thoughts:

“(W)hen I probe myself deeply whether I believe the whole “afterlife thing” to be true or not … I find that it isn’t even a question about believing. I know it. So…why don’t I live a life of certainty? Why don’t I live like the most beloved child of God, as you describe in your podcasts that I am? Where is this feeling of security that I so long for?”

I am coming to see that my friend’s lack of a sense of security is the core human issue. It’s the reason we are ever more dissatisfied with religious practice, and it lies at the center of modern cultures as a black existential despair. No religion offers us anything more than a hope that after death we might be safe, and even that small hope requires that we believe what for most of us is unbelievable. So at last we are giving up on religions, and even giving up on God, and we are finding ourselves to be even worse off. Now hatred, depression, addictions, and all manner of public and private pain are becoming more prevalent over all the earth! I submit to you that all these problems stem from a powerful ancient yearning for a feeling of security in our lives.

Having faith is not a virtue. There is nothing noble about believing things that contradict what we know to be true! Jesus in the Gospels uses a word that has been translated as “faith,” but He isn’t suggesting belief in religious dogmas. When we read His actual words, we see that what He is talking about is having certainty about the power of our minds! And He makes His points to Iron Age primitives by referencing the tiniest object they know. He says:

“Truly I say to you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move; and nothing will be impossible to you.” (MT 17:20-21)

To have even this much certainty about the powers of our minds will enable us to do what Jesus came to earth to teach us how to do, which is to bring the kingdom of heaven on earth:

“The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field;and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (MT 13:31-32).

So my answer to the alarming increase in atheism in modern life is to agree that the Christian God is bogus, while also sharing abundant evidence that the God of the Gospels is real. I have been teaching the afterlife evidence for a decade, so by now I have seen abundant proof that the emptiness religions leave in our hearts can be satisfactorily filled with truth!

Still, as my correspondent friend suggests, even knowing that God is real and loves us turns out to be insufficient to remove from our lives the negative energy that comes from living in the modern world. I am realizing now that to achieve the sense of security that is your eternal birthright also requires that you take the steps that Jesus beautifully lays out in the Gospels to elevate your personal vibration away from fear and toward more perfect love.

This makes sense, of course. Your ongoing sense of insecurity even after you are sure about the truth comes from the fact that knowledge alone cannot elevate you out of the sludge of fear that is thick now over all the earth. But the Gospel teachings can do that beautifully, and with amazing speed! Thanks to my primary guide, now we even have Gospel Cliff Notes in The Fun of Growing Forever. The book is available on Amazon, or if finances are tight just send me a contact through this website and I will send you a PDF.

The only way for any of us to achieve a sense of security on earth is to raise our spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. And if as few as ten percent of us will just take this essential step, Jesus promises us that the kingdom of heaven will overspread the earth the way a mustard tree comes to dominate the garden. The only genuine security comes from our elevating our personal vibrations to the point where we will never again even have a fear-based thought. So achieving security requires more than knowledge. It also requires that we transform ourselves as a first step toward transforming the world.

What if Everyone Knew the Truth?

Posted on September 6, 2016September 6, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

The fact that our two most trusted institutions still keep us ignorant of the nature of reality and of our own eternal natures is the source of every one of our problems. From poverty and criminality through hatred, oppression, war and greed, all the fear-based evils that plague us stem from this odd alliance between science and Christianity to keep us from understanding what is going on and who you and I actually are! So naturally, afterlife researchers will occasionally speculate over hors d’oeuvres and wine about how the world might change if everyone on earth knew what we few know now.

Let us speculate together. Let’s imagine that tomorrow a phone app is released that allows anyone to talk to dead relatives simply by ringing them up. It is available for free, and within the week it is being used on billions of cell phones all over the earth. What do you think will happen next? Here are my thoughts:

Everyone will realize that human life is eternal. This realization will take a little while to sink in, but it will within the week be major news and the trending topic everywhere. There is no area of our lives that will be unaffected by it.

Everyone will realize that God is real and God is all that exists. Atheism: you lose! Deism: you also lose. The human-like God worshipped by most religions does not exist, but rather eternal Mind not only continuously creates everything, but it is everything. This is such a radical departure from every human assumption ever made that it is going to take a few years to sink in; but as it does, there will be no aspect of our lives that will remain untouched.

All the earth’s religions will be shown to be in error. Oopsie! And I think this happens within months. Some religious leaders will initially try to claim ownership of the genuine God, but very soon it will be clear to everyone that the real God fits no religion’s dogmas. To take just Christianity, within weeks after the app’s release nearly everyone will have learned that Jesus didn’t die for our sins, that there is no judgment by God and no fiery hell, and that Christian traditions from communion through tithing to the Ten Commandments are all irrelevant.

These seen to me to be the first results, beginning within days and disseminated worldwide within no more than a year. And as people become ever more engaged in these new and deeper understandings, there will begin to be ripples of disruption through every aspect of human life. Here are a few of the things that should be well underway within the first few years:

People will start to think beyond this one lifetime. I call it “thinking on an eternal scale.” It seems to happen to us gradually, but as we begin to better understand what actually is going on and the fact that we will be living in these minds forever, we take better care of our minds. For me, this has meant lots of small changes, from giving up violent entertainments to making a greater effort to grow spiritually. I stopped caring so much about money or possessions when I realized that once I graduate I will have whatever I want. For free!

Mainstream science will be thrown into confusion. Science is a harder nut to crack than is religion. While giving people an easy way to talk with and learn from their dead relatives is going to be enough to break religion’s perceived hold on people’s minds, for the scientific gatekeepers to give up on materialism is going to take shaming on an epic scale. Expect efforts to debunk what is going on to continue for a year or more, until gradually younger physicists and researchers in every scientific field will have had enough personal experience of communicating with dead folks themselves that they will begin at last to investigate what actually is going on. My guess is that within just a few years’ time the hard and depressing work of sifting through and throwing out a century’s worth of bogus materialist scientific theories will have begun.

Religions will teach the truth or they will die. One reason why I am working so hard to spread those precious Gospel teachings is that very soon it will be apparent that all the dogmas of Christianity are wrong. The Pew Research Center has lately found a surge in the number of Americans who no longer believe, and we can expect this trend to accelerate once people are learning from their own dead loved ones that Jesus absolutely did not die for our sins. Since the Christian Gospels hold the most important set of teachings ever given to humankind, some churches may abandon two thousand years of error and begin at last to teach the truth; but some will not. And those that hold fast to discredited dogmas will find themselves empty of parishioners.

Interest in learning more about reality will explode. Once most people are having regular conversations with dead Aunt Mildred, curiosity about the truth will be a growing hunger that afterlife researchers will be thrilled to feed. Then as scientists, too, begin to drop their false beliefs and open-mindedly seek the truth, we will be delighted to turn over to them this long burden of having to do the investigative work that scientists should have been doing all along.

There will be a swelling interest in spiritual growth. As people start to think on an eternal scale, those who have been complacently assuming that Jesus “saved” them so they don’t have to bother will feel a swelling hunger to grow spiritually. And as more and more former old-dogma churches make teaching the Gospel truths their core purpose, my hope is that we will see a new and genuine Christianity emerge that eschews all dogmas and teaches only God’s truth.

Stop and savor all of this for a moment. We are talking here about a paradigm shift that is without precedent in human history! We would have to go back to the discovery of how to use fire to find anything comparably revolutionary. And the glorious fruit seems inevitably to be the raising over just a decade or two of the consciousness of sufficient people that human consciousness over all the earth will begin a rapid elevation. It will be that broad elevation in consciousness that is going to bring humankind together as we never before have come together, until all our problems begin to wither away in the light of a brighter dawn.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was a twentieth-century French Jesuit priest. He said, “Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

It is about to happen now. And it will be glorious!

The Wrong End of the Microscope

Posted on August 26, 2016 by Roberta Grimes

Watching research scientists continue to express their certainty about materialism when they have to know the dogma is wrong would be amusing if it were not so pathetic. They realize their profession is floundering. But it is their profession, after all, and they have families to feed and retirements to fund! So they continue to try to drive a train that is hopelessly off the rails, while at the same time they are beginning to acknowledge that there is a lot that their abbreviated version of science never will explain.

The result is a truly weird period in the annals of scientific investigation. To take a prime example, let’s look at what scientists call “the hard problem,” which is the whole enigma of how to explain consciousness and individual awareness. At one time it was confidently believed that figuring out how the brain works was going to solve the hard problem as a kind of fallout result; but the more brain research has been done, the clearer it has become that the hard problem won’t be giving up so easily.

To graze among recent articles on consciousness in the popular press is an exercise in wincing frustration. We see researchers beginning to get closer to theories that we know might be productive – we kind of lean forward in our chairs and pull for them – but then their need to reason outward from materialism always does them in. An article about the fact that consciousness can be demonstrated to be present after physical death is one such promising foray with some sense to it, but also much that is nonsense. The authors have so little interest in researching useful aspects of the literature that they refer to out-of-body experiences as “outer-body experiences.” They report at least one verified account of someone who was later able to report what had been going on around him while he was clinically dead, which fact should have been front-page news; but it was barely a footnote. So ignorance marches on!

Now let’s look at a different article that bears a highly promising title: Neuroscience’s New Consciousness Theory is Spiritual. The title is great, but that “S-word” – “spiritual” – is seen by the authors to be so near science’s imagined border with religion that before anything substantive can be discussed, they first must demonstrate that they are not advocating for a theory even remotely religious. To do that, they make the absurd assertion that science has things pretty much figured out. They assure us that “(M)odern science has achieved impeccable performance when it comes to explaining phenomena previously thought to be unexplainable. In this day and age, we have complete scientific descriptions of virtually everything.” Please read that twice, to better savor in print what even the authors must know is nonsense!

Their article then goes on to describe something called Integrated Information Theory (“IIT”), which attempts to describe what is happening when we have a conscious experience… but it does not even speculate about why it might be happening. As one of IIT’s proponents says, “Consciousness is a fundamental property of the universe. Wherever there is integrated information, there is experience. The theory takes its existence as a given and therefore doesn’t have to explain the mechanism behind it.” Good grief. If we can beg all our questions to this extent, then who even needs to practice science at all? Proponents of IIT go on to say that “The entire cosmos is suffused with sentience. We are surrounded and immersed in consciousness; it is in the air we breathe, the soil we tread on, the bacteria that colonize our intestines, and the brain that enables us to think.” Even a stopped clock being right on occasion, these sentences have a kind of rightness to them. But they arise from nonsense, and “garbage in means garbage out” is the most basic scientific premise of them all!

One arresting article suggests that consciousness might be a quantum phenomenon. So near, and yet so far! Even with this insight, all the speculation in this article is reasoned outward from materialism, with the expected confusing results. A former head of the ironically named Max Planck Institute for Physics in Munich, Germany, here posits that “just as a particle ‘writes’ all of its information on its wave function, the brain is the tangible ‘floppy disk’ on which we save our data, and this data is then ‘uploaded’ into the spiritual quantum field… it is actually just the material level that is comprehensible. The beyond is an infinite reality that is much bigger. Which this world is rooted in. In this way, our lives in this plane of existence are encompassed, surrounded, by the afterworld already… The body dies but the spiritual quantum field continues. In this way, I am immortal.” What on earth are we to make of this, beyond acknowledging that from a scientific perspective it is nonsense? To simply assume consciousness without explaining that it is incompatible with materialism and without even attempting to understand it seems to have become the scientific mode du jour, but until that materialist dogma is abolished no research scientist ever can tell us much about what actually is going on.

The genuine Max Planck felt free enough to ignore materialism and start from consciousness. He said three-quarters of a century ago that “I regard consciousness as fundamental.” He said, “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.” He was exactly right! But then materialism came in, and the scientific lights went out.

Blinkered as he is by materialism, even “the world’s smartest physicist” has become convinced that scientists never will figure out consciousness. And indeed they never will, for so long as the scientific gatekeepers insist on hamstringing scientific researchers with a nonsensical dogma like materialism.

Dr. Planck was right all those years ago. He still will be right all those many years hence, when some young physicist at last will identify consciousness as the source of everything so he can begin an unrestricted investigation of what consciousness actually is. The simple solution to the hard problem has been hiding in plain sight all along!

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

Thinking About Reincarnation

It’s Time For a Second Christian Reformation

Martin Luther – photo credit: rs-foto <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/50402151@N00/4768475053″>Dresden_2010_07_ 091</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Butterfly

Cargo Cult Science at Harvard

photo credit: philipp.richter <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/80134144@N05/14473601243″>vaycay</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

To Whom Do We Pray?

We Live in a Matrix

Resisting Enlightenment

Faith vs. Transformation

What if Everyone Knew the Truth?

The Wrong End of the Microscope

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