The Fun of Living Together

Posted on March 20, 2017 by Roberta Grimes

The point of figuring out what happens after death is that you finally learn how to live. You start thinking on an eternal scale! Far from losing interest in the things of this world, you care so much more about all of humanity; and when you are thinking spiritually, you can see the world’s problems in a clearer light.

So it is that I am now proposing a fresh approach to solving our racial problems. It is clear that nothing we have tried has worked! Although there are more black people now who have entered the American mainstream, the vast majority of slavery’s descendants still lead debased and hopeless lives. Fully half of young black American children live in poverty. Two-thirds of those children are fatherless! America’s schools are more segregated than ever before, so nearly all black children receive poor educations. And incredibly, although they are just thirteen percent of our population, black people make up half of America’s murder victims. Nearly all their murderers are black as well. An amazing forty percent of black men will spend time in prison during their lifetimes!

But, why?

I hate to say this, but many Americans have come to take it as a given that there is something about having darker skin that makes people less able to cope. So we give them welfare and affirmative action, we allow the black areas of our cities to deteriorate, we turn a blind eye to young black delinquents, and we call people racist who have the nerve to point out that any of this is disturbing. But it is disturbing. And it’s time that we did something about it that really works!

Kelley Glover and I have been friends for a decade without much talking about race. We’d just go out to lunch for a couple of hours to talk and laugh and enjoy one another. It was only when one day I was thinking about this and I brought the topic up that she began to teach me what it is like to be black in America today. And I shared with her what I thought was wrong.

The result is The Fun of Living Together – “We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools” (MLK, Jr.). We wrote it as a Fun book and in my voice because that was what my publisher wanted, but the whole book is our joint effort. This is the first book I’ve ever written with a living person. And despite the seriousness of its topic and the intensity of our emotions surrounding it, the fact that Kelley and I can be silly together under any circumstance has helped a lot!

So, why are we still having racial problems a hundred and fifty years after the Civil War? There is only one explanation left at this point. We botched emancipation.

We could have freed the slaves in an orderly process that included educating them to live as free Americans and encouraging their fellow citizens to accept them. But instead, we destroyed a large part of this nation in a devastating Civil War, after which we abandoned the newly-freed slaves to survive surrounded by outraged folks who had just lost everything. What did we think was going to happen? Nearly all of America’s freed slaves and their descendants lived debased and hopeless lives in the Jim Crow South for the next hundred years.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century. The more perspective we gain, the more certain that becomes. He brought an end to the Jim Crow South using only his pen and his loving example, and now his life and his words give a shape to the better America that is yet to come.

Our popular conception is that slavery was bad because it was violent and the slaves worked for free. But it turns out that what lingers of slavery over many generations is its effects on the mind. The slaves’ sense of being inferior, of being hopeless and beaten down and less is something that we have never addressed. So Kelley and I make a case in The Fun of Living Together that most of the descendants of American slavery still live in a kind of slavery-lite. We have thrown everything we can think of at trying to fix a few of the symptoms of their problem, but because we haven’t understood the cause, we have only made things worse.

Kelley and I now propose a solution that can end our racial problems in one generation and at little cost. Since we have by now tried every other idea and spent more money than our national debt, it is time to go back to emancipation and heal this nation where the rift began.

A friend told me a story yesterday that sums up the place where we are now. She feels shame in knowing that her ancestors owned eight slaves in an obscure town in Alabama and freed them when the Civil War began, after which they moved to Texas. One day a new client told her she had grown up in that same obscure town, so naturally my friend shared her shameful story. Her client burst into tears. She said that her own great-grandparents had been owned by a family that had freed them at the start of the Civil War and then moved to Texas.

They cried together that day. And so do we all cry! There is nothing we can do to change the past, but the time has come for us to fix a problem that should have been addressed when the Civil War ended. Then at last all Americans can come together in the perfect love and brotherhood that Dr. King was able to see lying waiting for us beyond the top of that mountain.

If not us, who? If not now, when?

Science vs. Religion

Posted on March 4, 2017March 4, 2017 by Roberta Grimes

I often urge my audiences to subscribe to Scientific American. When I add that it’s really a humor magazine, the room will generally erupt in laughter so most people don’t hear my explanation of why I find the magazine so amusing. Scientific American actually is funny, but in a tragic sort of way: more and more, popular science literature is full of articles about enigmas that scientists still cannot solve, the sad reconfirming of facts that they hate, and quirky investigations into nothing much that they must know will lead nowhere. Even that revered old saw of mainstream science, the replicable experiment, appears to have fallen victim to the sloppy despair of a profession by now so deep in crisis that more than two-thirds of scientific researchers cannot replicate other scientists’ experiments.

The cause of this growing malaise remains the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism that was put into place by scientific gatekeepers a century ago and to this day is enforced. Of course, anything based on a dogma has essentially become a religion, with all the need to enforce orthodoxy and to ignore contrary information that any faith-based system implies. To this day, no one who wishes to pursue a scientific career in any western university, or be published in a western peer-reviewed journal, can dream of investigating anything that might hint that reality is not matter-based; and this remains true despite the fact that quantum physicists have known for three-quarters of a century that, as the great Max Planck frankly put it, “There is no matter as such.” He said in 1931, ”I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

Consciousness is by definition not material, but yet those who hope to have careers in science must to this day eschew the investigation of consciousness as anything but an artifact of our brains. They can only conclude that there is something about matter that must inevitably give rise to consciousness. This dogma-based scientific requirement that matter must be primary was proven to be wrong almost a century ago, which is the reason why modern scientific inquiry has by now become so sadly hilarious.

One current example of the flatly non-scientific ends to which all of this must lead was published just last month (I swear!) and cited in Victor and Wendy Zammit’s wonderful Friday Afterlife Report. The article they cite,“Large Hadron Collider Disproves the Existence of Ghosts,” is such a marvel of foolishness that I cannot encapsulate all its nuttiness here. I urge you to read it for yourself. Its core argument is made by a British particle physicist named Brian Cox who asserts that, “We are not here to debate the existence of ghosts because they don’t exist… I would say if there’s some kind of substance that’s driving our bodies, making my arms move and legs move, then it must interact with the particles out of which our bodies are made. And seeing as we’ve made high precision measurements of the ways that particles interact, then my assertion is there can be no such thing as an energy source that’s driving our bodies.”

Media personality and scientific apologist Neil deGrasse Tyson, on the panel where this statement was made, was heard to marvel, “If I understand what you just declared, you just asserted that CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, disproved the existence of ghosts.”

Some of the un-serious attempts that have been made to explain away ghostly phenomena are then cited, but as with all such debunker literature, no attempt is made to examine “ghosts” as an objective phenomenon. Rather, the standard (and telling) false assumption is made that whatever is not scientific must be religious, and that as scientists we are battling the forces of ignorance. First, the Large Hadron Collider at CERN is touted as a triumph of international cooperation, where ten thousand scientists from a hundred different countries work together in blissful harmony. But “(r)eligion and science haven’t exactly gotten along over the centuries. And controversies between the two have flared up from time to time. Yet, it seems confidence in science and its principles, at least in the US, has been relatively constant from the middle of the 20^th century, up until the last couple of decades or so” when “… science is once again under scrutiny by segments of the population. Evolution, climate change, and even vaccines have been skewered by skeptics.” Oh, those evil religious forces of darkness! “Even the new dean of Harvard Medical School, George Q. Daley, warned in a recent Washington Post interview, that we are moving into a pre-Enlightenment era, where ideology molds reality rather than facts. This announcement about ghosts and CERN may act as a driving wedge, forcing these two camps even further apart.”

What we are watching here is nothing more useful than a battle between two alternative belief-systems. And since religions and materialism are equally narrow and erroneous ways of seeking to understand the world, there is nothing positive to come from their posturing at one another as if a reality not restricted by dogmas did not exist. And still, the march of folly goes on! Despite all the advances that have been made in the past fifty years by those who have been studying reality without the handicap of any dogma, that scientific need to enforce materialism has blocked any organized study of what might exist beyond materialism’s edges. So yet another sad milestone has been reached. The man who first cryogenically froze a human being in the hope that the man’s body could be resurrected one day has reached the age of eighty. And now he plans to freeze himself as well.

We know that this cannot go on forever. I give it another ten years at most. Once good electronic communication with those that we used to think were dead is in common use by the public at large, both of these sets of false belief-systems that still between them enforce human ignorance will be shamed into following lay researchers into investigating the by now obvious fact that what we think of as human consciousness is the source of everything. And meanwhile, there are some encouraging signs that the bravest and the best among mainstream scientists are finding ways to seek the non-material truth without being banished. Dr. Donald D. Hoffman’s eventual, inevitable Nobel Prize is going to be well deserved.

Forgiving Yourself

Posted on February 14, 2017February 14, 2017 by Roberta Grimes

Forgiveness is the most essential and also the most difficult spiritual exercise. Most of us still are vibrating at a fear-based more than a love-based level, which is why humanity is in such turmoil; and we are being told now by beings not in bodies that unless we can raise this planet’s consciousness, human life is on a downward course. That should be reason enough for us to make learning how to forgive a priority! But on a personal level it is important to add that living in forgiveness also makes you happy.

I have blogged several times about radical forgiveness, including here and here. And I have written about self-forgiveness here, but it seems to be time to talk about it again. Aside from questions about the loss of pets – which I get almost daily – the most anguished contacts I receive come from people who have read The Fun of Growing Forever and are stumbling over their need to forgive themselves. For them, in particular, finally forgiving our entire lives forevermore can be the ticket to a much better life!

Forgiving everything in advance is a mind-trick. It works because our minds are not the efficient computers that we imagine them to be, but rather they are:

Lazy. Our minds generally don’t analyze things. Instead, for the most part they blindly react based on the patterns that we have inadvertently set by reacting to similar stimuli.

Habit-Driven. If we had to think through opening a door or driving a car or composing a sentence each time we did even basic things we would be spending our days that way and we’d have little mind-space for anything else.

Highly Adaptable. The habitual links that we have established are only what our minds have found in the past to be the easiest pathways. Think of water flowing in a rocky stream: when we move a few rocks, the water at once flows differently.

So forgiving everything, once and for all, is just a matter of retraining our minds to never again react negatively to anything. And yes, it really is that simple!

In The Fun of Growing Forever and in this blog post I explain the easiest process for retraining your lazy, habitual, adaptable mind. The forgiveness-ball-and-mantra technique really works! It astonishes me to tell you that my life remains full of things that used to bug me, but now that whole reactive emotional overlay that once plagued my days is gone.

But for some people, self-forgiveness is especially difficult. Most of those who contact me about having trouble forgiving themselves will point in anguish at some particular thing they have done that they found unforgivable; and the things mention always seem trivial to me. They should have been addressable when they occurred. But by now, these people have trained their minds to obsess over them, so that stimulus-response pathway has become a thoroughfare. They might try forming forgiveness balls, but they insist that even doing that cannot begin to assuage their overwhelming guilt.

If this feels like a problem that you might share, then I suggest that you energize your forgiveness work! Still form forgiveness balls and say the mantra, yes, but also:

Remind yourself that this is about just you. If others who were involved are dead, then apologize aloud and at once; but if they are living, it generally is best not to apologize until after you have forgiven yourself.
Make a point of forgiving your entire childhood. Many of us have developed wrong programming in childhood that tends to make our self-blame worse; so while you are at it, forgive your childhood. Forgive your parents, teachers, siblings, friends, and everything you did that you now regret. The forgiveness-ball technique works best if you use it individually on people and events, so doing this right can take awhile.
Try to avoid stressors for at least six months. To the extent that you can, avoid people or places that are likely to make you feel worse about yourself, even if that means skipping some family holidays.
Read and write only peaceful wisdom. Read whatever uplifts your heart. And write! Some people find that it helps to write down whatever is bothering them today, then build the forgiveness ball, say the mantra, and burn that piece of paper. Do whatever you can to get all the poisons that you have spent your whole life building flushed altogether out of your mind!
Learn how to be good to yourself. Many who carry long-term self-blame will design unnecessarily difficult lives. They will make much of setbacks, deny themselves for others, and in various ways build up resentments that make them feel even worse about themselves. Building forgiveness balls around these obstacles as you notice them can be a help in cleaning out your mind; and even beyond that, insofar as you can, really get to know and like yourself. Try to do more of what makes you happy while it also betters the lives of others. With time and patient work, you can turn it around!

Forgiving yourself is essential, since until you have learned uncritical self-love you cannot really love anyone else. Self-love doesn’t mean having a needy ego, but rather it means feeling so good about yourself that you hardly seem to have an ego at all! Once you have fully forgiven yourself, you will see yourself as you truly are: you are the eternally best-beloved child of the all-powerful Godhead that is all that exists. When you fully grasp the enormity of your own particular preciousness, then peaceful joy will become your mind’s set-point. Forgiving yourself forevermore makes you the happiest that you can be!

(I apologize for my month away from blogging! I’ve been doing a speaking tour and finishing The Fun of Living Together, about which I’ll tell you more next week).

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!

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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!

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

The Fun of Living Together

Science vs. Religion

Forgiving Yourself

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

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