Author: Roberta Grimes

The Wrong End of the Microscope

ConsciousnessWatching 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 Rising Deaththeories 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 Consciousness Robotwhen 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 Man With Head in Sandway, 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.

Max PlanckThe 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 Boy With Flowersmany 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!

From My Heart to Yours

The Fun of Dying by Roberta GrimesThe Fun of Growing Forever was released last week, having been delayed because at almost the last minute it gained an extraordinary Foreword from Jack Canfield. I can never properly thank him for such an incomparable gift! Now each of the three Fun books has a Foreword by the greatest living expert in its field.

Together with my dear friend Wendy Zammit, Victor Zammit, Ph.D. is the foremost authority on the afterlife evidence. Their A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife is the indispensable handbook for anyone with an interest in what happens after death. So I am thrilled that he offered to write a terrific Foreword for The Fun of Dying, thereby giving us our first ribbon!

Gary E. Schwartz, Ph.D. of the University of Arizona at Tucson is one of very fewFOSIT_Kindle_011516 scientists engaged in the disciplined study of afterlife communication in a university setting. His The Afterlife Experiments is what convinced me that some mediums are indeed in contact with the dead! Gary has become a dear friend of mine, and when he offered to write a Foreword for a new edition of The Fun of Staying in Touch we again hit the endorsement jackpot.

Success magazine has named Jack Canfield “One of the most influential leaders in personal growth and achievement.” He isn’t just the originator of the much-beloved Chicken Soup for the Soul series, but he also is a prolific author, with more than a hundred million copies of his books in print in 47 languages. His Foreword FOGF Front Cover-Finalfor The Fun of Growing Forever is so amazing that the first time I read it there were tears in my eyes.

Back in April I first announced that The Fun of Growing Forever was coming. I refer you to my April 18th blog post for more information about the book.

In celebration of the release of this last book in the initial Fun trilogy, and as a gift to humankind’s ultimate Teacher, Whose Gospel teachings now are demonstrated to be the easiest and most effective system for achieving rapid spiritual growth, I recorded the following four videos, just posted today. I hope that you’ll enjoy them!

 

Slavery and Abortion

I must apologize. I have been cowardly about saying this for far too long.Slaves Working Friends have insisted to me that I can’t talk about abortion because I will lose the respect of the very people I want most to help; but this post is just like all the other posts here. There are truths being hidden from you, you have the right to be aware of those truths, and I am wrong if I am tempted to foster your ignorance just because some topics make me squeamish.

I must say, too, that I’m not writing this because a football star has lately shared some facts about Margaret Sanger that should appall us all. I don’t write from a religious perspective, nor even from a political perspective, and I never will attack your right to choose. I write today just as someone who is a student of the afterlife evidence and a student of American history, and who has spotted parallels that make me wish that people three hundred years ago had had enough knowledge to be able to really articulate why slavery was so wrong. Stopping that train before it got started would have spared us so much pain! And perhaps pointing out that out of ignorance we are repeating an eighteenth-century mistake might mean that this time around there can be a gentler and more positive outcome. So, here goes.

large_14014170321-252x300Abortion in modern America is what slavery was before the American Civil War. The analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s close. Here are some of the things that were said about slavery at a time when honorable people of good will could say these things out of plain ignorance:

  • Black people are not really people.
  • Black people cannot take care of themselves.

*     Free men have a right to use their own property without government interference.

*     Slaves are needed to get the work done; there is no practical alternative.

We read these arguments now, and we feel only derision. How can people ever have been so evil? It is easy for us, with our much greater knowledge, to say that skin color is just a trait and that all people are created equal, but I would argue that we should be doing this with humility. Our progeny will be judging us as harshly for our ignorance as we now judge our forefathers, and it won’t take them hundreds of years to get there. In our case, the knowledge necessary to show us toSlave Brother have been benighted and cruel is going to be available within the decade, so our judges will be our own grandchildren.

Here is what intelligent people of good will now say about abortion:

  • Fetuses are not really people. This is the key question, isn’t it? The dead tell us that a fetus is someone who has carefully planned a lifetime of opportunities for spiritual growth with the guidance of spirit guides and in conjunction with others who will share that lifetime. So, is a fetus a person? You tell me.
  • Fetuses cannot take care of themselves. But once they are born, they can be cared for by others, so where the birth-mother is concerned this disability is brief.
  • Women have a right to use their own bodies without government interference. I think our progeny will agree that this is true, but if they decide that fetuses are people they are likely to feel that some balancing of equities in our day should have been in order.Pregnant-Mom
  • Abortion is necessary to keep from burdening women; there is no practical alternative. Here is where our progeny are likely to see the biggest difference between the arguments for slavery and the arguments for abortion. Except in the rare case of a rape that results in conception, there are so many ways in the twenty-first century to prevent starting an unwanted fetus, and so many families desperate for newborns, that the statement that there is no practical alternative to abortion now is simply nonsense.

For those who feel that I am goring their sacred cows, let me say again that I am not taking a position on abortion itself. The evidence indicates that aborted fetuses grow up happily in the afterlife levels, so I even would say that if you’re going to do it, then you ought to do it right away so you can spare your fetus a late-term abortion and put it right into loving hands.

What I am talking about here is not the morality of abortion. Rather, I am Happy Newbornsuggesting from the perspective of history that our easy attitude toward abortion may well be judged harshly by those who come after us. People not now in bodies tell us that in as little as a decade, very good electronic communication between the living and the dead will be available. Then, in so many ways, the world will change! And my concern is that with better communication may come our posterity’s judgment that our current position on abortion is the intellectual and moral equivalent of what once was said by slavery’s apologists.

People in the eighteenth century didn’t have the luxury of knowledge and perspective, but we have it now. There, I’ve finally said it.

It’s an Avatar

One of the things I love about public speaking is that so often people will Tree Branchesremind me that they find some things hard to understand. I can lose track of how mind-bending some of these concepts are! And no matter how carefully I might write, if people’s minds are catching on something that seems so basic to me that I never mention it, then nothing I write will be very helpful. I have just returned from a trip to California where I met some lovely people and was reminded yet again of some of the basic concepts that I take too much for granted. Today I’m going to mention a big one!

We all become caught up in the notion that our physical bodies are who we are. The fact that mainstream science is so far into the weeds that scientists persist in seeking a source for human consciousness in the brain contributes to our confusion, as does this confounding sense we have that what our sensory organs are telling us is true, that a solid reality exists and that you and I must be these bodies.

But the evidence is overwhelming now that we are not these bodies at all. Instead, our minds are part of the eternal Mind that is all that exists. Please read the previous two sentences again, since unless you understand them you will understand nothing! What is true is that your mind is eternal, and everything that you perceive to be solid is a projection of eternal Mind. It is all a collective illusion.

Fall SceneOf course, something like this would have to be right in order for us to have out-of-body experiences and to so easily survive our deaths. But knowing that intellectually is a far cry from being able to live it! So I’m going to try to make plain to you now the relationship between your physical body and your powerful, eternal mind.

Your body is your avatar. If you saw the 2009 movie by that name, this will make more sense to you. As you’ll recall, Jake Sully sleeps in a pod while his mind is connected with a blue mimic of his body so he can act in an alien world. He feels that he is experiencing everything his avatar’s sensory organs pick up; he operates it as easily as if it were his own body. But it is only his mind that is in touch with the brain of that distant avatar. And his mind is always awake in either one body or the other.

This analogy isn’t perfect, but it’s close. The evidence tells us that when we enter a new earth-lifetime, a subset of our eternal mind will go through a process that connectsSunlight Through Trees it with our new body as it develops in utero. The connection is to the entire body, and not to just the brain: we create what amounts to nested energy-bodies that fit inside our physical bodies as a hand fits inside a glove. Those nested energy bodies have no need to sleep, so throughout our lives while our physical bodies sleep those energy bodies will leave them and move around to consult with spirit guides, visit with dead relatives, take courses, or even travel to the very end of the universe, all while still connected to that sleeping material body by an energy cord that can occasionally be seen. When we reach our chosen exit point from this lifetime, our nested energy bodies leave our physical bodies for the last time. The silver cord that has connected them throughout our lives then frays and disintegrates, and once that happens this sorry avatar of a physical body quickly dies. Meanwhile, our energy bodies rapidly raise their vibratory rates and enter the afterlife levels of reality (usually at Level Three).

Sun Through TreesThe difference, of course, is that your mind is not sleeping in a capsule while all of this is going on. Your mind is part of infinitely powerful and infinitely creative eternal Mind, and it exercises a kind of superconscious oversight while an aspect of it is involved in an earth-lifetime. Soon after your body’s death, your awareness will again merge with your eternal mind, and you will have access to all the powers and memories that you left behind.

I hope this makes things clearer for you! Think of your physical body as something like your old Toyota, just a useful way to get around, but nothing more. You would never confuse your car with yourself! And once you are certain that your mind will survive your death as easily as it survives the junking of your car, you will at last be able to begin to live the rest of your life on an eternal scale.

Considering how best to address some of the questions I heard in California got me thinking about the movie, so I watched it again. I urge you to do the same! It’s a visually beautiful and emotionally intense but uplifting experience, and it highlights where our scientific understanding was a decade ago… and where it remains today.

When I first saw Avatar in 2010, I reveled in the concept of someone sleeping in a capsule while his mind roamed in an alien body. That demonstrated a pretty advanced understanding! When I watched it again the other day, however, what struck me was its fixation on materialism. The planet must be “a neural network” with tree roots that demonstrate “more connections than in the human brain” through which flows “electrochemical communication” that the natives can access by means of an odd neural pigtail that is apparently attached to their brains. There is talk, too, of a “network of energy that flows through all living things,” and of a “goddess made up of all living things.” So near, and yet so far!

The big picture that still eludes mainstream science, and eludes even the Sunrisewriters of such insightful movies, is that the only thing that exists is consciousness. And consciousness is an infinitely powerful, infinitely creative potentiality without size or form, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware. Every human mind is integrally part of that consciousness. So whether we are talking anywhere on earth, a planet six light-years away, or the very edge of the universe, you are forever alive in all places at once. You might say that nothing else but you exists.

 

photo credit: <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138531998@N04/28180572131″>PATTERN.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Timeless and Spaceless

As we attempt to make ever better sense of what actually is going on, thelarge_6827701945-300x225 hardest concept for most of us to grasp is the fact that in nearly all of reality there is no objective time or space. I’m more used to it now, and I think I begin to understand the science of it, but still the effects of it can boggle!

Those we used to think were dead find their lack of space and time quite freeing. For decades I was mystified by the way the dead could think themselves to the other side of the world, or even to the planet of a distant star, and they would be there in less than an eye-blink. In the afterlife things look and feel solid, our bodies seem to be in every way real, and there is a perception of visual distance… but still, people tell us they can look at a mountain range across what seems to be fifty miles of distance and make out the veins in every leaf on every tree on every one of its foothills. It was really only when we began to get good quantum-physics-for-dummies books in the first years of this century that it was possible for afterlife researchers to begin to make sense of all of this. It’s simple, really.

EinsteinThe only thing that exists is consciousness energy. Even what we think of as matter is just energy at a lower rate of vibration. As Albert Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And Max Planck agreed. He said, “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.”

Reality is composed of consciousness energy in an infinite range of vibratory rates, very much as if your mind were a television set with an infinite range of channels. It is onlyUniverse-150x150 this material-seeming universe – which exists at what we think is the lowest vibratory rate – that is governed by a mathematics-based, clockwork form of physics. In the rest of reality, which is most of reality, the only physics is consciousness-based. So it is only in this material-seeming reality that time and space seem to exist at all! In all the infinite levels of reality beyond this one, the illusory matter is mind-created, all forms of energy are also mind-created, and time and space can exist or not and in whatever way your mind might like.

You will have to internalize these concepts if you hope to make sense of what is going on. Some of the implications are astounding. For example:

  • There is no such thing as size. The universe is simultaneously infinitely large and smaller than a flyspeck. The attribute of “size” simply does not apply to it.
  • The “Big Bang” is something like a thought. The notion that the universe began when something smaller than a pencil-dot exploded in a micro-instant to large_8382317948become this entire universe is easier to comprehend when we think of that explosion not as anything physical at all, but more like what it is: a mind-created fiction of illusory matter, space, and time. The so-called Big Bang is a thought. And without objective time, the Big Bang is a thought in the continuous now.
  • In fact, all that exists is Now. Without time, that conclusion is inescapable! And beyond this material universe – that is, in most of reality – those not in physical bodies tell us that indeed they perceive their reality in just that way.
  • What we think of as the past is apparently changeable. One of the things that some researchers find confusing is the way that things happening in our future lives can affect the lives that we are living now. Without objective time, the past simply isn’t fixed. The implications of this fact are so manifold and profound that they deserve and have received their own blog post here.
  • You are an eternal being. If you are aware now, then you always have been and Sunriseyou always will be aware. You are an eternal being by your very nature.

To claim and own and stand at last upon your status as an eternal being is the very foundation of human joy. And getting yourself past the notion that time and space are objectively real turns out to be its indispensable beginning!

A Lawyer on “Stubborn Skeptics”

GUEST POST: Victor and Wendy Zammit are the world’s leading afterlifeVictor Zammit experts. For decades they have fearlessly battled all who would deny humankind these truths, and they even have posted a million-dollar challenge for anyone who can prove that the afterlife evidence in their wonderful book, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife, is either misinterpreted or bogus. Their indispensable Friday Afterlife Report is available for free at victorzammit.com. This article by Victor will help you better understand why so many otherwise intelligent people, both scientists and religionists, are still so unable to accept what is by now incontrovertibly true. Having also long fought this battle against ignorance, I think what Victor has to say is brilliant!

 

AFTER DECADES of dealing with all kinds of paranormal skeptics, I can relate to you that there are at least nine reasons why closed-minded skeptics tend to remain stubborn about their skeptical beliefs – and why some of them unreasonably attack those who scientifically and empirically investigate evidence for the paranormal. The nine reasons below can apply to any person who inflexibly holds strictly subjective, personal beliefs, whether those beliefs are religious or secular.

Man With Head in SandMy experience with closed-minded skeptics is that they do not investigate the evidence. They completely reject any information that is not consistent with their own cherished beliefs, even if that evidence is scientifically supported. And they lack the skills, competence, and objectivity to perceive new evidence in a scientific and balanced way. Here are some of the reasons why:

  • RATIONALIZATION THROUGH COGNITIVE DISSONANCE. “Cognitive dissonance” is a term used by psychologists to describe the discomfort that arises when people are confronted with information that is fundamentally inconsistent with their own beliefs. When a materialist is confronted with highly persuasive evidence for the paranormal, that evidence will elicit in him extreme anxiety. Denial must follow. The materialist will become angry, hostile, even aggressive. He will feel forced to reduce his anxiety by rationalizing his beliefs and going into extreme denial.
  • CATHEXIS. This is a psychological term for the fact that some people develop a very powerful – and usually unconscious – super-glue connection with an idea or a thing. Some of those who call themselves skeptics are “cathexed” to ideas which are incompatible with the possibility of an afterlife. Because the connection can be powerful and unconscious, sufferers often will attack their source of anxiety, which can be anyone who puts forward evidence that contradicts their beliefs. So these individuals are immune to logic, science, and any kind of repeatable and objective evidence that threatens to reverse their cathexis.
  • NEUROLINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING (NLP). When some skeptics are confronted with information that is fundamentally inconsistent with their own deeply cherished beliefs, the mind of the skeptic will DELETE that information. As with “cognitive dissonance” above, this kind of skeptic will experience unbearable anxiety, a disturbance of his “comfort zone,” and will go into complete DENIAL. The most aggressive skeptics who are affected this way will even cheat, mislead, and lie about the real situation.
  • ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRAMMING. “Environment determines Mahatma Gandhiperception.” It is known that, by and large, the environment you were born in will shape how you will see the world. If a Western skeptic from New York had instead been born in India, more likely than not the skeptic would be a Hindu. If he were born to a radical, extremist Islamic family, the skeptic would be a Moslem. If born to an orthodox Jewish family, the skeptic would be an orthodox Jew. And in secular Western countries, many people today grow up with an atheistic bias. One needs to have skills and considerable resolve to rise above such environmental conditioning and programming.
  • BRAIN-EXPLANATION FOR “CLOSED-MINDED SKEPTICISM.” Skepticism can even be biologically based. When we have a rigid belief system, the neurons in the brain fire in a certain defined network. So if information (e.g. afterlife evidence) comes into the brain and contradicts our rigid belief system (which in this case is skepticism), those neural pathways will fire in the same old way and will not decode the new information. This functions just like a filter. It is only when the skeptic has a dramatic experience that a new neural pathway will be established, and then the old one gradually falls into disuse. Our belief systems are fundamental to filtering our perceptions of reality.
  • PRIMARY MOTIVATIONS: MONEY, POWER, STATUS – AND A JOB. Some people choose to be closed-minded skeptics for career advancement and/or to make money, to attain influence, and even for celebrity status. Those who are scientists may want to continue to work in science. Most scientific funding comes from big corporations, and it tends to go only to those scientists and researchers who have the potential to increase their profits. For example, you may get a Wall-Escientist who will reject the paranormal outright because he/she can get funding for taking that position. These scientists-come-skeptics will never listen to logic, to science, or to intelligent reasoning. They can’t move from their positions because they would lose money, power, status, and even their careers. Do you remember those negatively prejudiced scientists and medical doctors we once saw in glossy magazines in the U.S. and elsewhere in the world, and also on television, stating as scientists that smoking is good, and even is healthy for you? Or those scientists who once stated that certain pharmaceutical drugs were healthy, when subsequently it was shown that these drugs might have killed hundreds or even thousands of people – a drug like vioxx? To this day there are scientists in Germany who still insist that smoking is safe.
  • THE SMORGASBORD ARGUMENT. Professor Stephen Hawking is most notorious for using this “smorgasbord” approach, picking and using only the information that substantiates his own negative prejudices. This closed-minded skeptical professor does not know that in a courtroom situation his smorgasbord arguments would be torn to shreds. Why? Because he would be cross-examined on the critical, most vital evidence that he ignores because it fundamentally contradicts his deeply entrenched negative prejudices. He makes a huge error in thinking that he is an expert in the use of evidence! A litigation lawyer has exclusive technical knowledge of what is relevant, what is evidentiary, and what is essential admissible as evidence, and won’t let anyone get away with picking and choosing only whatever evidence supports his own position.
  • THE HYPNOTIC EFFECT. Those skeptics who are blatantly irrational, illogical,Consciousness Robot and unreasonable about the paranormal or the afterlife evidence could be suffering from a powerful negative hypnotic effect. Some years ago I sent clear, easily identifiable afterlife evidence in rebuttal to a couple of hard-line skeptics. Their reply was, “where is the evidence?” Yet non-aligned scientists easily identified the evidentiary value in the same evidence when it was sent to them. It is possible that skeptics at some time in their lives experienced a “parallel hypnotic directive” that there is no afterlife or paranormal evidence. This is exactly what happens when we see a hypnotist on stage telling a couple of our hypnotized friends that they will be eating an apple. But the hypnotist then gives them an onion to eat, not an apple, and the hypnotized subjects CANNOT IDENTIFY THE EVIDENCE and refuse to believe they each have eaten an onion! Even after they have been taken out of the hypnotic state, they still insist that “the apple was really delicious.” Hypnotic suggestion can be so powerful that it can be almost impossible for people to overcome it.
  • BEING SPIRITUALLY RETARDED. There is no link between intelligence and Early Scientistsbeing spiritual (you will notice that I said “spiritual,” NOT “religious.”) An atheist could be “spiritual” (or highly ethical) when he/she does voluntary work for the benefit of others without a thought of making some kind of profit for him/herself. But there is a class of closed-minded skeptics who may be highly intelligent but are spiritually retarded, meaning that they have not reached a stage in life where they can perform secular spiritual work for the benefit of others in selfless service. Nor can these spiritually deficient folks objectively identify legitimate afterlife evidence.

 

Having read Victor’s wisdom, now I better understand how it is possible that in the twenty-first century we still get such nonsense as scientists attempting to preserve the minds of those we love inside computers so we’ll be able to talk with them after they die. The next time I hear from someone who is stuck in close-minded skepticism, I’m just going to send him Victor’s wonderful words!

God and the Materialist Delusion

By now we can be certain that the Christian God does not exist. After decadesChristian God of doing afterlife research and collaborating extensively with other researchers, I can state without equivocation that there is no anthropomorphic God that judges us and condemns us to hell. Wonderfully, though, what exists instead is the loving Spirit that Jesus describes in the Gospels.

God is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware. All our minds are inextricably part of this one overriding consciousness; and we can be certain now that each of us is loved beyond our fondest imaginings. Each of us is God’s best-beloved child.

Stained Glass Jesus With LambThere isn’t just a little bit of evidence that this genuine God of the Gospels actually exists. Instead, the evidence is consistent and overwhelming to the point where to deny it anymore is just an embarrassing profession of ignorance.

So, now we know that God is real. And we can demonstrate that this genuine God is the perfect God of the Gospels. It appears that a theoretical physicist, too, believes he is edging closer to discovering God, although of course for a physicist to discover God is nothing new. The two greatest physicists of the 20th century didn’t care much for the Christian God, but the genuine Spirit which is all that exists was certainly well within their ken.

Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. In 1944 he said, “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 Max Planck Bustoriginates 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.”

 And although Albert Einstein is widely believed today to have been an atheist, his whole aversion seems to have been to just the Christian version of God. Of atheism he said, “I’m not an atheist and I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangements of the books, but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God.”

Einstein Front His inability to know more about God seemed to frustrate him. He said, “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts, the rest are details.”

Scientific geniuses like Einstein and Planck saw their heyday early in the twentieth century. But unfortunately, their hopeful successors have been detoured deep into the weeds because at about the turn of the twentieth century the scientific gatekeepers adopted materialism as what was then called “the fundamental dogma of science.”

As the brilliant scholar Rupert Sheldrake observes, “Since the nineteenth century, (materialism’s) advocates have promised that science will explain everything in terms of physics and chemistry; science will show that there is no God and no purpose in the universe; it will reveal that God is a delusion inside human minds and hence in human brains; and it will prove that brains are nothing but complex machines.

 “Materialists are sustained by the faith that science will redeem their promises, turning their beliefs into facts. Meanwhile, they live on credit.”

After more than a hundred years of precious little to show for it, Sheldrake tells us thatConsciousness “Confidence in materialism is draining away. Its leaders, like central bankers, keep printing promissory notes, but it has lost its credibility as the central dogma of science. Many scientists no longer want to be 100% invested in it.”

 He adds that “Materialism’s credit crunch changes everything. As science is liberated from this nineteenth-century ideology, new perspectives and possibilities will open up, not just for science, but for other areas of our culture that are dominated by materialism.”

But still the materialist nonsense continues! More and more, it seems that frustrated researchers are just going through the motions now, publishing peer-reviewed papers so sloppy that surprisingly few of their results can be replicated. Physicists who might have been as great as this century’s Albert Einstein or Max Planck are reduced to fiddling with subatomic particles that are really just vortices of energy. And this morning I read a review of an amazingly pathetic book.  One of its authors actually claims that soon we will be able to “scan a human brain at a fine enough spatial and chemical resolution . . . combine that scan with good enough models of how individual brain cells achieve their signal processing functions, to create a cell-by-cell . . . model of the full brain in artificial hardware, a model whose . . . behavior is usefully close to that of the original brain.” Since the human brain is nothing more than a receiver and transmitter of information, this claim is as silly as the notion that reverse-engineering a CD player will allow us to reanimate Elvis. But still, the authors say that these theoretical fake extra brains (called “Ems”) would be able to have experiences that we then could take as our own, as is suggested by the review’s playful title: “Your Em Goes to Bermuda.”

This baseless insistence of scientific gatekeepers that consciousness must Nicola Teslacome from our brains has blighted more than a century of what should instead have been open-minded scientific inquiry with the potential to bring to humankind riches beyond measure. And what may be worse is that scientists’ insistence that when our brains die we must die as well has caused so much unnecessary fear and pain. But the time is now! As pioneering engineer and inventor Nicola Tesla wisely said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

 

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“The Men of Her City Shall Stone Her”

Old-TestamentI have just read a blog-rant by someone who calls himself a Christian against Jan Crouch, the co-founder of Trinity Broadcasting Network, who recently died. I have no idea what a woman who spent forty years building the largest Christian broadcasting network on earth might have done to offend this Bible-thumper! But he used a lot of Biblical quotations to assure his readers that Ms. Crouch is at this moment frying in a fiery hell.

I’m sorry, but this has done it for me. I am going to tell you now categorically that not only is the entire Christian Bible not the Inspired Word of God, but anyone who uses pieces of it to beat down someone who has tried to serve God is himself enmired in deepest evil. We have been assured by those we used to think were dead that no powerful evil entity exists, but if there were a Satan, those who wield such hate-filled nonsense would be his disciples!

The strictest Christians insist to us that the entire Christian Bible is the inspired word of God, and it still applies today. Okay. Fair enough. Let’s take just a glimpse at what they claim that God is saying to us. So you won’t have to spend your whole day reading, what follows is just a tiny sample of God’s purported Old Testament Words that no loving God could conceivably utter:

Prophets-200x300If a girl is taken to wife and found to be not a virgin, then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death.” (Deuteronomy 22: 21)

If your brother, your child, your wife, or your friend tries to persuade you to serve a different god, “you shall not yield to him or listen to him; and your eye shall not pity him, nor shall you spare or conceal him. But you shall surely kill him; your hand shall be first against him to put him to death, and afterwards the hand of all the people.” (Deuteronomy 13:8-9)

If a son is rebellious and resists correction, “then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his hometown. They shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death.” (Deuteronomy 21:19-21)

And if someone breaks any of God’s commandments, or even falls away from the approved religion, “then you shall bring out that man or that woman who has done this evil deed to your gates, that is, the man or the woman, and you shall stone them to death.” (Deuteronomy 17:5)

They must have had piles of rocks all over, just waiting for someone to slip up! Even back three thousand years ago, this all must have seemed a bit over-the-top, so the Old Testament contains such further exhortations as, “Thus you shall not show pity: life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot.” (Deuteronomy 19:21)

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAFor heaven’s sake, even eating shellfish (Deut 14:9-10), wearing blended fabrics (Leviticus 19:19), or cutting your hair or beard, shaving, or wearing a tattoo (Leviticus 26-28) is a detestable Biblical crime! So whenever you look at a well-dressed and nicely coifed woman, or at a barbered and clean-shaven man, you are seeing someone who is not a strictly Biblical Christian. Or if he or she insists to you that the whole Bible is the Inspired Word of God, then you are looking at a hypocrite. There can be no getting around that.

Yet there are some few Biblical rules that these strict Bible-thumpers delight in enforcing! For example, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death.” (Leviticus 20:13) Let’s all be true Christians and destroy those gays! Can you imagine anyone less Christian than someone who selectively ignores parts of Holy Scripture that he doesn’t like while he delights in battering other people and ruining their lives with the parts that he does like?

What would Jesus say about all of this? We don’t need to wonder. He tells us in the Gospels that He came to bring us God’s new law of love, with which He intended to replace the whole of what later became the Christian Old Testament:

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

He even tells us plainly not to package His teachings with what became the Old Testament:

But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results.  Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17).

Dear friends, either every word of the Christian Bible is the Inspired Word of God, or none of it is except for any parts that we can somehow corroborate. Thanks to nearly two hundred years of testimony from people we used to think were dead, we can now abundantly confirm that indeed the Gospel words of Jesus Stained Glass Jesus Prayingon love, forgiveness, and the meaning and purpose of our lives were spoken by the genuine God Who came to earth in the person of Jesus. Those parts of the Gospels are indeed holy scripture! So the fact that so many modern Christians ignore the Gospel teachings is a tragedy of cosmic proportions. If any Christians remain who love Jesus and want to serve Him first of all, it is time now for all of us to speak out and defend the Lord from everyone who insists on using the Old Testament to diminish His message and to sully His name.

“There is Nothing New to be Discovered”

large_4052593758There are times when we encounter willful ignorance so spectacular that we stand in humble awe of it. How is it possible for an adult human being in the year 2016 to remain entirely unaware of every bit of modern afterlife evidence?

Incredibly, there is one physicist who claims to be so unaware. According to a recent interview in Scientific American, Sean Carroll of the California Institute of Technology argues in his new book, The Big Picture: On the Origin of Life, Meaning, and the Universe Itself that There is just no such thing as God, or ghosts, or human souls that reside outside of the body. Everything in existence belongs to the natural world and is accessible to science.”

This interview is prickly with bogus assumptions introduced by both interviewer and interviewee. That the only alternative to materialist science is religion; that “natural” and “supernatural” are meaningfully distinct; that the “natural world” cannot be greater than what modern science considers to be natural; that “natural” and “material” are therefore rough synonyms; and that the mere refusal to tea party girlnotice phenomena must mean that they probably do not exist are all cheerfully assumed to be fact. It is on some level adorable to watch educated adults conversing this way, pretending a narrow naivety, in much the same way that it is adorable to watch a tea party of children pretending to be grownups.

And their resolute ignorance runs deep. To quote Dr. Carroll, “I would make the argument that if there were a supernatural element that played a role in our everyday life in some noticeable way, it’s very, very likely we would have noticed it. It just seems weird that this kind of thing would be so crucial and yet so difficult to notice in any controlled scientific way. I would make the case that it is sufficiently unlikely in a fair Bayesian accounting that we don’t need to spend any time thinking about it anymore. Five hundred years ago it would have been a possibility. I think these days we’re ready to move on.” His worry is that if we give up on God, we might then give up on finding meaning in life, so he has written a book on how we might find that meaning within a materialist framework. It is an undertaking at once well-meant and ridiculous.

Even Dr. Carroll must be aware, as Albert Einstein said decades ago, that “Concerning Einsteinmatter, 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.” Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, agrees that “there is no matter as such.” Dr. Planck goes further, asserting in 1931 that “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 Max Planck actually said that consciousness must pre-date matter? And this is not a red flag for Dr. Carroll?

Apparently not. And he remains so cheerily oblivious to any sort of afterlife-related phenomena that he feels safe enough within the echo chamber that is modern materialist science to advocate for the party line without fearing that he will be made to look foolish.

Dr. Carroll is in good company. At the turn of the previous century there was the same sort of tribal certainty among physicists that they had it all figured out. For example, in an address to the British Association for the Advancement of Science held in 1900, William Thomson, Lord Kelvin, reportedly said,There is nothing new to be discovered in physics now. All that remains is more and more precise measurement.”

Albert Michelson, winner of the 1931 Nobel Prize in Physics, echoed Lord Kelvin in 1903, saying, The more important fundamental laws and facts of physical science have all been discovered, and these are so firmly established that the possibility of their ever being supplanted in consequence of new discoveries is exceedingly remote…. [I]nstances might be cited, but these will suffice to justify the statement that ‘our future discoveries must be looked for in the sixth place of decimals’.”

Obviously Dr. Michelson’s Nobel Prize was for his work with light and not for his skills at Max Planck Bustprognostication! Fifteen years after he uttered those words, Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. And all those physicists who had assumed that everything already had been discovered were left to try to live down their words.

     Sadly, so it also will be for our poor friend, Sean Carroll. It won’t be more than a decade or two before his book makes him a laughingstock, since we are confidently told by those we used to think were dead that there will soon be good electronic communication between their level of reality and our own. And meanwhile, beyond the ken of dogma-bound types like Dr. Carroll, scientists who retain their curiosity continue to make progress in building bridges between our benighted present and that glorious, unfettered future that begins when scientists will no longer be forced to constrain what they investigate in order to avoid inadvertently finding God.

 

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Apocalyptic Nonsense

If you are reading this, then you have survived another predicted Armageddon CityApocalyptic demise. Incredibly, there is a growing movement that takes seriously the Biblical Book of Revelation, and many Christians are so sure the end is nigh they say they won’t bother to vote in November.

For those unfamiliar with the Christian Bible, Revelation is its final book. It describes a vision of someone named John, who in about the year 95 A.D. wrote up his vision and circulated it as assurance to other persecuted Christians that Jesus was about to save them. If you are curious, here is a narrative attempt to make sense of the Book of Revelation. There is a lot going on, but in the climactic scene Jesus returns on a horse and defeats the enemies of Christianity in the Battle of Armageddon. Revelation quotes Jesus as saying, “Behold, I am coming quickly, and My reward is with Me, to render to every man according to what he has done.” (Rev 22:12)

Jesus Blessing ManLet us be absolutely clear about this. John was born after Jesus died. He knew nothing about Him beyond hearsay. Certainly he never read a finished Gospel. And please read what John quotes Jesus as saying! The words that he ascribes to Jesus could not have been spoken by the Jesus of the Gospels, which all by itself refutes the possibility that John was reporting a vision from God. Then too, think about the timing! Sixty-five years earlier the genuine Jesus was teaching us how to love and forgive so we could bring the Kingdom of God on earth, and then almost at once he decided to chuck it all and take us to final judgment? The words ascribed to Jesus in Revelation contradict the words that we can confirm that Jesus actually spoke. In the face of all this, how did John’s ravings come to occupy such a central place in Christian theology?

The Christian Bible was assembled by fourth-century clerics. They believed themselves to be inspired by God, but the Bible they produced is full of contradictions. The Christian Bible as it stands could not possibly be the inspired word of a loving and internally consistent God, or even of a sane and rational God. And even among all the Bible’s contradictions, John’s ravings stand out as utterly averse to the Gospels being written at about the same time. Worse, John’s quoting of his guy on a horse has distorted or replaced for many Christians the genuine words of the living Jesus!

In case you find this hard to believe, here are some prominent Christian pastors whoStained Glass Jesus Praying make preaching about John’s end-times ideas an important part of their spiritual message.

All of this is nonsense! It is evident from the words of Jesus that He never will bring about the end of the world, yet this fake theology has so polluted Christianity that it has made the religion that was named for Jesus the biggest obstacle that we now face in carrying out the Master’s work on earth. Jesus tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges us. He tells us that we enter earth-lives in order to learn to better love and forgive so we can grow spiritually. It is a tragedy of cosmic proportions that the ravings of a persecuted madman are now believed by so many Christians to be more important than the Lord’s Gospel message.

Christians can stop waiting for Jesus to return. His teachings have been with us for two thousand years; you might say He never really left. Instead of battling evil with force and negating the value of His own teachings, Jesus and His minions Sunriseare working now to raise the spiritual awareness of this planet. The dead agree with Jesus that once enough of us embrace His Gospel teachings, the Kingdom of God will overspread the earth. So instead of waiting in their churches to be Raptured before an Apocalypse that never will come, Christians who love Jesus should be out there now, helping the Lord to share the greatest news in all of history. We have His eternal promise that our future will not be an end-times war. Instead, our future will be the spiritual awakening that He came two thousand years ago to share. He says, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (JN 8:31-32)

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