To be a student of the greater reality is to be sitting in sunlight at the top of a mountain, talking with all the joyous people who also have managed to make this climb as we look out wistfully over the clouds that keep in darkness the whole world below. We’ve been sitting up here for so long that we have come to accept the sad cloud of ignorance that buries in gloom whole populations. But now we can see that, here and there, the ignorance is beginning to thin. A few shafts of sunlight are reaching the earth. Wonder beyond wonders, the scientific luddites are beginning at last to ask the right questions!
I date the beginning of this change to late 2012, although the Mayan calendar was likely not the reason. And it was only the fact that The Fun of Dying came out in 2010 that let me notice any change at all. I began to tour at the end of 2010. From then through 2014, I gave dozens of talks about the afterlife in bookstores and at conferences, to Unity Churches and IANDS groups. It was that broad exposure to people’s attitudes that let me appreciate what was going on.
At first, no matter where I spoke, I would see blank faces. When I called for questions, what they asked would be either too basic (But I just covered that!) or entirely off-base (Saints are a religious thing!). I would patiently answer their questions, of course, but after a couple of years of this I thought that I was about to give up.
Then, late in 2012 and almost overnight, I began to notice a change in 
people. I was speaking in many different cities, so it wasn’t that I had taught them anything; but I found that all my audiences now were nodding and smiling at what I said. They were asking wonderfully thoughtful questions. It was amazing. And it was happening everywhere!
We have been given to understand that a massive effort is underway at the highest levels of reality to elevate all of human consciousness before we succeed in destroying the earth. It seems to have begun in the nineteen-forties, at about the time when people first used atomic bombs in warfare. Most of those working in this field were born from the forties through the nineteen-seventies: I was born one year past Nagasaki, and Wendy Zammit just a few months later. Many of my friends are afterlife researchers who also were born in the forties through the seventies, and with me they have sat on that mountain for so long that now we greet the thinning clouds with shared looks of jaded amazement.
How is this happening so fast? I can only assume that every person in each audience of every afterlife speaker is being guided by his or her spirit guides to seek and better understand the truth. What other explanation could there be? And now, dear friends, we are seeing glimmers of the most amazing change of all, as traditional scientists start to open their minds.
I recall the way it was just a few years back. The gatekeepers at all the magazines and journals and the heads of university science departments were sure they were battling Christianity, and if they lost that battle, all the world would go dark. Traditional scientists had no awareness that there was objective afterlife evidence independent of any religious beliefs, since to them it was science against Christianity and 
there could be no third source of truth. I lightly mocked this attitude of theirs in The Fun of Dying, where I remarked that the Opinion editor of New Scientist magazine had told us in February of 2009 that “Misguided interpretations of quantum physics are a classic hallmark of pseudoscience … Authors with religious motives make shameless appeals to common sense.” Oh my. Those darned appeals to common sense have long been scientists’ most implacable foe!
But now comes a surprising poll, conducted by the odd couple of 60 Minutes and Vanity Fair, in which questions that would have been anathema to scientists even a few years back are being respectfully asked and answered. True, it’s not scientists who are asking these questions. And some of the questions are pretty clueless. But – trust me! – even three years ago, a lot of these questions could not have been asked by anyone in the mainstream media in a manner that implied that those being surveyed were anything better than abject fools.
Scientists are beginning to ask questions about our brains that are less than reverential. Information even is being discussed that hints at the amazing possibility that most of the human brain may not be necessary. This is huge! Instead of treating our brains as the far-beyond-precious sources of our minds, it is becoming more acceptable now to think of our brains as just specialized body-parts.
And at last the search for alien life is becoming more open-minded and 
creative. True, the search described in this article is still unfortunately matter-bound; but the authors go on to speculate that one reason why we haven’t detected intelligent life may be that what they term “biologically-based intelligence” is just a brief phase of development, after which “artificial, inorganic intelligence” arises and burrows safely underground. All of this is nonsense, of course, but for scientists to imagine that inorganic intelligence might exist at all is a departure that is quite new. And from it, the leap in insight toward a scientific recognition that intelligence is not and never was organic seems to me to be an easier step.
Even the notion of “creation” can be talked about now in a scientific magazine! You may not appreciate the fact that the C-word has for more than a century been considered an abhorrent alternative to that even more forbidden word, “God.” Any book with “creation” in its title would until recently have been tossed by scientists, while now such a book is being reviewed in my beloved Scientific American. Of course, the C-word here is only part of the title of a book. But there is a new looseness in the language used, a refreshing lack of defensiveness, that is heartening to see and is brand, brand new.
Scientists are even willing now to admit to big gaps in their understanding. Until little more than a year ago, for working scientists to show to the world any difficulty in interpreting results would have been seen as an act of possible surrender to the forces of religious darkness; but now, here comes an article that cheerfully highlights “six baffling results that just won’t die.”
So, have we at last won the battle for truth? Will the physics departments at 
major universities soon make studying the greater reality an essential part of their important work? Sadly, we are not there yet. But for the first time in my nearly seventy years of life I can begin to envision a day when afterlife studies will be treated like every other branch of mainstream science. R. Craig Hogan’s latest breakthroughs in the field of electronic communication with the dead might lead the second segment of your evening news, and my dear Scientific American even might approvingly review Victor and Wendy Zammit’s masterwork, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife.
That day isn’t now. But wonderfully, in January of 2016 we can for the first time in human history believe that it might not be long in coming!
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