Author: Roberta Grimes

Extraterrestrial Protectors

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One area about which the afterlife evidence gives us fascinating hints is the Red Flying Saucerwhole field of extraterrestrial life. I haven’t followed up on any of this evidence. To be frank, I haven’t wanted to know! So when I was recently told that one of my dearest friends has Arcturian spirit guides, I was brought up short. Then last week a friend who comments here double-dog-dared me to share what I have learned from the dead about life on other planets. So I guess it’s finally time for us to talk about aliens!

Everything that I know about life on other planets and in other dimensions has come from after-death communicators. For more information, I urge you to check out The Mutual UFO Network, or MUFON. As is true of life after death, alien life is an enormous and multi-faceted topic, so if you are drawn to it, you can spend your whole life happily doing research. For starters, here is some of what the dead have been telling us about alien life:

* This universe teems with alien life. But none of it has visited earth. We are told that there are more kinds of life in this universe than we can imagine! Some of it is intelligent to varying degrees, and apparently nearly all of it is benign. But the distances are too immense for anyone to have traveled through material space far enough ever to have visited the Earth. Of course, mainstream scientists, cheerfully unaware that experts are on hand who could answer many of their questions, still are looking for E.T. in all the wrong places.

* All intelligent life is of the same consciousness. Every one of us is part of God. Each individual is evolving spiritually toward its Source, and we do that by reincarnating repeatedly on the same planet while taking one or two lifetimes elsewhere. The primary reason for sticking with one planet is to minimize the difficulties of adjustment from one lifetime to the next. And in fact, if you have a co-worker so weird that everyone says he has to be from another planet, then that might well be the case! We are told that ours is the hardest of all the inhabited planets on which to evolve. It harbors the most negativity, but it also is the planet on which, with effort, the most rapid spiritual progress can be made. So reportedly, we are the Marines of the universe. Whenever you sashay into an interstellar canteen and ease up to the bar, you need only remark that you are from the Earth. Everyone will step aside.

* Assorted beings from other dimensions frequent the Earth. We just can’t see them. We know that there are at least seven nonmaterial dimensions that exist right where we are and function as our afterlife. Each of these dimensions seems to be enormous – perhaps the size of his whole universe – and we are told that there are other dimensions as well! The consciousness-based physics that governs our afterlife seems to be what operates in all the dimensions that lie beyond materiality, and reportedly they also teem with life. Reportedly, too, many inter-dimensional beings visit the earth as curious tourists. They can keep their higher vibratory rate and avoid being seen, or they can lower their vibratory rate and seem from our perspective to pop into and out of existence. I have seen evidence that benevolent alien motherships are in permanent station around the earth, each of them maintaining a higher vibration so it cannot be detected.

* The Earth is vulnerable to low-vibration inter-dimensional nasties. There is Two-Familiesso much negativity among the Earth’s people now that we are helpless. Even though higher-vibration beings easily fight off the much weaker evil entities that exist, as a people we are so spiritually sick that we have little ability to defend ourselves against low-vibration inter-dimensional evil. And this is especially true, of course, when these evil entities generally are invisible, and when modern scientists remain cluelessly materialistic. Modern science as a discipline has reduced itself to about the awareness stage that people were in when we first discovered fire, but we had no clue that air was part of the process. And, sad to say, our inattention to spiritual matters has stripped us of what should be our natural defense against evil, much as HIV can strip its victims of their ability to defend themselves against illness. Fortunately, a massive effort orchestrated at the highest afterlife levels is underway now to raise the consciousness of this entire planet. But until that begins to have some effect, we as a people are sitting ducks.

* Until we are spiritually healthier, the Earth’s people have powerful protectors. I don’t know much about the Arcturians. Until recently, I never had heard the name. But we are told that the most spiritually advanced beings in this galaxy are Arcturians. As a species, they are all perfected: they have no further need to incarnate, and they have no need to appear in bodies. Arcturians are the beings with the greatest power in all of nearby reality, and their current particular care is the protection of this sickly planet from low-vibration inter-dimensional scum that would like to take us over. We are assured that until we have progressed enough spiritually to be able to protect ourselves, these beautiful inter-dimensional beings will hold us in their loving care. I don’t know much about the inter-dimensional scummies. Our Arcturian guardians are keeping them away. But our protectors’ concern does not extend to facilitating development of the soul phone, and we were given a glimpse just this past spring of what has been holding up that process. Apparently a race of intelligent lizard-like non-material nasties at the vibrational level of our afterlife outer darkness has been preventing the soul phone from being developed. Wow. Of course, knowing what is wrong is half of solving the problem, and in this case it is teams of dead researchers who are battling the nasties in our behalf. They tell us that within the year these impediments to direct communication will be gone.

Meanwhile, of course, mainstream scientists blunder on. A few are becoming so desperate to find some shred of evidence of alien life that they have taken to searching for extinct civilizations. And of course, the Vatican doesn’t believe in aliens. They have only lately pardoned Galileo! But at least in the area of seeking other dimensions that might exist beyond this one, some scientists seem to be getting a clue.

What the afterlife evidence tells us is that reality is more complicated than we knew. But no matter what else reality might hold, we are protected by an infinitely Jesus in Contemplationloving God Whose minions are more powerful protectors than we on this tough planet can imagine. We are eternally, profoundly safe. But we also are still spiritual children! The most important thing that any of us can do, quite apart from religious considerations, is to begin today to live our lives strictly by the philosophy that Jesus taught. The dead tell us that the teachings of Jesus are the best way for us to make spiritual progress. And it is past time for us to grow up!

My new book, Liberating Jesus, will be out in October.

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Quantum Consciousness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A friend of mine has sent me an extraordinary interview with Lother Schafer, a quantum physicist who has more than a clue about what actually is going on. His Infinite Potential: What Quantum Physics Reveals About How We Should Live Max Planck Bust(2013) is a deeply remarkable book. Dr. Schafer has arrived at precisely the same set of conclusions about reality and the nature of our minds that you and I are exploring now! And while we have reached our conclusions from the perspective of the afterlife evidence, Dr. Schafer has achieved the same results from the perspective of quantum physics.

I urge you to listen to the linked interview. It is going to change your life! It doesn’t matter that mainstream scientific gatekeepers are still resolutely pretending that reality is only material, and they stubbornly continue to try to make sense of their hypothetical clockwork universe. Persistence is not a virtue when you are demonstrably wrong. Gatekeepers have managed to enforce spiritual ignorance in the scientific community for more than a century. But eventually – as it always does – the truth will win.

The immortal Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. He could have told you a hundred years ago what Dr. Schafer is saying today! 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.” And 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.”

It is frustrating to realize that the Chinese military, not hamstrung by Luddite Western physics, is already learning how to control robots with the human mind. The Chinese people have been in the forefront of energy medicine, and far ahead of us in their generalEinstein Front understanding of the nature of our minds. Meanwhile, American scientists cheerfully carry on assuming that the human brain is something more important than a two-way radio in the head of a meat-robot. Investigators have spent the past sixty years unsuccessfully seeking a source of Einstein’s genius in the man’s dissected brain. And researchers are working on ways to influence our minds by mechanically affecting our brains, which is the least efficient imaginable process!

You will be relieved to know that this enforced scientific ignorance soon must end. As Max Planck said in 1948, “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.” Of course, several generations of materialist scientists have succeeded one another since Dr. Planck shared that bit of wisdom, and science has remained in ignorance because scientific gatekeepers were working so hard to keep each new generation of physicists in ignorance during their formative years. But the gatekeepers’ power to enforce scientific ignorance is on its last legs. And that is in large part thanks to you!

As you further investigate and share these truths about what really is going on, you have the power to reach every third-grade Little League pitcher and every winsome fourth-Girl and Boygrader in pigtails. Among these children are the two who are destined to share the 2058 Nobel Prize in Physics as the parents of a consciousness theory of everything. Future groundbreaking physicists won’t feel inspired to investigate the truth unless we can reach them at a vulnerable age with enough information to make them curious. And fortunately, after a futile century of scientific obstructionism, you and I are beginning to reach them now!

 

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Slavery, Abortion, and Cecil

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Long before I knew that my primary spirit guide had once been Thomas twins-in-wombJefferson, I loved the man. My 1993 Doubleday novel, My Thomas, was written from the adoring viewpoint of his wife. And before I could write so tenderly about someone who had been a slaveholder, I had to do research and satisfy myself that Thomas Jefferson had not been a monster. Like you and me today, he only had had the misfortune of being born into a perverted culture.

Jefferson and his wife inherited hundreds of slaves. He couldn’t legally free them in Virginia, nor could he free them anywhere on the North American continent without dooming them to lives of misery. He came to feel that he couldn’t do anything but try to keep them safe and happy, and this he did, always hoping that a solution would be found to what he saw as a monstrous institution. There is evidence that if Martha Jefferson had lived, her husband would have retired from politics after the American Revolution and devoted his life to the cause of abolition. But Martha died in 1782. The rest, as they say, is history. And despite all the good that Thomas Jefferson did for this country in a lifetime of service, the single fact that he inherited slaves and he never found a way to end slavery is sufficient reason for the Democratic Parties of many states to decide this year, nearly a quarter-millennium later, to ban him from their annual dinners.

For Thomas Jefferson, slavery was roughly akin to what abortion is for you and me. Whether we are for it or against it, the legal right to abortion on demand is a part of our culture. As a culture, we accept the belief that a woman’s right to use her own body is more important than is a lesser life-form’s right to continue to exist. Just as, two hundred years ago, slaveholders’ property rights came before whatever rights their property might have wanted to claim. The analogy may not be perfect. But it is good enough to make me wince. How will our accepting easy abortion as a fact of life today make you and me appear to our distant descendants?

What we now think of as just the afterlife, a side niche perhaps, not very important, will soon be as much of a concrete but distant presence in each of our lives as Newark. Within a decade or two, there will be easy electronic communication with those we used to think were dead. Then living researchers will be able to quiz the dead about a lot of things, the whole topic of abortion among them. Even knowing what we already know, I shudder to think what more the dead might tell us. So far, this is what we can demonstrate is true:

  • Miscarried and aborted fetuses grow up in the afterlife levels. And these “products of conception” lovingly watch over their mothers’ earth-lives. I recall reading a hundred-year-old communication from a recently-deceased woman who had managed to have four coat-hanger abortions during her lifetime. She sounded shell-shocked as she reported to her family that four beautiful young people had greeted her and lovingly called her “Mom.” Imagine suffering that meeting right before you experience your life-review, where you will be asked to forgive yourself for everything you ever have done in your lifetime.
  • Most people’s lives are carefully planned to optimize their spiritual growth. Not only does an abortion end the life-plan of the aborted child, but it also ends the spiritual growth that the mother had planned to come from her having had that child as a part of her life. Given that there are far more people who want to come to earth-school than there are available bodies being born, the throwing-away of these opportunities is seen by the dead to be a tragic waste.
  • A disproportionate number of African-Americans are being aborted. By some estimates, more than half of the black children conceived in New York City are lost to abortion. When this statistic is combined with the fact that Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, remains controversial for the fact that she may have been trying to reduce or eliminate American black people, it is not a surprise that some black pastors have recently asked that her bust be removed from the Smithsonian Institution.  Will the hindsight of history see those of us who have condoned the abortion of African-Americans to have been the worst racists of them all?
  • Our casual acceptance of abortion is leading our culture to uncomfortable places. To call what looks like a tiny human being that moves and smiles simply “products of conception” is a perversion of our very language. To make the convenient killing of those beings a social good and a fundamental right seems to have led almost inevitably to appalling abortion mills where infants born alive have their spinal cords snipped and where not even the mothers are safe. Lately our acceptance of abortion has produced a series of appalling sting videos, unbearable to watch in spots, in which Planned Parenthood executives and others chat about the harvesting of fetal organs.

As was true of slavery, the question of abortion requires that we balance the rights of the strong against the rights of the weak. In Thomas Jefferson’s day it was obvious that protecting property rights was a core social good. Today it is just as obvious that women have the right to destroy their sub-viable fetuses. But what is acceptable in any culture always is a moving target. A wealthy Minneapolis dentist has long enjoyed the until-now-acceptable sport of big-game hunting. But in July he unwittingly killed a beloved lion, and thereby he destroyed his own life. Dr. Palmer’s travails are less about Cecil the Lion than they are about the fact that our culture had been shifting, and he had paid insufficient attention. What always has been acceptable – the brisk and manly sport of big-game hunting – is coming to seem to most of us now to be an outright barbarity.

This is what so often happens! Eventually it comes to be seen that the rights of the strong – whether property, sport, or avoiding nine months of inconvenience – when they are put on a balance scale are not as valuable to the strong as are the rights of the weak to their very lives. When eventually that balance scale is used, favoring the rights of the strong over those of the weak is seen by everyone to always have been such an obvious barbarity that those who hundreds of years ago were unable to see its barbarism must even then have been morally bankrupt. As Dr. Martin Twin BabiesLuther King, Jr., said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

I am taking no political position here. I still think that allowing first-trimester abortion is preferable to driving desperate women into back-alleys. But I also am becoming uncomfortably certain that two hundred years into the future I will join everyone who reads these words in being condemned for our having been alive in the United States at a time when at least a million abortions occur every year. Fifty-eight million abortions since Roe v. Wade. And almost 17.5 million of the babies aborted since Roe v. Wade were African-American.

I don’t know how to square this circle. I only know that history shows that Dr. King was exactly right. And forcing ourselves to look at this problem, recognizing it for the problem that it is, is our first step toward coming together in love and beginning to build a more just world.

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Coming to Know Your Best Friends

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It became clear soon after my last post was made that many readers are Thomas as Spirit Guidenot familiar with spirit guides. This is an area where I am not expert, but I’m competent to give you a beginner’s course. Let’s do that now! Your life will be richer and more fulfilling when you have a better sense of the spirit-friends who are lovingly there all through your life, helping you keep a steady hand on your tiller. All of us have spirit guides. There is one who agreed before you were born to be your primary guide through life, and as you take up various kinds of work or hobbies and perhaps experience trials there will be others who join or leave your team. Only your primary guide will be permanent, but if you are doing much in your life, you likely have a number of long-term guides. I have been surprised to learn that I have eleven.

Your team talks with the teams of those around you! It’s as if each of us is a celebrity surrounded by invisible retainers. This summer I have been helping to edit the autobiography of Mikey Morgan, a sixth-level being who came back to live a brief life and then to die at twenty so he could become familiar with modern people in order to teach us through the veil. I met his mother, Carol, in 2011 when she sat down near me at an afterlife conference and began a conversation. It was only when I read Mikey’s account of that meeting that I learned that he had cased the room, looking for someone to mentor Carol, and he had learned from my invisible retainers that I am a writer and an afterlife expert. And I am – what did they tell him? – friendly and enthusiastic. They thought I would give Carol the help that she needed. I was astonished to read this. I had had no idea at the time that I was moving through that conference with invisible handlers who were representing me to other invisible teams!

Your guides work beneath your conscious radar. Many nights while your body sleeps you will travel out of it to meet with your team; you’ll discuss current issues and get their advice, which is why “sleeping on it” works so well if you have a big decision to make. When something in particular is troubling you, it can help to pose it as a simple question as you are settling down to sleep. Then pay attention to your first thoughts in the morning. It can take a few months to iron out this process, but if you are persistent in framing your questions and expecting morning answers to be there, you should indeed begin to find that even if it isn’t the answer you were hoping for, some sort of answer will be there when you awaken. Your primary guide will put thoughts into your mind, will steer you toward or away from ideas, will comfort you when you are down, will make you extra joyful when things go well. He or she becomes something like a part of you. My primary guide has left me briefly only twice in my life, and each time his sudden absence made me feel frail and helpless. An important part of what I had thought of as myself was abruptly gone.

So who are these people, anyway? Why do they work so hard to help us? Our primary guide will generally be a close eternal friend who is probably more spiritually advanced than we are. Being a primary guide is a privilege and a great responsibility. Assisting people now in bodies to achieve greater spiritual growth in this lifetime helps our spirit guides to grow spiritually as well.

You can come to better know your spirit guides. Foolishly, I never had cared about my guidance team, and never once had thanked them, even though I realize now that everything I ever have done in my life has been possible only with their loving help. Since Thomas broke into my daytime life in February, I have come at last to know and really begin to love my precious friend. He and I have communicated through a medium, and we’ve worked together on writing a book, so I find that I always am aware of him now, a calm and stolid presence who sometimes seems to be just behind my left shoulder. Never in front. Never obtrusive. Always there. And sometimes now I will wake up with remnants of our nighttime conversations in my mind. I almost want to say to you that this feels a lot like falling in love, like getting a puppy, like being given the world’s most miraculous toy. Having Thomas become an active presence in my life has been Christmas and my birthday rolled into one.

This is a real relationship! It’s like having a wise and supportive and protective and sometimes exasperated older brother. Thomas had selected two possible publishers for our book. Perhaps because he likely was working on each of their minds when they heard from me, both presidents responded at once to my inquiries. Both requested the manuscript with no agent involved, and almost at once both accepted it for publication. Thomas preferred one publisher, perhaps because it bears a more prestigious name. Then last Wednesday I woke up realizing that he had told me during our nightly meeting that since I am such an “obsessive nutcase” I would clash with his preferred publisher. He told me to sign with his second choice.

Now I ask you, was that nice? I said to my husband at breakfast, “He called me an obsessive nutcase! That wasn’t nice!” My husband looked at me thoughtfully and said, “No, not nice. But true.” I still giggle whenever I am reminded of the way the two men in my life really see me.

Having a close relationship with the friends who are working behind your scenes is fun! Please try it. Not only are you going to come to better understand your own life’s purpose, but you will find a rich camaraderie in building a relationship with your spirit guides. You can attempt to better get to know them in the guidance meetings you have while your body sleeps, but I have found that I was unable to make my guides’ daytime acquaintance that way. For most of us, the most efficient way to begin Spirit Guide Teamto make waking contact with guides is through a spiritual medium who specializes in doing this work. Ideally, your medium of choice will help you learn to receive your guides’ subtle guidance. After having neglected Thomas and his team for so long, I want them all to be my best friends! I want to feel as close as I can to this merry and talented group of folks who wonderfully have made me their much-indulged center.

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Springtime With Thomas

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

All of us have spirit guides who help us live the life-plans that we made Young Thomas Jeffersonbefore we were born. It must have been my primary guide who spoke to me from out of the light when I was eight, but in all the sixty years since that night I never had wanted a daytime meeting with him. We travel out of body during sleep and meet with our guides on many nights, and I always have felt well-guided.

Then on February 21st of this year I had a telephone reading with Susanne Wilson, who is a wonderfully gifted spiritual medium. My intention was just to visit my family, but toward the end of the hour my spirit guides asked to speak with me. I learned on that Saturday afternoon that I have eleven guides. Four of them help with my personal life; three work with me on writing fiction; and three assist with my afterlife-related projects. And then my primary guide stepped forward and announced that his name is Thomas. In his penultimate earth-lifetime, he was – imagine a drum-roll – Thomas Jefferson.

I was less dumbfounded when I first heard this than you might expect. I have had for my entire life an intense affinity for Thomas Jefferson, even to the point of keeping a life-sized bust of him in my office. I also wrote a well-received novel about his ten-year marriage that was published by Doubleday in 1993 and reissued by Wheatmark last year. It was entitled – this seems ironic now – My Thomas. Thomas told me that he actually had “co-written” that novel, which explained a Jefferson Memoriallot! I always had known that it was better than anything I could have written.

Being a primary guide is a full-time job, and of course I felt unworthy of that kind of attention from someone I idolized, but Thomas insisted during that first reading that I not think of him as Thomas Jefferson. That hadn’t even been his most recent lifetime. So I thought that was that. I had a great story to tell friends over lunch, and a sense that finally I knew who it was that was guiding my writing and my life. I began to think about trying to get him to collaborate with me on a book that would address the lies that Jefferson’s political enemies had told about him and that history had recorded as true, the Sally Hemings lie first among them.

But then in mid-May Thomas asked Susanne Wilson if she would conduct another reading with me. I spent an hour with him, listening and arguing through Susanne. That hour altogether transformed my life.

I have indeed just completed a book with Thomas, but it has nothing to do with Thomas Jefferson. It will be published in the Fall. And it is so far beyond anything that I ever could have imagined writing that it is going to deserve its own blog post when the time is right.

One of the things that Thomas had said during our brief February conversation was that I should start doing online education . (Yes, the people Old Thomas Jeffersonwe used to think were dead are up on modern electronics!) To get my feet wet, I then signed up to be part of a free Sacred Stories Telesummit this month. My Sacred Stories appearance will be on Wednesday evening, July 22nd. Since what has happened in my life this spring is the most sacred story that I can imagine, I may get up my nerve to talk about it then. We’ll see. If I do talk about it, I would love to know that you are in the audience.

Now, on another topic:

One of life’s ironies is that by the time we finally learn enough to be of some use to people, we have accumulated so much mileage that our upholstery is threadbare and our tires are bald. About a month ago we established a YouTube channel and uploaded a series of introductory videos that were done in March. All I can see when I look at them is that this particular vehicle is decidedly past-peak! But of course the message is not, so today I am swallowing hard and sharing those videos with you. It will be immediately apparent to you why my primary mode of expression is podcasts and blog posts!

And finally, I don’t say this often enough: THANK YOU. I hear from so many people who comment here and post or message me on Facebook and send me emails. I have made hundreds of new friends! Please know that I will never take your friendship for granted. If I can help you along our shared life’s journey, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

P.S. – I have just asked Susanne to ask Thomas if he would mind my telling you who he was in his penultimate earth-lifetime. Here is his response, word for word: “It is time. Tell them I lived several more remarkable lives, in my opinion and most assuredly in the opinion of the esteemed discerning council in the realms. Nevertheless, this so-called Jefferson life shall be best known to your world.” Consider my mind to be officially boggled.

Faith Versus Fact

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The most important thing for us to understand about the spurious battle between large_4052593758-300x280Christianity and science is that it is a battle that neither can win because neither of them is the open-minded pursuit of the truth. Both Christianity and modern mainstream science are belief-systems. And if you look at only what you want to see, always through a blur of pre-conceived notions, it is impossible for you to see anything clearly.

Neither Christianity nor science can serve us well until each of them loses its fear that its world-view might be wrong and begins an open-minded pursuit of the truth.

I was forcefully reminded of this problem when I read a review in the current Atlantic of a self-satisfied new book by evolutionary biologist Jerry Coyne called Faith Versus Fact. A review of the same book from a Christian perspective is here.

The book’s very title – Faith Versus Fact – sums up the primary problem with science. Christians understand that their religion is a belief-system, while scientists have made the belief that they are pursuing the entire truth a tenet of their particular religion. They don’t even realize they are practicing a religion! And when your vision is so altogether distorted that you cannot recognize that those distortions exist, then it is hard to see where you go from there.

Science prior to the twentieth century seems to have had a more open-minded investigative function. There was then less fear of finding God, and more of a hopeful sense that reality could be objectively investigated and better understood. But the start of the twentieth century brought the advent of quantum mechanics, and at the same time it saw the production of some phenomenal communications delivered through deep-trance mediums by teams of dead researchers who were trying to give us proof of their survival. Rather than having to deal with the dead while at the same time they were digesting quantum mechanics, university departments and peer-reviewed journals adopted materialism as science’s “fundamental dogma.” They made the study of afterlife evidence and anything related to spirituality off-limits for anyone who wanted to work in a university setting.

Mainstream science’s fundamental dogma of materialism remains in place. To this day, no scientist who wants a university career or hopes to be published in a peer-reviewed journal can work in any area of research where he might discover that reality is based in an underlying intelligence. By strictly limiting what scientists can and cannot legitimately study, the scientific gatekeepers of the past century have turned science into as much of a deluded belief-system as Christianity ever could be. Both are built upon faith, whether in God or in not-God. And Dr. Coyne is right about one thing. Faith is no substitute for facts.

Into the void left by science during the past hundred years have stepped earnest laypeople bent upon studying the afterlife evidence and the nature of reality without any beliefs-based limitations. These folks are currently the only people who are doing science as Sir Isaac Newton understood science. And over a century of effort they have learned a great many things that would be useful to both Christianity and science, if either had any interest in stepping outside its own beliefs-based boundaries. For example:

  • No judgmental Jehovah-God exists. Christianity is a first-century belief-large__4679548147system, and as you would expect, its tenants are first-century beliefs. Early in its history it decided that its whole Bible is “the inspired word of God,” but except for the Gospels, the God that inspired those writings has no objective reality.
  • Jesus of Nazareth is genuine. Christians can be assured that we now can demonstrate the reality and the extraordinary nature of the historical Jesus. Much of what Jesus says in the Gospels is amazingly consistent with things that afterlife researchers have only recently established through independent research.
  • Nothing is solid matter as physicists in the nineteenth century envisioned solid matter. The only thing that exists is energy that can manifest as matter with the illusion of solidity. By now, every physicist knows this is true. Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. 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 Max Planck Bustsolar 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 think of as human consciousness is primary and must pre-exist matter. Planck said as far back as 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.”
  • The only thing that exists is an energy-like potentiality that manifests as consciousness. Everything that we think of as solid is an artifact of consciousness. Our minds are part of that consciousness, so our minds are by definition eternal. To call that base consciousness “God” is not wrong, but since it bears little resemblance to the rather nasty fellow that Christians have dreamed up and named “God,” we might follow Planck’s lead and call it “Mind.” God – or Mind – is more loving, more powerful, and more protective of each precious human mind than you can possibly imagine.

As you can see, the greatest discoveries of the past century have been made in the yawning gap between the two belief-systems, science and Christianity. It is only in the open-minded study of everything that humankind can find a way forward that is based in what is actually real.

Jesus on the CrossSo now we have Christians stuck in a much-beloved but altogether outmoded belief-system and worried that scientists might find that God does not exist, and scientists stuck in another much-beloved but altogether outmoded belief-system and worried that they might find that God DOES exist. Both of our most trusted institutions are caught up in a useless, spurious battle which Dr. Coyne attempts in his book to keep us focused on for just awhile longer. He and his fellows are trying to prevent our noticing that the scientific emperor has no clothes until they can finish out their careers. It is hard to be sympathetic with these scientists, the pleasures of tenure notwithstanding. As a result of its intransigent insistence on the notion that a century-old world view is still relevant, science is keeping humankind mired in ignorance.  

The whole faith vs. fact dichotomy is altogether spurious. Dear friends, there is only one reality. There is not a “faith” reality and a “facts” reality, with the facts version obviously superior. In order to lay claim to knowing the “facts” and to be justified in calling itself superior to Christianity, science would have to study all the evidence on which facts might be based, including nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. Dr. Coyne in his nineteenth-century artifact of a book condemns Christianity for “thinking that an adequate explanation can be based on what is personally appealing rather than on what stands the test of empirical study.” He would be well advised to look in a mirror.

Actually, and not for the first time, the only one who comes through all of this lookingJesus in Contemplation smart is Jesus. Unlike either science or Christianity, the thought of our seeking the whole truth does not scare Him. He is not afraid to urge us to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and the door will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door is opened.” (MT 7:7-8) Even after two thousand years, He still is hoping that you will at last “know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (JN 8:32)

 

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Fruit of the Lord’s Tree

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Someone who had read my post of June 6th, By Their Fruit You Will Recognize Them, has asked what I think is a wonderful question. If Christianity abandonedStained Glass Jesus Praying the rest of the Bible and began now to follow only the Gospels, how would things be any different?

As you may recall, in that earlier post we applied to modern-day Christianity the Lord’s own standard for any organization that purports to be of God:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” (MT 7:15-20)

It isn’t necessary to again point out the many ways in which Christianity has let down the Lord of whose teachings it remains the custodian. If necessary, please review my blog post of June 6th. So, what did Jesus actually teach? How might things be different if we took His teachings seriously?

The First Requirement For Spiritual Growth is Humility

The dead tell us that our earth-status counts for nothing in the afterlife levels. Jesus agrees with them. “Many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (MK 10:31) “The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (MT 23:11-12)

Spiritual Growth is Based in Love

We can’t say for certain that spiritual growth is only love, but we can say that loving perfectly is at its core. And universal love is not just another religious rule to be mechanically followed. Rather, it is a way of thinking that must altogether fill our minds so we never again have any thought nor do even the smallest thing that is not the fruit of a heart full of love.

“A new command I give you: Love one another. As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” (JN 13:34) “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (MT 22:37-40)

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’  But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. He causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Are not even the tax collectors doing that? And if you greet only your own people, what are Stained Glass Handsyou doing more than others? Do not even pagans do that? Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (MT 5:43-48)

We have learned from the dead that perfection in loving God and loving others really is the standard. We are meant to become like Jesus.        

Unless We Continue to Make Spiritual Progress, We Will Fall Backward

Jesus says some things in the Gospels that seem incomprehensible and even cruel until we realize that He is referring to not earthly riches, but spiritual ones.

“For everyone who has will be given more, and he will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what he has will be taken from him. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” (MT 29:30)

“For there is nothing hidden that will not be disclosed, and nothing concealed that will not be known or brought out into the open. Therefore consider carefully how you listen. Whoever has will be given more; whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has will be taken from him.” (LK 8:17-18)

When Jesus mentions “having” in these places, He isn’t talking about material wealth. He is referring to spiritual growth, which from His perspective is the one thing worth having. And these are not God’s arbitrary rules. Rather, they are spiritual laws in a reality governed by the physics of consciousness. As inevitable as the tug of gravity and as inexorable as the temperature at which water freezes is the fact that either we continue to progress spiritually, or we risk losing whatever spiritual progress we may already have made.

We Are Meant to be Good Stewards of Our Own Spiritual Growth

It isn’t up to God to magically bestow upon us the gift of spiritual progress. Whether we make progress or not is in our own hands, and there are no shortcuts. Jesus tells parables to help His followers grasp this essential point. He is talking here of our attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven, by which He means the upper afterlife levels where we live in joyous proximity to our Source.

“Again, it will be like a man going on a journey, who called his servants and entrusted his wealth to them. To one he gave five bags of gold, to another two bags, and to another one bag, each according to his ability. Then he went on his journey. The man who had received five bags of gold went at once and put his money to work and gained five bags more. So also, the one with two bags of gold gained two more. But the man who had received one bag went off, dug a hole in the ground and hid his master’s money.

“After a long time the master of those servants returned and settled accounts with them. The man who had received five bags of gold brought the other five. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with five bags of gold. See, I have gained five more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

“The man with two bags of gold also came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘you entrusted me with two bags of gold; see, I have gained two more.’

“His master replied, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant! You have been faithful with a few things; I will put you in charge of many things. Come and share your master’s happiness!’

“Then the man who had received one bag of gold came. ‘Master,’ he said, ‘I knew that you are a hard man, harvesting where you have not sown and gathering where you have not scattered seed. So I was afraid and went out and hid your gold in the ground. See, here is what belongs to you.’

“His master replied, ‘You wicked, lazy servant! So you knew that I harvest where I have not sown and gather where I have not scattered seed? Well then, you should have put my money on deposit with the bankers, so that when I returned I would have received it back with interest.

“‘So take the bag of gold from him and give it to the one who has ten bags. For whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. And throw that worthless servant outside, into the darkness, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’” (MT 25:14-30)

This is an important parable! Our spiritual nature can be seen as an extraordinary opportunity given to us by God, but it is only the beginningStained Glass Jesus With Lamb of what is possible for us. Our task is to nurture our spiritual nature and build upon it throughout our lives, so when we graduate back to where we live eternally we will hear those beautiful words: “Well done, good and faithful servant!”

Can you imagine a world in which everyone who professes to be a Christian starts to follow the Gospel teachings of Jesus, and only the Gospel teachings of Jesus? The very contemplation of such a world makes me giggle with joy. I would love to have your thoughts!

 

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Stumbling Toward Consciousness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A frustrating but still amusing hobby is watching scientists who are bound Universe-214x300by a “fundamental dogma” of atheistic materialism continue to stumble toward a consciousness-based understanding of reality… by exhausting every other possible theory. Some readers of this blog have reproached me for being too hard on mainstream science. How is it possible that universities in the twenty-first century still are enforcing something so inane as a fundamental dogma about anything?

It is, sadly, all too possible. Watch a brilliant professor who is on the cusp of actually discovering how consciousness interacts with the brain take on a deer-in-the-headlights look when someone suggests to him that his theory of reality is rather close to one that was first advanced by an eighteenth-century bishop.

Donald D. Hoffman Ph.D. is a Professor of Cognitive Science at the University of California, Irvine. His TED Talk on the fact that we are not perceiving an accurate and objective reality is simple and enlightening, and I urge you to watch it all; but if your time is short, I’ll summarize what for our purposes are the important parts and then urge you to watch the last few minutes.

Dr. Hoffman begins by asking, “What is the relationship between your brain and your conscious experiences?” He believes that the reason this problem has so far proven to be insoluble is not that its solution is beyond our capability. He suggests instead that we can’t solve what scientists call the “hard problem” of consciousness simply because we have made an incorrect assumption. We have assumed that we are perceiving reality accurately.

Dr. Hoffman has done simulations based on the theory of evolution, and has found that evolution does not favor our seeing an accurate objective reality. He tells us that one-third of our brain’s cortex is engaged in vision, which is an astonishing fact all by itself when you consider all the other functions that traditional scientists ascribe to the brain. But “Is it true that accurate perceptions are fitter perceptions”? “Does natural selection favor seeing reality as it is?” Dr. Hoffman reminds us that fitness, and not objective perception, is the key to our evolutionary survival. He has run hundreds of thousands of evolutionary game simulations, and he has discovered that accuracy of perception of an organism’s surroundings seems to be beside the point: nearly always it is fitness alone that is most evolutionarily successful. We are the product of our evolution, so he concludes that we – like all other animals – are not perceiving reality as it objectively is.

So calculations based in the theory of evolution reveal that “Perception is not like reality, and reality is not like our perceptions.” “There is something that exists when we don’t look, but it’s not space-time and physical objects.” “That reality – whatever it is – is the real source of cause and effect in the world. Not brains or neurons. Brains and neurons have no causal powers.” “What does this mean for the mystery of consciousness?”

Now we come to his point, and it’s a wonderful one. “Perhaps reality is some vast interacting network of conscious agents, simple and complex, that cause each other’s conscious experiences.” This is an insight very close to what we have learned about reality from the afterlife evidence, which is simply that all that exists is infinitely creative Mind, and each of our minds is a part of that Mind. Eureka!

Or… maybe not. As you will shortly see, there are places where this earnest fellow feels that he cannot go, even though he is touchingly enthusiastic about his liberating insight. “Once we let go of our massively intuitive, but massively false assumption about the nature of reality, it opens up new ways to think about life’s greatest mystery.” “I bet that reality will turn out to be more fascinating and unexpected than we ever imagined!”

Then at the end of Dr. Hoffman’s talk, he is asked whether his work doesn’t support the work of Bishop George Berkeley (12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), who supposed that consciousness causes matter and not the other way around. The question comes just after 21:00 on the clip linked above, and I urge you to watch it so you can see the horror with which this heretofore confident and cheerful scientist greets this dread suggestion. Dr. Hoffman fumbles that Bishop Berkeley was a “deist” while the look on his face says, No! Can’t go there! The theory that consciousness does not arise in the brain is something close to a third rail of science: you touch it, and your career dies. So Dr. Hoffman recovers with the statement that what he is talking about here is “conscious realism – quite a different approach.” Although why it is different is a puzzler to me.

Dr. Hoffman is a brilliant and thoughtful research scientist. And what he is working on is close to the same insight – but arrived at from a different direction – that was advanced by Max Planck, who was the father of quantum mechanics. In 1931 Dr. Planck 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, Max Planck Bustpostulates 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.”

Consciousness is the water in which we swim like fish, so immersed in it that we know no other reality. The evidence that it does not and could not arise from a material brain is so manifold at this point that the fact that serious scientists stuck with the foolish dogma of atheistic materialism still waste their time trying to figure out how consciousness arises in the brain makes me sad. What a waste of time and talent! We can take heart, though, from the work of pioneering researchers like Donald Hoffman, whose curiosity is such that no amount of peer-pressure bullying will entirely silence them. Dr. Hoffman is right. And he will win.

 

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By Their Fruit You Will Recognize Them

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus in the Gospels warns us that wrong religious teachings can be recognized by the evils they bring. He says:

Turtle“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” (MT 7:15-20)

Christianity is based in a very long book called the Bible. The entire Christian Bible, composed of ancient Jewish and early Christian writings, is considered by Christians somewhat magically to be the Inspired Word of God. Given the way the books of the Bible were assembled by the early Church, this seems to me to be a dubious claim. Who are we to be putting words into God’s mouth? I once asked a fundamentalist friend how he could be so sure that a canon put together by a committee in the equivalent of smoke-filled rooms was absolutely all inspired by God. He told me confidently that God had worked through all the participants in those synods. No doubt! His answer reminded me of what had been said by a priest of a religion whose certain belief was that the world rides on the back of a turtle. When asked what the turtle was standing on, the priest had said confidently, “It’s turtles all the way down.”

In the same way, the Christian Bible is said to be God’s Word all the way down. And this seems to me to be the fatal flaw of modern Christianity.

I have read the whole Bible from cover to cover perhaps a dozen times. For decades I would read two or three pages every night, beginning with Genesis and going through to Revelation. Then I would go back to Matthew and read the New Testament through a second time before I began again with Genesis. It is this exercise of having actually read the Bible repeatedly that makes me confident that the entire Bible could not possibly be the Inspired Word of a loving and internally consistent God. Or even of a sane and rational God.

The fact that the Christian Bible doesn’t hold together as a coherent unit is a problem that Christianity could have addressed by declaring as a fundamental tenet that the Gospel words of Jesus are primary. Where there is a conflict – and there are many! – the teachings of Jesus should control. But perhaps because the Inspired Word of God cannot be seen to have inconsistencies, and because the teachings of Jesus are post-legal and require a Old-Testamentlifelong personal commitment, Christians have solved what should have been a big problem by making the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels no more than suggestions about how we should live. To Christians, Jesus is not their Teacher, but instead Jesus is the Lamb of God, sacrificed to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins.

This distortion at the root of the Christian tree has stunted its growth in peculiar ways:

  • No one who actually reads the Gospels can believe that Jesus meant his teachings to be mere suggestions. By treating them that way, Christians betray the life’s work of the Teacher upon whom the religion is supposed to be based.
  • The core Christian doctrine of sacrificial redemption paints a terrible picture of what God is. Would you enjoy watching the murder of your own child? Of course not! What on earth kind of a monstrous Father could require the brutal murder of His beloved Son?
  • The Old Testament Books are full of a wrathful and often petty Jehovah God. Calling the Old Testament the Inspired Word of God teaches Christians to fear the genuine God. Since fear is the opposite of love, this emphasis makes it difficult for Christians to develop the loving relationship with God that is essential to a life of spiritual growth. Christianity distances its followers from the infinite and perfect love of God. For a religion to do that is inexcusable.
  • The Old Testament contains a host of cultural commands that Christians do not follow. From not wearing clothing blended of two kinds of fibers and not eating pork and separating meat from milk right through to the rules about how men can wear their hair and beards and harsh punishments for what we see as trivial infractions, a lot of the Old Testament is not followed by Christians. And indeed, it should not be followed now. These were rigid cultural rules for a harsher time thousands of years gone by. But by calling the Old Testament the Inspired Word of God and then not following parts of it, Christians are disrespecting their Deity. If it’s okay to disrespect God by ignoring parts of the Divinely-Inspired Old Testament, then what is to keep us from disrespecting God in other ways?
  • Catholics and Fundamentalist Christians take some of the Bible’s cultural rules as God’s Inerrant Word. For example, Fundamentalist Christians insist that creation has to have happened over only six days, that homosexuality is a grievous sin, that sexual contact outside marriage always is sinful, and that women must submit to men. Catholics historically have not allowed divorce or the use of birth control, and they have required priests to be celibate males and women to cover their heads in church. In being so adamant about enforcing these lesser and arguably outmoded cultural rules, Christians are ignoring the warnings of Jesus against enforcing unloving religious rules and also against self-righteously judging others.

I would argue that the religion that was founded in the name of Jesus bears so little relationship to what he taught that it is time either to change it radically or to begin to cProphets-150x150all it something else.

The greatest proof that Christians are wrong in building their religion around the whole Christian Bible is that – as our beloved Teacher warns us – Christianity today bears some terrible fruit:

  • Rather than spreading the teachings of Jesus about love and forgiveness, Christians battle only for cultural views. From the fight against homosexuality to the insistence that only the death of Jesus on the cross can get us into heaven, Christians share their religion’s misshapen fruit. In doing this, they give Jesus a terrible name before a world that badly needs his Gospel teachings.
  • Rather than demonstrating Jesus’s perfect love and forgiveness in their own lives, the most devout Christians try to live their lives by Old Testament rules. The Duggars of the longstanding TLC TV reality show, “19 Kids and Counting,” live by Biblical commands that require them to have as many children as possible because “Children are a heritage from the Lord, offspring a reward from him. Like arrows in the hands of a warrior are children born in one’s youth. Blessed is the man whose quiver is full of them.” (Psalm 127:3-5) Other elements of the Duggars’ lifestyle, so peculiar to modern-day people, are similarly based in Biblical cultural rules. Their living this way does not advance God’s truth. Instead, it teaches modern people that Jesus must be outmoded, too.
  • Rather than focusing upon spreading awareness of the perfect love of God, the strictest Christians instead teach only their own culture-based beliefs. When it was lately revealed that the oldest Duggar son had years ago sexually molested his own sisters, there was another misshapen fruit of Christianity plain for us to see. But because their religion is not based in the teachings of Jesus, the Duggars exhibit no awareness of this core problem. Indeed, the news about Josh Duggar brought to light the fact that other fundamentalist Christians have been caught molesting children and in other ways behaving despicably by modern standards. More disgusting fruit of the very sort that Jesus in the Gospels suggests that we watch for so we can avoid false prophets. In burying the eternal Teachings of Jesus inside teachings and behavior that modern people find repugnant, Christianity continues to deny to the world the most essential set of truths that God has ever given to us.

I am sorry to be so blunt. I still fondly remember all the comforts of that old-time religion that for most of my life was good enough for me. But I have come to understand Jesus in Contemplationthat for us to be comfortable in a religion that we believe gives us personal salvation while we ignore the Gospel words of Jesus that the afterlife evidence now show us are true, we betray God. And we cheat our fellow man. Until Christianity reforms itself and begins to follow Jesus – and only Jesus! – we continue to delay the heaven on earth that is possible only when we live by God’s truth.

Lovingly, patiently, Jesus still calls to us. “Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations… teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age.” (MT 28:19)

 

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Is There Life After Birth?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Victor and Wendy Zammit produce a wonderful free weekly newsletter that twins-in-wombcovers the whole range of death and afterlife topics. You can subscribe at VictorZammit.com. The depth and range of the information they share will amaze you!

As a break from this heavy but essential discussion of the meaning and the message of Jesus, I want to share with you a recent piece from the Zammits’ Friday Afterlife Report. Wendy tells me the author is unknown.

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”

The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our Pregnant-Mom-215x300mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”

The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”

The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”

“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists, then where is She now?”

The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could Twin Babiesnot exist.”

Said the first: “Well, I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence. You can hear Her loving voice calling down from above.”

Dear friends, out of the mouths of babes….

 

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