Author: Roberta Grimes

Suicide

I guest frequently on radio programs, and some recent hosts have ask me to address the suicide of Robin Williams with the hope that I can comfort the many people who love that beautiful man. I love him, too. But I have little comfort to give to radio Robin Williams Starlisteners, and I don’t plan to discuss his passing on my own weekly program, Seek Reality. The best news that the afterlife evidence offers to us about suicide is that it is not all bad news.

To understand why killing yourself never is a good idea, it is important to know a few basic things. Briefly:

1)    The chance to learn on earth is a gift. We are told that there are many more people wanting to live an earth-life than there are bodies to accommodate them, and we who are here are the fortunate ones who were given this phenomenal opportunity.

2)    We plan our lives. In close cooperation with our guides and with those who will be important in our lives and their guides, each of us writes a pre-birth plan. We cannot say for certain that every bad thing that happens in our lives is planned, but the evidence is strong that we eagerly plan to have bad things happen so we can grow spiritually. An easy life is like an easy gym session: it doesn’t build much spiritual muscle.

3)    Each of us plans two or three possible exit points into our lives, and suicide never is one of them. As soon as we have gotten whatever spiritual growth can be wrung from this lifetime, our higher consciousness takes the next exit and we happily boogie outta here.

So, you can see the problem. We petitioned for the chance to come here, and we planned whatever lesson is making us think now that we would rather die than see it through. If we commit suicide, we land back in the Summerland and we face our post-death judgment phase while we are struggling with the horrible realization that we screwed up very badly.

God doesn’t judge us. No religious figure judges us, and that is bad news since perhaps a loving God would have compassion on us for our mistake in taking our own lives. Each of us is our own afterlife judge, and the evidence is strong that we judge ourselves ruthlessly. We know what we intended! We planned to have great spiritual growth come from whatever caused us to kill ourselves, and we entered this lifetime hungry for that growth. Instead, we threw our chance away. We blew it!

The way suicides handle their self-judgment seems to vary considerably:

1)    Sub-adults forgive themselves easily. Children and people even into their twenties seem not to have trouble forgiving themselves, and they get tremendous loving support.

2)    The old and the dying generally forgive themselves. There seems to be a sense on their part that they have wrung most of the value out of this lifetime, so hastening their imminent departure was a forgivable decision.

3)    People in midlife who kill themselves may be unable to manage self-forgiveness. I don’t think that anyone knows the statistics, but evidence is strong that many who kill themselves in midlife in order to avoid a planned catastrophe – divorce, bankruptcy, a career crisis, whatever – will find self-forgiveness to be difficult or impossible.

Our ability to attain the higher afterlife levels is based on our rate of spiritual vibration. Evidence suggests that nearly everyone who has lived a reasonable life achieves at least the third afterlife level. But if you are unable to forgive yourself for something you have done in life, then gradually your spiritual vibratory rate will slow. You will find it harder and harder to remain on the third level. You will have plentiful love and counseling, but ultimately unless you can forgive yourself you won’t be able to maintain even the second afterlife level. You will end up in what Jesus called the outer darkness, “where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.”

Where does this leave our beloved Robin Williams? He was an ambitious being when he entered this lifetime. He chose a horrendous set of lessons, combining complex interpersonal problems and extraordinary professional success with mental illness, and reportedly also Parkinson’s Disease. Wow! Any one of the four would be a tough row to hoe, and he chose them all. He was only in his early sixties, which today is late middle age. And he is bright. He is intense. I worry that for him, self-forgiveness may not be easy.

Fortunately, though, Robin Williams is very much loved. And for us to send love to those who have recently died seems to assist them in maintaining their spiritual vibratory rate, and even to assist them in self-forgiveness. Whenever I am asked about the fate of people who commit suicide, I always say that suicide is a disastrously bad idea and explain why that is true, but I also urge everyone to send love and light to loved ones lost this way, and to pray for these people in Robin Williams Quotewhatever prayer tradition makes sense to the mourner. If everyone who loves Robin Williams will do that, then I am confident that he is going to be fine.

As is true of everything else that we once might have regarded as sin, the problem with suicide is not the deed itself, but rather it is the tremendous sense of guilt that suicide can bring. Don’t even think about killing yourself! The problem with killing yourself is that it is impossible for your mind to die.

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Seek Reality Radio

SEEK REALITY is on Web Talk Radio as of January 5, 2015, with a new podcast every week. And it continues on the Contact Talk Radio Network live on Saturdays at 10:00 a.m. pacific time, 1:00 p.m. eastern time.

Podcasts of all of our programs are available for free on iTunes.

Here are my Seek Reality radio programs from early July through the end of 2014 that are available now for download on iTunes:

7/5 – Gary Schwartz on His Latest Research – Gary Schwartz is the foremost traditional scientist working in this field today, and whenever he is my guest we have fun and make news!

7/12 – Donna Smith-Moncrieffe Talks About Using Spiritual Energy – Donna is a fearless researcher with some amazing insights to share.

7/19 – Victor Zammit – Victor and Wendy are stars of the afterlife-research world. Their Zammit Friday report is a must-read, so if you don’t yet receive it, go to victorzammit.com and subscribe!

7/26 – Dianne Collins Talks About “Quantum Thinking” – Dianne’s book, Do You Quantum Think?, is an impressive and exciting piece of work, and hearing her talk about how she arrived at her conclusions is a delight.

8/2 – Robert Kopecky Talks About How to Survive Life (and Death) – Robert Kopecky survived three near-death experiences, and the result was a delightful book of wisdom. We will be discussing the only things that matter and how to live life to the full.

8/9 – Hillis Pugh Talks About Gratitude – Hillis Pugh teaches the power of gratitude and gratitude affirmations, which is a topic very important to me as well. His book is Thank You Thursday.

8/16 – Rosemary Ellen Guiley Talks About Afterlife Communication Methods. – Rosemary is a gifted psychic, and a powerhouse of information about how we can use ancient methods to better communicate with our dead loved ones.

8/23 – John McGrail Talks About His Book, The Synthesis Effect – John is an expert on personal empowerment and how to make the most of your life using techniques based in our quantum reality.

8/30 – Dave Edwards Talks About His Tragic, Triumphant History – Having lost his beloved and their newborn child, Dave was driven to the edge of despair until those very loved ones intervened and transformed his life. His is a gripping, uplifting story.

9/6 – Carol & Mikey Morgan Discuss Signs from the Dead – Our beloved Carol and Mikey were of considerable help as I was writing The Fun of Staying in Touch. Mikey is going to give us more information about signs and how they are produced!

9/13 – Donna Smith-Moncrieffe Discusses Healing, OBEs, and Past-Life Regression – Donna is a gifted researcher of a number of important phenomena. This is her second appearance on Seek Reality – her first was wonderful and highly enlightening.

9/20 – R. Craig Hogan and Roberta Grimes Talk About What the Afterlife is Like – Several listeners have asked us to do a detailed discussion about living in the afterlife. We look forward to sharing with you the best news in all of human history!

9/27 – Psychic Medium Mark Anthony Talks About His Book, Love Never Dies – Mark Anthony is the “Psychic Lawyer,” a gifted medium since childhood, and his experiences have been fascinating and amazing.

10/4 – Joannie and Darrell Bolton Talk About Their Book, With Unwashed Hands – Darrell Bolton is a traditional Christian missionary who had a medical emergency in a primitive country that is both Communist-leaning and partly Muslin, and the fact that he is a retired Air Force officer caused some of those who treated him medically to want to kill him. Fortunately, Joannie was there to help, and the power of their minds (what Jesus called “faith”) resulted in some amazing miracles.

10/11 – Terri Jay, the Psychic “Horse Whisperer – I don’t entirely agree with Terri on some things, but her powers are undoubted and she makes a fascinating guest.

10/18 – Robyn Reynolds Talks About Communicating With Her Lost Stepson – This lovely woman’s remarkable spiritual voyage following the death of her stepson at the age of twenty makes for a wonderful and heartwarming story.

10/25 – Hillis Pugh Talks About the Power of Gratitude – I love this wonderful, great-spirited man who has devoted his life to teaching (and living) the power of gratitude!

11/1 – Jamie Turndorf – Dr. Love – Talks About her Book, Love Never Dies – Jamie’s book is the most extraordinary love story that I have ever read, even extending far beyond death. And it is all true!

11/8 – R. Craig Hogan Talks About the 2014 ASCS Conference and the Exciting Things Planned for 2015 – Craig and I co-chaired this year’s conference, and we are planning something even more amazing for 2016 (right side of the banner above).

11/15 – Betty Anne Millar Talks About Amazing Signs from her Husband – These include some extraordinary experiences with electronic communication.

11/22 – Waller Joel Talks About Physical Mediumship – Our own dear friend Waller will be my guest!

11/29 – Donna Smith-Moncrieffe Talks About Physical Mediumship – Like Waller, she was at the David Thompson seances in Sarasota in September.

12/6 – Dianne Collins Talks About Quantum Thinking – This is Dianne’s second visit with us. Her book is extraordinary!

12/13 – W. Dennis Parker Talks About Therapeutic Hypnosis – The capacity of our own minds to heal us is powerful!

12/20 – Roberta Grimes Talks About the Meaning and the Message of Jesus – I am my own guest.

12/27 – Roberta Grimes Talks About the Nature of Reality – Again, I am my own guest.
My final two podcasts of 2014 were from my heart to yours! My big wish is that you can step forth now from the doubts and fears that both science and Christianity have sown in us, and enter with joy the abundant and glorious truth that you are a powerful eternal being, an infinitely precious part of Source, and you are forever perfectly loved! 

ASCSI Conference!

THE ACADEMY FOR SPIRITUAL AND CONSCIOUSNESS STUDIES

AFTERLIFE RESEARCH AND EDUCATION SECTION

“Life In the Afterlife”

Conference in Scottsdale, Arizona, September 25-27, 2015

The Academy for Spiritual and Consciousness Studies put on an extraordinary conference in July of 2014 entitled “New Developments in Afterlife Communication.” Its 2015 conference, “Life in the Afterlife,” promises to be even better, with presentations by some of the leading lights in the worldwide field of afterlife studies. I am co-chairing this conference, and I’ll be one of its presenters. I hope to see you there. It will be illuminating, groundbreaking, and a lot of fun!

Your Mind is Eternal

The greatest discovery in all of human history was expounded by quantum physicist Max Planck in the early part of the twentiethorigin_4290962747 century. I am told that he wasn’t the first to put it forth, but his experiments demonstrated it so conclusively that he was frank to say it aloud. Sadly, he was altogether ignored. The only thing that won him a Nobel Prize was his work in quantum physics. But he certainly should have received a second Nobel Prize for his theory that what we think of as human consciousness is primary and pre-existing.

The Fun of Staying in Touch will be out late this month. It was delayed a bit by my friend Gary Schwartz’s offer to write a terrific Foreword, and also by the fact that I am finishing Letter From Wonder for the fall. Publishing six books in one year because you are catching up on a twenty-year drought does take quite a bit of time! But in assembling quotations for The Fun of Staying in Touch, I have been struck yet again by the fact that the earliest quantum physicists seem fully to have understood that they had made a discovery that was even more important than the role of quanta. They had discovered that human minds are of the very stuff that brings the universe into being.

Abundant support for the theory that what we think of as human consciousness is primary and pre-existing derives naturally from the double-slit and other classic quantum physics experiments, all of which suggest that researchers’ own minds influence their experimental results. Max Planck said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” By 1944 he was saying, “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 particles 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.”

           Planck wasn’t the only leading early-twentieth-century physicist to come out and say that human consciousness seems to be primary and pre-existing. The grid of human-like consciousness from which all of reality apparently suspends is sometimes called the “matrix”; it is also called the “field.” Albert Einstein, winner of the 1922 Nobel Prize in physics, said of subatomic particles, “The field is the sole governor of the particle.”

Mathematician Euan Squires agreed that, “Every interpretation of quantum mechanics involves consciousness.”                          

Other Nobel-level scientists, too, have come to conclude that what we think of as human consciousness has to be primary. Biologist George Wald, winner of the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, is quoted as saying, “It has occurred to me lately—I must confess with some shock at first to my scientific sensibilities—that both questions (the origin of consciousness in humans and the origin of life from non-living matter) might be brought into some degree of congruence. This is with the assumption that mind, rather than emerging as a late outgrowth in the evolution of life, has existed always as the matrix, the source and condition of physical reality—that stuff of which physical reality is composed is mind-stuff.”

And so it is! Exactly right.

All the evidence indicates that your mind is an undivided part of the energy-like potentiality that brings forth the universe. As such, it is:

1)    Eternal. Your mind exists outside of time. It never began, and it never will end.

2)    Powerful. Even while we are in bodies, the power of our minds seems to be limited only by our own beliefs in their powerlessness. After death, our minds can literally create the realities in which we live.

3)    United with all other minds. In truth, there is only one of us here. Each of our minds is deeply united with every other human mind.

4)    Fundamentally good! Our cultures distort our behavior so severely that we have some strange notions about human nature that simply are not borne out by what we now understand to be true about the nature of our minds. While our minds are sufficiently creative to conceive of evil, they are at their base the very essence of pure love that we have long imagined God to be. That is who we are.

EinsteinAs that universal genius, Albert Einstein, said of the overarching Mind of which each of our minds is a part, “Every one who is seriously involved in the pursuit of science becomes convinced that a spirit is manifest in the laws of the Universe – a spirit vastly superior to that of man, and one in the face of which we with our modest powers must feel humble.”

Our powers are modest, true. And deservedly we ought to be humble in the face of God. But we are of God’s very essence. Powerful, eternal, and infinitely good. At the core of your being, that is who you are!

 

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Willful Scientific Blindness

A few weeks ago I talked about some of the ways in which the fact that mainstream science has ignored the afterlife evidence has Universemade scientists unable to understand some seemingly unrelated things. When you arbitrarily choose to ignore all evidence related to a major aspect of reality, then naturally your understanding of the rest of reality will be distorted! The levels of reality that we enter at death exist precisely where we are but at a higher vibratory rate, very much as different television channels exist in the same place but at different frequencies. Choosing to study only Channel Five, as mainstream science still does, is going to make you oblivious of the content and effects of all those other channels.

For scientists to flat ignore nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead, and for them further to ignore all the related implications of quantum physics and consciousness research, is going to mean that their attempts to study their own “approved” aspects of reality will come up against repeated frustrations. I enjoy reading popular-science magazines, in part because so often when I discover some new scientific conundrum I can readily think of plausible explanations that are related to the greater reality of which this universe is an integral part (see Mainstream Science is off the Rails, June 28, 2014).

I hadn’t planned to be back on this topic so soon, but I have just learned something else that confounds me. Scientists have only now discovered that eighty percent – eighty percent – of the detectable light in the nearby universe seems to have no discernible source!

To quote the article linked above:

“It’s as if you’re in a big, brightly lit room, but you look around and see only a few 40-watt lightbulbs,” astronomer Juna Kollmeier — a Carnegie Institution for Science professor and the lead author of the new study on missing light said in a statement this week. “Where is all that light coming from?”

Good grief, how is this possible? How have they altogether ignored something so major for so long? This foolishness ranks right up there with the fact that mainstream physicists continue to study as if it were the whole enchilada what even they themselves admit is less than five percent of what exists. Nearly the entire universe is made up of dark matter and dark energy. Physicists call all this stuff “dark” because it doesn’t give off or reflect the photon-based light that exists in this material universe. When it comes to ninety-five percent of the universe, physicists admit to being clueless! And given that they have known for awhile that they were in this amazing pickle, they seem to be remarkably untroubled by it.

Dark matter makes up about 27% of the universe, which is more than five times the sum of all the material matter and energy in the universe put together. To their credit, physicists are having another go at trying to understand it. Their problem, though, is that they are looking for dark matter as if it were another set of subatomic particles – weakly interacting massive particles (WIMPs), to be exact – when the very fact that dark matter won’t interact with the light on this material level of reality strongly suggests that it is not particle-based matter.

           Please think about that for a moment. Physicists are trying to study dark matter as if it were just a more exotic sort of material stuff. But if something will not react with the photons of matter-based light, then it seems self-evident to you and me that probably it is not conventional matter.

           Let’s offer these struggling physicists some help. Based on our study of the afterlife levels of reality, we know or strongly suspect that the following things are true:

  • There are at least seven levels of afterlife reality, all of which exist exactly where we are and are separated from one another and from this universe only by their different rates of energy-like spiritual vibration.
  • Each level of afterlife reality may be as large as this material universe, although since space – like time – is an artifact only of this material universe, “size” is not a characteristic that we generally associate with the afterlife levels.
  • Several of the afterlife levels of reality are as solid-seeming to their inhabitants as this universe is to us. Level Three is so reassuringly earth-like that some who die in their sleep and wake up there have trouble believing they are dead.
  • The physics of the afterlife levels is entirely consciousness-based. The matter and energy there is not based in particles at all, and therefore we can assume that it would not interact with material light composed of photons.
  • There is an intense white light in the afterlife levels. I have seen this spiritual light twice in my life, and it is much brighter than sunlight. It also has the remarkable ability to illuminate material reality. When I was eight, I saw a flash of spiritual light in my bedroom. It lit up everything.
  • The basis of reality is an infinitely powerful and highly emotional energy-like potentiality. Everything that we think of as real springs from this Source.

How can these facts help us to help our floundering mainstream physicist friends? Let’s suggest to them what “dark matter” is likely to be, what the source of all that non-photon light likely is, and even – as a bonus – what is the probable name of the “dark energy” that makes up 68% of the universe. I am betting they will eventually discover that:

  • “Dark matter” is the afterlife levels of reality. That it seems to be in a size ratio with this material universe of five-to-one looks to be about right.
  • The eighty percent of the light in the nearby universe that seems to have no source is spiritual light. No photons involved!
  • “Dark energy” is spiritual energy. No associated matter, no subatomic particles, nothing but infinitely powerful potentiality. I call this glorious energy Mind, and each of our minds is a part of Mind. You might prefer to call it… God.

 

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What It’s Like to Witness a Death

Having talked last week about how it feels to die, let’s consider now the experience of being at the bedside of someone you love who is about to embark on that universal journey. Of course, some deaths are going toorigin_6306545022 feel tragic. People who die unexpectedly or out of generational order are likely to distress their loved ones by the very act of dying. Life can hold so much pain! Please know, though, that the afterlife evidence overwhelmingly indicates that:

1)    Virtually all deaths are planned. We plan our lives before we are born in conjunction with our spirit guides and with those who will be important in this lifetime and their guides, and as part of that process we plan in two or three exit-points that our higher consciousness can choose to take once we have done as much as we can do in terms of learning and growing in this lifetime. There is a lot of evidence that even what seem to be accidental deaths are planned exit points. Death is almost never a real accident.

2)    Dying is a pleasant and joyous experience. Of course, as I admit in my previous blog post, getting to the point of death can be rough, but the death process itself is gentle and enjoyable. If a body seems to be dying in pain, there is plentiful evidence that the mind is already happily out of that body and doesn’t feel its pain. All really is well! So even though it is difficult to be losing a loved one, don’t worry about the person who is dying.

3)    Nobody ever dies anyway! Our minds are part of eternal mind. We never began and we never will end, so the death of the body makes amazingly little difference to the person going through the experience.

           Even knowing all of this, it still can be difficult to attend a death. It can help for you to know how death feels to the person dying, so please read my previous blog post on that topic. And here are some additional points to keep in mind as you sit beside the bed:

origin_30043159471)    Death is highly individual. It is impossible to generalize about any aspect of the process of dying because each of us handles it differently, and above all we want to be in control. No matter how the death may be affecting you, this is a major event for your loved one, so it is important to let him or her take the lead.

2)    Some of the dying want to talk, but some don’t. Your task is to listen, to answer questions, to offer love and comfort. I have found that sometimes reading psalms or poetry is welcome. Dying folks often stop communicating with the living once their deathbed visitors arrive, so as death approaches you may find that your reading or speaking isn’t wanted anymore. Instead, you might begin to observe what seems to be half of a telepathic conversation.

3)    There usually is a period of lucidity a day or so before the death event. When a person near death suddenly seems to improve, to be more lucid and have more bodily strength, then that is a sign that death can be expected soon. As it comes closer, we sometimes witness seemingly impossible things: someone with end-stage dementia might begin to interact normally, or someone who is very weak might sit up vigorously and even stand.

4)    You may see deathbed visitors. As Raymond Moody tells us in his wonderful 2010 book, Glimpses of Eternity, it is not uncommon for people at the bedside to glimpse a long-dead person or pet who has come to escort a loved one to the afterlife levels. You might even have a vision of the beautiful place where your loved one is soon to go, as if a wall of the room had dissolved and let you glimpse a whole new world beyond it.

5)    You could see your loved one leaving the body. A faintly glowing mist might appear above the chest and head area. That mist might seem to assemble into a human form that either lies or sits above the body, still attached to it by a glowing cord. This part is highly individual, though! Don’t be concerned if you don’t see anything.

6)    You could feel your loved one leaving the body. If you are hugging your loved one at the right moment, you might feel the energy of that newly-freed being pass right through your body; or if you are sitting by the bed, you might just feel a sense of lightness and even elation. Don’t be concerned if none of this happens for you, since it seems to be highly individual. You will know that the dying person’s silver cord has broken when the body ceases to breathe.

7)    Don’t try to get the attention of your newly-freed loved one! Once the silver cord is broken, there is no way to re-animate that body. Begging the one you love to try to do that is counterproductive and dangerous. Even your bursting into tears can put your loved one at risk, since it is essential that newly-freed minds keep full attention on their deathbed visitors in order for them to make an easy transition to the afterlife levels of reality. For your loved one to be distracted by you now could mean that he or she might lose the ability to perceive those crucial guides.

8)    Give the dying person permission to go! Some dying folks will hang on for days out of worry for us. Or, worse, their bodies might die but they might remain, feeling obligated to us. Rescuing people who have gone off-track is an act of charity, and from one of these rescuers I heard an awful story about a little boy who was found to be still in his hospital bed many years after his death because his mother had begged him not to die while she was away. Apparently he died during that night. The little boy’s mind, though, was still in his bed years later, obediently awaiting his mother’s return.

9)    Your loved one may prefer to die in your absence. Death is the most personal act of our lives, and most folks prefer to do it without living people in the room. I am not sure why this is true, but I have a hunch that the dying want to spare us (and themselves) whatever anguish we might feel in witnessing their moment of death. So whenever you leave someone who is dying, tell your loved one that dying while you are away would be all right.

10)Take care of yourself! Losing a loved one is painful, even when we have plenty of warning. Once you have helped a parent or spouse or child through a healthy and positive death, don’t expect to snap right back. Give yourself permission to grieve. Learning what death is and where your loved one is now can help immeasurably to ease your worries; and spending extra time with family and friends, or volunteering to help others, can help you begin to think beyond yourself. But don’t forget to address origin_2674610197your own needs.

           The one whose body has died is now healthy and happy. Death really is the ultimate illusion! No matter how old you are now, when measured against your eternal life this little period when you will be apart is going to be amazingly brief. You can rejoice in the certainty that a glorious eternal reunion is just around the corner!

 

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How it Feels to Die

Every one of us is going to die. Yet our culture offers no real preparation for this universal human experience, and few of us haveRHS Garden Hyde Hall, Essex, UK | A garden with wide ranging hor much understanding of the actual death process. You will be relieved to know that the afterlife evidence overwhelmingly suggests that for most of us a well-conducted death can be the best time of our lives. Fortunately, folks who have gone before have thoughtfully shared their own experiences, so it is possible to have a pretty good understanding of what our death will be like. Based on my reading of nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead, here is a brief summary of how death feels from the perspective of the person living through the experience.

The Final Few Days of Earth-Life

           A number of people have chastised me for the title of my book, The Fun of Dying. And they have a point. In order for us to transition from this vibratory level of reality to the levels that are occupied by the dead, we have to get ourselves free of material bodies that are fighting to stay alive. And that process emphatically is not fun! Whether we are dying of cancer, an injury, or just old age, unless we are unexpectedly called in our sleep we are likely to find unpleasant the process of weakening our material body enough for death to overtake it. Within the last two or three days of life, though, most of us rally. We are more alert, generally our pain lessens, and we tend to be more accepting of impending death, even if we had previously been fearful.

           It is within the last few days or hours that we first see our deathbed visitors. One or more of the dead people and pets that we are most likely to trust will show up, looking young and healthy. The number of visitors and the timing of their arrival is highly individual: I have seen reports of deathbed visitors coming and going for weeks, and also reports of deathbed visitors showing up immediately before the event. We might see just a spouse or parent or a childhood pet, or we might find ourselves entertaining a crowd. My guess is that the usual interval between the arrival of visitors and the death is twenty-four to forty-eight hours, so let’s assume that is what happens in our case. Our dead loved ones usually first appear in an upper corner of the room, and they might stay there, although sometimes they will come down and take a chair and make themselves at home. Deathbed visitors generally converse with us mentally, and in fact once we are in contact with them we tend to lose interest in communicating with the living. Mom is here, looking amazingly great after a forty-year separation! Now I know that everyone else must be fine, and I also know for sure I will survive my death.

We might have actual glimpses of post-death reality. It will be as if a wall of the room has disappeared, and we will see breathtaking natural vistas with lots of greenery and flowers in unearthly colors backed by snow-capped mountains. We might see a beautiful, ethereal city. This sort of gift is more common if we are alert and not medicated, and anecdotally I would add that it seems to happen more readily for young people. There are reports of children dying a century ago from diphtheria and other now-vanquished diseases who would enjoy panoramic vistas for days before their actual deaths.

The Final Few Hours of Earth-Life

            Our earth-bodies are nested energy bodies. A couple of them – including the one that we think of as our material origin_342069144body – are going to die now. But there are several energy bodies that we will be taking with us, and the process of separation can take awhile. It begins in our extremities, our hands and our feet, and if we are awake we may feel it happening like tiny threads breaking. Bodily separation doesn’t hurt, nor is it frightening; but it is interesting to be aware of the process. Gradually these surviving energy bodies will gather into our chest area and then will leave, either from the chest or more commonly through the top of the head.

Once out of our material body, our surviving nested energy bodies will re-form into a human shape that is still attached to the material body by what is called the silver cord. Being out of our dying body feels wonderful! Minutes ago we were trapped in a frail and decrepit body, weak and ill and at death’s door. Now suddenly we feel young, healthy, vigorous and joyous! Some of the dead even tell us that leaving the body produces a surge of what feels like physical pleasure.

           For our inner energy bodies to travel out of the body during sleep has been routine for most of us all our lives. That silver cord has been tough and infinitely stretchy, but it is fraying now. Soon it will disintegrate. While we wait to complete our transition, our energy replica might lie suspended above our physical body, face down, still attached by that silver cord; or else it might sit cross-legged in the air or tip down to stand beside the bed and interact with our deathbed visitors. When it first forms, our energy body is naked. We quickly notice that, and our mind clothes it.

Actual Death

The breaking of the silver cord is our moment of death. Without our support, that material body which has served us so well ceases to breathe, and its heart stops. This is a moment of danger! People we love who are gathered around the bed will realize that our death has occurred, and especially if we are young and what precipitated the death was unexpected, we may witness agonizing grief. Our instinct will be to focus on the living and try to reassure them that we are fine, but to do that could bring disaster! If we take our attention from our deathbed visitors even briefly, we can lose our ability to perceive them. Stuck there in a limbo outside of time, it is possible for us to become an earthbound ghost for centuries. There are ways to offer help to those who mourn us once we have transitioned to the afterlife levels, but until then they cannot see or hear us. There is nothing we can do for them. How ever hard it is for us to see their pain, we must altogether ignore the living!

Moving On

            We have died. The universal fate of all living things has overtaken us as well, and it has been amazingly easy and happy. There has been no pain and no fear. We have been supported gently through the whole death process, and asWaddesdon Manor Gardens, Buckinghamshire, England | Immaculate N a dead person we feel terrific! We might still worry a bit about the loved ones we are leaving, but we feel ourselves now young and healthy and joyous and wonderfully enveloped in love. Our deathbed visitors are hugging us, feeling as solid as anyone living; our childhood dog might be jumping up on us or happy-dancing at our feet. We turn away from our deathbed with relief and with anticipation of the wonders to come, and we join those who have come for us in together lifting our spiritual vibration and approaching a glorious new world.

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Jefferson, Asperger’s, and Race

My husband of forty-two years is a high-functioning Asperger’s person. Asperger’s Syndrome is a disorder on the autism spectrum whose sufferers tend to be very bright but often have trouble relating to others. A book published in 2000 origin_2872017812called Diagnosing Jefferson makes a compelling case that our third president was another extraordinary man whose blessing and bane was Asperger’s Syndrome.

The revelation that Thomas Jefferson’s life displayed the signs of Asperger’s is crucial for anyone who hopes to understand him. To ignore his condition and judge him for traits that were beyond his control would be as morally wrong as it would be to judge someone with a club-foot for his inability to run well. There are some advantages to Asperger’s Syndrome, but also some important disadvantages. I urge you to read Diagnosing Jefferson for a more complete analysis of all the ways in which the insight that our third President was an Asperger’s person helps us to make a better sense of him.

In particular, Jefferson’s Asperger’s diagnosis is helpful as we ponder his attitude toward race. It is clear from his writings that he hated slavery with the fervor of an ardent abolitionist.He well understood how incongruous it was for Americans to be fighting for their own freedom while they held a subject people in thrall, so in 1778, at the height of the American Revolution, he led a successful effort to make Virginia the first place on earth to end the importation of slaves. He saw this as a necessary step toward ending slavery altogether. There is little doubt that if his wife had lived, Thomas Jefferson would have retired from public life in 1781, and together they would have devoted the rest of their lives to finding a way to end slavery. But she died in 1782. And the idealist in her husband died with her.

Thomas Jefferson hated slavery, but he was also – how can I put this delicately? – convinced that there was a difference between the races. Unlike true racists, Jefferson did not want black people to be inferior to whites. This fear he had that there were racial differences enormously complicated his wish to free the slaves. But he believed to the end of his life that there were differences that went beyond shades of skin, and he believed this because he had Asperger’s Syndrome.

           A key characteristic of Asperger’s people is a very much lessened or entirely absent ability to empathize with others. They cannot imagine that other people don’t see the world in the same way they do. This can be annoying in a marriage, although you learn to work around it. For a slaveholder, Jefferson’s inability to comprehend how different he might feel if he were a slave led him to draw disastrously wrong conclusions.

Thomas Jefferson was fourteen when his father died. Shortly before that event, something happened that forever shaped the boy’s perception of black people. Peter Jefferson was trying to rid his plantation of an old shed. He had a gang of slaves hauling on ropes, chanting as they were wont to do, and repeatedly failing to pull the thing down. Eventually Peter shooed the slave-gang away and took up the rope himself, and in front of his gullible son he singlehandedly pulled the shed down. Thomas Jefferson learned that day that his own father was physically stronger than four slaves pulling together.

As Martha discovers in My Thomas, this self-protective tendency of slaves to make as little effort as possible extended to intellectual matters as well. Her beloved Great George enlightens his mistress by telling her that a foolish man cannot survive as a slave. “The cleverest slave is the one most stupid. The quickest slave is the one most slow. If a slave can convince you he cannot work or his leg is lame or he has taken ill, then he has won, has he not? Only look at a slave and see a perfect idiot, and the man you see is surpassingly wise. The stupid ones you can work to death, mistress. The cleverest ones work the least of all.”

This made sense to Martha, who had the capacity to imagine how it would feel to be a slave. But Thomas Jefferson was an over-achiever with Asperger’s Syndrome. It seems never to have entered his mind that his slaves would not make the same effort to work and think that he did, so he saw their apparent weakness and dullness as a self-evident lack of capacity. To the end of his life he worried that black people were physically and mentally less than whites, so to free them into a stronger white culture would put them at a crippling disadvantage. He feared that racial differences might be so great that integration would be impossible, and a well-meant but ill-planned abolition could lead to bloody racial warfare and the tragic subjugation of the weaker race.

Thomas Jefferson was a realistic idealist. Before risking an emancipation that could be disastrous for this hopeful new nation and for the slaves themselves, he needed more information. Toward the end of Martha’s life he was thinking about origin_5802606397experimenting to see whether whites and free blacks could live in harmony on neighboring farms, but her death ended his interest in experimenting, as it ended his interest in many things.

Last week I discussed the substantial evidence that it was Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph, who fathered the children of Sally Hemings. To all of that we can now add the fact that a man as fastidious as Jefferson was, as obsessed with preserving his personal honor, and as worried that black people might be less than whites, would not have let himself father mixed-race children. With all the other evidence there is against the Thomas-Sally calumny, this certainty that Thomas Jefferson’s personality and beliefs would not have allowed a relationship between them is something you can take to the bank.

photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/nostri-imago/2872017812/”>cliff1066™</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>cc</a>     (older Jefferson portrait)
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The Sally Hemings Question

It doesn’t matter to me who fathered Sally Hemings’s children. Seeing how devastated Thomas Jefferson was by Thomas Jeffersonthe death of his wife at thirty-three, at one time I even thought that if he had managed to find a new love later in life, that was fine and none of us had the right to judge him for it. But knowing Jefferson as I had come to know him, I became sadly confident that it never had happened. Seeing that his nephews, the Carrs, seemed to have fessed up to it, at the last minute I added to the 1993 edition of My Thomas a postscript naming one of them as the father of Sally Hemings’s children. Then after the novel was first published I did some more extensive research. I came to see that all the evidence pointed not to Thomas Jefferson and not to the Carrs, but to Thomas’s younger brother, Randolph.

It has been twenty years since I researched the Sally Hemings question, soon after My Thomas first was published. The evidence that it was Randolph and not Thomas who had had a relationship with Sally Hemings seemed so incontrovertible to me that I am astonished that the old story has not long since been widely seen as discredited. For example:

1)    A relationship could not have begun in Paris. Thomas Jefferson went to Paris as a widower with his oldest daughter in 1784, and he sent for his middle daughter after the youngest died at Monticello. Fourteen-year-old Sally Hemings accompanied that second daughter to Paris in 1787, but she was a last-minute choice that probably was made at Monticello. It seems unlikely from the evidence that Sally’s going to Paris was Jefferson’s idea. I have seen it suggested that Paris was where he began a relationship with Sally, but there was no contemporary whisper of it. And Sally didn’t return from Paris pregnant, nor did she become pregnant soon thereafter. Her first child wasn’t born until she was twenty-two years old.

 2)    Randolph was reportedly often at Monticello when his brother Thomas was there. Randolph’s plantation was twenty miles from Monticello, and contemporary accounts suggest that he was a frequent visitor.

3)    Randolph socialized with the Monticello slaves. It was said that he was often in the quarters and he would “play the fiddle and dance half the night.” His brother Thomas, on the other hand, is not reported to have socialized in the quarters at all. My extensive reading of his early correspondence indicates that the young Thomas Jefferson hated the institution of slavery and considered the fact that he had inherited slaves and there was no legal or practical way to free them to be a bane and a burden.

4)    Sally’s Jefferson children were conceived during the interval when Randolph was single. Randolph was widowed young, and in defiance of custom he did not soon remarry. By my calculation, all of Sally’s Jefferson children were fathered while Randolph was single. I further have seen evidence that Randolph’s relationship with Sally was known among the slaves, who on at least one occasion saw him sneaking from Sally’s cabin early in the morning.

5)    Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings were together in the same house for two decades without more children. Sally’s last Jefferson child was conceived in 1807, when she was only 33 and shortly before Randolph ventured west. Jefferson lived for nearly twenty years more, and during all that time Sally Hemings served as a Monticello house servant. If her Jefferson children were Thomas’s and not Randolph’s, why on earth did she stop bearing them so young?

6)    There are no reports that Thomas Jefferson took a special interest in Sally Hemings. I have seen no contemporary reports that anyone saw affection between them. Although he freed her children, he did not free Sally at his death. Given the decades during which they lived in close proximity in a house full of servants, and given the fact that Sally bore six Jefferson children (four survived), this lack of contemporary evidence of an apparent relationship between them seems to me all by itself to be a full refutation of the rumor.

7)    The story that Sally Hemings bore Thomas Jefferson’s children is rooted in vitriol. The only contemporary evidence that Thomas Jefferson might have been the father of Sally Hemings’s children was the word of a reprobate named James T. Callendar whom Jefferson had denied an appointment as the Postmaster of Richmond, Virginia, and who bore the then-president a public grudge.

8)    There is no other evidence of a Thomas-Sally relationship. Those seeking to advance the notion that Thomas Jefferson was the father of Sally Hemings’s Jefferson children have nothing but Callendar’s attacks to rely on, so they have advanced what they call additional evidence. All of it is speculative in the extreme. For example, Jefferson took measures to screen his private rooms from outside view when he returned to Monticello following his presidency. It has been suggested that he was seeking to hide a relationship with Sally, but this action of his has a simple explanation rooted in colonial custom. It had long been usual for travelers on the road to stop for the night at plantations on the way, and so many people took advantage of that fact and arranged to be near Monticello at nightfall so they could become the former president’s overnight guests that in Jefferson’s old age his Monticello became a kind of unpaid hotel. With so many strangers wandering his grounds, it is not surprising that a man so private wanted to keep people from looking in at him.

 9)    Thomas Jefferson’s personality and character make such a relationship unlikely. Eighteenth-century gentlemen thought very differently from people living today. It is easy for us to say that, what the heck, Sally looked like Thomas’s late wife and she was his property, so naturally he would have had his way with her. But gentlemen in his day were obsessed with guarding their honor, and Thomas Jefferson was fastidious about this to a fault. His extensive writings make it seem unlikely that he was capable of thinking as we do. And even though in many ways he was a different man after Martha’s death, I think the fact that Sally was his property – in the absence of any other good evidence – is thin justification for deciding that therefore he must have been the father of her children.

Mount Rushmore 10)Thomas Jefferson had emotional issues that make his having been the father unlikely. He seems to me to have been emotionally incapable of fathering mixed-race children. There, I’ve said it. My reasons for feeling so strongly about this are going to have to wait for next week’s blog post, but when you see my reasoning I think it will make sense to you.

So Thomas Jefferson is very unlikely to have been the father of Sally Hemings’s children.We are not going to know the truth until each of us eventually dies and thinks to investigate the Sally Hemings question from where the truth resides. For now, I think there is enough evidence that somebody else fathered Sally Hemings’s children that with all that Thomas Jefferson did for his country, the benefit of the doubt is the least that we owe him.

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Mainstream Science is Off the Rails

I love popular science magazines. Scientific American is my favorite, but Discover, NewScientist, and Science News also origin_6760135001are immensely entertaining. I began reading popular science a couple of decades ago as I tried to puzzle out the physics of the realities into which we graduate at death. What I learned was that many of the peculiarities of physics in the greater reality can be nicely explained once you have even a nodding acquaintance with quantum physics. I learned a lot more as well. And sadly, the more I learned about the issues that torment mainstream scientists now, the more I began to see how in nearly every case I was able to offer insights and explanations that came from my study of the afterlife evidence. Mainstream science has been off the rails and into the weeds for the past century because it still refuses to consider all the implications of quantum physics.

The most important insight to come from quantum physics is one that mainstream physicists still ignore. What we think of as human consciousness is primary and pre-existing. The great Max Planck, who won the Nobel Prize in 1918 as the father of quantum physics, said it better than I can. 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.”

Dear friends, this was the greatest scientific discovery of the twentieth century. It might have been the greatest scientific discovery of all time. And even now, a full century later, mainstream scientists continue to ignore it.

The reason why the discovery that consciousness is primary still terrifies mainstream scientists so much that to this day they walk around with their fingers in their ears and humming loudly is a topic for another blog post. I have tried to understand something that makes no sense at all, and I think I can give you partial answers. But the fact that the discovery that consciousness is primary is being altogether ignored has meant that many mainstream scientists continue to spend their careers pursuing nonsense and getting nowhere. Meanwhile, the insights that could have come from their having pursued this extraordinary discovery are left to be supplied by a business attorney with a passion for studying the afterlife evidence.

At this point, when I read most articles in popular science magazines I find myself considering possible answers to what still are puzzling questions for scientists. Here are a few examples:

1)    Where does consciousness come from? Easy-peasy! It comes from nowhere – it is primary and pre-existing. Everything that we think of as real comes from consciousness. So all those scientists looking for the source of consciousness in the brain are, sadly, wasting their careers. Dr. Bruce Grayson of the University of Virginia is one of the few mainstream scientists who are pursuing the truth about consciousness, and he offers some fascinating insights into how the afterlife evidence supports Max Planck’s discovery. Here he is, well worth a watch, from the indispensable Zammit Friday Afterlife Report. Just scroll down.

2)    Do we have free will? Experiments have shown repeatedly that when people are asked to make spontaneous decisions to do something, their bodies begin to act very slightly before their brains register the decision to act. For scientists who are working in the weeds, this seems to indicate that we don’t have free will, or that our illusory free will might be the product of something they call background noise. This is another question that the afterlife evidence answers easily. Yes indeed, we do have free will. But many of the decisions affecting our bodies are made by what you might call our superconsciousness or oversoul, a part of our minds whose activity may not be detectable in our brains at all – or may look like “background noise.” Your oversoul decides to act and then directs your body to act, and only after it has initiated that action does it inform the portion of your mind that is active in your brain. If you can back off a bit and act as an observer, you will find that most of the things your body does in the course of a day – getting out of bed, picking up a fork, tying your shoe – seem to happen automatically, without your having to think through the steps that are necessary to make them happen. If you had to think about each separate component of many of the things you do, your active awareness would be able to think about little else. So your oversoul nicely supports you by taking over a lot of that burden.

 3)    How can the universe exist and be stable? From the moment of the initial big bang some 13.8 billion years ago through the breath that you are taking now, the continued existence of this universe has depended upon many variables whose tolerances are vanishingly tiny.  Having read a number of popular-science articles in this vein, I am sorry to tell you that from a mainstream scientific perspective it is a genuine miracle that you have survived long enough to read this sentence, and it is virtually certain that you will not survive long enough to finish this blog post. Yet I am unworried. You and I are fine! The Big Bang theory tells us that everything we think of as real expanded from the size of a pencil-dot to the size of the present matter-filled universe. And in the process, it consistently maintained perfection in every parameter, so it has resisted its own destruction for what is going on 14 billion years. Come on! How likely is that? It is impossible, to be frank, unless you accept Max Planck’s insight that consciousness is basic and you realize that this universe is something akin to a thought. Consciousness began that thought from nothing, and consciousness – like an infinitely powerful computer – still continues to tweak every relevant tolerance in nanoseconds. Again, the solution to a whole set of questions now driving scientists crazy is one that Max Planck gave them a century ago. If the universe were as raw and random as most scientists imagine it to be, I would suggest that you go and hug your sweetie right now and not waste your few remaining quanta of time before the universe collapses in reading the rest of my blog post. Of course, the universe is neither raw nor random, so please read on. You are eternally safe in everlasting arms

4)    Why are Mainstream Scientists so bollixed up in Studying Trivialities? As you read the popular science magazines, over and over you see scientists earnestly drilling down to study ever more tiny things while never considering the possibility that there might be a bigger picture. It’s like watching them study fire without considering the possibility that there could be something in the air that, you know, is involved with burning. Their latest delight is having found the Higgs Boson, a tiny speck that long has been postulated because subatomic particles are just whirling energy so there needed to be a way to give those vortices mass and allow them to interact with gravity. The Higgs does it! Except that still nobody knows how it does it.  Personally, I long have thought that gravity and certain other mystifying phenomena might involve the parts of the greater reality about which scientists still have no clue. I don’t know. I do know, though, that to try to study anything in the universe without attempting to understand the role of consciousness is a fool’s errand.

5)    How is it Possible That About 95% of the Universe is Invisible to Us? Here is the biggest scientific weirdness of all! Scientists now understand that nearly everything that exists in the universe doesn’t interact with light and cannot be studied by any means now available. They call it “dark” matter and energy. They know it has to be there because of the behavior of visible celestial bodies, and they calculate now that the whole universe’s energy and mass is less than 5% detectable matter. About 27% of the universe is dark matter, and 68% is dark energy. Dark matter and dark energy constitute about 95% of this universe! Mainstream scientists are stumped, so they scratch their heads and spend their time on other things. Let’s give them a suggestion. Of course, you and I can’t be certain about what dark matter and dark energy actually are, but we can guess. Exactly where we are but at higher rates of vibration on a consciousness-energy spectrum are at least seven levels of reality that each may be more vast than this material universe. If I were to guess, I would say that for those afterlife levels to constitute at least 90% of a greater reality that includes this universe would be about right. Wouldn’t it be a fine piece of irony if mainstream scientists’ obsession with materialism and atheism turned out to have gotten in the way of their discovering that the regions where the dead reside have been part of our universe all along?origin_4290962747

Max Planck was a visionary. We can prove now that he was right. And only when scientists stop ignoring the greatest discovery in human history are they going to be able to make sense of so many things that they find perplexing now. Planck 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.”

 

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