Author: Roberta Grimes

Wealth and Power

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Before we are born, we write into the plan for our upcoming lifetime a series of challenges that operate like the machines in a gym to help us to Moneystrengthen our spiritual muscles. Things like poverty, cancer, abusive spouses, the deaths of children, and other calamities are pretty obvious spiritual lessons, but believe it or not, they aren’t the big ones. No, the evidence is strong that the toughest life lessons of all are possession of either wealth or power. Put them together, and you have a one-two punch at which even advanced beings quail.

What prompted me to discuss this problem was a recent article entitled What Wealth Does to Your Soul.  The answer turns out to be: nothing good! Over and over, studies have indicated that the richer people are, the more selfish they become and the less satisfied they tend to be in general. Then, of course, there is Lord Acton’s timeless quotation: “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Now that I understand how difficult these lessons are to master, I keep seeing examples of people struggling with them. Here are just three:

  • Many of the best afterlife communications were delivered in the first half of the twentieth century. Those newly dead in the teens and twenties had been active in the age of the Robber Barons, and some of them had amassed great wealth. I was repeatedly struck to see how much remorse they harbored over how they had used their wealth and power, and how disappointed and frustrated they were to have wasted that opportunity for spiritual growth. Some of them even said that they had set themselves back spiritually. One kept saying to his assembled family, “I really thought I could do it.” Even reading his words a century later, his palpable “Damn it!” comes through.
  • Around the year 2000, a tech company went public and created three young billionaires. I can’t recall now which IPO it was, and at this point it origin_5802606397hardly matters, but two members of the trio were often in the news. The third dropped out of sight. Soon it became known that he was giving most of his gains away. Eventually some reporter cornered him on the street and said something like, “Dude, what are you thinkin’?” This beautiful young man retorted, “If I kept more than what my family needs, how could I ever look God in the face?” He had chosen a tough lesson, but he was Acing it.
  • I have long been a fan of Thomas Jefferson. He was an intellectual and spiritual giant, and for a number of reasons I think he was the greatest American of the eighteenth century. In doing decades of afterlife research, I have accumulated much miscellaneous information, including the apparent fact that after that important lifetime he had needed one more as a poor farmer before he could retire from incarnating. His reason? “Jefferson could have been my last lifetime, but I had too much power and I didn’t always use it well.”

 As is true of nearly everything that we learn in studying the afterlife evidence, Jesus told us all of this long ago. He said, “Many who are first will be last, and the last first.” (MK 10:31) “The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoeverorigin_3393763298 exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.” (MT 23:11-12) And “I tell you the truth, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” (MK 10:15) These pretty words are not just words! The afterlife evidence confirms that they are statements of fact about the spiritual physics that governs all our lives.

So much of what Jesus says in the Gospels sounds like only pretty words until we put together nearly 200 years of messages from the dead and come to see that it is profoundest wisdom. Only “the poor in spirit” are able to make spiritual progress toward becoming “the pure of heart” who approach reunion with God. It wouldn’t be a bad idea to put the Beatitudes of Jesus at the core of your spiritual reading:

“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.

Blessed are they who mourn,
for they shall be comforted.

Blessed are the meek,
for they shall inherit the earth.

Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they shall be satisfied.

Blessed are the merciful,
for they shall obtain mercy.

Blessed are the pure of heart,
for they shall see God.

Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they shall be called children of God.

Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” (MT 5:3-10)

 

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Race and Gender

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Recently I received an email from the granddaughter of an American slave who asked a Black Womandistressing question. She said that people of her race are too often thwarted in life, and she asked me whether racial differences are “a joke from God.” She especially wanted to know whether in the afterlife everyone would be equal. Her question is heartbreaking, but its answer is thrilling.

Each human mind is a powerful and eternal part of the Mind of God. Minds have no racial characteristics whatsoever. Furthermore:

  • The evidence is strong that nearly all of us live many earth-lifetimes. Most of us seem to live at least one lifetime of each race, although we favor one race and one general culture for most of our lifetimes. Apparently this makes our adjustment to each new lifetime easier, so it lets us concentrate on our planned lessons with fewer distractions.
  • Dealing with the issues raised by superficial differences among people can give us powerful opportunities for learning to better love and forgive. Evidence suggests that those whose present lifetimes include racial or cultural issues planned those situations as important spiritual lessons.
  • Those who have victimized people of another race or class often plan in a subsequent lifetime to be members of the group that they tormented. There is evidence that many American slaveholders and Jim Crow-era racists planned subsequent lifetimes as disadvantaged black people.

So I was happy to tell my correspondent that when she enters the afterlife levels her new body will be of whichever skin shade she prefers. Her only legacy from her lifetime lived as a person of color will be whatever spiritual lessons she has learned from the experience, so my hope is that she is making the most of them!

Gender, too, is a characteristic of our earthly bodies that does not relate to our minds. All of us live both male and female earth-lifetimes, although – as with race – we tend to favor one gender.

I have had a number of regressions and past-life readings, and in every previous lifetime of which I am aware I was a male. One psychic told me that I have always been male, although I doubt that. Still, I vividly recall being about a year old and barely walking, and discovering as I toddled toward my bath that this body was missing something essential! My thought was, “Oh. I’m the other kind this time.” My exact thought, word for word: I swear. We aren’t even supposed to form memories so Asian Womanearly, but the shock of my gender-switch was so great that I still can distinctly recall that moment.

Rather than being God’s joke, I have come to think of these racial and gender differences as God’s gift. Consider how boring our lives would be if everyone looked and acted alike! It’s important, however, that we not forget that racial and gender differences are entirely on the surface. They don’t exist at the level of our minds. And learning to more perfectly love and forgive in the face of these extra challenges is a primary reason why we are alive.

 

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Pets in the Afterlife

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Woman with Dogs and CatIf there is one question I am asked more frequently than any other it is whether our companion animals are waiting for us in the afterlife levels. Some people lead with a personal challenge: “If my dogs can’t be there, I’m not going!” I understand how they feel. A heaven without our animal friends would not be a heaven at all, so I’m delighted to report to you that every animal we ever have loved awaits us in a beautiful eternal reality where love never ends.

There are many things about the afterlife that we can say are more than likely, based upon nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. This is one thing, though, of which there is no doubt.

Animals are of a fundamentally different spiritual nature than human beings. I have seen messages from channeled entities saying that animals are of a “purer” nature, but I’m not even sure what that means; I know only that animals have spiritual identities, and those identities are unique to each kind of animal. When creatures die in the wild, or when domestic animals die without a close human bond, they return to what is sometimes called a “group soul” that is specific to their species. However, when any kind of non-human creature develops a love-bond with a person, that animal develops a separate identity. It enters our afterlife levels as a young and healthy version of itself, and there it awaits the joyous day when it can again lick our face or perch upon our finger or jump up, purring, into our arms.

You can immediately see a problem. People who enjoy their animal companions will love many cats or dogs or birds in their lifetimes, and the evidence suggests that all of them are going to be waiting for their human friends. There are early-twentieth-century communications where someone who has been in the Summerland for awhile complains about the mob of dogs and cats that greeted a new arrival, and nothing would do but that she first must pat every one of them before human loved ones could get near enough to hug her.

It isn’t only beloved dogs and cats and parakeets that await us, but farm and circus animals that have been loved by a human being likewise develop independent minds sufficient for them to be waiting in the Summerland. I have just had a wonderful reading with a psychic medium, my first in more than a decade, and my relatives and guides chose to assemble on my grandparents’ dairy farm. The medium kept remarking about how beautiful the farm was, and how abundant were the dairy cows, each one of which must in life have been a special pet of my grandfather’s.

Sometimes our animals will be among the deathbed visitors who help us transition. Reports of dogs at deathbeds are common. One early-twentieth-century hermit who had trusted no human being in life reportedly was met at his deathbed by a big white horse he must at some point have loved.

Boy with Horse

Our animals often give us post-death signs and communications. A familiar bark or meow, a rub against a leg, or a cold nose against an arm: these are frequent little signs. Animals that had slept on our beds will sometimes continue to do that, so we might be reading or watching TV and we will distinctly feel the animal jump up onto the bed and then see and feel the little paw-indentations as the animal walks to its sleeping place, where we will see and feel the greater indentation as the animal curls to sleep beside our feet. Full-blown visions of animals are rare, but they can happen, too.

My most extraordinary animal communication was a visitation dream from my horse. There was Beau in harness in front of me, pulling the cart in which he and I had enjoyed exploring the dirt roads near our home. He was trotting along happily, and I was in rapture. The only problem with driving a horse is the bugs in your teeth because you can’t stop grinning. Then we had, one after another, three encounters with diesel eighteen-wheelers that had no business on wilderness roads. Each time, as the truck bore down on us, I steered Beau into the roadside bushes and fast jumped out of the cart to hug his head against my chest so he wouldn’t bolt as the truck roared past us. As the third truck – perhaps his death – was approaching, I woke up.

That had been a communication dream, but what had it meant? In Child with Birdminutes, I knew. We had moved twice during his lifetime, and Beau was thanking me that he had been kept safe during both of the moves of his life and gently cared for until he died. After that dream, I have decided that I won’t ride or drive a horse again until my friend and I are reunited and I can have bugs in my teeth forevermore.

The fact that simply being loved by a person can give an animal an independent existence is one more indication of two things that the afterlife evidence consistently tells us. Our minds are integral parts of the eternal and infinitely creative Mind that brings forth the universe. And of every power that exists, by far the greatest power is love.

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Physicists Unchained

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

To be a physicist in the early twenty-first century looks like the most frustrating job in the universe. I say this because being even a devoted physics Isaac Newton Plaquegroupie reading popular-science versions of what physicists are up to now feels mind-shriveling. I will give you some quick examples from the recent press:

Apparently the Big Bang, now thoroughly engrained in our minds as the way the universe started, isn’t such a sure thing anymore. Perhaps the universe instead is in a steady state. To quote a summary of a recent paper on phys.org: “In physical terms, the (steady state) model describes the universe as being filled with a quantum fluid. The scientists propose that this fluid might be composed of gravitons—hypothetical massless particles that mediate the force of gravity. If they exist, gravitons are thought to play a key role in a theory of quantum gravity.” (My emphasis.)

Time is one of the few things that everyone on earth experiences, but for physicists it is still a mystery. To quote a recent puzzling article in my beloved Scientific American, “Whether through Newton’s gravitation, Maxwell’s electrodynamics, Einstein’s special and general relativity or quantum mechanics, all the equations that best describe our universe work perfectly if time flows forward or backward… Of course the world we experience is entirely different….” 

Physicists are attempting to study dark matter, which is called “dark” only because it Erwin Schrodinger Sculpture In University of Vienna Courtyard -won’t interact with photons of light. They tell us that everything that we think of as real makes up only 4-5% of the universe, while dark matter makes up 23-27%. (Apparently estimates vary.) So in an effort to study a mass which is five times the size of the known universe, physicists are looking for wimps thousands of feet beneath the surface of the earth. This time we’re reading The Wall Street Journal: “A wimp—a weakly interacting massive particle—is thought to be the stuff of dark matter, an invisible substance that makes up about a quarter of the universe but has never been seen by humans.” I have talked previously about the fact that dark matter is a candidate to be the afterlife levels of reality, and there are physicists who speculate that it might be an actual inhabited reality. But rather than investigating either of these theories, physicists are spending billions of dollars investigating the unlikely possibility that five-sixths of the matter in the universe is a fluff of particles constituting nothing.

Meanwhile, Quanta Magazine tells us that “Physicists have discovered a jewel-like geometric object that dramatically simplifies calculations of particle interactions and challenges the notion that space and time are fundamental components of reality.” Oops.

There’s more, but I can see that you are nodding off. My point is that some very big things are all at once going wrong in physics.

  • There no longer is any “there” there. Even what were believed for decades to be established aspects of reality are turning out to be on shaky ground. Practicing physicists will tell you that this uncertainty is part of the joy of their profession, but those of us cheering from the bleachers would like to see a few throws hit the basket. We hope for at least a dawning sense of what actually is going on. Yet the response of most working physicists to uncertainty seems to be just to drill down further on theories and methods that make the big picture even harder to grasp.
  • Physicists insist on studying only part of what evidence suggests is real. We have understood for at least a century that what we think of as solid matter is not solid, but still universities continue to enforce atheistic materialism as a fundamental dogma. Doing physics now is like trying to understand why there is water on the floor while making it taboo for anyone to study the condition of the roof.
  • Modern physicists are entranced with particles. Not phenomena. Not concepts. Not great sweeps of space. Indeed, not much of anything on the macro – or even on the visible – level. Using just a search for one kind of particle to study matter at least five times greater than all the visible matter that exists, and a search for a hypothetical particle to help determine how the universe began, makes little sense to you and me.

I have come to think that holding atheistic materialism as a core dogma has at last brought physics to a true dead-end. There simply is nothing that is both material and bigger than the size of an atom that has not already been well studied, which means that drilling down into atoms is all that physicists have left. So for universities to drop all dogmas and allow physicists to study whatever turns up would shine some much-needed light into physics.

What afterlife researchers have discovered is far more than just the fact that human origin_4290962747minds are eternal. We are learning a great many interesting things about each of the very issues that are puzzling and confounding physicists today. And looking at what we have to show them would at least give physicists the welcome chance to go back to sometimes studying things that can be seen with the naked eye.

Let’s take the concept of time as one example of where considering the afterlife evidence might be of use to working physicists. Here is some of what afterlife researchers are learning apparently is true about time:

  • Time is a linear constant only in this material universe. And the universe as we perceive it makes up only maybe one-seventh of what we are able to establish exists.
  • In the reality that we enter at death, time is subjective. We can choose to experience it either consistently or once in awhile, or we can dwell happily outside it. Imagining how being free of time might feel is difficult from our perspective, but from my point of view the very thought is wonderful!
  • When viewed from outside the material universe, all of time within the universe is happening at once. I understand that the very notion of this makes your eyes cross. We are told, too, that while we live multiple lives, all our lifetimes are happening at the same time.

Physicists used to understand time a lot better than they do now. Albert Einstein said, “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” He also said, “The distinction between past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” He understood that time is a non-fundamental construct that operates as an arrow for convenience. The afterlife evidence helps us understand that Einstein was spectacularly right.

How might it work for universities to throw out the obsoleted dogma of atheistic materialism and allow physicists to include studying the roof in their effort to better understand why there is water on the floor?

Requiring scientists charged with understanding all of reality to study only a portion of it renders it impossible for them to do anything that is ultimately productive. If there were no non-material component to reality, then it would be legitimate for university gatekeepers to forbid physicists from being distracted into researching things that are not real. The fact is, though, that over the past nearly two hundred years we have accumulated abundant and consistent evidence that much of what is Einsteinreal – perhaps most of what is real – is not material. Yet it interacts with and profoundly influences the material reality that physicists are trying without much success to understand. So might it be useful to the advancement of physics for universities to abandon their century-old dogma of adamant atheistic materialism?

As the saying goes, at this point it can’t hurt.

 

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The Importance of Forgiving Yourself

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

After my post on radical forgiveness I heard from people who said their toughest Hourglassbattle was forgiving themselves. Self-forgiveness is hard for many of us, perhaps because those raised in Christianity have been steeped in the pain of our inherent sinfulness. The afterlife evidence has some pretty important news for us on that score! But before we talk about how we can best deal with the notion of original sin, let’s first understand why learning self-forgiveness is so important.

Afterlife communicators consistently suggest that there is indeed a judgment, but neither God nor any religious figure ever is our afterlife judge. Instead, soon after our deaths we undergo a holographic life review in which we feel again every emotion of our lives, and we also feel all the emotions that our actions have engendered in others. Then, while we are reeling from the shock of that, we are told that it is time to forgive ourselves. The dead consistently say that each of us will be our own afterlife judge! And believe it or not, Jesus has been telling us the same thing for two thousand years.

It’s important to remember that when Jesus lived, to speak against the tenets of Judaism could bring a prompt death sentence. The crowds that followed him included Temple spies, but these spies were often changed, so one of Jesus’s devices for thwarting arrest was to parcel out bits of truth on different days. Fresh spies would be oblivious, but his followers could put it all together.

Few Christians seem to have noticed that Jesus told us two thousand years ago that God doesn’t judge us.

“Moreover, the Father judges no one, but has entrusted all judgment to the Son, that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father.” (JN 5:21-23)

Okay, so now Jesus has us focused on the notion that God has made him our new judge. Then on another day, before different Temple spies, he gives us these additional insights.

“As for the person who hears my words but does not keep them, I do not judge him. For I did not come to judge the world, but to save it.” (JN 12:47)

So God doesn’t judge us and Jesus doesn’t judge us. Who then will be our afterlife judge? On a different day, with different Temple spies, he gives us the same answer that the dead give us.

“Do not judge, or you too will be judged. For in the same way you judge others, you will be judged, and with the measure you use, it will be measured to you.” (MT 7:1-2).

For Jesus to have said all at once that God doesn’t judge us, but instead each of us will be our own judge, would have brought him to the cross a lot sooner. He had to be cagey about it. Unfortunately, these are subtleties that mainstream Christianity has missed. But Jesus said it two thousand years ago, and the dead are telling us the same thing today: after death, each of us will be our own judge. So the art of self-forgiveness is the most important thing that we can learn in our lives.

The fact that self-forgiveness is so important means that the central Christian teaching that we are reprobates so repulsive to God that Jesus had to die to “save” us is plain tragic. Fortunately, though, the afterlife evidence gives us a set of wonderful truths to join with the beautiful teachings of Jesus and replace origin_3393763298the doctrine of original sin. What we learn from nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead is that each of our minds is part of eternal Mind – each of us is part of God, if you will – and each of us is infinitely loved. The evidence is strong that no matter what we do, God never judges us. God seems not even to notice. It’s as if each of us is God’s treasured toddler, blundering about and getting into trouble but incapable of doing anything wrong.

Even after you have replaced the flawed notion of original sin with the evidence-based truth of original perfection, learning self-forgiveness can be tough. In my experience, your best approach is first to learn to forgive others, immediately and completely, no matter what they do. As Jesus says, we should forgive even someone who wrongs us repeatedly, “not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (MT 18:21-23) Learn to practice automatic love and forgiveness, so when you stand before the bar of your own unfortunate mistakes in this life you will have the judgment of a supportive being who will give you only perfect love.

 

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Radical Forgiveness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus’s disciple asked him, “Lord, how many times shall I forgive my brother when he MM Quotesins against me? Up to seven times?” Jesus answered, “I tell you, not seven times, but seventy-seven times.” (MT 18:21-23) No matter how many times someone does you wrong, you are meant to forgive without a thought. Every time.

I was reminded to talk about forgiveness by an article in the current Atlantic which cites the psychological and even the physical health benefits to be expected from forgiving. What struck me when I read what was an excellent article on a topic essential to human wellbeing was that it still did not go far enough. So let’s summarize what the dead tell us is the reason why we are born at all. Again, I think Jesus says it best:

“‘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 sons of your Father in heaven…. Be perfect, therefore, as your heavenly Father is perfect.” (MT 5:43-48)

Human life is a school in which we are meant to learn to love the way God Mandelaloves: universally and completely. That’s it! And that’s all. Learning to love is why we live in families, why we are crowded enough to have to deal with others, why some of those we deal with do us wrong, and why bad things happen to good people. Every occurrence in your life is either love or a call for love. So no matter the question, love is always the answer.

Forgiving the big and little bruises that come from human interactions is an essential precursor to our learning to love perfectly. Holding grudges against family or friends gets in the way of our loving them, so even in happy family situations the need to forgive keeps coming up. This is “intimate forgiveness,” the simple overlooking of negative interactions with the people we love. And it is basic stuff! It’s kindergarten. The kind of forgiveness that learning to love perfectly requires of us is quite a bit harder.

Both Jesus and the dead who communicate with us urge us to focus on what we might call “radical forgiveness,” which means forgiving every wrong ever done by anyone, no matter how life-changing it might be, as if it never happened at all.

Think about that!

We are meant to learn automatic, reflexive, universal, and complete forgiveness.

Here are some important facts about the process of radical forgiveness:

  • Forgiveness is not approval. If someone harms you or harms someone you love, immediate forgiveness is essential. You needn’t (and you likely shouldn’t) try to approve of whatever wrong was done.
  • You don’t have to voice your forgiveness to the offender. In family situations it may be important that you tell your sister or your dad that you forgive, but in most other situations it is fine (and much easier) to forgive privately and move on.
  • Forgiveness is for you alone. Except within families, the wrongdoer likely doesn’t care whether or not you forgive, so forgiveness is the gift that you give to yourself. And what a gift it is! As you learn to do it better, you will find that radical forgiveness makes you feel free and glorious.
  • Forgiveness becomes ever easier. When I first came to understand the importance of forgiving every wrong, I was an Olympics-level holder of grudges. To be alive was to keep score! At last, three decades later, I have mastered automatic forgiveness. The difference is like setting down a hundred pounds of unnecessary garbage so you can dance your way through life.
  • There is no wrong that cannot be forgiven. When you treat forgiveness as an exercise that is essential to your spiritual health, you will find that there is not much difference between a stubbed toe and a murder from the perspective of forgiving every wrong.

Human minds are eternal! When measured against forever, these unpleasant interactions with others on earth really amount to precisely nothing.

MLKSo, how do we manage radical forgiveness? The easiest way feels like a physical process. What I did in the beginning was to package the wrong in my mind, gather it all up and wrap it together. Then I would think, “I forgive and release!” and let it go. I let it go physically: I pushed it away. Sometimes the darned thing would come back so I would have to go through the process again, but now my forgiveness is so automatic that I seldom give it a thought. Outrage turns out to be a lot like anger. If you court it and really let yourself feel it, you are going to feel a lot more of it; but if you refuse to give it mind-space, soon it doesn’t even get started. You still notice the wrong, and you recall how that sort of thing used to really wreck your day, but now it doesn’t bother you at all.

Learning automatic forgiveness is the foundation of our spiritual growth. It is essential to our learning all the wonders of perfect love. And it makes your life easier. And so much happier!

 

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Editing the Bible

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

In the wake of recent terrorist attacks that seem to have been inspired by Old Testamentholy writ, certain helpful folks have suggested that the Koran may need editing. Well, a certain other book could use a bit of editing as well.

My primary objection to mainstream Christianity is that it does not follow Jesus. It follows instead a set of dogmas that were first advanced by the Apostle Paul as he tried to make sense of the unexpected and calamitous death of the Messiah. Paul did the only thing he could think to do, which was to wrap the words of Jesus in first-century Jewish beliefs and practices that are for the most part abhorrent now.

With the plain words of Jesus suggesting that his mission was to wean the Jews from what was already ancient scripture and teach them that they could approach God directly, this stubborn adherence two thousand years later to beliefs that are not supported by either the teachings of Jesus or the afterlife evidence is frustrating for me. So you can imagine my delight when a friend sent me the following email that shows much better than I ever could why Christians and Jews alike should be willing to give God the right to deliver new revelation.

My friend says:

In her radio show, Dr Laura Schlesinger said that, “as an observant Orthodox
Jew, homosexuality is an abomination according to Leviticus 18:22, and
cannot be condoned under any circumstance.”  The following response is an
open letter to Dr. Laura, penned by a US resident, which was posted on the
Internet:

——————————————————————————–

Dear Dr. Laura:

Thank you for doing so much to educate people regarding God’s Law. I have
learned a great deal from your show, and try to share that knowledge with as
many people as I can. When someone tries to defend the homosexual
lifestyle, for example, I simply remind them that Leviticus 18:22 clearly
states it to be an abomination …. End of debate.

I do need some advice from you, however, regarding some other elements of
God’s Laws and how to follow them.

* Leviticus 25:44 states that I may possess slaves, both male and female,
provided they are purchased from neighbouring nations. A friend of mine
claims that this applies to Mexicans, but not Canadians.  Can you clarify?
Why can’t I own Canadians?

* I would like to sell my daughter into slavery, as sanctioned in Exodus
21:7. In this day and age, what do you think would be a fair price for her?

* I know that I am allowed no contact with a woman while she is in her
period of Menstrual uncleanliness – Lev15: 19-24. The problem is how do I
tell?  I have tried asking, but most women take offense.

* When I burn a bull on the altar as a sacrifice, I know it creates a
pleasing odour for the Lord – Lev.1:9. The problem is my neighbours. They
claim the odour is not pleasing to them. Should I smite them?

* I have a neighbour who insists on working on the Sabbath. Exodus 35:2
clearly states he should be put to death. Am I morally obligated to kill
him myself, or should I ask the police to do it?

* A friend of mine feels that even though eating shellfish is an
abomination, Lev. 11:10, it is a lesser abomination than homosexuality. I
don’t agree. Can you settle this? Are there ‘degrees’ of abomination?

* Lev. 21:20 states that I may not approach the altar of God if I have a
defect in my sight. I have to admit that I wear reading glasses. Does my
vision have to be 20/20, or is there some wiggle-room here?

* Most of my male friends get their hair trimmed, including the hair
around their temples, even though this is expressly forbidden by Lev. 19:27.
How should they die?

* I know from Lev. 11:6-8 that touching the skin of a dead pig makes me
unclean, but may I still play football if I wear gloves?

* My uncle has a farm. He violates Lev.19:19 by planting two different
crops in the same field, as does his wife by wearing garments made of two
different kinds of thread (cotton/polyester blend). He also tends to curse
and blaspheme a lot. Is it really necessary that we go to all the trouble
of getting the whole town together to stone them? (Lev.24:10-16) Couldn’t we
just burn them to death at a private family affair, like we do with people
who sleep with their in-laws? (Lev. 20:14)

I know you have studied these things extensively and thus enjoy
considerable expertise in such matters, so I’m confident you can help.
Thank you again for reminding us that God’s word is eternal and unchanging.

Your adoring fan….
James M Kauffman, Ed.D. Professor Emeritus, Dept. Of Curriculum,
Instruction, and Special Education University of Virginia

Dr. Kauffman makes such a brilliant point. Anyone who insists upon using the Old Testament to condemn homosexuality – or indeed to condemn anything at all! – had better be prepared to start condoning many things that people of good will find abhorrent.

Fortunately, although most Christians haven’t noticed this detail, two thousand years ago Jesus himself abolished all but two Old Testament rules. He said, “‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ ProphetsThis 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)

In first-century Samaria and Judea, what we call the Old Testament was commonly called “the Law and the Prophets.” Jesus is saying that the whole of the Old Testament comes down to the simple commands that we love God and we love one another. Period!

Let’s be clear about this. Anyone, whether Christian or Jew, who bludgeons others with Old Testament rules while he himself cuts his hair or wears blended fabrics or plays football or does a little work on the Sabbath is a hypocrite. If he is a professed Christian, he also is showing a sorry ignorance of the words of Jesus.

(My friend who sent the above email adds, “It would be a damn shame if we couldn’t own a Canadian.” Heh.)

 

photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/pelegrino/4610934992/”>Nick in exsilio</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>cc</a>
photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/18909153@N08/5954223821/”>Cross Duck</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>cc</a>

The Hard Problem

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

As a follow up to last week’s post about the wonderful Rupert Sheldrake and his Consciousnesspioneering work in studying aspects of consciousness, I’m going to offer you another great TED talk that was delivered by Australian philosopher and cognitive scientist David Chalmers in 2014. Chalmers shares with us here some extraordinary insights about consciousness. And surprisingly, his TED talk has not yet been banned!

Human consciousness is primary and pre-existing. Still stuck as they are in their core dogma of atheistic materialism that insists that the universe is a clockwork machine, most mainstream scientists still find the primary role of consciousness impossible to grasp. And their obtuseness is especially surprising in view of the fact that some leading physicists have known or suspected the truth about consciousness for more than a century. Max Planck, who in 1918 won a Nobel Prize in physics as the father of quantum theory, said it well. Based upon his lifetime of research in the field of quantum physics, 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.”

Given the overwhelming scientific evidence that Max Planck was right, it’s astonishing that so many decades later the primary scientific dogma remains atheistic materialism. Any notion that consciousness might be more than an artifact of our brains is viewed by the mainstream scientific community as heresy, and in the UK and in some other countries even the mention of it is banned.

Fortunately I’m writing in the United States, so I’m able to share this wonderful, respectful TED talk in which David Chalmers proposes the possibility that consciousness, you know, just might be primary after all. And a blog post about it to boot.

People tell me they enjoy the links I share, so here is one while we’re at it that further illustrates the primacy of consciousness. “Terminal lucidity” is a term lately coined to refer to the fact that many of those whose brains are entirely fried before death will recover astonishing abilities as their bodies begin to die. There are a number of reports of end-stage Alzheimer’s patients and others who were helpless or even comatose unexpectedly becoming aware and chatting normally with those around them in the minutes before their deaths. No problem at all for you and me to explain, since the mind as it disengages from the body simply is regaining the powers that had been suppressed by the damagedorigin_4290962747 brain’s faulty wiring. But entirely beyond the ken of mainstream scientists. An endless bounty of such peculiarities will be more readily understood once the faulty dogma of atheistic materialism is shown to be a train to nowhere, and scientists return after more than a century to trying to figure out what is true.

David Chalmers calls the question of why we even have conscious awareness to be the “hard problem” of consciousness. And hard it certainly is! Mainstream scientists cannot begin to learn anything important about human consciousness until they stop looking for consciousness in the brain, and instead follow the lead of brilliant researchers like Chalmers and the immortal Max Planck and begin to investigate the possibility that human consciousness might be important, after all.

 

photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/alicepopkorn/4322458196/”>AlicePopkorn</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>cc</a>

photo credit: <a href=”https://www.flickr.com/photos/fischerfotos/7408813732/”>Mark Fischer</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>cc</a> 

The Science Delusion

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One of the few trained scientists making a career in studying the greater reality is Rupert Sheldrake. His curiosity about all the many phenomena that Rupert-Sheldrake-Quotes-1spring from the fact that reality is based in consciousness has greatly enhanced our understanding of oddities ranging from the sense of being stared at and the fact that dogs can anticipate their owners’ arrival to the astonishing way in which for one laboratory animal anywhere on earth to learn something new makes it easier for all other members of the same species to master the same trick.

All of reality is consciousness-based. All higher living things are connected by mind. The fact that most traditional scientists remain stuck in a clockwork view of reality that is based in the dogma of atheistic materialism does nothing whatsoever to change what us true, but it only renders useless a lot of the scientific research that is being done today. And it ensures that when eventually the longstanding scientific walls against the truth are breached, a lot of the scientists working now are going to look ridiculous.

Here is a great Scientific American interview with Dr. Sheldrake. And thanks to Victor and Wendy Zammit’s free Friday Afterlife Report, here is Dr. Sheldrake’s wonderful 2012 TEDx talk on “The Science Delusion.” This TEDx Talk actually, incredibly, was BANNED because it delivers information that conflicts with mainstream scientific dogmas.  Materialist scientists apparently are terrified of the free and open exchange of ideas. Indeed, their fear seems to be increasing as the Internet renders impossible their longstanding suppression of ideas and facts that they have managed to keep from public awareness for decades because they find them inconvenient.

This is such an exciting time to be alive! Too many visionaries like Rupert Sheldrake have spent their whole careers in undeserved obscurity, while scientists stuck in materialist dogmas that by now have little to do with reality have maintained their university careers. Fortunately for you and me and other open-minded seekers of the truth, this nonsensical suppression of information that some scientists find inconvenient seems to be about to end.

Did Jesus Mean to Start Christianity?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

This Christmas brought more of the same old battle over whether Jesus was the founder of Christianity. It’s origin_2184637971a spurious dispute. The fact that the Apostle Paul and not Jesus was the founder of Christianity seems incontrovertible to me. Jesus died before the religion began. Yes, he sent out his disciples to spread his teachings after his death, but those teachings on love and forgiveness had nothing to do with the doctrine of sacrificial redemption upon which Paul’s Christianity is based.

 In trying to put the notion to rest that Christianity actually was founded by Paul, the author of the article linked above makes arguments that miss the point. He says, “Every year, it seems, an attempt is made, usually around the Christian holidays, to debunk some aspect of Christian belief— usually involving the Virgin birth, or Jesus’ resurrection, or his relationship with women. This year features an effort to depose Jesus as the founder of the Christian church, replacing him with the apostle Paul.” I don’t see comparing the Gospel words of Jesus with the dogmas of the religion that bears his name to be an attempt to depose anyone. Rather, it is an attempt to better understand what actually happened. The author above insists that the notion that Paul and not Jesus founded Christianity “is a reheated version of an old theory that has been exhaustively debated, and basically put to rest among serious scholars of Christianity.” But then the author makes no attempt whatsoever to support this statement.

So, what does Jesus have to say about religions? First, here is his opinion of clergymen:

“Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.” (MK 12:38-40)

And his opinion of religious traditions:

“And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’” (MT 15:3-9)

“You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to the traditions of men… You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions.” (MK 7:8-9)

He was emphatic in telling us that we should worship God as individuals:

“When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and on the street corners to be seen by men. I tell you the truth, they have received their reward in full. When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (MT 6:5-6)

Indeed, far from trying to establish a religion, the focus of Jesus’s Gospel ministry seems to have been upon freeing us from religious dogmas and encouraging us to approach God individually:

“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; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door is opened.” (LK 11:9-10)

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46)

“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” (JN 8:31-32)

He says, “the truth will set you free.” But, from what does learning the truth set us free? Based upon what Jesus says in the Gospels, it is hard to avoid the creeping suspicion that what he actually came to do was to free us from religions altogether so we could approach God on our own.

With all of this in mind, the debate over whether or not Jesus founded Christianity seems nonsensical to me. There is no Gospel evidence beyond a couple of remarks that are likely edits that Jesus meant to start a religion. And there is plentiful Gospel evidence that his primary purpose was to enlighten us about the nature of God and the meaning and purpose of human life, so perhaps we might move beyond needing religions and learn to relate to God directly.

Of course Jesus didn’t mean to start Christianity! Obviously Christianity is actually “Paulianity”! Anyone who disputes that fact displays a lack of understanding of the Gospels and of early church history. Christianity is based on the ideas of a man who never knew Jesus in life, and who used Hebrew prophesy and first-century Hebrew sacrificial practices to establish a set of dogmas around which he could build a religion. Nothing in the Gospels suggests that Jesus thought he was a human sacrifice. Nothing suggests that he knew a God so petty and so unforgiving that such a barbaric sacrifice was necessary. The core dogmas of Christianity were Paul’s ideas. And they made sense to people at the time, back when Jews still sacrificed animals in the Temple. But why do they make sense to anybody now?

Please let me be clear. My point here is simply that Jesus doesn’t seem to have intended to found a new religion, and the religion that now bears his name doesn’t bear much relationship to what Jesus taught.  Paul’s New Testament letters set forth a doctrine of sacrificial redemption that did not originate with Jesus, and that now is the core of  Christianity.

I think it’s important to add here that the doctrine of sacrificial redemption has been refuted by the afterlife evidence. Scholars have found no hint in nearly two hundred years of communications from the dead that God ever has judged anyone, and nor have we found any evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross has redeemed a single human being. Instead, the afterlife evidence abundantly indicates that Jesus in the Gospels tells us things about God, reality, death, and the afterlife that we could not have origin_3393763298confirmed by any means until at least the twentieth century.

So Christianity is wrong, but Jesus is right!

And had Christianity been based not in Paul’s ideas, but rather in the teachings of Jesus, its dogmas today would be so different. The least that we owe Jesus now is an open-minded re-examination in an effort to better understand his actual meaning and his message.

I am grateful to Paul. If he hadn’t packaged the teachings of Jesus in first-century Hebrew religious ideas, we would not have those teachings today. Thank you, Paul! Now perhaps it’s time to open your gift.

 

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