Author: Roberta Grimes

Daring to Study the Afterlife Evidence

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

            “There are two ways to be fooled. One is to believe what isn’t true; the other is to refuse to believe what is true.”– Philosopher Soren Kierkegaard

           Having spent decades studying more than 150 years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead, it astonishes me to see how hard people who consider themselves to be defenders of science still are fighting against the possibility that any of this might be true. They never investigate anything! How can people with scientific training altogether refuse to consider whole categories of documented phenomena that have real-world effects? The problem seems to be that they are fearful that what they might find could disrupt their scientific assumptions and perhaps even derail their careers. That’s it? That’s their problem? And they still call themselves scientists?

I am a business lawyer. I had no particular belief system to support when I started this investigation, nor do I have one now. I origin_299431532(1)remain skeptical of every new afterlife-related detail, but at least I do investigate things! I look for answers. And after I have assembled enough evidence of all stripes to draw a rational conclusion, I draw that conclusion and explain where it came from. What these scientific Luddites do is to refuse to investigate anything that doesn’t fit their predetermined beliefs. They even presume to post on the Internet flat lies about the afterlife evidence and about those who would investigate the evidence. Have they no self-awareness at all?

 “First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” – Mahatma Gandhi

           Ignoring the afterlife evidence worked amazingly well throughout the twentieth century. If scientists won’t talk about something, and if the three network channels plus PBS won’t cover it, then it must not exist. But the Internet has dramatically increased the public’s access to information of all kinds, and in the area of afterlife evidence and afterlife-related science the effect of the Internet has been explosive. Just as Baby Boomers are entering the what’s-next stage of their lives and glimpsing death on the horizon, there is a flood of fresh afterlife-related information waiting for them.

           ”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.” – Physicist Max Planck, winner of the 1918 Nobel Prize for Quantum Physics

         We are coming to see, too, that cutting-edge science supports what the afterlife evidence tells us is true. It all fits together so origin_4290962747beautifully! Quantum physics is a kind of plug that connects the physics operating in the areas of reality that we enter at death with the physics that functions only in this material universe. The earliest quantum physicists realized that consciousness is primary. Scientists today still revere these folks! Why won’t they listen to them? Max Planck and his fellows knew a hundred years ago that the math-based, clockwork model of physics that is still so beloved of mainstream science is insufficient to explain what we know about reality, even if we ignore the afterlife evidence altogether.

So at this point we are somewhere between the “laugh at you” and “fight you” stages of Gandhi’s formulation. And as the “fight you” stage intensifies, it seems clear that mainstream scientific apologists are going to fight to their own bitter end, until the moment when we reach a tipping point in the public’s understanding. Awareness of the truth is spreading. At some point there will be one new bit of evidence – perhaps a telephone for talking with the dead – that is so popular, and so undeniable, that all the lying on earth by scientific apologists won’t be able to save mainstream science from looking supremely foolish. And not only foolish, but venal. If mainstream scientists had at any point in the past hundred years been willing to open their minds enough to investigate the afterlife evidence, the truth could have been known by everyone long since. And the fearful and bereaved could have been spared so much pain.

           Still, now we have every reason for cheer. It has taken us much too long to get here, but in this new century truth will win.

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“The Chances Would be Infinite Against Their All Agreeing in the Same Falsehood”

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Michael Tymn is a venerable light in the field of afterlife research, a meticulous and fearless scholar whose blog is a must-read for me. Michael is an expert on nineteenth-century deep-trance and physical mediums, and his books are informative and beautifully written. In his current blog post he talks about Adin Ballou, his new candidate for the first professional psychical researcher by virtue of Ballou’s recently-rediscovered 1852 book, An Exposition of Views Respecting the Principal Facts, Causes and Peculiarities Involved in Spirit Manifestations Together with Interesting Phenomenal Statements and Communications.

I had never heard of Mr. Ballou, but Michael’s diligence in all he does makes me think that, sure, friend Ballou may well have been the earliest pioneering psychical researcher. And what delights me is what Ballou reports to have been a summary of the teachings of the spirits he interviewed in the course of his research. Even given the fact that these interviews took place more than 150 years ago, and given the different attitudes and suppositions of modern interviewers as opposed to those in Ballou’s day, the spirits then were telling him precisely the same things that they are telling us now. To wit, and directly quoting the ancient researcher:

* There are seven spirit spheres, or circles, inferior to the heavenly or celestial spheres, and each sphere or circle has several degrees. Man progresses through these spheres, drawing nearer and nearer to God, or nearer to the divine standard of perfection.

* Death does not change man’s real character, nor his proper spirit sphere, nor his capability to make progress, nor the laws of progress.

* Many spirits remain very long in the lower spheres, but while they are “spirits in prison” there is no such place or state as a hell, of unmitigated, hopeless mercy.

* God, angels, and all the higher spirits are forever seeking the elevation of the inferior spirits, by all just, wise, and appropriate means.

* Spirits in the higher spheres are employed in three general exercises: 1) in striving after a more perfect knowledge of and communication with God, whom they cannot see there any more than here, as a personal being, but only in spirit by faith and intuition; 2) in study, self-examination, contemplations of truth, and acquainting themselves with all useful knowledge attainable to them; 3) in ministering to struggling spirits on earth and in the lower spheres – endeavoring to elevate and bless them.

* Spirits in any circle can descend into all the circles below their own, but cannot, except by special permission, ascend into a higher sphere, until qualified by spiritual progress.

Every word is familiar to those who read a lot of afterlife communications.  Every afterlife communicator over centuries of patiently-delivered messages has been telling us exactly the same things! It is this complete correspondence among communications received in every communication style and over nearly 200 years of time that makes me certain that the afterlife evidence is genuine. In decades of reading lots of pre-1960 communications from the dead, I have never found an outlier.

This complete correspondence among all such communications is for me dispositive proof that the afterlife is real, and proof that it is just as the communicators say it is, since the odds against chance for such complete agreement up and down the line are prohibitive.

Sir Robert Barrett makes this point in his seminal book, Deathbed Visions (1926). He there quotes Richard Whately, a venerable early-nineteenth-century scholar and onetime Archbishop of Dublin, who said,

           “It is evident that when many coincide in their testimony (where no previous concert can have taken place), the probability resulting from this concurrence does not rest on the supposed veracity of each considered separately, but on the improbability of such an agreement taking place by chance. For though in such a case each of the witnesses should be considered as unworthy of credit, and even much more likely to speak falsehood than truth, still the chances would be infinite against their all agreeing in the same falsehood.”

The Taboos of Science

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One of the reasons why it is so essential that mainstream scientists begin to get a clue about the nature of reality is that the truth is so wonderfully explanatory. Human minds are part of eternal Mind, which is the SONY DSCcore creative force and the only reality. All of this is as scientific as anything could be scientific, and it is at the core of what we all should be thinking as we study reality.

Mainstream science, however, remains a belief-system. Whatever doesn’t fit its predetermined dogmas is taboo, and cannot be studied by any scientist who cares about his own career.

If you don’t believe me, then listen to my friend Hank Green, who is a wonderful popularizer of traditional science and my particular guilty pleasure. Green puts out frequent videos on Scishow.com that explain a lot of cool scientific stuff. The videos are brief, the information is wonderful, and the man himself is so entertaining that I cannot get through the day anymore without watching at least one SciShow video. While Green himself would be the first to insist that every scientist stay on the mainstream reservation, he is open-minded enough to at least say that scientists have their own taboos.

Green cheerfully tells us that scientific taboos have existed “forever” because scientists are desperate to protect “their jobs, their tenure, or their credibility.” He lets us know that today this unwillingness to study anything that doesn’t fit “current social norms” is called “the Simmelweis Reflex” after Dr. Ignaz Simmelweis, a Hungarian physician who in the 1840s proposed that doctors should wash their hands before delivering babies. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries so many women died of childbed fever that it was normal for men to bury several wives. Simmelweis was preaching common sense, but his radical idea was received with horror. He was fired from his job and hounded out of medicine, eventually dying in 1865 in an insane asylum.

A few years later, of course, Louis Pasteur’s germ theory of disease showed that Dr. Simmelweis had been right. This experience made the scientific community no more introspective, but it did give scientists a name for their own foolish perpetuation of taboos in what is supposed to be a field dedicated to the open-minded study of reality. The Simmelweis Reflex remains a force to this day.

           The Simmelweis Reflex is what makes modern scientists decide that the study of the afterlife evidence is as taboo as Dr. Simmelweis’s colleagues considered his germ theory of disease to be. Eventually its longstanding taboo on studying the afterlife evidence is going to hold up twentieth-century science to the ridicule that it deserves.

Wait – that sounded mean-spirited. Sorry. What I meant to say is that mainstream science’s observation of taboos is causing us incalculable harm because the afterlife evidence and the afterlife science that mainstream scientists refuse to consider give us ways to explain so much of what must otherwise be seen as beyond explanation. Here are just three examples from my pile. I thought about calling this blog post “The Minds of the Dead, a Two-Faced Baby and a Talking Mongoose” before sanity prevailed:

1)    The minds of the “Dead.” Scientists are coming to understand that many people who seem to be unconscious or semi-conscious and in a permanent vegetative state are in fact conscious to some extent but unable to communicate. Coming up with ways to help these locked-in souls to access the world is now a major concern. Researchers in the field of afterlife communication are communicating with these supposedly unconscious folks even now, and sometimes in chatty detail.

2) Faith and Hope are christened: Conjoined twin girls who share a body but have two brains continue to defy medical odds after miraculous birth. Faith and Hope are two brains and faces that share a single newborn body. Could there be anything more tragic? How are we supposed to think about this? Mainstream science, of course, has not a clue. But those who study the afterlife evidence know that nearly all of us write plans for our lives before we are born, and a birth like this one surely was planned for the benefit of the two babies, for their family’s benefit, or even for the further edification of humankind. Abigail and Brittany Hensel are two similarly conjoined young women who already are educating anyone who doesn’t consider even acknowledging their very existence to be taboo. They are twins conjoined from the chest down. By definition they are genetically identical, and their life experiences have been mostly the same. Now 24, they are college graduates, lovely young women, and as different from one another in tastes, preferences, personalities, and everything that makes us human as might be two random people you could meet on the street. Explain THAT, mainstream science. Can’t do it? Well, we can. The Hensel girls offer wonderful evidence that each human mind is unique and eternal.

3) In England, Researchers Investigate Case of the Talking Mongoose. Apparently a talking mongoose named Geff (his name was pronounced “Jeff” but the mongoose couldn’t spell) appeared one night in 1931 to a farming family on the Isle of Man and proceeded to recite nursery rhymes, sing “Carolina Moon,” and generally make a curmudgeonly nuisance of himself, to the point where the British government is still investigating Geff stories eighty years later. I chose this Wall Street Journal article as an illustration of the legions of such stories that mainstream science has to stonewall and ignore because it has no way even to investigate them. Maybe Geff was just a goof by a bored British family. Maybe Geff was what he claimed to be, The Eighth Wonder of the World. A consciousness theory of everything allows us to investigate alleged phenomena like Geff using well-established alternative parameters and hypothetical explanations.

Of course, the most important thing is for you to come to understand that your mind really is eternal. Once you know that, you will never again fear anything. Your future peace of mind comes first. On the other hand, though, it also would be nice for mainstream scientists to begin to get a clue. It is impossible for scientists to understand a reality of which they are so fearful that most of it still remains subject to the sad Simmelweis taboo.

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Doing Science

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I have heard from a number of people about my blog post entitled Physics in Crisis, including someone who asked a question that has been on my mind for awhile. How is it that in the year 2014 nearly everyone pursuing a career in science still insists on building that career on core beliefs that are flat-out origin_6760135001wrong?

The way I more often phrase the question is, “Could I be crazy?” I don’t think so. Everyone who has open-mindedly studied the evidence has drawn the same conclusions about the nature of reality that I have drawn. We can’t all be crazy! But you must agree that it is flat-out strange that most real scientists continue to stonewall evidence that doesn’t fit their theories. By default, in 2014 many of those doing genuine science are non-scientists.

Never having taken a course in physics, I am a quantum physics enthusiast. The great Max Planck is my personal hero. Never having taken biology beyond one mandatory course in college, I consider Bruce Lipton to be a transformative figure. Because knowing the truth is so essential but the real scientists don’t seem to be pursuing it, I join other open-minded researchers in doing science. When eventually mainstream scientists return to open-mindedly seeking the truth, we will be delighted to give them back this baton!

To be worth pursuing, every scientific theory must do three things. It must fit all the known facts, it must not be readily refutable, and it must be predictive. It still might not eventually be shown to be right, but if a theory passes those base tests then it needs to be pursued and further tested.

I here propose a theory of everything that can be shown to pass all tests. It is this: What we think of as human consciousness is primary and eternal. Simple! It explains many things that continue to puzzle mainstream scientists of all stripes, and it provides a way to unite Newtonian and quantum physics. Beyond that, it explains every instance of what scientists persist in calling “paranormal phenomena” because they cannot see where they fit. Scientists can’t understand what they call the paranormal so they ignore it, which makes as much sense as it would make for them to avoid studying the air because it’s invisible.

A consciousness theory of everything works. It is simple, testable, predictive, and useful. Whether it is next year or another hundred years from now, eventually it will be shown to be right.

The problem with mainstream scientists is that they have adopted atheism as a “fundamental dogma,” so all their work is tinged with a worry that they might inadvertently find God. Anything that bases itself on a dogma is a religion, by definition.

Max Planck first advanced the theory that consciousness is primary as he developed quantum physics, for which he won the Nobel Prize in 1918. It was obvious to the earliest quantum physicists that you cannot get behind consciousness. Max Planck was right a century ago. He is even more right today.

Most scientists hate the notion of a consciousness theory of everything. They can’t refute it, and I suspect that some of them are coming to realize that it might be right. So what do they do? They ignore it. They refuse to look at the relevant evidence. They try to debunk any evidence that comes into public awareness, and they shame those who dare to take that evidence seriously. Meanwhile, they use billion-dollar particle colliders to seek support for other theories, and they slice and dice donor brains in a desperate search for something they might call a source of human consciousness. All that money and effort is being wasted.

I wouldn’t care, except that this scientific stonewalling is doing so much harm. Let’s look at a few of the ways in which you and I are being hurt:

1) Most people still fear death and mourn their dead loved ones. Knowing that human consciousness is eternal will greatly lessen all these pains, and will spur research into ways to facilitate better communication between the dead and the living.

2) Many of us consider this life to be all there is and think we can coast through it. In fact, this lifetime is meant for spiritual growth to improve the eternal lives that we live in other dimensions. There is no shortcut around actually doing the spiritual work that we have set for ourselves, as those who believe they can live lazy lives and then be “saved” on their deathbeds must learn to their sorrow.

3) Spiritual energy powerfully affects our lives. As Jesus said, if we believe we can move matter with our minds, then we can do it. Easy-peasy. Many ills can be caused, lessened, and even cured by our minds. There are so many ways in which our individual consciousness works in our daily lives that it would take a whole book to origin_4290962747look at them all, yet mainstream science ignores this field altogether.

No one is asking mainstream scientists to believe anything! All we are asking is that they open their minds and look at the evidence without a beliefs-based bias.

As the great Max Planck said more than eighty years ago:

“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.”

He was right! When will the physicists who revere him today begin to consider that possibility?

 

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Physics in Crisis

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One of my vices is popular science magazines, and I especially love Scientific American. It’s full of articles that are candy for the mind, luscious insights you might never use but you feel better equipped for life by knowing them.

I began reading my favorite magazine a decade ago, as I was trying to puzzle out the origin_4290962747physics of the afterlife levels. It is an extraordinary fact that nearly two hundred years of communications from the dead are so breathtakingly consistent with one another, and in some cases so detailed, that as quantum-physics-for-dummies books began to be more widely available in the first years of this century it became easy for investigators to puzzle out how the afterlife works and how reality fits together. The physics of the afterlife levels is a more extreme version of what we here call quantum physics. Our quantum physics is a kind of plug that connects the matter-based physics that exists just in this material universe with the consciousness-based physics of most of reality. When I first realized this, I felt the way working scientists must feel when they make a discovery. Wow. Just, wow.

I love Scientific American. So to read the lead article in the current issue made me sad in the way you’re always sad when a personal hero shows feet of clay.

The article talks about a crisis in physics as if this were a new event. In fact, physics has been in crisis ever since the immortal Max Planck and his brethren came up with quantum physics more than a century ago. Newtonian macro-physics and quantum physics don’t fit well together. Each of them is demonstrably right, but generations of physicists have been unable to come up with a theory that unites them.

They have trouble explaining other things as well. For example, this material universe is based on tolerances that are vanishingly tiny. Were any of these numbers off by a bit, the universe would be unstable and none of us would be here. So among other things, a workable theory of everything needs to account for the stability of a universe that should be unstable, and it needs to make Newtonian and quantum physics smoothly work together. And – the core problem – it has to do these things while obeying what they call “the fundamental dogma” of atheism.

Since we have been running headlong in the wrong direction, most of the theories proposed have been insane. That an infinite number of universes were created in the big bang, and only in this one were the numbers right; that each time a butterfly flaps its wing a brand-new universe is created. Crazy. But craziness is necessary when you turn what should be an open investigation of reality into just a belief-system based on any “fundamental dogma.” Supersymmetry in its various permutations has for decades been the physicists’ leading theory, even though to non-physicists it looks like just more nonsensical tail-chasing. The crisis in physics troubling Scientific American is the fact that after a century of floundering, apparently supersymmetry isn’t panning out, either.             

Aside from its apparent fear that it might inadvertently find God, the core problem in physics seems to be that it is focused on just the material universe. In fact, this material universe is an integral part of a much larger whole that is composed of at least seven additional energy-based dimensions. Those dimensions are as real as this material universe, they are interdependent with it, and they are inhabited by people we used to think were dead. Trying to make sense of the material universe without factoring in the rest of reality is as futile as it would be to study fire without being aware of oxygen.

When we investigate the greater reality being introduced to us by the folks who live there, one thing we learn is that human consciousness is not an artifact of our brains at all. It is primary and pre-existing. Everything troubling physicists could be resolved if they would dare to investigate the role of consciousness, which is just what the first quantum physicists realized more than a hundred years ago. If his successors had listened to Max Planck, they could have avoided wasting the twentieth century.

Max Planck won a Nobel Prize in 1918 as the father of quantum physics. Among other things that his work showed was that consciousness is primary and pre-existing. Consciousness – the human mind – affects the results of quantum physics experiments. It brings matter into being. It has to be primary. Toward the end of his life, Planck said:

“As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the 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.”                         

The afterlife evidence overwhelmingly shows that Max Planck was exactly right. Only when twenty-first-century physicists stop floundering and reconnect with their roots will this century-long crisis in physics be over.

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Hindsight

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My mother married my father because she was pregnant. As an adult I thanked her for having gone ahead with the pregnancy and given me life, and she said, “You’re assuming I had a choice?” So I must admit to sharing the core aversion that many people have to abortion, but I am not avidly on large__7468312536either side of the issue. I only note that our culture has become an abortion culture, in which the disposal of fetuses has become an easy substitute for personal responsibility and common sense.

Reportedly, forty percent of pregnancies in the United States now end in abortion. Nearly thirty percent of American women will have had an abortion by the age of 45. In New York City, more than half the African-American children who are conceived are aborted. Just hold these statistics in your mind for a moment.

In the same way that you and I live in an abortion culture, Thomas and Martha Jefferson lived in a slaveholding culture. Both of them inherited slaves in a colony in which freeing them was illegal, and even in the colonies where blacks could live free, they suffered miserably as society’s dregs. That Jefferson detested slavery is abundantly clear from his contemporary writings. That he concluded that these slaves he was stuck with were better off in his care than sold of or freed seems sensible, especially given the fact that during his marriage – the period covered by My Thomas – he seems to have been hopeful that slavery could soon be ended.

A recent review of My Thomas has made me see our abortion statics in a new light. Of course, it is hard to put ourselves into the minds of those living in other cultures, but this tendency that some now have to judge slaveholders as irremediably evil and insist that those people should have known better makes me wince. This reviewer said:

“(Martha) is constantly surprised that their slaves don’t actually love them. She does come by the time of her death to outstrip Jefferson in his thinking of human rights, especially concerning slavery, yet she is never able to acknowledge even to herself that the children her slave Betty bore to her own father were, in fact, her half-siblings as much as the daughters of her two despised step-mothers.” (Here I disagree, of course. A non-judgmental read of the novel shows that the Hemingses were very much loved, which fact comes directly from historical records. )

How easy it is to judge the past! I am envisioning now a biography written in 2214 about a twenty-first-century hero who – I don’t know – won a Nobel Prize for having found a pill that prevents cancer while she simultaneously worked with UNESCO to end childhood hunger all over the world. She felt forced to have two abortions, one because she was still in college and the other because the fetus had Down Syndrome. Both were understandable and forgivable.

But unfortunately for our hero (let’s call her “Joy”), in 2173 abortions were outlawed worldwide because scientists had by then determined not only that fetuses feel pain, but that the recently-discovered human soul attaches to the fetus at conception. (Of course, by 2214 babies are desperately needed anyway, since in 2122 a cure for aging was found so now half the world’s population is over seventy and there is a desperate need for more young people to support them.)

What will Joy’s biographer say about her? How will her having done things for humanity’s health that are roughly comparable to what Thomas Jefferson did for humanity’s freedom stack up origin_4164575815against the fact that she not only lived in a barbaric abortion culture, but she herself had two abortions? I think you can read the above review – or read a host of contemporary comments about the fact that some Founding Fathers were slaveholders – and you already know the answer.

It is impossible for any of us to know how future people are going to judge us. I chose abortion for this illustration, but I could as easily have chosen America’s appalling prison system, the ways in which we sexualize our children’s lives, or the horrendous way in which our society has effectively cut off for so many people the possibility of economic advancement.  We don’t know what life will be like in two hundred years, so we don’t know for which of these things they will judge us. But one thing is certain. They will judge us!

As Jesus said, “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). Keep that immortal wisdom in mind the next time you feel tempted to judge historical figures who were trying to make the most of their own very difficult times.

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Why Bad Things Happen to Good People

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One of the questions that the afterlife evidence answers for us has long been a stumper. Why do bad things happen to good people? Atheists sometimes use the question as large_2280556593proof that there can be no loving God, while even those who are very religious will sometimes fret and question their beliefs as they try to answer it. But when we answer the question from the point of view of the afterlife evidence, we find that it all makes perfect sense. A lifetime on earth is just a hard day in school.

As is true whenever you research any real phenomenon, studying nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead shows us more than the fact that our minds are eternal and death is an easy, joyous passage. It gives us a lot of information about what the afterlife is like, and also – wonderfully – it tells us a lot about the meaning and purpose of human life.

Here is what we now know to be true:

1)    Human life is eternal, and an earth-lifetime is brief. If your life were not eternal, then for you to suffer a disabling injury or for your two-year-old to die would be an epic tragedy. As it is, even the most horrendous lifetime is only an eye-blink in the glorious eternity that is where you live.

2)    Our lifetimes on earth are opportunities for intensive spiritual growth. Spiritual growth is the core impulse of every human mind, but life in the Summerland levels is so easy that making spiritual progress there is difficult. Here, though, we can plan into our lifetimes lots of exercises in love and forgiveness that vastly improve our opportunities for spiritual advancement.

3)    Before we are born, nearly all of us write what amounts to a lesson plan. Few lifetimes are random! Together with those who will be significant in this lifetime and all our spiritual guides, we intensively plan the ways in which we will help one another with our spiritual growth.

            Your awful first husband? You and he probably planned both the marriage and the way it turned out. The auto accident that cost you your foot? Ditto. All your job issues? The way your child struggles in school? The swindler who took most of your money? The afterlife evidence tells us that very few accidents happen and few big events in our lives are random. We and our large_2967604762guides and those significant to us might make adjustments as our lives go on, but the afterlife evidence overwhelmingly tells us that you planned all the bad things that happen to you, and you eagerly planned them as spiritual lessons.

As A Course in Miracles tells us, everything that happens in our lives is either love or a call for love. Whatever the question, love is the answer. There are no real tragedies when every human mind is eternal, although our unwillingness to take every opportunity to better learn to love and forgive can indeed be tragic. As Jesus says,

“Do not resist an evil person. If someone strikes you on the right cheek, turn to him the other also. And if someone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak as well. If someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.”  (MT 5:39-41)

“You have heard that it was said to the people long ago, ‘Do not murder, and anyone who murders will be subject to judgment.’ But I tell you that anyone who is angry with his brother will be subject to judgment.” (MT 5:21)

“A new command I give you:  Love one another.  As I have loved you, so you must love one another.” – Jesus (JN 13:34)

No one said that spiritual growth would be easy! But it is the whole reason why bad things happen. When you love and forgive, no matter what happens, you can find yourself joyously learning and growing and you can much improve your own eternal life.

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Something New in the World

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My Thomas is about the American Revolution. It is a true story of the kind of love that few of us ever manage to find, and a carefully researched examination of the formative years of one of America’s Founding Fathers, but at its heart it is the tale of a group of people who mutually pledged “our Lives, our The Lexington Minute ManFortunes, and our sacred Honor” to the fight for their freedom. They risked it all.

It is difficult for us now to imagine what a new thing that fight for freedom was. The American Revolution was the first time in history that any colony had attempted to throw off its parent country, and the grievances on which the Revolution was based were by most standards slight. Those at the front of the fight – the young Jeffersons included – were proud to consider themselves to be Englishmen. So why did they risk their lives and everything they had to throw off what was such a modest yoke that two other British colonies – Canada and Australia – are still sort-of members of the British Commonwealth today? Why did the American Revolution happen?

I wondered about that more and more as I researched Thomas Jefferson’s early life and wrote My Thomas. The public words that Thomas speaks in the novel are from his contemporary writings, and as you read them you can see that at first he didn’t expect bloodshed. He saw the colonists as simply claiming their natural rights as Englishmen when they decided to throw off a relationship with England that they had outgrown. As the colonists begin to claim their rights, and as the parent country objects, you see the Revolution developing as a kind of colossal misunderstanding. More than once I wanted to tell them all just to sit around a table and work this out!

So on the surface the American Revolution might be seen as the result of an escalating series of affronts and responses, with each side indignant that the other is being unreasonable. But you realize as you read Thomas Jefferson’s early writings that it was always more than that.

The whole of Western history had been trending away from the collective and toward the individual for at least the past eighteen hundred years. Personally, I find the seed of British America’s desire for freedom in its Christian roots, and in the moment when Jesus first urged us to throw off religious origin_324380799authority and approach God directly: “But 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 6:6) When you are told that you don’t need religious masters, then the eventual realization that you don’t need secular overlords either is inevitable.

But freedom is not free. To quote Martha Jefferson in My Thomas, “Only those can be free who insist with their lives that they must be free.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson was asked to write a hymn to be sung at the dedication of the Revolutionary Battle Monument in Concord, Massachusetts, on July 4, 1837. I loved his Concord Hymn as a child, and even today it can make me teary.

Concord Hymn

By the rude bridge that arched the flood,

Their flag to April’s breeze unfurled,

Here once the embattled farmers stood

And fired the shot heard round the world.

The foe long since in silence slept;

Alike the conqueror silent sleeps;

And Time the ruined bridge has swept

Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.

On this green bank, by this soft stream,

We set today a votive stone;

That memory may their deed redeem,

When, like our sires, our sons are gone.

Spirit, that made those heroes dare

To die, and leave their children free,

Bid Time and Nature gently spare

The shaft we raise to them and thee.

Historical Revisionism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christopher Columbus once ordered the simultaneous burning alive of a hundred Native American tribal leaders. The historian who mentioned this in a History Channel program awhile back tried to soften the shock of it by noting that “the fifteenth century was a barbaric age.”large_7730558908

There was a time when I would have shuddered and changed channels. Later on, I would have been comforted to know that people dying in pain are soon out of their bodies so their actual suffering is limited. Now, though, I hear about the burning of Native Americans by Christopher Columbus and I wonder whether it might be our fault.

The afterlife evidence tells us that reality is very different from what we perceive. Our senses and our prejudices lie to us, and we comfort ourselves by trusting a modern science that is equally senses-driven and prejudice-prone. In contravention of everything that mainstream science and your lying eyes tell you, here is what the afterlife evidence now tells us:

1)     Time is subjective, and it is not linear. If things are happening at all, then they are happening all at once.

2)    Matter and energy, time and space are holographic, which means that each unit (however you may measure it) contains all the information of every other unit.

3)     Matter and energy, time and space are mind-created. Universal Mind is their foundation, and each of us is an undivided snippet of that universal Mind. Another hologram. So our minds are more powerful than we can imagine.

4)    Mind-energy tremendously affects what we see as reality. Think of a horror movie in which when a hate-crazed actor arrives the castle starts to crumble, the peasants sicken, the grass withers and the skies cloud over. But then our loving hero comes back and that castle crisply reassembles itself, the peasants and grass recover, and the sun shines bright. Try to realize that this is something like the effect that our minds apparently have on our surroundings.

5)    All our lifetimes are happening simultaneously. Something like reincarnation does seem to happen, but it happens outside of time. More advanced beings tell us that as each of us makes or avoids making spiritual progress in this lifetime, we affect for good or ill all our other lives, past and future.

Please read this list again. Then multiply by every person on earth that insight that whatever we do in this lifetime affects every one of our past lives.

Temporarily trapped in this illusion as we are, we cannot really grasp what all of this means. But one thing that it may well mean is that we are not just the product of our history. We also may be the co-creators of it.

This puzzle has been on my mind for years, ever since I first began to wrestle with the time dilemma. The possibility that our modern evils are creating or worsening evils long past is both appalling and hard to grasp. But there seems to be no way out of it. The evidence is abundant, consistent, and incontrovertible to anyone with an open mind.

Imagine how all of this might be working. Stalin and Hitler, racial lynchings, and all the many evils of the twentieth century could have worsened the history that came before, created Biblical stonings and Medieval wars, perhaps turned Christopher Columbus’s capture of a few Native chieftains and sternly lecturing them into his burning one or two at the stake. And then ten.  And then a hundred. We would be none the wiser.

Now imagine that in this new century we begin to practice love and forgiveness within families, house to house, street to street, and then over all the earth. And gradually – imperceptibly at first – the world’s bloody history turns back to peaceful. Every book on every shelf in every library on earth records an ever gentler past, until all that evil never happened at all. 

It has long been thought that as modern humans migrated out of Africa, they conquered and destroyed the Neanderthal peoples that then inhabited what is now Europe. It turns out, though, that what they actually did was to assimilate Neanderthals as they moved north, so now everyone with European ancestry has Neanderthal genetic material.

18r5lc4ubwq1xjpg This wonderful picture was taken at the Neanderthal museum in Germany. It’s from a recent article that suggests that as much as 20% of the Neanderthal genome survives in modern humans.

It turns out that our earliest human ancestors made love, not war.

But somewhere along the way becoming “more civilized” seemed to be a good idea. We began the ongoing distortion of our own essentially loving natures that led erelong to the climactic evils of a cruel and bloody twentieth century. Now contemplate a hundred Native Americans screaming together as they burn, and the notion that their suffering could be the fruit of humankind’s later history. If you don’t want to learn to love and forgive perfectly for your own sake, then think about the possibility that you might be doing it for them.

It’s About Time

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Part of the fun of doing afterlife research is the fact that as you put together many hundreds of afterlife communications received over nearly two centuries, you find that the dead are telling us remarkable things about the structure of reality itself.

The dead tell us that reality is energy-based. There is pretty strong evidence now that large_8382317948nothing is solid. As the great physicist, astronomer and mathematician Sir James Jeans once said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.” All the levels of energy-based reality – including this one – exist in the same place, and they are separated from one another only by their different rates of vibration. So far, so good. The channels of your television set all exist in the same place as well, and that analogy makes it easier for us to imagine what actually happens at death. The dead tell us that when you die your mind will simply raise its own rate of vibration from this level of reality to the next, very much as you might change television channels, and there it will pick up a whole new solid reality! Dying is just that simple.

What seems to be even harder for most of us to grasp than the fact that there is no solid matter is the apparent fact that time and space also are subjective illusions. We are so dependent on the notion that space is spacious! In fact, with nothing beyond it, space is both infinite and tiny. Size is not one of its characteristics. We think it must be large because these temporary bodies that we believe we now occupy are infinitesimal in relation to it, but the dead tell us that they can travel instantly by mind across the entire universe.

And time is apparently also nothing like the arrow that we imagine it to be. Time is subjective, mind-created, and non-linear. As 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.”

To further boggle your mind about time, I should add that there is considerable evidence that the following things are true:

1)    All our lives are happening at once. There is so much evidence that we live multiple lives that the concept of reincarnation cannot be denied by anyone who has examined the evidence, but rather than progressing from past to future, apparently all our lives are happening at the same time. Very rarely there will be moments of actual bleed-through from one of our lives to another. A very advanced being has suggested that the easiest way for us to understand reincarnation would be to imagine it as a bucket from which each lifetime is dipped and back into which each lifetime is poured.

2)    Future-life progression is as easy as is past-life regression. Dr. Brian Weiss pioneered techniques for hypnotically regressing people with phobias and other psychological problems to past lives in which some trauma had occurred, and he discovered that simply reliving that trauma could serve to cure the present-life psychological issue. Having been cured of a fear of heights this way, I can personally large_6827701945attest that his technique works well. Dr. Weiss then found that if there was no obvious source of problems in a past life, he could just as easily progress people under hypnosis to a future lifetime, and there he often found the causative trauma!

3)    History apparently is happening all at once. This is a natural corollary of the two previous points, and since time is not real it is probably inevitable. It may well be that all the aspects of what we think of as linear history actually are occurring simultaneously and intimately affecting one another.

So reality is not just stranger than we have been imagining it to be, but it is stranger than we can imagine it to be! Next week I will give you a boggling insight into what these facts about time might mean.

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