Is Civilization the Problem?

Posted on February 8, 2014 by Roberta Grimes

When it first occurred to me that civilization might be the problem rather than the solution, I chuckled at my own silliness. It was the 1970s. After having just lived through the turmoil of the sixties, I was feeling that we had gone-off track, and my little thought-experiment in living without the trappings of civilization that eventually became Letter From Freedom was going surprisingly well. But civilization is basic, isn’t it? For a long time, whenever it occurred to me that human nature is debased by civilization and not elevated by it, I slapped that idea away. large_12249032916

But now, more than thirty years later, I am back to writing about Atlantica again in a world that is in many ways even more debasing to humanity than was the world of the sixties.

On just one day a few weeks back, I read about Syrian gangsters playing soccer with fresh human heads; about people in Kalamazoo, Michigan, stepping around but otherwise ignoring a 31-year-old man who had been shot and was dying in the doorway of a store; and about the president of North Korea enjoying watching a political rival being eaten alive by starving dogs (sorry for that mental picture).

That day was my final epiphany. I’m sorry, but it’s time to say it aloud: TEN THOUSAND YEARS OF CIVILIZATION HAS NOT ADVANCED HUMANITY AT ALL.

I defy you to show us any proof that statement is untrue.

I have suspected since at least the mid-seventies that civilization had gone serious off-track, and no doubt you have had similar thoughts. It’s bad out there, and it’s getting worse. Still, what choice do we have? Wouldn’t a lack of civilization mean chaos?

I don’t have the answer, but I think it is long past time for us to ask the question.

What is civilization? I’m going to define it here as the organizing systems of governments and religions. If you have a better definition, please share it in the comments, but for this brief medium_3989138122 discussion let’s try out mine. Down through all their history, governments and religions have had certain things in common:

1) They define human beings as flawed and base. Animalistic. Fallen from grace. Unable to live in natural harmony with one another.

2) They define themselves as essential in order for human beings to live peacefully together. Both governments and religions see their roles as controlling what are natural human tendencies toward evil and chaos.

3) They operate by coercion. Whether it’s civil laws or religious rules, the very essence of civilization is restraint.

4) They require that some people exercise power over others. The only difference between governments, whether civil or religious, is the extent to which they will accept restraints on their own powers. A republic is more pleasant than a dictatorship, but it is a difference in degree and not in kind.

5) They tend toward ever greater controls and corruption. From the treasure of kings and popes to the bureaucratic cronyism of modern governments, all civil and religious systems tend to aggregate ever more power to themselves, and to confiscate ever more wealth that they had no part in producing.

Given these universal characteristics of civilization, the only reason to continue to allow governments and religions to operate at all would be if they were essential in order for human beings to live together.

Do we need them? That’s the real question, isn’t it?

I have spent decades reading nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead. The amazing fact that many hundreds of such communications are entirely consistent with one another helps to prove to us that the afterlife exists. The further fact that the afterlife they describe is entirely consistent with the core science of quantum physics is of course astounding. There is a world of truth waiting to be investigated as soon as mainstream science stops fighting it.

Of course, the afterlife evidence has a lot to tell us about the afterlife itself. The fact that it also explains a great deal about reality in general is a wonderful bonus. But for me, the best thing about the afterlife evidence is what it has to tell us about human nature. The afterlife evidence tells us with absolute consistency that our minds are part of eternal Mind, which is the only thing that exists. Our minds are part of God, in other words. Therefore, in truth, we are all good.

Oh. So both governments and religions are making precisely the wrong assumptions about human nature. In doing so, they are imposing on us laws and restraints that are probably unnecessary, and that distort our true nature in ways that create problems rather than solving problems. I think this is a fact, based upon the evidence. And further proof of its truth is the certainty that after more than ten thousand years of trying, governments and religions have done nothing whatsoever to make people better in any way. Nothing. Nada. Rien.

But if civilization doesn’t work at all in advancing human nature, then what might work? That is the question that the Letters From Love Series is designed to ask, and to begin to answer. Stay tuned!

Signs From the Dead

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Roberta Grimes

Our growing understanding of how reality is structured makes us realize how near the dead are to us. They are right here! We’re told that there are something like eight primary levels of energy-based reality, separated from one another by their rates of vibration, and all of them are exactly where we are. But far from making communication easier, the fact that reality is an energy spectrum all located in a single place makes unaided communication from there to here seem impossible. Think of your Channel Five weatherman and your Channel Seven newsman trying to chat with one another while both are on air, and without a phone. The fact that communication between Knuckles Range - Rustic levels through mediums has become a well-documented phenomenon is a wonder! But what if we never consult a medium? How else can our loved ones signal their survival?

It seems that over the millennia the dead have wrestled with this problem. They are more aware of us than we are of them, and as they transition and adjust to their new surroundings they are anxious to get word to us that they are still here. We are coming to understand that even long before there were earth-based scientists, there were clever and dedicated teams of dead researchers trying to understand what they were dealing with and puzzling out how to deliver signs to us that they lived on.

It is from this perspective of ancient experimentation that we must look at the kinds of signs that come to us from those we love in the period soon after their deaths. Many are natural objects like feathers and stones, or growing things like flowers or insects; and some involve what seems to be the manipulation of the minds of animals and people. Some of the objects – and even the insects – are likely apports. They are objects materialized from there to here, in a process never studied and not well understood. There are hints that apports may be removed from this material level at some other point in time and deposited back here, often materializing in air, so a decades-old newspaper (for example) could plop onto a table looking fresh from the press.

So, what are some of the physical signs that our dead loved ones can send to us soon after their deaths?

1) Coins. People start finding coins in the same denomination – pennies mostly – or they find clusters of large_8587989414 the same set of coins. The coins sent as signs will sometimes bear a significant date, such as a birth or death year or a wedding year.
2) Feathers. Some of the dead have made feathers their specialty. Of course, finding a feather loose beside your feather pillow isn’t going to mean much. But repeatedly finding feathers of all kinds on the ground, in drawers, even in your pocket can mean that someone you love is thinking of you.

3) Dragonflies and Butterflies. Beautiful insects are such a common sign. It may be that bees and ants also are used, but nobody takes much notice of them; however, a big dragonfly that comes to sit on your hand or a butterfly that dances in front of you is hard to miss. One spectacular insect sign happened soon after a teacher’s death. Her replacement reported that on the first school morning after her death, a yellow butterfly flew in through an open window and went up and down the rows, lighting briefly on the head of each wondering child, and then flitted out again.

Common Picturewing 4) Electrical Manipulation. You can imagine the joy in heaven when we started electrifying our homes! Since our beloved dead are energy beings, messing with electricity is easy for them, and just within the past century or so they have learned to do it very well. They blink lights, turn televisions on and off, and even sometimes put messages on computer screens. They can extinguish streetlights as we pass beneath them, cause cellphones to ring, and even (rarely) dial us up to have a chat.

5) Scents. Whiffs of cigarette smoke or perfume or perhaps the smell of lilacs or cooking: the dead seem to be surprisingly able to make us experience familiar scents. As someone who has enjoyed this phenomenon – my first scent communication, long ago, was of my grandmother’s perfume – I have wondered whether the scent is out there in the room. Could others standing nearby smell it, too? I have come to think not. I have come to believe that the dead are able to impress the scent directly on our minds, but whether that is true is anyone’s guess.

6) Physical Impressions. This kind of sign seems to be less common, but some of the dead will create phenomena which make it seem as if they are physically present. A surviving spouse might feel and see the other side of the mattress compress, or a spouse or parent might feel a physical hug. Someone who lost a beloved pet might feel and see the indenting of the coverlet by his feet, and then a depression where that pet always slept.

7) Visualizations. Sometimes, near the moment of someone’s death, he or she will appear to a loved one many miles away. Generally these apparitions will look younger and happy, they glow, they don’t speak, and often they are just bust-high or waist-high.

8) Birds and Small Animals. The most common small-creature signs are birds swooping in front of our windshields. Or sometimes a type of bird will be reported far outside its range, like the Florida crane that graced a Long Island gravesite several days in a row. Freakishly unafraid squirrels that have large_3719756211 approached and seemed to know us have been reported, too. There was one summer afternoon a couple of years ago when a huge owl came and perched on a light while a celebration of someone’s life was underway on a patio below it, and it stayed there until the last guest left. Our loved ones might be impressing their own minds onto the minds of these creatures to make them behave this way, although no one knows for sure.

9) Numbers. Seeing on a digital clock or a license plate a series of the same number repeated, or perhaps a date or other number that would be meaningful such as a birth, wedding, or death date, can be a sign from a deal loved one. Just one such instance isn’t meaningful, but if you repeatedly see a number like 11:11 when you randomly glance at a digital clock, your loved one may be reaching out to you.

10) Coincidences. We have had communications from upper-level beings who insist that there are no coincidences, and every seeming coincidence is the work of Spirit. I don’t know about that. But I do know that the chances that some of the stranger coincidences we see could occur at random are less than we suppose, so it is important to pay attention. When my mother died, someone sent me calla lilies, never realizing the importance that particular flower had in my mother’s life; and someone else sent a sympathy card that featured chickadees (Mother’s favorite bird) perched in lilacs (Mother’s favorite flower) oddly out of season. I assume that those were signs from my mother, but I won’t know for sure until I contact a medium.

11) License Plates. To be thinking of a loved one and at the same time see a license plate with his name or with some other significant term on it really brings you up short! Yet it happens. We have no idea how the dead are able to pull this off.

12) Songs. Here is something else in the category of: We have no idea how they do it. But they do. And often. A widow of someone recently dead will turn on a car radio or enter a store, and there will be playing the very song that the couple danced to at their wedding.

Don’t assume that everything that happens is a sign, but pay attention in the months after a loved one’s death. When you spot a possible sign, be sure to thank your loved one, since if the dead think they are being ignored they will generally give up.

How do we know that the dead send these signs? Because they tell us, over and over again. We are told that there are teams which help the newly dead to orient themselves to their new lives, and one of the things they offer to do is to teach new arrivals how to produce signs for their loved ones. Some of the dead become good at it, and a few are still delivering signs decades later. But for most of the dead, signs are given within the first year or two after their deaths, and once they see that we are past the worst of our grief they generally abandon the practice. They know that we’re fine. And they have lots to do!

It’s impossible to know what percentage of the dead will give us signs of their survival, but my research has led me to think that most of them try. They remain the same people after they die, and their love for us is as intense as it ever was. So, keep your eyes and your heart open!

Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Posted on January 25, 2014 by Roberta Grimes

Cultural realities shape our lives in ways that become so ingrained that we often don’t see evils for the evils they are. When you and I look around, we can see lots of things about Thomas Jefferson present-day America that are likely to appall our descendants, from overstuffed prisons and third-trimester abortions to vast disparities in wealth and station and the careless ways in which we inflict adult entertainment on our children. The fact that you and I don’t become personally involved in any of these practices doesn’t let us off the hook, since if enough of us protested, things would change.

Thomas and Martha Jefferson were born into a world in which the slavery of peoples brought here from Africa had been part of their culture for a century. It was a normal evil, just as the things mentioned above are evils that seem normal to us. Having been born near the pinnacle of a society in which slavery was a fact of life, both Thomas Jefferson and Martha Wayles Skelton Jefferson inherited human beings.

They were stuck with slavery. As Jefferson said later in life, they had a wolf by the ear: they could neither hold onto it nor safely let it go. And being freed was not an attractive option for a slave in Eighteenth-Century Virginia. It was legal at that time for anyone who encountered a freed former slave to enslave him again; and even beyond Virginia, freedmen lived wretched lives on the margins of white society. Discovering that Jefferson felt stuck with slavery as an institution that he detested was an important step for me, since I don’t think I could have written My Thomas if the truth were otherwise.

From my brief study of it, slavery in Eighteenth-Century Virginia seems surprising in a number of ways:

1) Apparently sexual relations between the races didn’t much occur before the middle of that century, so during Jefferson’s youth nearly all the slaves were of exclusively African ancestry.

2) Slaves apparently worked until dusk six days per week, but then typically had Sundays off. In Jefferson’s case, there is evidence that he often used Saturdays off as a reward.

3) During their free time, Jefferson’s slaves raised vegetables and chickens for themselves, and they sold their surplus food to their master for money. I know… I didn’t believe it either, but Jefferson’s written accounts of some of these transactions still survive.

4) Jefferson was set emphatically against the physical punishment of his slaves. His attitude seemed to be that he and they were stuck with this situation, so his only option was to care for them and treat them fairly. I was able to find just one instance of his ordering the whipping of a slave, and that was in his old age when apparently a teenager drove him temporarily insane. This incident upset him so much that it may have been the exception that proves the rule.

Martha Jefferson spent most of her life in the friendship of Betty Hemings, the half-white slave her father took to his bed soon after his third wife died. At his death, Martha inherited Betty and her children, six of whom were Martha’s half-siblings.

Thomas and Martha seem to have treated the Hemingses almost as part of their family. The love ran deep, and this difficult situation may have been one reason why Thomas Jefferson’s contemporary writings indicate an increasing impatience with slavery as an institution. He was too clear-headed and practical to think the problem would be easy to solve, but during Martha’s lifetime he seems to have become increasingly determined to solve it. His first step was to engineer a ban on the importation of African slaves, and thanks to his efforts, in 1778 Virginia became the first place on earth to ban the importation of slaves.

In 1781 Thomas Jefferson retired from politics altogether. Had Martha lived, he would have had the time to pursue the experiments in racial understanding and integration that were by then foremost in his mind. With his extensive political experience and skill, there is a reasonable chance that he would have been able to manage an end to slavery in America long before the Civil War. But when Thomas lost Martha, he seems to have lost his race-relations motor. He fled Virginia and the future they had planned together, and he tried to fill the void she had left by resuming his political career. It’s too bad, really. It’s difficult to read his Revolutionary-era writings on the subjects of slavery and race and not think about what might have been.

Writing Your First Novel

Posted on January 19, 2014 by Roberta Grimes

As I was preparing to republish My Thomas and publish the first two of the Letters From Love novels, I had to “come out” to my legal clients and to friends who had never known me as a writer. Especially with people who had long known me as their business attorney, I had some strange conversations! But what most surprised me was the fact that people I never had imagined might be writers began to share with me their lifelong wish to get a novel published. And they asked me for advice.

medium_2934189215(1) Here is the advice that I give to people that I care about: Don’t do it. Because reading a novel is easy and fun, people have the perception that writing a novel has to be easy and fun as well. But writing good fiction is the most difficult and time-consuming pursuit on the face of the earth.

It’s difficult because there are so many things that have to be happening for fiction to work. It’s difficult because no matter how good a novel is, there are ways to make it better. It’s difficult because it requires that you spend many hundreds of hours alone, with your family and friends off enjoying their lives while your only companions are the people in your mind. And it’s time-consuming because you will have to spend at least a decade working at it before you write something worthy of publication.

If I have discouraged you, then you’re welcome. You have gained back a whole lot of time and energy that you can devote to something else! If not, then you and I share an unfortunate but joyous form of mental illness, and all you can do is pick up your quill and join the happy sufferers who went before you. Here is what I did to prepare to eventually publish My Thomas:

1) Read Good Fiction. The sort of novel that I like to read may differ from the sort that you prefer, but all good fiction is strongly plotted, with interesting characters who feel like real people and grow or change as the novel progresses. And – most importantly – good fiction tastes wonderful. It is spare, with each word perfectly chosen and just a few words evoking whole scenes; and it is active, moving your eye right along, with no burrs or catches anywhere. My own teachers were Pearl Buck, John Steinbeck, John Updike, and Anne Tyler. Brilliant, brilliant writers. I read Pearl Buck’s House of Earth trilogy several times in childhood, savoring the way that just a few words could bring early-twentieth-century China to life and make it sizzle. Read good writers. Stop reading sloppy or lazy writers, no matter how popular their novels might be.

2) Practice. Assume that your first ten novels will be worthless, but write them as if they were sure best-sellers. The first million words of fiction that you write are your practice words. Write only what feels perfect to you as you write it, then go back and polish it carefully; and then put it away and resolve to make your next practice novel even better. Rewriting your favorites can be a great exercise. I wrote my first practice novella in 1977, and this year – after dozens of rewrites – it was finally published as Letter From Freedom.

3) Live. No matter what your genre might be, good fiction has to feel like life, so the more things you do with your life, the better. For my part, being a wife (41 years and counting), a mother, and a grandmother has given me lots of fodder. Working as a lawyer, advising people financially, researching and writing about the afterlife, having a host of different friends: your experiences will differ, but being fully present in a varied life is essential if you want to write novels that are going to feel real to readers.

4) Have a Day Job. A successful novelist whose names escapes me famously said, “You can make a fortune as a writer but you can’t make a living.” That was truer back in the day when New York houses were the only way to publish, but even now just a tiny percentage of the novels that make it into print will sell sufficient copies to earn a paycheck. Writing fiction is a hobby. It is the best hobby on the face of the earth, but it’s a hobby all the same.

5) Write Strategically. You’ll have written eight or ten practice novels by the time you feel ready to try for publication, so you will have used up your random ideas. Now you are ready to write to sell. Browse bookstores and best-seller lists and talk to people who love to read. Look back at all those practice novels to help you figure out how what you write best intersects with what many people are reading. Then, plan a series of novels. There are so many reasons to go for a series that they deserve a separate blog post. For now, suffice it to say that your job will be easier and you will be more likely to develop a following if you write your first novel with a series in mind.

6) Put Out Your Best Possible Product. No matter how wonderfully you write, the barriers to having your first novel find an agent, never mind having it bought by a New York house, are so high that I would not attempt it now. Self-publishing is ridiculously easy, and if you do it well for a novel or three, then if having a New York imprint is important you will be more likely to find one. Don’t flounder and court despair in pursuit of your first contract. Instead, self-publish. But don’t let the fact that you are self-publishing diminish the care that you bring to your work! You must have a professional editor, a professional cover designer, a professional interior designer, and a terrific website. All of that is basic. You are building your oeuvre. Professionalism has to be your priority.

7) Promote! Until very recently, publishing fiction was a white-shoe, old-boys’ club. Now, however, it is the Wild West. Things are changing so rapidly that what was daring two years ago is now not only commonplace, but staid. Five years ago you couldn’t sell a self-published novel, while today self-published novels can be best-sellers. Five years ago, being reviewed in Publisher’s Weekly and The New York Times was essential to a book’s getting noticed; today, though, just Amazon.com and a few fiction websites are all you’ll need. And all it takes for you to get the fifty good Amazon.com and Goodreads.com reviews that can give your book sales power is hustle. So, go for it!

My advice is that if you can avoid writing fiction, then you really should avoid writing fiction. But if, like me, you can’t live without it, then the good news is that the market for new fiction writers is better than it ever has been!

Imagine

Posted on January 11, 2014 by Roberta Grimes

I never was a Beatles fan. I found their early stuff unappealing, and as soon as I began to appreciate them Paul went and married Linda and broke my heart. Every girl I knew had a favorite Beatle, and the one you chose told us who you were: Paul appealed to the romantics, Ringo to the motherly types, George to the New Agers, and John to the hippies and flouters of tradition. John was too sophisticated for a sober conventionalist like me.

So I wasn’t paying attention when John Lennon’s Imagine came out in 1971. I was religious at the time, and deeply into investigating the afterlife, so when eventually I noticed the song its first lines struck me as a direct assault on everything that I was certain was true based upon the evidence. medium_11659735555 I wrote the song off as just more of John Lennon’s hippie foolishness.

After I published The Fun of Dying in 2010, I began to meet people who had lost loved ones. Among the most extraordinary of these is Maria Pe, an attorney whose two beautiful sons were murdered by their father on June 21, 2011. What Maria has done with that tragedy is a glorious story for another day, but soon after meeting her in mid-2012 I went to her sons’ website, seanandkyleimaginefund.com.

When you open the site, John Lennon’s glorious paean to human freedom and individual worth begins to play.

I was stunned. I had never before listened to Imagine. Each of the words struck me individually; each was a separate revelation. And there was a portrait of this beautiful visionary who was himself murdered much too young, and portraits of two angelic murdered boys. The experience was life-changing for me.

John Lennon was singing about Atlantica, the center of my series of novels, the place where human life finally works. I was astounded the first time I heard these words. John Lennon had seen Atlantica, too.

Imagine there’s no heaven
It’s easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today…

Imagine there’s no countries
It isn’t hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no possessions
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world…

You may say I’m a dreamer
But I’m not the only one
I hope someday you’ll join us
And the world will live as one

The afterlife evidence shows us more than the fact that our lives are eternal. It also reveals that there is no heaven and no hell: John Lennon was right about that. God neither judges nor punishes us. After we die, we find instead a glorious eternal series of afterlife realities in which John Lennon’s dream is everyday truth. And these afterlife realities work because our minds are glorious and inextricable parts of eternal Mind. Each human mind is perfect by nature: we are one with the consciousness-energy that creates the universe.

Knowing what I know now, I see John Lennon as a visionary and a seer. He might be the greatest visionary of the twentieth century. His dream of human unity and freedom of mind has been glimpsed by so many great Americans, including the two that I consider to be our greatest: Thomas Jefferson and Martin Luther King, Jr. And it animates the teachings of the greatest mind of all, the beautiful teacher and seer who is Jesus.

Dear friends, John Lennon’s dream is not only possible, but it is inevitable. He has envisioned for us a glorious future in which people have finally learned who we are, and when at last – once we have tried everything else – humankind will have discovered that we can live as One because in truth we are One.

Bringing Martha Jefferson to Life

Posted on January 4, 2014 by Roberta Grimes

I came across Alf J. Mapp Jr.’s Thomas Jefferson – A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity in a bookstore one day in 1988, and I was taken with the title. My law practice was in hiatus because my housekeeper had been arrested for drunken driving with my young son in the back seat of her car, and I was looking for something substantial to read. I loved the book, and I fell in love with the earnest young man who was its subject, so I wrote Dr. Mapp my first-ever fan letter. Soon we were phone friends. It was obvious from the book that my new hero had been desperately in love with his wife, but Dr. Mapp told me that since Thomas Jefferson had burned all their letters and all her papers, nobody knew anything about Martha. I told him idly that – what the heck – I was going to figure her out and re-create her journal. My Virginia gentleman friend graciously urged me to do that. I remember saying as we talked about it, “But I don’t know anything about colonial Virginia! I can’t even describe how someone would walk into a room.” He told me that gave me an interesting challenge. And so it did.

I wrote My Thomas more than twenty years ago, but I remember the process vividly. I wanted first to see where Thomas and Martha had lived, so we took a family vacation to Williamsburg and began the drive up to Monticello. We were derailed by an auto accident in Richmond. Not deterred, I soon spent a week in Charlottesville and had a private tour of Monticello as if I were an actual scholar, and for day after day I sat and transcribed Thomas Jefferson’s letters and papers and account books. I had to do it in longhand. They would allow neither the photocopying of original documents nor the use of a typewriter in their quiet library, and this was long before laptop computers. The ipad was not yet a gleam in Steve Jobs’s eye.

Spending a week reading Thomas Jefferson’s handwriting in the actual ink in which he placed it on the page, seeing his patient notations of what he had been doing, what he had spent, what he owed to which slave, and what he had been thinking was an unforgettable experience for me. Being surrounded by extraordinarily warm and gracious Virginians who spoke with an accent that was probably a lot like his own made me feel still closer to the man.

Nobody at Monticello knew much about Martha, but I was told that she had died of tuberculosis. Someone had written a definitive paper. I waited to read that paper until I had transcribed my whole thirteen years of Jefferson’s life with Martha, then I asked to see the paper that proved that Martha had died of tuberculosis. What I was given was an exhaustive study of Jefferson’s illnesses and treatments throughout his life. As I recall, the last sentence of it was, “And as for Martha, what could she have died of but tuberculosis?” That pretty well sums up the attitude of historians toward Martha Jefferson. We can’t know much, so we have to assume that she didn’t matter much.

By the time I came home from Monticello, I knew that I really was going to attempt to re-create Martha Jefferson’s journal. I thought she deserved to have someone try to know her well enough to bring her back to life, especially since I was seeing at that point how essential she had been to her young husband’s development. They had lived in an age when women often died in childbirth and many men buried two or three wives, but Thomas Jefferson had mourned his Martha forever. That had to have been one remarkable lady!

We forget now how difficult it was to do research before the advent of the Internet. I went to libraries, I bought books, I steeped myself in 1770s Virginia life. With only a dozen years to cover, I was able to focus my research to the point that eventually I could describe precisely how someone would have entered a room. The odd juxtaposition of aristocratic formality with gritty farm life surprised me. So many things surprised me! Readers of My Thomas have insisted that I must have made up the part about the Jeffersons buying food from their slaves, but the accounts still survive in Thomas’s own hand. I plan eventually to do a series of posts on Martha’s diabetes, on slavery in colonial Virginia, on the Sally Hemings question, and perhaps on other aspects of the novel, so if there is a question that interests you, I hope that you will let me know.

It’s impossible to look at Martha directly, just as scientists can’t look at a black hole directly. Black holes deform the light of the stars around them, though, and scientists study them largely by studying these effects. In the same way, studying how she seemed to affect Thomas’s light is a useful way to come to know Martha Jefferson.

large__6980636681(1) And we can seek to understand what the ideal woman would have been for a man like the young Thomas Jefferson. He was rather shy, earnest, bookish, high-minded, and ambitious. He seems to have been someone whose company gentlemen enjoyed, someone they admired and marked for success, but ladies seem to have found him clumsy. It has been suggested in recent years that Thomas Jefferson was a high-functioning Asperger’s Syndrome person. I have Asperger’s in my family, and I have to say that diagnosis seems right, although at the time that I wrote the novel I had never heard the term.

So this was my strategy. Discover as closely as you can the shape of the hole, precisely carve the plug to fit it, and you have a woman who so completed the man that when she died so young he never found love again. He spent more than forty years mourning her loss.

The proof in this for me was that when I put together the Thomas I had come to know and the Martha I had managed to fashion, they immediately began to write their own story. It was amazing and wonderful to watch. I had to keep them to the plot that history had dictated, so I was meticulously researching and double-checking and setting up their scenes. But then I would say, “Okay, you’re on!” and sit back and watch and listen. My Thomas and his Martha did every scene in one take.

And they grew as characters in ways that didn’t have anything to do with me. That Martha became an ardent abolitionist and champion of human rights was nothing I had intended, but it shouldn’t be surprising when large__9480568716 her beloved surrogate stepmother and several half-siblings were slaves. I watched them develop as abolitionists together, Thomas Jefferson and his Martha, to the point where toward the end of her life he was plotting his checkerboard experiment to see whether blacks and whites could live together… and that experiment comes from his contemporary writings.

My Thomas is a careful and literal re-creation of those thirteen years of Thomas Jefferson’s life, and it’s the best I could do to bring to life the woman who is his forever love. Since life is eternal, they had ringside seats to the process. I hope they are pleased with the result!

God Is Real

Posted on December 29, 2013 by Roberta Grimes

In decades of studying nearly 200 years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead, I have been able to find no evidence at all for a vengeful Old Testament Jehovah-God. Instead, that version of God appears to have been a last synthesis of the pantheisms which gave ancient peoples lots of people-like gods: the real God, of course, is nothing that we created.

Instead, modern afterlife evidence points to consciousness as the only reality. Which means that everything is God! When I was small, I learned playfully to give my address beginning with my street and town and county and ending with “… the solar system, the universe, the mind of God.” That was closer to the truth than we knew.

But just finding out that everything is Consciousness, capitalized – that is, everything is God – is not enough. We small_4679548147 hunger to understand God, to know God, and there the modern evidence is incomplete. I will tell you here what I think that I begin to understand about Consciousness, with the caveat that we have a lot more to learn once science stops insisting that God does not exist and religions stop insisting they have God in a bottle.

I will here call Consciousness God. They are the same. But if you are a diehard atheist and reading the word “God” creeps you out, then simply substitute the word “Consciousness” for “God.” Copy this post out to Word and do a replace, if you like.

Modern evidence overwhelmingly suggests that:

God is the Creator of the Material Universe. Evidence suggests that God creates the universe to be what we humans would think of as a school for the growth of consciousness itself. I say “creates,” since for God time does not exist; therefore everything about the material universe, including the illusion of time, is a part of God’s creation. We cannot know for sure, of course, but from God’s perspective it likely happens either all at once or perpetually.
God is our Source and our Destination. As best we can puzzle it out from the evidence, each bit of consciousness – each “I,” if you will – is emitted from the Creator and immediately then is striving to return to its Source. Those are human concepts which of course aren’t right, but they are somewhat analogous to what the evidence suggests is what is happening. We are in materiality to learn, and once our learning is perfected we gladly graduate back to God. Of course, since objective time does not exist, both the learning and the return are probably from God’s point of view instantaneous.
God is Good. This school, this universe, and all of reality are more gentle and more profoundly loving than we on this tough planet can imagine. The image of God as Father is the closest that our puny minds can come, but it vastly understates the degree to which each “I” is absolutely loved. The universe exists for our growth, and there is nothing in it that can harm us.
God is Light. Beyond the material universe – that is, in most of reality – there are no suns. Instead, most of the dimensions of reality are lit by God and by God alone, so the lower vibratory dimensions – those farthest from the Source – are dark, while the higher dimensions are brighter and brighter the closer they come to God’s center. Again, of course, these are human conceptions. In reality, the dimensions are not layers and God is everywhere and does not have a center… but this is the closest that I can come to expressing what modern evidence says is right. Beyond materiality, Consciousness is light. Each “I,” each speck of consciousness, also appears beyond materiality to be light, with the more advanced specks of course much brighter… but again, this is saying it in human terms. There is evidence that without the gorgeous Summerland illusion to which we graduate at death, what the afterlife reality would look like to us is a black night starry with pinpoints of light that each are individual beings.
God Doesn’t Care About Religion. Here is a piece of irony! I have found no evidence whatsoever that God cares one whit whether you are religious. Religions appear to be man-made systems based upon ancient superstitions and fed by human fears of the unknown and by that age-old human need for community. There is evidence that each earth-religion has an after-death haven for its adherents that is mind-created by co-religionists; but this is not heaven, and sooner or later each adherent must be rescued to reality. In fact, the more you study the evidence and you read the Gospels side by side, the more you suspect that far from meaning to establish a new religion, Jesus came to wean us from the old one. My study of the evidence has made me a more ardent follower of the teachings of Jesus, since the evidence so completely shows Him to be right; but it also has made me confident that you needn’t be a Christian to “get into heaven.” Indeed, apparently to be a mind-closed follower of one of the more extreme sects of any religion will just buy you an unnecessary after-death stay in an off-track limbo of religionism.
God Helps Itself. Since everything is God, it is erroneous to think of “God” and “Guardian Angels” and “Saints” and “Spirit Guides” and you and me as separate beings. There is overwhelming evidence that each of us on earth is surrounded by non-material helpers: some of these are Spirit Guides and some are Angels, and each of them is also an “I.” Each “I,” whether material or nonmaterial, is working toward its own perfection, and a big part of that work is this helping of others. Each of us is not just in God’s hands, but we are God’s hands. Before I understood that everything is Consciousness, I used to think that this was the only way that God is still working here on earth; but now I realize that of course God can work directly as well as working through us. God is all there is. It seems from the evidence that most of the help that we get comes through God’s invisible helpers, but since each of them also is a part of God, to think of it that way is a distinction without a difference.
God Creates Through Us. It is difficult to see our creative work here, since on earth we seem bound by the laws of physics, although there is evidence that even here the more spiritually advanced of us are able to affect materiality with our minds. But since we are of the same consciousness as God, apparently we are co-creators: beyond materiality, many of us are able to create what appear to be new realities as solid-seeming as the earth but more gorgeous, like earth-perfection greatly magnified. There are wonderful earthlike Summerland levels to which we go immediately after our bodies die, places full of flowers in incredible colors and magnificent buildings of every description, and the evidence suggests that all of this is mind-created over eons by earth-graduates. Husbands lovingly replicate their wives’ favorite earth homes down to the smallest dish, so their wives when they arrived can feel at home; and scientists and doctors and other professionals re-create earthlike places of work where their colleagues can decompress in surroundings that feel familiar. Evidence suggests that since space is infinite, all of this mind-created stuff lasts forever. Long after that loving couple has outgrown their need for the house, it stands through eternity unless another recent earth-graduate wants to change it around and make it his own.
God Is All That Exists. Think about that, really think about it, and you change your life completely. It is easy to say that you yourself and everyone you know and everything you see, whether animate or inanimate, is Consciousness and nothing but Consciousness. The evidence indicates that this is true; say it, and the words roll off your tongue. But stop and think about what that means!

There is a great deal more to learn about God. But for me at the moment this seems to be enough.

Human Nature

Posted on December 22, 2013 by Roberta Grimes

Physicists do thought-experiments. Using everything you know about how certain things would work in certain situations, you shift some of the variables in your mind and see what happens then. I didn’t know that scientists do thought-experiments when I started thought-experimenting in the mid-seventies, but I discovered then – surprisingly – that experimenting in your mind seems to work.

I was just out of law school at the time, a stay-at-home new mother. Having just come through the youthquake of the sixties, I was deeply cynical about our culture. Out of boredom, I began to think about a human society that would be the polar opposite of western civilization. How would it work? The core element, of course, would be personal freedom and profound respect for the freedom of others. But if everyone is free, how does the work get done? Marriage would have to be permanent, since in modern society it is almost whimsical. How does that reconcile with freedom? Would there be laws? Who would run the place, and how? If you have read Letter From Freedom, you have a sense of what my thought experiment became, but it was a process. Moving thoroughly into this alternative world and understanding how it worked took time.

Writing it down as a novel made my experiment feel more real. I would come up with situations and watch to see how the denizens of my little world would react. The Atlantican culture seemed curiously resilient, but it took me awhile to understand why.

What surprised me most was the fact that the people in my experimental world became more and more sensitive to one another. That being so perfectly free from coercion might make them more tolerant and kinder made sense, but this reading-minds thing they soon had going did not. One of the only scenes in Letter From Freedom that was written when it was still a novella and survives in the finished novel unchanged is the moment when Jude tells Liz why it is essential for human minds to be free:

“I’ll tell you what I told him. I can’t think of another way to say it.” He squatted and fished a stick from the ground and said, “Now, it seems to you that you and this tree over here are separate, right? Nothing between you but air? And you think you and I are separate, too. But you’re wrong. It’s an illusion.” He drew a circle in the dust and said, “Suppose you had a big hollow sphere. Suppose you could see it only across the middle. What would you see? A circle, right? A slice out of a sphere? Now, suppose the sphere were ribbed. Connected at the top and bottom, but separate at the sides like a birdcage. So if you saw that only across the middle, what would you see?” He drew a circle of dots beside his solid circle. “That’s what you’d see. Separate, right? But not separate, because even though you can’t see it, those dots are connected above and below. Their separation is an illusion. It’s your seeing that’s faulty.”

I thought that moment was surprising and beautiful and really, really strange. By then it was the early eighties. I was beginning to read afterlife communications, but it was only after my father’s death in 1991 that I stopped writing fiction and my afterlife research became obsessive. I read hundreds of communications, most of them received before 1950. I began my research as a skeptic, assuming that every medium was a charlatan and feeling that I was searching like Diogenes to find a bit of honesty. But that phase soon passed. Within a few years’ time I realized that not only have we been receiving good communications from the dead for more than a century, but those communications taken collectively are so consistent and so detailed that now we can say with confidence not only that we survive our deaths, but also what the afterlife is like. I solved that problem early. My interest then shifted to using communications from the dead to better understand the nature of reality and what human beings actually are.

We all know human nature, right? We’re human. Everyone we know is human. But are we expressing true human nature? Or is our profound lack of mental freedom keeping us from expressing what we are?

Let me introduce you to Patrick, who used to be the star of the Dallas Zoo. Patrick was born and 5016905302_11e36d63a7 reared in captivity. After eighteen years in Dallas, he matured into a gorgeous silverback gorilla who had no idea whatsoever of how a gorilla should behave. He got along okay with male gorillas, but he attacked females. He couldn’t be allowed near them. Recently he was shipped to a gorilla reform school in South Carolina, where they will try to help him discover and express his true gorilla self.

You and I are in captivity, too. We live constrained by rules and taboos and customs. Of course, we think that’s fine. It makes us civilized, right? And civilization is good, by definition. The problem is that over all the thousands of generations of human civilization, there is no evidence that humankind has been improved by civilization at all.

I discovered what I call the “civilization problem” as I was putting together all the things that I was learning from studying the afterlife evidence. All the hundreds of communications that I had read, received over more than a century of time, were remarkably consistent in what they had to tell us about what we really are. Here is a quick summary of what I have learned:

1) The only thing that exists is an infinitely creative consciousness matrix. Everything we think of as real is created and held in suspension by that matrix. Even Max Planck, the eminent physicist who in 1918 received the Nobel Prize for quantum theory, knew about the consciousness matrix. In 1944 he 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 tells us he was exactly right.

2) Our minds are part of eternal consciousness. And they are the only part of ourselves that is real. You aren’t just created in God’s image, dear friend, but the evidence consistently tells us that your mind is of the very stuff of God.

3) Consciousness is infinitely loving. God is not human-like. God does not have a beard. God seems from the evidence to be something like an infinitely powerful energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, and highly emotional. The only emotion that consciousness apparently has is an intense affinity – love, in other words. And we are part of that love.

4) There is no evidence of a powerful being set in opposition to God. After decades of looking, I have to say that there doesn’t seem to be a devil. And that would make sense, since the evidence tells us that the less loving an entity is, the weaker it is, so the most evil entities of which we are aware can scarcely function.

All the evidence taken together confirms that our true nature is to be infinitely loving. And only loving.

Um, what? Wait a minute. If that is genuine human nature, then where does all this evil come from? The afterlife evidence suggests pretty strongly that it comes from us. We infinitely loving beings, each of us a part of eternal Mind, are also, like Mind, infinitely creative. And because we are living so at odds with what is apparently our true and loving nature, we create all the evil that exists.

Christianity tells us that human nature is crass because we have rebelled against God. There was a “Fall.” So, here is a question for you. What if that Biblical “Fall” was actually the dawn of civilization?

I don’t know the answer, but I think it is long past time for us to ask the question. Other than computers and microwaves, you cannot honestly look around and say that human nature has advanced one whit since civilization 5150508205_4efef070c2 began. Civilization is no help to us. It only keeps us constrained. We are all like Patrick, making do in a cage that seems superficially comfortable, but that distorts the way we think and behave to the point where we have no idea who we are.

The Letters From Love series began as a way to ask this crucial question. It begins with a glimpse of how human beings might happily live without the cage, and its later novels will explore how we might even now begin to leave the cage behind. And now, more than twenty years after I first heard Jude speak those peculiar words, I am coming to understand what he meant. He was right. We are all densely connected, and the separations that we perceive among people are illusory. When we begin to understand all the glorious implications of that fact, then our new world of freedom can begin.

Characters

Posted on December 14, 2013 by Roberta Grimes

The biggest lesson I had to learn about writing fiction is that the writer doesn’t write the story. Instead, these supposedly fictional people come alive at some point, and they take over. If the writer won’t let that happen, the story dies on the page.

It was Pearl Buck who made me want to learn to write fiction. I spent my childhood reading and re-reading her novels about China, and loving the grace with which a few words and a bit of dialog could evoke a whole exotic world. As an adult, I switched to reading everything that John Steinbeck, John Updike, and Anne Tyler wrote. All of them, like my childhood friend, seemed to know the trick of creating a whole enjoyable alternate reality. Interesting and complex people; moments that were insightful and sad and funny; the sight and smell and touch of a place all formed within my mind, complete, and from just a few words. What a gift they had! I didn’t realize that the reason their novels worked was that their characters were creating their stories and my writer heroes were especially good scribes.

Happy The first novel I ever tried to write was a brief version of Letter From Freedom. The year was 1977, and I was conducting a thought-experiment that needed a story, so I made up a story. Rich older guy brings lovely young woman to his private island. He’s in love with her, but she falls in love with a native on the island and with the island’s culture so she stays there forever. Mine was a stupid, boring plot, and dead on the page. But then something odd happened.

Before I talk about this, I had better make clear the fact that I know these people are not real. I know I’m not channeling them from the dead; they don’t somehow live on other planets. They began as my creations, and they live in my mind. I am rational enough to understand that. But still, in some way that continues to confound me, fictional characters come alive and take over.

I’m used to this process now, and rely on it. But the first time it ever happened to me was when I tried to do a second draft of my thought-experiment novella, and I found that now the characters seemed to have developed a bit of independence. That older rich guy insisted on being younger. That beautiful young woman refused to be beautiful, and she talked like a wiseass. Not my idea. She fell in love with the rich guy, which was a nuisance; he was in the story just to get her to my thought-experiment island. I wanted her to end up with Jude! Jude was patterned on my old college boyfriend. She was patterned after me. This was my alternate reality, darn it, and I had the right to write it my way. So I forced my original story for a few more drafts, and then for a long time they were a love-triangle. For a very long time Jack was a bully. After all, he’s a rich guy, right? And Liz had to be pretty because a heroine is pretty.

It was the experience of writing a novel about historical people that taught me that characters drive the story. I have such reverence for Thomas Jefferson that even though My Thomas covers just twelve years, before I wrote a word of it I spent my every spare minute for a year studying everything Jefferson wrote before the age of forty. I carefully studied the history, too, all the events and the cultural details and the way they ate and dressed and lived. I studied slavery, which – like most things – seems to have evolved over centuries. By the time I had the history and the culture down and I had the genuine Jefferson in mind, when I put them together his Martha appeared and they lived out their story. I watched and listened and wrote it down.

My Thomas is the best thing I will ever write. When I read it again after twenty years in preparation for resuming my Letters From Love series, I was astonished to see how good it was. I had to tone down the Elizabethan English for reasons that become clear in Book Three of the series, but I was reluctant to do even that. My Thomas is good because I let the characters tell their story. And that was necessary not because they are historical people, but because the characters always own the story. It belongs to them. The novelist is their scribe.

There are many ramifications to this central fact. Here are a few of them:

1) Characters have back-stories. My wonderful editor insists that I write out the back-story of any character that seems to her not sufficiently fleshed, and I have found that to be a useful exercise. I also often find it surprising. Even if I haven’t consciously thought about a character’s back-story, when she asks me to write it I can flow pages of it. Somehow it already exists in my mind.

2) Characters have issues. I used to resist letting the ones I liked have any flaws at all, but if they didn’t have flaws there would be no story. And studying their flaws can be a great way to better understand a character. For example, Jack is a bit of a sissy. I thought for years that was because he was rich, but then in perhaps the tenth draft of what became Letter From Freedom he started telling Liz about his horrible childhood. Liz, too, began to make more sense when she shared the roots of her insecurities.

3) Characters are well-rounded. I used to consider Michael in Letter From Freedom to be the embodiment of evil, but when my editor asked for his backstory (editors call this a “bible”), we found him to be surprisingly nuanced. The only part of his good side that made it into the novel was his devotion to his widowed sister, but even that keeps him from being a caricature.

4) Characters will give you revelations. I have been around Jack and Liz for 35 years. You would think I know them, wouldn’t you? Yet I continue to learn new things about them. When I began to write Book Three, I notice that at seventy Jack is so security-conscious that this preoccupation is becoming pathological. So last month I did what I always do when I am trying to better understand a character: I asked him where that came from. Within a day the answer was in my mind, and it explained so much! I think it will surprise you, too.

5) Characters will embarrass you. Oh, will they embarrass you! I am a business attorney, happily married for 41 years, and a mother and grandmother. Writing a sex scene makes me blush, but the characters tell me to shut up and write. I used to try to leave out the sex scenes, or at least to tone them down a bit, but that never worked. And I’m going to have to write Book Four, the ancient history of Atlantica, which is full of wrongheaded violence and cruelty. I wince at what people will think of me, pulling all that out of my mind! I think a big reason why I have waited until my sixties to write full-time is that by now I have mostly stopped caring.

The key to writing fiction is to let the characters live it. You are their scribe. You watch and listen and write it down, then you clean up your prose and maybe do some rearranging. But the characters have to tell their own stories, or whatever you write won’t be worth its ink. That’s humbling, but ultimately it’s freeing, don’t you think?

Thomas Jefferson Still Survives

Posted on December 6, 2013 by Roberta Grimes

Two of my big interests have long been researching death and better understanding Thomas Jefferson, and it’s fun when those interests come together! I met Jefferson in 1988 when I found the first volume of Alf Mapp’s excellent biography, Thomas Jefferson – A Strange Case of Mistaken Identity, a book that is even more timely today. How could anyone not love the young Jefferson? I fell in love, and I began an obsessive research project that culminated in the publication of My Thomas in 1993. I was less interested in Jefferson’s later years, in part because I found those years so sad: after Martha died he was a broken man, and he remained in important ways broken. But I knew about the not-so-strange coincidence of his having died fifty years to the day after the date that we now assign to the Declaration of Independence, and I knew that his great friend John Adams also died on that day. Jefferson died at about one o’clock in the afternoon, and it is reported that sometime before he died four hours later, Adams stirred and said his final words: “Thomas Jefferson still survives.”
I have known these facts for a quarter of a century and thought nothing of them. It was only yesterday, in an exchange of emails with the venerable Stafford Betty, professor of religion at California State University at Bakersfield and a leading afterlife expert, that I saw the obvious. Dr. Betty has surmised that Adams must have had a deathbed visit from Jefferson. Of course! He’s right!
It is usual, and probably universal, for one or more of our dead loved ones to be present at our deaths, visible to us and sometimes visible to others in the room. They are there to assist us in making the transition, since without their help there is a risk that we will be distracted and won’t efficiently move on to the higher vibratory levels of reality where the dead reside. It is similarly not uncommon for people who have just left their bodies with a distant loved one in mind to appear to that loved one as part of the natural transition process. Jefferson died in Virginia, while Adams died in Massachusetts. In the post-death reality there is no distance, and it is reasonable to assume that as Jefferson was dying he might have been wondering if his ancient friend Adams, then in his nineties, might still be alive. For him to have appeared to Adams would have been an easy and unremarkable event.
There is no other good explanation. The two were close friends through much of their lives, and after a political estrangement in the early 1800s they spent their last years exchanging letters that were full of genuine affection. But by their deaths they hadn’t seen one another in decades. John Adams died surrounded by his loving family, but all conversation with them had ceased. Why on earth would he have randomly stirred when he was only minutes from death and speculated about whether Jefferson might be about to beat him in the lottery to become the last Founding Father to die?
Adams wasn’t speculating. The event so momentous that it prompted a moribund man to speak aloud was the sudden appearance of Jefferson himself, standing by his bed, perhaps saying the like of, “Come along with me, Adams – dying is easy.” And I like to think that on Jefferson’s arm was the wife he had pined for most of his life, smiling up at him in the sweet joy of their being together now forevermore.

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

Is Civilization the Problem?

Signs From the Dead

Thomas Jefferson and Slavery

Writing Your First Novel

Imagine

Bringing Martha Jefferson to Life

God Is Real

Human Nature

Characters

Thomas Jefferson Still Survives

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