Roberta Grimes

Near-Death’s Travesties and Lies

Posted by Roberta Grimes • July 25, 2026 • 8 Comments
Death, Jesus

 “The time has come,” the Walrus said,
“To talk of many things:
Of shoes — and ships — and sealing-wax —
Of cabbages — and kings —
And why the sea is boiling hot —
And whether pigs have wings.”
       – Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) from Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

If you ever have Googled yourself, then perhaps you can imagine how surprised I was when I tried that, just a few days ago, for the first time in my life. My reason was a practical one. Since I am in the process of publishing three books, and the publisher has me working with a publicity team, the first thing those lovely people said to me was that I had to get my public life together. They told me it was ridiculous that I have a podcast life, a blog life, a Facebook life, a books life, and soon a Praxis many-languages life, all public faces, and none of them is linked to any of the others. I had never even seen my Facebook life, at least not once in more than a decade; but the woman who manages that one does it very well indeed (55,000 people follow me there, as opposed to fewer than 5000 who read this blog). So, we are going to hire her now to help us pull together and manage all these many separate me’s. There is also an Instagram me, by the way, but we cannot even discover who runs that! Now, in writing this blog, I often have Googled experts on various things, and I have found their pictures at various ages spread across the top of the page. Their accomplishments would be interspersed and just below, and their biographical information would be down the right side. And, amazingly, there I also was! Someone had even made me Google-ready. However, what I also found prominently displayed was a link to an article on Reddit.com, whatever that might be, entitled, “Can No Longer Recommend Roberta Grimes For Afterlife Research”.

When I followed the link, I found a discussion-board for Near-Death Experiences. The article itself was nonsense, some fellow saying that Roberta Grimes had loved NDEs, but then I had inexplicably turned against NDEs, so now he refused to follow me. I responded to that article with a comment explaining what NDEs actually are, and especially the fact that they are not afterlife evidence. But having someone who had been attacked by name on their website unexpectedly respond with the truth seemed to horrify those Reddit.com moderators. No, their rules required that I must say that “I believe” this-or-that. I could not state that anything was true or false. Oh please! Here, this fellow had been allowed to list a whole string of lies about me, stating my actual name but not his! How fair was that?Belief has nothing to do with the evidence-based truth, my very dear but completely deluded Reddit friends. It is because of this habit of theirs that NDE-ers’ have adopted of so completely confusing beliefs with the truth which by now has allowed these NDE “believers” to so infiltrate and befoul the essential field of evidence-based afterlife education that we are reliably told by those not in bodies that just very ecently, almost 25% of the people who die normal, planned deaths on earth are not transitioning normally to the afterlife anymore, but instead they are going off-track at their deaths. FOR SHAME, all you irresponsible NDE-pushers! You are causing such tremendous harm!

I apologize, my dear and lovely blog-post readers, but we must talk about this, here and now, and apparently very emphatically. Based upon my fifty years of extensive afterlife research, and based upon the evidence provided within many Near-Death Experiences themselves: Near-Death Experiences never involve any form whatsoever of actual death! The problem is simply that when Dr. Raymond Moody named those newly-discovered phenomena in his 1975 book, Life After Life, he gave them a very confusing name. But if someone is standing before you now, and telling you his or her near-death tale, then there never was even an instant of time when that person ever was in fact briefly dead. It turns out, my dear ones, that actual death is a clearly black-and-white event. Why are we so certain about this? Here are some of the reasons why:

• Your visible material body is attached to your non-material, internal, spiritual body by what is called a silver cord. Many people actually can see that silver cord in dim light as a thin, shimmery, silver-blue strip. The “silver cord” is first named in the Bible’s Old Testament, at Ecclesiastes 12:16. We are told even there that when it is “snapped”, that is all she wrote. There is no un-snapping it. Your material body is right then immediately and permanently as dead as a doornail.

• In some of the most extensive Near-Death Experiences, the experiencer comes to a place where a voice says, “Turn back! You are approaching the place where the dead are. If you continue, your silver cord will break, and it cannot be reattached, so you will die.” This phenomenon is so well-documented of NDE-ers being told to turn back when they reach the edge of “where the dead are”, and it is so reliably known by researchers, that everyone who claims to have studied NDE phenomena must have heard of it. And it tells us conclusively that NDEs cannot be excursions to the place where the dead actually are. It insists to us that “near-death” is not actual death, and that death is always a one-way trip!

• The NDE tunnel with a light is a rescue device. In all the afterlife research that I had done prior to 1975, which was the bulk of my in-depth afterlife studies, I never had seen a single instance of the tunnel that ends in a light until I read Dr. Moody’s Life After Life in 1975. The very lowest-vibration levels of the astral plane are negative. So, when someone is unexpectedly out of his material body on earth, his guides would be likely to hoover him up into a wormhole that conveys him directly to beautiful Level Three of the astral plane.

• Each Near-Death Experience is peculiar, aberrant, and unique. While on the other hand, planned experiences of dying on earth are generally remarkably the same. The astral plane contains our afterlife, which in fact is our eternal home, and it includes a great deal more besides. That astral plane is precisely where we are, but at a slightly higher vibration: think of your mind as a TV set, now tuned to the vibratory level of this earth; then think of the astral plane as a couple of “channels” higher in vibration. Many of us astral travel easily out of body while our material bodies sleep, always tethered to those mateial bodies by our silver cords, so most NDEs happen in the astral as well. The overall look and feel of the astral plane is so very different from the earth that it is easy for NDE-ers to imagine that they have died briefly, and then have come back to life. But of course, that does not make it true!

• There is no afterlife hell. And yet, about one in seven NDEs is reported to be negative, or even to feature a fiery hell. A NDE experiencer who finds himself in “hell” can simply cry out, and at once he is out of that illusion; but of course, that does not alter the fact that anyone who thinks that NDEs have anything to do with the genuine afterlife now believes that there must be a genuine hell. There is not. What does exist is an “outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth”, just as Jesus very well described it (see MT 8:12). But only we can put ourselves in the outer darkness, by allowing our spiritual vibration to fall too low. We will have to be rescued, if we wind up there; but of course, NDEs have nothing to do with actual death, so they can tell us nothing whatsoever about any of these afterlife details.

Soon after the International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS) was formed in 1978, and some of its earliest members were insisting that they had briefly died and then come back to life, so their Near-Death Experiences had in fact been trips to the genuine afterlife, I could see the potential developing for some genuine disasters! Craig Hogan and I had been working hard to educate people about what was going to happen at their actual deaths, and now here came these NDE-ers, spewing their confusing nonsense! I spent time back then with Raymond Moody, including one delightful afterlife conference dinner. Dr. Moody is the author who first coined the in artful and imprecise term “Near-Death Experience”; and clearly, Dr. Moody knew back then, back thirty years ago, that no near-death experiencer ever enters the actual afterlife. That was perfectly clear to him then, back when we all were still attending afterlife conferences together. I also corresponded at the time with the IANDS leadership team about the worrisome fact that some of their members were claiming they had died and come back to life. They assured me that, Oh no! They never would support claims of anyone’s having come back from the dead! But indeed, reports now are that IANDS has supported “I died, and this is what I learned” reports at their conventions. So now, IANDS shares in the shame, and in the blame.   

Near-Death Experiences can happen whenever your body is briefly unable to adequately sustain its life, so it may be on mechanical life-support, or also it might not be. Whatever its situation, during the time when your material body cannot properly sustain itself, your spirit team might take your spirit body on an adventure, most likely into the gigantic astral plane, and still securely connected to your material body on the earth-plane by that silver cord. Your healthy silver cord while you are in your prime is incredibly stretchy! It will allow your internal energy body to safely travel to the edge of this universe, if you spirit guide feels inclined to assist in such a very long-distance adventure.

I should mention, too, the very important fact that what happens during your NDE is generally meant to be between you and your spirit-guidance team, and is meant for your own spiritual edification. You can see a great many things during your NDE, and meet and talk with some truly amazing people. Please understand, however, that we are  firmly told that neither the genuine God nor the genuine Jesus ever appears in any Near-Death Experience. If either religious figure is seen, it is always played by a member of your own spiritual guidance team. God is a spirit-Being anyway, and entirely non-material. I can’t say this for certain, but it is my understanding that God never appears to anyone anywhere as a physical Being. And Jesus reportedly disdains NDEs, but here is a tip for you, my dear one: Jesus does very lovingly greet newcomers to the afterlife who want to met Him. As soon as you arrive home, simply ask to meet the genuine Jesus. The Being you meet then will be the real Jesus, as you will know right away by His amazingly high and strong personal energy vibration; and you will be in for an extraordinary experience of very gentle and highly personal love and light.

But, what can we do about the horrible fact that the NDE movement has apparently so carelessly, and entirely without regard for the countless people they are harming, destroyed all our efforts to educate the world about the beautiful natural-death process? ALMOST TWENTY-FIVE PERCENT of people who die natural, planned deaths on earth now go off-track at death! And before this foolish obsession with NDEs, which have nothing whatsoever to do with death, that simply was never happening! There is a one in four chance now that among those off-track, newly-dead souls is your own grandmother, my dear one. Your brother. Your child. People who go off-track this way generally end up in some illusory place.  On a fake cloud, perhaps, with other off-track souls who are strangers to them, and beside fake St. Peter’s Gates that never open. Or they might be drawn to a dim little fake village built around a steepled church that is having a perpetual bake sale. There are a number of these what are called “hollow heavens”, apparently mind-created by deluded dead folks long ago, and now still out there somewhere as traps that lure the off-track newly-dead. They sound unbelievably creepy, even frightening to me! Elevated beings not in bodies are tirelessly working right now to rescue each of these loved ones who have been drawn off-track on the journey home. But I could write a whole new post about why theirs is such a difficult task, with these dead people already so confused and alarmed! I grieve, and I pray for our beloveds in transition, who should have been protected from this completely irresponsible IANDS-sown confusion. But they were not. It truly is incredible to me how feckless these supposed experts can be.

All that you and I can do now is to try our very best to protect the ones we love with a solid afterlife education. The blog links in the paragraph below are seven years old, because back then I was posting far more often about death and the afterlife; whereas now, my interest tends more toward spiritual matters. And some of those old posts’ links, sad to say, have rotted! But because I never read NDE nonsense, the information they contain remains as good as gold.

The actual death process is amazingly consistent over time and across cultures, as are the details of the afterlife to which all of us will soon return to live our eternal lives. And thanks to the fact that before NDEs became a thing, beginning in 1975, the genuine death and afterlife evidence was both abundant and consistent, there is such a detailed consensus now about what happens at and after death that the truth is readily accessible. Fifteen years ago, I wrote the book on death, where I stressed the fact that, wow, our lives are eternal. Then, I established, our wonderful friend Dr. R Craig Hogan and I share the cost of, and he maintains what is the definitive death-and-the-afterlife website, which is seekreality.com. And we are in the process of translating our death-and-afterlife books into as many languages as possible! But, oh my dear ones, far above  anything else, please keep your mind free of NDE distractions. Don’t risk suffering even a moment’s delay on your journey to our joyous eternal home!

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son!
The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!
Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun
The frumious Bandersnatch!”
– Lewis Carroll (1832-1898) from Through the Looking-Glass (1871)

 

 

(Most photos are from Vecteezy.com)