Roberta Grimes

How Death is Designed

Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 01, 2026 • 10 Comments
Afterlife Research, Death

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation!
O my soul, praise him, for he is your health and salvation!
Come, all who hear; now to his temple draw near,
join me in glad adoration.

Praise to the Lord, above all things so wondrously reigning;
sheltering you under his wings, and so gently sustaining!
Have you not seen all that is needful has been
sent by his gracious ordaining?

Praise to the Lord, who will prosper your work and defend you;
surely his goodness and mercy shall daily attend you.
Ponder anew what the Almighty can do,if with his love he befriends you.
– Joachim Neander (1650-1680) & Catherine Winkworth, English translator (1829-1878), from “Praise to the Lord” (1680

My beloved friends, when you see a silent tragedy happening, and you point that tragedy out to the people who are causing it, and who could so easily end it, but they ignore it, then what do you do? Well, in my case, I have tried reaching out to the International Association for Near Death Studies (IANDS) and telling them that now almost 25% of the dying are going off-track because IANDS is allowing NDE experiencers to talk about NDEs as if they were actual deaths that had been reversed, and the events that happen in NDEs had been real events, so now many of the excited newly-dead folks are looking for that tunnel with a light. But IANDS has never responded to me. I have a little hunch that they really don’t care. Right now, on all the internet discussion sites, I can see from the little research I have done in the past week that the NDE folks have come to reign as “afterlife experts”. Sadly, in a land of the blind, a one-eyed man is king.

Well, then. Here, my dear ones, from a genuine afterlife expert, is the truth about Near-Death Experiences. Near-Death Experiences became relatively common only after about 1960, when people whose mateal bodies had suffered the sudden inability to support life for any reason could be rescued and given life-support to assist them in their survival until their bodies would be able to again support them without medical assistance. In the meantime, their internal energy body – the part of all of us that is in fact eternal – could leave that material body, still attached to it by the silver cord that kept the damaged material body alive; and with the guidance and support of their spirit guides, angels, or whoever was then in charge, they often would have adventures. Very often, the event that had rendered the NDE experiencer’s material body to be temporarily uninhabitable would have been sudden, so to get the experiencer out of harm’s way, his or her spirit guide would effect a rescue by opening a wormhole through layers of low-vibration reality right down to the material body and hoovering the experiencer right up to Level Three of the astral plane. This is the tunnel-and-a-light experience so often reported in NDEs. The only thing in any NDE that even remotely approaches actual death just proves my point that no NDE has anything even remotely to do with death is that some very long-duration NDEs will get to a point where a voice will say something like, “Stop! Go back! You are approaching the place where the dead are, and if you continue, your silver cord will break. It cannot be reattached, so you will die, and it is not your time to die.”

So then, my dear, you can be certain that any living person who is standing before you and saying the equivalent of, “I died and came back to life”, is lying to you. And you should feel free to tell him or her so! The astral plane feels amazingly different in every conceivable way from this earth-reality. The very atmosphere there is nothing but love, and even the colors are different because many of them are beyond the visible-light spectrum. So anyone who goes there during an NDE can perhaps be forgiven for thinking that, wow, they were for sure in the sho’ ‘nuff heaven, even if, technically, they did not actually die first. Well, maybe. But they did not in fact die. So, their NDE has nothing whatsoever to do with death. And when the general public is encouraged  by IANDS itself to use these folks’ NDEs as if what seems to happen in them were genuine death-and-afterlife experiences, and evidence of what likely happens to most folks in general, when it very clearly is none of that; then, Houston, we clearly have a big problem!

Death is a universal and entirely natural part of life, so the level of misinformation and fear that still surrounds it in the twenty-first century is horrifying! So much of what we are told by those we venerate as authorities is scary, silly, and entirely wrong. The scientific community still insists that the death of our bodies will be the death of our minds, while Christian clergymen assure us that after death we might end up in a fiery hell, or in a tortuous purgatory, or sitting around in a boring throne room, or sleeping until we hear an end-times trumpet. When the true information about what actually happens at and after death is so abundant now, and when so much of it has been readily available to us for more than a century, there is no excuse for spreading all this depressing misinformation and plain garbage NDE nonsense! The remainder of today’s post will discuss what is usual when any of us approaches a natural death. Then, next week, we will talk about what can go wrong, and what is going wrong now for the almost 25% of the dying who are being betrayed by the IANDS community.

We plan for our eventual deaths as part of the life-planning process. All the important events of our lives are planned by us in committee, before we are born, and we also plan two or three exit-points that our higher consciousness can choose to take if it determines that for what ever reason it is time for us to leave our current lifetime. Death at any time other than a planned exit point is possible, but it is rare. Almost never do we know at a conscious level that our higher minds have chosen to take an upcoming exit point; but often, after people have died, their loved ones will look back and notice that the decedent had spent the months before death wrapping up details, reconciling with people, finishing projects, settling debts, and in general trying to make things a little neater for those have left behind. This is true even if the death is by an accident, and not a slower illness.

The day of your death is meant to be the happiest and most beautiful day of your life. It’s the day when you are reunited with loved ones you may have thought you never would see again, the day you get to see and hug the guides who have helped you make the most of this lifetime, and the blessed day when you leave this illusion and return to the joy of your true home. For most people, death is every bit that just plain wonderful! But I have lately come to accept the fact that our willful cultural ignorance about death still means that a significant number of people are botching their well-planned deaths, and taking temporary detours to nowhere. We’ll be talking about some of their travails next week. First, though, let’s talk about what actually happens in the sort of well-planned death that most of us can look forward to enjoying.

You will need to keep an open mind! If you can approach your death knowing just in general terms that the process is going to be easy and happy, and that you will at every moment be cared for and supported by loved ones – if that is all that fills your mind as your death approaches – then you will manage it just fine. You might even be one of the fortunate ones, like my own mother, who simply fall asleep here and wake up there. But most of us are awake during at least some part of the death process. And some of what happens during your death is likely to feel odd or confusing to you, and to your survivors around the bed. So it can help if you know what to expect:

• You will begin the process of separating from your body sometime in the hours before your death. We don’t know exactly when this begins, and it may be variable and personal to you; but for many, the first sign of this separation will be what seems to be a partial recovery. People who had been in a comas might wake up, and perhaps even sit up and speak normally. Those with dementia who might not have been coherent for years might converse with those around them. From your perspective as the person who is dying, it seems that in general both pain and fear are almost or altogether gone, and you feel better, and pretty much matter-of-fact about your dying now. The cause of all these changes is apparently the partial separation of your energy body – your mind, or perhaps your “soul” if you prefer – from the physical body that is about to die.
• In the hours before death there will be deathbed visitors. The timing of this is highly variable. One or two of these people that we used to think were dead will sometimes appear to the dying person as much as a couple of weeks before the death; but more commonly, these visitors will first begin to appear in the last day or two. From your perspective as the dying person, this is an astonishing experience! You are in the midst of actively dying, not uncomfortable, and not really worried, but still unsure about what comes next; and then suddenly, Dad appears in an upper corner of the room, looking solid and in the prime of life. He starts speaking with you in your mind, and you respond to him mentally. He might come down into the room, or he might stay partially visible in an upper corner; he might be joined by other dead loved ones, all looking great, or even by dead pets. For nearly everyone, this sudden appearance of happy loved ones many years after their own deaths is so thrilling that we will mostly stop interacting with our living visitors. On occasion, too, some of the visitors in the room will also see these deathbed visitors, and they even might accompany the dying person at the start of the post-death journey. Dr. Raymond Moody’s book, Glimpses of Eternity, details this interesting phenomenon of shared-death experiences.
• Actively dying is a gradual process. From the moment when you see your first deathbed visitor, you will know that you are in fact immortal, wow, son of a gun! So what happens next can be a lot of fun for those who are awake throughout their whole dying process. You might think of your earth-body as something like nested dolls. The outer layer or two will be dying now – the one composed of matter, and also perhaps the energy aura that defended you against negative entities while you were alive (although we aren’t sure about that). But the internal energy bodies that hold your earth-mind will survive your death, so your nested bodies must separate. People who have been awake while this was happening have said that it begins in the fingers and toes and progresses toward the torso, and it feels as if lots of tiny threads are breaking inside your body. I think of it as un-velcroing! The energy part of you that is leaving is un-velcroing from your physical body, and it gathers in your chest. It then leaves through the chest wall or through the top of the head, and it rises in the air above your body. People at the bedside can sometimes see it as what looks like a vague gray mist. Now that it is free of matter, its spiritual vibratory rate rises rapidly, so very soon the living can no longer see it. That gray mist is you! It contains your mind, your awareness, and your perspective, and by some accounts, just that process of leaving the body feels intensely pleasurable. In the air above your body, above and vibrating higher than the view of nearly everyone living, you re-form into a solid-seeming person, still attached to your body by a glowing umbilicus called the silver cord. You happily hug your deathbed visitors. All of you are solid, young, and beautiful.
• Your material body’s actual death moment is the breaking of the silver cord. It is that attachment to your energy-self that has kept your material body living, so as soon as it breaks, your body’s heart stops. And your energy body, you in the air above, you feel terrific, young and vigorous and thrilled to be free of that old boat-anchor of a body; but living people you love may be around your bed, and very aware that your material body has just died. This is the single most dangerous moment of your entire existence! What you do now is going to be critical, as you will better understand next week.
• It is essential that you accompany your deathbed visitors. We are as clueless when we emerge from our dying bodies as we were when we emerged from the birth-canal as babies, and this seems to be the reason why our planned deaths include deathbed visitors. Our visitors try to keep our attention, and they coax us to accompany them right away, since for us to remain with our mourners for long puts us at risk of becoming earthbound.

The next stage of life exists right where we are now, but just at a higher vibration. If you will think of your mind as a television set, and your death as simply changing channels, this will make a lot more sense to you. After your silver cord has broken, it will feel as if you are physically moving, but in reality you and those who accompany you are raising your personal vibrations from what we might call the physical channel to the slightly higher afterlife channel. This process does not involve a tunnel and a light! That commonplace from near-death experiences is instead just a rescue device for people unexpectedly out of their bodies, to protect their process of passing through the very negative lowest astral levels.

The way most people experience the transition from the earth plane to Level Three, the entry level of the astral plane, is as something like passing through a brief fog. The formerly solid room where you died becomes vague and vapory, and then it disappears; while in front of you, the fog is lifting to reveal a gorgeous and intensely colored but solid and amazingly earthlike new world. There are a few afterlife channels below it, and many more vibrationally above it, all existing pretty much where we are now; and the Summerland where our families congregate to welcome us back home is gorgeous, and it is enormous beyond our ability to adequately imagine or describe it. From your perspective, having just dropped your material body and been reunited with loved ones you thought you had lost, you now find yourself suddenly young and beautiful and standing on solid ground in earth-like surroundings more gorgeous by far than anything that exists on earth. What may be most surprising is the fact that there is nothing but love and joy in the very air you breathe! And the pure white light that illumines this place so completely that there are no shadows feels like love beyond your ability even to adequately express it. You truly are in heaven now! And for most new arrivals, the shock of joy that comes with this realization can make us need to simply sit down for a while, and look around as we take it all in.

 Jesus is vibrating at this point even above the Godhead level, but He chooses to remain accessible to everyone who wants to meet Him as soon as they come home. So, little pro-tip here, my dear ones: as soon as you arrive back in the astral plane, be sure to ask to be taken to the real Jesus, and that will be done for you. We are told that when “God” or “Jesus” appears in an NDE, that is always the experiencer’s guide or angel, just playing the part for the experiencer’s edification. But the Jesus that you can be taken to visit after your death will be the genuine Lord Jesus Himself.

Your death was planned even before you were born to be an easy and joyous return to your genuine eternal life. Knowing this makes even more tragic the fact that because our culture is so ignorant and fearful, dying today carries many risks of which you will need to be aware so you can better guard against them; and now added to those risks is the terrible and entirely unnecessary risk of being led astray by the entire near-death industry. Stay tuned….

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)