Posted by Roberta Grimes • January 10, 2026 • 1 Comment
Afterlife Research, Death, Human Nature
The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands;
And the little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new,
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.
“Now, don’t you go till I come,” he said,
“And don’t you make any noise!”
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
He dreamed of the pretty toys;
And, as he was dreaming, an angel song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue.
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
But the little toy friends are true!
– Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)
My dear ones, let us now consider together, in frank and very positive terms, what our next-stage journey is going to be. After all, for many of us, that journey is not very far away now. I am something of an expert on what that lovely transition is going to be for each of us, because I studied it fairly exhaustively when I was right out of college. The year was 1970. I was living in Boston, and working for a big insurance company, programming an IBM 360 computer that was the size of a house, although it had much less power than does your cell phone. On weekends, I took to browsing used-bookstores to collect what were some amazing books. The end of the nineteenth century, and the first thirty years of the twentieth century had been the heyday in southern Great Britain and in the northeastern United States of the great deep-trance mediums, like Gladys Osborne Leonard (who was my favorite, along with her chatty spirit guide, Feda). So, in the Fifties and Sixties, all the people who had first collected the wonderful books that had been written by the folks who had studied those phenomenal mediums were themselves dying in their turn, and a lot of their wonderful books had ended up in Boston’s great old used-book stores. Where I then gladly found many of them!
My purpose back then was to convince myself that our lives truly are eternal; because, at the time, I was worried about that. And wow, those books were so spectacular that I was able to convince myself then, in spades! I bought perhaps a dozen of those wonderful books, and I read them eagerly; and it was easy for the skeptic that I was at the time to firm up a strong case for human survival. Deep-trance mediums were not like any sort of medium that is working today, but rather they could go into trance so deeply that they could withdraw from their bodies altogether and let their guides, with the newly-dead person sitting right beside them, take over the medium’s body and speak directly to those sitting in the room. It was amazing! I read so many cases of newly-dead people who could give their living survivors detailed accounts of what dying had been like for them, and also where they were living now; and even though they had died in London, perhaps, or in the Boston area, or in the environs of New York, they all had had personal variants of very much the same experiences. It was always basically the same process, the same sceneries, the same clothing, the same pastimes, the same personal judgment process, the same often tiny details. The same everything! Through at least a hundred different death and afterlife accounts, no two were alike, and yet no two were very different.
This is how, when reviving hospitalized people who were close to death became more common in the Seventies, so then Raymond Moody wrote his Life After Life about near-death experiences, I could study NDEs, and could realize pretty quickly that in fact reviving people who have actually died is impossible. We will talk about the death process in a moment, and you will see then that our material bodies during life have an internal energy body which is connected to our material body by what is referred to in the Biblical book of Ecclesiastes as a silver cord. So, then when your energy body leaves your material body – as it often does, while your material body sleeps – that silver cord can be seen, and it looks like a faintly shimmery, bluish streak. Here is that Biblical reference:
Remember Him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
– (Ecclesiastes 12:6-7)
The Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes was written about 935 BCE. That was almost three thousand years ago. Three thousand years! So, it was written even a thousand years before Jesus had to enlist the tremendous powers of the Godhead to produce more energy in one burst than all of humankind together even today can produce in one burst, just to reanimate His crucified and stone-dead body enough to resurrect it for one more day on that first Easter Morning. NDEs have nothing whatsoever to do with death, as you will shortly see, so the name that Dr. Moody gave to then is really unfortunate. Even today, some foolish NDE experiencers will talk about “having died and come back to life”, and in so doing, they demean both life, which is precious and extraordinary, and also the wonderful gift that NDEs actually are. Genuine NDEs are in the nature of very vivid, dream-like sequences that are given to experiencers by their spirit guides. Each dream-like sequence is unique to the experiencer, and it is meant for that experiencer’s own edification.
Life, on the other hand, is precious and extraordinary, in and of itself! Scientists still cannot tell us where life first came from, and nor can they say even now how it is produced; they cannot yet even tell us for certain how we can be sure when we are actually dead. But they can tell us, to their own amazement, that they lately have discovered that life actually gives off light. And that light fades and disappears when the life that produces it fades and dies.
So, I learned in my twenties from the great deep-trance mediums who had been developed toward the end of the nineteenth century what the overall process associated with a natural death would be. And most deaths are natural. Moreover, my further studies indicate that the process of a natural death really has not changed at all since I was first out of college. If a death is accidental, on the other hand, or if it is caused by human agency, it may seem to us to be worrisomely painful; but please know that we are routinely told afterward by the person who experienced that death that he or she was out of the body before the car crash or the murder or whatever it was happened.When death is going to be the result of some event, our guides protect us from experiencing most of the pain of it.
But now, let’s consider a usual death, the sort of death that most people experience. What happens in that case? Will we be much aware of what is going on? Will we have much choice as things progress? Let’s talk about it:
My dear one, you are truly an eternal being! And it is impossible for you to understand how deeply and completely you in particular are loved. We come to this very difficult earth-school to learn and to grow spiritually, so yes, some of this life may have felt hard for you. Rough and unloving. And unfortunately, Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity suggests the possibility of punishment in your next stage of life. But oh my dear one, you can forget all that now! God is love, and only pure and glorious love, and after the very hard and bitter lifr that you have just spent in earth-school, the infinitely loving God of All is eagerly waiting to welcome you home for milk and cookies forevermore! Oh, yes indeed! The tender, love-filled process of going home after a life lived on this hardscrabble earth is so sweetly joyous; it’s the best part of life. You have been loved and nurtured all your life, but often without fully realizing that was what was going on for you. However now, toward the end of your time on earth, God can show you God’s love purely, and without reservation. And God does that now! Oh, my very dearly beloved friend, welcome now to the perfect and eternal love of the forever-living God!
Ay, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
The smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting the long years through
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue,
Since he kissed them and put them there.
– Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
Thanks for this post Roberta!
“Most dying people newly out of their bodies will be distressed to see their mourners’ distress, and they may attempt to capture the attention of living people and reassure them that they have survived their death. ”
I remember you talking about this before and it may have helped with my father as he was dying from cancer.
I was really worried that this could happen to him as it was clear he was close to leaving this existence.
I put my hand on his arm and told him it was time to go home. He took one last breath and left.
I also remember my grandmother before she passed away. It seemed like she was laughing and talking with her siblings that had passed away long before. It wasn’t until I read your awesome blogs that it made me realize that was probably what was happening.
Not fearing death really makes me feel free.
Thanks!
Thomas