Roberta Grimes

Being Conscious

Posted by Roberta Grimes • February 01, 2025 • 4 Comments
Afterlife Research, Death, Human Nature, The Source

Whether I’m right, or whether I’m wrong,
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong,
I gotta be me, I’ve gotta be me,
What else can I be but what I am?

I want to live, not merely survive.
And I won’t give up this dream of life that keeps me alive!
I gotta be me, I gotta be me,
The dream that I see makes me what I am!

That far-away prize, a world of success,
Is waiting for me if I heed the call.
I won’t settle down, won’t settle for less,
As long as there’s a chance that I can have it all!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

Working scientists of every stripe simply cannot get over their frustrated wonder at the plain fact that you are aware that you are reading and making sense of these words. I kid you not. This fact clearly bothers them very much. They still cannot explain how it happens, so they call this central fact of our lives “the hard problem”. And in truth, it is a very hard problem for them! But that is true only because more than a century ago, the scientific gatekeepers, the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, unfortunately began to require that the only trustworthy scientific proofs for anything that they ever will accept must be material in nature. They created what they then called the fundamental scientific dogma that all of reality must be matter-based. But it turns out that not even what our senses perceive as material is actually solid in any meaningful sense. Matter is composed of atoms, and atoms are by their nature almost entirely empty space because even the subatomic particles of which atoms are composed are just whirling specks of energy.  So scientists have given themselves an unnecessary problem which they never will be able to solve.

What’s more, since consciousness is not composed of atoms, as any matter-based form of energy would be composed of atoms, working scientists have long been certain that your conscious awareness must be a mere emission generated by your material brain. So for the better part of the last century, scientists have sought a source of human consciousness inside the human brain, only always and forever to come up empty. Of course, they will never find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, because for matter to generate consciousness would be an impossibility for reasons that scientists cannot understand because they have no scientifically acceptable way even to study what consciousness is. This just-published interview with one of the leading scientific researchers in this field yet again makes that simple fact quite clear. But instead of accepting the fact that, well, of course the brain doesn’t generate consciousness, some neuroscientists have lately decided that, okay, so then your conscious awareness must be  an emission generated by some combination of reactions inside your material brain plus the sensory and emotional reactions of other aspects of your material body as well. Put all of that together, and somehow, Presto! Awareness arises in your whole material body and brain put together. Omigod, what utter and complete nonsense! The scientific community has so narrowly circumscribed its acceptable description of the reality in which we live our earth-lives that much of what is very important is going to remain forever beyond its grasp.

I have spent the past fifty years researching the afterlife. Unlike a working scientist, I have put no limits on what I could study or how I would allow myself to study it; but still, my biggest handicap in doing this research has been the simple fact that I am by nature highly skeptical. In trying to figure out whether an afterlife exists, I was only seeking to make some kind of sense of my childhood experience of light. Even a decade or two after that event, my experience of light still felt as real and immediate as if it had happened only last night, so I had a pressing need to better understand where that light and the voice might have come from. Where else could it have come from, I thought, other than from where the dead are now… that is, if the dead might be still alive somewhere?

Luckily, it turns out that there is a truly amazing amount of consistent evidence that human life is eternal. And figuring out not only that in fact we all do indeed easily survive our deaths, but also that we can learn what happens to us after our deaths, and where and how it all happens, even down to what happens during the many long centuries after each of our deaths on this earth, is actually easy for any disciplined researcher who is willing to devote sufficient time and effort to doing the research. This has been for me by far the most compelling and enjoyable lifelong avocation that you can imagine! You may be surprised to discover that real evidence for the afterlife does not include near-death experiences, which are just spontaneous out-of-body experiences that may include travel into the gigantic astral plane; but NDEs never include visits to the actual afterlife. NDEs are therefore useless as evidence for anything except for the fact that we easily can travel out-of-body. As indeed we can! All of us travel out-of-body during our deep-sleep phase, and we generally do that almost every night.

A few other careful researchers have shared my same wonderful hobby over roughly the same few decades, and we have reached about the same glorious conclusions, which fact has been so greatly reassuring! Two of these peer afterlife researchers who deserve special mention are, of course, Dr. R. Craig Hogan, who does such a wonderful job with seekreality.com, our shared website which at this point is the best and most thorough source of information on death and the afterlife that exists anywhere; and also Australians Victor and Wendy Zammit, whose website, victorzammit.com, is also full of wonderful information. The Zammits’ weekly afterlife newsletter is truly a must-read!

All right, so now my Thomas wants me to tell you some of what – besides him – long ago convinced me that human life truly is eternal. I began to do this research in the early seventies, when I was first living in Boston and browsing used and new bookstores every weekend. Just anywhere that I could find books about death and the afterlife. I consulted mediums, too, finding that a few were good but most were awful, and little by little I came to see that I was putting together a picture of a strictly evidence-based afterlife reality that was consistent and that began to feel real. Here are a few of my high points:

• Old books about the great early-twentieth-century deep-trance mediums. For example, Gladys Osborne Leonard, who was my favorite, worked with a bossy spirit guide named Feda, as I recall. These grand old mediums had developed their incredible gifts before the development of electric lights, and they could go into a deep trance and turn their bodies over completely to their spirit guides, who then would chattily entertain newly-dead folks who could converse easily and in detail with their relatives in the room. Each book about one of these mediums would contain dozens of vivid conversations between the living and the newly-dead. And all those hundreds of different adventures in all those books about the work of all those mediums were happening in precisely the same wonderful, gigantic place. They all talked about the same process, the same physics, the same clothing, the same surroundings, and all the same minuscule bits of information across the whole gigantic afterlife. The details, both great and small, were all the same.
• Deathbed Accounts. Experiences of the dying who are not heavily drugged as their death approaches are amazingly consistent, and they seem always to include the comforting assistance of dead loved ones who have come to take them home. These accounts go back as far as the early nineteenth century, when Thomas Jefferson transitioned on the morning of July 4, 1826, and then he appeared to John Adams on that same afternoon to invite him to come and join him in the afterlife. Dead people who appear to the dying this way will usually appear in the upper corners of the room, looking young again and healthy; and once they appear, the dying person will typically stop talking to the living, but will talk only to the new arrival. The dying will even see dead people who, as in Jefferson’s case, have only just died, so the dying person could not possibly know that the deathbed visitor is dead. John Adams’s last words heard by the living were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives!” Those words were no doubt exclaimed by him as a smiling young Jefferson appeared to him in an upper corner of the room.
  
• My adventures with mediums. What we want when we consult a medium is a bit of absolutely spot-on evidence that the person that medium is talking with is our own transitioned loved one! And to be sadly frank, nearly all of the mediums that I ever have consulted have given me information that was much too general. “Your Mom is here. She says she’s very proud of you!” Yeah, well, great, but I need something that is a lot more specific than that. The best communication I ever have received from my mother came through a medium not long after my mother’s death. The medium said, “This is your mother. But why does she keep pointing to her eyebrows? Oh. She says she doesn’t need to paint them on anymore.” Bingo! My mother was always embarrassed that her eyebrows were so sparse, and she would paint on these big, black eyebrows. That was the one key thing that she could have said that she would have known would have given me definitive proof of her survival. But this medium could not possibly have known that.
• Books by extensive astral-travelers. Here I confess that I found some accounts that were so weird they were likely fiction, but I also have read some books by people who have learned to go out-of-body at will, and they could enter the gigantic non-afterlife parts of the astral plane, which is most of the astral plane, and tell us their wonderful travel tales. The more of this literature you read, the more you can see how it paints a picture of a gigantic, largely still unexplored new reality.
•  My own astral experiences. I cannot go out of body at will, so it wasn’t until April of 2022 that my Thomas first took me to the astral plane and let me remember the experience, because Jesus wanted to talk with me. Now, just to be clear about this, all of us go out of body on most nights during the period of deep sleep that generally comes first each night, but we simply don’t remember doing it. We might chat with our spirit guides and our dead loved ones, but generally we don’t leave our bedroom, or perhaps our immediate neighborhood. Sometimes some of us might astral-travel with the help of our guides, since the astral realms are more or less where we are but just at a higher vibration. Easy to find, if you know how to get there; and easy to get back to your body, since you can follow your silver cord. In any event, I have recently been there, and I know how vastly familiar it is going to feel to you when you yourself go home. The astral plane truly is our eternal home! And once you have visited the astral plane with awareness of the event, you will understand without question that, of course silly bunny, human life is eternal! And these few minutes that we spend on earth for each brief lifetime here are the dimmest shadow of what it feels like to be alive in the astral plane.
• The Gospels. I have studied the Gospels extensively, even majoring in early Christian history in College, and I am familiar with the rest of the Bible as well. And yet it is only relatively recently that I have come to see how closely Jesus’s Gospel words align with what we learn from the afterlife evidence. It is clear that Jesus was familiar with, and His Gospels reinforce, the details of our eternal home.

As we afterlife researchers have done all this research, of necessity we have also made some side-discoveries. Most notably, in the process of researching death and the afterlife, we have come gradually to understand that what human beings experience as consciousness is the grounding of all reality. Everything that actually exists is composed of and made by consciousness. There really is nothing else. Think of that old cartoon of two swimming fish, where one says to the other, “How’s the water today?” and the other says, “What’s water?” That is us, really. Consciousness is the water in which we swim. And that is true for clueless, oblivious  scientists as well. They cannot study consciousness because consciousness is both the water and the swimmer. They cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

When I was in kindergarten, they taught each student to recite our home address. I recall that back then sometimes after school I would play alone in the empty lot beside my house, and an extremely tall, kind man who wore a long robe was sometimes waiting to talk with me there. He taught me to add to my home address, “the earth, the solar system, the universe, and the Mind of God.” And actually, he was precisely right! All of reality, including the whole of every level of the astral realities, all of it is within the Mind of God, so therefore all of it is One Consciousness. And nothing else but that One Consciousness exists.

Of course, if you think for a moment, you will realize who that long-ago kindly tall man in the woods next door who taught me so much must have been….

 

I’ll go it alone. That’s how it must be.
I can’t be right for somebody else
If I’m not right for me. I gotta be free, I’ve gotta be free!
Daring to try, to do it or die, I’ve gotta be me!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)