Posted by Roberta Grimes • May 20, 2023 • 35 Comments
Human Nature
Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
Would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon?
We could float among the stars together, you and I.
For we can fly! We can fly! Up, up and away!
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon!
The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon.
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon.
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky.
For we can fly, we can fly! Up, up and away!
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon!
Suspended under a twilight canopy,
We’ll search the clouds for a star to guide us.
If by some chance you find yourself loving me,
We’ll find a cloud to hide us.
We’ll keep the moon beside us.
– Jimmy Webb, from “Up, Up and Away” (1967)
One good thing about being in your twenties and having a planned role to play that is not scheduled even to begin until you are sixty years old is that you will have a lot of time to prepare for it. And in retrospect, it is clear that my Thomas intended to use all our intervening years both wisely and well! He was a rookie as a spirit guide, and the amnesia that we accept when we enter these earth-lives made me feel like a rookie as a human being, so he and I started out as rookies together. I had just come through the turmoil of the nineteen-sixties, so by the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was altogether disgusted with civilization. Thomas had prompted me to major in early Christian history in college – I can still remember his nudge from out of nowhere – and he chose for me a very Catholic husband with Asperger’s syndrome. I entered a crowded mixer one evening, and I spotted a nervous but nice-looking guy who had an amazing halo of light around him (I swear!), and right then and there I fell in love. I needed to learn to be a good researcher, and I also needed a stable career, so Thomas prompted me to want to be a lawyer. I needed to learn to write very well, and I think Thomas thought that writing fiction would help me learn to better understand people. So that was why he brought Marvina into my life.
It was clear from last week’s comments that our blog post failed to convey the message that Thomas and I had hoped it would convey. History is lived forward, so when it is viewed backward, people often miss noticing some of the most important historical events. Once again, my beloveds, what we are attempting to do with this brief numbered series is to try to determine what human beings really are at our deepest core. Scientists tell us we are just meat-robots, lacking even the most basic free will, while Christianity says that we are venal and fallen, at our core just nasty and malleable putty, which means that we must endure tight controls in order to live together in peaceful community. And I do like Linda Ellerbe’s book! I hope that one day you will read it. Perhaps if you were to read the whole book, you would grasp her points better than you ever can get them just from reading the excerpts that I chose, and that Thomas and I then used in that blog post. I was planning to move on from it now, but my beloved Thomas has persuaded me to take a detour for just this week. He wants to share with you some of our treasured friend Marvina’s contributions to our work. She is my only other spirit guide that I know by name, and it is long past time for you to meet her. We could have done none of this work without her!
But first, let’s quickly summarize what we were trying to do last week. As we know, the ancestors of these meat-bodies evolved over many millions of years. You might think of all the various creatures in this quick video (scroll down) as simply animals, not human nor even proto-human, but simply living as animals live, and gradually moving up the food chain in their experience of punctuated equilibrium until they became apex predators themselves. But then, amazingly recently – just 200,000 earth-years ago! – something happened that nearly wiped out all the hominids on earth. And then every human being living today, and even ninety percent of all the other animals and the plants that are now alive all appeared at essentially the same time, about 200,000 earth-years ago. There actually was something like a Garden of Eden event! And it is just those specific people who lived 200,000 earth-years ago and their direct descendants that we are trying to understand in more depth with this brief numbered series. But the problem is that those people were bright and sensitive enough to be fearful of the vast unknown around them, and the monstrous gods that they invented with the hope that those gods might be fierce enough to protect them from the vast unknown have given us an awful mental picture of those people themselves. Were the earliest true humans really as fearsome as the gods that they created for their own protection? Or were they instead more like sociable plants by nature, living in peaceful community and creating scary-seeming gods only as they might create scary-seeming spears as they prepared to go out and peacefully hunt in loving cooperation with their gentle companions?
The main point of last week’s blog post was the crucial fork in human history that occurred at 325 CE, and that would have been much more obvious to those who were living history forward than it was to our blog readers here. Prior to that year, we were still essentially the same creatures that had appeared in the Eden of 200,000 earth-years ago. And it is those basic humans that we are trying to better understand with this brief series! At that crucial fork in humanity’s history as it was being lived forward that was the year 325 CE, one branch would have taken us into two thousand years of living the teachings of Jesus. If we had taken that fork, we might by now be living in the kingdom of God on earth.
But on the branch of the fork that Constantine forced human history to take in that fateful year, he locked away inside his newly-created Christian Bible everything that Jesus had said. Every word! Then for the first thousand years of Roman Christianity, that Bible was published only in Latin. Even after the Reformation, lay people were strongly discouraged from reading the Bible. And in most modern-day denominations, Christians are urged not even to read Jesus’s words without adulteration by Paul’s letters. So since modern Western civilization is built on Christianity and its fear-based dogmas, it is almost impossible for moderns to study humankind in its natural state. As our beloved community here seems to have proven yet again last week.
And now, Thomas wants us to tell you my story. I graduated from college in 1968 and was married in 1972, and my oldest child was born in 1977. Chrissy was a very easy baby who was happy to amuse herself, so she would play beside me while I spent most of my time writing and doing research. She has Asperger’s syndrome, like her dad, but since much later she graduated from college at twenty and she is now a brilliant artist and a software engineer, her life has turned out very well. And before she was born, even before our marriage, Edward was drafted as a pathologist and he went to Vietnam, which also gave me lots of time to myself. There wasn’t much afterlife evidence available until after Raymond Moody’s Life After Life came out in 1976, and those were the days before personal computers, and I have always hated TV. So I spent most of the seventies more or less trying to reinvent civilization.
I didn’t think at the time that was what I was doing. I believed I was researching and writing novels. But I was so appalled by what I had witnessed in my then-brief lifetime that I spent a lot of the seventies experimenting with alternative ways of organizing human societies. I began by inventing an island in the South Atlantic that had been populated by shipwreck victims, and on that island everything was the opposite of the way things were in the United States. It would be another forty years before I would even meet Thomas, and twenty years at least before I would give much thought to what a spirit guide is and how this whole thing works, so I didn’t realize that none of what then was happening in my life was my own idea. But in fact, of course, none of it was. During this past week my Thomas has been helping me to reconstruct that time, which process has been a lot of fun all by itself. Who knew? But fifty years ago, there being no time where he is now, Thomas and I spent years experimenting with these very questions, in anticipation of today. And that was when Thomas invited Marvina to join us as my writing guide and my fiction channel, which she has continued to be for all these intervening years. I know now that most of that whole many-years-long series of experiments was conducted under her close tutelage.
The thing about fiction-writing is that, unlike real life, it always has to work. It has to be true to scientific realities and to human nature, and nothing ever can be miraculous. In real life, impossible things can happen every day! But if you try to use miracles in a piece of fiction, immediately you turn off your reader. And in fiction, your characters themselves also must all be true to life. Once they have their own distinctive personalities, they must continue to behave consistently, or – again – you will turn off your reader. And learning how to design people who had never been caged turned out to be the hardest part of this entire process.
So in retrospect, using these fictional vignettes was a surprisingly productive way to test alternative social organizations. Our testing ground, which is that little island in the South Atlantic, is twice as long as it is wide and about as far south as Virginia is north, so it has seasons. It’s a spent volcano with a grassy valley in the middle and small mountains at the northern end. I used to know its dimensions, but you could walk it from south to north and back again in one very long day that began before dawn and ended after sunset, although you never would actually do that. The only animals are half-tame long-haired sheep, horses shrunk to ponies, and dogs, cats, and rats, all off shipwrecks. The only possible name for such a place would be Atlantica, so we have called it that for fifty years.
To create a way to live that is the opposite of Western civilization is very much easier said than done. I am unclear on whether Marvina first said it or whether it was my own idea, but I began these experiments with the conviction that if I could create a way of life for Atlanticans that was the precise opposite of American life, they would then live together in a happy community. And I will spare you all the ugly details, but I created disaster after fictional disaster. Marvina never let me know that I was not alone in playing this game, so I went through months and then years of frustration while the Atlanticans kept getting into fictional wars and otherwise running off the rails. Then I would notice the elements of control over people’s lives that still existed, and which apparently were the reasons why what I was writing still was going wrong and things still didn’t work. It took me a couple of years to relax enough to create characters that were even capable of living in freedom. I think I was afraid of what they might do if I really let them go.
What I gradually learned is that it is very hard for those of us who live in Western civilization to imagine how it is possible for people to live without any controls at all. What, do you mean no laws for real? Are you kidding me? But very gradually I learned so much! The two things these people could not abide were gods and fixed leadership structures. Whenever I tried any form of civilization that included a religion or leaders in set roles, there soon were the usual civilization-style issues. What they seemed to like best was no actual leader, just an old and beloved wise-woman figure who helped them keep a kind of voluntary order, and casual debates held over communal meals that eventually resulted in a consensus that might take them years to develop. That style of civilization was spiritually happy, and it worked well, even over centuries.
The key thing I learned is that people really cannot abide living with any constraints at all.
And when we live with no constraints, we are peaceful, loving, and mutually supportive.
The more you try to restrict people with laws and rules and even customs, the more they fight to be free of them. And people living in absolute freedom are not raving crazies. Not at all! No, that sort of response seems to be what you get when you restrict someone’s freedoms, and his mental cage then chafes on his mind. We enter these lives in order to learn and grow spiritually. And even though we may not be consciously aware of that fact, at a subconscious level spiritual freedom is a core human need that is apparently as essential to us as food and breathing. On Atlantica, when we let them have as much freedom as they want, it turns out that they want freedom without any limits at all.
Here is a little more of what Atlanticans have learned about managing a rules-free society:
What my Atlantican years have given me to understand is that human beings living in a state of nature are neither meat-automatons nor sinful putty. Far from it! If people are allowed to feel themselves to be entirely free from shame and all constraints from earliest infancy, they are happy, loving, mutually supportive, wise, and simply delightful to know. Marvina and I have gotten to know a few Atlanticans pretty well over the past fifty years, although their several novels are now long out of print. My Thomas wants us to finish channeling that series now, and to put it back into print since most of my other work is largely completed. We’ll see. But we consider it to be beyond dispute that both Western civilization and Christianity with all their many fear-based laws and rules and shames and miscellaneous restrictions on people’s lives are the cause, and they certainly are in no way the cure of all the many problems and cares that burden people in the modern world.
Love is waiting there in my beautiful balloon.
Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon.
If you’ll hold my hand, we’ll chase your dream across the sky,
For we can fly, we can fly! Up, up and away!
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon! Balloon!
Up, up, and away!
– Jimmy Webb, from “Up, Up and Away” (1967)
Thanks, Roberta, for telling us more about your interesting life and creative analyses.
I was born in the mid-50’s and I was raised by my parents to pay attention to “reality” and was never really taught about a Greater Reality other than going to a vague Heaven or Hell after I die. That reality seemed so far away (in time) as to be out-of-mind. It doesn’t seem so far away anymore.
So, unlike you, I never thought much about how the world could be different. I found your imagining about how a world could be different if the history and rules were different to be interesting. I must declare that I find this current world to be very non-ideal and downright uncomfortable.
I found the Atlantican world to be much more peaceful and desirable. It seems similar to how some indigenous peoples may have lived. Oh, how I wish, now, that people could just get along and be One with all of Creation. I wasn’t always this way. I have changed. It doesn’t seem that the Atlantican world/reality will ever be where I reside in this incarnation. I feel like I have fallen into a river with a fast current and that I am being swept along with no hope of getting out of the flow.
Although I currently don’t want to incarnate again, it may feel very different about reincarnating once that I am back in the Greater Reality. I have told Lord Jesus that I want to help with His mission. Maybe a change will really occur to the Earth after some global war or cataclysm, or there will be a New Earth or another world to incarnate on that is kinder and gentler, but I will go where He wants me to go and do what He wants me to do.
I look forward to all your posts and they make me think.
Blessings to you and your family,
David D.
Hi Roberta,
I have been beating against the walls of Western
Civilization all my life! I do not feel free. Irrational
people are increasing
We are on the wrong path. Jesus’s own words were hidden in Constantine’s Bible. White Supremacy is a devilish idea. It is and I must say it.
Jesus helps us on Earth The answers are in his Gospeis Knowledge of the Truth can free us, but I must
do my part. My soul is restless Jesus’s Words are healing balm.
Gratitude, Forgiveness and Love I have been given the
Way back. I am thankful, very thankful,
Oh my dear Erica, white supremacy is indeed devilish! But there are those whose whole purpose is to divide us, and we will resolutely fight against them. We will not be divided! As you can imagine, on Atlantica, positioned where it is in the South Atlantic, the people are mostly of African descent, and darker skin is thought to be more beautiful there, but nevertheless there is no discrimination against those whose skin is lighter. Love is all that matters!
Oh my dear David D., I am so glad to be a part of your life! This feels like a gift to me, this weekly sharing of ours. And yes, in this past week Thomas has brought me back to that time when we were living in Atlantica. I had forgotten it all! We Americans tend to think that it is easier to live as we do, with all our modern conveniences, but actually the Atlanticans have life figured out so much better because they just do whatever they feel like doing from minute to minute all day long. I really had forgotten how that felt, how delightful that was. An American in one of those novels who is studying the culture calls it a responsibility: each of them is adding his share of joy to the common whole.
Dear Roberta,
Were the Atlanticans hunter-gatherers? I’ve read that the hunter gatherer lifestyle necessitated only a small portion of the day (about 15-20 hours per week) devoted to gathering food or hunting, and the rest of the day one had leisure. So different from the modern, Western lifestyle! I’m a legal secretary and used to work in a large law firm full-time; it was very, VERY stressful! Now I work from home part time for a 2-attorney law firm. I make just enough to pay the bills, and the rest of the time I have for “leisure” (I had originally quit my job to care for my now-crossed-over boyfriend who needed a lot of care). I intend to stick to this schedule as long as I can, because I think that “free time” is very important to a person’s mental health and wellbeing. I often think that the Industrial Revolution was NOT a good thing….
Much love,
JenniferK
That’s an interesting question, my dear JenniferK! I think they are whatever would have come right after hunter-gatherers. They fish when the fish are running in the spring and fall, and otherwise someone lures a half-tame sheep away from the other sheep and near the communal kitchen, and slits its throat. They pick wild berries and fruits and pull wild roots in season, but they also have communal gardens where they cultivate and grow some crops. But, you’re right – they don’t spend a lot of time on food-gathering.
And what is amusing is that since all work is voluntary, if on some particular day nobody feels like preparing the stew that is what they generally have for their main meal late in the afternoon, they all show up to eat together and there is nothing much to eat. So then they party while a lot of them pitch in to rustle something up. Singing, dancing, making thrown-together salads, just horsing around. They don’t take anything really all that seriously.
Dear Roberta,
It is good for understanding to simplify from the complex world of perceivable phenomena to see the essential principles controling the apparent complexity, what in science are termed the laws of physics.
A. Realm one, the original world
1. There is God alone.
2. God exists in the eternal Now in which time does not run.
3. At some point in the eternal now, God decides to make activity, to make happenings for His enjoyment in being conscious.
B. The second realm, Heaven
1. God manifests Himself as light, as an expression of His consciousness.
2. God makes a world of creatures and an environment in which they will exist and also enjoy their being.
3. The creatures and their environment (Heaven) are made by God from God’s own being, so everything in Heaven owns God’s consciousness and exhibits light as an expression of their consciousness.
4. Heaven and its creatures exist in a natural state of loving blissfulness.
C. Realm three. the material world
1. As was the case before in realms one and two, God creates another realm that supports new forms of being.
2. Unlike realm two which is entirely blissful, the material realm is stressful.
3. The plants made to exist in the material world as counterparts to those made for Heaven are subject to diseases.
4. The humans and other beings from the rich diversity of beings made to populate Heaven are made with needs and desires that are inherently self-centered (well theorized by Freud’s constructs of the Id and Ego).
5. The animals of the material world eat plants and other animals to survive and procreate.
Conclusions.
Our primary being exists as spirit, consciousness expressed as light, and usually exists in the perpetual Now of Heavenly bliss. We voluntarilly take on assignments to live in the stress of the material world to benefit from knowledge of the harshness of the material world. When returning to Heaven, we realize just how blissful Heavenly existence is, appreciate it, and enjoy it instead of simply existing in it. The human condition is by design stressfull, but we exist in it for tiny fractions of the perpetual now that is existence in our Heavenly home. There are also other “animal” forms that God has created in the material world, and they too exist in stress; we may be educated by inhabiting bodies other than the human form.
From my own perspective as born Jewish and having had to wonder about the nture of a loving God who allowed Hitler to to create his Nazi empire that brutalized Jews and others, the above analysis serves to explain why. The human experience is designed to be stressful. Humans eat other beings, plants and animals. The material world is frankly Hellish by design, but serves a valuable purpose by educating spirit to realize and appreciate its creation and home in Heaven.
I am sorrowful about all of the conflicts humans have in society, in politics, and about the violence of individually perpetrated crime and government perpetrated war. But I know my time is limited, and I will shortly be returning to Heaven. My deepest concern is that I will keep coming back to the material world for graduate education.
Oh my dear beloved Jack, I am trying so hard to get back into being serious! Thank you for this little boost of seriousness!!
Actually there was a civilization that kind of came close to the Atlanticans. It was the Native American tribes in their pure form. However in order to have our for profit western civilization, their way of life unfortunately had to be destroyed. I often wonder what peace we would have had we all just worked together, and learned from each other. Western civilization could learn a lot from the Indigenous tribes.
Oh yes indeed, my dear Jeff. And as is true of the Atlanticans, the Plains Indian tribes before there was contact with Europeans and before there was any crowding were highly spiritual. In fact, some communicators through deep-trance mediums in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries reported that people who had been very damaged during their lives on earth were taken to what was apparently the afterlife of Plains Indian tribes for intensive spiritual healing, and then after a time they would be brought away again, entirely healed.
Dear Roberta,
Slightly off topic but your comment gave me a chill (in a good way). A few months before my boyfriend passed, he told me that he had had a dream on that particular morning that Native Americans were on horseback and were coming to retrieve him, and he thought that he was passing away at that time (he felt as though they were coming to take him to the afterlife). He had a lot of trauma in his life and so this is very believable to me that that might be where he could heal. Sorry for veering off topic.
There is science missing. Or is science out because humans don’t want to accept that we didn’t just pop into life as human as we are! And it sounds like all your decisions were not yours but Thomas’s.
The Bible is important but not as history but in mythological words tells the history of a people in ancient times. God being life, is present but interpreted according to the many times it was written and rewritten.
Oh, but my dear Barbara, we did in fact discuss science – that was Who Are We? (#1) in this series. Since modern science is convinced that consciousness has to be produced by our meat-brains, and that we ourselves are nothing but meat-robots which lack even free will, there wasn’t much constructive hope for us there!
It’s fascinating to read the comments of others who read the same words that I read, and yet each finds something different to focus on. For me, Roberta, this blog was like watching you open up from a bud into a flower, and now I really want to meet Marvina! Please bring back into print your early novels and finish the series. Thank you.
My dear lovely Janelle, thank you for caring about her! Marvina is wonderful, but she has not been one to put herself forward, since she is not my primary guide in this lifetime. When she speaks to me, she sounds very soft and no-nonsense. The couple of mediums who have seen her have said that she keeps to the background. One says that she looks like “a young Ruth Bader Ginsburg.” Her job has been to coach me at writing, and especially at writing fiction, but she pointedly tells me that Thomas’s work with me always comes first. In recent weeks, though, she has been helping me to edit the sixth, unpublished novel in that series that we have been working at off and on since the early seventies, but we put it all aside at least ten years ago. She tells me that there is one more to go.
Good morning Mrs Roberta,
I think modern science is unfortunately just big business today. So is pharmaceutical business. I put my 83 year old mom with dementia on coconut oil and mct oil for the last 21 days. I’ve seen more improvement in regaining her memory then the last 10 years taking Donepezil! I think the human race is finally realizing, there is no future without our connection to Source.
BTW, I always preferred John Lennon’s song, Imagine. Peace and Light to everyone!
Oh my lovely Anne, that Lennon song always makes me think of Atlantica! The simpler everything is, the happier people are. That really is true!
Dearest Roberta,
The Atlantican life fascinates me. I would like to see Thomas create a Game of Life with a suitable variant of that old board game and then run the heck out of it until it blew up, or not. The object would be, if it blew up, to see what the game parameters were. An example parameter would be the magnitude of a volcano that could wipe out a certain size of a town. This might cause some of the inhabitants to rise up and steal food or other necessities and provoke a wider conflict. It would be interesting to see if rules-based societies would be robust enough to continue to operate, or not.
Yours,
Cookie
David, So you may find this book, available on Amazon, of interest:
The Ancient Secret of the Flower of Life, Vol. 1 Paperback – April 1, 1999. For myself, I no longer have the deep interest in science or history that I had before constructing the theory I wrote about above.
Material life is incidental to oureternal existence– entertaining, but not much else (although entertainment is indeed vsaluable. Just think about poor rocks sitting around unable to participate in the action).
Dear Jack,
I was intrigued by the subject matter of your book. I haven’t read a spirit cum science book since I read C.S, Lewis’s “That Hideous Strength”, which changed my outlook on science. Perhaps this book will also change my outlook again, for the better, I hope.
So, I have ordered St. Germain’s book.
Yours,
Cookie
My dear Cookie, the question really seems to me to be whether non-rules-based societies can survive and quickly adapt in times of crisis. And when Atlantica was overrun by some very bad guys, even though the Atlanticans vastly outnumbered them, I was surprised that they didn’t fight back, even though the bad guys did some awful things. Their choice instead was to retreat and outlast the evildoers, and in retrospect I can see that the reasons why they made that choice were complex. But they all made it.
Dear Roberta,
Home run! I, too, often wonder what life on earth would be like had humanity not diverged onto its current path. This past week, someone started a discussion with me about Jeremiah 17:9 “The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked: who can know it?”. I said I don’t for one moment believe that to be true. They said, “Rubbish. Any person who has the least insight and honesty about his own heart knows it is deceitful and desperately wicked.” When I asked for clarification, the person was unable to answer. I asked, “If you really believe that, can you explain why? Is yours deceitful and desperately wicked? Can you give an example? I literally don’t understand where you’re coming from.” They were unable to give an example, thus proving my point. Christians who believe all parts of the Bible are probably confused and discouraged by verses like this.
What is your view about whether or not humans were “tampered with” to create our current iteration? (I.e., the show “Ancient Aliens” suggests that extraterrestrial beings messed with our DNA to create modern humans). I’ve read some of the Sumerian creation myths and wonder just what, if any, truth there are to those myths. Not that it would matter, either way, if earth is just where we come to have experiences to spiritually progress and experience duality. But there are a lot of unknowns.
Like Janelle, I would be interested to read your early novels! I enjoy your writing style and it would be a welcome reprieve from the negativity of this world to immerse oneself in that kind of story.
I also love reading everyone else’s comments on here! Many perspectives.
Thank you for everything you do!
Much love,
JenniferK
My dear JenniferK, these really are women’s novels. They weren’t in print for very long, because almost immediately Thomas came out to me and my life went in this new direction, and frankly I forgot all about writing fiction, but back when they were in print I heard from some readers who loved them and the people I heard from were mostly women, although a few were men. My main problem with it was that back then I didn’t really understand Atlantica myself; but now I think I do. The series needed an explanatory Preface, which I would write now before republishing them.
A couple of additional things about Atlantica that have been coming back to me:
* The people are actually quite spiritual. When you or I might pray, they will drop into trance, in circles if they can form them, or in emergencies just right where they are. Marvina calls this “circle yielding,” and it seems to be quite powerful. I’ve seen them bring people back from death this way.
* Their bonding with one another is unbelievably strong, and I don’t think it would have required any outside DNA. Simply removing from their lives all the negativity that exists in Western civilization makes them immensely loving and self-sacrificing for one another, quite naturally. That was another thing that surprised me, although I don’t think that it should have done.
Thanks Roberta, for taking the time to clarify your previous post.
It sometimes takes time for the ideas to get past my extremely hard cranium.
What I am finding out, through trial and error, is that we can build our own slice of heaven within our little neighborhoods.
We may not be able to control many things in the Western world. We can make life easier and help each other spiritually progress one neighborhood at a time.
Working towards any goal brings us together. It could be as simple as helping a neighbor get their lawn mower working. Just every day stuff we all struggle with. Joking and laughing while working together brings out who we are.
It’s amazing how fast helping each other can change the world, one neighborhood at a time.
We see it on this blog every week.
Did I mention one neighborhood at a time enough?
Holy moly do I need an editor.
Ah yes, my dear Thomas. One neighborhood at a time! And that is really the only way that any positive change can happen.
Oh my sweet friend Thomas, you always make me smile! We all of us do badly need an editor. I will go back and read a blog post from years ago, preparing to link to it for some reason, and I will wince to see some of the repeated words and other rookie mistakes in it!
Dearest Roberta,
What an amazing and quite unexpected blog post you offer us this week:
You know, I always favored the Plains Indians of your country. (Also the Hopi nation.) I’ve often wondered if they were more spiritually advanced than the European derivatives of their time. Their depth, wisdom and sheer courage makes one wonder if they held to a greater awakening of true humanity, than those that incomers who beset them so egregiously in the 1800s. Delighted to read that you also feel something along these lines about the Great Plains living Native Americans.
Roberta, your exploration of the best human society, via the Atlantica thought experiment, is a most noble conceit. Would that our ‘thinkers’ worked towards creating the finest model for human community – other than insisting upon the power-oriented, economic-reductionist and advertising-propaganda based marketplace that they are obsessed with making out of our free nations. Would that the market served the community. Would that humanism, empathy and nature-care were our highest goals. In this, as you say, simpler societies were far more advanced.
You know I saw an internet, fictional series featuring a loyal group of middle-American teens running round and dealing with a disastrous dimensional door that was mistakenly opened into our world, from a nether realm of darkness and monstrosity.
(I neither recommend nor name the series, in the interests of people wishing to keep their minds clear of science-horror images.😉)
The one thing that stuck with me was this: The heroic and good hearted kids called the nether darkness the ‘Upside Down.’ Everything was like the features of our world turned upside down, in an evil and twisted way. For instance; the beautiful local houses were burnt out, gray shells harboring dangerous creatures in the Upside Down dimension. The blue lakes of our world were noxious cesspools in the nether dimension. The clear, daylight sky was dark and stormy in the upside down place. Instead of flocking birds, this dark place had swarms of killer, bat-like creatures. Basically, the lower world was a twisted mockery of our world. It was almost as if the dark place could not form itself, nor even exist, unless it took its features from God’s beautiful creation and then twisted them.
This fictional ‘Upside Down’ gave me an idea. What if our earth was a kind of broken form of the higher, Heavenly realms? (IE: dualistic/broken.)
Then I looked to what I have learned about the Afterlife: There the flowers are tall, varicolored, sentient and do not die. On earth the flowers are often smaller; they wither and perish. In the higher realms our souls are ever young and everlasting, not sickly, aging and dying. In the Heavens the sky is lit by the light of God, no night is needed and we are ‘fed’ by energy-love. Down here, we have a sun of limited lifespan; we have day and night; hot and cold. We must nourish our own survival as best we can or go hungry. Upon high, we have large soul families and also wider connections to many more souls; true connections full of loving-joy. Here on earth our relationships are broken by death or discord or illness… There, souls are free to roam and fly, while on earth many people cannot afford to travel; they are all too often economically bound to crabby bosses. And in the Heavens the Presence of God, the Light of Love, is absolutely everywhere. And when we pass over, we are nurtured by souls in the Afterlife and healed from our earth-based life trauma..
So I have realized that the comparison to the the fictional Upside Down is consistent.
Compared to the effulgent Heavens earth is the upside down place. We are living in the poorer dimension! We survive in a much degraded, even cruder likeness of the glorious Afterlife.
So Roberta, when considering a better human society, we could look at how souls see and treat each other in the Heavens and begin from there. Imagine what we could create! ❣️🌎🌅
I think you nailed it, Efrem. It’s very hard to live here and I’m sure there are dimensions in the universe very much like the one you mentioned. Earth is very dominated by the ego and the need for control and power. This is probably why they call earth a “school”
Thank you dear Lola ❣️
I agree this dualistic world in which we live is rife with tough lessons to be had. Often containing calamitous happenings, this world sure qualifies as a school of hard knocks..
I can’t help wishing the knocks weren’t quite so hard though. 😣
Oh my dear Efrem, how beautiful this is! You really have nailed it! After my eventful past week I wish I could spend more time with this because it is a whole blog post in itself, but just know my dear that the American Plains Indians were so deeply spiritual that apparently people severely harmed on earth are still taken to their encampments in the astral plane after death to be nurtured for a time, so they can be brought back into a healthy spiritual balance and healed.
Hi Thomas,
I enjoyed your ‘neighborhood ‘ blog.
I, too, find little things matter a lot.
it’s the gesture of good that then unrolls by
itself.
And it’s so easy–the next thing in front of us
AIl we have to to do is respond gflerica
Thanks Erica!
I’m seeing some it in my neighborhood. More and more people showing each other appreciation and love. It’s pretty darn cool. I can get a sense of what Heaven on Earth can be like just from interacting with these wonderful people.
I agree. There is a thin line between negativity and downright evil.
This was in answer to Efrem – sorry