Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 17, 2026 • 0 Comment
Afterlife Research, Death, Jesus, The Fun of Dying, Understanding Reality
When morning gilds the skies,
My heart awaking cries:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Alike at work and prayer
To Jesus I repair:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
To Thee, my God above,
I cry with glowing love,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
The fairest graces spring
In hearts that ever sing,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Does sadness fill my mind?
A solace here I find,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Or fades my earthly bliss?
My comfort still is this,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Edward Caswall (1814-1874) (translator from the German), from “When Morning Gilds the Skies” (1854)
As recently as just a few years ago, this weekly blog operated more like an old-style forums website. Do you remember how things were then, even just a few years ago? We would write a blog post, and a regular group of commenters would at once have at it! I would try to respond to most of what they said; but even back then, when I had much more time, I could barely keep up with those commenters. Some of our blog posts, back in 2022 or so, would have almost a hundred comments, even though our list of subscribers was not much larger than it is now. And, wow, if back then we had brought up the idea of abolishing all religions because they had been established without any relationship to the teachings of Jesus, or to the wishes of the genuine God, perhaps we might have gotten many more than a hundred mixed indignant and delighted comments!
What Thomas and I have been doing most recently is using these weekly ruminations to think through this whole reality that surrounds us all. Or, rather, perhaps he already understands exactly what is going on, and he has been teaching me what the greater reality is all about, and using our shared weekly blog posts to do it. I have known ever since I was in my twenties what actually happens after we die. I have known those great truths in minute detail, since the deep-trance mediums who were working around the turn of the twentieth century were able to put people who were still on earth in direct contact with their loved ones who had recently transitioned, so the detailed and particular questions that could be asked and then answered gave us amazingly detailed and truly delightful information. Eventually, all those amazing books that had been written in the nineteen-tens and -twenties about Gladys Osborne Leonard and the other great deep-trance mediums and their work had ended up in used-book stores, when those who had bought and loved those books had later on transitioned back home in their turn. And I was there in the nineteen-seventies, eagerly ready to snatch all those books up! So, I knew even before I was thirty years old the most beautiful of all eternal truths at lie at the center of all human existence. Not only is every one of us eternal, but what we think of as “heaven” is incomparably, perfectly, and amazingly wonderful, beyond even our most optimistic imaginings.
So far, so great! Right? But, where is all of that happening? I can remember looking up at the sky and imagining my own dead loved ones up there now, just sitting on the edges of clouds and looking down at us wistfully, maybe swinging their feet. Because, where else could they be?
In trying to understand where the heaven to which we return at death actually is in relation to this earth, and to this universe, we naturally look to scientists for direction. But scientists are bound to study reality only in relation to what we refer to as matter, and – silly them – their materialist dogma rules out their ever being able to understand consciousness, since it is by its very essence not material; and yet, what we experience as consciousness, or human awareness, turns out to be central to our ever understanding this reality. And fortunately, as we have been saying here, some well-respected scientists came to understand, in the very early part of the twentieth century that, in fact, consciousness is what underlies all of reality. Consciousness turns out to be both the sculptor and the clay. The great physicist Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. In 1944, toward the end of his life, he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Even the inestimable Albert Einstein ended up saying, also at the end of his life, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” He also said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
The consciousness that these greatest of all scientists of the whole twentieth century discovered can be very simply defined. Consciousness is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, governed by emotion and therefore likely self-aware. That is my Thomas’s, my beloved spirit guide’s definition of consciousness, given to me only when I insisted that consciousness had to have a definition! He also tells us that consciousness is all that independently exists, so it includes everything that exists, not only the whole universe around us, the afterlife, and the incomprehensible-in-size whole greater reality, all of which, beyond this universe, afterlife researchers refer to as the astral plane; and also, of course, all human minds. In fact, our afterlife is just a small part of a many-layered reality where we live eternally, all of which is part of that vast astral plane. Our true home vibrates higher than this entire universe does, but otherwise it exists precisely where we all are now! This explanation is easiest to envision if we simply think of a set of television channels, with this universe at channel One. We now believe that it is the lowest-vibrating level of all the many levels of reality. Then, above it are the various slightly higher-vibrating astral levels, just like the higher-numbered channels on your television set; and a part of each of those levels is our eternal astral home. Which means that bodily dying here is simply a matter of changing our astral channels!
Figuring this all out, and then discovering that every bit of all the afterlife evidence that I ever have read fits together with every other bit of afterlife evidence so perfectly, was truly wonderful for me.
But, there really was one thing more that still bothered me. I had discovered all of the above by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, which was why I then wrote The Fun of Dying, in 2010. But there was still one element of my belief-system left that remained only something that I believed; and frankly, I am a flat-out lousy believer! I remain a skeptic until I have seen enough evidence of something to become absolutely certain that what I am just believing is in fact true. In the course of my research, I had learned quite a lot about all religions, and especially the Roman-constructed Christianity that is now the world’s predominant religion, to realize and to post what we posted here last week. And still, Omigod, those ongoing splits in the Christian religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine founded in the year 325 CE still continue! So there are now forty-five-thousand-plus-one, by actual count, Roman-style Christian denominations in the world. And with all my Gospel-reading, there was one thing more that I still personally needed to find a way to know for certain. Is the Jesus of the Gospels actually a genuine, historical human Being?
I was almost convinced, and for a number of what were mostly subtle reasons. It was the Shroud of Turin, and the fact that I became certain around the same time that The Fun of Dying was first published that The Shroud was in fact a genuine historical artifact that had been miraculous preserved, and it proved Jesus’s resurrection from the dead. So then I was even more deeply, almost, even more close to entirely convinced of Jesus’s historical authenticity. But, you know, I was still just, not quite there.
Then, in April of 2022, something truly incredible happened to me. It was a series of events so unbelievable that, to this day, I still feel as if it must only just have happened. It rivals; or no, it really far surpasses my childhood experience of light. That experience happened when I was eight years old, which means that it was seventy years ago now, but it still feels as if it just happened last night. And that night has shaped my entire life! But, my dearly beloved friends, the night when my Thomas took me with him to meet Jesus in our eternal home, the genuine Jesus, for real, as He is now, unexpectedly and with no warning at all, was a more extraordinary experience than I could even comprehend until Thomas and I had talked it out at length. Which took us days afterward, of my asking and his patiently answering my questions.
Thomas is my spirit guide. And spirit guides are supposed to stay with those they are guiding constantly, throughout those guided beings’ lifetimes; so, since Thomas also is, it turns out, among those closest to Jesus, having sworn to Him never to elevate himself above the sixth level into the Godhead level, but instead to serve Jesus eternally. So, nearly every night while my body has slept, Thomas has visited Jesus in the third level of our astral home, which is where nearly all of us return to the afterlife; and since Thomas cannot leave me behind, he just always has taken me along, but always with amnesia for the whole experience. So I have been visiting Jesus for this entire lifetime, even as an infant; I just never realized that!
So, while that whole experience was a confounding, gob-smacking surprise to me, it seemed to be pretty normal to Jesus. I first came to awareness sitting on a bend of that riverbank, with grain in my hand, feeding those beautiful neon-colored fish. Thomas sat to my right, and to my left sat an older man, he looked to be maybe early sixties, who had the most extraordinary high, pure personal energy. This all felt oddly familiar, although I had no idea why. And everyone there normally chooses to look maybe thirty years old, in the prime of earth-life, so who was this very high-vibrating older guy?
Then Thomas spoke quietly. He spoke some odd language, just to the Man on my left; he later told me that he was telling Jesus that He could look like Himself, and I would not be afraid. And instantly, in an eyeblink, Omigod, it was Jesus who was sitting there beside me! He didn’t look like what I soon learned to call the pale and blue-eyed “church-Jesus”, with the light-brown hair to His shoulders, who greets all the newly-transitioned Christians who want to meet Him. No, the way He prefers to look now is with more melanin-enriched skin, light-brown eyes, and shorter, curlier brown hair. The way the river there was bent, He was almost facing me, and I was facing Him; but I could not bear to look at Him directly. Looking at Jesus felt to me like looking at the sun! Even though, sure, we were in God’s always-afternoon-level light of love, so gentle that it doesn’t even cast a shade; and there were all those odd, playful colors for things like grass and tree-leaves and sky. And – yes – the atmosphere there is just pure love, and Jesus radiates a rich and radical, even a much greater love. All I could think of, right there in His presence, was the harsh and judgmental religion that claims Him. Wait! Wait a minute. Were there nail-marks on His wrists? No, there were not.
Jesus spoke to me, softly and gently. English is not His first language, but He speaks it well, and with just a mild accent that I have come to love. He said something like, “Little One! My Little One, don’t be afraid. I love you, My Little One! I asked that you be brought here to Me so we might talk about a work that I would like you to perform for me.” That is another cute thing He does, as He translates in His mind. Instead of “a task”, He might say “a work”. So adorable. And during that night’s visit, and visits that I made to Him during many subsequent nights over that spring and the early summer of 2022, as Thomas continued to bring me to visit Jesus, and they both allowed me to keep memories of these visits to what I soon came to think of as my personal close and very special friend, Jesus. Oh, how I came to love and eagerly anticipate those almost nightly visits!
Whenever thereafter He first spotted me, Jesus would call to me happily. “Little One! My dear Little One, come and sit with Me and tell Me about your day!” OMG. My day had always been just the way your day had probably been, as boring as you can possibly imagine; but Jesus would be avid to hear each detail. He even remembered the names of the people in my life, my family members especially; and even though He probably knew how they were, because, you know, He is actually God, after all; He seemed to see it as a courtesy that He inquire after at least my husband and my children by name. My Thomas – and Jesus always referred to Thomas by a literally unpronounceable name – but my dear Thomas was always nearby and listening, and he would later explain to me that Jesus wants desperately now, since his seventeen hundred years of healing work done among all the millions upon millions of victims of Roman Christianity is now almost completed. what Jesus wants most of all is to live upon the earth again, as He once lived in Galilee, and to teach again among the simple people of the earth, the people that He still loves so much. But that is impossible, after all the love-filled work that He has done to heal those harmed by Roman Christianity since His resurrection, and no matter how He tries to lessen the effect on others of His now so even much more vastly elevated personal spiritual energies.
What Jesus wanted me to do for Him now was to create for Him a personal website. Which astonished me. How could Someone Who last walked on earth two thousand years ago even know what a website is, for heaven’s sake? But what really astonishes me about Jesus, far beyond anything else, is that He has so well accepted and come to tolerate, and perhaps even love this religion that has destroyed everything that Jesus first came to earth to teach and to establish. Whenever I have visited Him, He is distracted; and oddly distracted, it seems, if you don’t realize Who He is. He will be talking, and then His eyes will dart; He will be distracted for an instant, repeatedly; but He keeps on talking. Thomas tells me that He is just answering prayers from the earth. He does that constantly, around the clock, since He lives now in a place where there is no time, and on the earth there are always some Christians not sleeping. Jesus’s name, and the false dogma that He died for our sins are attached to the world’s most predominant religion. Perhaps He could simply ignore that fact. Instead, what He does, what feels like perhaps every fifteen earth-minutes or so, is to stand up as He is transforming into church-Jesus yet again, and steps away maybe thirty feet to go to greet the little group of newly-dead Christians who have come to meet Him in person. When I have remarked to Thomas how amazing this is, my Thomas told me that, long ago, Jesus had a choice to make, even while He was in the literal midst of healing all the millions of Christianity’s victims. He could be bitter about Constantine’s theft of His Own earth-mission, and simply ignore Constantine’s version of Christianity; or else, He could take Constantine’s Christianity over from here. Now, Jesus’s name has become the most beloved name over all the earth.
When evil thoughts molest,
With this I shield my breast,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
The powers of darkness fear,
When this sweet chant they hear,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
When sleep her balm denies,
My silent spirit sighs,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
The night becomes as day,
When from the heart we say,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Be this, while life is mine,
My canticle divine,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Be this th’ eternal song
Through all the ages long,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Edward Caswall (1814-1874) (translator from the German), from “When Morning Gilds the Skies” (1854)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
