Posted by Roberta Grimes • May 24, 2025 • 0 Comment
Afterlife Research, The Source, Understanding Reality
Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, Holy, Holy! Merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!
Holy, Holy, Holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.
Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)
Our frame verse was my childhood pastor’s favorite opening hymn. My goodness, even just reading it all these many decades later, even now it makes me feel eight years old again, standing in the fourth pew on the left with my parents, hymnals open and singing in that old white steepled New England church. Reverend Turrell is up there in his pulpit, and here am I, the only child among all the adults in that very well-filled church. I can look around and see that now, but at the time, I think I was oblivious to the fact that I was the only child in that church full of adults. I know that I never told my mother why I suddenly wanted to go to upstairs church, and not to Sunday School anymore. But for me, throughout my childhood after April of 1955, every morning was always the first morning after I had that amazing experience of light. I insisted that my family attend church every Sunday thereafter, and I listened avidly to Reverend Turrell’s sermons, seeking whatever hints he might share about what that experience of light might have been.
When you never anyone ask a question, it takes you a very long time to get sufficient answers. But after many decades of research that began with my college religion major, by the time my mother had her own experience of light when I was in my forties and my father was on his deathbed, I was able with some confidence to tell her what had happened to her, and to assure her that not only had both Moses and the Apostle Paul had similar experiences that are described in the Bible, but her own daughter had had such an experience myself more than three decades before. That was the first time that I ever told a living soul what had happened to me when I was eight years old. Until then, I had only seen those two experiences of light described in the Bible! But since my mother’s experience of light, I have been talking about my own experience, and I have met a few other people, too, who have had experiences of light. They never talk about theirs, either. These experiences are much less common than are near-death experiences, and they seem to be used as a reliable way to capture our complete attention when there is something that God very much wants us to hear!
This is what the Bible tells us happened to Moses: 2 “The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. 3 So Moses said, ‘I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.’ 4 When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, ‘Moses, Moses!’ And he said, ‘Here I am.’ 5 Then He said, ‘Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.’ 6 He said also, ‘I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.’ Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God” (Exodus 3:2-6). God then goes on from there to have a fairly lengthy chat with Moses about bringing the Israelites up out of Egypt. Wow, this is pretty heady stuff!
Here is what happened to the fierce oppressor of the early Christians named Saul, and it turned him at once into the great Apostle and eventual martyr, Paul: “Now Saul, still breathing threats and murder against the disciples of the Lord, went to the high priest, 2 and asked for letters from him to the synagogues at Damascus, so that if he found any belonging to the Way, both men and women, he might bring them bound to Jerusalem. 3 As he was traveling, it happened that he was approaching Damascus, and suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him; 4 and he fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting Me?’ 5 And he said, ‘Who are You, Lord?’ And He said, ‘I am Jesus whom you are persecuting, 6 but get up and enter the city, and it will be told you what you must do’” (Acts 9:1-6). And that was that! Paul’s conversion to become a leading follower of Jesus was immediate and complete.
My mother’s experience of light was more mundane. As she was settling into bed after a long day of tending to my dying father, she was confounded by a flash of light in the darkened room. She heard a voice say from out of it, “I’m giving you a few more days with him so you can get a few things straight.” Mundane, indeed! She was sure that stentorious voice had to be God’s. As, indeed, it likely was. But she told me the next day that she had no idea what particular still-hanging issues between her and my father God might be urging her to work out before he died.
My own childhood experience of light was probably even more mundane than was my mother’s. I woke up in the middle of the night one night when I was eight years old with a new, vastly hollow feeling inside, and with the certain terror that there is no God. No God! Then there was a flash of light so brilliant that it lit up my whole bedroom and my whole row of dolls, and out of that light a young male voice said, “You wouldn’t know what it is to have me unless you knew what it is to be without me. I will never leave you again.” And, sure enough, that emptiness in me was gone, and I have never been alone again. Even in this moment, my much older body contains not just me, but the Spirit of God as well. That voice, however, was not God’s, but it was Thomas’s, as he very much later admitted to me. He is my faithful spirit guide and my dearest friend.
But when I first heard that voice, I didn’t know that it was Thomas speaking to me. I only knew with a mighty certainty at the age of only eight years old that there truly is a God! God is real. And not only that, but God cares enough about me in particular to reassure me that God will always be right here inside me. And this is a certainty that never has left me, ever, no matter what else has been happening in my life. I never told anyone about my experience of light, not until I first told my mother about it when I was forty-three. But for the rest of my life, that experience has stayed with me, as if it had only just happened last night. It is that experience of light that has driven all my death, afterlife, and Biblical research, and my teaching work, even to this day.
Our dear Reverend Turrell really loved the Trinity idea that is featured in today’s frame verse. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit? God in three persons? But I knew even as a young child that idea didn’t seem to be right, because God is internal. Even Jesus said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; 21 nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-22). And wow, I have known that ever since I was eight years old! God is within you, and you can feel God there! Jesus also told us that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24), which always felt to me to be right. God is within you. God is Spirit.
Eventually, we few who study reality as a research discipline have come to understand that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact all that there is. There really is nothing else. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. The easiest way for you to think of Consciousness is to imagine it as something like the air, uniformly everywhere. But unlike the air, Consciousness is an all-powerful, energy-like potentiality, so like any other energy. it vibrates. And it vibrates in a vast range from fear and hatred at its lowest, slowest, and weakest vibration to intense and perfect love at its highest, fastest, and most powerful vibration.
Are you still with us on all of this? If not quite, then please read the previous paragraph again, and read also the blog post that it links, and perhaps some of what is linked from that blog post as well. Materialist mainstream science is still so fiercely afraid, on a level that looks to be literally Medieval, of the possibility that it might inadvertently discover the Christian God, that it refuses to do much to investigate Consciousness, or to consider even remarkable evidence in favor of Intelligent Design. And this is true, even when evidence clearly points to just a Designer, and not to the bearded and human-like Christian view of God at all. It fascinates us to watch trained scientists dancing more and more edgily around ever stranger ideas, such as the notion that neuronal networks inside the human brain and galaxy networks on vast scales in the universe look to be somehow oddly similar. OMG, really? As if, perhaps, you know, they might somehow share One Designer, after all?
Meanwhile, we who live and work in a more rational reality have come to understand that, in truth, All is One. What we call “God” is the highest Consciousness vibration, and our minds are of course all part of that same Consciousness, but we only currently are all vibrating considerably lower while we briefly occupy these material bodies. That is the difference. And it’s the only difference. But we all share that single Consciousness, so we are One with one another, and we are One with God. This sense that I always have had that Jesus is right, and God is within me, of course that is all true, since it is easy for those at higher vibrations to move lower. God truly can dwell in each of our hearts, and fundamentally all of us are One Being.
So this notion that God is a “Trinity” is actually a pretty good metaphor for all the ways in which God is ready to freely act within our lives. But always, of course, by our own invitation. God fills all the possible love-based aspects that humankind can imagine; although the Trinity is never material, and it cannot be seen to in any way limit God:
But it is all God! All is God, and there is nothing else but the Consciousness that is God! God is One. And, oh My dear so much beloved God, and my precious friends, brothers and sisters who are God’s children around us, How truly perfect is this feeling of knowing it all forever and for certain! Far too often, people are afraid to have such an intimate and fully open relationship with God, because Christianity teaches us that we are sinners. But, pish-tush! God cares nothing for our little mistakes made in simply living and trying to grow spiritually. We all come here to learn! Making mistakes shows that we are trying to learn, and that is a good thing. Simply try to follow God-as-Jesus’s teachings, and try to love everyone every day ever more perfectly. Just open the top of your head and invite God inside for a chat and a cup of spiritual tea, or for whatever feels right to you now. God wants each of us to lead this relationship that we are having with God, as we gradually open ourselves to ever deeper intimacy with the one true God. Then, when you are ready, invite God right into your heart forevermore. And God will laugh with delight, and will hug you there with the very greatest joy!
Holy, Holy, Holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, Holy, Holy! Merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
