Posted by Roberta Grimes • August 29, 2026 • 0 Comment
Afterlife Research, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality
I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses.
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me,
And He talks with me, And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)
I still can remember how it felt to be afraid to die. That was, back when I was in college, and I only believed in an afterlife, but I put a lot of hope behind my belief; even thougn I had no way to know for sure whether my vague ideas about the afterlife might be grounded in anything remotely real. But being in that place of mere belief in vague ideas was so uncomfortable! I had no real idea of what an afterlife might look like, how it might feel, or where it might be; or even how I might travel from here to there. My belief was even vague enough that there was still a good chance that there could be nothing after death at all. So, I graduated from college, and I moved to Boston, and I found my job of the future, which was programming in Cobol an IBM 360 computer that took up one whole floor of a good-sized office building. (That computer had, parenthetically, a fraction of the calculating power of your modern cellphone). Boston was a happen’ place in 1970, but I had very little money; so on weekends, I would browse used-books stores, looking for books about the afterlife. That was when I discovered a treasure-trove of books that had been written a half-century before, about the great deep-trance mediums whose wonderful talents had been forged in the reliable darkness that had been possible only before the advent of electric lighting.
It took me just a few quick years of avidly reading accounts of deep-trance medium communications between the recently-dead and their grieving loved ones still on earth to begin to know for certain that we survive our deaths. Come on! I am, to be sure, a skeptic by nature; but I am rationally persuadable! And during those few years, I read hundreds of accounts – at least two hundred, and probably more – that had been received in southern England, in the Boston area, and in southern New York State, through deep-trance mediums, with the cheeky assistance of each medium’s chatty disembodied handlers.It was amazing what could come through this way! The handlers would have your newly-dead loved ones right there with them, and sometimes those loved ones would even speak directly, using the body of the medium, who was always very deeply in trance.So, all those accounts were highly evidentiary, and often very richly detailed.And in all of those very different accounts, while each held varying small details, every communicating, newly-dead loved one described the same general post-death process of retyrb, the same types of clothing, the same pastimes and vegetation, the same odd colors and quirky details, just clearly the very same kind of place. So, eventually, I was convinced! Okay, I finally did get it. Obviously, we really do survive our deaths.
But knowing only that fact is still not enough, is it? You go outside, and you look up at the vacant, ice-blue sky, and you wonder. If there truly is an afterlife, then where the heck is it? You listen to the scientists, and they still, willfully, are able to give you no comfort whatsoever. There is an afterlife, butt where is it? How does it work, and how does it fit with this reality that we know??Oh, my dearly beloved friends! The gap that yawns between having a hopeful belief that there might be an afterlife waiting for us, and knowing for certain that the evidence is so strong that, my gosh, there is absolutely a certain eternal life for us, is a canyon as wide as the skies!
For most afterlife researchers, learning as many details as we can about the next stage and how our transition to it works seems to have felt like enough. They studied the evidence, and then they taught it, and they helped to ease many people’s fears. But there were a few of us who realized decades ago that, yes, the afterlife is indeed real. And that tells us something meaningful, and indeed it tells us something very important, about the whole of reality itself! To understand what that something was, we became devotees of popular science magazines, and we soon discovered the work of Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of Quantum Mechanics. Our dear Max was a contemporary of the inimitable Albert Einstein. But he ventured beyond Einstein, and he encountered consciousness; and frankly, in their later lives, Planck’s discovery of the primacy of consciousness, with its attendant implications of the great and fundamental, underlying fact that consciousness underlies all of reality, seems to have driven our beloved Einstein a bit mad.
Consciousness is in fact the base of all reality. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. (link) If that is not eventually determined to have been the greatest discovery of the twentieth century, then it certainly will be high on the list! But the materialist scientific community is so worried about inadvertently finding the Christian God that for the past century, they have been frantically searching for some way that our human brains might somehow generate consciousness. And that, my dear ones, is the rough equivalent of looking for a source of air inside our lungs.
Max Planck studied consciousness for much of the latter part of his life. In 1944 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 particles 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.” And for his part, to his credit, toward the end of his own life, Albert Einstein said, “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.” And he added, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
We have recently (linked) written here about the primacy of consciousness in our reality, and the way that consciousness contains and operates our greater reality, so we won’t say much more about it again today. But understanding all of this is key to your freeing yourself at last from every possible fear! Religious people make such a big deal of faith, but faith is very thin gruel indeed. Faith and hope are similar in design and effect, and they are both toop easily shaken; as you know, if you “believe” in an afterlife, but then you look up at that empty sky. Jesus has a lot of respect for faith, if you can hold on to it despite every challenge to it! He says, “For truly I tell you, if you have faith the size of a mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you” (MT 17:20). Ah, but how does having faith compare with knowing the truth about the afterlife, dear Wayshower and Best Friend, our best-beloved Jesus? He says, “You will know the truth, and the truth will make you free” (JN 8:31-32).
In my own experience, what knowing the whole truth really frees us from is every fear! Back when I was a few years out of college, and I had vanquished my fear of death with information, I still had my “but, where the heck is it?” confusion about where the afterlife might be, when clearly the skies were barren. However, as further years passed, and as Craig Hogan and I and others dove deeper into the insights of the earlier afterlife researchers who had also gone deeper, with Max Planck of course leading us all, we finally really did begin to get it. We saw how it all fit together, how the astral afterlife reality is able to be in fact nearly all of reality, and how mainstream scientists actually account for that fact. Well, wow. So, the afterlife is right here where we are, but it is simply at a higher vibration! I can recall the very first time I saw this fundamental truth explained this way, in a book written in the first part of the twentieth century. There, the dead communicator explained that dying is as simple as changing stations on a radio dial.
First knowing all of that was amazing and wonderful. And lots of the facts were even fortifying other facts, so for a long time I really didn’t need more. I even realized one day that I had altogether lost not just my fear of death, but even every one of all my fears put together. I had always been afraid of the dark, but now I found that I could sit and work in the dark all evening long and not mind that at all. But still, maybe fifteen years ago now, and probably at my Thomas’s prompting, I found that all the evidence had yet one more amazing thing to teach me.
As I have said elsewhere, our purpose in coming to earth has long since been made clear to us. That purpose is to use the earth’s negative energies, its many fears and angers and hatreds, to push against, so we can much better raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from the ishy low vibrations and toward ever more perfect love. That is the reason why each of us is even here on earth at all! And I have studied the canonical Gospel teachings of Jesus for my whole adult life, to the point where I nearly have them memorized. The more I study them, the more it strikes me that Jesus surely must have understood when He was on earth what consciousness is, and the role that it plays in all of reality. Of course, He could not even begin to explain modern scientific principles to the illiterate primitives that He was teaching, now, could He? So, Jesus used graceful euphemisms. He talked most often about the Kingdom of God, for example, saying that his teachings on love and forgiveness would bring the Kingdom of God on earth, and telling us that the Kingdom of God is within us. And when I read His teachings with what we know now about the role of consciousness as the core of all reality in mind, I am certain that Jesus was referring to consciousness when He talked about the Kingdom of God.
When I realized that the Gospel teachings of Jesus seemed to allow us to directly replace the words “Kingdom of God” with the word “consciousness”, I wondered whether those Gospel teachings would all by themselves be effective in raising people’s spiritual vibrations. So, I conducted a little experiment on close to a hundred unsuspecting souls: I offered a course that promised to raise people’s consciousness vibration enough to make this their final necessary earth-lifetime. And what still amazes me is how rapidly this all so perfectly worked! Those who stuck with the simple course that I taught them, using only the canonical Gospel teachings of Jesus, raised their spiritual vibrations so efficiently and so amazingly well in just two, or something under three earth-years! I have no doubt at all that this was precisely what Jesus was about when He was on this earth.
So, my dear ones, here is what we have learned:
Because there was a time when I, too, only believed in a possible afterlife, I know that merely having faith that life goes on is not remotely enough for you now! There was a time when I had only the afterlife evidence, so I know that is not going to be enough for you, either. What you need is a way that you can carry me around, an app maybe, so you can ask me every possible question as each question occurs to you. Perhaps a lot of videos that you can call up on cue, if you want answers to more complex questions.
He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing.
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.
And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
