Posted by Roberta Grimes • October 18, 2025 • 0 Comment
Afterlife Research, Death, The Teachings of Jesus, Understanding Reality
Here we all work ‘long the Mississippi
Here we all work while the white folk play
Pullin’ them boats from the dawn ’till sunset
Gettin’ no rest ’till the judgment day
Don’t look up and don’t look down
You don’t das make the boss man frown
Bend your knees and bow your head
And pull that rope until your dead
Let me go ‘way from the Mississippi
Let me go ‘way from the white man boss
Show me that stream called the river Jordan!
That’s the old stream that I long to cross
– Oscar Hammerstein (1895-1960) & Jerome Kern (1885-1945), from “Ol’ Man River” (1927}
My experience of light at the age of eight instilled in me as a very young child a powerful need to understand what is going on. I have wanted ever since that moment to know everything! I have wanted to know not only Where that light came from, and Who had spoken from out of it, but also every bit of What in fact is behind it all. And not only What, mind you, but almost as importantly, as I grew, I also craved to know Why? Why does this universe even exist, and why does it go to all the trouble of maintaining itself within such tiny tolerances so as to sustain itself perfectly as a fit and stable habitat for human beings, over all the millennia? That gigantic supernatural light, which had been more brilliant than any light you can imagine, even though it did not affect my eyes – that light – had revealed to me, when I was too young to know that there are some questions that we are not supposed to ask – that light had made me see that this is all just a stage. Life on earth is something like a personal play, unfolding all around us. And therefore, obviously, there is a Very Big Guy who is lovingly staging it for each of us, who is pulling the strings behind that curtain that are making it seem so real in each moment. Even grown-ups who believe in God are used to taking this theatrical stage and its scenery a lot more seriously than I ever have been able to take any of it, ever since that long-ago amazing night.
It is only in recent years that I have come to understand, and to discuss with my Thomas, what a powerful difference that experience of light has made in all the rest of my life. It turned me into an embarrassingly eager and ravenously hungry Seeker. Thomas has lately helped me to bring back memories from when I was even younger than eight. I was only four years old, and we were learning in preschool to recite our address, for just one example. I have a vague memory of a tall, thin man in a long blue robe sitting on a large rock in the un-built and thinly wooded lot that was next to our house. Thomas tells me now that man was himself, and no one else could have seen him but me. He would wait for me after school on many days when I was very young, and I used to visit him there, and he would teach me things. I can recall just tiny snippets of this now. But the tall man would ask me what I had learned in school that day, and I would tell him. So, on that particular day, I told him that I had learned to recite my address, in case I was ever lost. I said to him, “101 North Street, Grafton, Massachusetts.” To which the nice man taught me to add, “The United States of America, The Third Planet, the Solar System, The Universe, and The Mind of God.” Lord only knows what my teacher must have thought when I recited that back to her the next morning!
Much later, I came to understand that we have God’s invitation to ask all our deepest questions. The very reason why Jesus returned to earth was to teach us. He is for each of us that tall man in the wooded lot next door, in our shared private place; and Jesus invites us to come and visit Him and ask Him all our questions! Jesus says,7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened (MT 7:7-8).
That experience of light when I was eight years old remains ever-present and hyper-real, even all these many decades later. I realize now, too, that of course even long before my much-beloved Thomas ever came out to me, just over a decade ago, and he told me who he was, he was very active in my mind, and I was following his prompts. In addition, because of that light and that voice, I am not afraid to seek answers, because I am confident that there are going to be answers worth finding! For a very long time, it used to amaze me that just about everyone else was not excited at all, as I have always been excited, to look for evidence of the afterlife. It is only fairly recently that I have come to see that many people are afraid to look for afterlife evidence; and I understand now that the reason is because they fear to discover that there might be nothing very good behind that curtain. Or, even worse, there might be simply nothing at all. No God. No afterlife. Which means that at death, we simply blink out like a light.
And of course, so many people’s fear of seeking this most important of all truths is also the fault of the American scientific community. It is science that shamefully insists – and in the twenty-first century, no less! – that there is no God. And it is science that also tries to make people believe that there is nothing after death. And in doing that, of course, the scientific community is not remaining neutral at all, as it always is supposed to remain neutral when any question at hand is still unproven. But rather, in this case, science is making up from whole cloth, and even is dramatizing, what we might by now with justification call The Greatest Lie in History.
Because of the Presence that was behind the light that I saw on that amazing night, I know with certainly that there is a Mind, an Intelligence, or what we generally call God. But you needn’t give that Divine Presence a name; and certainly, don’t call it God if you are an American, since calling that Intelligence “God” is such an intimidating concept for American scientists! More than a century ago, the mainstream scientific gatekeepers in the United States were so horrified by the possibility that Max Planck, who was the brilliant father of quantum physics, had found God when he announced that consciousness is primary – and in fact, so indeed Dr. Planck had found God! – that they declared that materialism was now “the fundamental scientific dogma”. And they thereby turned mainstream scientific inquiry into the religion of atheism. Literally. So, ever since the early twentieth century, by decree of the university scientific departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, scientists are required to believe that consciousness is produced by the human brain, and no other scientific finding is allowed.
So now, a literal billion dollars is being wasted in trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain. Which is the literal equivalent of trying to find Frank Sinatra still alive and singing inside your iPhone. This is the height of atheistic scientific silliness, when consciousness is so obviously primary and pre-existent, just as Max Planck insisted that it is, a full century ago. And of course, another silliness in wasting funds and effort is the ongoing scientific search for how life began, while not allowing any reference to consciousness; which is too bad, when of course life is a primary property of consciousness itself. And the greatest scientific silliness of all is the fact that those scientific gatekeepers of more than a century ago so much feared inadvertently finding God that they turned science itself into a religion, the religion of atheism, when religion was the very thing that they were trying so hard to avoid! But, no worries. Once some new generation of working scientists eventually becomes sufficiently disgusted with wasting their careers on doing such nonsensically limited research, they will point out as a single body just how naked the emperors of the scientific community truly are; and then in a single day, this useless and stupid constraint on their work will shrink with embarrassment and be gone.
Meanwhile, for those of us who are not afraid to live in the beautiful and secure sunshine and joy of this God-created genuine reality, making this our one-and-done last necessary earth-lifetime is easily possible! We can decide now that we will work so hard at raising our own spiritual vibrations that we will achieve the fifth level in the astral plane this time around, and be happily one-and-done! That can be true, even if you are in the late afternoon of your present earth-lifetime, if you really will put your full mind to it. Thanks to Jesus, and thanks to Max Planck and to some other modern researchers who have helped us to understand why we come to earth, and how this whole system of consciousness energy actually operates; if you choose to do it, you can raise your personal spiritual energy pretty rapidly. To give yourself the gift of sufficient spiritual growth that you can escape the need to ever return to earth after your next transition home, you will first need to understand what consciousness is, and how to work within it:
And, of course, before we begin to work to elevate your spiritual energies, we will need to cleanse your life of every source of fear and other negativity. And for many people – it feels awful to say this! – most of the negativity in your life may well come from your religion. The shortest course toward rapid spiritual growth is to follow the lessons that Jesus taught, and yet many Christian churches don’t teach those lessons. Instead, they teach guilt and shame surrounding the notion that Jesus had to die for our sins, and fear of judgment and our very possible condemnation to a fiery hell. If there is any of this in your church, then its negativity will likely prevent the spiritual growth that we are going to be working toward now. So, before we begin, it would be great if you found a more love-based church that could feed your heart.
So now that we understand how Consciousness works, we can begin to see how we might indeed make this our last necessary earth-lifetime! The three powerful spiritual trainings that can transform us spiritually are GRATITUDE, FORGIVENESS, And LOVE. And while eventually we will be living all three for the rest of our lives, it is best to begin to work on them in that order, because each prepares our mind to better handle the next.
We begin by developing An Attitude of Gratitude. Buy a small booklet of blank pages, and every morning for at least the next six months, write at the top of a page just one new thing for which you are grateful. Then below it, write a sentence or two about why you are grateful for that one thing. Then say a brief prayer to God, thanking God for that one thing that you have just written down. Doing this each morning is easy at first, because you can be grateful for each of your family members, and then for sunny days, and for each kind of flower. But by the seventieth day, since you are not allowed to repeat, you are down to being grateful for your neighbor’s dog that barks at night, because at least with his help, you’re never late for work. By the eightieth day, you are struggling to think of a reason to be grateful for mosquitoes! This instilling in yourself an attitude of gratitude is a wonderful exercise. If you will honestly stick with it for the full ninety days, you will find that it softens you spiritually to a surprising extent. It gentles you. It lightens your heart. And it helps to prepare you for the deeper work of forgiveness, which of course you can begin while your gratitude work is still ongoing.
Universal Forgiveness feels difficult for many of us until we really work at it, and especially forgiveness for the really big and awful things! But Jesus tells us that we have to forgive everything. And He is so right! When His disciple, Peter, asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). Don’t kid yourself about this. Whoever you are having trouble forgiving could not care less whether you forgive him or not! The wrongdoers don’t care. Forgiveness of others is always the big gift that you give to yourself!
And fortunately, there is a mechanical method that makes complete forgiveness simple. It’s called Forgiveness Balls. You just sweep whatever great wrong you are confronting into a nice, tight ball, with big sweeps of your arms, and of course you include all the people involved. Get it all in there! And then you tamp that ball down tight with your hands. Then with both hands, you slowly push that Forgiveness Ball away, saying out loud, and meaning it, “I love you. I bless you. I forgive, and I release.” You will probably have to do this several times at first. But do the whole exercise again slowly, and do it firmly! What you are doing is retraining and teaching your stubborn mind that you really do mean it! You really do forgive whatever this infraction was. Each time you do a Forgiveness Ball about some very big thing, over and over again, and you sincerely mean it, you will feel your resentment of whatever it was lessening, until all that resentment just goes away.
This is how spiritually happens, but you cannot let anything get in its way. When the part of eternal Consciousness that is Your Mind has been cleared of all negativity; when it has been softened and gentled by the patient and kindly every-morning thoughts that are endless Gratitude expressed to God; and when it has been purified of every resentment by complete and total Forgiveness: then it naturally is ready to fill you with the perfect Love that Jesus came to teach, that great and perfect Love that pisses all understanding! Jesus said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). That perfect love is your whole spiritual goal! And you will find that love comes naturally to you, love even for perfect strangers on the street, in stores, and everywhere! Cultivate it, and let it happen, my dear one. Find some work for other people that you enjoy, and that will help your own growth in love grow stronger: for me, it has long been sharing with others what my lifetime of research has taught me.
Ol’ man river, that ol’ man river
He don’t say nothin’, but he must know somethin’
He just keeps rollin’, he keeps on rollin’ along
Ah gits weary, an’ sick of tryin’
Ah’m tired of livin’, An’ skeered of dyin’
But ol’ man river, he jes’ keeps rollin’ along
– Oscar Hammerstein (1895-1960) & Jerome Kern (1885-1945), from “Ol’ Man River” (1927}
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
