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Which is Real?

Posted by Roberta Grimes • June 24, 2023 • 25 Comments
Afterlife Research, Jesus, The Source, Understanding Reality

He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea!
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights every star that makes the darkness bright!
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night.

 He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
And though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Jack Richards (1925-2011) & Richard Mullan from “He,” (1954)

I get afterlife questions constantly. A common one is, “What can we ever find to do in the afterlife? It must be so boring, with nothing to do.” When in fact, the complete opposite is true! There is a whole endless circus in the afterlife of time-travel and space-travel and toys and research and playtime, and spending endless non-time with loved ones and actually meeting and even talking with Jesus, and with Elvis, and also attending and yourself even performing in concerts and shows, and learning to play the piano with Mozart, and skating and swimming and boating and snowboarding and generally having such infinite fun that it is a very good thing that our afterlife bodies never need to sleep! And then after I finish gushing over a great long list of endless afterlife delights, and I remark that it’s a good thing indeed that objective time does not exist in the afterlife, because if it did, it might take you a thousand years at least just to exhaust all these and so many other wonderful afterlife delights, one of the questions that I sometimes will get from some diehard cynic or other is this: “Well then. So, which of these realities is real? Because they can’t both be real. Both here and there. So, which is it?” Which one is real?

Scientists believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, with an uncertainty factor of only 200 million years, either way. But, who knows? This universe could just as easily have been created as an initial tiny habitat for primitive humankind only two hundred thousand years ago, and made to grow gradually larger and more complicated and seemingly older only after the fact, as that became necessary, as we human beings became steadily ever more sophisticated, and therefore more curious, so we never would find an edge. In fact, ninety percent of all the animal species on earth appeared at about the same time that the first humans did, only 200,000 earth-years ago. There were thereafter at least two near-extinction events for humankind, one caused by a severely adverse climate event around 150,000 earth-years ago, during the Marine Isotope Stage 6 period, so named because it was a specific type of ice age, when not only did the polar caps and glaciers around the world expand, but all the deserts did as well, since the atmosphere had so much moisture sucked out of it by the ice. And the area of the world most affected by this extreme ice age and extreme dry period combined was southern Africa, where the entire world population of human beings then still lived. It has been estimated that at the anatomically modern human population’s lowest point, there were probably fewer than 1000 people alive on this entire planet.

The second human near-extinction event was only about 74,000 earth-years ago. It followed the super-eruption of a Sumatran volcano called Toba that ejected roughly ten thousand times more ash and gas into the atmosphere than did the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980, dimming the sun globally for at least five years, killing off most of the vegetation worldwide, and threatening all human life on earth. It has been estimated that again the earth’s whole anatomically modern human population, still confined to the southern part of Africa, was reduced to between 1000 and 5000 people.

But this second calamity was actually a fortuitous event. Toba’s eruption deposited sufficient ash along the eastern edge of northern Africa and the Nile valley that a green corridor was created all along that edge, where there only had ever been impassable desert. And over the next sixty-odd thousand earth-years, wave after wave of human travelers wandered out of Africa and began to populate the rest of the world. The glaciers of the most recent ice age still covered most of Europe, so it wasn’t until about ten thousand years ago that anatomically modern people finally made it into western Europe. But it was Toba’s last eruption that made humankind’s African exodus possible. And it was only then that sufficient anatomically modern people began to live in enough different places on earth that the odds began to favor our species’s long-term survival.

When we realize how amazingly brief our history as a species actually is – only two hundred thousand years! – and how recently human beings made it out of Africa, then the possibility of the world as a human habitat deliberately created for spiritual learning begins to make more sense. Materialist scientists love to talk in terms of our universe’s history as billions of years in length, and our human evolutionary history as five million years long, but we know enough now to realize that such numbers are actually meaningless to us. We understand that within Consciousness there is neither time nor distance, so the genuine God, as the extreme Alpha of Consciousness, could easily have created us in the Now of two hundred thousand earth-years ago, and simultaneously built for us a backstory of billions of years, and we would believe it all without question. In truth, we would be none the wiser.

I am sorry to break this news to you so bluntly, but in fact there are an amazing number of little “tells” which suggest that we are probably living in precisely that 200,000-year-old God-created universe, and believing in a simultaneously God-created backstory. I will never forget my first “OMG!” moment, which happened even long before I first realized that nothing else but Consciousness exists. It was almost forty years ago now, back when I still was reading everything I could get my hands on in the field of afterlife evidence, and also reading about scientific anomalies. I think this fellow called his book something about “God signs,” and it was full of various kinds of weird phenomena. For example:

  • Creating Stars. The forty-odd-year-old moment that first got my attention was a story of someone who had pointed his telescope at an area of the sky that was then entirely devoid of stars. He first made certain of that fact. It was entirely blank! Then he left his telescope in place, and one year later to the day he returned and looked through it again. And now that same place in the universe teemed with billions of galaxies. As I recall his explanation, this was then a well known, if creepy phenomenon among astronomers. And so many people were testing it for themselves that astronomers expected that soon there would be no place left in the visible cosmos that was not well-populated with galaxies.
  • Punctuated Equilibrium. Darwin’s original nineteenth-century theory of many gradual, constant, minute changes that happen continuously and constitute evolution looks so silly now as to beggar belief, because in fact that is not the way that evolution happens. Instead, once a species appears, it will go through long periods of stasis before a new, related species appears and then goes through another very long period of little or no change at all. This “punctuated equilibrium” is frankly what you would expect to see if God were creating all these creatures anew, modifying them, and just sticking them into place in series. It is no wonder that materialist scientists don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about the details of Darwinian evolution.
  • Rhinoceroses. There are a few strains of animals – and rhinoceroses are one of them – which simply appear in the fossil record, and don’t have any discernible ancestors which connect them back to a very primitive first ancestral creature. It is almost as if God just had an idea for a funny animal one day, and went with it. And when we realize that nearly all the modern species of animals appeared at the same time, 200,000 years ago, we cannot help but wonder whether with some of these more peculiar kinds of animals, the existence of both punctuated equilibrium and especially odd creatures like rhinoceroses that appear out of nowhere might be evidence that something like that might actually have happened. They all seem to be perhaps evidence of a hurried kind of “good enough” wish to fudge things on the part of the Divine.
  • The Big Bang. Scientists tell us that the universe began in a Big Bang a very long time ago. But of course, something cannot really have come from nothing, or that is the biggest “tell” of all! So the “Big Bang” doesn’t really explain anything, does it? You can then ask, “What was before that?” and then “What was before that?” an infinite number of times, no matter how long ago or how recently materialist scientists want to tell us that the creation of the universe first happened. Occasional efforts have been made to explain what existed before the Big Bang, including perhaps prior universes which might have ended in a Big Crunch before they expanded outward again. But the fact is that since matter is almost entirely empty space, this entire universe is as insubstantial as a thought, in any event.
  • Daily Miracles. Had I realized that I soon would be writing this post, I would have captured more of these, but you know what I mean. We come across unlikely-seeming happy stories in our news feeds and in our lives all the time! And on the world stage, from the hair’s-breadth survival of those first human beings through their early repeated near-extinction events, right through the had-to-happen success of the Normandy invasion in the Second World War, to the remarkable fact that in the nearly eighty years since Nagasaki was leveled, no country has been allowed to explode an atomic bomb of any size in anger, we all have witnessed so many miracles that by now we simply take them for granted. But we never should take any of them for granted. God is intensively and minutely active in this world right now, and from moment to moment.

All right. So, after I hope I have at least somewhat convinced you that the afterlife reality must be more substantial than this clearly shaky and artificial-seeming material reality quite obviously is, let’s cross over and take a look at that other side, which from here we call the afterlife. The reality that we live in now is scientifically proven to be 99.9999999% empty space, for heaven’s sake! And there are a lot of little tells which suggest that this reality may well have been thrown together to become our habitat only a mere two hundred thousand earth-years ago. Perhaps it began as one planet, or even as a single flat plain only very recently, and then it was built outward from there as the human creatures in this little playpen meant for spiritual education took to exploring it, so they never would find an edge. Surely the whole gigantic astral plane, with its multiple solid-seeming levels which include the afterlife as a tiny part must be a whole lot more substantial than this is!  

Well, actually, not so much. The afterlife exists in the same physical location that we do, so when we die, we simply tune our minds to a higher vibration, very much as you might tune your TV to a higher-numbered channel, and there we pick up a whole new solid-seeming reality precisely in the same place where we are now. Dying is just as easy as that. But what is really amazing and wonderful about the astral plane which is our eternal home is that when we are there, and especially for the more spiritually advanced of us, our minds are much more powerful than our minds are when we are on earth. Consider these examples, gleaned from abundant afterlife communications:

  • You can have whatever you miss from your life here just ended. Someone who has recently died might think of a book, a trinket of jewelry, a treasured vase from a former earth-home, or whatever else you might miss, and just turn around, and there it is. I think the reason for this facility is so we will get past caring about material things. But for whatever reason it happens, it is flat-out astonishing.
  • Building is by mind. It is possible to stick-build people’s post-death homes, but why bother? When people in the afterlife or in the astral plane want to build a house, they will draw the plans for it, and then they call by mind for sixth-level beings to come and think it into existence. And a few of them, perhaps three or four, will appear and gravely study the plans, and study the place where the building is going to be. And then they will put their minds together, literally, and the building will shimmer into and out of existence briefly before there it stands, brand-new and as solid as can be!
  • Travel is by mind. People in the astral plane can travel from here to the edge of the universe in a literal heartbeat of non-time, simply by thinking the wish to be there. We cannot go higher in vibration than the level of the astral to which our level of spiritual development has suited us, but we can readily go lower. And many people there are inveterate travelers, especially soon after they have first returned home.

So then, which reality is real. Is it here, or is it the afterlife and the astral? Or it might make better sense to ask, which reality is more real? I think we would have to rate the answer to that question to be a toss-up. The material-seeming reality that we inhabit now is just what amounts to the lowest vibrational level of the astral reality, and these realities are so closely connected that it is impossible to separate them. Both of them are composed of and governed by and existing within the same Consciousness which is all that exists, of which each of our minds is a part, and which at its highest vibration is God . They are in fact both part of the same reality, just in two different expressions to make for our more efficient earthly spieitual learning. And Jesus told us all of this, we realize now. But then, didn’t Jesus tell us everything? The problem was that so often we didn’t know enough to have a way to understand what He was telling us at the time. Long ago our sweet Brother said, “Do not be afraid, little flock, because your Father has chosen to give you the kingdom! Sell your possessions and give to the poor; make yourselves money belts that do not wear out, for yours is an inexhaustible treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near nor does a moth destroy” (LK 12:32-33).

He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold!
He knows every lie that you and I have told.
And though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Jack Richards (1925-2011) & Richard Mullan from “He,” (1954)

Roberta Grimes
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25 thoughts on “Which is Real?

  1. I was reading the news this morning and thought, “The Red
    Sea parteth…” That army headed to Moscow. That incident
    must involve God. As you said, God is involved moment by
    moment.
    I try not to try to understand everything, but more and more,
    I am surprised by the simplicity of switching over to
    Heaven!
    I flat-lined during a
    major surgery; when I re-entered my body, I just moved about 1 yard right and
    slipped into an obese woman’s body. I needed to feel
    the heaviness of gravity. I was back. I opened my eyes
    back in my room, all cleaned up, with about 5 nurses puttering around me.
    The whole experience was equally real.

    When I roamed outside my body-no big deal, but no, I
    did not meet Jesus. I felt safe, guided by an invisible energy. Jesus was there, as He is here
    I wonder if we “die” by moving right– very real and very
    okay.

    ,

    1. Oh my dear Erica, what a sweet and surprising story! Actually, the fear of dying is innate in us, because if it were not, we would slip right out of these bodies so easily and so happily and hurry right home, and that would not be a good thing at all. But we will do it soon enough. And meanwhile, let’s all enjoy and make the most of being here!

      1. Dear Roberta,
        You have clarified something for me that I have always wondered. I’ve always wondered WHY we fear death so much. And this answers it perfectly! It actually made me lol because you are so right about that (if we weren’t we would want to hurry home right away).

        1. Dear JenniferK, that bit of fear is actually seen as important, and higher-level beings are concerned about preserving it, once the truth about our eternal lives is widely known. But I think their worry is unnecessary. I have known the truth for twenty years at least, and so has Craig, and others of whom we are aware, and we aren’t doing anything to hasten our deaths. We see our remaining teaching time here as valuable, and we can happily wait and anticipate the fun times ahead, the way you wait happily for Christmas morning!

  2. Roberta you have an amazing gift to explain the unexplainable. Einstein showed us velocity had an inverse relation with time. The faster we go the slower time goes. At the speed of light there is no lapse of time. The first ray (or particle) of light still exists in the same instant it was created.
    The eternal has no time. Time is an artifact of subjectivity created by the One Source. All that we gaze upon and experience is creation sustained by the Love of One Source.
    A feeble shot of trying to express the unexpresable 🙄

    1. Oh my sweet Mike, it does feel so inexpressibly different to be in the astral plane. I don’t know why, but I want to express it in terms of music. It feels as if you are riding on a wave of music. It feels beautiful.

  3. I have longed to be an organist so I could please my audience with renditions of Bach’s work, such as Air of the G-String. Sadly for me, that was not to be. Lately, I thought I should be able to be an organist because my mother was a pianist, albeit not a very good one, and my father was attempting to be a violinist as attested by a stack of 78 RPM practice records, which I never heard him play. I assumed that somewhere back in my astral family tree, I would find more of my ancestors with musical acumen who would send me musical prompts as needed, but no such luck.

    Yet I still think that I am being prompted by my higher self, so I could play beautifully or wretchedly, the latter indicating I was operating in a low plane and the former on a high plane. This construct, if true, would indicate reality could be measured by a “goodness of fit” type measurement. The better the fit the higher the reality.

    Yours,

    Cookie

    1. Oh my dear Cookie, when you return home, you can work on all of that! One of the wonderful things about being there is that we have full access to our vast eternal minds, so learning things there is so much easier! And our hearing there is infinitely better. People tell us that we have never heard music until we hear it there. It is so positively beautiful, and when you attend a concert you can even see the music in forms and shapes and colors over the performers.

  4. I was lucky to be at my dad’s side when he passed last year.

    I sat next to him waiting to hear if he saw anyone that had passed before him. Before my grandmother died she was seeing siblings passed long before she did. She would giggle by herself. When I asked what was making her laugh, she said she was talking with her brother who died a long time ago. So I was looking for signs like that to determine when my dad was ready to leave.

    He didn’t really say anything. No signs of deceased family members coming to prepare him for his journey home. The cancer had infiltrated everything including his brain. He just gasped for air, which was why we knew he was close. He was always a fighter and no doubt tried to hang on because he was worried about my mother. I was worried he wouldn’t leave when he did pass. So I put my hand on his arm, said we will be alright and told him it was time to go home. He took one last gasp and released himself from this place.

    It was beautiful, in a way, to just let go of everything. One exhale and he was at peace.

    As for what is real or what is not… we can’t agree what is real in this world. We can look at the same thing and see different realities. It sounds like we are more in tuned with each other back home. Love is reality and nothing else matters.

    1. Oh mt sweet Thomas, love is reality and nothing else matters! How beautifully said! And actually, people who are actively dying and already with their deathbed visitors are often so caught up with their reunions that they simply stop communicating with us altogether, so your experience with your grandmother was a gift! Most often, we will just realize that clearly those who are dying are caught up in talking with someone by mind, and we are glad for them, if a bit sorry to be left out of the party. Such a joyous time that is!

  5. Hi Roberta,

    I enjoyed the afterlife and can’t believe what is ahead of us! It makes me feel good that my love ones that have passed on are having a great time..

    I love playing guitat and who love to contiue to play with my favorite players who have since paased over!

    Its nice to know that even though I never made ir big in the earthschool, I could still have the opportunity to study music if I want.

    Because of You and Thomas, I hope to meet Jesus! To be in his prescense would be awesome!

    One more thing In also love to surf in AZ there is no ocean and I don’t get a chance to drive to California that often.

    Your blogs are alwaya brighten my Sundays!

    Litsa

    1. Oh my sweet Litsa, I am thrilled to be a part of your Sundays! Perhaps we should write more about what is ahead for us all, because the afterlife is really so amazing, although for next week I’m being called to write more about Jesus. It it is actually Thomas who sets our topics. If it were up to me, I would have run out of ideas a long time ago!

        1. Oh my goodness, my dear Litsa, Thomas is most of our team! Without him, I would be reduced to scouring the internet to try to find things to write about.

  6. Roberta,

    I have pondered the process by which we experience our incarnated lives. As an engineer, I am always curious as to how designs/plans are executed. I don’t have dreams much, and any dreams that seem important, I could count on one hand.

    I did have a unique vivid dream a few years ago, where I was someone like a secret agent. I remember that I ended up fleeing from some pursuers and was killed. Then I woke on a couch in a room filled with couches. My friends were there and they were waking up, too. We all started laughing and celebrating and giving each other high-fives at the wonderful experiences that we had just had.

    Is that how on Earthly incarnations are accomplished in the Afterlife/Greater Reality? Maybe … It could be. I see more and more discussion by others in the social media that I follow about how we may be living in a Simulation (or The Matrix, which was a series of movies). What is “real” anyway? As you have noted, this Reality is just a wisp of “material” and that “material”, when subdivided down to the subatomic level is more like waves of potentiality and is not really material-like at all!

    I have 3 grown sons and I sometimes try to share my realizations from my life’s journey. I told my oldest son about the above dream. He got a funny look and pulled up a media clip on his phone of a cartoon showing characters in an arcade sitting down at a game and having a virtual lifetime experience, like my dream, until they reached “Game Over.” Funny how we can find hints or nuggets of truth about this Reality if we are trying to be perceptive.

    However Consciousness executes this experience that we are living as an Earth incarnation is not really as important as how we spiritually grow in it. It sure seems to be a solid, sometimes painful, sometimes joyful, and usually interesting experience!

    I feel so heavy and tired now, like I am running out of gas. I really don’t ever want to “play this game” again. Whenever “Game Over” comes, I hope to leave the arcade and then just work to be of service in the Greater Reality with Lord Jesus.

    Thank you, Lord Jesus, and Roberta, for showing us the way to accelerate our spiritual progress.

    Blessings to you all,

    David D.

    1. Oh my dear David D, that is a bit the way that life is. True. We’ll look back on it and we’ll say, wow, that was like an afternoon! And doing our best to love and forgive and follow the genuine God makes our spiritual growth far simpler, while the religions with their fake gods make our spiritual growth more difficult. That, in essence, has been our problem for so many millennia, and changing that was the primary reason why Jesus came. But my sweet friend, seeing my name in the same sentence with the Lord’s name as I am struggling with our blog post for next week makes me cringe. I really am just trying so hard to help, dear!

  7. Dear Roberta,
    Each time I read your new blogs I think, ‘Oh, this is my favorite one,’ and then I read the next week’s and I say the same thing. This one really resonated with me (I’m not necessarily fond of that term ‘resonated with’ because it sort of sounds new Age-y, but it fits here).
    Sometimes I have lucid dreams where I am literally creating beautiful landscapes, so what you are saying about us being able to create with our minds in the astral makes a lot of sense to me. I don’t induce lucid dreams – they happen spontaneously – but when I become aware that I am having one I am usually flying above a beautiful landscape with green grass, and trees, and beautiful skies, and sometimes small villages below, that I am somehow aware of the fact that I am consciously creating it. I’m sure that sounds like lunacy.
    Before my boyfriend died we used to discuss things. Well, more like, he used to listen to me babble about my ideas of the afterlife. He was very ill (although I thought he had more time left than he actually did) and in the last months of his life, I would tell him that he could create our house in the afterlife since he was very good at interior decorating (he loved artwork, and statues of angels, and harps, and beautiful furniture and wall hangings) and because I “love to create landscapes in the astral,” I would take care of the outside of the house. That poor man probably thought I was crazy! Lol But he listened to me talk nonetheless.
    Much love,
    JenniferK

    1. oh my dear wonderful JenniferK, so often you make me smile! I can see him now decorating that wonderful house for the two of you, so happily!

  8. Roberta
    I didn’t like my blog.
    You know I love the Earth I want to stay many years
    The experience I had is over. I don’t want to cling to
    experiences.
    My Dad died In “95 but I miss him a lot. I love him.
    He was only 74.He didn’t want to die.
    I was there when he took his last breath-peace.

    1. Dear Erica, it is good to love the earth, and all the people in it. But don’t become addicted to it, dear. Learn to see it as a pale shadow of the glories to come, and as a place where you can learn to ever more perfectly learn love and forgiveness. This is such a perfect place for that!

    2. It’s understandable you love this earth dimension, Erica and just as understandable that you love your dad and miss him now he’s no longer living here.

      Take heart because you know he lives on in the etheric and that you’ll be joining him when the time is right for that to happen.

      For the present, continue to enjoy whatever you love about this earth and know that the rest of the time you’ll spend here won’t be wasted whatever you do. Remember also that should you wish, you’ll be able to return at some point in this earth’s future.

  9. Thank you, Mac
    for showing me there will be options and today
    I can just enjoy the day.

    I miss my dad and hope he can feel my love.

    Thanks again, Erica

    1. It’s my position that the closeness you had with your dad here on earth remains just as rich now, even though he’s moved ‘next-door’. He’ll feel your love; he’ll feel how you miss him as doubtless he misses being with you.

      But he knows you’ll be together again and I hope you will be comfortable to get on with your life here and to make the most of whatever this physical world affords you. You most assuredly may enjoy the day without any fear about anything. After you have passed over and join him you will understand how you can choose to do what YOU wish to do. And he will lovingly endorse the choices you make.

      We will understand so much more after we leave these shells in which we live and which constrain us so much. That understanding will enable you to make the choices that will be right for YOU.

      blessings

  10. Mac ,
    Thank you again
    Everything you’ve said makes sense
    ands let’s me be content with who I .am
    And unafraid of the future

    Blessings,
    Erica
    .

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