Posted by Roberta Grimes • April 28, 2018 • 31 Comments
Quantum Physics, The Source, Understanding Reality
The most transformational book I ever have read is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first read it in 1973, and I didn’t realize until much later the way that book formed a basis for my later afterlife research. It opened my eyes to a deeper awareness that nothing is as it seems; it primed me to later accept the evidence that what we experience as human consciousness is primary; and the fact that something so fundamental has been steadfastly ignored by mainstream scientists because it doesn’t fit their narrative was my first clue that the mainstream science emperor is indeed buck nekkid!
That book’s core insight from my perspective was that plants are conscious, and they can communicate. What a revelation! Consider only the work
of Cleve Backster, then America’s foremost expert on lie detectors, who one morning in 1966 decided to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached to one of its leaves a galvanometer, the part of a polygraph machine which registers human emotions, and he found that the plant was reacting very much as a person would react who was having transient thoughts. He soon found that the most extreme reactions in the plant were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves; the reaction was less if he only imagined burning the leaf, or even if he actually burned it. His plant would react, too, if other living things in the room were credibly threatened with harm; and Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants can read the minds of their keepers from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing revelations are more than fifty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in history.
This discovery that plants are in some way conscious still fills me with wonder. It formed a basis for my growing, research-based awareness that what we experience as consciousness must be primary. There is no other explanation that fits all the evidence! So when in 2011 I read the ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and I found that the greatest of all quantum physicists had decades before reached the same conclusion, I had a joyous eureka moment. As quantum physicist Max Planck famously said, ”I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
All of this came to mind again when I was reading last month’s Smithsonian magazine, 
and I came across an amazing article called “Do Trees Talk to Each other?” Well, of course they do! Peter Wohlleben is a German researcher now popularly known as the “Tree Whisperer” whose book, The Hidden Life of Trees, is available in English. Please read the article, since I cannot here conceivably do it justice. I only can tell you that after you have read it, you will forever after see each forest as a thriving community of sentient individuals in communication with one another, caring for their young, even caring for their old and for the stumps of those felled by people; caring, too, for other benevolent creatures, and fighting off the ones that mean to do them harm. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again!
What we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force. It is all that objectively exists! So it shouldn’t really surprise us to find that every living thing is conscious; and in fact, that may be true of even what we consider to be non-living things. If consciousness is the base creative force, then perhaps even rocks might somehow be conscious? One of the things we generally do when we first return to our eternal home is sightseeing, even on other planets. I recall reading an account by someone who had been enjoying doing his post-death touring, and he talked about a planet where the life was not carbon-based, but instead was silica-based. That entire planet teemed with life! But you didn’t realize that at first, because it all moved ve-e-e-ry sl-o-o-o-wly. You know, come to think of it, the rocks on this planet are moving pretty slowly, too….
More and more, it is becoming clear that accepting Max Planck’s genius insight that
consciousness is primary is going to be essential if scientists are ever to end their century-long materialist muddle and again begin to do productive research. A Nobel Prize awaits the first open-minded physicist who is brave enough to finally and forever remove his own materialist chains!
Thanks for another insightful note. You may be aware that I’ve too come to the conclusion that everything is not only made by God, but must be made of God. After all, even God could not go elsewhere to obtain anything to use in his creation. God is fundamentally consciousness, so everything He forms must also carry that consciousness– and that means EVERYTHING.
Thank you for your beautiful comment, sir! Discovering the primacy of Consciousness does indeed mean actually finding, and not losing, the true God! Perfectly expressed; I think you’re wiser than I am ;-). This was my early insight, too – decades ago! – and the thought freaked me out back then because I was still so deep in fear-based Christianity. I think that’s the way it hits many of us initially. So, God knows even our most shameful thoughts? And how could even Hitler be God? The evidence leads us to a truth that is so incompatible with fear-based religious teachings that the two simply cannot exist in your mind simultaneously! And for me, at least, trusting the genuine God enough to abandon all those false Christian dogmas was very, very hard.
For those who are having the same trouble I had at first with the primacy of Consciousness, I think I ought to say a word here. Dear friends, if you are coming to understand the primary role of Consciousness – indeed, the SOLE role of Consciousness! – and if even the possibility of that is giving you trouble, please know that you are at the beginning of a joyous journey toward meeting at last God’s genuine, perfect, and glorious Truth! There are answers to every one of your questions. The greatest peace, the greatest joy that you can imagine is in the heart of the genuine God that you never will meet unless you abandon all beliefs in false religious notions and put your trust only in what is true. What did it for me in the end was realizing that it was Jesus who was leading me out of a religion that isn’t based in His teachings at all! He told us these truths as plainly as He could, given that He was on earth at a time when speaking against the prevailing religion brought an immediate death sentence. Given that constraint, in the end He had to leave it up to us to discover and to trust in God’s perfect, eternal Truth:
“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).
Thank you, Jack, for giving me an opening to share once again the fact that abandoning false religions doesn’t mean abandoning the Messenger who also shared what everyone soon will know is inevitably true!
You know Roberta, I think it’s time you came clean, and owned your own ability for endless projection as the real source of your experience of religion. Christianity is not fear-based, it is the believer himself (herself) that chooses fear — and focuses on that, if they do so — as part of their own unenlightened process towards the truth. I can tell you, as a Catholic (who has also practiced and learned from Islamic Sufism as well as Tibetan Buddhism and Taoism over the years) that there are millions of Christians who have their lives strengthened daily through their God-given faith and by the power of the Holy Spirit working through them. And: there is very little fear motivating any of it. It couldn’t. Why? Because fear doesn’t really work — for believers or non-believers.
There are plenty of positive things to focus on in scripture, and Jesus said that basically we’re all saved, so the good news can’t possibly be compromised. True, there may be certain priests or imams or gurus who have their own focus on the more punitive fire and brimstone aspects of teaching, but thereby hangs the tale so to speak: it really is to each his own. It doesn’t represent the religion as such, merely those who seem to need that as part of honoring their karmic predisposition. Pope Francis has done wonders for opening up the church’s mercy to many people who were until recently still in despair, and saying, about many things, “who am I to judge?” And who’s most upset with him? Those of a more “traditional” stripe who need their Catholicism to remain doctrinally unchanged…
So, God-given consciousness has led me on my own journey through all of these paths, away from the Catholic Church when young, but then through all the wonderful and joyous and heart-opening eastern traditions, and back to my Catholic roots again, where I can begin to see what I’ve missed (such as the rich contemplative aspects) — because I’ve experienced what is beyond the mere teachings of these religions, and yet fully embraced by all of them, since they are all first and foremost about love. It’s only the immature distortions of modern too-liberal mindsets that focus on the “shoulds, musts and have-tos” of religions as the only meaning they wish to see in them. How sad! And so your advice about not meeting the “genuine God unless one abandons all beliefs in false religious notions” can’t possibly be true — since His way of working throughout His creation is far beyond the limitations you or anyone else would place on him.
So, it’s time to stop giving truth to the lie, cherry-picking gospel verses, and give up the ghost… The messages of spiritual people are always much better received when they are positive ones, and not made at the expense of downgrading the “other” way as a negative one, which is dishonest, and ignores that religions have their place. After all, many have also found the truth as you’ve found it, Roberta! But they don’t seem to have the ax to grind anymore…
With respect, Petrus, the fact that you personally have escaped the fears that Christianity instills in most of its believers, you personally have concluded that “Jesus said that basically we’re all saved,” and you personally feel that for me to encourage people to escape their Christianity-based fears and trust the genuine God is not a service is, sad to say, just self-important boasting on your part. You are helping no one. Good grief, your whole comment is about how you have escaped Christianity’s fear-based beliefs, like the central one that we must be “saved.” Your very boasting proclaims the truth of what you are trying to deny!
You personally have made a successful voyage out of traditional Christian teachings and into a more deeply spiritual life! Well, bully for you, Petrus. And so have I. You and I are able to dance for joy in the sunlight of God’s perfect Truth, and apparently that is quite enough for you. Would that it also were enough for me! But unfortunately, I love people and I love God. I have escaped – as have you – but I spent fifty years in Christianity; and now that God has freed me, I am feeling God’s call to help others to make our same journey into the light.
Of course Christianity is based in fear. I have never until now met a single Christian, no matter how earnest, who denied that fact. Some have said, “You’re right – we should concentrate more on the teachings of Jesus,” but none of them ever has boasted to me that they have escaped the fear so no more need be said.
The teachings of Jesus are love-based, but there is no Christian denomination of which I am aware among the 40,000-odd that now exist that is based in the teachings of Jesus. No, instead they are all based in the notion of Adam’s fall, original sin, the need for sacrificial redemption and “God so loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son….” Based in the notion and the burden of sin, and of sin’s power to lead us to hell. The fear of not being in the right denomination. The fear of zigging where God wants you to be zagging. You claim Jesus as your personal Savior and are “born again,” or you are going to Hell forever! I have studied the death process pretty intensively, and those who attend many at their deathbeds have consistently told me that the people most upset and fearful as the end approaches are always by far the devout Christians! What on earth kind of monstrous teachings would make believers so fearful at the end of good lives?
Enjoy your perfect life, Petrus! Ignore all those still enmired in Christianity that you might have been able to help. But don’t demean yourself by looking down on people who, unlike you, feel called to serve by spreading the genuine Gospel truths! I will follow Jesus. I can do no other.
It’s not surprising that you’ve misunderstood me Roberta, since you’re still looking to maintain your “narrative” consistency. There is much more to the Christian religion, as there is to Islam (etc), than the admonishing aspect you seem to focus on. For example, most religions have monastic orders that provide a life-sustaining nourishment through their contemplative ways and offerings, which many lay people take up, and which lead to deeply spiritual experiences, especially on retreats (since no one need become a monk or nun). It seems this has not been part of your experience, and yet it has great value… as does the offering of the Mass: a tremendously satisfying ritual that is mysterious and profoundly beautiful in itself, as an expression of love as well as gift. That is the heart of Christianity. You may be unaware but there are many pagans and druids who are jealous of the Catholic mass, and who consider it the height of occult spirituality.
So, there simply has to be more to it than fear — otherwise 85% of the world’s population wouldn’t still be involved with religions. It just doesn’t make sense.
Granted that “sin” for some Christians might easily be unenlightened behavior for Buddhists, and some do better with one definition than the other. In the end, everyone finds their path eventually, and works with their circumstances, it can’t be otherwise. However, do we think we can just wave people’s karma away with a wake-up wand? Karmically some individuals need the fear (don’t kid yourself), and there are also plenty of people in the world who don’t seem to be able to learn things except the hard way, through having to be shamed into greater awareness, or having outsized egos that need to make mistakes and pay dearly for them… plenty of those folks are still around if you pay attention (they’re easily our neighbors), so an approach recognizing that guilt easily relates to sin is often appropriate.
I don’t need the pain and fear myself, it’s true, since I see a tremendous beauty available, and the offering of the Mass (especially the traditional mass) is really what Christian religion is all about, it just doesn’t get more profound than that: you are giving something back to the God that is worthy of Him, and no one else. Also, there is much more to be said for humility than fear, and it’s the cultivation of humility that religion allows — that is exactly what is missing from the “I’m spiritual but not religious” crowd’s brand of spiritual bypassing — they’re the ones who excel at boasting.
Lastly, Ken Wilber has pointed out that many (10% or so) who are at the vanguard of leading human society forward, and who are spiritually more advanced or attuned at some higher level, are moving much too fast, and are too impatient with the rest of those whom they see as dragging behind, or as backwards, or stuck at unenlightened levels and choices — which is pretty offensive to many. Not incidentally, many of those “others” are ones who have been regularly made fun of and denigrated by progressives and liberals in this country who think they know best… but those “deplorables” took their revenge by voting in Trump. Food for thought…
Petrus, my “narrative consistency” comes from my heart and not my head, and your comeback here sadly demonstrates that I have not misunderstood you. I know some very spiritually advanced people who are still in bodies, and not one of them would have so badly needed to continue to maintain his own “narrative consistency” here as you feel that you must. The very idea of publicly attacking someone acting from love and trying to help others would have filled them all with personal horror, and any impulse they might have been feeling to enlighten me about anything would have needed privacy and the gentlest possible love in their expression. So you do not help yourself with this response, and it makes me sad for you that you have no ability to see that.
Oh, how certain you are that all your assumptions about me must be true! And perhaps you are right, and you know more than I do, but I have done the best that I could as a seeker through a busy life of marriage, children, grandchildren, law practice, and a decades-long study of the afterlife evidence. I majored in early Christian history in college, with a minor in eastern religious studies. I studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I have read the Christian Bible from cover to cover a half-dozen times, the New Testament twice as many times, and the Gospels so many times that I can quote parts of them by heart. I was an ardent Catholic for 25 years, taking Mass at least weekly. I was a Lector and a teacher. Now, I know that might not seem to you like much religious seeking, but I lived it all as deeply as I could.
And what is this supposed to mean? So, there simply has to be more to it than fear — otherwise 85% of the world’s population wouldn’t still be involved with religions. It just doesn’t make sense. Petrus, I gather that you have never been afraid, but for all lesser mortals fear is by far the strongest motivator! We come to earth programmed to seek, and when that seeking leads us to a religion that rewards us with heaven if we will warm the pews every week while it vividly threatens us with eternal fire if we do not, then most people are driven by that carrot-and-stick combination to warm those pews. In fact, as I have been writing The Fun of Loving Jesus – a blueprint for a Christianity based in love and not in fear – I find myself stuck on the chapter where we talk about how we are going to get people less self-confident than you are to participate when there is no fear to motivate them! Since all my books are channeled, and since the whole book was the work of days until those writing it with me got to that last part, I have to assume that my collaborators who are not now in bodies are as stymied about how to build a religion without a fear motivator as I am!
And fear is the literal enemy of spiritual growth. I focus on fear not because I have been afraid – since my experience of light at the age of eight, I think I really never have known fear – but I focus on it because I have loved the people I worshiped beside with my whole heart. I have listened to them. Their spiritual growth long ago came to matter to me more than my own. And above the altar from which was served nearly every Mass that I have taken in all those 25 years has been a bleeding Jesus effigy nailed to a cross. That didn’t bother you, as happily immersed in your personal experience of the Mass as you were, but the more I read the Gospels and the more I studied the afterlife evidence, the more I came to love Jesus and came to see that what He taught was being mostly ignored while the guilt of His having had to die that way because we are so fallen and disgusting was being emphasized all began to make me feel called to help the Lord help His misled flock to know Him more truly.
Dear Petrus, love is the opposite of fear. Where one exists, it crowds out the other. You have never feared, but don’t discount the terror that others feel when confronted with the Christian doctrines of original sin and sacrificial redemption! If you choose to ignore that because you know that you yourself are “saved,” then please at least have the grace not to attack me for trying to help those who contact me daily from the depth of the terror that “the religion of Christ” has instilled in them.
This will be my last response to you here. Your train of thought is not even the subject of this blog post. I probably should have deleted your comeback above, but you have given me such a wonderful opportunity to help others here to see the difference between living in the head as you do, and living in the heart as we must in order to truly grow spiritually. My having done that really is using you, and I apologize for that now! I hope you can forgive me. But I am very grateful to you, sir, for this opportunity. Since we each have made our public points, I will be deleting anything further that you post here. But if you want to continue this discussion, I will be happy to answer an email that you send to me through the contact block on this website.
HI Roberta,
I, too, recently read this article, having “discovered” it while idly picking up the magazine in a doctor’s waiting room. As with animals, anyone who has spent time among plants can observe that they behave in a manner that is obviously communal and responsive. My wife has cultivated a whole garden around this fact. It’s a legitimate landscaping and garden design strategy called companion planting (for me, it’s aligned with the realization that what we call “natural selection” appears to even the most casual observer to be a conversation between what we’ve been told to think of as environment and any evolver in that environment. Anyway, I couldn’t help but notice as I came away from the article that the author had to work in a quote that said something like (I don’t remember the exact wording), this behavior in no way proves that plants are sentient. It IS the Smithsonian after all. 🙁
Thank you for commenting, dear Mike, and thank you for reminding me to say that the amazing work of this disciplined and truly brilliant scientist has been steadfastly ignored by the mainstream community. It doesn’t fit their materialist dogma, so it cannot be allowed to see broad daylight! But like the work of Dr. Ian Stevenson, Dr. Gary Schwartz, and so many other visionary scientists whose work doesn’t fit the materialist narrative, the day will come – and it won’t be long now! – when the work of Dr. Peter Wohlleben will be celebrated as the indispensable core of a brand-new, reality-based science that is no longer dogma-bound. Those desperate to suppress the truth are still in charge now, but they cannot forever hold back the sea!
One funeral at a time, right? 😉 Roberta, a foot note: I have been studying what we call “Eastern” religions for a couple of decades and have come to understand just enough to be dangerous, but it strikes me that religions that do not come out of the medieval versions of Judeo-Christianity — in particular Shintoism comes to mind — take for granted that everything in creation has its own form of spirit. In short, there is no such thing as a non-sentient being (including technology from the Japanese POV — again, not certain I’m understanding this correctly , but it sure seems to me that from time to time my computers and iphone like to tease me, just to show who’s really boss 😉 )
It was Dr. Planck who said that science advances by deaths, and he said it in frustration at the fact that he had discovered the primary role of consciousness and what was the greatest discovery of the twentieth century had been resolutely ignored! He said it close to a hundred years ago. So far, we are still waiting for the scientific death that will at last bring the light….
And, yes, many eastern religions are closer to the truth than is Christianity, but they are still RELIGIONS. Religions are belief-systems, by definition: they are flies in amber that always drift farther and farther away over time from whatever core truths first gave them birth. I am amused, though, to think that at least the Japanese are coming to realize that everything is Consciousness, so of course our computers and iPhones must be conscious! My laptop, here, is probably at this point my closest friend. For certain, she knows me best ;-).
All of my devices have been known to protect me from doing regrettable things by crashing at opportune moments!
What a wonderful way to begin my day–thank you for this. I’ve always felt myself in the presence of mighty lifeforms when I’m in an old forest and was lucky to grow up just a block or two from one in Pennsylvania. I felt awe and reverence when I was there by myself and never felt alone or lonely.
And then there was a plant that seemed linked to me somehow: it was a Monstera that had grown huge and that I’d hung from the ceiling because it took up so much space. If I sat across the room from it and on impulse made a stroking motion, one of its great leaves would bend in time with the movement of my hand.
The reason I even thought to try that experiment was the wonderful book you mention in your first paragraph above. I was already a passionate gardener by then and it has informed my relationships with plants right up until the present. They may not be sentient in the sense of a human brain, but then I don’t believe consciousness has its origin in that organ.
Hello Patricia! Of course, you are right: not only does the brain not generate consciousness, but in fact it is not the only way that consciousness attaches to the body. There are people walking around right now who are functioning just fine and are ignorant of the fact that their skulls are filled with fluid, with only a thin shell of brain material – just enough to perform the very basic functions that are all that our brains perform. Even our bodily cells are composed of Consciousness! No wonder our state of mind has such an astonishing effect on our overall health. And energy medicine works so perfectly. Really, everything scientists believe about medical practice is altogether wrong!
I wish that book had first affected me in the beautiful way that it affected you! I have never after I read it believed for one moment that plants are not actually conscious. Instead, forever after, keeping houseplants felt wrong – all plants should be free! – and I had an awful time with preparing vegetables. Cut a tomato? Grate a carrot, for heaven’s sake? Do they suffer less if I can’t hear their screams? I am better now, but to this day I have a lot of trouble eating raw vegetables!
still hoping Roberta, that you and your colleagues can bring more proof to all of this, being the doubting Thomas. why don’t I remember past lives if I had them? I love your work, just wanting to better believe it all! Was just discussing this last night with a parent who has faith in christian god, and a couple of younger family who think more like me – one wonders if it’s just evolution, for ex. I am a so-called ‘free thinking’ agnostic who hopes there is something that I am aware of when my physical body leaves this earth. xo!
Dear Barb, there is such abundant and consistent afterlife evidence of so many kinds, received over nearly 200 years and documented by so many zealous researchers as they assembled it into so many good books, that for you to say you have’t seen sufficient proof is an admission on your part that you can’t have looked very hard :-(. Have you read the Zammits’ book? Anything by R. Craig Hogan? by Michael Tymn? Gary Schwartz? Or any of my books? Really, what have you read so far to try to better understand these phenomena?
You don’t remember past (or future) lives (with no objective time in the greater reality, all our earth-lives are happening at once) because when you enter each earth-lifetime you take less than 5% of your vast, eternal mind with you; and on top of that fact is your literal agreement before you are born not to attempt to remember other lives. Because if you remember them, you won’t focus on this one! (Although as Lola says, many people do spontaneously remember them or discover them in various ways.)
If you would like a copy of The Fun of Dying in PDF, just send me an email through the contact block on this website and I will be happy to send it to you.
let me add to above: focus on how you can bring your message to a wider audience in a way that we can better understand.
Dear Barb, with respect, I have spent the past decade of my life doing nothing but focusing on how I can better bring our message to a wider audience in as understandable a way as possible, and that is true of all my colleagues in this field as well! Our problems are two:
1) This is a tremendous topic! It touches upon literally every aspect of reality and every bit of what it means to be human. We try to present it as simply as possible, broken down into digestible bites and in as many ways as we can, but there is no way to impart this knowledge in one gulp, just as you can’t get an MD degree and start doing surgery in one gulp.
2) There are two massive, deeply entrenched, rich and powerful interest groups that are heavily invested in hiding these truths from you, and from the world, since if they ever become widely known, both of those interest groups will lose credibility and will look so ridiculous that they cannot survive with their credibility intact. Those two interest groups are mainstream Christianity and mainstream science. They are both going down, but not right away; and until they do, you can assume that they will both work hard to keep the truth from you for as long as possible! So it is up to you, Barb. You can go along assuming one or both of those interest groups is right; or you can do what fortunately more and more seekers are doing, and open-mindedly seek the truth for yourself. Unlike both of those interest groups, we are glad to welcome you to question us as deeply and challenge us as creatively as you like! We only ask that you first do enough basic research that you will be able to begin to understand our answers. Again, I’ll be happy to send you a PDF of my book!
Roberta et al,: My whole life I was uneasy about the concept of re-incarnation because of the simplistic notion that it’s somehow related to “paying” for what you have done in one life by “coming back” as something else. Also, being a Catholic, the business model of the universe is that God is a divine “manufacturer” of souls who after cranking them out, slips them into similarly manufactured bodies to do…what? Go blindly through a series of one-time tests? Anyway, I started to read about quantum physics and about how (another simplified understanding coming up) space/time is actually a function of “something else” and that it’s not linear, that in fact the “arrow of time” doesn’t move at all. One day, not too long ago, while I was driving, it hit me: spinning plates! I thought about a performer I saw on a variety show who spun plates to funny music and then added one more plate, and then another, and eventually was running around keeping them all spinning. It’s a crude analogy but (and I like to imagine the funny music too), it seems to be that’s what our soul is “doing,” in a sense — aided of course, by our soul teams, some of whom get in the way of the plates just to “bug” us and others of whom run around with us. It may not be the perfect analogy, and I’m still uncomfortable with the idea, but it’s not “re” incarnation at all, but “multi” incarnation. Still working on this metaphor…
Thank you, Mike – you have given me a giggle!
Barb, May I suggest you look into The Monroe Institute and take an intensive- Out of Body Experience- Then you will have your proof.
The intensives are safe , you will be guided by people who have had the experiences. Check out William Buhlman and his numerous works- you tube has some great interviews with him as well. Roberta’s book, the Fun of Dying has lots of references as well.
Well worth your time, as consciousness is all that matters. As responsible beings on this life journey, and I say this to you because you have read Roberta’s words, it is thoroughly up to each individual to “raise” your consciousness so that you continue to grow, and learn no matter in body or out.
I want to have a conscious death this time around as I am intrigued to evolve in love!!!
Carol, The Monroe Institute is an excellent suggestion! And I, too, want to be awake and aware when I graduate, having spent almost my entire life studying and preparing for the process! When I first spoke with my mother after her death, the first thing she said was, “You were right about everything!” But still, I want to see it for myself….
In answer to Barb, many people remember past lives. You won’t read it in the newspapers or the media, but it’s a fact, and there are many past life counselors like Dr. Brian Weiss for example. As far as plants go, they too have a consciousness – just in a way we don’t always recognize. There is no way to escape consciousness; it is everywhere. Without it, there would be nothing.
Roberta, your blog was the first thing that popped up this morning and it Made My Day! For years I have felt such a spiritual feeling around trees, and as a child practically spent all my time in trees just hanging out. Thank you for your insights. Now, if only we could convince others…Recently at a women’s retreat what used to be lush forest land was clear cut near an adjoining property. I walked to the clear cut and felt such an emptiness – and worse, large trees were cut and just left to rot among the debris. Does that make me a tree hugger? Yes! I wish so much that others would see that we are all connected both spiritually and in the physical environment. Please keep up your good work.
Hello BJ, and thank you for commenting! You must be a sensitive, that you were able to pick up the energies of those fallen trees. And you are right: seeing that and feeling the pain of it is bound to make anyone become a tree-hugger! But still, we must never put trees above people. I know that isn’t your take, but for many that is indeed the lesson… and it is a vastly unhealthy one. What we have got to do is elevate ourselves more toward what was the Native Americans’ spirituality, and begin to respect and love all creation! We must eat. We must have places to live and work. But those that we used to think were dead say that the spirituality of the Native Americans was so much more advanced than ours, since they also had those needs and they satisfied them with love, kindness, and respect for the land and all that it held. Dear BJ, I look forward to the day when all of humanity begins to think that way!
Roberta, you are a blessing. Thank you for your steadfast commitment to helping the world to better understand the TRUTH that we are so much more than these bodies and labels we identify with.
I have been reluctant, in the past, to expound publicly my views because I do not hold any degrees or have not had an NDE.
Recently, however, I realized that I was born knowing and my lack of credential is self imposed. Having said that, I honer your efforts and applaud your ability to write so ferociously!!! You inspire me.
As for trees, I grew up in the Redwoods of Northern CA and always feel at home among those huge giants that hold so much wisdom. I feel it in any forest, and where ever nature abounds, but most intensely with the Redwoods.
I think that Art, movies specifically have been helping to open the mainstream mind to the Truth. I think of AVATAR and the way in which the indigenous people lived so obviously connected to the land and all of nature. I remember telling my children that that is how it is- we just haven’t learned how to embrace the beauty of it in this NOW. It truly is a beautiful picture because of the TRUTH that is shown on screen.
Of course, I find truths in many things, that may not be obvious to others.
Peace and love to you and yours.
Thank you, dear Carol – this is lovely! This work needs all hands, and clearly you have much to share; you will find, too, that the older you become, the more fearlessly you will proclaim your truths. Please let me know how it goes for you!
I love Jesus and I love the way Roberta loves Jesus. Being a gay poster on a decidedly ‘un-gay’ forum (Paracast), I take a lot of heat for being a Progressive Christian and gay.
It’s nice to hear kind words every once in a while.
Thomas R Morrison
Oh dear Thomas, you have made my day! As you know, sir, Jesus taught us 2000 years ago that we were to dispense with the whole Old Testament (what the Jews of His day called “the Law and the Prophets”) and replace it with God’s law of love. When asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name one of the Ten. Instead He 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). Christians, of course, always ignore that last part, and the reason why they do that puzzles me. I hate to imagine – although I can’t help thinking – that present-day Christianity is primarily based in the very judgmental and rules-based parts of the Bible that Jesus tried so hard to get us to throw away.
Jesus taught us, too, that the very judgment that Christians are so quick to offer against those who might transgress the outmoded OT ideas – indeed, any judgment of others at all! – was anathema to him. He said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).
Dear wonderful Thomas, may your measure forever overflow with the perfect love of God!
Thank you Roberta. I have learned much from our extraterrestrial brothers so I make no personal claims to the content of my posts.
Well, no copyright.
I studied Cleve Baxter’s work and purchased the most sensitive galvanometer I could find. I made two thin copper electrodes with a light spring clamp and attached them to an outdoor plant that had very large leaves. Cleve used a jacana plant in many of his experiments. I then concentrated on lighting the plant on fire. I almost fell over in the dirt when the needle moved just as I thought of doing this. The poor little thing also reacted when I thought of yanking it up out of the ground!
I repeated these thoughts several times and each time the needle moved. I must have scared the electricity out of it!
Can plants think? I don’t know for sure, but they can react to thought in some way. This might be fear based from the perspective of self preservation . That I proved to myself.
However, in support of Roberta’s dialog with Petrus’s, I don’t espouse to ideologies that use fear to keep the troops in line. It’s only my opinion that God (consciousness in all aspects) simply doesn’t work that way.
Salespeople work that way…
Where is God in my little plant experiment? Well, maybe, in more ways than this, God, All That Is, IS the experiment!
This is lovely, dear Ivanhoe! Thank you for sharing your thoughts with us!