Roberta Grimes's Blog, page 45

Is There Life After Birth?

Victor and Wendy Zammit produce a wonderful free weekly newsletter that covers the whole range of death and afterlife topics. You can subscribe at VictorZammit.com. The depth and range of the information they share will amaze you!

As a break from this heavy but essential discussion of the meaning and the message of Jesus, I want to share with you a recent piece from the Zammits’ Friday Afterlife Report. Wendy tells me the author is unknown.

In a mother’s womb were two babies. One asked the other:

“Do you believe in life after delivery?” The other replied, “Why, of course. There has to be something after delivery. Maybe we are here to prepare ourselves for what we will be later.”

“Nonsense,” said the first. “There is no life after delivery. What kind of life would that be?”

The second said, “I don’t know, but there will be more light than here. Maybe we will walk with our legs and eat from our mouths. Maybe we will have other senses that we can’t understand now.”



The first replied, “That is absurd. Walking is impossible. And eating with our mouths? Ridiculous! The umbilical cord supplies nutrition and everything we need. But the umbilical cord is so short. Life after delivery is to be logically excluded.”



The second insisted, “Well I think there is something and maybe it’s different than it is here. Maybe we won’t need this physical cord anymore.”



The first replied, “Nonsense. And moreover if there is life, then why has no one ever come back from there? Delivery is the end of life, and in the after-delivery there is nothing but darkness and silence and oblivion. It takes us nowhere.”



“Well, I don’t know,” said the second, “but certainly we will meet Mother and she will take care of us.”

The first replied “Mother? You actually believe in Mother? That’s laughable. If Mother exists, then where is She now?”



The second said, “She is all around us. We are surrounded by her. We are of Her. It is in Her that we live. Without Her this world would not and could not exist.”

Said the first: “Well, I don’t see Her, so it is only logical that She doesn’t exist.”

To which the second replied, “Sometimes, when you’re in silence and you focus and you really listen, you can perceive Her presence. You can hear Her loving voice calling down from above.”

Dear friends, out of the mouths of babes….

 

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Christianity vs. Jesus

Not long ago while stopped in traffic I noticed that the driver of the truck ahead had adamant religious views. His bumper stickers, plastered high on the back of the truck so they would not be missed, read, “If you’re living as if there is no God you had better hope you’re right!” And, “If It Ain’t James 1611 It Ain’t Bible.” And, “Are You Saved?” There was a fourth sticker that quoted Old Testament passages in tiny print that you could not make out. But that was just as well.

A recent Pew poll announcing the decline of Christianity has been much in the news. Christianity seems to be in particular trouble in Great Britain. A Yahoo study finds that Christianity is on the decline in the United States as well, and there are those who think that American Christianity is altogether doomed.

It’s hard to know what is going on, but that truck plastered with clinically insane bumper stickers might be a clue. The old-time Christianity of hellfire and damnation centered around a God so lacking in love that he needs to watch his Son’s murder before he can bring himself to forgive us may have been appealing in the nineteenth century, but fear does not feed the human spirit. More to the point, it turns out that old-time Christianity is wrong.

I have spent decades studying nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent communications from the dead. Together they paint a detailed picture of what happens at and after death, and – more to the point – they show us what does not happen. Nowhere has anyone found evidence that any of these traditional Christian teachings are true:

There is no evidence that God or any religious figure ever has judged anyone


There is no evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross ever has “saved” anyone


There is no evidence for a separate devil, a fiery hell, or permanent damnation


There is no evidence that you’ve got to be a Christian to get into heaven


There isn’t even any evidence for an anthropomorphic God, with or without a throne

So Christianity is wrong. It’s wrong!

I was an ardent Christian for most of my life. I can sing so many hymns by heart! But when I realized how wrong Christianity is, and how damaging to the human spirit and to the message of Jesus it continues to be, I left the Church without regret.

Although a tremendous body of afterlife evidence demonstrates that Christianity is wrong, at the same time the dead are proving to us that the Jesus of the Gospels is right. About ninety-five percent of what Jesus is quoted as saying in a modern translation of the Gospels is entirely consistent with what the dead are telling us, even in small details.

So now we can prove that Jesus is right! Unfortunately, however, none of the Christian teachings refuted above came from Jesus. And because that is true, Christians are reduced to insisting without evidence that the whole Bible is “the Inspired Word of God.”

What would Jesus say about that?

“Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I have not come to abolish them but to fulfill them.” (MT 5:17)

What does Jesus mean by whatever he says that has been translated as the word “fulfill”? Might he mean that since we have his teachings, we don’t need the Old Testament anymore? When asked about the most important commandments, Jesus is quoted repeatedly as saying some variant of:

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.” (MT 22:37-40)

“The Law and the Prophets” was what the Jews of Jesus’s day called the Old Testament. Far from suggesting that the Old Testament is the Inspired Word of God, a reasonable interpretation of the Gospel words of Jesus is that his teachings supersede the Old Testament.

Those traditional Christian teachings that we now can demonstrate are not true come from that same Old Testament – arguably now superseded by Jesus – and from the Apostle Paul, who was a first-century man without the least understanding of the miracle his generation had witnessed. Yet modern Christianity asserts that its own traditions based in the Old Testament and in the teachings of Paul have to be the Inspired Word of God?

What might Jesus say about that?

“And why do you break the command of God for the sake of your tradition?…You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: ‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.’” (MT 15:3-9)

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46)

“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)

From what is the truth going to set us free?

When you read the words of Jesus, you find that the only people this perfectly gentle and loving man could not stand were clergymen.

“Watch out for the teachers of the law. They like to walk around in flowing robes and be greeted in the marketplaces, and have the most important seats in the synagogues and the places of honor at banquets. They devour widows’ houses and for a show make lengthy prayers. Such men will be punished most severely.” (MK 12:38-40)

Jesus actually comes out and tells us that we don’t need religious traditions and we don’t need clergymen. We can relate to God as Spirit, without a religious middleman between:

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.” (MT 6:6)

I think that any unbiased person reading Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John is going to come away as I have, with the strong suspicion that what Jesus came to set us free from was… religions.

Now, how about this:

“Watch out for false prophets. They come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ferocious wolves. By their fruit you will recognize them. Do people pick grapes from thornbushes, or figs from thistles? Likewise, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, and a bad tree cannot bear good fruit.  Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire. Thus, by their fruit you will recognize them.” (MT 7:15-20)

Many Christians would love to beat me over the head with that passage for having dared to write this post. But after two thousand years and more than ten thousand separate denominations, what really is the fruit of Christianity as the Apostle Paul designed it? Think about the “strict Christians” you know who are petty and judgmental and holier-than-thou. Speak to people who are living their lives according to their own consciences and are told by Christian family members that they are going straight to hell. Go into any hospice and hear from the volunteers how many Christians die in fear of God’s judgment.

By their fruit you will recognize them.

I have no doubt that Jesus is the only begotten Son of God, miraculously born of a virgin. I am confident that he came to bring us God’s truth, that he performed miracles and healed the sick, and that he died a martyr and miraculously rose from the dead. I love Jesus with everything that’s in me. What I altogether reject are the ten-thousand-plus Christian denominations that honor him with their lips while their hearts are far from him.

Jesus is right! And his prescription for how we must live our lives is such an essential message for all of us to hear as the world falls apart around us that if it takes the end of Christianity to force us to actually listen to Jesus, then I say, bring it on! The hour is late. Christianity’s false traditions have done nothing to elevate a fallen world, so it seems past time for us to cast aside the religion and listen to the Man.

 

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Consciousness Does Not Compute

What is consciousness? Where does it come from? What does it do? Even a decade and a half into the twenty-first century, mainstream scientists still insist that consciousness has to come from the brain.

 But your consciousness is not generated by your brain. We have discussed elsewhere the many reasons why you can be certain that this is true. By now it is well established that human consciousness pre-exists the universe and is inextricably a part of the Source energy that manifests everything that we think of as real. Your brain, as important as it seems, is nothing more than the way that your eternal consciousness connects to your body during this brief lifetime.

The evidence that all of this is true is consistent and overwhelming. But mainstream scientists have a problem. Still bound by the century-old “fundamental dogma” of materialism, they dare not look at the evidence objectively. They cannot even consider the possibility that consciousness might be anything other than an artifact generated by the brain.

One Nicholas Humphrey, who is emeritus professor of psychology at the London School of Economics and a professor at Darwin College, Cambridge, describes in a recent article in Scientific American Mind the conundrum being faced by true believers. I’m going to do something unusual here and quote extensively from his article, since it so profoundly sums up the Gordian knot into which mainstream science has tied itself by insisting that matter has to be material.

Dr. Humphrey tell us that “(Consciousness) (t)heorists tend to fall into one of two camps. Some assert that the manifestly eerie and ineffable qualities of subjective experience can only mean that these nonphysical qualities are inherent in the fabric of the universe. Others, including me, are more suspicious. They argue that consciousness may be more like a conjuring show, whereby the physical brain is tricking people into believing in qualities that don’t really exist.”

Dr. Humphrey refers to researchers who consider consciousness to be an innate property of the matter of the universe as “realists” because they think that consciousness is real and not illusory. He says, “In their view, if your sensations appear to have qualities that lie beyond the scope of physics, then they really do have such qualities. And these realists explain their reasoning by suggesting that the brain activity underlying sensations already has consciousness latent in it as an additional property of matter—a property as yet unrecognized by physics but one that you, the conscious subject, are somehow able to tap into. The price for this explanation is that it implies that the standard physical description of the world is radically incomplete.” Oops! In other words, it is dangerous to think of consciousness as real because this notion flies in the face of “the standard physical description of the universe.” It challenges our fundamental dogma of materialism. And to those making their livings as physicists, doing that is a very bad thing.

Those who are not “realists” hold that consciousness is a kind of illusion, but Dr. Humphrey thinks he has a better idea. He is of the camp that considers consciousness to be illusory, true, but he says, “While I believe consciousness may indeed be a stage trick by the brain, I want to suggest that it is also a stroke of artistic genius. Consciousness as art is surely a more palatable notion than consciousness as illusion.” He adds, “Consciousness, by placing you at the center of this brilliant and perplexing work of art, encourages you to think of all humans as equally touched by magic. Thus, you end up… as centers of spiritual excellence, spreading the joy.” With apologies to Dr. Humphrey, this is nonsense. What do phrases like “spiritual excellence” and “spreading the joy” even mean in a situation where your consciousness is nothing but an illusion or “art” that disappears with the death of your brain?

Dr. Humphrey does acknowledge that there is a problem with his theory. “How can there be physical matter on one side of the equation and nonphysical consciousness on the other? Philosophers talk about the existence of an ‘explanatory gap’ here. As Colin McGinn has put it, ‘You might as well assert that numbers emerge from biscuits or ethics from rhubarb.’” Just so.

One of our commenters here, Michael A. Williams, shares with us a wonderful article that gives a definitive answer to Dr. Humphrey and to all others who are stubbornly wed to the made-up notion that matter must be material and consciousness has to be generated by the brain. An Oxford-trained South Korean quantum physicist named Daegene Song has shown mathematically that “Among conscious activities, the unique characteristic of self-observation cannot exist in any type of machine… Human thought has a mechanism that computers cannot compute or be programmed to do… The brain and consciousness are linked together, but the brain does not produce consciousness. Consciousness is something altogether different and separate. The math doesn’t lie.”

It is no  coincidence that Dr. Song is young. To paraphrase the immortal Max Planck, “science advances by deaths,” as those holding fast to failed ideas give way to those who are free to look at the world with fresh eyes.

Dr. Song is not the first quantum physicist to grasp the fact that human consciousness is primary and it pre-exists the universe. In 1931, Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And Erwin Schrodinger, another Nobel Prize-winning quantum physicist, said many years before Dr. Song’s birth, “Consciousness cannot be accounted for in physical terms. For consciousness is absolutely fundamental. It cannot be accounted for in terms of anything else.”

Science advances by deaths. And it is past time now for the old, failed dogma that matter must be material to give way to the glorious certainty that human consciousness is primary and pre-existing. Not only is consciousness real, dear friends, but it is the ONLY thing that is real!

 

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Uploading Your Mind

Despite extensive evidence that human consciousness is primary and it pre-exists the universe, mainstream scientists still believe that nothing exists that is not material. They are certain that your mind, your personality, all that you are is generated entirely by your brain, so when you die your mind will blink out like a light.

All of this is nonsense, of course. For your material brain to generate your mind is flat-out impossible. But because materialism is a “fundamental dogma” of modern physics, it still permeates all of mainstream science. And it leads researchers to propose ever more lunatic projects. I’ll give you three that have lately come across my desk, and then we’ll talk about some reasons why we can be certain that our brains do not generate our minds.

1) Mind Uploading Will Replace God. http://motherboard.vice.com/read/mind... The notion that soon we will be digitally uploading the minds that are generated by our meat-brains so we can survive our physical deaths is so deeply nutty that even after having read this article three times I still cannot figure out the sense of it. “Being able to upload our entire minds into a computer is probably just 25-35 years off given Moore’s Law and the current trajectory of technology growth and innovation” the author confidently informs us. How is this possible, when scientists are sure that your mind is just an artifact of your meat-brain? The author says only, “mind uploading is generally considered possible by experts. After all, humans are just material machines, striving to create other machines that mirror ourselves and desires. Ah yes. We’ll translate all the information in your brain into bits and make a copy of you online. But what about your individual awareness? Your emotions? Your sense of being who you are? No mention of how we’re going to transfer all of that. And once this miracle of uploading our minds is achieved? “Expect a much more utopian society for whatever social structures end up existing in virtual reality and cyberspace. But also expect the real world to radically improve.” Utopia!

2) Thoughts Being Transmitted by Brain-to-Brain Link. In the strictly material world of mainstream science, it is very big news that a readout from someone’s brain can now be interpreted by someone else. “Using noninvasive means, researchers made brain recordings of a person in India thinking the words “hola” and “ciao,” and then decoded and emailed the messages to France, where a machine converted the words into brain stimulation in another person, who perceived the signals as flashes of light. From the sequence of flashes, the French recipient was able to successfully interpret the greetings.” What a great mess of trouble just to say “hello”!

3) We Are About to Experience Everlasting Youthfulness. The idea here is that we can keep on discovering ever more sophisticated ways to turn back the clock on our bodies, over and over again, always keeping just ahead of encroaching old age and therefore never reaching our expiration dates. Aubrey de Grey, who is an expert in this emerging field of trying to outrun the clock, says, “If we ask the question: ‘Has the person been born who will be able to escape the ill health of old age indefinitely?’ Then I would say the chances of that are very high. Probably about 80 per cent.”

All of this is an utter waste of time, money, and wonderful intentions! Here is why:

– There is no need to upload your mind in order to preserve it. Your mind is eternal by its very nature. It is impossible for it ever to die.

– Mind-to-mind communication without the need for mechanical “flashes of light” is already being practiced by those who understand that human minds are inextricable parts of one eternal Mind. And they are saying a lot more than just “hello.”

– Delaying the ills of old age is a laudable goal, but it cannot stave off death. Nor should it. Our post-death home is infinitely more wonderful than this brief, unpleasant afternoon in school!

How can we know for certain that our minds are not generated by our brains? Here are three clues that seem persuasive to me:

1) Our minds can exist apart from our bodies. Even one documented case of someone’s body and mind being in two different locations at the same time would be sufficient to establish this principle, and by now we have hundreds of such cases. The science is settled, if only mainstream scientists were not so afraid to examine the evidence!

2) The dead live happily in a glorious earth-like dimension very close to our own. Here is something else that has been so thoroughly documented that it is only physicists’ clinging to materialism as a fundamental dogma that keeps them from learning what we long have known. The minds of the dead have survived just fine! This seems to me to be conclusive proof that their meat-brains could not possibly have generated their minds.

3) The human genome does not code for the human mind. C. Elegans is an almost microscopic worm of fewer than a thousand cells. Its genome contains about 21,000 genes, which fact gives us a useful benchmark. And to the astonishment of researchers, the human genome turns out to contain only 19,000 genes, nearly all of which predate even primates. So the human genome does not code for the human mind. How then is it even possible for our minds to be generated by our brains?

The goals of all three of the scientific projects outlined above have long since been reached. Our minds are eternal, we cannot die, and since we all are part of eternal mind we can readily communicate at the level of our minds. Well, what do you know? The future is here. It doesn’t need technology. And it is beyond-belief wonderful!

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Ending the Great Stagnation

Tech billionaire Peter Thiel warns us that science is in a period of what he calls the “Great Stagnation.” He frets that we are stuck in what he sees as a “culture of conformity” because “innovation depends on individuals who are willing to pursue unconventional, or even controversial, ideas.”

Mr. Thiel, you are exactly right. The Great Stagnation began a century ago, when the scientific community refused to investigate a flood of good afterlife communications that amounted to something close to proof that people easily survive their deaths. Instead of having a look, scientific gatekeepers worried that science might inadvertently find God, so they adopted materialism as what was then called science’s “fundamental dogma.” Materialism has since hardened into a requirement for all mainstream scientific inquiry. Of course, anything that is based in a dogma has become a belief-system and is not a genuine science any longer. All of this results in what you have observed. Physicists have been floundering in the weeds for a century.

Oh, but they still put up a brave front. They have the money to build particle colliders that enable them to earn a living while they discover nothing very useful. The recent run of the Great Hadron Collider failed to find some thirty particles required for important theories of physics that have been in place for decades. And yes, the last run of the GHC did discover what is believed to be the boson that gives subatomic particles their mass; but what physicists still fail to consider is a more important question that goes to the very heart of physics. Why is a Higgs Boson necessary in the first place?

This problem of restricted scientific inquiry has handicapped some brilliant careers. Ethan Siegel, in a terrific book review entitled Einstein, Schrodinger, and the Story You Never Heard: How “Faith” in the Universe Destroyed Two Brilliant Men of Genius, tells us how two of history’s greatest physicists were tripped up by their materialist prejudices reinforced by their need to keep themselves in conformity with the materialist party line. Siegel wonders, “(H)ow many of the ‘best’ theoretical ideas that lack evidence at the present – supersymmetry, extra dimensions, grand unification, string theory – will turn out to be completely wrong?” Since all these theories are attempts to make sense of a universe that is not material while remaining grounded in materialist dogma in order to keep careers alive, my suspicion is that all of these theories are wrong. But we won’t know that for sure until we can turn physics back into a genuine science.

The irony is that by now, research physicists understand that nothing is solid in the sense that Sir Isaac Newton understood the word “solid.” Max Planck is in the same scientific pantheon as Einstein, and as far back as 1944 he said, “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.” Of course, more recently it has become clear that those “particles” are actually vortices of energy. That is why physicists need the Higgs Boson. Mass has to come from somewhere.

So physicists get what is going on, but for public consumption they must hold to the party line of materialism or risk their careers. This zone of silence has led to a massive and appalling level of ignorance in the mainstream culture about such essential matters as human nature and the nature of reality. Rather than understanding by now that these bodies that we briefly wear are about as important as your old Toyota – useful for awhile, but soon abandoned – many of the world’s most sincere people see themselves as waging a desperate fight against their own extinction. Once the car breaks down, they’ll blink out like a light!

And among those fighting hardest to keep running what in his case is probably a Bentley is our wise and observant friend, Peter Thiel. “(T)he idea he’s most passionate about is using technology to extend human life far beyond what it is now,” so he is funding scientists to look for better ways to tinker under the hood.

What is saddest about all this waste of money and brilliance is that research is now ongoing in the very areas of inquiry that would most interest Peter Thiel. It is being conducted by physicists of stature, and the only thing that it lacks is funding to hasten the day when everyone on earth will know that human minds are eternal. There is no area of inquiry more certain to transform all of human life for the better than the research in electronic communication across dimensions now being conducted by Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and other household names who unfortunately have forgotten that here on earth we need money. The gizmos they keep proposing to their earthly lab assistants tend to be unbelievably expensive.

Still, we will get there eventually. The teams of dead scientists working on this tell us that even without much funding they expect to have a workable “soul phone” in place within the next few years. Of course, with a few million dollars applied to this most important area of scientific research in all of human history, success could happen sooner. So, how about it, Mr. Thiel? There is no better way to invest your wealth in “individuals who are willing to pursue unconventional, or even controversial, ideas” that are certain to transform the world!

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Radical Forgiveness

Afterlife studies is a genuine science, which means that it has much to tell us beyond the fact that human minds are eternal. One of its most important revelations is the final answer to that age-old question: What is the purpose of human life? Here the dead agree with most major religions. We are here […]

When a Child Dies

Last week I was on Coast to Coast AM with George Noory. Beginning while the show was still on air, I received a wonderful flood of emails, so many that it took me two days and nights to answer them all. Most were questions or comments, but a few were heartbreaking stories. One of these […]

Welcome!

If you have been a member of this website for awhile, I hope you know how much I appreciate your friendship. If we have recently met on the wonderful George Noory’s Coast to Coast AM, I want to welcome you to our shared adventure! For the first time in human history, we are beginning to […]

Wealth and Power

Before we are born, we write into the plan for our upcoming lifetime a series of challenges that operate like the machines in a gym to help us to strengthen our spiritual muscles. Things like poverty, cancer, abusive spouses, the deaths of children, and other calamities are pretty obvious spiritual lessons, but believe it or […]

Race and Gender

Recently I received an email from the granddaughter of an American slave who asked a distressing question. She said that people of her race are too often thwarted in life, and she asked me whether racial differences are “a joke from God.” She especially wanted to know whether in the afterlife everyone would be equal. […]