Find the Reason for Living Forever

In today’s episode of Healing From Within your host Sheryl Glick author of The Living Spirit a tale of awakening, spiritual communication, healing and the truth of our being as well as a guide to Inner Soul Development is most delighted to welcome back for a chance to discuss her new book Roberta Grimes author of The Fun of Growing Forever. Previous interviews with Roberta Grimes on her books The Fun of Dying and The Fun of Staying In Touch may be heard on my website www.sherylglick.com

Roberta and Sheryl will share a greater understanding of the afterlife and its implications for improving human development as their studies research and their passion and need to share the truth of who we are and why we are experiencing life in a physical reality is endless. All shows on Healing From Within in one way or another share a remarkable view of our human and energetic potential as we learn more about human nature and the universe and find many ways to look within for self-investigation, self-reflection and to discover how mastering our emotions thoughts and actions, and by raising our vibration helps us create our most successful healthy life and afterlife journey.

In today’s episode Roberta Grimes a business attorney novelist and speaker whose spiritual journey began with two extraordinary experiences of light as a child has spent decades studying nearly 200 years of consistent communications from the dead and other afterlife related evidence to assemble an in depth understanding of who and what we are how reality works the nature of God and the meaning and purpose of our lives

What afterlife researchers have discovered turns out to be a great deal more than just the fact that human minds are eternal! Afterlife studies is a genuine science that encompasses a consciousness-based reality many times the size of this material universe. The physics of consciousness and all its implications will so dominate the second half of this century that eventually people will look back on today’s benighted scientific beliefs very much as we now look back on the practice of balancing humors by bleeding the sick. Revelations to come over the next few decades are going to change everything.

Perhaps the most important insight to flow from what the dead are telling us through dedicated and highly educated mediums is that now, quite unexpectedly, we have received the answer to humankind’s oldest question. At last we know why we are here! You came into this lifetime eager to achieve the greatest possible spiritual growth. That is what the dead tell us is the reason why we even are born. As best we have been able to determine, it is the reason why the universe exists. And the fact that you have not always known this is the greatest indictment of mainstream science and organized religions that I can imagine.

As Roberta tells us, “We all seek meaning in our lives, especially as we move past the grubbing for money and status of our early years. And even those who find earthly success soon discover that there is no end to those struggles, no top to be found, no rat-race prize, so every thoughtful person eventually sees that whatever success we might find on earth gives us nothing more than toys whose luster is going to dim as our bodies fail. No matter how rich and famous we become, we realize in the end that we have never owned anything. The only thing that you and I can own is the powers of our eternal minds, so achieving spiritual growth while on earth is the best way to add to our permanent wealth.
Perhaps the notion of growing spiritually doesn’t seem appealing to you now. It sounds stuffy and churchy. Who needs that? Fine. Then let’s call it plainly what it is: spiritual growth means ever more perfect love. Most of us would say that love feels good, but on Earth love is as ephemeral as mist. Perhaps if you were aware that spiritual growth means feeling ever more deeply in love all the time, with everyone and everything forevermore, you might find the concept more attractive. Achieving spiritual growth turns out to be the whole secret to human happiness.”

She goes on to say that “No religion puts spiritual growth first.” One of the reasons for that is that Jesus who inspired Christianity as the second Abrahamic religion did not come to do that. Jesus was basically not religious, but spiritual, and a modern teacher of the Afterlife Soul life and concepts of Universal Love and Forgiveness as the way to know our soul essence and bring heaven to earth..a Master Teacher perhaps, not a religious one. Many Christians consider the entire Christian Bible to be the Inspired Word of God. Having read it through a number of times, Roberta feels she must tell you that she finds the Bible to be so internally inconsistent and so full of culturally-biased and even un-Christian advice that it seems presumptuous and insulting to pin it all on God. It seems more accurate to say that the writers whose work was assembled into the Christian Bible may have been inspired by God, but they heard God through the filter of their primitive lives in the ancient world so they could have garbled some of God’s message. This would be understandable and forgivable. But the fact that it might have happened means that no serious researcher can use most of the Bible as a resource when trying to understand a factual God.

The red letters of the Gospels are another matter. Thomas Jefferson said that the words of Jesus stand out in the Bible like “diamonds in a dunghill,” and when you read the Bible through and reach the Gospels, you can see what he meant. In a recent translation, Jesus sounds like a modern man trying to educate primitives: you see him speaking simply and patiently, saying things over and over to people who seem not really to understand him. You even see his rising frustration, and his repeated efforts to quell that frustration and say things over yet again, more simply. Put aside the fact that Jesus’ followers started in his name a prominent and now widely fragmented religion. Just read the words of Jesus without religious bias, and you find yourself sympathizing and liking him as a wonderfully wise and good man you would enjoy having as your friend. Reading his words without religious bias makes you wonder whether things that he said might be found to be factually accurate.

Here is where our problems arise. If we don’t want to indulge in the magic-thinking notion that the whole Bible is the Inspired Word of God, then we have to take into account how easily the teachings of Jesus could have been distorted during the past two thousand years:

1. For Jesus to speak against the prevailing religion was a crime punishable by death. He was trying to stay alive long enough to share what he had come to teach, and he managed that feat for more than three years by using some fascinating tricks. He would tell what sounded like innocent stories, then say, “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (wink-wink) to urge his followers to look for his deeper messages. He would give people innocuous-sounding bits of information at various spots along the way, knowing that the guards watching him would change, and hoping that his faithful followers would be able to put those bits together.
2. Those who heard Jesus speak and passed his words along, and those who eventually committed them to writing, seem not to have fully understood what he was saying. It is possible that they inserted or altered words or passages here and there to better support their own understandings. We would be none the wiser.
3. Jesus’ message could have been altered as it was translated into Greek and then from Greek into English. Aramaic is so different from Greek that direct translations from Aramaic to English are nearly unrecognizable by people who are used to modern Bible versions. The fact that the Gospel words of Jesus that have been translated twice still are so consistent with the afterlife evidence is flat-out amazing to me.
4. We depend on the good will of those who were in control of the written Gospels for two millennia. Here is where our trust is tested! There is evidence that people eager to support their own religious doctrines edited the Gospels over the years, which means that apparently words were put into or taken out of Jesus’ mouth.

• Sex. Do I have to say it? The emotions associated with sex are the classic upper and downer of drug use. They have nothing to do with genuine love.
• Romance. We know the feeling of being in love with someone as a necessary bridge toward marriage, but that intense high of falling in love cannot be for life, even if we marry happily. And if we never make it to a permanent union, then falling in love has to end in the emotional crash of falling back out of love.
• Marital love. The emotions of marriage after the honeymoon phase run a daily gamut of highs and lows. As someone who has been married forever, I don’t consider the emotions engendered by a long-term marriage to be especially high-energy; but on the other hand, once we begin to master ultimate love, then marriage can be extraordinary.
• Parental Love. There is an intense protective feeling that binds mothers and fathers to their offspring and can inspire parents to defend their children with their lives without a second thought. Mercifully, that feeling begins to wane as our children grow away from us; but then, of course, come the grandchildren. I can testify that the most intense emotional high known to humankind is that of a grandmother with her grandchild in her arms. But, nope, this isn’t ultimate love, either.
• Love for Pets. There are many people who would say that the greatest love they ever have felt was for a dog or a cat or a rat. This kind of love seems to be related most closely to parental love, but since it often is used as a substitute for loving other human beings it does little to advance our spiritual growth. Indeed, it might even get in the way.
• Friendship. Many of us have longtime friends whose lives feel like our personal gift. The love I feel for close friends feels more like the steady high of ultimate love, but it still is too dependent on the people involved. Even the friendship kind of love can end badly.
• Patriotic Feeling. Whether we are talking about love for country, love for gender, love for race, or love for groups and organizations, it is all the same. That quicker beating and exultant lift of your heart that you feel at the thought of your tribe is just more of the love-drug. It does nothing to raise your spiritual vibration.

• Practicing universal forgiveness retrains your mind. By giving yourself the conditioning of immediate, forceful action against negative emotions, you seem to be teaching your mind not to bother with emotions you refuse to court. Your mind finds an easier route forward, and your ongoing insistence on always pushing anger away reinforces your mind’s new route until it has made peacefulness its habit. If you let yourself really indulge in anger or crankiness or raging grief, then your mind will give you more of these emotions; but if you refuse to court negativity, your mind turns out to be sufficiently lazy that it will stop reacting once it realizes that reacting will be a waste of its energy.
• Practicing Universal Forgiveness seems to be a powerful antidote to fear. Fear is the most negative emotion of all, the energetic opposite of love, and what seems to be the case is that when you are squashing various other negative emotions, your mind stops responding with fear as well.
• Practicing Universal Forgiveness raises your happiness set-point. Feeling much more peaceful inside, and with negative emotions never troubling you now, you should find that you like being yourself much better than you ever have before.
• Universal forgiveness dramatically improves your interactions with other people. For most of my life, I had a close friend or two. I didn’t even really like people. But once I had mastered universal forgiveness, I found that everyone I met was nicer! That everyone on earth is more wonderful just because I have learned how to forgive is a source of ongoing amazement to me. And I should add that my husband went from being sometimes so unpleasant that I used to think about leaving him to becoming at once the most kindly, dear, and loving man on the face of the earth. After forty-four years, unexpectedly my forgiveness practice has transformed my relationship with him as well.