Nobody knows the trouble I’ve been through.
Nobody knows my sorrow.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.
Glory hallelujah!
Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down.
Oh, yes, Lord!
Sometimes I’m almost to the ground.
Oh, yes, Lord.
– From “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had” in Slave Songs of the United States (1867)

By survey, it is estimated that more than eighty percent of the people on earth are still afraid to die. What an appalling statistic. Eighty percent! And the most important reason why that statistic is so devastating may not be readily apparent to you:

  • Consciousness is the base creative force, and objectively it is all that exists. Since consciousness is indestructible, and since each of us is a part of consciousness, the plain fact is that each one of us is literally indestructible. In simple truth, no one ever dies.
  • Consciousness exists in a range of vibrations, from base fear at the lowest and slowest level of vibration to perfect love at the highest and most rapid vibrational level. And since fear of death is the base fear, and since all our minds are part of a single consciousness, the statistic that I quoted at the start of this post means that fear now pervades the entire lower aspect of the one consciousness that is all that exists. So it weighs us all down, sinking all of us with a kind of leaden ballast.
  • That ballast of negativity that weighs down consciousness therefore affects all of humankind. It doesn’t matter that you and I might be entirely unafraid to die. The fact that so many people are afraid acts as a kind of ultimate pollution that sours the consciousness that is all of us with a sludge of general negativity that is expressing itself in the world right now in a number of subtle but powerful ways.

For example:

  • Mood. A general depressiveness and lack of hope pervades all of humankind. This negativity is especially apparent among the young, who lack the resources to combat it. There is a dour sense of hopelessness that is taking over modern societies like a cancer, especially in the Western countries.
  • Rage. From road rage to crudeness in politics to greater ethnic warring to more alarming sparring at the national level, we are becoming ever more furious with one another.
  • Global Catastrophes. Have you noticed that something or other is always just about to get us? If it’s not famine or global cooling or warming, then it’s Covid or aliens or something else. Young people might see this as a new phenomenon, but we who are older remember that in the nineteen-seventies we were facing both imminent worldwide famine and the advent of the next ice age.

And since everyone on earth shares a single consciousness, whatever affects even the least of us must on some level affect every one of us. The implications of this fact are so extraordinary as to almost beggar the imagination! Individually we are indestructible, but nevertheless we are susceptible while we are on earth to endless attacks of morbid negativity that our modern excellent communications have vastly compounded. I chose decades ago to cut myself off from television, radio, and newspapers altogether, and that does help. I urge you to try it. If an actual war ever does break out, you can be sure that someone will let you know.

The cause of all this vastly increased worldwide negativity is humankind’s heightened fear of death in recent decades. And that is something that we are going to have to address if we want things on earth to ever improve much at all. But why are modern people so much more afraid to die?  Let’s first stipulate the fact that there is no reason on earth why death should ever be feared! Life on earth is nothing but a very brief sojourn, and we have so much evidence now of what happens at and after bodily death, and of the fact that we all live forever, that no one should ever be afraid of the minimal transition that we erroneously call death. So, what is making people so much more afraid now?

Your first assumption is bound to be that this is not a new phenomenon. Didn’t people always fear death this way? Well, actually, no. Our frame-verse this week is a song that was sung by a people held in bondage some two hundred years ago and more, who looked toward death as a release from their present state of oppression. And while that may seem surprising to us, it was more usual for people in past centuries to see the next stage of life as an adventure, and not as something to be feared. Think of the ancient Egyptians, for example, who built their whole culture around getting ready for what was coming next. Even very primitive cultures often had folk tales about family reunions in a happy afterlife.  So, no, people didn’t always fear death the way people fear death in the twenty-first century. So what has happened of late? Why are modern people so much more afraid to die?

As I have investigated this problem, I have come to think that it has three primary causes:

  • Materialist scientists have been spreading a miasma of fear. People in Western countries are taught that scientists are honest and honorable people, highly trained, and therefore to be trusted in all their proclamations. And in recent years, materialist scientists have taken to proclaiming that life after death is scientifically impossible. In spreading their nonsense, they have substantially contributed to lowering the planet’s consciousness vibration from love-based toward ever more deeply fear-based.
  • Scary near-death-experience YouTubes erroneously insist that hell is real. I have heard of late from a number of people who were panicked by watching hellish NDE YouTubes. And if this many people have reached out to me, then there must be many more who have found those scary YouTubes and believed that they were documenting actual experiences. My dear friends, for the umpteenth time, (a) there is no hell, and (b) no one who comes back from an NDE to tell the tale ever has actually died.
  • The decline in Christian church attendance likely also plays a role. The number of children in America in 2022 who ever have attended church services amazingly is now in the single digits! And while you and I might rail against the false and fear-based dogmas of Christianity, for someone to believe in a God of any kind provides a sense that a positive afterlife is at least a possibility. While without the comfort of a God to believe in, it is easy to imagine nothing after death but the terrors of a howling void.

There may be other reasons, too, why so many more people are so much more afraid of death. But the point is that the shared vibratory level of our human consciousness has sunk to such an alarmingly low level of negativity that the result is manifold negative effects in human cultures worldwide. And our increased fear of death in the twenty-first century is the ultimate cause of every one of these problems!


So, how will having more of us know that we are all immortal beings make a difference?

This is a fascinating phenomenon! I first observed it in myself some forty years ago, and since then I have seen it happen for many other people as well. When I was young, I was terrified of the dark. I was actually afraid of many things. Then as soon as I graduated from college, I began to study the afterlife. My afterlife studies intensified with my discovery of the heyday of afterlife communications through physical and deep-trance mediums that occurred in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. For two years or so in the late seventies I prowled used-book stores and libraries, and I read as many of the accounts of after-death communications produced during that turn of the century heyday as I could lay my hands on. It took me about two years to really get past what I thought of back then as my normal fear of death, and my first-stage liberation from the fear of death first became apparent to me one evening. I was in my office. My husband was watching the news on TV, and our infant children were sleeping. It had grown dark as I was concentrating on writing on my computer. And for the first time in my life, I was sitting there alone in pitch darkness, and I was not afraid. I noticed that. I took quick stock of myself. Was it really true? It was true. Suddenly I didn’t fear the dark at all. It was then that I first understood that vanquishing the fear of dying automatically vanquishes all our other fears as well. And I became frankly giddy with my lack of fear! For a while I even had to be extra cautious, believe it or not, about retraining myself to be careful in situations where caution really is needed. Even as recently as nine months ago, I carelessly walked on glare ice, and I fell and hit my head and broke my wrist.

When you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything. 

If we want to improve the condition of humankind in all respects, there is just one magic bullet that can do it all. We will have to make certain that as many people as possible learn as rapidly as possible the truth about death and the afterlife, so they can altogether vanquish their fear of death. And surprisingly, it seems not to matter much to whom we teach these truths. Since our minds are all part of the single consciousness that continuously manifests this one reality, it has been estimated that for as few as ten percent of the people on earth to altogether lose their fear of death and thereby to significantly raise their consciousness vibrations will begin a benevolent feedback cycle for all of humankind. As few as ten percent! Just as this miasma of negativity has weighed down all of humankind, the difference that those ten percent can make will act to buoy and lift all of humankind. There is no other way that we can make this happen. And all of humankind is in such desperate straits that we ought at least to try it!  

Of course, the lame and entirely counterproductive battle that is now ongoing between materialist and religionist scientists that we discussed last week is going to make it harder to achieve any kind of positive result. We know that. But, truth is truth! And as Craig Hogan and I work to promote seekreality.com, as we prepare teachingsbyjesus.com, and as I blog and do my podcasting and day by week by month by year as we do everything possible to teach as many people as we can the glorious truth that there really is no death, at least we know that we are doing all that we can to try to lift the world. And if you will do all that you can do as well, then perhaps we might yet plant enough love to supplant and choke off sufficient weeds of fear, and we might soon manage to bring for humankind a very much brighter harvest day!  

Although you see me going ‘long so,
Oh, yes, Lord,
I have my trials here below.
Oh, yes, Lord.
If you get there before I do,
Oh, yes, Lord,
Tell all-a my friends I’m coming to Heaven!
Oh, yes, Lord!
– From “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had” in Slave Songs of the United States (1867)