Hi my name is Jelani Sims and I used to be an atheist  :'(

I used to be because quite recently I stumbled upon the strange topic of life after death.

Let me just give you a little background on my life. I grew up in a very religious family, constantly barraged with christian beliefs :(

I accepted them for about the first 12 years of my life, then I went to boarding school. In boarding school, I started contemplating about the scriptures about what they were telling me.

Basically I came to the conclusion that religion was put in place to control people of lower intellect. Telling me that If i didn't "worship" what I consider an idol, I would burn forever more was not something that was going to scare me into submission.

It was then when I became an atheist : (

Becoming an atheist was refreshing yet depressing at the same time. Refreshing because I was proud of myself for seeing through the fog that is religion, and depressing because I realized "thought" that we were only living to die.

Two months ago I found this website, read it and thought nice fairy tale. But something sparked in me  :) A thirst for knowledge that I never felt before in my life. It had begun.

Long story short, after about 2 months of constant research, I have come to the conclusion that the afterlife does indeed exist  :)

I don't have all the answers yet and i feel I can't get them from constantly reading books and scouring the internet.

I have come here because looking on your posts I feel you guys are people with the same viewpoints as me, and can help me on my quest for a higher understanding of what life after death really means.

My name is Jelani Sims
and i used to be an atheist  ;)


 
 

HI Jelani-
Welcome to the forum. So your trip took you from faith to a materialist perspective and back to understanding based on developing insight, and now you're developing even more of it.  That seems to be about as good as it's gonna get. The key to going even farther is to be brave enough to actually get involved. Bruce offers some useful ideas about doing soul retrieval, a useful activity that tends to increase both understanding and meditative skill.

enjoy
dave

Hi Jelani,

It's a wonderful search, isn't it? Welcome to this board, and I agree, trying out some of the activities taught here will make it all much more personal for you. From my own visits "out there" or "in there" as the case may be, I have found that there is a great, vast world of possibility that exists for me, and amazing synchronicities to notice and experiences to explore. All I believe in now is that there is much more to my existence than I suspected, and that love is the great lesson in all of it.  There is no end to the journey once the mind is opened and the heart is awakened, and no separation between "that" world and this one.

love, blink

Hi Jelani,
good to hear that from you.

What is sad is that often smartness and science is connected with the belief that there is nothing beyond the material world. It seems to me this behaviour is almost like a prerequisite to enter the scientific world. But the belief there is nothing is a belief too- not a scientific fact.

Most people who call themselves atheists don't believe in an afterlife, but there are some atheists who only don't believe in a god as presented in some religions, but they think it's possible that there is something beyond the physical world.

I was interested in science as well as in all paranormal stuff from childhood on. I've read much, before I finally had the TMI Gateway Voyage which was an eye-opener for me. I can also recommend Bruce's AK Guidebook (as well as his others).

Happy journey,
Spooky

I don't know if I'd call myself an atheist, but I am one who does not believe there is a creator god in charge of the universe, as in a seperate entity, greater than all of us peons.

I do, however, very much believe in the afterlife and the paranormal. I also have (and always have had) a very keen interest in science.  My heroes include Carl Sagan, Isaac Asimov (who wrote more than just SciFi), Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein..

I do believe there is a creative "spark" existant..and WE are it, so in effect..WE are the god we worship. :)  Or, as they say in the Crimson Circle.."I am god..and you are god, too."

Hi Jelani

I believe;
God lies spellbound in nature and it is God in us who recognises God in nature which in turn awakens us to perceive God as a living God.

Lots of love and joy on your path.
:)

Always got to jump in with my pet peeve - atheism and theism have no necessary connection with a belief in the afterlife.  Not a big deal, but there is no reason someone has to believe in a god to believe in an afterlife, nor the other way around, and I hate to see people (not you, just peopel in general) get all conflicted over something that should be a non-issue.

There are people who would consider me an atheist because I don't believe in a particular, one over all, creator type god, but I definitely believe in an afterlife.  My Dad was an atheist, he believed in ghosts and spirits and some kind of afterlife.  I've actually known people who did believe in an all-powerfull creator God but didn't believe in an afterlife!  Different strokes...

Hello Ra:

I was raised a Catholic, stopped believing in Catholicism when I was about 14 because it didn't make sense, but eventually through various experiences I found out that God and Jesus do exist; however, not in a fundamentalist you better be obedient or else sense. Just as you can't force a kid to become excited about Christmas morning, you can't force a person to live according to love. If you live according to love you'll gravitate to a nice place when you cross over, if you live according to hate you're liable to gravitate to a negative place when you cross over.

For a while I had some energetic blocks that were due to my having a problem reconciling God, Jesus and Fundamentalism. I found that God and Jesus didn't evaporate out of existence simply because fundamentalism came around.

If things such as people, higher self/disc/over souls and the planning intelligence (spoke about in Bruce Moen's fourth book) can be aware of everything that exists within their realm of existence, then why can't the source from which everything comes (God) also be aware of everything that exists within its realm of existence? Even Robert Monroe wrote of a creator (his book Ultimate Journey) who created everything according to a plan and makes adjustments according to need, and Robert Monroe wasn't religious.

I've experienced divine love, and feeling gratitude and humility towards one's creator and his helpers has nothing to do with subservience. It is similar to being grateful and respectful towards a loving parent who always did you right, only magnified many times.  In the end what matters is that everybody gets to experience the wonderful love and happiness that the divine plan has in store for them.  There is nothing wrong with having special feelings for beings who already live according to the love and light that we all aspire for whether we realize it or not.

Just to add my two cents, the term "God" carries a huge amount of freight. If we take the attitude of physics, the universe is not, and cannot be an "eternal event" because it simply would have burned out in the first 200 billion years or so. So it is a temporal event set in an eternal frame. Something caused this temporal occurrence. St Thomas Aquinas called it the "Uncaused Cause". To me it's a matter of logic and statistical relationships. If I were a proper Buddhist it would be "Mind" and for a Hindu it would be the "Ineffable Brahm", and so on for all the other ways in which we try to express this idea. I'm reminded of Mohhamed's words, "God has many names, and all of them most excellent."

The image that personally is most appealling is that from Edgar Cayce, that we reincarnate until we get it right, and then we are able to identify with the creative impulse, and thus we become "Co-Creators with God".  

Or another thought from the more extreme nihilist side, if I can identify myself with "nothingness" then I am eternal, because all that is outside of the temporal  world is of the nature of nothingness. And to become identified with nothingness means simply that I do not rely upon the opinions, restrictions and circumstances of the immediate universe in order to define myself, but instead, I am content to simply "BE", which brings me back to the creative instant. Ultimately, this turns out to be the central message of Buddhism, and the reason that Siddhartha cautioned against a belief in a "Soul" or a "God", since these terms are inevitably a repository of social ideas.

So, by denial of the immediate, the BST associated with everyday life, we return to the moment of creation, and the common Source out of which everything seems to have emerged. And from there, amusingly enough, we return to the everyday world. It all seems to be a matter of attitude.
PUL
dave

Hello and Welcome...:) It was nice to read your post.You are obviously a very intelligent, insightful, intuitive, and interesting person.I can relate with you about challenging the staus quo, so to speak, at least for me, has often been the greatest motivator and catalyst to the soul journey/research and development cycles in which I seem to live in. :)

I'm glad you are here and will look forward to hearing from you in the future,as everyone here so far has touched me in one way or another,knowingly or unknowingly...and I need to hear the stories and experiences of people just like yourself. Take care, and greetings again;)