Month: July 2022

Kindness

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself.
– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), from “The Merchant of Venice”

What has stuck in my mind for the past three months is watching Jesus bless a much taller man who had just died. Every detail of that moment was astounding to me. I have analyzed it from every angle, and learned from it, perhaps even more than Jesus intended for me to learn from it. In the end, I have concluded that the most saintly virtue of all – the one that really sets Jesus apart – is not love after all, but it is instead a titanic but still entirely natural, a deep and instinctive and all-encompassing kindness. 

It was kindness that made the Neolithic incarnation of my spirit guide’s younger brother which Jesus was long ago feel compelled to hunt for survivors of a massacre, and then find a way to save a woman and her children from the carnage all around them. Kindness that made that same Being feel unable to bear ascending to the Godhead unless He could find a way for everyone else in the world who ever would be born also more efficiently become perfected. So He took an unprecedented earth-lifetime from out of the Godhead in order to study us and figure out a way to make that same process happen more efficiently for us all. Et voila – in due course, we have the Jesus of today.

We flatter ourselves that such extraordinary kindness must be just a natural human trait. But sadly, it is not normal at all. In fact, the opposite is true. I am currently on a business trip, and a few days ago I missed a turn on an unfamiliar road. There were a few options that I might have taken to seek a way to turn around, so I hesitated. The driver behind me blared his horn. To make sure I fully understood his displeasure, he continued to blare it until after he had passed me, when he gave a final, separate blare. And on another day, amazingly, the driver behind me began to lean on his horn the instant the light turned green, even though he could see that the road was blocked by a gigantic tractor-trailer that was halfway through making its turn. When people are riding alone in their cars and they have a chance to show who they are to people they never will see again, they enjoy using their horns in full measure.

It is odd that we think of love as more important than kindness. Since I watched Jesus demonstrate to me in April what genuine kindness actually is, I have been meditating on the differences between love and kindness. In the end, all that I can come up with is that kindness is a characteristic, while love is an emotion. The dictionary definition of kindness is “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate,” which makes it seem to be almost a throwaway; while love is “an intense feeling of deep affection.”  Love is big and showy! Jesus tells us to love because He had worked out by the period of his public teaching that it is emotion that governs consciousness, which is the base creative energy. And love is the highest consciousness vibration. That is why He made such a big deal of love!

But an emotion can actually be a dangerous thing. And emotions are always subjective. Think about it:

  • Emotions are personal. I know how I feel, but you can have no idea!
  • Emotions are unpredictable. Even if you can surmise that, yes indeed, I do feel love, there is no way to say what my feeling of love might move me to decide to do.
  • Emotions are fickle. I used to love, but now I find that I really don’t love so much anymore.

How many times have lovers ended up destroying the beloved? We have talked here about kinds of love, but all those conversations are unsatisfactory, because while they help us to define different kinds of love, still they don’t solve the problem of how easily love can go wrong. Love is an emotion. And emotions are ever-changing by their very nature.

Or what about someone who might be duly-elected in a country without a Constitution as sound as the one that blesses the United States, who is sure that he loves his country’s people more than anyone else ever could, and therefore he knows what is best for them? So he declares himself to be dictator for life. Then he closes all the banks for a week, and he open them again with accounts in the name of every man, woman, and child in that country, citizens and illegal aliens alike, and each account contains precisely twenty-five thousand, one hundred and thirty-eight dollars and forty-seven cents. An equal division of that nation’s liquid wealth, to the penny. Everyone from the formerly richest on down is now equal in liquid net worth. There have been more foolish, misguided, and nonsensical things done in the name of great love and at the height of passion than perhaps for any other cause.

So in the end, it is day-by-day kindness that must do all our heaviest lifting. While love is hot, kindness is cool. While love is passionate, kindness is caring. And kindness at least gives us some objective standard, a way to measure the effects that our acts have on people. The more I think about it, the more I realize that you could justify just about any barbaric and monstrous act as something that you were doing out of great love. Not enough food and no way to get more? Then you kill off all the grandparents of course, and you feed them to the children. Can’t have babies starving! Many parents who commit suicide will take their children with them, out of love. In fact, just weeks ago a woman in a Midwestern state came home to find that her husband had committed suicide. Whereupon, she drowned her children in a nearby lake and then killed herself. If great love is the standard, then even the greatest cruelties can make some kind of sense. But if kindness is the standard, then all of that is nonsensical.

Which brings us to what I witnessed on the night of April 6th. After death, we can appear to others how ever we like, and normally nowadays Jesus looks very different from what you might expect. He appears now to be a kind of universal everyman. My oldest grandchild was adopted from Colombia, and Jesus’s skin is my grandson’s beautiful reddish-golden shade. He looks to be about thirty years old, with hazel eyes, a prominent nose, curly hair, full lips, and a short, efficient beard. He is perhaps five feet, ten inches tall, and I think of His look as what you would get if you put the entire human race through a blender. I have asked Thomas if that is how He looked in His lifetime as Jesus. Thomas tells me it is more that Jesus is experimenting with looking this way for the time that He is now moving toward, when Roman Christianity at last is no more and His life will be teaching in all the realms.

So we were sitting on that astral riverbank, feeding the fish, and Jesus was talking, and unexpectedly He simply transformed into pale church-Jesus, slightly taller and with blue eyes and light-brown, shoulder-length hair. I have trouble looking at Him directly, so I was aware of His change in appearance only when He stopped talking and stood and went to greet the little group of people that was approaching us.

My first though when Jesus left Thomas and me to welcome those Christians who had just come home was that this was something private that we were not supposed to see. Now, though, I feel that perhaps He was calling on me to watch Him do this. For some reason that I cannot fathom, this Being whose perfect goodness is beyond all comprehension has decided that I am worthy of the task of telling His story to the world in a website. It feels now as if He was saying to me something like, “Watch Me do this. Learn something new.” And as I think of it now, I remind myself that there have been tens of billions of Christians who have lived and died in the past seventeen hundred years. Tens of billions. With a B. Not all of them have wanted to be blessed and healed by Jesus at the ends of their earth-lives. But if even a tiny fraction of them – say, only several million of them – have thought this would be a special moment for them, then Jesus has put off whatever else He might have done among the endless fun things that there are to do in the astral plane, suspending His own life for seventeen hundred years in order to do this for every Christian who has wanted to meet Him and receive His blessing.

The people in the group were forming a line, and the first man in line was very tall. My guess is that he was six feet, five or six inches tall, and he clearly had been someone important in life. He wore a crisp white shirt without a tie, open at the neck, with creased dark slacks and shiny shoes. He started to fall to his knees before the Lord, but Jesus said, “Peace, my son,” and He slipped His hands beneath the man’s arms at either side. He didn’t try to lift him. It was a signal, and the man regained his feet. Jesus was smiling up at his face. Thomas and I stood maybe twenty feet away and to the side, so we could observe it all. Jesus then put both His hands way up on top of the man’s head and said, “Bless you, my son!” with a bit of a giggle in his voice, and He grinned. I think He was being playful to acknowledge how tall the man was, and to put him at ease about his almost-kneeling faux-pas. And the man said, “Thank You, Sir.” Thank you not just for your blessing, but even more for treating me as an equal. And they stood smiling at one another. That man could joyously grin down at church-Jesus, and he could look Him in the eye as I still cannot, until he was the one who ended that moment and made way for the next person in line.

And that was nothing, right? But I can’t stop thinking about it. Replaying every detail of it. That Jesus the risen Lord has done all of that so sweetly and gently and made that moment so perfect for even a million people, and perhaps for billions of people over seventeen centuries defies my imagination. He could get others to dress up as church-Jesus in His place. No one would know. When I said that to Thomas, he said, “But He would know.” The “Jesus” who appears during near-death experiences and other personal dreams and visions is a presentation by our own spirit guides, who know best what we would need. Whatever “Jesus” says during your own NDE is said by your guide and not by Jesus. But if you were devoted to Jesus during your lifetime, He won’t send an imposter to meet you when you die.

I had thought that after fifty years of research, I had nothing more to learn in this field, but Jesus had this one more lesson to teach. The fruit of spiritual growth is not love at all. Love is what produces spiritual growth, by raising our personal consciousness vibrations. No, the true fruit of spiritual growth is kindness. And when you realize that, and you begin to look for it in people, you glimpse it everywhere. Yes, there are low-vibration bullies who use their auto horns to try to make our driving miserable, but most drivers are more courteous. All my clients own closely-held businesses, and I have repeatedly seen them do kindnesses here and there for needy employees. My sister’s teenage grandson is taller than I am, but still he happily plays hide-and-seek with his much younger sister, and he cooks with her because it makes her happy. When you look for them, you see these little kindnesses. And I realize now that the ultimate fruit of spiritual growth is not angelic purity. No, it is this perfect, gigantic, all-encompassing kindness that can make Jesus willing without complaint to delay the advent of His own Way on earth for almost twenty centuries while He patiently waits out Roman Christianity, and He heals every one of that religion’s victims. And my Thomas tells me that never has Jesus even privately complained.

I have been trying so hard for my entire life to ever better understand Jesus. I majored in studying Him in college. I have read the Gospels until I can recite whole sections of them by heart. I have met Jesus in person. He has told me His story, and it makes a lot more sense than the Christian version of His story ever could. Sometimes I think I really do begin to understand the genuine Jesus. But then I recall the blissful peace of His face as He smilingly welcomed home that umpteen-billionth victim of this religion that has delayed the advent of Jesus’s Way on earth for the past two thousand years. I recall the perfect joy in His face, and I see how happy He was in that moment. And I realize that I still cannot understand Jesus as a Man at all.

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.

– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), from “The Merchant of Venice”

The Silver Cord

Remember Him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
 and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
– Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

Please read our frame-verse a second time. The Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes was written about 935 BCE. Almost three thousand years ago. Three thousand years! That is even a thousand years before Jesus had to enlist all the powers of the Godhead just to reanimate His crucified and stone-dead body enough to resurrect it for a few days more on that first Easter Morning. Let us together briefly hold that thought.

Seeking to understand reality as deeply as possible is the most difficult thing for most of us to force ourselves to want to bother to do. And I am not sure why that is. But I guess the task of fully understanding things seems to be so monumental in prospect that most people would rather not even try. Most people would prefer instead to settle for superficial explanations for even the most gigantically glorious phenomena. They want just surface-level answers that can then be reduced to little human-sized bites. And then they try to tamp those bites down even more, so they can swallow them like pills that can be so well-digested that people barely need to pause before they can move right on. Take near-death experiences, for example. That term was coined by the wonderful and indefatigable Dr. Raymond Moody, who told me when he was my guest on a Seek Reality podcast some years back that he had given those phenomena that name because he knew they had nothing to do with death. Of course, however, since near-death experiences often involve amazing astral travel, and they can sometimes feel like dying and coming back to life, many near-death experiencers blithely assume that must be what has happened to them. They must actually have momentarily and amazingly died! And even many worthies who consider themselves to be near-death experience scholars will do little to try to disabuse experiencers of their demonstrably erroneous delusions.

I have never been able to understand this urge that so many people seem to have to slide right through life without trying to more deeply understand even their most extraordinary experiences. For me, it is the seeking, and the ever more profound discoveries that so often result from our deeply seeking that really make our lives worth living! When I had my two childhood experiences of light, they remained forever vivid in my mind, as all such extraordinary experiences will do. And they inspired more than fifty years of obsessive research that began right after college. I couldn’t rest until I had at least some idea of where that light and that voice had come from! I began by researching life after death, because that was all that I could think to do, which was how I first discovered the afterlife. And I fumbled and blundered on from there! The fumbling and the blundering are part of the fun. It wasn’t until I was thirty years old that Dr. Moody published Life After Life, and I discovered the existence of the astral plane. I said, “Aha! So that’s where that light must have come from.” And then I happily carried on.

It wasn’t until I was fifty years old that I felt that I had the physics and geography of the greater reality all figured out and verified and cross-checked. Of course, I wasn’t calling it that back then. I think I was probably calling it heaven. And the only problem was that at about the same time, I was realizing that none of what I had learned from this part-time study of whatever evidence I was turning up could validate my obsessive Roman Christian beliefs. Oh, on the contrary! I knew that what I was learning about the afterlife was right, which meant that Roman Christianity had to be dead wrong. And could you be condemned to hell for having discovered that there is no hell? I stopped reading the Bible at that point, stopped doing any more afterlife research, and for two years I simply tried to pretend that none of that had ever happened.

Eventually, though, on one rainy afternoon I bucked up my courage and I dared to trust Jesus enough to read only the  four Canonical Gospels. I wasn’t testing Jesus. I was doing that extra bit of Gospel-reading in the same spirit in which I had studied early Christian history in college. It was yet more basic research.

I have told you this story before, and how astonished I was to see that repeatedly Jesus refers in the Gospels to what I already knew from my afterlife research to be true. But then when I came to the story of the woman at the well, where Jesus refers to “living water,” I ‘bout fell off my chair. The water in the afterlife is oddly dry, it feels like silk to the touch, it gives off notes like music, and it is alive. Not only does Jesus say nothing in the Gospels that contradicts what I learned by doing afterlife research, but the fact that two thousand years ago He knew about that living water really sealed the deal for me. The afterlife is real! And Jesus is our living witness.

 So it was my determination to pursue the truth, and not to live my life just barely flitting along skimming the surface of it, that made it possible for me to find, and then to deeply research the afterlife. Which brings us to the night of April 6th. The more that hour recedes into the past, the more I realize that actually meeting Jesus on that amazing night was the most extraordinary thing that ever has happened to me.

And thanks to my having bothered to do such thorough afterlife research over decades, I know enough now to tell you that, as is true of our nightly meetings with our spirit guides and our transitioned loved ones, my meeting with Jesus took place in the gigantic astral plane. The astral plane is probably as much as twenty times the size of this whole physical universe, and it is all so densely interwoven with the material universe that it would be impossible to separate them. If I had thought to look behind me when I was with the Lord, I would have noticed that I was trailing my own faintly bluish cord. So in fact, despite the heavenly atmosphere, I was not actually dead! And nor was I even sort of dead-ish. Despite the wonderful, love-filled atmosphere that otherwise might have fooled me, just as it fools so many near-death experiencers, I know that I was just astral-traveling when I met with Jesus on that unforgettable night.

 Here is a news flash for you, all our dear beloved NDE experiencers! Well, perhaps it isn’t exactly news at this point, since it was first written about three thousand years ago. Are you able to speak up and tell us now what happened to you during your NDE? Then you never, even for a single moment, ever actually died. To “flat-line” on a monitor does not equate with being “dead,” since the same machine that has just gone flat on one of its monitors is also maintaining your material body’s functions, and therefore that machine is keeping your material body fully alive. If there were no such machine, however, at this moment you would be reading these words in spirit over a living loved one’s shoulder. Insofar as I have been able to determine, our frame-verse this week is the first written mention of the silver cord which connects your energy body with your material body and keeps it alive, and that ancient Biblical verse is testament to the fact that the silver cord has always been visible in dim light when people were out of their material bodies. So even back three thousand years ago, they were able to precisely define what physical death is, and when it occurs! The human silver cord is amazingly stretchy. During life, as the great Robert Monroe demonstrated, you can probably travel to the edges of the universe without having it break. In a more extensive near-death experience, NDE experiencers will often come to the edge of the afterlife foyer area, and they will be warned to turn back because if that NDE-er does not turn back, his silver cord will break, and his material body will die.

 The silver cord cannot be reattached. Physical death is always a one-way trip.

We are very seldom allowed to remember those frequent meetings that we have with our spirit guides and loved ones while our material bodies sleep. And even on occasion with the King of Kings. Having active memories of our frequent trips out of our material bodies would only distract us from the business at hand, which is to take these earth-lives seriously enough that we can learn and grow spiritually just as rapidly as possible. This is why books like Robert Monroe’s indispensable trilogy are so essential! I urge everyone who has even the slightest interest in better understanding physical death, the afterlife, and what actually happens during near-death experiences to read Journeys Out of the Body, Far Journeys, and Ultimate Journey. And if reading those three books piques your interest at all, then you might consider looking into the wonderful work of The Monroe Institute. Bob Monroe’s books are decades old, but  they remain on the intellectual cutting edge.

 When Jesus was crucified, He planned to die unusually quickly. He needed to resurrect a usable body, so it had to die before the soldiers went around and broke the legs of those dying on crosses who were still alive so they could no longer push up and keep on breathing. The soldiers wanted to finish all the executions and take the dead bodies down prior to sundown on the eve of the Sabbath, so Jesus and God had His quick death prearranged. But still, even with their careful planning, by the following Sunday morning Jesus’s crucified body had deteriorated so much that when He resurrected it with a gigantic burst of energy on that first Easter morning, His material body was such a mess that He had to abandon it within a few days. Even for God Himself, fully resurrecting an actually-dead body is a very difficult proposition.

And so, dear near-death experiencers, it is long past time for all of you to face one incontrovertible fact. You cannot sever your silver cord – which is the true definition of death – and then reattach that cord to your material body and move on with your earthly life.  If you are able to tell your own beautiful story, then you never for a moment have actually died.

We have known for at least three thousand years that death is always a one-way trip! So I hope that The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), will continue to help NDE-ers and the public to understand such basic things as the true definition of death and the crucial function of the silver cord. When all of this was crystal clear to Biblical folks as early as three thousand years ago, it is essential that clear and definitive education on these matters continues to be maintained. Near-death experiences are, as the wise and delightful Dr. Raymond Moody said during his Seek Reality podcast years ago, indeed wonderful spiritual experiences. But all the hundreds of NDEs and their messages that I have studied since 1980 have been just deeply personal to the experiencers themselves, and certainly no NDE that I ever have seen has had anything to do with actual death. For anyone to pretend otherwise misleads the public, it goes contrary to all the afterlife evidence, and it defies simple common sense.

Remember Him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
 and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
– Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

My Lord and My God

A week later His disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said,
“Peace be with you!” Then He said to Thomas,
“Put your finger here; see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it into My side.
Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
– (JN 20:26-28)

What I have come to love most of all about our merry band of commenters here is that you so often help me think things through and come to a deeper understanding. This time around, you have helped me realize that of course Jesus has continued to grow spiritually throughout the past two thousand years! Since we now have been told that Jesus began as a usual human being, that added understanding is common sense. And in the reality without time that is the astral plane, my Thomas tells me that he watched it happen as he came and went at his Brother’s request, taking repeated lifetimes on earth meant primarily to try to protect the Lord’s precious teachings. But that is nearly all he has been willing to tell me.

 I forgive my beloved friend. I am coming to see only slowly that he has been keeping some fairly big secrets from me, but those secrets never were his to tell. Perhaps they are not yet mine to tell either, but at some point the Lord’s secrets will belong to humankind since the withholding of them has caused us so much confusion. For me, the central point is Jesus. He must make His Own decisions. He is the most famous, the most amazing person in all of human history, and almost every human being on earth now feels a connection with Him on some level, but still no one actually knows who He is? And despite my Thomas’s two thousand years of secrecy, now that Jesus has decided that He is going to tell His story, Thomas is beginning to open to me. Just a bit.

Almost the first thing that Thomas ever said to me when he first introduced himself through a medium was that we had shared seventeen earth-lifetimes. But he has never been willing to say much more than that. Although apparently we do go far back! In the first of those lifetimes of which I am aware, I was a teenage boy and he was a chieftain and we were early followers of the Lord’s Way who died together in a Roman massacre. In another of those lives, I was a French monk and he was some sort of pamphleteer in around the year twelve hundred. He was allowed to hide in our monastery and write his diatribes, provided that I vetted them. In what I believe was the most recent lifetime we shared, he was Thomas Jefferson, and in his old age I was a law clerk who worked with him on an early version of Liberating Jesus. He was so old at that point that he decided not to publish it. When I was writing My Thomas in 1990 and researching that book at Monticello, they told me they actually had such a manuscript, which fact still amuses me.

I have been asking Thomas what it was like, watching all those victims of Roman Christianity flood into the afterlife over all those years. He tells me that to Jesus they were all His chrished people. They arrived in pain and calling for Him, and He welcomed each of them, and He healed them. But, in the millions? How could He manage that? Thomas says that Jesus just managed it. He had His Council, after all, and the earliest comers helped Him love and heal the later arrivals. Don’t forget what the atmosphere is like in the afterlife. It is nothing but love and light!

 Jesus established an afterlife healing center for the victims of the Inquisitions. I had recalled that there was just an Inquisition or two, and it all happened a long time ago, but in fact Roman Christianity was torturing heretics to death off and on for most of a thousand years! And Thomas tells me that at first their astral bodies would mimic their damaged earthly bodies, so helpers pretending to be medical teams would sew back on whatever the torturers had lopped off, heal the victims’ remembered burns, and so on. Jesus found so much joy in righting the worst wrongs of Roman Christianity. He would sit at the bedsides of people who felt that they needed to be in bed, or more usually He would go from group to group in the beautiful healing gardens, just teaching them and loving them. Very soon He would have them singing and dancing the old Hebrew harvest songs together, which of course was what He would have recalled from the last time He was on earth. Thomas says He taught them to pray all over again. Many of them were angry, and He didn’t deny them their right to be angry. He simply taught them to also be grateful. He taught them to pray, “Thank You God for this flower.” “Thank You God for this friend.” The more questions I have been asking Thomas, the more his memories of those times have been coming back to him.

 But the crucial work of protecting Jesus’s Gospel teachings was something that the Lord did Himself. The Councilors of The First Council of Nicaea in 325 smugly insisted that they were “inspired by God,” and my Thomas tells me that actually they were right. It was Jesus who was working with those Councilors’ minds as they put together the first Roman Christian Bible. Thomas told me this just last Friday, and I slapped my forehead. Omigod. Of course! I feel like an idiot that I never thought of it myself! It was Jesus Himself who chose the four Canonical Gospels and rejected all the other versions. He allowed them to remove some references to reincarnation, but He made sure that enough remained that we would be able to puzzle it all out later. And everything that they wanted to add to the Gospels was added to the back of each in such a way that later on it could be plucked back out again. So then all that Jesus really had to do was to pay loose attention to what was happening on earth, send my Thomas to the various religious hotspots, and tune His mind back in closely to the Councilors’ minds whenever another church Council was later convened. His precious teachings were always under His divine protection.

 It is first now that I even think to wonder what my own role in any of this might have been. Thomas insists to me at once that I have had no role. But I have shared seventeen earth-lifetimes with him? And as I ask the question, I have the answer. Not from Thomas, but from Jesus. The Lord reminds me that in the first Appendix to Liberating Jesus, He outlines how we can recognize and remove what the Councils have added to the Gospels, and we can have again the words that He spoke as He now wants us to have those words. And He calls Liberating Jesus “our book.” I wish I could properly describe His voice.

Thomas tells me that he was so close to Jesus over all that time, and Jesus’s further spiritual growth was so gradual, that he didn’t realize the enormity of what it was that he was witnessing until we began to talk about it here over the past few weeks. And it wasn’t just that Jesus was loving back to spiritual health all the millions of victims of the Inquisitions and the Crusades who needed His comfort and His care. He also was loving and comforting those who had been made to suffer the lifelong terror of never knowing whether perhaps they might have been created by a monstrous God simply so they could populate a hell that of course does not even exist. By far most of the Roman Christians that Jesus has loved into spiritual health over the past seventeen hundred years have been just the billions upon billions of Catholics and Protestants of all those forty-thousand-odd fear-based denominations who have lived and died in Roman Christianity, and unfortunately they were cheated of Jesus’s perfect love-based Way because the Romans had exterminated The Way of Jesus just three hundred years after it began. In welcoming each of them individually, and in loving each of them into spiritual health, Jesus was – inadvertently perhaps, although I am coming to think more and more that He must have known very well what He was doing – Jesus was using Himself to demonstrate the value of His Own Gospel teachings in raising the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind. And what a demonstration it has been!

 In that two-thousand-year astral reality without time, my best guess is that Jesus has demonstrated something like the spiritual equivalent of a million years of humankind’s future spiritual evolution.

One of the emails that I accept daily out of plain curiosity is from a fire-and-brimstone traditional pastor who is sure that the End Times are upon us now. Jesus is about to ride in on His white horse and start right in at lopping off heads. Or whatever it is that the Book of Revelation tells us that Jesus is about to do. I must confess that toward the end of my decades of cover-to-cover Bible-reading, I took to skimming the Book of Revelation, just as I took to skimming the Begats. There are only so may Begats and Lakes of Fire that any sane person is able to take in one lifetime. But it is indeed possible that these are the End Times in one way or another, and indeed Jesus is about to return, since He has asked the most unlikely individual that you can possibly imagine to build for Him His Own website. I am giggling a bit, involuntarily, as I type this. Jesus has so completely perfected Himself that He is at once both infinitely powerful God and as sweet as a perfectly cherished child.

Jesus has certainly proven that His method for achieving human spiritual development works! If that was His goal, then He has succeeded. I can recall that when I used to read the Bible, each time I would end the Old Testament with Malachi and start right in with the Gospel book of Matthew, as I would again freshly encounter Jesus it would be like stepping directly from ancient days right into the modern world and beyond. And Jesus is our model now for what all of humankind is going to be in that blessed and far-distant day when we all have long-since abandoned not only wars and rumors of wars, but even the pointless fears that the Roman religion has brought to us, and we have returned with joy to the Way of Jesus, the Way that our beloved Lord has now proven to us is going to be The Way indeed! That bitterly sadistic and all-too-human fire-and-brimstone pastor would not recognize Jesus now.  

       We will close here with a few eyewitness details from the Gospel of John. When you read today’s frame-verse, you realize that Jesus had already shed His reanimated material body by the time He first encountered His bad-boy disciple, the infamous Doubting Thomas, just a week after His resurrection. By then Jesus had already begun to use an astral body on which He had created mimics of His crucifixion wounds. Which amusing detail purely fascinates me!

Of course, we know from little details given elsewhere, and from the fact that when Jesus first left the tomb He didn’t want His material body to be touched, that it had begun to deteriorate by the time of His resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. So He probably cast aside His material body as early as, say, the following Tuesday. But here, certainly, He could not have entered a locked room and simply appeared there unless He was already operating in astral form. And we know from the fact that mentions of His crucifixion wounds soon cease that He didn’t think it was necessary to keep maintaining them on the astral body that He used for the forty days before His final bodily ascension. But He had to make His point to Doubting Thomas!

 I love the fact that the Bible is so amazingly rich in these little first-person observations that it lets you play the detective, even two millennia later. And we will have more to say about that next week.     

A week later His disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said,
“Peace be with you!” Then He said to Thomas,
“Put your finger here; see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it into My side.
Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
– (JN 20:26-28)

Pearl of Great Price

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by day” (1971)

On April 6th I met Jesus in person. And He turns out to be a profoundly complex but amazingly relatable and even actually human Being. He is human not as you and I are human, but He is human because two thousand years ago He studied the elevated Beings around Him who even back then were of lesser rank, the members of the Godhead Collective and the tall and glowing Beings of Light, and He realized that He was about to be subsumed into the most elevated Collective. And once that happened, He would lose His chance to stay in contact with humankind, so He made the decision to take His personal Collective and live separately on the entrance level of the astral plane. And for the next seventeen hundred earth-years He lovingly welcomed and comforted and healed each of the billions of victims of Roman Christianity and many more people besides, and He taught and served  on Level Three and in the children’s villages.  He never claimed any of the privileges that His ever more exalted rank was earning Him.

Although the night of April 6th has remained vivid in my mind, it has taken nearly three months for the strangeness of the Lord’s situation to dawn on me. And Jesus is such a remarkable Man! He is in some ways childlike, and as low-mileage as anyone on earth might be who at the age of thirty has lived an entirely solitary life in a forest. But at the same time He is deeply powerful, as if He were an immense engine idling. He is personally smooth, without rough edges, gentle and mild, at the pinnacle of power but nevertheless extraordinarily sweet and kind.

My Thomas never volunteers information, even if something is bothering me. One morning last weekend I blurted to him, “Why did you take me there? What was the point? Now I can’t get Him out of my mind!”

“So it is only now that you bring Him up?”

“Isn’t He lonely? He is all by Himself!”

“He is not lonely. He is never alone unless He wants to be alone.”

 “Is John with Him?”

Thomas didn’t answer that question. He threw me a kind of “It’s complicated” thought.

“Doesn’t he visit Jesus?”

Here I got the clear thought that John likes Roman Christianity and nothing more will be said.

But none of this is my business! We each were thinking that same thought at once, which seemed to soften my precious friend. I have come to see that he is in a difficult place. He is sworn to be my spirit guide for this earth-lifetime, and he loves me as all of our spirit guides love us, but at the same time I am coming to see more deeply that he is the close intimate of God Himself. And as we both had that added thought, he seemed to soften further. I can see what an immense relief it is to him that he no longer must keep these two parts of his eternal life separate. And I gather that the separation is ending now only because Jesus wants it to end. Surprisingly, Thomas then said many things in rapid boluses of thought. And as I was trying to take them all in, to my further surprise he told me that it would be acceptable for me to share with you a lot of what he had just told me. I realized as I was hearing him in my mind that of course he was in contact by mind with Jesus as he was talking to me. And he probably is constantly in contact with Jesus. So all of this must be what Jesus wants us to hear. And as I had that thought, I felt the Lord’s affirmation.

 Wow, the veil is really thinning now! 

Thomas told me that Jesus made the choice when He returned from His lifetime on earth never to rejoin the Godhead Collective. This universe exists as a place for human beings to experience the spiritual stressors that will enable us to better grow spiritually. And The Way that Jesus developed for us to achieve that result required that He maintain His identity as Jesus, and also maintain His personal Collective so He could better lead His new movement. By then He had achieved a status which allowed Him to make these choices. But He still was to remain at the Godhead level. That was His earned status. That was the established order of things, and the Celestial Council was in ultimate control. However, when Jesus realized how rapidly His being at that level was putting Him completely out of touch with the earth, He chose to permanently occupy a lower place. And so, once again He was making waves. 

Thomas has long since told me that the Being Who is Jesus, uniquely perhaps among all the beings who ever have been born on earth, loves people. I mean, He really loves people! So to be separated from where He could care for and nurture the followers of His precious Way was unbearable for Him, especially since already the nascent Roman Christian movement was beginning to deliver up its first victims as it assumed control on earth of the followers of the Lord’s Way. The Celestial Council soon found that it could not prevent Jesus from welcoming and comforting and healing those victims. And thus began the Lord’s seventeen-hundred-year ministry that is moving toward its end only now, as the Roman phase of Christianity apparently at last is nearing its end.

I don’t think that I fully understand what I am about to say, but Thomas wants me to try. God is infinitely powerful, infinitely creative, and perfectly loving Consciousness energy. The material universe consists of nothing else. Jesus told us as much when He told us that God is Spirit (JN 4:24). More precisely, God is Consciousness at its highest vibration. The Apostle Paul told us that it is within God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). And loving others, exercising love constantly, is how we all grow spiritually, so as Jesus loved all those  billions of damaged Christians into spiritual health over seventeen centuries, He became perhaps more personally powerful even than the entire Godhead Collective combined. It was a byproduct of the way He was ministering, and it was something that Thomas tells me now that he noticed more than Jesus did as Thomas was coming and going, taking repeated lifetimes on earth to do what he could to try to guard Jesus’s teachings as they had carefully preserved them within the Roman Christian Bible. He was with Jesus almost constantly between lifetimes as he watched with Him the development of Roman Christianity, and then its course through all those centuries.

Thomas has repeatedly told me, and he emphasized yet again to me last weekend, that none of Roman Christian theology has anything to do with Jesus. And it has little to do with God! But Thomas tells me that he never has heard the slightest complaint about any of this from Jesus, nor the least bit of resentment of the religion that was named for Him. And my Thomas has seen nothing from Jesus but perfect love for the billions of Christians who have returned home revering Him, although their religion has nothing to do with the Lord’s Own Way.

Jesus’s original Collective is vastly augmented now by a battery of Christian saints and clergy, and all those lay Christians who have returned home as His devoted followers. In the astral plane, Jesus now heads a gigantic spiritual family. So as we talked last weekend, I wondered to Thomas about what role he might still play for Jesus. He is just an earthly brother from the Lord’s final ordinary lifetime that I calculate must have ended maybe seven thousand earth-years ago, even before the Lord’s ascension to the Godhead level. So in practical terms, what might Thomas be to Jesus now? At that, my Thomas smiled. Even though I cannot see him more than vaguely in my mind, I can feel his emotion when he smiles. And he almost never smiles. He said thoughtfully, “He tells me that I am the only one who still outranks Him. I am His older brother, right?” Thomas even chuckled a bit, as if to himself.

I thought about that. Then I said, “He cannot be serious!”

“He is perfectly serious. He loves people with His whole heart, but all He ever gets is worship. The only one who can love Him as a human man seems to be me. So I am His pearl of great price.”

It was most of another day before I said to Thomas, “He really said that?”

“He says it all the time.” Then Thomas added, “He uses that term in the Bible (MT 13:46). And that is also why He loves those fish. And the deer. They don’t know that He is the King of Kings!”

I know what you are thinking now. Jesus can hear us talking about Him. So we shouldn’t talk about Him! We can talk easily in front of my family because our conversations are by mind. But when Jesus can hear us talking about Him, isn’t that embarrassing?

It was. But when I first had that thought, Thomas said, “You wonder why Jesus allows you to share what we are saying. My child, He is not a human man, who has a need to hide His thoughts. His thoughts are your gift! Jesus loves everyone, but He trusts almost no one in a human body because He knows their hearts. He sees how His name is used by clergymen to build their earthly wealth. It is the hardest thing for Jesus to trust anyone in a human body because money is the great human obsession (MT 6:24). When I took you to meet with Him in April, it was by His invitation. He would like you to become more comfortable with Him. But He believes that He can trust you.”

Wow. It may be my Thomas’s new pride in me, which I can feel, even more than the amazement of the Lord’s expression of trust that really makes me smile.

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by day” (1971)

Seeking Sense in Hindsight

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.
With God as our father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Sometimes people try to imagine how the world will look in a hundred years. But what about a thousand years? And have you ever wondered how people living a hundred years from now might look back at us? Or what about people living a thousand years from now? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder how this moment is going to look in hindsight, when viewed from a thousand years from today?

Someone who was interviewing me about Seek Reality Online just this past week asked me what I hoped it might achieve over the next five years. And I miffed that question. Five years isn’t much time. But a thousand years is a whole different matter!

It has lately been estimated, based upon surveys, that close to ninety percent of all the people on earth are still afraid to die. To Craig Hogan and me, that is a horrifying statistic! If only the mainstream scientific community had listened to the illustrious Max Planck when he said in 1931, “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.” And then in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Max Planck received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. Just think how the world could have changed back then, if the scientific community had listened to him! Dr. Planck knew that the matrix of matter is consciousness. And at some point in the next thousand years, whether it happens sooner or it happens later, that fact will be seen to be incontrovertible. But meanwhile, as Dr. Planck also said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” But we have already had three generations of scientists grow up since he said those words! And still, even today, more than three quarters of all the people in the world are so ignorant of the fact that their minds are eternal that, tragically, they remain terrified of death. The consequences of their fear are manifold. And they are tragic beyond words, as you will shortly see.

So Craig Hogan and I and our significant others are giving up our dreams of retiring in Tahiti. Instead, we have resolved to work until we take our final earthly breaths, and to knock down that awful ignorance-of-death statistic by using our Seek Reality Online platform to teach as many people as possible the glorious certainty that our minds are eternal, and that the life beyond this life truly is wonderful beyond their fondest imaginings. We don’t want to go home ourselves until we can leave behind a world where at least five percent more of the people on earth are as certain as we are that their lives are eternal!

But, what good will that do?

Well, first let’s look back from a thousand years from now at the world as it is today. I know that doing this is hard to get your mind around! But let’s be as frank as we can. Let’s look at all the political battling, at the wars here and there that cause so much pain, at the vast disparities between poverty and wealth, and at the places in the world where a few hold power and put multitudes in such desperate straits. Let’s notice the soulless power of transnational mega-corporations, although – true – in some parts of the west there is a healthier sense of middle-class ease. Some worry, though, that our middle-class lifestyle carries a risk of causing global warming. My particular gripe is that we are gradually choking the seas with plastic bits. And over us all hovers the minute-by-minute threat of nuclear annihilation! One way or another or in some combination, it seems impossible to imagine that this world and the human species that inhabits it can survive for another hundred years, and never mind another thousand years!

There is one word that describes what unites every one of these problems. From the wars to the multinational corporations carelessly spewing their carbon and plastics, and the plutocrats and dictators seizing power, and frankly every other mess in the world that we despair of ever solving. No matter what is wrong, FEAR is at its base! We know that, of course, because fear is the lowest consciousness vibration. It is fear that drives people and nations to seize and accumulate their money and their power, and yet they never have enough to ever really feel safe enough. Fear is at the root of jealousy, anger, avarice, and every other negative emotion you can name!

So we wallow in all the emotional filth that fear produces, not realizing until in some much more enlightened age it will be pointed out to us that:

  • All of these problems are loosely related, and they all stem from our existential fears; and
  • All of them have at their core our nameless terror of death and extinction.

Those looking back at us from a thousand years from now will understand all of this perfectly well. They will diagnose all of our current problems, trace them to their singular source, and justifiably blame the culprit, which is a shortsighted scientific community that barely a century prior to this benighted moment turned itself into a dogma-based belief-system in order to avoid the remote possibility that it might discover a Christian God.

So, no Tahitian bungalows for us! When I explained all of this to the reporter who had asked me that question about where I hoped to be in the next five years, I told him that once we teach as few as five percent more of the world’s population that they will live eternally, then since all human minds are connected, we will raise the consciousness vibration of the population of all humanity enough to stop all wars and immensely reduce the political problems and the oligarchic oppression worldwide. He calculated then that we were going to have to reach and teach more than three hundred million more people. So we had better get busy!

Of course, all we can do is the best that we can do. But apparently wise souls as diverse as Confucius and Eleanor Roosevelt have been quoted as having said that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness! So our candle is lit. And since all that we will have to do is to educate what amounts to the entire population of the United States, we plan to concentrate our efforts here.

Where Roman Christianity is concerned, however, the view from a thousand years from now begins to look increasingly dark. The religion’s stubborn insistence on clinging to its Roman version rather than returning to its roots in the teachings of Jesus seems to be cutting itself off from those roots together, and at a rapid rate: since 1944, when 92% of Americans still believed in God, the percentage of Americans believing in God has now dipped to an appalling 81%. I plan to build a companion website for SRO that will teach the Way of Jesus, but that likely won’t be nearly enough to stop what is an increasingly rapid decline.

It does feel ironic to think that when historians look back a thousand years from now, perhaps the greatest gift that Roman Christianity is likely to be thought to have given to the world during its so often benighted reign will have been its truly remarkable attempts at an open-minded science. Of course, they did it with a motive in mind. In trying to prove that this or that complex biological phenomenon could not have arisen without an active Mind involved, the Christian scientists that will be lauded then for their farsightedness were trying to prove the existence of the Christian God. But nevertheless, while heavily funded twenty-first-century materialist scientists were wasting billions of dollars trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, some really brilliant contemporary scientists with very little funding were doing groundbreaking work in abundantly proving that phenomena like DNA required a Designer.           I admire some of these unsung geniuses more than I can say!            

And it amuses me to imagine what a laugh those future scientists are going to have when they study these years. Think of it! The supposedly serious scientists of today will look like Luddite knuckleheads, seeking a source of consciousness inside the human brain, when it will long since have become self-evident that consciousness is the base creative force. Consciousness is who we are. It also is the water in which we swim. And the Christians, by contrast, will look like heroes, doing their pioneering work with almost no funding. I have attended a couple of their conferences, and have been blown away by the joyous pioneering scholarship of people who are free to do their science without the burden of that heavy hand of their own self-imposed dogmas.

And so we press on. But it gives you a new perspective on your own life and culture when you imagine the distant future watching you making your decisions, doesn’t it? I can’t think of any generation, with the exception perhaps of the American Founders, who lived with the conscious thought that people a thousand years hence were actively watching them going about their work!

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment now.
With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment and live each moment
With peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995), Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)