Author: Roberta Grimes

Love’s Imperfect Fruit

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The road is long, with many a winding turn,
That leads us to who knows where, who knows when.
But I’m strong, strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

 So, on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear. We’ll get there.
For I know he would not encumber me.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!

 If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another. It’s a long, long road
From which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?
– Bob Russell (1914-1970), Bobby Scott (1937-1990), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

Even the most carefully loving followers of Jesus, trying prayerfully and with the greatest concern to live a deeply Christian life, can have trouble doing all the most loving things perfectly well. We all act impulsively sometimes, and we thereby can do other people inadvertent harm. Perhaps we don’t completely understand some situations, or we haven’t thought through all the possible results of every one of our actions. Or we might face situations where, no matter what we do, someone is going to be harmed, in any event. Or perhaps, at the very least, someone is bound to be severely inconvenienced?

And sometimes, it is our very eagerness to help that can cause other people the very worst tragedies. The easy and happy cure that we might spot for someone else’s pain might actually worsen his disease; or it even might turn him into a crazyman killer who is likely to murder someone else. Real life is so complicated! And, as some wag once said, “the road to hell is paved with good intentions”. These problems have been weighing heavily on my mind of late, especially since a couple of these sorts of problems which have been frequently in the recent news came near to affecting my own life pretty heavily when I was very young. And some people, whose lives may not have been personally affected by these two issues at all, nevertheless have their own strong opinions on these two matters in particular. All that I can do here is to share my personal experiences, and then suggest to you that, whatever your own strictly-held views might be, these issues are more complicated than you might wish them to be. I do think, therefore, that each of the issues that we will be discussing here today is a lot more complex than the politicians would have us believe that they are. In fact, my Thomas and I believe that the two issues that we will discuss here first really belong outside the political arena altogether.

ABORTION

I was born as what was back then called “a seven-month baby”. My parents’ wedding pictures actually contain a little family of three. In fact, both my mother and her sister seem to have been pretty carefree about birth control, since my seven-month-baby cousin was born only a month after I was born. I grew up happily and feeling very much loved, so I never gave any of this a thought until the Roe v. Wade Supreme Court decision which made abortion an easy alternative was handed down in 1973. I recall thereafter arguing in a law school class how badly flawed the Roe decision really was, for heaven’s sake, with arbitrary trimesters written into it, and so on. It was flagrantly and absurdly judge-made law, and it needed to be overturned, as eventually it was, just over fifty years later. Around the time of Roe’s original decision, though, with abortion then so much in the news, it occurred to me to thank my mother for her kindly not having aborted me. I thanked her for instead marrying my father and carrying me to term. And my own dear and much-beloved mother looked up at me from whatever she happened to be reading at the time, and she said to me, pretty coldly I thought, “What choice did I have?” My own mother said those actual words to me. TO ME! To her own beloved child!! I said nothing to her in return. What could I have said? But I realized then, in that horrible moment, and I was aware for the rest of her life, and now my own, that her culture had taught her that before I was born, I had been nothing more than a tumor of cells, a mere parasite on her body. And had she actually been given that terrible option to abort me, then yes, she probably would have aborted me. And then, I never would have come to be.

My Take on Abortion, from Love’s Perspective: We afterlife researchers know now for certain that I was already fully and completely myself when my parents’ egg and sperm first came together at my conception. Even before that moment, there was a great deal of forethought that had already gone into everything from the design and planning of every detail of the lifetime that I am living now, including my gender and the location and choice of parents for my precious planned lifetime to come. True, there is some suggestion nowadays that if there is a high likelihood that the mother will choose abortion, perhaps no planned occupant will be allocated to that fetus; but the jury is still out on that. There are too many psychics who have witnessed fetuses being whisked out of abortion rooms by literal angels who have come to take those children to the afterlife homes where they will be lovingly reared to afterlife adulthood. My Take is that unprotected sexual intercourse ALWAYS should be seen as the potential production of a living child. So, you must never have unprotected sex unless you are willing to devote those next nine months to a possible pregnancy!

But, what about rape? Well, no rape ever was the resulting infant’s fault, now, was it? One Miss USA contestant back in 2014 told us that she had been the product of a violent rape. Her mother had frankly explained to her why she didn’t have a present father, and had told her that having her as a precious child to love had been her motherly compensation for that awful assault. The girl, once grown, then devoted herself to advocating for victims of sexual assault.

TRANSGENDERISM

 Throughout my childhood, I wanted to be a boy. This was long before transgenderism was ever a thing, and I was fortunate indeed that it was long before children were given in their schools the peculiar notion that they might change their genders, because if I ever had been told such a thing was possible, I would have signed up for that surgery in a heartbeat! As it was, I never told anyone about my problem, not a friend and not even either of my parents. I remember that I generally hung out a lot with the boys in grade school, and I also had shy crushes on a couple of girls. In the third grade, I grew rapidly in height, so I became the tallest child in my class. And when they did standardized testing, they foolishly let us know that I also tested to be the smartest child in our class, so then I was teased about that, and I had to beat up some of the boys. I was tough! But then, right about when I was turning fifteen, something wonderful happened. I entered full-blown puberty. I never had talked to anyone about my secret, desperate wish to be a boy, so the fact that my wish was lessening rapidly as I drifted toward feeling ever more female was no big deal to anyone but me. I turned sixteen, and then seventeen. Wow, the transformation in my feelings was amazing! By the time I was attending an all-girls’ college, I was through puberty, and I was happy to be an entirely heterosexual female. As it turned out, all that I ever had needed to straighten out completely was hormones!

My Take on Transgenderism, from Love’s Perspective: I grew up with a younger sister and a female cousin who were close to me in age, so whatever they were wearing and playing at and talking about while we were growing up, my cover was just to copy them. So I was mentally mostly a boy, while pretending to be a girl. Mostly, though, I lived a solitary childhood. I read and wrote and drew pictures of horses, and I rode and cared for my own horse. I just kept my private thoughts. It was not until decades after I grew up that I met my Thomas, my spirit guide, and he suggested to me a very sensible reason why I had wanted to be a boy before my female hormones kicked in. I lived seventeen incarnations with my beloved Thomas since I first met him, and our first meeting was right after the death and resurrection of Jesus. He assures me now that in every one of those lifetimes that I lived with him, I was always a man. We aren’t sure about my earlier lifetimes, but it’s possible that this is the first time I ever have been a woman. So, it’s no wonder it felt weird for me to be born into a female body this time around. I have been researching this whole transgender thing, and in fact I think it is likely that what happened to me – a switch in genders before this incarnation – is probably the usual reason why any child ever might feel “transgendered”. And if they do feel that way, then I am living proof that puberty is likely to cure the problem. So, I think that no child ever should be told that transgenderism even is a ‘thing”, for heaven’s sake! My Take is that if adults choose to lop off parts of their bodies, or to begin lifelong hormone therapies, then that is entirely up to them. But it is literally a criminal act to inflict such awful, aberrant ideas on children, when for their bodies’ natural hormones to kick in is very likely to entirely fix any gender confusion that they might have in childhood.

FREEING DANGEROUS CRIMINALS OUT OF KINDNESS TO THE CRIMINALS

Recently, a gruesome murder occurred in North Carolina that could so easily have been prevented.  A sweet and innocent twenty-three-year-old refugee from Ukraine who had come to the United States in search of a better life was commuting home from work, when a monstrous serial criminal stood up from the train seat behind her and stabbed her in the neck, murdering her. The compounded facts that this girl had fled a country at war, only to be murdered here; and her entire killing was caught on camera; and on top of it all, her killer had a ten-year criminal history, was clearly mentally ill and a major threat to society, so he never should have been on the streets at all made this whole story big nationwide. We see Iryna Zarutska just casually step up onto that safe and wholesome commuter train and swing down into a seat, very busy at once with her phone at the end of just another work day in the land of the free. And then, because some judge had favored that criminal monster’s liberty over your precious life and my life and Iryna’s, we watch him coldly stab her to death and walk away.

My Take on Criminals’ Freedom, from Love’s Perspective: There have been a number of stories like this in the news lately, about lax and sloppy judges and prosecutors releasing repeated criminal offenders without requiring them even to post any bail at all. And, not very surprisingly, all too often, those released criminals have then killed or otherwise severely damaged some innocent person’s life not long after they were released. In this case, after Iryna Zarutska’s death, the North Carolina legislature thought better of this situation, and it passed some sensible legislation that should make it less likely in the future for such an appalling murder by a released career criminal to happen in that state. My Take is that when the choice is between showing love to criminals and showing love to innocent community members, it is imperative that those in positions of authority always must put the interests of the communities they have sworn to protect before the interests of known criminals!

 So, now where are we? How can deeper and more thoughtful love solve these, and other problems of the kinds of love-based choices that we are daily being forced to make between people? For example:

  • Is it possible to love the mother who has an oopsie pregnancy, while we also love her unborn child? Well, of course it is! Carry the child to term, then give it up for adoption if you cannot raise the child yourself. We’re talking nine months of your life, but all of the child’s! If you kill that child for the sake of your own convenience, you will feel her abortion pain and lost life during your eventual life-review, my dear, and you surely don’t want that! 
  • Experts insist now that we must give transgender children puberty-blockers, and thereby they prevent the very puberty that is most likely to solve those children’s whole “transgender” problem. Which makes no sense at all! Every cell of each child’s body will always remain the gender that he or she was at birth, no matter what we do. So, love really demands that we try that easy and likely transgender fix of letting the child complete a natural puberty first of all, does it not?
  • And as for whether or not love requires that we must lock up potentially dangerous offenders, well, what do you think? The whole idea behind “cashless bail” – the idea that we should simply release these poor, dear criminal souls right away so they can kill again, and as soon as possible – really makes no sense at all, and it never did make any sense. The legal system exists first of all to protect innocent civilians, for heaven’s sake! So it is time that we insist that a loving criminal code must return to making the absolute protection of all innocents its first priority.

As you can see from only these three examples, strictly following Jesus’s command that we love everyone perfectly requires considerably more thought and care than we might at first have thought that it did, because love must include us all, and even the helpless unborn. Jesus didn’t preach, but rather think of how very well He taught! Here is my favorite example of Jesus teaching love’s true commandment of perfect love, from the Gospel Book of John. 3 “The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, 4 they said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. 5 Now, in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?’ 6 They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. 7 But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them,‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ 8 Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. 9 When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. 10 Straightening up, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?’ 11 She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now, on sin no more'” (JN 8:3-11).

And there you have it, my dear ones. for Jesus, love is something like a many-sided game of chess. Because everyone must be invited to play. 

 And the load Doesn’t weigh me down at all!
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. He’s my brother!
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!
– Bob Russell (1914-1970), Bobby Scott (1937-1990), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Forgiving

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!

 This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,
Age of Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius!
Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust, abounding.
No more falsehoods or derisions,
Golden living dreams of visions,
Mystic crystal revelation,
And the mind’s true liberation,
Aquarius, Aquarius, Aquarius!

 When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
– Galt MacDermot (1928-2018), Gerome Ragn (1935-1991), James Rado (1932-2022), from “Let the Sun Shine in” (1968)

I have been astonished as I have gone about this past week in Massachusetts, counseling some of my longtime and very-much-beloved legal clients, by how many people have mentioned to me their surprise at Erika Kirk’s public forgiveness of her young husband’s assassin. Well, of course she forgave him! She and Charlie Kirk and the organization they founded together, Turning Point USA, teach Christianity, and forgiveness is the very base and core of everything that Jesus taught. There can be no real love without forgiveness. And as for our personal spiritual growth, unless we forgive completely every great wrong that is done to us, then very much spiritual growth will be impossible for us ever to achieve. Erika Kirk said as part of her message during Charlie Kirk’s extraordinary funeral service that was held last Sunday in a football stadium, and was streamed worldwide to what now is estimated to have been more than a hundred million people, that she forgave her husband’s assassin because Jesus had said from the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:34). But Jesus gave her even much bigger reasons for forgiving Charlie’s assassin, as Charlie himself could have told her during his lifetime! Forgiveness of even the worst wrongs ever done to us is the greatest gift that each of us can give to ourselves.

We come into this lifetime as what amounts to unsophisticated Neanderthals. Have you ever watched a baby closely for very long? They are cute, yes, but they are selfish and unthinking. They live lowly me-me-me sorts of material lives bent on just survival, and on grasping for the simplest pleasures in the basely material world that they perceive to be around them. But the only reason why we come into these lifetimes at all is to learn to grow spiritually. It’s a hard, rough place, this world sadly is, and the worst thing about it, saddest of all to say, is the evil in the hearts of some of the other people who share this world with us. By contrast, our true home is all love and light! Still, we need the ugly, negative stresses of this world to push against, as the  most effective way for us to achieve the elevation in our spiritual vibrations that we so eagerly crave. This kind of spiritual growth needs negativity as a stressor, especially in spirituality’s lower ranges. And back home, we come to hunger for spiritual growth, because we know and are close to some much more spiritually developed beings, which of course are all around us in our eternal home! So, even though we are not thrilled by the thought of it, eventually we plan another lifetime on earth, with plenty of pains and stresses planned into it, hoping that in this next lifetime we will at last raise our spiritual vibration enough that this can be our last necessary earth-lifetime.

As infants, we are not much in contact with home, and we are fearful and selfish. But most of us are soon back in contact with home in childhood, and we then easily can maintain that close contact throughout our lives. We have come to earth with active use of only thirty to forty percent of our vast, eternal minds, stripped down now for efficient spiritual learning. But that is by no means all that we have for support while we are here! In addition:

  • Each one of us has a primary spirit guide while we are on earth, who helped us to plan this lifetime, and who is with us throughout our lives, always in close communication. Most people consider that small voice in their minds to be simply a part of themselves, and too often they will feel free to ignore its prompts; but it is always there, trying to keep us on the life-path that we planned with our spirit guide’s loving assistance.
  • We also may have one or more additional spirit guides for specific purposes, helping us to learn skills or to master difficulties at various times in our lives. If you are writing a book, learning to play the piano, fighting an illness, and having marital troubles, you might have six or seven additional guides for brief periods, just for those specific issues.
  • Most of us will travel out of body most nights while our bodies sleep, and nearly all of us have complete amnesia for these frequent experiences. The silver cord that keeps our spiritual body attached to our material body, and keeps our material body alive, is unbelievably stretchy, and the astral plane which includes our eternal home is right here but just at a higher vibration, so astral travel is a lot like changing television channels. So, while our material bodies are in their deepest phase of sleep, we consult with our spirit guides, we visit with loved ones, and we stay in close touch with what are in fact our true eternal lives.

So, even though as infants we have little awareness of who we truly are or why we are here, by the time we are leaving the first decade of these lifetimes, with the love of our parents and with their guidance, and with the further gentle guidance of our loving home-based-team we can begin to be quite aware of who we are, and more and more clearly we also can begin to understand spiritually why we are here.

Or else… for some, not so much at all. If you will again read the three points above by which our personal home-teams stay in very close contact with each of us throughout our earth-lives, and are ever more carefully guiding us, but so very quietly, so utterly subliminally and respectfully, you will realize that it can be easy for the more aggressive and negative folks among us to choose to flat-out ignore their guidance. So for them, effectively their spiritual guidance is optional. Not only is it optional, but there is a lot that can go wrong, and can prevent some people from ever really hooking up with their home-team guidance at all. And that is how serial killers and other evil people can come to be as they go about their lives living solo in this cold and often cruel material world. People without parents, and especially those without male figures for their childhood and youthful training and guidance; people who never have been taught to distinguish right from wrong by any earthly mentors; and especially those who have been maltreated, or have had evil examples in life on which to model themselves, or both: these poor, benighted souls are not going to ever even hear the faint and always lovingly and very respectfully whispered guidance of their spirit guides from deep inside their own minds.

 So, true, no one ever comes to earth having planned to be an evil monster! But our spiritual guidance is sufficiently subtle that, especially if even a few things go wrong for us in our lives on earth, it sometimes does not take much of a negative push to drive us off what might have been a positively-planned start in life toward ever deeper negativity. And so, it seems to have been the case for Charlie Kirk’s assassin, from what accounts we have seen to date, that he simply went off the rails. He was raised in an intact two-parent family, and his parents said that until about the age of twenty, he seemed to have no aberrant thoughts at all. He then may have been radicalized by his online friends, but his motive for assassinating Charlie Kirk likely won’t be entirely clear until his trial.

Still, Charlie Kirk’s assassin is not our focus today. Why was it so important that Erika Kirk forgive her husband’s killer? Less than a week after Charlie’s death at the age of only thirty-one, she pointed to the fact that Jesus from the cross had forgiven His tormentors and executioners “because they did not know what they were doing” as her reason for forgiving the boy – well, barely a man – who had slain her husband. But from the cross was not the only, and nor was it even the most important time that Jesus ever talked about forgiveness!

For Jesus, forgiveness was a constant teaching. It was nearly as important to Him as was love, and indeed He saw forgiveness as an indispensable precursor to love. Of course He said, ‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:36-40). So, love is most important! Game, set, and match.

21 Then Peter came and said to Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” 22 Jesus *said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:20-22). He said,  “Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone, so that your Father who is in heaven will also forgive you your transgressions” (MK 11:25).

Jesus also routinely used His forgiveness of sins as a shorthand way to enlist the powers of people’s own minds in their healing. As He did in this example from the Gospel Book of Luke: 20 Seeing their faith, He said, “Friend, your sins are forgiven you.” 21 The scribes and the Pharisees began to reason, saying, “Who is this man who speaks blasphemies? Who can forgive sins, but God alone?” 22 But Jesus, aware of their reasonings, answered and said to them, “Why are you reasoning in your hearts? 23 Which is easier, to say, ‘Your sins have been forgiven you,’ or to say, ‘Get up and walk’? 24 But, so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,”—He said to the paralytic—“I say to you, get up, and pick up your stretcher and go home.” 25 Immediately he got up before them, and picked up what he had been lying on, and went home glorifying God (LK 5:20-25).

Even when Jesus had only just risen from the dead on that first Easter morning, forgiveness was on His mind. Here is the relevant passage from the Gospel Book of John: “He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord. 21 So Jesus said to them again, ‘Peace be with you; as the Father has sent Me, I also send you.’ 22 And when He had said this, He breathed on them and said to them, ‘Receive the Holy Spirit. 23 If you forgive the sins of any, their sins have been forgiven them; if you retain the sins of any, they have been retained’” (JN 20:20-23).

Forgiveness is crucial, because until you have forgiven everyone for everything, whatever you still have not forgiven is going to weigh ever more heavily on your mind. If you are Erika Kirk and someone has assassinated your husband, until you have forgiven that assassin from your heart, then every time you think of your beloved husband, now taken from you, you will unavoidably remember his assassination, and the bitterness of that will only grow ever worse for you. So, free your love for your husband at once from that last, tragic stain! Forgiveness is the gift that you give to yourself.

 And forgiveness really is so easy! Thomas tells me that Jesus taught what they called “prevenient forgiveness”, or words that meant something like it, “forgiving all wrongs at once”. But since this process requires gestures that Jesus’s contemporaries apparently did not understand were important for the process of retraining their minds, this teaching did not survive. But the teaching is so simple. You just gather every wrong with sweeps of your arms and squash it all with your hands into a nice, tight ball. Then with both hands you slowly push it away while you say aloud, “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.” And you do that over and over until you start feeling that you truly have forgiven. This does work amazingly well. And it’s permanent! When Thomas first taught me to do prevenient forgiveness this way, back in 2011, I spent about two months that summer completely retraining my mind with this technique. I am amazed to tell you that it worked so perfectly that I have never had to do it again. And now Thomas tells me that this is my last necessary earth-lifetime

I saw the musical Hair in New York City in 1969, I think it was, when I was fresh out of college. I loved it! And yes, a few of the actors did take off all their clothes and dance around naked. The end of the Sixties was a genuinely weird, but still a very hopeful time. I recall asking some people what the Age of Aquarius mentioned in our frame-verse actually was, and being told that we were just on the cusp of it. Someone said that the true astronomical Age of Aquarius, when peace would guide the planets and love would steer the stars, would not be coming until we were a great deal older. Well, we who were young then are pretty old now, wouldn’t you say? So, isn’t it about time for Jupiter to at last align with Mars, so peace can begin to guide the planets, and love can step in and steer the stars?

When the moon is in the Seventh House,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
– Galt MacDermot (1928-2018), Gerome Ragn (1935-1991), James Rado (1932-2022), from “Let the Sun Shine in” (1968)

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Love Above Politics

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Now I’ve been happy lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come,
And I believe it could be, Something good has begun.
Oh, I’ve been smilin’ lately, Dreaming about the world as one!
And I believe it could be, Someday it’s going to come.

 ‘Cause out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train.
Oh, peace train take this country! Come take me home again.
Now I’ve been smiling lately, Thinkin’ about the good things to come!
And I believe it could be, Something good has begun.

 Oh, peace train soundin’ louder, Glide on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah, Come on the peace train.
Yes, peace train holy roller, Everyone jump on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah, Come on the peace train.
– Cat Stevens, also known as Yusuf Islam, from “Peace Train” (1971).

My dear Thomas and I never discuss politics with you here, and nor will this be a post about taking any sort of political position. But all of us live in this material world; and so inevitably, our spiritual lives are affected by the fact that we must live in these often very political nations. And there are times when things happen around us which have such profound, and also such manifestly troubling spiritual implications for us that we are going to have to deal with in some fashion, if onlyso we can put them to rest in our minds. If we believe them to be unmentionable among us, or if we foolishly argue about these stupid political issues that we cannot possibly affect, then we only will lower our spiritual vibrations, completely unnecessarily. And we might thereby retard our personal spiritual growth. One such potentially troubling event happened in the American State of Utah on this past September 10th. I was going to say nothing about it here, but it has become surprising clear in only a couple of weeks that the assassination of Charlie Kirk, who was the head of Turning Point USA (TPUSA), might possibly become one of those few events that cleave American history with a clarifying fire. He was not especially well known, and he was only thirty-one years old; but the internet spreads news everywhere now, and instantaneously. From the moment that bullet hit Charlie Kirk’s neck, it oddly seems that American history, and therefore all of human history, may have been set upon a new track altogether.     

To find the last previous event that felt a lot the way this one does to me now – so awful, and at the same time so transformative – I’ve got to go back in my mind just over sixty years. Our high school was overcrowded, and therefore we were running on morning and afternoon shifts. My sister and I had just arrived home from school, and we were making our lunch when the phone rang. Our father was calling to tell us to turn on the TV, because the president had just been shot. Every American who was alive and aware in November of 1963 can still recall the events of that week, as if they had happened just yesterday. And I am thinking now that, while history never repeats itself, surprisingly often, it will rhyme. Now another young and charismatic politician with a beautiful wife and two very young children, who similarly believed that he was trying to bring wonderful new ideas to a young generation of Americans who were born in a new and hopeful century, has been assassinated for his efforts and for his ideas. And this recent assassination, too, seems to me to have very strangely happened, just as it happened during that last historical moment in time, just at the nexus in history when America has reached another socialist/communist bridge too far. But, see if you agree.

I am so apolitical at this point that I try not even to prefer either political party.  My parents were Republicans; but then, so are the parents of the killer in this second major assassination, when clearly his political views as he has expressed them, post-arrest, by the time that he was pulling that trigger were about as far left as one can get. And my parents were Republicans because all their friends were also Republicans; and this was in Massachusetts, mind you! When Massachusetts is one of the few American states where being a Republican always has been an exercise in electoral futility. But I think I leaned more toward Democratic ideas when I was young, to the extent that I had a preference. I was charmed by Jack Kennedy and his beautiful family, and I thought the Democratic presidents seemed to care more about regular people than did Eisenhower, Nixon, or any other president until Reagan. But I think I always have been simply apolitical. I always have given little thought to anything that I have lacked the power to change.

 Researching this article took Thomas and me a surprising amount of time! For one thing, most of the major news sources were of no use at all. They seemed to know almost nothing about who Charlie Kirk even had been, and they had no clue about why young Americans were going what seemed to be so insane over his having been so abruptly murdered. But there were other news sources online that seemed to be following this story closely. I subscribed to a few of them; and then the deeper I went, the more I wanted also to go higher and broader, since I began to see a century-sized story here that I thought was more interesting than was even such an important murder. It occurred to me as I was reading these sources that my parents’ old white-shoe Republican party really had effectively died out back somewhere around the 1960s. That was when the Republicans were no longer able to get working majorities in the U.S. House and Senate. But then along came two Democratic-turned-Republican presidential candidates, who decided to pick up and use that nearly-dead Republican husk as their political zombie-suit – please follow along with me here – because by 1980, the takeover of the American Democratic party by far-left international socialism/communism was just effectively beginning on the American west coast.     

Ronald Reagan was our first Democrat-turned-Republican president. He frankly told us when he was running for president in 1980 that he was a longtime Democrat, and he said that he hadn’t left his party, but his party had left him by sliding too far to the left. So, Reagan picked up the Republican presidential mantle, since it was no longer in effective use by anyone else; and he very well governed at the start of the Eighties as a populist Democrat. After all, that was what he was! He chose as his running mate an old-style, white-shoe Republican in the person of George H.W. Bush. The two George Bushes, father and son, then governed after Reagan like the old-style Republican presidents that they were, and not as populists. But they did manage to get three terms because of the goodwill engendered for that second George Bush by his responsible handling of the 911 terrorist attacks.

Then came more Democrats, and fortunately Bill Clinton was shoehorned in between the Bushes, and he was in the classic Democratic populist mold. But he looks to me to have been the last Democratic president in the style of Roosevelt, Truman, and my personal favorite, John F. Kennedy. When Barack Obama followed that second George Bush in 2008, he was the first American president who was more in the big-government, socialist mold. And the too-far-leftward-for-the-American-middle-class drift of the Democratic party was then complete. From the viewpoint of an impartial scholar simply doing research and taking a long perspective of America’s presidential history, we had reached an interesting point as the 2016 election approached. Obama had no obvious successor at the end of his second term; and frankly, I think his more socialist ideas had already worn out their welcome with many older Americans, anyway. My parents’ Republican party was still in ideas-zombie-land, and the Democratic party was on its way toward becoming too pushy and top-heavy, and not what Americans wanted, either. Neither party had any new ideas, and nor were there any obvious rising political stars on either side.  

 So then, in June of 2015, down that golden escalator came Donald Trump. Like Reagan, Trump was a longtime, old-style populist Democrat. He always had wanted to run for president, and by then he was almost too old to do it. He chose a calculating, and kind of a brilliant way to do it; and in the process, he created a new Republican Party to fill that Republican zombie-suit that actually, for a while, may become unbeatable:

  • First, he used the successful Ronald Reagan as his presidential model. Trump had switched to the Republican party some years earlier, so he could run as a Republican; and he has governed more as an old-style populist Democrat, just as Reagan had done forty-odd years before.
  • Second, Trump used the internet well. It was a tool that neither JFK nor Reagan had possessed. He did narrow and targeted polling to find out what middle- and working-class Americans wanted, and what young men in particular wanted. And whatever eighty or more percent of his targeted groups preferred, those objectives alone became Donald Trump’s whole presidential platform.
  • Third, he worked hard to convince his targeted constituency that he was their guy! Now, Donald Trump was born into wealth. He has always been a billionaire many times over, and he was never shy about showing off what he owned. But for his favored constituencies, he personally served McDonald’s hamburgers through the drive-through window, and he drove a garbage truck while he campaigned. For his beloved regular folks, he ran for president with gigantic populist revival rallies, especially in the swing states, where he danced and sang his patriotism; he wore, and he still wears, red hats with slogans; he loudly promised to do everything that they most wanted; and he frankly proclaimed his Christian faith. No old-style, white-shoe Republican would have done any of that!
  • Fourth, every member of his cabinet is little more than half his age. And they all are bright, appealing, photogenic, and chosen with what I believe is an additional, broader purpose in mind.

I have come to think in recent days that Donald Trump may be attempting to build a gigantic, old-Democratic-style, populist party of all the people of every race and creed in these United States. He has named it the Republican Party, designed it as conservative-centrist, and claimed for it the broadly popular side of every issue that now exists. And he has filled its leadership with young and beautiful men and women who all are leaders that he has trained in his mold. Each can take a couple of terms as president after him, down through almost the end of this century. Of course, our history suggests that the American people seem to like to alternate their presidents between political parties. But I think this is what he has in mind!

The primary source of the international push for socialism/communism that has taken a firm hold on the American west coast, and has been behind some of the worst leftist rioting in this country in recent years, is a loose organization called Antifa. It claims to be “anti-fascist”, but it seems really to be just against any organization that is not to the extreme political left.  Antifa is an older group – even I have been aware of them – but apparently, they had been causing disturbances at some of Charlie Kirk’s recent appearances. So now, the president has designated Antifa to be a major terrorist organization. If he means that, they may be as good as dead now in the United States.

Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk’s TPUSA is soon to become gigantic! We could not even keep up as we did our research with the size to which this assassination situation has grown. Last Sunday was the first Sunday after it happened, and Charlie Kirk had, just before his death, proclaimed that he wanted his Christian faith to be what he would be most remembered for. So, oh my God, last Sunday people went back to church in droves, even for some after they had spent decades away, and all over the United States! This weekend looks to be even more full of tributes to Charlie, with reports, for example, of two sports stadia in Phoenix holding ceremonies at once, and more than a million in combined attendance there. 

Turning Point USA had chapters active at about nine hundred colleges two weeks ago, when Charlie Kirk was shot. But as of now, in just the past two weeks, they have received more than 54,000 applications from colleges and schools wanting to start their own TPUSA chapters!  And while some Democrats have tried to vilify Charlie Kirk in the wake of his assassination, generally calling him a racist, which he clearly was not; reports now suggest that quite a few Democrats have been switching to the Republican party, they say in disgust at what leaders of their former party were unfoundedly saying about Charlie Kirk. So, okay then. Just in the past few days, this whole thing has become even monumentally bigger than Thomas and I could have imagined it would become when he flagged it to me as something that we needed to write about! But, what have we learned, we who are concentrating on trying to grow spiritually enough to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime?

Well, one thing we have learned as we did this research is that in the United States at this point, both political parties are monumentally bollixed together. My parents’ old white-shoe Republican party of Eisenhower, and of “he governs best who governs least”, seems to have been taken over by the old-style centrist-populist Democrats when they needed a new home after the Democratic party was seized by the international socialists/communists in the late middle of the twentieth century. Those extreme leftists drifted this way after their old ideas had killed tens of millions of people worldwide by the middle of the twentieth century, and their collectivist ideas were flunking out all over Europe.  Actually, even socialism-lite never has done very well anywhere, has it? It’s really only our plain and perfect U.S.. Constitution that still works, my dear ones, after 250 years. Who knew?

But the most important thing that we have learned from your allowing Thomas and me to play a bit of hooky from our teaching role this week is just this: evil people will do evil things, and our only sensible response is love. We cannot fight evil with evil at all, because if we do that, we only redouble the evil, and we and the world gain nothing. Nothing!  So, no matter what happens, our only possible answer is love. Love, and yet more love. Jesus told us we must love the evildoer, and so we must do that! No matter our political party. No matter what! It doesn’t matter, because you and I cannot possibly have any effect on these earthly outcomes. So. hug your neighbor who thinks differently politically, and laugh together at those sillies who allow their spiritual lives to be polluted by nothing but stupid divisions over nothing. That old peace train in our frame-verse has been rolling for more than fifty years now, my ever so dearly beloved friends. If  all of us of both parties can come together with hearts full of love, which really is all that matters now, because frankly we have tried everything else, then perhaps that old hippie peace train still might after all take this whole country home again to the clean and simple, high-minded and Constitutional place where we began…. 

            Get your bags together, Come, bring your good friends, too!
Our cause is getting nearer, It soon will be with you.
And come and join the living, It’s not so far from you.
And it’s gettin’ nearer, Soon it will all be true!

 Oh, peace train soundin’ louder, Glide on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah, Come on the peace train, peace train.
Now I’ve been cryin’ lately, Thinkin’ about the world as it is.
Why must we go on hating? Why can’t we live in bliss?

 ‘Cause out on the edge of darkness, There rides a peace train.
Oh, peace train take this country! Come take me home again.
Oh, peace train soundin’ louder. Glide on the peace train!
Ooh-ah, ee-ah, ooh-ah Come on the peace train!
– Cat Stevens, also known as Yusuf Islam, from “Peace Train” (1971).

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Good Vibrations

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

With a song in my heart,
I behold your adorable face!
Just a song at the start,
But it soon is a hymn to your grace.
When the music swells,
I’m touching your hand.
It tells that you’re standing near, and …
At the sound of your voice,
Heaven opens its portals to me.
Can I help but rejoice
That a song such as ours came to be?
But I always knew
I would live life through
With a song in my heart for you!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), from “With a Song in My Heart” (1929)

After our last week’s blog was posted, I heard from a number of people who wanted to learn how they, too, could make this their last necessary earth-lifetime. I really loved that! And I meant it seriously when I told you then that, wow, if I can do it, my dearly beloved friend, for you this ought to be a much easier task. When I was young, I was self-absorbed to an absurd degree; and I was highly un-promising. So, you are starting now from well above where I was. The great trick to rapid spiritual growth is that you have to decide that you want to achieve the fifth astral level in this lifetime, even more than you want to partake of this world’s idle pleasures while you let one more lifetime slip away.

You will have to want it now more than you want to hang with the guys over beers on Friday nights, or go out shopping with the girls on Saturdays. Even more than you want to watch scary movies, or watch tennis matches or baseball games; and even more than you want to make money, or be lazy, or simply think a lot about many other things. You will have to really want it enough to ignore everything else in life, at least for a while! You will have to want it badly enough, in the beginning, to make it the center of your life, because our minds are unbelievably lazy. They resist like mad any efforts we make to change whatever are their current habits. Soon, that mental laziness will be a plus. Once you have your stubborn little mind re-trained, you will be able to allow it to coast upward toward ever greater spiritual perfection. But for now, in the beginning, this process is going to be a fierce struggle of you against your mind’s laziness, and its reluctance to change any of the old habits that you yourself long ago negligently trained into it. This first part is only a transient phase, but just be warned about it. This first part is not easy!

Our overall task is to raise our mind’s vibration away from all the negative emotions, and toward just pure and perfect love. And since the only person that I ever have taught to do this is myself, I will tell you how I taught myself to do it. I wasn’t keeping notes, because I had, I swear, no idea at the time how amazingly well this was going to work! But as I recall, I did the core part of it over only a year or less, maybe forty or more years ago. That was all the time that it took to get me well-started in the right direction. And, it was amazing! Once my mind had given up on fighting for its old, wrong habits, and it had fallen into forming the right habits, my spiritual growth became just a matter of tending a vigorous and rapidly-growing spiritual garden.

For you, I have done a lot of hard thinking over the past few days, trying to recall my whole history in detail. And my first surprising realization was how long ago I took these first steps, and just how awful in the beginning I really was. But, confession can be good for the soul. So, here goes. There was a time, when I was in my early thirties, when I was the worst driver in the history of the universe. Not just always speeding, but also aggressive and bossy. It’s a wonder that I didn’t kill someone! Then at last came the day that made me stop and take a good, frank look at my entire life. I was driving along in my usual maniacal way, speeding in the extreme right lane, so some frantic driver, maybe late for work, had to cut right in front of me to barely make his highway exit. OMG, he could have killed us both! And it was my self-given, absolute duty back then to manage everybody’s business as I policed the world, so I shot off at that exit right after him, and I rode his bumper through several turns. Of course, my acting in this crazy way was a form of acute insanity. I can recall having in some small, sane part of my mind the cogent thought that I didn’t want to be doing this, and I wanted him to get us both out of it. Which he soon did, by driving into the parking lot of a police station. I sensibly sped away.

But this was the incident that at last made me realize that I no longer wanted to be the person that I then was. I hear often now from people who have just achieved that same sort of Eureka moment in their own lives; although their moments of sudden self-realization usually are not so extreme as mine was. How ever it comes for each of us, these moments when reality finally grabs us by the throat are such a wonderful gift! In short order, over the next year or so, I did perhaps eighty percent of the mind-retraining that I needed to do to set myself on a rapid course toward the much later moment when, quite unexpectedly, I would hear my own dear Thomas say, “This is now your last necessary earth-lifetime.” OMG, and he said it so matter-of-factly! But even without his confirmation, I knew that I had made tremendous spiritual progress since my final day of being technically insane. You clearly can feel your healthy spiritual growth as it is happening! And for you to very efficiently retrain your mind so you can rapidly raise your spiritual vibration, and so you can thereby make this your last necessary earth-lifetime, you won’t need to hire a guru. You won’t need to chant mantras, or go on retreats, or really disrupt your present life at all. You will need just to make very efficient use at first of a single modern invention which is so perfect for this role that I think God may have invented it entirely for this single purpose! You will only need to very often and in specific habitual ways drive your car.

This car-trick works so magnificently well at carving away every low-vibration mental habit that I really think that God may have invented cars with this sole purpose in mind. Back when I was still a lunatic driver, I was driving thirty miles each way every day to law school; and then after that, I developed a law practice in which all my clients were closely-held businesses, so I would drive considerable distances on many weekdays to visit those businesses and their owners on-site. In the very beginning, I had to fight my mind hard each time I drove to try to change every separate detail of the awful way I managed all of those drives. But then, I think that Jesus intervened, and redesigned my whole driving procedure at once.

 One of the lovely things about my life is the fact that I have so many wonderful longtime friends that I never have met. I just hear from them every so often, whenever they have a question or a comment. And a few days ago, an older friend that I have known for a long time but never have met who lives near where we used to live decades ago, in the Boston area, emailed and told me that he wanted to try to make this his last necessary earth-lifetime; but meanwhile, he would have to spend the next two weeks driving to Boston for medical treatments every day, and he was such an impatient and awful driver that he really was dreading that! Did I have any advice? He lives maybe 30 minutes from the city, depending on traffic. Here is exactly what I emailed back to him:

My dear lovely Kevin, I used to be an insane lunatic of a driver, so I know just what you mean!

Here is my advice:

1) Always, from now on, get up a little earlier and read the 23rd Psalm and then the Lord’s Prayer before you even get in the car.

2) Always leave with at least an extra 30-45 mins for the drive, above what you are sure you are going to need. (Yes, really!)

3) Always, whenever you drive, have soothing music that you like playing softly in the car.

4) Never, ever drive above any speed limit, no matter what!

5) Always have a spiritual book you will enjoy, a tablet with Liberating Jesus, or anything else that is spiritually healthy for you to read when you arrive early and have to wait, so you can keep your calm and gentle mood at the hospital as well.

6) And whenever someone tailgates you or cuts you off, immediately and eagerly move over and wave him on ahead of you with a big smile, because you know for certain that he has just had an awful kitchen accident, and now he has five bloody fingers in a bag beside him on the seat, and you just hope and pray that he can get to the hospital in time to have them sew those fingers back on! Of course, if he shows you just his middle finger and he frowns big-time as he passes you, then you’ve got to make your smile of encouragement even bigger, and your wave more loving, because he is showing you that he has only one finger left on that hand!!

When I finally decided to shape-up my life, I began to do precisely this whole routine every time I got in the car. I did it for months, even including the bigger smile and wave at the two or three wise guys who gave me their middle-finger salute; I guess they did that because I didn’t move over fast enough. If my memory of this period of my life is right, it took only perhaps a couple of weeks of my driving in this silly but actually highly enjoyable way, before I had begun to so transform my whole attitude toward driving, and then soon even my whole attitude toward life! This really was all that it took for me to begin to altogether retrain my mind. Soon, it all became automatic; and then before long, driving became the happiest and most eagerly anticipated part of my day. Driving was my pleasant and private me-time, never rushed, when I could think, and maybe have a chat with Jesus. And, wow, what do you know? Before long, my mind began to approach everything else in my life the way that I was dealing with driving! By retraining my mind to stop being pushy and bossy, but to become instead always extremely careful, courteous, and polite about driving, I found myself just naturally becoming more and more that way about everything else that I did, as well. And as my children grew, I think this deliberate mind-training even made me a more thoughtful, respectful, and loving parent. If driving a car is a regular part of your life, then you can decide today that you are going to use driving to take control of, and to completely retrain your mind, just as I did mine, And today you can make a substantial beginning toward pruning the worst spiritual negativity from your life.

Dropping all the rest of the negativity from your life will also thereafter be so much easier! Within months, if my memory is right, I realized that I was finding all forms of television more and more irritating. TV was too jarring, somehow. It was too rackety, after the peaceful and lovely pace of my driving days, from its ugly canned laughter and sped-up talking to the news solemnity and commercial alerts. So, soon thereafter I gave up TV. I had already given up scary and action-type movies. I never had played video games. So, then it was easy to also give up movies altogether. No bigs, and I can always go back; but to this day, I never have missed any of it.

Once you have done away with all the negative training of your mind that once had been dragging you down, and your mind is happily retrained to respond to the world in only positive ways, you will find your spiritual vibration rising naturally. To vastly assist and speed up that process, all you will need to do now is to encourage the flourishing in your heart of a boundless, joyous love for every person with whom God has graced your life! And this part is so laughably easy, because it is what your mind is literally created to do. Simply choose a very happy love song, and for this purpose I have found that today’s frame-verse works best for me. Then from now on, whenever you see the face of anyone in your life, whether it might be a family member or a co-worker or close friend, or a neighbor that you often encounter; or for me, it’s also the members of my Wednesday-Thursday class; whenever you see any of these familiars, really look at each person’s beautiful face. Feel the special love and joy of having each of them in your life! And sing your special little love song to each of those people in your mind. And mean it.   

How does it feel when your spiritual elevation is happening? The first thing I noticed was that I was less and less able to feel anger; until now, when I cannot feel anger at all. And for someone who used to be more or less infuriated all the time about something, that was a pretty big change! But things of the world that affected me personally simply seemed to matter to me less and less as time went on. I realize now, too, that I gradually withdrew from contact with self-absorbed people, with angry people, and with people of low vibration in general because being around them was just too stressful. I used to do afterlife speaking engagements and conferences, but I began to find that the energies around me when I was at those events were just too negative. I can better understand now why the saints of old withdrew into the wilderness to be with God. My life in general feels softer, and gently joyous. I will giggle sometimes for the sheer perfect joy of the sight of a loved one”s beautiful face! Really, it’s lots of gentle and subtle things, positive changes that I notice just in retrospect. And they all began with that odd loss of my ability to feel anger, which once had been my predominant emotion!

There is no limit to love! Jesus told us that. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And as you ever more perfectly train your mind to love each of these beautiful ones who are closest to you in this lifetime, you are lifting your own vibration so rapidly, and by miles and miles, and so joyously! Then, whenever you feel ready for this, my darling, with a laugh of God’s own pure delight, you can spread your personal, beautiful love to encompass all the world.

At the sound of your voice,
Heaven opens its portals to me.
Can I help but rejoice
That a song such as ours came to be?
But I always knew
I would live life through
With a song in my heart for you!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Lorenz Hart (1895-1943), from “With a Song in My Heart” (1929)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Your Mind

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
3 He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.

4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You have anointed my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– King David (1040-962 BCE), from Biblical Psalm 23 (about 1000 BCE)

My dear one, you really own nothing that you think is yours except for your eternal mind. Everything else that you might think belongs to you, how ever solid it might seem to you now, is just a part of this very brief and actually altogether unreal reality that we all think we see around us now, which is more like a vast, collective human illusion. The whole of what we consider to be reality, including the bodies that we seem to inhabit, really is nothing but empty space. And this planet that we briefly visit, the way we might visit a local gym, is just a useful workout place where we can exercise spiritually, so we can ever more perfectly empower our vast, eternal minds. And why does reading this surprise you? It surprises you only because in order for you to get the greatest benefit from your brief but useful time on this planet, it is important that you take this life seriously, so you come into this experience with complete amnesia about what actually is going on, and why you even are here at all. A newborn baby has no idea! And neither do you and I. That way, we all will take this life seriously, as if we had been born into something that is real, even though it is more like just a flimsy stage set. We take on the problems of our earth-lives that each new day brings, not remembering that we, and those closest to us in this lifetime, actually planned these vexatious issues into our lives as mind-challenges, as opportunities for achieving greater spiritual growth while we are here.

Yet at the same time, come to think about it, far too many people don’t take their lives on earth anywhere nearly seriously enough! These precious earth-lives are our minds’ great opportunities for achieving sufficient elevation away from rage and hatred, and toward ever more perfect love, so we can hopefully stop having to keep incarnating on earth altogether. That glorious mind-elevation that we all so eagerly seek can in reality only happen here on earth. And then, we get to take it home when our earthly bodies die, and we get to use it in our eternal lives forevermore. Growing spiritually is the reason why we come to earth; and yet, because we come here with complete amnesia about the reason why we have come here in the first place, people will heedlessly cheat and abuse one another. Our brothers and sisters even will carelessly kill one another!

When I was invited to visit Jesus in the astral plane in April of 2022, I was allowed to retain a memory of those events so I could remember that He had told me His story. He told me then His actual reason for having chosen to be born from out of the Godhead as a Perfected Being, He said that His reason had been to teach people what is actually going on, that human life is eternal; and He wanted to teach people how to achieve enough mind-elevation to be able to make this incarnation, the one that you are living now, your last necessary incarnation on earth. Before Jesus was born, He watched from the Seventh astral level as people were born over and over again on earth, but because most of them never knew why they were here, they were making almost no progress at all! He told me He simply could not stand to watch people incarnate over and over again, learning almost nothing each time! That precise mind-training in forgiveness and love which would help people to learn to make rapid spiritual progress on earth was, very specifically, what The Way was that Jesus taught, and that He then sent His Disciples out to teach after His Resurrection; it was designed to solve this problem, once and for all. And for three hundred years, His Way was highly successful, spreading to millions of followers all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. However, Constantine’s fear-based Christianity supplanted Jesus’s Way. And sadly, it is its near-opposite!

So, yes, Christianity does not much follow Jesus. But it is a religion. Religions can make their own rules. What is really astonishing is the fact that mainstream scientists also make their own rules, while at the same time they also claim to be open-mindedly studying the objective truth. So, scientists are flat-out lying to us! In the early part of the twentieth century, Max Plank and his merry band of quantum physicists basically freaked out the traditional physicists when they announced that consciousness underlies everything. As our dear, amazed Max said in 1931, so this was almost a century ago now, “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 he was right, of course. Consciousness does underlie it all. But the scientific gatekeepers, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals, were not at all ready to go there, because there smacked too much of finding God; so around 1910, they informally but pretty firmly instituted what we might call the scientific dogma of materialism. They fixed their problem: no creator was now needed! They thereby turned science into the religion of atheism, and that is what science has  been, ever since. Oh, there are some things that scientists still can do well. But there also are things they are compelled by their materialism dogma to do which are fundamentally crazy. At the moment, they are spending a billion dollars trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, which is the precise equivalent of seeking to find your nightly newsman inside a television set.

Your mind really is the only thing that you can call your own. So it is time for you now to concentrate on taking very much better care of it! Just quickly, let’s understand what your mind is, and where you actually are in the great scheme of reality. First, let’s acknowledge that our dear brother Max Planck was right! Consciousness is in fact all that exists, and everything else that we might think is real is an artifact of that Consciousness. And of course, since we now realize that Consciousness is all that exists, we now treat the whole topic of Consciousness with a lot more respect! For example, from now on we will capitalize the word. How might we define the Consciousness that is all there is? We should note here that mainstream scientists cannot yet even define Consciousness at all. But with considerable help from my Thomas, what is given below is the best definition of Consciousness that I have been able to manage; he tells me that it will turn out to be right.

 Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, infinitely powerful and creative and also highly emotional, and therefore almost certainly self-aware. Its emotional range exists from what we feel as fear, anger and hatred at its lowest, slowest, and weakest vibrations, and perfect love at its highest, most rapid, and most powerful vibrations.

 As Max Planck and his contemporaries discovered more than a century ago, there is no way to “get behind” Consciousness. Or to put it more accurately, you cannot “get outside” consciousness; because in fact, there is nothing whatsoever beyond Consciousness, in any direction. So, okay then. Let’s pause here for a moment and think about this. As we are coming now to better understand reality, and how reality actually works, your eternal mind is not “created” at all; but rather, your mind is of the very stuff of the Creator, and inextricably part of the Creative Mind. There is no clear separation whatsoever between your mind and the minds of all other people, and there is no separation between your mind and the Great Creative Mind. All is One Mind! We know, too, that our pets, and in fact we know that all animals possess eternal minds as well, and that animals that we have loved will be waiting for us in the astral afterlife, and will greet us there when we transition home. In fact, as the wonderful and astonishing galvanometer expert Cleve Backster proved extensively as far back as the nineteen-sixties, living plants also are conscious in their way, and they are easily able to read our minds, so there is no separation even between individual plants’ minds, or between their minds and our minds, either. So, of course, all this mind-stuff must be eternal, by its very nature! And all these minds are One Mind. Every living creature, including presumably every living fish and insect and even every living microbe, and for certain of course every living plant, is, with us, inextricably part of the one great, vast, and eternal Consciousness, which, thanks to Max Planck and the other earliest quantum physicists, we know is all that exists.

Yet of all this great, teeming mass of life that is, to at least some minimal extent, living in conscious awareness on this planet, it is only people who are sufficiently sophisticated minds that we are inspired to attempt to further elevate our minds spiritually within the Consciousness which is all that exists. I believe that we can say this with confidence. In my whole half-century of doing extensive afterlife research, I have seen no evidence, and not even a hint, that any other form of life also ever seems to be attempting to elevate themselves at all toward more perfect love! Yet when we are in the beautiful astral plane levels of Consciousness, which is where our minds spend most of our eternity, we come to crave greater and ever greater elevation of our minds. We then choose to be born yet again on the earth plane, with amnesia for why we are here but with a plan for growing spiritually.

So, here your mind is now on earth, once again. And most of us have lived many lifetimes on earth, each of which has brought only minimal spiritual growth, because your mind’s spiritual-growth needs are intense. And they are very precise! Many people live hundreds of lifetimes on earth, just “turning on the wheel”, as the Buddhists say, and as Jesus observed with considerable frustration, but making only minimal progress each time. Good grief, Thomas tells me that I have lived seventeen earth-lifetimes just with him, alone! Your mind’s past experience likely has been about the same; and yet, if you and I had lived our previous lives with more care and precision, perhaps we could have made any of those other lives the last one that really was necessary for us to spend here. Now, if you are to have any hope at all of making this your last necessary lifetime on this earth, you will need to raise your mind’s spiritual vibration considerably! These are the most important things that you really must do, this time around:

  • Avoid All Negative Entertainments and Pastimes. When I finally got serious about protecting my mind, I found that I was so sensitive to negativity that now I can’t even watch movies or TV that contain stressful scenes or even arguments, so I avoid movies and TV altogether. No video games either. I have tamped down my music to lovely symphonies, beautiful old Doo-Wop slow dance stuff, just the most peaceful entertainments that you can imagine. I can’t bear to watch hammery sorts of news shows, but if something is important, I will  hear about it eventually.
  • If You Want to Attend Religious Services, Find a Love-Based Version. For a long time, I went to Catholic Mass with my husband. But when I really got serious about raising my spiritual vibration, I had to stop doing that, because seeing that life-sized, full-color Jesus bleeding on the cross over the altar was too upsetting to me. You might experiment with a Unity Church if you can find one nearby, or a Unitarian or a Congregational Church, a Jewish Chabad, or another sort of love- and joy-based religious home.
  • Never Mess with Negative Beings or Ideas. Various low-vibration aspects of Consciousness do exist, and sometimes they wear a positive mask. Mostly, these are influences and fragments from very low-vibration dead people that are still hanging around on earth, believe it or not, and your mind has natural defenses against them; but still, you can get yourself in trouble with them if you are not careful, especially when a friend or a family member suggests that you accompany them to this or that “spiritual” event. There are of course some helpful non-Christian gurus, but there are many who are not helpful at all, and some which are quite spiritually harmful. Don’t waste this lifetime! For you, it must be only Jesus.
  • Frequently Read and Closely Follow the Teachings of Jesus on Forgiveness and Love. It is amazing how rapidly and well those teachings work! My Thomas tells me that when Jesus was on earth, He taught prevenient forgiveness, and using that technique is the easiest way to free your mind of every bit of guilt altogether. Then, just let Jesus into your heart! Give yourself over to the love and peace that passes all understanding. Now it truly begins!

My Thomas has recently informed me that I have managed to raise my mind’s vibration enough that now this can be my last necessary earth-lifetime. What this means is that I have achieved the upper part of what afterlife researchers call Level Five of the seven aggregate astral levels.    Those at this level are far enough now from all negativity that we can continue to grow spiritually by teaching in the astral plane, by serving in the healing gardens and in the children’s villages, and by acting as spirit guides for people who are taking lives on earth. This is an important and exciting achievement! Wow. This is spiritual nosebleed level. I could feel that a lot was happening in my mind of late, and soon I will write more about it for you. I was becoming a lot more peaceful. Nothing ever was bothering me anymore. I am always so happy now! And I mean, always, all the time, no matter what is going on around me. Happy for no reason! But, OMG, my much-beloved friends, if I can do it, then I promise you that you can do it, too! Simply follow the perfect instructions that were given to us by our so very deeply treasured Wayshower and Best Friend. Jesus gave to you and me the surest recipe for very rapid spiritual growth there can be! And wow, it really works so well!! Now, very soon  it will be up to us to put our minds to teaching the whole world to follow His lead, because soon we can demonstrate what the end will be. He came to bring peace to all the world, and now we can see how it will come….   

because You have anointed my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– King David (1040-962 BCE), from Biblical Psalm 23 (about 1000 BCE)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Is Jesus a Christian? (#2)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!

Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.

Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

Christianity bears Jesus’s name, although nearly all of what modern Christianity teaches is not even remotely what Jesus teaches in the Gospels. So, you would think that at some point, more Christians might start to wonder what Jesus’s opinion is of the religion that they practice. Is He pleased with it? Is He disappointed in it? Or is He even, at this point, disgusted by it?

Okay, so since nowadays we can communicate with people that we know are dead, why has it never occurred to anyone that we should be able to communicate even better with Someone that we know has risen from the dead? I have been reluctant to proclaim the Shroud of Turin to be Jesus’s actual burial cloth, miraculously preserved for two thousand years. But the experts who continue to study the Shroud are by now making an overwhelming case for it.  There really is no other explanation for all the Shroud’s amazing details! Not only is it the genuine article, it is indeed the cloth that received and wrapped Jesus’s body when it was removed from the cross; but also, the Shroud of Turin and the marks on it prove that Jesus came to us as a literal Divine Being. For one small example, some of those marks are a photographic negative, and they have been there since long before anyone then living on earth could have known what a photographic negative even was! And the scorch on the Shroud that was made when Jesus reanimated His dead body would have required more concentrated power for it to be made in a single burst than anything that we can produce all at once worldwide, even today. And all the horrific details of the torture that Jesus willingly put Himself through are right there on the Shroud of Turin. Just reading about the way they used those nails turns your stomach. And all, so He could die a very public death and then resurrect Himself very publicly, and thereby prove to us at last that we live eternally.  No other explanation for all the details of the Shroud of Turin, and the marks that it carries, than that Jesus came to us as God on earth is even possible.

So, we do have definitive proof that at least Jesus’s body was briefly actually dead, and that He then reanimated it. And incidentally, He is the only person ever known to have done that, because those who have near-death experiences (NDEs), no matter how vivid their experiences might seem to them, never actually die and then come back to life. Death for everyone else but Jesus always is a one-way trip! But the fact that Jesus in fact rose from the dead is vividly documented in the Gospels (see e.g. JN 19:40-20:18). So then, should we not even more be seeking to speak with the still-living Jesus, who is alive right this minute on the third level of the astral plane, and He still greets every new afterlife arrival who asks to meet Him and receive His blessing? Why aren’t Christians asking Him directly through good mental mediums how He feels about this religion, which is the largest on earth; and although it follows Jesus almost not at all, it still somehow claims Him for its leader? Since Christianity teaches very different doctrines than what Jesus ever taught in life, do we now not owe Him at least the courtesy of asking Him straight-out whether He ever personally adopted the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created and formalized at the First Council of Nicaea that was held in the year 325 AD, since that was three centuries after Jesus’s death and resurrection, and it had so little to do with what Jesus taught when He was on earth? Or, does Jesus just consider Himself to be still a Jew? Or, perhaps, has He spiritually moved far beyond any human religious belief and practice whatsoever?

I never have presumed to ask Jesus any of these questions, but now I know what His answers would be. And not only that, but I know that Jesus wants Thomas and me to tell you now how He feels about the Christian religion, whether or not you even care what Jesus thinks. Actually, I had been thinking now that maybe we might not talk about it in this week’s post, after all. Thomas wanted to finally say it this week. We wrote last week’s post, intending to talk this week about Jesus’s opinions; but now, I have been thinking about maybe just dodging it all. I don’t want to talk about it. I still love my gentle childhood version of Christianity! The one that my sweet Reverend Turrell taught and lived. The one that we sang. We sang today’s frame-verse very often! And there are a good two billion practicing Christians on earth who still love the gentle version of Christianity, the one they still imagine that Jesus heads, just as I do. I didn’t really want to say it today, after all. However, I was driving on Wednesday, running some minor errands, when I heard Jesus’s unmistakable voice in my mind. He said, very strongly and clearly, “Say it now.”  

Oops! Okay, Sir. Yes Sir! Yes. I’ll do it. Jesus’s voice is unmistakable. And you don’t say No to Him!

So, for the past couple of days, I have been thinking about the best way to go about doing this. Thomas has been helping me a lot! It is his view that the core of what is so wrong with all forty-eight-thousand-odd versions of Christianity is the religion’s insistence that Jesus’s death on the cross was a sin-sacrifice. In the nature of Judaism’s ancient sin-sacrifices of animals.  

But, what does Jesus say about sin? Jesus destroyed most of those old religious ideas about sin in one stroke! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead, He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And He confirmed that His abandonment of religious laws was consistent with the divine plan, when He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (MT 5:17). So, Jesus told us that spiritually, we didn’t need those old religious laws about sin anymore. We were now rising above them all.

The concept of sin is grounded in religious laws, and of course all religions are human-made. So, in shrinking the Law and the Prophets down to just two commandments about love, and thereby discarding nearly every Jewish law, was Jesus abolishing the whole ancient concept of sin? I think the answer to this question is yes! To the open-minded Gospel student, the many times that Jesus pushed aside what were then inviolate religious laws, and He gave us cagey reasons for His doing so, look like a campaign to discredit those laws without running afoul of the always-listening Temple guards. Here are some examples:

“At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here! But if you had known what this means, “I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath’” (MT 12:7-9). And the strictly religious folk of His day acted pretty much the way some Christians do now: they shamed and shunned anyone they judged to be sinful. Jesus, on the other hand, especially loved even the most unlovable! For example, we read, “And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him” (MT 2:15). He even told us why He especially loved sinners. He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (MK 2:17).

“Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!”  In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’” (LK 15:1-10).

The more you read the Lord’s Gospel words with the guess that perhaps He was abolishing the very concept of sin, the more you realize that was precisely what He was doing! Jesus had replaced the Law and the Prophets with God’s new law of love; and in doing that, He was announcing that we were ready to move beyond a primitive and puerile thou-shalt-not morality, so then we could begin to live by a standard that is based entirely in love. Whatever we might do is no longer so important, but instead all that matters is what is in our hearts. If we have raised our spiritual vibration sufficiently that our every thought, our every impulse is based in nothing but love, then everything that we do from out of that love is good and moral, by definition. And when you think about it, you realize that in fact, this is a much stricter standard than any old-style, sin-based law ever could be. This law requires that we make no decision without first weighing it on the scales of love that are becoming ever more perfectly manifest in our hearts.

It is from this more profound base of understanding where there is only love that we come to understand why we also cannot so easily judge the woman who has committed adultery. This is from JN 8: “But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.  Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again, He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on, sin no more’” (JN 8:1-11). This is so beautiful! 

And yet, the religion that carries Jesus’s name is based in the false notion, which never came from Jesus, that we are all irremediable sinners, to the point where Jesus had to be born as a sinless sacrifice to take all our sins upon Himself. And then Jesus is purported to have died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, after the manner of all the animal sin-sacrifices made to God by the Jews in their Temples. And the Christian religion has, for most of its history, been extraordinarily barbaric, to the point where Jesus is displayed on crosses in gory detail in all the Catholic churches to this day. Wow, to be a Catholic Christian is to be torn and riven with guilt even from childhood, knowing that such a good Man as Jesus had to die like that because you are so sinful, and so just plain awful! The whole history of the Catholic Church displays a surprising level of brutality, too. If you have not yet read Helen Ellerbe’s horrifying book, which is entitled The Dark Side of Christian History, then you really ought to do that now. And know that Jesus has spent much of the time since He last died on earth and then rose and ascended, simply healing the hundreds of millions of victims of the worst of Christianity’s most horrifying acts of raw and sadistic cruelty.   

Then, since around the early part of the twentieth century, Jesus has been communicating with some on earth who were especially able to receive His communications. Some of these messages that look especially real to me were received from Jesus via automatic writing through James E. Padgett, a Washington, D.C. Attorney, between the years 1914 and 1921, and were first published in 1940 in a book entitle Book of Truths. Now Jonathan Beecher, the head of White Crow Books, which is the pre-eminent publisher of such spiritual books, is republishing these teachings in a new book just out, entitled No One’s Dead – The Jesus Messages. I won’t be interviewing Jonathan on Seek Reality for a few more weeks, so I have only just begun to read his book; but one quotation from it already jumps out at me. Jesus says there, “I did not die for your sins; those are on you.”

The definitive answer to the question that begins this post is that, No, of course not. Jesus is not a Christian in Constantine’s mold! And nor is God, for that matter. Neither of them follows any religion, but rather every religion is strictly human-made. Jesus taught His followers a spiritual movement which He called The Way that was based upon and meant to more easily spread His Gospel teachings; and His Way soon had millions of followers, spreading rapidly in the first three centuries following His death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. Until Constantine’s armies destroyed most of it, and drove its remnants far into the desert. Let’s see now what happens next, as Constantine’s religion begins to fall of its own weight….

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

 

 

 (Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Is Jesus a Christian? (#1)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before!
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, see His banner go.
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before. 

At the sign of triumph. Satan’s host doth flee.
On then, Christian soldiers; on to victory!
Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise.
Brothers, lift your voices! Loud your anthems raise!
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.

 Like a mighty army moves the church of God.
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod!
We are not divided, all one body, we!
One in hope and doctrine; one in charity.
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
– Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

As soon as I began to more deeply understand the details of early Christian history, and that happened when I was a sophomore in college, my religious life began to fall apart. Had no one else ever noticed the fact that Christianity was just one gigantic crisis, and most of it really made no sense at all? My goodness, it was the Roman Emperor Constantine, and not Jesus after all, who actually had created the religion! And a lot of Christianity as we practice it even now, two thousand years after the Lord’s Ascension, was in fact directly contradicted by what Jesus actually had taught when He was here! Did no one actually read the Bible? I had been reading the Bible from cover to cover repeatedly since I was eleven years old, so I already had seen some very big discrepancies between the things that Jesus had said as they were reported to us right there in the Gospels, and the most fundamental things that Christians in their churches were being taught to believe. I still can recall how I felt that spring when I was only twenty years old, as each new difference in dogma separately landed on me, and again set me fretting. I would go out then sometimes to where the other girls might be, perhaps sitting and lying heedlessly on the new-cut grass, and I would try to explain to those who were my closest friends why this was all so upsetting to me.

 But no one much cared. It was springtime in New England, it was the nineteen-sixties, and elsewhere, boys were being drafted and dying for nothing, while people were rioting in America’s cities. And we who were in college and far from what were really very much bigger problems were savoring the fact that we were the lucky ones. As the whole modern world fell apart around us, they thought my fretting about religious errors was just so much utterly irrelevant nonsense.

My much-beloved favorite professor seemed so old to me, when I was so young, that I recall her now as likely having been old enough to have personally attended the Emperor Constantine’s First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. Miss Corwin was the only person I knew back then who cared as much about the drama and tragedy of Christianity’s big errors as I did. She instilled in me a mighty fury at the Roman Emperor Constantine in particular, almost as if she had known him personally! Vividly, and to this day I can recall her tiny office with its bookshelves to the ceiling, and the way she would patiently sit with me and listen and attempt to assist me as I wrestled through my first great Christian disillusionments. Oh, my problems did get worse over the years that followed, and especially since there never has been any attempt made by the Roman Christian church to answer anyone’s issues with it at all. Oh, what? You’ve found a problem or an inconsistency with this or that, or with some other Christian church teaching? Well pound sand, my little apostate friend. Say twelve Hail Marys or go to hell, because that is just the way it is.

I soon personally learned just how very badly Catholicism handled dissension, because I fell in love with a Catholic when I was in my mid-twenties, and the priest who taught me to become a Catholic so we could marry actually put it to me just that way. He briefly tried to teach me pleasantly, but when I began to ask him a few of those tough questions that Miss Corwin and I had wrestled with when I was in college, his pleasantness disappeared at once. He just said to me something like, “Look, either you accept the religion, or you marry someone else. I think you should probably marry someone else.” So, I just crossed my fingers behind my back, where only God could see them, and I thought God didn’t mind, since God already knew that I had all those self-same problems with Protestantism. I became a Catholic so I could marry my Edward. I can recall thinking at the time that eventually, my beloved was going to mellow out and we both could settle on Episcopalianism. But, boy, was I ever wrong about that!

 It was only after I met Thomas as my spirit guide much later on, and then he persuaded me when I was in my early sixties to give the rest of my life to God, that he helped me to realize that there is Someone Else who might be even more bothered about all the conflicts in Roman Christianity than I am. And Thomas thinks it is time for all of us, and really it is long past time for every Christian now living on earth to give Jesus the courtesy of at least wondering what might be His point of view on all of this! My Thomas, my much-beloved spirit guide, is very close to Jesus. He has been close to the Being who became Jesus since they died together in their last shared earth-lifetime, which Thomas believes was lived in what is now Syria about six thousand years ago. Jesus then ascended to the Godhead level, but He remained in touch with the being who had been His older brother, my Thomas, and He asked him to wait while Jesus tried to understand what just had happened to Him. Then eventually, after maybe four thousand years, Jesus not only had figured everything out, but He had persuaded God to allow Him to incarnate from out of the Godhead in order to teach us all how to grow enough spiritually in one lifetime so we will never again need to return to earth. So Thomas’s brother incarnated from out of the Godhead as Jesus. My Thomas then incarnated again on earth as well, and he served Jesus in that lifetime, and forevermore.

 Even now, I have been given to realize, Thomas’s primary role in his eternal life is to serve Jesus, and he has sworn never to further advance spiritually so he always will be able to do just that. The two of them remain extremely close. Thomas meets with Jesus nightly, and since he also is my spirit guide for this lifetime, so by the spirit guide protocols he cannot leave me alone while he astral travels to see Jesus, he has been dragging me along without memory of the event on every night of my earth-lifetime. Good grief. When Thomas took me to visit with Jesus in the summer of 2022 and allowed me to remember those meetings, and he did this what I reckon was eight or nine times while my body slept, I had some glimpses of just how close those two actually are.

My favorite astral memory from that summer is of the two of them sitting close together on Jesus’s riverbank under that many-colored, always-twilight sky and happily chatting in their long-lost last earth-language. They could more easily have talked by mind, but Thomas has told me that sometimes they just enjoy dredging that language up and seeing how much of it they can still remember. I was sitting where I usually sat in these moments, slightly above and maybe twenty feet behind them, on a little hill. Then Jesus glanced to make sure no group of Christians was approaching, He gathered Himself and got ready to stand, and He whispered something to Thomas that was an insult in that old language. Thomas later told me that what Jesus usually would call him was “Bloody General”. Something like that. Then Jesus would stand up and run, and Thomas would chase Him, the pet deer would scatter, and inevitably Thomas would catch Jesus, throw Him to the ground, and, yes, beat Him up. The one time I saw this happen, I was so horrified that I flew up into the air and hovered above them. I distinctly recall the sweet look of Jesus’s face as He calmly looked up at me from under Thomas’s bigger and bulkier body in mild surprise. Then Thomas quickly looked up, too, and the whole thing ended.

No one was supposed to have seen that! But they both had forgotten that I was in “awake” mode.  They discussed it, and at my request they allowed me to remember and report what I had seen. Thomas later told me that this is the most important thing that He uniquely does for Jesus. His cherished Brother is a fully Divine Being, vibrating even higher than this universe’s Godhead level, so no other being ever would even presume to treat Jesus the way that Jesus wants Thomas to treat Him. Indeed, no one else likely could bear Jesus’s very strong personal vibration and get close enough to Him to do it, even if they were willing to try to assist Him in this unique way. But Jesus is eager to retain the last remnant of His human status, to somehow keep His human connection to us, to remain “Fully God and Fully Man”. And it is only Thomas’s regularly tussling with Him like the earthly kid-brother that in fact he once was that enables Jesus to retain the last remnant of His “fully man” status.

So, is Jesus bothered by the basic differences and disconnects between “The Way”, the movement that He began during His lifetime that was born from out of the godhead, His movement that was based upon His teachings alone; and Christianity, the very different human fear- and guilt-based religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine founded for his own purposes three centuries later?

There are now some 48,000 different Christian denominations worldwide, nearly all of which are less than two hundred years old. Worldwide Catholicism counts as a single denomination, while many others are as small as a single church building. The differences in doctrine among Christian denominations are often tiny. And the worst disagreements between Jesus’s original Way and the fear- and guilt-based Christianity that Constantine created, which we might say is typified by today’s frame-verse, are these three:

  • Jesus Died for Our Sins. This awful idea is the very core of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear- and guilt-based Christian religion, and it is at the center of virtually every Christian denomination. It is securely rooted in the ancient Hebrew custom of sacrificing unblemished animals as sin-offerings in their temples; so Jesus, God’s sinless Son, became for Christians their ultimate sin-offering. But Jesus says nothing about this in the Gospels! In fact, He instead tells us that neither He nor God ever judges us (see JN 5:22-23 and JN 12:47), so for Him to have died as such a sin-offering would have been unnecessary. In fact, Jesus’s teachings tell us that His coming abolished any need for sin-offerings! Furthermore, this whole idea makes no sense. If that had been why Jesus came, to be a sin-offering, then why did He bother to spend three years teaching us anything? Why didn’t He just appear, jump right up on that cross, and die? Sin-offerings were supposed to stay dead, so His rising made His status as a sin-offering actually flawed. Even more to the point, if God insists that we learn to forgive others when they sin against us, and we know that God certainly does insist that we learn to forgive, then why can’t God forgive us when we sin? Why did God even need Jesus’s sin-sacrifice? This whole bad idea is insulting to God, and it is deeply humiliating to Jesus.
  • God will judge you for your sins, and God can send you to a fiery eternal hell. This is another bad idea that is a hangover from very ancient ideas about gods. Jesus specifically tells us in JN 5:22-23 and JN 12:47 that neither He nor God ever judges us, and while there are some vague Gospel mentions that might have been hell, I believe they were added later. He talks just about the Outer Darkness, the lowest afterlife level, to which we can indeed condemn ourselves for a while if we have trouble forgiving ourselves during our life-review. But when Jesus talks about God, it is only in reference to perfect love! We are to love God, and God loves us. For Jesus, God’s name and His own name are never to be used as a fear-based means of control, as a way to manage an army; but rather and only, He and God are all about infinite and perfect love.
  • God demands that you follow God’s chosen religion, and God will punish you if you guess wrong and follow a different religion. I can remember from my childhood the schoolyard taunts of the Protestants who didn’t go to the local Catholic church, and vice-versa. To this day, I still sometimes get emails from adults, and even from retirement-age people who want to know whether there is some Christian denomination that God actually prefers. And of course there is not, according to the afterlife evidence. I am coming now to suspect that instead, God might be thinking something like, “A pox upon them all.”

The eternal Jesus has in fact expressed some strong opinions about these core Christian beliefs to me personally, and He also has channeled essentially the same thoughts to others.  His feelings about the Roman Christian dogmas do not surprise me at all, and I think that they won’t surprise you, either. What does surprise me a little, perhaps, is that He is choosing this time on earth above some others to make His own ideas so clearly known! We’ll finish this important conversation next week….

 Onward then ye people, join our happy throng!
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud and honor unto Christ the King!
This, thru countless ages, men and angels sing.
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.

 Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,
But the church of Jesus constant will remain.
Gates of hell can never ‘gainst the church prevail.
We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail!
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
– Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Love and Fear

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Love is but a song we sing!
Fear’s the way we die.
You can make the mountains ring,
Or make the angels cry.
Though the bird is on the wing,
And you may not know why,


Come on people now, smile on your brother!
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.

Some may come and some may go.
We will surely pass,
When the One that left us here
Returns for us at last.
We are but a moment’s sunlight,
Fading in the grass.


Come on people now, smile on your brother!
Everybody get together, try to love one another
Right now. Right now. Right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), from “Get Together” (1967)

There are times when my wish that I could  be a Christian again will unexpectedly overwhelm me with yearning. I have a sister and a cousin who are about my age. We three have been close all our lives, and now we text together when something happens that seems to one of us to be worth sharing. So naturally, when I held my big deer breakfast last Sunday morning, I texted to Lee and Paula a few pictures taken out my office bow window. My daughter had stopped at a Buc-ee’s on her way back from a drive down to Houston on that previous afternoon, and she had bought a big bag of deer-corn with which to entertain our local population. For people who don’t live in Texas, I should add that a Buc-ee’s is a highway-side world too gigantic to be called just a pit-stop, and it sells a lot of eccentric things, including bags of deer-corn. (The fact that those camouflage-colored bags of deer corn have big bull’s-eyes printed on one side of them is something that we can politely ignore.) So, there were a dozen deer in our yard that morning, ranging from bucks wearing half-grown antlers in velvet down to this year’s spotted fawns. All of them were just outside my office bow window, cheerily munching on their Sunday breakfast maybe six feet away but oblivious to me!

I texted a few deer pictures to Lee and Paula, but I didn’t hear back from them for almost an hour. Their tardiness excuse was that they each had just come home from church. One lives in Colorado now, while the other is still  in Massachusetts, and each has of course become a matriarch who dwells, as I do, immersed in the comings and goings of a grown daughter’s nearly-grown family. And, amazingly to me, they both find going to their local Protestant churches on Sundays to be a usual part of their love-filled lives. Now, though, I can too plainly see that horrifying religion for what it is: it’s a fear-based Roman trap that wears Jesus’s beautiful face as a mask while it uses its own dogmas to hold more than two billion people ensnared for life.

But what fills me with raw, inescapable yearning as I read their texts about having just attended their churches is, of course, the sweet New England church of my childhood, where I never heard a single fear-based word. I still receive that church’s weekly emails, to this day. But dear Reverend Turrell has long since transitioned, and that church itself is several days’ drive away from where I live now in Texas. And unlike my sister and my cousin, even though I have pledged my life to serving God, and now I know and I deeply love the genuine, still-living Jesus with everything that is in me, I find that I can no longer be a Christian. For a time, soon after we moved to Texas, I thought the Unity Church might be my answer, since it was down to just singing and studying A Course In Miracles and positive conversations about how to better live the teachings of Jesus. But more recently, Unity has begun to almost semi-deify its late-nineteenth-century founders, the Fillmores and some others, which is the very last thing that poor Charles and Myrtle ever would have wanted.

My problem is that I know far too much! I know that the religion that we call “Christianity” was begun in the year 312 C.E. by the Roman Emperor Constantine, after the Romans had spent the previous two centuries trying to destroy the whole Jesus Movement. Those first centuries of persecution had only served to make the Way of Jesus stronger, but then Constantine had suddenly made a shift and begun to follow Jesus himself, because he thought he had seen a vision of a cross in the clouds, and heard a voice that said, “By this sign you shall conquer.” Which hardly seems to be a great spiritual base on which to build a new religion!

What Jesus had given us was a set of spiritual teachings that He called “The Way”. His body had died on a cross at the end of His earthly life, true enough; but only so He could then miraculously raise it from the dead, and thereby prove to us all that our lives are eternal. Jesus’s Way was immediately powerful, and it grew steadily ever more powerful. It soon had millions of followers, all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away from its roots as Rome. But then, three hundred years after Jesus’s Resurrection and His Ascension, along came this Roman crazyman Emperor who needed a great fear-based way to unify and energize his armies So he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, and he directed them to create the first Christian Bible, and the fear-based doctrines of the Christine religion that is still being followed worldwide to this day. Christianity is not Jesus’s Way at all; but rather, it is Constantine’s Way.

How do I know all of this with such soul-wrenching certainty? Because Jesus, our beautiful eternal Wayshower and Best Friend Jesus, who came to us truly as God on earth, has personally told me His genuine Eternal Life’s Story. One night in 2022, and with no warning at all that this was about to happen, my Thomas took me to the astral plane to meet with Jesus, and together they allowed me to remember the event. Seriously! I look back at this whole life that I am living now, at my Experience of Light when I was eight years old; and then at discovering that my spirit guide is not a usual sort of spirit guide, but rather he was Thomas Jefferson in his most recent lifetime but one, and he has been what you might call Jesus’s close sidekick for the past two thousand years. You cannot make this up, and I am private by nature, so for sure I never would have chosen any of this! When I first began to put it together, and I started saying, “But, why me?” Thomas would cheekily retort, “Why not you?”

This is my Thomas’s first time working as anyone’s spirit guide, and as I think you can see, he is not yet great at the job (Sorry, Thomas). Everyone who is born on earth has a primary spirit guide for that whole lifetime, and the point of Thomas’s spirit guide role is supposed to be to guide me in raising my base spiritual vibration. So, our relationship should be all about me! But apparently, Thomas and I are very old and close friends, and my usual gender is male, so he treats me with more familiarity, and with much less gentle respect than is usual in the basic spirit guide relationship. And although I have no memory of any of this while I am in this body, I gather now that I also am part of Jesus’s eternal inner circle. So, Thomas and I came into this lifetime that is supposed to be all about ME. But we planned my life mostly around continuing to serve Jesus, as we have been doing ever since the Lord’s Ascension, two thousand years ago. Which, Thomas is now pointing out to me, has been a very effective way for him to help me to further raise my personal spiritual vibration, has it not? So, perhaps he hasn’t done such a poor job at his spirit guide role, after all, wouldn’t you say? And, shouldn’t I be admitting to that, now? Or, so he keeps saying to me. And he is right, of course. Well, in any event, that was the reason why he and Jesus gave me so little explanation of what was going on, when, one night in 2022, Thomas simply took me to meet with Jesus on the Lord’s astral riverbank. And Jesus, without ceremony, simply set about telling me His eternal-life’s Story.

Over time, we are preparing teachingsbyjesus.com at Jesus’s direction, and we eventually will be promoting it for Him. Thomas and I are absolutely not driving this train! And I have no idea about the timing, but I have the vague sense that Jesus is waiting for certain unguessable things to happen on earth before we will be given the word to complete and begin to promote His website. So it may be even decades from now. There is no time where Jesus is. What He told me about Himself in April of 2022 is meant just to be posted on that website, but He said these things to me as we sat together on that astral riverbank, and we fed His fish with grain that simply appeared in our hands beneath that odd astral sky streaked with colors that never are seen on earth. So, I know His truth now, and I cannot un-know it. I had been gradually growing away from Christianity over many years, even as I still loved the religion, because I had been seeing ever more clearly how different it is from the teachings of Jesus, and how based in fear it is, and not based in love, and how it really does not closely follow Jesus’s teachings at all. But I had gone to sleep that night not realizing that now would be my breaking point.

Jesus has a distinctive voice. He speaks softly and gently, and He has a mild, unguessable accent. He told me that He wanted to tell me His story, because it was time for the world to know His story, and He wanted me to tell it on His website. Which I told Him that of course I would do. Jesus lived His last earth-lifetime with the being that I call Thomas very long ago. My Thomas and I have come to reckon that the last earth-lifetime that Jesus ever lived as a usual human being was about six thousand years ago, when He was the middle brother of three princes in a walled city somewhere in the Middle East. His older brother then is now my Thomas, and His younger brother became the Apostle John. Those three long-ago princes died in their late teens and early twenties when their city was conquered by barbarians, and Jesus then rose to become a perfected Being at the Godhead level. And when He saw how unjust this whole system was, that people had to incarnate repeatedly because no one realized what actually was going on, He seems to have spent some four thousand earth-years petitioning God to allow Him to be reborn from out of the Godhead – something never before done, and also never done since – so He could teach humankind how to use the challenges of their earth-lives to grow spiritually, so then they never would have to be reborn on earth again. Well, wow. So Jesus really was once one of us! There was His purpose clearly stated for us, too: He was born from out of the Godhead so He could teach us how to grow spiritually, and it really had happened, just this way!

As He was telling me His story, Jesus had often to leave me briefly, to stand and go to greet and bless groups of newly-dead Christians, and then return and sit down again on His riverbank and return to feeding His fish and telling me His story. He would know when those groups were approaching us, even from a distance and without turning to look for them. And of course, He could read my mind as well, so I didn’t have to ask my most pressing questions. After we had talked about His life story through His teaching phase on earth, He said, “Little One, you wonder about My death on the cross, but you know these answers before I give them to you. My plan had been to give My disciples their charge, and to begin their teaching walk with them. Then one day, I would just walk away and ascend. But the problem was that, no matter what I said, I never could convince the people there is no death! They had all those bone-boxes. They thought they knew better than I did.”

He said those last words as He was standing, yet again. The custom of that time was to lay out the bodies of the newly dead in caves to rot away until only their bones remained. Then their bones would be gathered and placed in bone-boxes, called ossuaries, which would be labeled with each decedent’s name and then put in permanent storage. So, no wonder no one believed Jesus when He told them they were going to live forever! As Jesus sat down again beside me this time, He was saying that He had decided that His only option was to die a public death, a crucifixion, and then to resurrect His body. He had been practicing by resurrecting dead small animals, and that was working, although He couldn’t keep them alive for long. But once He was inside His resurrected corpse, He thought that He could keep it going for long enough to prove His point to the crowds. However, the advanced Beings who were His guidance team for His lifetime as Jesus absolutely forbade His letting Himself be crucified. For Him to debase a divine being to that extent? They refused to even consider allowing it! But Jesus said to me – and I will never forget the look on His face when He said this – that He was going to do it, no matter what they said. Which was why, on the cross, He briefly cried out to God with worry that God was not releasing Him from His body soon enough for Him to escape having the soldiers break His legs at sundown, so His body would die before the Sabbath began; since of course, broken legs would have rendered that body unable to walk once He resurrected it.

 We talked that night about what Jesus could read from my mind was my major concern, which was whether He had died as a sin-sacrifice. That dogma is Constantine’s core Christian teaching, and yet it makes no sense at all, for at least these two reasons:

  • Jesus tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges anyone, so no sin-sacrifice ever was needed (See JN 5:22-23 and JN 12:47).
  • If Jesus had died as a sin-sacrifice, then His rising from the dead would have made no sense, since the Temple sin-sacrifices always stayed dead; yet the explanation for Jesus”s rising that He gave to me, that He rose from the dead to prove to the crowds that our lives are eternal, makes perfect sense.

So from the moment when I woke up that next morning, and forever after, I can no longer bear Christianity. I cannot be inside a church. That religion is fear-based Roman lies! No, Jesus did not die as a sin-sacrifice, and to make the Roman instrument of torture that killed His body His symbol now is horrifying! Jesus’s symbol should be light and joy, the beauty and certainty of God’s perfect love. That is what I think, but what I think doesn’t matter. What does our Wayshower and Best Friend think…?

If you hear the song I sing,
You will understand (listen!)
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both.
It’s there at your command!

Come on people now, Smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, Try to love one another
Right now, Right now, Right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Growing Spiritually

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

If I loved you,
Time and again, I would try to say
All I’d want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way.
‘Round in circles I’d go!
Longing to tell you,
But afraid and shy,
I’d let my golden chances
Pass me by.
Soon, you’d leave me.
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know
How I loved you!
If I loved you….
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “If I Loved You” (1945)

There is just one reason why you were born. There is a main reason why people do what they do, why they are as they are, and why this world is as it is, in all its manifold and mysterious complexities. There is one reason why this universe exists, and why it ever has existed at all; and why, against such extremely long odds, you and I as individuals are alive here today. That reason, when viewed from every angle, is always in fact going to be the same reason. And it is, indeed, a very good reason… I will certainly cede to you that fact! But still, wouldn’t you expect to find more than one reason for every conceivable thing that exists, from the smallest microbes to the most distant stars, and even down to each hair on your own very precious and beautiful head? I have spent my life looking for additional reasons, or for something else that also might be going on here, when you really look hard for it. I have searched for some ancillary things that we might point to as also of significant importance in this reality. But, no one else seems to be proposing any other reason for anything to exist; and, you know, at this point, I have largely given up trying to find another reason. Every other proposed reason that I ever have seen is just ancillary to that one primary reason. When it all comes right down to it, at the base of our reality, the deeper we look, the more perfect this singularity of purpose seems to us to be, at least to each sincere and consistent seeker. So, if you might have reached any other conclusion about what actually is going on here, will you please speak up now? A lot of us are all ears!

The one conclusion about what actually is going on that seems to be what everyone on earth has reached is that this universe is designed to be our habitat for rich and rapid spiritual learning. That’s it! And apparently, that also is all. We won’t attempt right now to give a name to the Designer who set up this reality, beyond noting that we are living within what is apparently a grand and remarkable design which is centered upon that singular purpose of humankind’s rapid spiritual learning and growth. And a “Design” does indeed imply a “Designer”.

We should note as well that admitting that obvious fact does put us far ahead of the whole mainstream scientific community. All materialist scientists resolutely remain with eyes squinched shut and fingers in both ears, so they can continue to insist to us that the reality that we perceive to exist around us in fact has no purpose and no design about it, whatsoever. No purpose, so no Design. No Design, so no Designer! Mainstream materialist scientists still insist that the universe just somehow randomly appeared in a Bang! out of nothing one day, and for no reason whatsoever. From there, it randomly developed to its present stage. Somehow and amazingly, but always randomly, it simply rambled toward nowhere, developing always by sheer happenstance to become this remarkably orderly world, even including the complex wonder of you and me, all out of nothing and with no plan. But you and I long ago dismissed their ideas as just the product of their odd religion of atheistic materialism, because the universe is so obviously precisely designed, just as you and I are designed, with this clear purpose of  our rapid spiritual development while we are on earth always somehow behind it all. Anyone who actually studies the evidence without the scientists’ atheistic religious bias can reach no other sensible conclusion.

When you begin your research with parameters predetermined, and with the end result already in mind, then you cannot claim to be doing real and objective science. To this day, scientists still are awkwardly certain that the brain must be the source of consciousness, despite all the evidence they have developed so far against this assumption, and although even to this day they still cannot begin to fathom how that might happen. And they also still assume that life first somehow sprang from lightning hitting some magical primordial goo, although to this day they cannot tell you how that might possibly have happened, either. .After more than a century of devotion to their religion of atheistic materialism, when it comes to explaining why and how matter arose, where consciousness comes from, and how life began, the materialist scientists’ efforts still are sadly going nowhere.

So, my dear ones, at this point we need not continue to wait even a moment longer for the scientific community to eventually get a clue, as it ever more pointlessly flounders on. Like the worshipers of Marduk in the ancient past who threw their firstborn infants into the fires burning in their idols’ bellies, materialist scientists still follow a belief-system that we can see by now is tragically wrongheaded. But meanwhile, we understand that the truth of this beautiful reality around us is in fact so simple! As our great hero, the pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck, discovered more than a century ago, what we experience as consciousness is in fact all that independently exists. Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality, so it vibrates as what we experience as human emotion. Love is at the highest and most powerful consciousness vibration; and fear, anger, and hatred are at the lowest, slowest, and weakest vibration. And since time does not exist in our true home, if you are conscious now, then you are conscious eternally. You are eternal by your very nature. And if what we are summarizing in this paragraph is not already clear to you, simply put the word “consciousness” into the search bar above and to the right, and you will find more than thirty posts that document my own developing awareness over the past few years of the overwhelming fact that Consciousness is all there is. Consciousness is the sculptor as well as the clay. You also will find in those posts some terrific linked articles and videos that helped me to at last achieve these ultimate insights. Please enjoy those prior posts about consciousness, until all of this at last makes sense to you.

So, now we know for certain that our lives are eternal! You and I dwell forever in more beauty and joy than we can possibly imagine with just these little stripped-down aspects of our minds that we are using during these brief earth-lifetimes. Oh, we often do astral-travel at night back home from here while our bodies sleep. And some of us are learning to remember those journeys, because the veil between realities really is thinning at this point. But still, the Luddite scientific community holds an oddly mesmerizing control over most people’s minds. It really is amazing! Think about it. Since the scientific gatekeepers first imposed their nonsensical dogma of atheistic materialism on the whole scientific community more than a century ago, there have been no more fundamental scientific discoveries.  We still don’t know how or why the Big Bang happened, nor what might have come before it; we don’t know what consciousness is, nor where it comes from; nor even how life on earth began. The answers to even these most basic questions still, and seemingly forevermore, must now elude us. And far too many people still overly trust a scientific community which tells us that one day very soon, for no discernible reason, we each will forever blink out like a light. And so, scientists sadly cheat most people now living on earth of the chance to use this lifetime as they came here firmly intending to use it, as a place for wonderfully rapid spiritual growth!

Every person now living on earth, all eight billion or so of us, has chosen to be born on this planet because it provides us with an ideal environment in which to grow spiritually.  Each of us carefully planned these earth-lives with the help of our eternal mentors and our spirit guides for these earth-lifetimes; and we had the help, too, of wonderful eternal friends who now play important roles in our lives. We briefly put aside most of our vast, eternal minds so our active earth-minds were stripped down for rapid learning, and we accepted amnesia about what was going on as we prepared to be born into the earth-lives that we are now living. This material universe, and this earth in particular, is considered to be the toughest, and the best place in all of reality in which to achieve very rapid spiritual growth!

I suppose part of the reason why this is true is that, once you are here, you have no idea why you are here. And now, I’m going to use my own life as a pretty good example. Apparently, I am not actually a spiritual low-life and utter dunce in my real life, but rather I have been working with Thomas and serving Jesus for many centuries; but you never would have known that from my own early earth-life this time around. I was embarrassingly selfish, conceited, and self-absorbed as a child, quite spiritually un-promising. OMG, it embarrasses me now to look back at the whole first half of my life as Roberta! But I did feel driven to do all that afterlife research, and to read the Bible daily, and especially the Gospels, over and over again repeatedly from the age of eleven; and gradually, a more spiritually aware being emerged in me. What seems to be the case is that we all come into these earth-lives as I did, just spiritually stupid and self-obsessed, and our guides direct us in our very early development. And I don’t care how old you are now, it is amazingly easy for you to use the teachings of Jesus to retrain yourself spiritually, and to raise your own consciousness vibration rapidly enough from wherever you are now that you can make this your last necessary earth-lifetime. Once you make spiritual growth your whole focus, it can take almost no time at all! Just a year or two perhaps, if you will put your whole mind to it.  

So, let’s really do this now. It was Thomas who directed me in taking these steps, even before I actually had met him in 2015. I think he probably did it as an experiment with me, and it worked beautifully! Raising your vibration enough to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime turns out to be as easy as One, Two, Three…

  • One, Perfect an Attitude of Gratitude. This is so simple! Get a notebook, and write down one new thing each day that you are grateful for. Or perhaps two at first, if you are an over-achiever. Write down what you are grateful for, and briefly why you are grateful for it. Also form the habit of falling asleep counting your blessings every night. When you concentrate on it, Gratitude becomes a wonderfully positive, reflexive, and constant attitude.
  • Two, Apply Prevenient Forgiveness to Everything. The “Miracle” in A Course in Miracles is forgiveness, and universal forgiveness is the essential precursor to universal love, so whenever anything or anyone bothers you at all, always forgive it right away! At once and automatically, gather everything that even remotely bothers you into a nice, tight ball, and then push it away from you slowly with both hands as you firmly say aloud, “I love you. I bless you. I forgive. And I release.” Do this even two or three times in succession if necessary, always going through the whole process of gathering whatever bothers you, including all the people, and forming the forgiveness ball and pushing it away while you say the mantra, until all your negative feelings about whatever it was are altogether gone.
  • Three, Master Universal Love. You will discover that once your Attitude of Gratitude has become habitual, and your Prevenient Forgiveness habit has largely cleared up all the things in your life that ever used to bother you, then you are going to find yourself liking, and then even loving things, and especially people, that you never would even have noticed before. Perhaps there were things about some of your family members, work associates, neighbors, and friends that used to get on your nerves; but now, oddly, those things bother you less and less. Or there was a house you used to pass on your daily walk where they never properly mowed their lawn, and rather than feeling irked by their laziness, your first thought now is that perhaps you ought to organize a neighborhood fund for people who have trouble affording to pay for lawn mowing.

Mastering these steps in this order is important. You are altogether retraining your pared-down earth-mind! Your attitude of gratitude first captures your mind’s full attention, and it prepares your mind for more intensive learning. Then, your obsessive use of Prevenient Forgiveness, your retraining of your mind with those forgiveness balls, clears away what has been a lifetime of letting your mind run wild with petty selfishness. This is some truly heavy-duty stuff! I spent about six months monitoring my every thought, and stopping and punishing my mind with another forgiveness-balls session whenever I had even the slightest mean or petty notion. And this was back in 2011, so almost fifteen years ago now. And in all the years since, I have never again had the smallest unkind thought about anyone. I have never had to form another forgiveness ball since then. Not even once!

It was sometime in about 2015, soon after Thomas had first come out to me as my primary spirit guide, and soon after we had together written Liberating Jesus, that my dear Thomas announced to me from out of the blue one day that I had now achieved the upper fifth spiritual level. So therefore, this is my last necessary earth-lifetime. I had never asked him this question, but he knew that, wow, I would want to know this, when it happened! And, yes, I did want to know it. I really had mastered my mind and raised my vibration to this extent? I knew that I did feel very different. It had been a long time since I had had any sort of unkind thought at all. I recall that I stood up slowly from my desk when he said this, and I went outside, and I walked around for a bit, just taking it all in. That was more than ten years ago. By now, I am used to this idea. I think that I  have grown even more. But my darling, my dear one, my precious friend, please think about this. If I have done it, Then anyone can do it! You can so easily do it, too!

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Sin?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

On occasion, someone will reach out to me by email, and will ask what I know is an unbearable question for a parent even to contemplate. They will remind me that I keep insisting that there is no hell. But, if someone has done some really bad thing, something awful, what will happen to him? How will God judge him? And sometimes, what follows will be an awful story of someone whose young life has gone terribly wrong, someone’s child has committed a crime perhaps, has killed someone, has killed himself or herself, or has died by a fentanyl overdose; and so on and on. Or it might not even be a child who has been lost. It might be some other loved one who has grieved my correspondent in some terrible way.

To be frank, this is the most hideous aspect of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s  Christianity. Under the highly judgmental version of the Christianity that we have been faithfully practicing since the year 325 C.E., every mistake that you and I make on earth, however petty that mistake might seem to us to be, is immediately labeled a terrible “sin” by the religion. And that mistake, that sin, is reportedly about to subject us to God’s terrible wrath. Isn’t that right? Well, or so the Christian religion insists to us. But I am able to reassure my correspondents that Jesus tells us that nothing of the kind is true!

What does Jesus say to us about God’s judgment? Let’s open our Bibles together now, and ask Jesus that very question. What we find there about sin in actual fact is that Jesus pushes back pretty hard on the notion of any sort of divine judgment. Jesus even goes so far as to tell us that, “Not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son, even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). So then, is Jesus telling us that God does not ever actually judge us? So now, is Jesus actually our judge? Is that why Jesus went to the cross for us? Well, no, because Jesus now tells us in the Gospel of John that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Jesus came to save the world? You came to save the world from what, Jesus? Well, it is clear from everything that Jesus said during His earthly ministry, which was more than three years long, that what Jesus came to save us from was spiritual ignorance. And Jesus seems even to have gone so far as to tell us that there is no universal judgment. He says, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).

This idea that, so long as we forgive, then we also will be forgiven is Jesus’s great and very consistent theme, throughout all four canonical Gospels. When Peter, His disciple, asked Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I must forgive him, up to even seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you.They will pour into your lap a good measure – pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return (LK 6:37-38). Huh? While Roman Christianity uses the word “sin” as a powerful noun, as a fixed crime that, once you have committed it, now it rigidly exists, so it requires either punishment or some form of atonement; for the Jesus of the Gospels, “sin” is just a trivial and always-flexible verb, so it is easily modified, and even easily forgiven altogether. He says to the woman who was caught in adultery, at whom no one in the crowd has felt sinless enough in front of Jesus to cast the first stone, “I do not condemn you either. Go. From now on, sin no more” (JN 8:11). Wow, look at that! Jesus sees her sin not as a serious and rigid noun, a crime punishable by death. But rather, it is a trifling and flexible verb, a mere piffle that He can entirely dismiss with a word.

My gradually becoming so completely dismissive of the rigid, sin-based teachings of the Catholic Church has been made easy by the simple fact that the afterlife evidence all has sided so completely with the gentle Gospel words of Jesus. There is, in point of fact, no afterlife evidence whatsoever that God ever judges us. None at all! No afterlife evidence for a fiery hell, and nor is there evidence for any place of punishment at all after death beyond “the Outer Darkness, in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12) The afterlife evidence tells us that this outer darkness is the very lowest-vibration afterlife level, and it is cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting. Only we, ourselves can ever put ourselves there, and that can happen only if we are unable to forgive ourselves for something that we have done in our earth-lives.

On the much more positive side, the Canonical Gospel teachings of Jesus can be seen now to be perfectly true! God never judges us, and also neither does Jesus. No, our post-death judge is always ourselves. And we don’t call this process judgment, but rather we call it just a life-review, and it happens very soon after our deaths. Each of us, with the assistance and comfort of our spirit guides, and sometimes also with the assistance of others who have been important in our lifetimes, will meet together, and will view all the significant events of our lifetime that just has been completed. We might be seeing all the important events from beginning to end, or else from the end backward to the beginning. But either way, this time we will feel the emotions of that whole lifetime from the points of view of all the people that we have in any way affected, for good or for ill. 

Many of those who have been through these life reviews will tell you that they can be pretty awful experiences! They say they never had remembered some of these life-events; and some of the very worst times, when they had most upset or pained people, were things that they had thought nothing of at the time. On the other hand, some of their most obvious screw-ups, they had apologized for and largely repaired during life, so those events weren’t very big deals in their life-reviews. But, the little girl you shamed in third grade? The boy whose great love you stole when he was twenty-two? The dry cleaner you denied a bank loan, so they went out of business and they couldn’t pay for their daughter’s cancer treatments? Learning complete forgiveness, and especially self-forgiveness while we are alive, really is essential! And not even so much so we can forgive others, but because eventually the day will come when we are going to face the deepest truths about ourselves. As Jesus so abundantly tells us! And on that day, even His “seventy times seven times” may not be enough times for us to need to forgive ourselves.

I have told you before in this space that eventually the impossible contrast between the way the Jesus of the Gospels sees sin, and the way the Roman Catholic Church sees sin, made my eyes cross! For Jesus, sins are only trivial mistakes made in the process of spiritual learning and growth, and always easily forgiven.  While for the religion, each sin is a permanent burden that only the  pure blood of Jesus on the cross can wash away. So eventually, and it was a number of years ago now, I asked Thomas point-blank who God really is. Is God the stern and fear-based God of the Catholic Church, or is God more the loving Father that Jesus taught us to know and to love in return? And does God see sin as a burden that only Jesus’s blood-sacrifice on the cross can remove?

So then, one morning as I was waking up, my Thomas showed me as a clear vision the living room of our first family home, way back when our three children were toddlers. In the early eighties, the carpet was pale blue, and the sofa was striped pale blue and white. The God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with His long, white beard was sitting on the sofa in that long-ago living room, looking like a Grampa and grinning at a toddler who looked like my blond and curly-haired son at about the age of one. The baby was giggling as he carried a cup of orange juice around the living room. Then, Whoopsie! The cup tipped, and all that orange juice spilled on the pale-blue carpet. The baby started to cry, but God laughed, and He leaned and picked up the baby, just as it toppled; and God cuddled the baby in His arms. That precious child will learn how to carry juice without spilling it, just as you and I will learn how to grow spiritually past our little sins and mistakes. Cod’s love is perfect! And each of us is God’s best-beloved child. All of our sins are nothing worse than spilling orange juice on the carpet.  We can call God our own heavenly Father, and we always can trust our God to keep us from falling. Every time.

 

He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.

He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

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