Author: Roberta Grimes

Whose Christianity? (#1)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

On a hill far away stood an old rugged cross,
The emblem of suff’ring and shame.
And I love that old cross where the dearest and best
For a world of lost sinners was slain.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.

Oh, that old rugged cross, so despised by the world,
Has a wondrous attraction for me.
For the dear Lamb of God left His glory above
To bear it to dark Calvary.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.
– George Bennard (1873–1958). From “The Old Rugged Cross” (1912)

Of all the things that influence our lives, the single thing about which we have the greatest right to feel most certain is the way that Jesus, our Wayshower and our Best Friend, specifically suggests that we should live our lives. Wouldn’t you agree that is certainly true? Doesn’t each of us have the unrestricted right to be personally sure of how Jesus wants us to live while we are on this earth? I mean, if you cannot be sure of what Jesus wants of you, then how can you really be sure about anything?

But, here is our problem. When I wrote my first book in this field, The Fun of Dying, and that was fifteen years ago now, there were then by most counts more than ten thousand different denominations of Christianity being practiced on earth. True, perhaps most of those versions occupied just  one, or maybe only a few church buildings. But even if there had been as few as perhaps just a hundred major versions of Christianity at that time, or – Lord forgive us! – just a thousand versions, how on earth were we supposed to know which version might possibly be the best one to follow? And, much worse to even contemplate, was it conceivably true that only one of those very many version was the “right” one, the one blessed by God? A few of those ten thousand versions actually were proclaiming back then that they alone held heaven’s keys, and if you followed any other Christian denomination, then you were flat-out going to hell. Worst of all, I am sorry to break this news to you on such a lovely Sunday morning, but when I just asked Google how many Christian denominations there are today, I was horrified!  Modern Christianity is breeding all around us like metaphorical rabbits. Amazingly, there are four times as many denominations of Christianity now than there were just fifteen years ago!

There are more than forty-five thousand Christian denominations now, believe it or not. Even as the number of Christians, in the United States at least, has been slowly declining; although, according to the most recent Pew survey, the religion seems to be leveling off in the low-sixty-percent range of all Americans; still, the differences of opinion among American Christians seem to be proliferating.  People are coming at us from all directions now, and many of them are telling us with lead-pipe certainty that they know just what Jesus wants us to do, yes-sir-ree, and no question about that at all. We can listen to them and ignore all the rest.   

But the problem is that all these spits among denominations so often are based on trivial nothings. One group of Methodists, for example. will allow female clergy, and this other group will not. A third group will allow homosexual clergy, and perhaps there are subgroups for Methodist homosexual female clergy, and another for homosexual male clergy, and so on. Or it might be abortion that has people frothing and further splitting Christian denominations into bits. Or it might be the fact that Oprah has now become a spiritual teacher, but her demands are not strict enough and she refuses to focus on that bloody cross, so now she is alarmingly leading people astray. To tell you the truth, decades ago I looked into many of these splits upon splits as they were happening, but now they only dishearten me. The fact that people who purport to love Jesus have split what Jesus gave us as a single love-based spiritual Way into more than forty-five thousand fear-based religions, many of which insist that the followers of most of the other Christian religions are damned for eternity for not believing quite the right things, is a shame and a horror!

Today’s frame–verse trumpets the central teaching of the original fear-based Christian religion that was designed for the Roman Emperor Constantine at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 C.E., and it remains the core teaching of the Christianity that still is the world’s predominant religion today. Most people associate that religion with Jesus, but as we again approach our celebration of Easter, and we remember that Jesus chose to die on a cross, it is important for us to also recall that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s explanation for Jesus’s crucifixion that came out of his First Council of Nicaea was based upon nothing that Jesus ever taught! We will talk more about all of this next week. But the whole notion that Jesus died on a cross as a sin-sacrifice to God was only one of many ideas that arose in the burgeoning spiritual Way of Jesus as it spread rapidly around the whole eastern half of the Mediterranean Sea during the first couple of centuries after Jesus’s death and resurrection. To prove my point that Jesus never taught that His death on the cross was meant to be a big-deal sin-sacrifice to God, please just note that there are more than six million burials of early followers of Jesus’s Way in the Roman Catacombs, Those burials occurred from the Second through the Fifth Centuries C.E.. And to show you how little the manner of Jesus’s death mattered to His earliest followers, among all the many illustrations on those tombs in the Roman Catacombs, not a single depiction of a cross can be found. Instead, what is commonly seen in the Catacombs is Jesus as a brown-eyed, curly-haired Shepherd with a goat on his shoulders, to show that He came to care for everyone, not just the sheep of His own flock but also all the wayward goats.

We now understand that a big core problem with that central teaching of Constantine’s new Christian religion, which was and today remains that Jesus came to die as a pure sacrifice for all our sins, is that it makes the religion fear- and guilt-based. So the religion worked beautifully for an Emperor who needed an efficient way to control his masses! Constantine seized on and built up that one strain among the many strains of thinking that then existed in the spiritual Way of Jesus, and his armies tried to stamp out every other strain. But we have learned a lot in seventeen hundred years. We now know that:

  • Reality is composed of and created by what we experience as consciousness. Literally nothing else but consciousness exists. And…
  • Consciousness exists on an emotional vibrational scale from fear, guilt, anger, and hatred at the lowest vibrational level up to intense love at the highest level. And we come to earth to learn to raise our personal vibrations on that scale, since at home, in what from here we call heaven, there is so little negativity for us to push against.

The Gospel teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love are in fact ideally suited to help us learn to rapidly raise our personal vibrations within consciousness. If we will just follow His teachings, we can make the best use of our earth-lifetimes to grow spiritually away from fear and toward ever more perfect love, which is the entire point of our lives on earth! But, please read our frame-verse again. As you can see, Constantine’s awful, fear-based core Christian dogma is literal spiritual poison. And when you combine that seventeen-hundred-year-old teaching with the more recent tendency of modern Christians to squabble and split the religion even further over ever tinier differences in the ways they might want to worship, or in the preferred sexual preferences of their clergymen and other such trivialities. And with even their tendency to want to attach the imagined influence of a theoretical Satan to anyone who doesn’t happen to choose their own particular flavor of worship or clergy sexual preference. Frankly, at this point, you and I throw up our hands. We now have more than forty-five thousand slightly different Christian religions to choose from worldwide, with some of them actively squabbling with one another? And nearly all of them have at their core that awful dogma that says that Jesus died for our sins, so they are unavoidably teaching not love, but mostly fear and shame? Might we actually be better off with no Christian religions at all? With instead just loving and studying God and Jesus, but doing nothing more complicated than that?

Because, please think about just how horribly that awful teaching presents  both God and Jesus to a world that so desperately needs them both. Poor God! What does that teaching say about the wise and loving God Who calls upon all of us to learn to perfectly forgive one another. God in the Gospels in the Person of God’s Son calls upon all of us to lovingly forgive our fellow man. But the Christian religion tells us that God flat refuses to forgive you and me for whatever we might have done wrong, unless God first gets to enjoy watching God’s only begotten Son being horribly tortured and murdered. Dear God, please forgive me, but that is what the dogma of “substitutionary atonement” plainly says! And, what about Jesus? What does that same dogma say about our own beloved Wayshower and Best Friend? Poor Jesus! It tells us that all the precious and intensely worthwhile Gospel teachings that He gave to us when He taught us for three and a half years were not the true reason why He was born on earth. Not at all! No, the dogma of substitutionary atonement tells us that Jesus’s one essential role on earth was to remain sinless for His whole earth-life so He could then take every human sin upon Himself, and His body could be tortured and killed as a pure sacrifice to God.  

The First Nicaean Council’s explanation for Jesus’s death on the cross is insulting to God, and it is humiliating to Jesus. And furthermore, it makes no sense:

  • If substitutionary atonement were true, then Jesus did not need to teach. He just needed to stay sinless from birth, and then at the appointed time he had to take all our sins upon Himself, past and future, and go through the pain of being tortured and killed as a sin-sacrifice to God. Why God would have wanted to watch Jesus go through all that, when God could just have forgiven us all in the same way that God asks us all to forgive one another, is a question that the dogma never bothers to answer.
  • If substitutionary atonement were true, then Jesus didn’t need to rise from the dead. After all, no lamb that was offered in the Temple as a sin-sacrifice ever came alive again! Jesus’s coming alive again does nothing to enhance Jesus’s sacrifice; and indeed, it is a confusing distraction.
  • Since it demeans God and it insults Jesus, that substitutionary atonement teaching also reduces and distorts what is best about the Christian religion that features them both. I will have more to say about this next week, but if you only think about it for a moment, you can see how plainly this is true. God loves you, but not enough to forgive you for even your petty human sins without the blood-sacrifice of Jesus’s death on the cross also added to the scales in your favor? And what good are the teachings of Jesus, if His having lovingly delivered them in service to God was not able to help Him escape His then having to go through all that pain and humiliation?

Worst of all to my mind is the fact that in most Christian churches which play up the notion that Jesus died for our sins, actually teaching the plain Gospel words of Jesus is at the same time sadly minimized. The biggest example of this problem, of course, is Catholicism, the largest Christian sect by membership, where I spent the first twenty-five years of my marriage. A few small bits of the Gospels are read routinely as a part of the Catholic Mass; but seldom are those parts expanded upon in the priest’s homily, or are they otherwise discussed. In some Unity Churches, A Course in Miracles study groups are held; but while Jesus also led the group that channeled that book to us in the Sixties, ACIM is deep and complex and therefore often difficult to understand, and studying it is a serious commitment. By contrast, the Gospel teachings of Jesus can be read all together in one evening. They are simple to understand and easily memorized, and at the same time they are the most powerfully life- and love-affirming lessons ever delivered by anyone.

Next week, we will look more deeply at the conundrum that we all will face as Christianity yet again rolls aside the stone from Jesus’s burial cave on another Easter morning and finds an empty tomb. For two thousand years, we have been content to offer our own shallow, human-level answers to the question of what that empty tomb might mean. What fresh answers might we propose this year…?

In that old rugged cross, stained with blood so divine,
A wondrous beauty I see,
For ’twas on that old cross Jesus suffered and died
To pardon and sanctify me.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross
And exchange it someday for a crown.

To the old rugged cross I will ever be true,
Its shame and reproach gladly bear.
Then He’ll call me someday to my home far away,
Where His glory forever I’ll share.

So I’ll cherish the old rugged cross
‘Til my trophies at last I lay down.
I will cling to the old rugged cross,
And exchange it someday for a crown.
– George Bennard (1873–1958), from “The Old Rugged Cross” (1912)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Sharing Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I love you, there’s nothing to hide.
It’s better than burning inside.
I love you, no use to pretend.
There! I’ve said it again.

I’ve said it, what more can I say?
Believe me, there’s no other way.
I love you, I will to the end.
There! I’ve said it again.

I try to drum up a phrase that will sum up
All that I feel for you.
But what good are phrases? The thought that amazes
Is that you love me, and it’s heavenly!
– Redd Evans (1912-1972). From “There, I’ve Said it Again” (1963)

I have been so consumed with working and with doing all the things that I do each week that I never have thought much about distant strangers. I mean, until just recently. My core work for the past forty years has been practicing law for closely-held businesses, and I have continued to enjoy doing that in my semi-retirement; although now, I practice law for just a very few longstanding clients. For my whole life, of course, I have been interested in Jesus and in the afterlife, so I have spent all my life’s spare time immersed in research; and in semi-retirement, I do a lot more of that. I study Jesus, the afterlife, and the mysterious science and spirituality of our greater reality. My library at this point holds thousands of books, with many of them gathered from used-books stores, to the point where they take up several rooms; and my saintly husband is almost at the point of saying, “I love you, but at this point it has to be the books or me.” Well, he almost says that. But he also has quite a few books of his own.

My much less patient supplemental husband, my deeply treasured spirit guide, Thomas, began a dozen years ago to insist that it was time for us to begin to teach some of the spiritual wisdom that I have spent the better part of my lifetime accumulating. So in 2013, he and I began to do that. First, in June of that year, we began a weekly podcast; and then later in that same November we wrote our first blog post. Our blogging was irregular at first, but pretty soon it began to be weekly as well, and typically each weekly offering takes a day and a half to research, write, and polish. Another half-day or more goes toward preparing and recording our podcast, and back then I still was the attorney of record for at least a dozen businesses. I loved doing it all, but I cannot now imagine when I must have found enough time back then to sleep!

The reason why I so much love my life has always been the people. Yes, I practice law, but I never have been inside a courtroom. In fact, one of my clients is involved in litigation at the moment – first time this ever has happened – and we have called in a litigation attorney to handle the case for them (they will win it easily). But my legal clients have always been family businesses, which are the economic beating heart of America, and my work for them has been contracts, transactions, estate planning, and general business advice. For each of the few businesses that I have stayed with for decades, through good times and not so very good times, and through all their planning and working things out, each business’s family members have become quite literally my own much-beloved family. I could not love them more if I shared their names. There are four especially beautiful families that are now preparing to pass their businesses to the third, or in one case even to the fourth generation. And having known each business’s patriarch when my legal practice still was young, I am determined now to work long enough to be able to help to prepare all their beloved next generations’ members, and then to draft their transfer documents!

After twelve years of weekly podcasting, too, the reason why I still love doing it remains all the glorious people involved. Over time, I come to dearly love many of my repeat podcast guests! I love the listeners as well, because I often hear from them, and I even have met a number of them. By now, “Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes” is syndicated, and I will randomly meet people who recognize me because of our podcasting. I also get emails from listeners all over the world. When I often begin many podcasts by addressing those watching and listening as “my dear ones”, I mean that! If you are curious about my podcast, here are some audio links: Apple & Spotify. Even though I have a great face for radio, we began in late June of 2023 to also record these podcasts in video. The video podcasts are available on Apple TV, Roku, and Amazon Fire Stick streaming devices; or you can download the Experts and Authors App on your AppleTV, or else just visit www.Expertsandauthors.tv  online and click SEEK REALTY.  And back here in our studio, there are  just the three of us plus Thomas working each week: my beloved Sam of webtalkradio.net, and yours truly, with our weekly guest. Sam has been my engineer for perhaps a decade, and I truly do not believe that I could do this podcast anymore if he were not always right here with me.

The Seek Reality guest who has been with us the longest is Dr. R. Craig Hogan. Craig and I share ownership of the biggest and most complete source of afterlife information on the internet, which is Seek Reality Online; but that website really is all Craig’s baby! He runs it beautifully, and he does that better than I ever could. Craig was my first-ever Seek Reality guest when we began our podcast twelve years ago, and he has been on with me faithfully once each quarter ever since. In fact, he and I have just recorded our 48th episode together! Although I hear every week from agents representing new potential guests, about eighty percent of our guests now are repeats, most of whom have done Seek Reality episodes with us many times by now. Listeners will let us know that they want to hear from some particular guest again. Or in some cases, I might think that a guest’s story is so important, or so interesting or so enjoyable, that I will let just a few months pass before I will bring that person back again.

Today I am going to share with you one remarkable recent Seek Reality guest. She joined us for the first time a year ago, and I thought her story was so wonderful, and so important, that I brought her back twice more last year, and an additional time early in 2025, so she is already a four-times regular guest. Hers is one of those unbelievably uplifting stories that seems to be impossible, but it is true nonetheless!

After an accident in 2003 left Brandy Gillmore wheelchair-bound and in terrible pain, doctors told her there was nothing more that they could do for her. This was going to be her life. But Brandy refused to accept that, so she searched for a cure, and eventually she figured out how to heal herself. Brandy Gillmore discovered research that changed the course of her life, and she made a complete recovery. But for Brandy, that was just the beginning! After she managed to heal herself in 2010, she didn’t want to just talk about her healing. But she wanted to help other people to see real and objective proof that our minds really do in fact possess the power to heal our bodies!

 So in 2015, Brandy made that goal a reality when for the first time she was able to demonstrate self-healing to physicians in real-time under thermal medical imaging (TMI). Then soon after that, Brandy was invited to deliver a TEDx talk,  which was a pivotal moment in her healing journey. Please notice here that, as has been true with other TEDx talks which demonstrate the truly remarkable powers of the mind, or else demonstrate the failings of science, including Rupert Sheldrake’s famously banned TEDx talk, Brandy’s TEDx talk carries a bogus warning label. This says nothing negative about her work, but it does say something seriously sad about cutting-edge TEDx talks and those who fear them!

More recently, Brandy Gillmore has continued to demonstrate amazing healing results using medical thermal imaging. She demonstrates these results on her own podcast, which is called Heal Yourself. Change Your Life, and in speaking engagements for medical professionals and general audiences. Her excellent book is called Master Your Mind and Energy to Heal Your Body. I think her book is a must-read, especially if you have health issues. The fact is that our minds possess an extraordinary ability to heal our bodies that is far beyond any placebo effect, and Brandy’s book helps readers to understand the missing link to mind-body healing. It provides a simple step-by-step process that helps her readers understand how we can all access this hidden healing potential of our own minds. Brandy’s website is brandygillmore.com.

 There is something else, too, that I enjoy doing weekly with people that I so dearly love. In 2024, at Thomas’s behest, I experimented with teaching a course in how to use the teachings of Jesus to raise your personal spiritual vibration far enough away from fear and close enough to perfect love that you can achieve at least the top of the fourth level of the afterlife by the time that you graduate from this lifetime. That will put you at a high enough point that you can cease to incarnate. By the time that you are vibrating reliably at that level, Thomas tells us that you will be able to continue to grow spiritually just from what you will be able to do from there, primarily serving as a spirit guide or otherwise helping others. We managed to complete two of these twelve-week courses by late in the summer of 2024.

But the problem was that some of the people in each of those two classes wanted to keep on learning and working with me and with one another, and I wanted very much to keep them in my life! I love them. They are part of my own family now. And this is, no kidding, a beautiful worldwide family! Yes of course, about half are Americans from all over the U.S, and a couple of them are Canadian, but then my dear ones in this group encircle the world! We have several members from Australia, and one each from Serbia, South Africa, and Grenada in the Caribbean. We hold our meetings at 5:00 p.m. U.S. eastern time on Wednesdays, which is close to midnight in Serbia and South Africa, and 9;00 the next morning in Australia. And that works for us!

So we will come together again this week, joyously. We always invite Thomas and Jesus to join our gathering, and usually they are already with us. Most often, Thomas will have suggested a topic of discussion for us, and Jesus seldom speaks but His benevolent love will be in what feels like the cozy meeting room around us. And that cozy little Zoom meeting room is worldwide! But you would never know it. You would think we all live in the same small town, and we are meeting in someone’s living room. The love in everyone’s voice for one another is palpable.The delight in simply being together and able to share our thoughts with people who love and understand us personally is indescribable! And it gives you a whole new perspective, doesn’t it? So this is what has lately gotten me to thinking. I think of these shining, so familiar faces that only a year ago were strangers, some of whom are actually a whole world away. The very thought of that is inconceivable now, when I love each of them so much! But I wonder now, as I think of how easily we all have become one family, whether we might find a way, someday, somehow, to make a whole world of former strangers feel so beloved to us as we all now have become?

Forgive me for wanting you so,
But one thing I want you to know.
I’ve loved you since heaven knows when.
There! I’ve said it again.
– Redd Evans (1912-1972), from “There, I’ve Said it Again” (1963)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Seeking Reality

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Be My love, for no one else can end this yearning,
This need that You and You alone create.
Just fill My heart the way you’ve filled My dreams,
The dreams that You inspire with every sweet desire.

Be My love, and with Your kisses set Me burning.
One kiss is all I need to seal My fate.
And hand-in-hand, we’ll find love’s promised land.
There’ll be no one but You for Me, eternally,
If You will be My love!
– Sammy Cahn (1913-1993), from “Be My Love” (1950)

This is such a wonderful time to be working in this field where you and I find so much joy and excitement! We want to truly know God, and to ever better understand the reality that surrounds us all. We want the bliss of living in ultimate awareness of our reality in each sublime and shining moment! So I have spent my whole adult life studying the Gospel teachings of Jesus, the amazing details of the afterlife, and also popular science magazines, always insisting as I was doing this often thrilling work that there had to be just one reality, and that therefore, since these three separate lines of study are independently real, they must fit together in some fashion and together comprise one great, all-powerful, and infinite truth! They must somehow together create one reality. Of that, I always was sublimely confident.

You could not, of course, ever make sense of reality using only one source of knowledge. For example, you could not study just popular science or the afterlife realities or what Jesus had taught, and expect that you were building a well-rounded body of knowledge that would allow you to make fundamental sense of everything that is real. No, somehow I always realized in my vast, enthusiastic naivete that if I was going to truly seek reality, I was going to have to attempt in the course of my life to come to know more or less a whole lot about everything! So, I persisted in my uncertain certainty, and in my refusal to accept any easy answers to the great whole truth that I always was sure would for certain underlie it all. Until eventually, God sort of sighed at my stubborn persistence, and especially at my endless importuning of the Godhead for the greatest truths that I always knew had to be beneath it all, and available… if God would only, please, You know, lend a little hand here? And eventually, God did indeed give me guidance on my last few steps of the way.

Our human problem is, of course, that we come to earth with not much more than half of our vast, eternal minds available to us, since we are here for rapid spiritual learning, and not to figure out the greatest secrets of reality. But God loves each of us beyond all reason, and God does encourage us to seek these greatest truths! Remember that Jesus says to us in the Gospel Book of Matthew, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (MT 7:7). And what can possibly be a plainer promise than that? The Lord’s word is His sacred bond! But it takes lifelong, persistent and honest work on our part to earn the right to find, with God’s ultimate help, these greatest truths. We must avoid blind alleys, too, and there are two especially big blind alleys that we must carefully avoid!

Those two worst blind alleys that lie in wait and might lure us astray as we seek to find God’s eternal truths about reality are both man-made. And the reason why they are so insidious is that many people consider them to be God-made. So, people trust them as sources of divine knowledge, and they generally think of them as legitimate sources of information about the fundamental reality that we believe we see around us now, when in fact they are nothing of the kind. Many of you, my beloved friends, are going to throw brickbats at me for pointing out these two areas as factual blind alleys; but nevertheless, blind alleys is what they are:

  • Religious Dogmas. Anything that any religion teaches must be considered to be a blind alley where seeking actual, factual information about objective reality is concerned. And this is especially true of Roman Christianity! Every Christian belief that is not based on something that Jesus actually said must be seen to be based in and supported by only human ideas. This is not, of course, true of the Christian Bible, many parts of which are in fact divinely inspired. We know from Jesus, and I have been told by my spirit guide, Thomas, that Jesus and Thomas both were present at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, when the Christian Bible was assembled; and there they heavily influenced the Bible’s assembly as to the choice and placement of the words spoken by Jesus. So we can indeed largely trust the Biblical Gospels. But the human-created dogmas, such as the notion that Jesus died for our sins? Oh, no indeed.
  • Near-Death Experiences. A Near-Death Experience (NDE) is a spontaneous out-of-body experience which generally happens because the victim’s physical body is temporarily unstable, or that body might even be briefly altogether unable to support life. Our energy bodies generally leave our physical bodies as often as every night during the early, deep stage of sleep; and we might stay in our bedrooms, or else we might travel widely in our energy bodies while they remain attached to our sleeping physical bodies by an extremely stretchy energy umbilicus that is called the “silver cord” (see Ecclesiastes 12:6). During NDEs, our spirit guides will often take us to the love-filled astral plane, and they will create quite vivid, dreamlike experiences for us there; but we never go to where the dead are. In fact, during more extensive NDEs we might approach the place in the astral plane where the dead are, and we are then warned away from it. We are told that if we continue and actually enter the place where the dead reside, our silver cord will then break, and our body will die on earth. Death is always a one-way trip because the silver cord cannot be reattached.

Neither Christian dogmas nor NDEs can be of any use to us as we try to make sense of the objective reality that we perceive to be all around us. Both are useless for the same reason, which is that Roman Christian dogmas and NDEs are equally the product of human minds. So what happens in them tells us nothing about the eternal Mind of God.

Nor, for that matter, can early-twentieth-century materialist science, with its dogmatic insistence that reality must be physical, tell us anything about objective reality, or about the eternal Mind of God. You already know, as we are fond of saying in this space, that 99.9999999% of the supposedly solid reality that you believe you see around you now is, no matter how solid it might seem to our solid-seeming but still immaterial fingers, in fact entirely empty space. And indeed, more and more, the generation of scientists now edging toward retirement age is finding itself forced to give up on solid physicality as a characteristic of reality; although since physics has been so devoted to the dogma of materialism for more than a century, materialism now oddly feels to that generation of scientists like a line that superstitiously cannot be crossed. But still, they mention often kind of stepping over that line or edging around it now. One thing that scientists are lately discovering is just how precisely designed even the most minute details of our home planet actually have to be in order for it to reliably support life. Ah, did we actually hear someone just say that long-forbidden term, “intelligent design”?

I enjoy reading dear Father Richard Rohr’s musings, and he has lately been quoting to his followers some of the mystics of the early middle ages, the greatest of whom were head over heels on fire with their intense love for God. Theirs was often the kind of absolute, complete and naked love that could make a sailor blush! So when I went looking for a suitable frame-verse for what I wanted to say to you today, nothing less than “Be my love” would do. Those mystics knew God as the intimate and highly personal object of a genuine and all-encompassing love more deeply satisfying than any mere sexual love could be. And I can see that now. As I have opened myself more completely to God, I begin to understand how soul-deep satisfying their lifelong love for God truly was. We ourselves live our whole lives inside the Mind of a Godhead whose deep and intense love for us passes all understanding. And when we return God’s love, and we devote our lives in love and service to God and to God’s people, we can live in a bliss far beyond sublime!

Okay, so when I put together my eccentric lifelong immersion studies of the Gospels, and of death and the afterlife, and also of popular science magazines in an effort to understand reality, did I ever actually learn anything for certain? Oh, yes indeed! Perhaps oddly, my assumption that each of my three lifelong areas of study as I sought reality would illuminate the other two areas has turned out to be pretty much right. The conclusion is inescapable to me now that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact primary, just as the great father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, first discovered that consciousness is primary a full century ago. Consciousness is all that actually exists. Consciousness is the sculptor, and it also is the clay. The popular science magazines slowly are getting there, too, but I wouldn’t know at all where they were heading if it were not for my afterlife studies and some of what Jesus tells us in the Gospels. The more I have put together my lifetime of knowledge gathered from avidly studying my three sources, the more I have been able to build a comfortable certainty of the great reality that Jesus came to teach us about, where God smiles. The great reality that I have spent my life seeking is indeed the literal Mind of God.

And the God described by Jesus in the Gospels is remarkably consistent with the God that we also find in the afterlife evidence. What everyone who has done very much research in this field has discovered is that nothing else but what you and I experience as Consciousness, or the Mind of God, actually exists! The whole of reality is literally a thought in the Mind of God. This conclusion is obvious, inescapable, and slap-your-head simple. And God is not some human-made physical creation with a long beard at all; but rather, as Jesus insists to us, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24). The afterlife evidence confirms what Jesus tells us in the Gospels, that God never appears as a physical Being. Jesus also tells us that God never judges us, and that neither does He, Jesus, ever judge us. Jesus says, “For 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). And then when we have digested that fact, Jesus adds, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him” (JN 12:47). And again, the afterlife evidence confirms these basic truths about God and about Jesus. There is no joy more certain than is our eternal joy in the perfect love that God has for each of us individually! The reality that I have spent my life seeking turns out to be God’s love song for you, echoing down through all the ages and filling all of time and space, forevermore.

Be My love, for no one else can end this yearning,
This need that You and You alone create.
Just fill My heart the way you’ve filled My dreams,
The dreams that You inspire with every sweet desire.

Be My love, and with Your kisses set Me burning.
One kiss is all I need to seal My fate.
And hand-in-hand, we’ll find love’s promised land.
There’ll be no one but You for Me, eternally,
If You will be My love!
– Sammy Cahn (1913-1993), from “Be My Love” (1950)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Whither Christians Now?

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 banners 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.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

Last week we considered the entire history of Christianity to date, trying to summarize two thousand complex and too often bloody and venal years in a few quick paragraphs. Of course, my own problems with Christianity began when I was eight years old, and I was awakened at what I think was four in the morning by a brilliant flash of light and then the comforting voice of my spirit guide. Because of that light and that voice, I began so young to disdain kiddie Sunday School, and instead I was glad to attend grownup church. I began to read the Bible repeatedly from cover to cover when I was eleven, and my college major had to be early Christian history. I was eager back then to learn so much more! And my college advisor, Miss Corwin, took me to a much deeper personal understanding and love for Jesus than I ever had found even in gownup church, together with a resentment of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s role that I have never in my life managed to get over.

While it was my childhood experience of light that first transformed me into an eager Christian, it was my college major that much later soured me on the Roman Christianity that has long been the world’s most prominent religion. Now I look at Christians that I respect, and especially the smartest ones, the ones that I know love and honor Jesus, and sometimes I want to say to them, “Oh my very dear one, how can you possibly believe all that Christianity as a religion still insists that you must believe? My darling, where in this is your mind?” But I never actually do say that to anyone.  

The core Roman Christian teaching is that Jesus was born pure and sinless so He could then assume all of humankind’s sins, and He could suffer and die for all of us as our pure sacrifice to God. And you know that makes no sense at all. Just think about it! That whole idea is insulting to God, and it is humiliating to Jesus. Please consider what it says about both of them. God gentlly insists that you and I must learn to forgive whatever happens to us in order for us to grow spiritually. And yet God is not willing to forgive us for anything unless God first gets to watch God’s own Son being tortured and murdered? Does that make sense? And Jesus taught us for three and a half years the greatest wisdom of all the ages, but when it comes right down to it, Jesus’s greatest and most sacred role is not to teach us anything, but rather it is just to be our blood-sacrifice to God for our sins? He is a sacrificial lamb, dumb and mute, and nothing more? When we truly love and respect God, and when we also truly love and respect Jesus, each in their own pure and perfect light, we can see that none of this makes sense. Obviously, it makes no spiritual sense! But even beyond that, it makes no literal, factual, objective sense when we actively apply to it our God-given minds. It is frankly and on every level a fundamentally stupid idea.

It was wonderful Miss Corwin very long ago who first pointed all of this out to me. I can remember that seminal afternoon in her study to this day, her somewhat disorderly books and papers, and how angry at some long-dead Roman Emperor named Constantine she still was, that he had fabricated this nonsensical dogma that made fools of both God and man, and then he had formed his own version of Christianity around his dumb idea. To me, at barely nineteen, she looked to be maybe old enough to herself have known that ancient Roman Emperor personally. And yet, she probably was not even as old then as I am now.

It is said that if you love hot dogs, then you never should watch hot dogs being made. And the same can surely be said of Christianity! I began college as an ardently devout Christian who was planning to become a minister. But by the time I graduated from college, my Christian feelings were deeply nuanced. I still kept my daily Bible-reading habit; and in fact, I kept that up into my early fifties. I still loved Jesus, and even more deeply, just as Miss Corwin very deeply loved Jesus; but then a few years later I met the love of my life. Edward was and remains an ardent Catholic, so that ended my ambitions toward entering the Protestant clergy! And after I had watched Christianity being made at the First Council of Nicaea, I had kind of lost my taste for Constantine’s brand of Christianity, anyway.

My Thomas is the lead author of these weekly offerings for you, and he wants me to point out whenever I mention First Nicaea in any way derisively that it did accomplish two very good things:

  • The First Nicaean Councilors assembled the first Christian Bible. Before First Nicaea, there was not one definitive place where what we now call the Old Testament, the Gospel teachings of Jesus, and the letters of Paul could be found preserved together in good and consistent form. Those Councilors sought out the best versions of all those scriptures, they prayed together, and they claimed to be divinely inspired.
  • In assembling their Bible, The First Nicaean Councilors respected Jesus. As they worked, those Councilors messed far less with the teachings of Jesus in the four canonical Gospels than they actually might have messed with them, collecting and including only the teachings that Jesus Himself was impressing on their minds that He wanted them to use, and putting their few wrong additions just at the backs of the four canonical Gospels, so anything they could not resist adding, such as Jesus’s call to Peter, would be easy for us to spot and remove.

My much-beloved Thomas reminds us that the First Nicaean Councilors could so easily have filled their Bible with Jesus spouting lots of invented nonsense taken from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s ideas! And you and I would be none the wiser.  Nowhere do we find Jesus saying, “I go to the cross now to die for your sins!” or anything like that sort of nonsense. Thomas tells me that he and Jesus were indeed actually present at the First Council of Nicaea, gently influencing the Councilors’ minds at key moments, and keeping pure the Christian Bible that resulted from their efforts. As a result, the Bible that Roman Christianity uses now is one that Jesus’s followers still will be able to use, even after Constantine’s faulty religion eventually fades.

And speaking of the long decline of Roman Christianity, which is something that we have been expecting, it may be a bit longer in coming than we have been imagining would be the case.  A recent Pew poll suggests that, in the United States at least, the decline of Roman Christianity has slowed, and it may now even have effectively been halted. The Pew Research Center calls itself a nonpartisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C. which provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. It recently surveyed more than thirty-five thousand American adults across all fifty states, making this one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. The results of this most recent survey are striking:

  • 62% of American adults still identify as Christians. This includes 40% who are Protestants and 19% who are Catholics.
  • The religiously unaffiliated group has held steady at 28%. This includes those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” and it is nearly unchanged from multiple previous surveys.
  • 7% of respondents identified with a non-Christian faith. Their list of these other religions includes faiths such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.
  • The percentage of Christians has remained stable over the past five years. Pew points out that this marks the first time in decades that the decline has stalled.

Christianity experienced a steep decline percentage-wise in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. In 1990, roughly 90% of Americans still identified as Christians, which seems to be an astonishing statistic when you learn that by 2007, that percentage had already dropped to 78%. The last major Pew religious survey prior to the one just conducted was in 2014, and it recorded Christians at 65%. Pew calls it “not insignificant” that the steepest declines took place during the eight Obama years.

Some observers note that there seems to be a correlation between the decline of religious feeling and political leftism. For example, as was noted above, the steepest decline in Christian religious feeling in the United States in recent years seems to have happened during Barack Obama’s leftist presidency. And over several years beginning in 2020, more traditionally leftist Canada to America’s north devoted some three hundred and twenty million dollars to finding any evidence at all that nineteenth-century Christian schools for indigenous children there had buried many of those children in unmarked graves, which project inspired quite a lot of anti-Christian Canadian hatred.  When little to no evidence for such a travesty could be found, after a few years the project was abandoned, but not without the waste of so many millions of dollars and the vandalizing or the outright burning down of fifty-five Canadian churches.

It feels comforting to find that the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians seems to be perhaps no longer declining! If this percentage eventually stabilizes at something like fifty percent of Americans who are still willing to hold to Roman Christianity with its deep flaws in dogma in order to keep their relationship with Jesus, and also their relationship with our culture’s old-time religion, well then, perhaps we might gently re-mold Roman Christianity into something more loving and less fear-based. Edward tells me that some old Catholic traditions, like confession, simply don’t seem to happen anymore. However, even gentling the old religion now would still leave some forty percent of formerly Christian Americans without a real spiritual home. And what we still don’t know for sure is what Jesus wants to do now for those who have fallen away from Roman Christianity but still want a relationship with Him.

Pew tells us that ninety percent of Americans were professed Christians thirty-five years ago, and that percentage has declined by one-third now. So it is worth asking what those thirty percent of Americans who already have abandoned the Christian religion are doing today for their spiritual sustenance. Jesus has lately suggested to Thomas and me that for those who have left Roman Christianity, He intends to begin His original Way once again. “The Way” was Jesus’s movement that thrived during the three centuries following His death and resurrection, and it quickly grew to millions of people before Constantine destroyed it. Jesus and Thomas have channeled through me two books that Jesus tells us His new Way will use, and He has asked us to begin a website called teachingsbyjesus.com that will not become fully operational until He tells us how He wants us to complete it. And so, my dear ones, here we are. We have framed our blog post this week with the swashbuckling words of a hymn that I recall so well from my childhood spent attending and loving grownup church. I smile to find that there still is life and a possible way forward for the old-time religion that I once loved, and Thomas and I are talking now about writing for next week a post about what it might take to save it. And meanwhile, in the timeless, glorious reality where Jesus now plans His eternal Way’s next stage, we are watching Jesus, and wondering, and waiting for His next stage to begin.

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.
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 through countless ages Men and angels sing.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

A Bit of History

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

To dream the impossible dream. To fight the unbeatable foe.
To bear with unbearable sorrow. To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the un-rightable wrong. To love, pure and chaste from afar.
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star.

 This is my quest! To follow that star!
No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.
To fight for the right without question or pause.
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause!
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One God!” (Deut 5; Deut 6:4) This is the most important Law of Moses, and first given to him by God on Mount Sinai thirty-three hundred years ago, after Moses had brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. And then Jesus, some thirteen hundred years later but still two thousand years before this morning, when He was asked what was the greatest Commandment, He boiled the entire Law of Israel, including all Ten Commandments, down to just these two: “‘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).

As we have said often here, Jesus came to teach us how to forgive and to love so we can raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently that we will never again need to incarnate on earth. And His teachings work so beautifully to do precisely that! So, why then did the Lord’s effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth not succeed the first time around? Actually, it was going very well for at least the first four hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus’s earliest followers buried at least six million of their dead in tunnels beneath the city of Rome, the last of which burials date to the early fifth century C.E. And in all the art in the Catacombs tombs, there is not a single cross to be found! Instead, the symbols are all peaceful ones, like the fish, the dove, the vine, and especially the Good Shepherd who carries on His shoulders not a sheep, but a goat. What amazing evidence of the fact that the earliest Christians knew that Jesus had come to uplift all of humankind spiritually, including even the very least worthy among us! This gradual and gentle spreading of His Gospel truths seems to have been just what Jesus intended to have happen. After all, He said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Well, okay then. But over the past two thousand years, a few untoward things have transpired between God and humankind. For one thing, in about 312 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine believed that he had seen a cross of light emblazoned with the Latin words “in hoc signo vinces,” which means, “by this sign you shall conquer”. And at once, he went from being a persecutor of the followers of Jesus to becoming the father of his preferred version of the Christian religion.

Of course, Constantine the Great’s Christianity, which still is the world’s dominant religion, is nothing like Jesus’s original gentle spiritual movement. Jesus knew that because every human mind is part of one eternal Mind, it would not take much more than this single population, using Jesus’s teachings to raise their personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, to begin to elevate the spiritual vibrations of everyone then living on earth. The transformation of the minds of His followers would begin the transformations of all human minds! As Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13:33). So we have every reason to think that for those first few centuries, the advent of the kingdom of God on earth was unfolding just as Jesus and as the divine Collectives of the Godhead had intended that it should unfold; and quite rapidly, too. But then the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye on the Lord’s beautiful Way, and he had his brutal way with her.

The first thing that Constantine did was to select one version of Christian thought, and set out to destroy every other version. He chose for himself the most fear-based version of all, the one that claimed that Jesus’s crucifixion had been required by God as a sacrifice for our sins. There were more than three dozen “heresies” brutally stamped out or driven into the wilderness by the early Roman church under Constantine before he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE that formalized Constantine’s new religion. Those rejected “heresies” had been strains of thought among pre-Roman-Councils followers of Jesus. They had peacefully coexisted as alternative ways to follow Jesus, because the Lord’s original Way had not been a religion at all! It had required only that people follow Jesus’s teachings and learn to ever more perfectly love and forgive; and as Jesus had said, “He who is not against us is for us” (MK 9:40).

The Roman Emperor Constantine’s deeply fear-based notion that Jesus had died for our sins had been just one of many ideas in a widely varied spiritual movement. It had been harmless, until Constantine had used his First Council of Nicaea in 325 to begin to impose one Christian religion with its human-made and fear-based dogmas upon the world. A gentle and gradual movement that was spreading nothing but forgiveness and love would have been useless to an emperor. But a fear-based religion that carried the dogmatic threat of hellfire for anyone who disobeyed him? Now, that was something that he really could use! Six more church councils followed that First Council of Nicaea in 325, all called or presided over by emperors and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. So a fear-based religion that bore the name of Jesus but otherwise had almost nothing to do with Him was imposed upon the world by force at a cost of what is conservatively estimated to have been twenty-five million mostly awful deaths.

We are surprised to study this history now, and to reflect on the fact that God allowed all of it to happen in quite this way. All of it, from the transformation of Jesus’s peaceful and beautiful Way that seems to have been working so wonderfully for hundreds of years into Constantine’s barbaric and dogmatic religion, and then the inquisitions and the crusades. Thomas whispers to me now that, ah, but Constantine created the Bible that has safely preserved the words of Jesus. And Constantine began those seventeen hundred years that were dominated by fear and negativity for people to push against, into which we can forever after down through the timeless ages choose to incarnate for priceless spiritual learning and growth.

Our earliest evidence that a new effort has begun to bring the kingdom of God on earth dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when we began to receive much easier and more abundant afterlife communications. This effort to thin the veil and better enlighten us might have seemed to the Godhead to be necessary in order to begin the process of at last taking down both Constantine’s fear-based Christianity, and also the equally false notion of atheistic scientism, in preparation for the war-filled and spiritual-stress-filled twentieth century that was soon to dawn. No one knows for sure why we were suddenly being shown so much more of what was really going on behind the curtain!

But among God’s earliest targets in this modern-day effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth were physicists. As we neared the turn of the twentieth century, clockwork materialism remained in place as a dogma in a reality that is in no respect solid, to the point where Nobel Laureate in physics Albert Michelson said in 1894, “It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” Even the great Max Planck, another Nobel Laureate and the eventual father of quantum mechanics, said in 1924, “When I began my physical studies [in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly… he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science… Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but… theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.”

To shake up this scientific materialist complacency completely, the Godhead did two things at once. It initiated a new age of much better communication between the living and the not actually dead. And It also channeled in to the minds of Dr. Planck and a few other physicists the wonderfully disruptive theory of quantum mechanics. What strikes me most profoundly is the way God has been acting even in what we know now was a clear divine emergency, with an extraordinary respect for human free will and dignity! Everyone who comes to earth with a commission from the Godhead does so voluntarily, and it is through these willing minions that nearly all God’s work on earth is done. God works in the world with all the love, patience, and respect of a host of perfected Beings who once inhabited bodies themselves. What a sublimely beautiful process!

When the scientific community was forced to react simultaneously to the twin challenges of quantum physics and very good evidence that the dead do in fact survive, it chose to deal with the first challenge and ignore the second. This stonewalling by the scientific gatekeepers of any evidence at all that the universe is not matter-based has gone on now for more than a century. Apparently it is going to end only when God decides it must end. There is a lot that we still don’t understand. But for the first part of the twentieth century, the Godhead seems to have watched Its work unfold while avoiding further interference in the affairs of humankind… That is, until we used nuclear bombs in warfare in August of 1945. This was apparently what God had been working to prevent, and its suddenly happening anyway seems to have been a wake-up call that might have been unique in human history. Insofar as we who study this can tell, four initiatives were then begun at once:

  • The decision was made that we will never again be allowed to use nuclear arms in warfare. If you wonder why it hasn’t happened in the more than three-quarters of a century since Nagasaki, despite the fact that nuclear armaments have proliferated and human crankiness abounds, be assured that we have been told that God is preventing its happening. There are anecdotes about missile tests in which an unexplained missile would turn up out of nowhere and shoot down the missile being tested. But my hunch is that God is working mostly at the level of many human minds.
  • A renewed effort was begun to demonstrate to the world what actually is going on. The floodgates of broader information began to open in the fifties, and then in the seventies they opened much wider! Most of what afterlife experts are telling you now is an accumulation of many bits of information that have been permitted to us by the Godhead. If it had not been God’s perfect will that we figure all these things out now, we would still be as clueless as people have been clueless throughout all of human history.
  • Many more minions began to parachute in. There is no time where the Godhead is, so the first of this new wave of minions were born in the thirties and forties. And we continue to be born today, these people who have promised to assist in the work of raising this planet’s consciousness vibration and bringing the kingdom of God on earth. I may be typical. I am my primary guide’s comrade through seventeen lifetimes, and I had promised him that I would come in and do some specific things that would help him to put a finis to his spiritual work done as Thomas Jefferson. That effort was still in the planning stage when this call came, and we answered it! We made a life-plan for me that included efforts to complete his prior work, and we overlaid it with this plan to help the Godhead that now consumes my life.
  • A decision was made to freshly introduce the Gospel teachings of Jesus to the world. Of course, for this to happen requires that the fear-based Christianity created by Constantine the Great must either die away or be transformed, and we see this ongoing now on both fronts at the level of billions of human minds. Our task is just to nurture the love of Jesus and His Gospel teachings, carefully saving the baby as God discards the bathwater.

The Lord’s Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness and raising our personal vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth are needed now, more than they ever have been needed before! Those of us who have closely studied the Gospel teachings and are working now in the Lord’s harvest field are delighted to report that it all truly is happening now, and all around us. This Impossible Dream of universal human forgiveness and love as Jesus taught it, such that it really will be possible for God’s kingdom to begin to overspread the earth, is all awakening now.

And beyond that, as we who have spent our lives studying the glorious afterlife evidence can tell you, is the certain fact that all that really exists is consciousness. Or as our dear friend Craig Hogan would put it, all that exists is mind and experiences.  Now we wonder ever more deeply about something even more. As we have studied both the teachings of Jesus and the illusory reality in which we live these lives, we come to ever better understand that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact all that exists. There is no such thing as solid matter. And the afterlife evidence, plus bits of things that Jesus said when He was here, including His much more advanced teachings in A Course in Miracles, all lead us to begin to wonder whether perhaps this all might be a pure illusion? Is it possible that Jesus insisted that we love our neighbor as ourself because He knew that our neighbor is ourself?

It is a surprising, and even an amazing question. To which one day we each will learn the answer!

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Overcoming!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We shall overcome, We shall overcome,
We shall overcome, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.

 We shall be alright, We shall be alright,
We shall be alright, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.

We shall live in peace, We shall live in peace,
We shall live in peace, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.
– Joan Baez, from “We Shall Overcome” (1963)

I have said elsewhere in these musings something that feels hard for me to believe now, but it remains true nonetheless. I lived the first eighteen years of my life in these United States of America without ever seeing in the flesh a single person of any race other than my own. Not even on a stage somewhere, or inside a Chinese restaurant. I grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts, and, needless to say, we didn’t get around much. But perhaps all of that was just as well. My parents never had an occasion to say anything racist in my presence. So the fact that some folks who appeared on TV had different skin tones and castes to their faces was to me as a child utterly unremarkable.

Once, when I was eight or ten, I mentioned to my mother as I was lying on my tummy on the carpet, watching TV with her, that, wow, Nat King Cole looked exactly like our family dentist! Had she ever noticed that? The resemblance was amazing. She sputtered, “But he’s black!” Oh. Well, sure, except for that. It is remembering such moments that makes me know that if you rear children without instilling racism in them, they grow up to see skin shade and racial details as no more important than eye color or hair color. Even to this day, I don’t think that I see race in the same way that most people do.

And so it was that I first fell in love in college. And I fell hard! He was tall, dark, gorgeous, intellectual, soft-spoken, and so much my destiny that I even had dreamed of exactly him, including how he would look, just a few nights before I met him at an inter-college mixer (he was Columbia; I was Smith). I met him at the start of my sophomore year, and by Thanksgiving I was eager for my parents to meet him because I was so sure that he was The One. I was certain that they would love him, too! He rented a car, as I recall, or his parents did it for him, and we drove the hour and a half or so down the Mass Pike to my family’s home. I had told them how in love I was, and what a star he was at Columbia; I had told them everything wonderful about him except for the fact that his parents were Chinese immigrants. I hadn’t been hiding that fact from them. It just seemed to be so unimportant.

My mother covered her shock when she saw him better than my father did. Even to this day, the fact that my beloved’s race mattered so much to them feels amazing. My goodness, why would anyone even notice another person’s race, and never mind caring about it? We got through that one Thanksgiving together, and then my beloved and I talked the issue through. He was my deeply beloved, and I cherished him for the next two years, even though we subtly agreed that we would not again inflict our relationship on my parents. Instead, on weekends we often would visit his parents’ townhouse in Queens, New York, where I came to love his adorable parents and I learned to use chop sticks like a native; and we went to a Chinatown dim sum restaurant as a happy tradition on Sunday mornings. He loved Manhattan, and I began to love the city, too, as I  saw it through his eyes. He graduated the year before I did; and even then, Columbia was showing the radical leftist tendencies that the school has today. We had never much talked about politics, but soon after he graduated, one day he amazed me by asking me to come with him to California “to join the Revolution”. I think he knew before he brought it up that his idea was going to be a bridge too far for straight-laced, Christian little me. And besides, I still had one more year of college to go before I graduated. So, sadly, we parted – over politics, mainly – and we went on to live our different lives. Otherwise, I am pretty sure that eventually I would have married him.

The other great love of my life before I met my eventual husband was someone that I never met. There were two big historical events that crammed the evening news each night during my high school and college years, neither of which made sense to me, and both of which were very far removed from my life. One was the fighting in Indochina which soon became the Vietnam War; and the other was what to me was the nonsensical racial troubles in the American south. Nonsensical to me! But also, far away. I could watch the marching and all that anger, and be just puzzled by it. But then, ah, there was one voice that soon stood out from all the rest. Do you remember his completely magnificent voice? His conversational voice made him sound like a Rhodes Scholar. His speeches, and the look on his face as he gave them, were absolutely magnificent. I listened to him, and I read what he said, and then what he wrote, and for the first time I began to really understand what the racial struggle in the American south was about. Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. made it all start to seem absolutely clear and plain, and then he even made it begin to feel very personal to me.

He was such a small man! Oh my goodness, you would see him in a group of young and tough black men who were around him to protect him, and he looked so unremarkable. But wow, as soon as he opened his mouth, freedom would ring! Here is just a sample of Dr. King’s public message:

He was quoting Thomas Jefferson when he said in July of 1965, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God, Creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This is a dream. It’s a great dream! The first saying we notice in this dream is an amazing universalism. It doesn’t say, ‘some men’; it says ‘all men.’ It doesn’t say ‘all white men’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes black men. It does not say ‘all Gentiles’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes Jews. It doesn’t say ‘all Protestants’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes Catholics. It doesn’t even say ‘all theists and believers’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes humanists and agnostics. Never before in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profound, eloquent and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality. The American dream reminds us—and we should think about it anew on this Independence Day—that every man is an heir of the legacy of dignity and worth.”

“Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.”

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. “

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

“I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

I first heard this beautiful, sainted man speak, and I fell in love with him. Omigod, did I fall in love, and thereafter I hung on his every word! The moral midgets who fought him in the American south were trying to destroy this nation’s Founding Fathers and everything they had stood for and built; and then this one small, beautiful man stood up against them. He stood tall and strong against them all! The modern American Founding Father that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has proven to be was the greatest American of the Twentieth Century. And now, as a new American national administration takes shape, we can see so many of Dr. King’s young inheritors of every race and shade, all free at last now, thanks to Dr. King, of even the smallest taint of racism or sexism, so many of them finding positions of leadership in the country that Dr. King loved so much, and that he fought and then he died to save. He always deeply believed that this nation was someday going to find a way to reform, and to redeem itself.

So I look around in amazement and delight, and I see that Dr. King’s vision already is alive and coming true right now! I live in what was once a Confederate and slave-holding state. It is one-third black, one-third Hispanic, and one-third white, if you want to talk about races, but nobody here ever talks about races. We Texans all live happily together with a lot of immigrants from India as well, and legal immigrants from South America and from other countries all over the world. Oh my dear beloved Martin, here we all are right now, already living in your Promised Land! We are all your grateful inheritors! Look at us, please, my very dear one, and know that you have already won! Witness your great dream coming true!

My dear friends, we hardly had noticed it, but Dr. King’s big dream is coming true now, in Texas and in the whole former Confederacy. And as the future years and then the centuries pass, the miracle that is this whole free nation, wisely designed and founded by a Generation of Giants and then largely saved two centuries later by that one extraordinary, visionary man, will continue to thrive for all the lovers of freedom and justice who are their grateful beneficiaries. May all Americans, in the long course of time, always prove themselves to be ever more worthy of these great Americans’ wonderful gift!

We are not afraid (oh Lord), We are not afraid (oh Lord)
We are not afraid, today.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.

 We shall overcome (oh Lord), We shall overcome (oh Lord)
We shall overcome, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe
We shall overcome, someday.
– Joan Baez, from “We Shall Overcome” (1963)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Your Internal Life

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light:

Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When my way grows drear,
Precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall:

Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.
– Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” (1938)

When our very dearly beloved Jesus was born from the Godhead two thousand years ago, He was born among ignorant primitives. And that was for Him the entire point! He came here to teach people what our life on earth was meant to be for, because during long previous ages of time, everyone had endlessly turned on the wheel, as Gautama Buddha later would put it, being born into life after life on earth and making almost no spiritual progress each time because we never had any idea why we even were being born at all. Was there ever a point to any of this? Jesus chose to come to people for whom life was only ever an endless drudge. He was determined now to give to each of us the love of God, the purpose of personal growth, and the eventual joy of endless paradise.

For the Being who would become Jesus, achieving His own spiritual perfection by simply living on earth had been an easy task. Jesus loved people as easily and as naturally as He breathed! For Jesus, each individual person always was so inconceivably precious, so lovely, so downright adorable that even as a child in His last pre-Jesus lifetime, He would spend His days tending and doting on everyone. My Thomas had been his older brother in that last lifetime that Jesus lived on earth as a pre-ascended being, and while my dear spirit guide’s memory of it all is vague now because he has lived so many other lifetimes since then, he does remember his own exasperation at his need to always protect his younger brother. That boy never would fight, not even to save himself! To the warrior-general that Thomas had been in that lifetime, having a kid brother like Jesus had been craziness-making! When Thomas and I have talked about this, and he has tried to describe the way Jesus had seemed to see other people, what he has come up with is the idea of a world full of cute but helpless puppies. Imagine seeing the whole world as if every person in it is wonderfully adorable and also desperately needs your care.

Even now, in fact, Jesus seems to see each person who visits Him in just this way. When Thomas was taking me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane during the summer of 2022, the Lord would always appear to be so delighted to see me, with his powerful personal energy always tamped down to just a sizzly buzz. If Jesus doesn’t remember to reduce His personal energy that way, it is so overwhelmingly powerful at this point that it is difficult for us to be near Him; it feels to you and me like a painful battering. But Jesus is aware of that, so He politely keeps it in check for us. At this point, He is vibrating even higher than the Godhead level, but His overwhelming love for people compels Him to spend His eternity on the third level of the astral plane, which for nearly all of us is the entry level to the afterlife. There He mostly sits beside a river that is full of multicolored, iridescent fish, and with a herd of tame deer nearby. And He greets small groups of people who are newly transitioned, who want very much to meet Jesus at last.

They come in small, polite groups of maybe fifteen or twenty, and they line up to be greeted by Him. Since I  would spend perhaps a couple of hours with Jesus each time Thomas took me to visit with Him, I became used to watching Jesus briefly transform into what we called church-Jesus, with lighter skin, longer and paler hair and blue eyes. Then He would stand and go and welcome each person in line with a few words, a smile, and a blessing. If a woman who had died in childbirth was carrying her baby, He would take the newborn into His arms and kiss it and bless it, too. There is no sense of time passing there, but to me all of this seemed to happen something like every fifteen minutes or so, around the clock! While meanwhile, Jesus also would be talking in His mind with those who always are praying to Him. Thomas tells me that Jesus can smoothly do all of that while He also is keeping a conversation going with us. But How can He possibly love people this much? How can He be so entirely selfless?

That really is the right word to describe Him. Jesus is selfless. All the rest of us seem to have our little “I’m important!”egos, at least to some extent; but Jesus really does have no ego at all. Instead,  all that matters to Him is you. Whenever I arrived to visit Him there under that many-colored sky, He usually would be sitting on His riverbank, communing with His fish. He would look up at me and smile like the sun rising because wow, here she is back again. As I sat down on His riverbank beside Him, He would say, “Little One! My Little One, tell Me about your day! What did you write today?” I always tried to tell Him something specific from my day because He seemed to be so strangely avid to know more about my life, and then He would bring up some details from my last visit and ask about them, and want to know how this or that legal client’s situation had turned out. He then asked me about other of my legal clients, since He knew them by name, as we fed His many-colored fish with grain that just would appear in our hands. But if I tried to ask Him rather shyly about His own day, Jesus? Who has visited You lately? How was that? He always would deflect my questions and ask me again about me. Once I thought to ask Him if any famous people from the earth had died today. He simply looked at me quizzically and asked me another question about my own life, and I realized later that He knows so little about what is happening on the earth from our perspective that He would have no idea about who might be famous among us now.

All the lovely memories that I still hold of having spent personal time with Jesus during that summer give me some sense of what it must have been like to be one of His earthly followers. The Biblical Gospels tell us that He was very charismatic during His lifetime on earth, and wow, I really have felt that same charismatic tug, just sitting and quietly talking with Him! As He began His career as an itinerant preacher, simply teaching and answering questions wherever groups of people would gather, Jesus soon had hundreds, and then thousands of people that followed Him wherever He went. The common people would hang on His every word.

Some scholars who have closely analyzed the words of the Old Testament, and also the way that Jesus taught, now suspect that they know what may have been happening for many of those first followers of Jesus. We know from their writings that human beings even as late as Jesus’s time really didn’t have much in the way of internal lives, and certainly not in the vivid and complex way that we do. Think about it. Their old heroic ballads were stark and plain and were primarily about people simply doing or being commanded by God not to do certain things. Even the psalms were minimalist in their messages. Indeed, even for King David there was action in the outer world that he clearly could describe, but there was relatively little going on in his mind when you compare it with our rich internal lives. This may have been why, before the advent of Jesus, not only did we not know why we were here, but even had we been told that we were here to grow spiritually, we would have given one another puzzled looks and scratched our heads. What was that all about?? The teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, were all about discovering and then richly building our inner lives! Jesus’s teachings were about emotions, and primarily about love and forgiveness.  

Consider this remarkable exchange that Jesus had with a lawyer of the Pharisees: 34 But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. 35 One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question. Testing Him, he said, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And Jesus said to him, “‘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 22:34-40). And wow, Jesus gave them what was an extraordinary answer! “The Law and the Prophets” was what Jesus’s listeners, those ancient Jews, called what we now would call the entire Old Testament. It was the Ten Commandments, the Psalms, and the Proverbs. It was everything. He was telling them that you can now boil the entire Law and the Prophets, all those scrolls put together, down to just two Commandments from God: Love God, and Love Your Fellow Man.

Jesus had just turned all those many old, external, formal Laws into just two Laws which are entirely spiritual, and therefore they are entirely internal! Jesus was talking to old-minded, entirely externally-minded clergymen, so they really had nothing to say to Him in response. Look at what comes right after this key exchange just above: 41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus turned it about and asked them a question. He said: 42 “What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” They said to Jesus, “The son of David.” 43 Jesus said to them, “So then how does David in the Spirit call Him ‘Lord,’ saying,

44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
Until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet”’?

45 If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He his son?” 46 No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Jesus another question (MT 22:41-46).

Do you see what has happened here? People who still lack an internal life of the spirit have no way even to conceptualize what Jesus just has asked them. They therefore cannot formulate an answer. You or I could answer Him, though, could we not? We understand that there is an afterlife where David in Spirit now dwells. And we know that David in Spirit is gladly able to assist his Son by putting his Son’s enemies beneath his Son’s feet.

And so it was that Jesus came to us from out of the Godhead to live that lifetime on earth so He could open us all to the greater life of the Spirit, which is internal. It is of the mind, and built on Jesus’s teachings about love and forgiveness. He gave us then the concrete certainty that we are in truth fully spiritual beings. We are not at all the material beings that we can see in a mirror, only dimly. As Jesus said to the Good Thief who was crucified beside Him, so He also says to us, now and forevermore: For so long as you tend to your own life of the Spirit, you will steadily grow in love, and “Truly I say to you, you shall be with Me in Paradise” (LK 23:43). 

When the darkness appears
And the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river, I stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand:

Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home
– Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” (1938)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

All Reality is Consciousness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

… He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea.
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights every star that makes the darkness bright.
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night.
He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive”
– Richard Mullan & Jack Richards, from “He” (1969)

What you and I experience as conscious awareness is in fact all that exists. In all things and in every aspect of reality, consciousness is everything. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. Or, as my darling Thomas so well put it to me, long before I could have understood who that tall stranger in the long blue robe who spoke to me and taught me in the empty lot beside my childhood home actually was: everything there is or there ever can be is part of a thought in the mind of God. Thomas taught me that there never has been and there never can be anything else.

The fact that consciousness is all there is was first discovered by the earliest quantum physicists around the turn of the twentieth century. And it was a major reason why mainstream science so resolutely drove itself off the rails into materialist atheism at about the same time, in what the scientific community imagined was its own defense. I first discovered this crisis of science just in passing, as I was browsing in used-book stores, reading popular-science magazines, and discovering so much wonderful turn-of-the-twentieth-century afterlife evidence. It is easy to see why Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, must have panicked the whole field of Newtonian physics when he began to go public with his discoveries! If you have not yet done it, you ought to read the ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner. Quantum physics makes sense, and their book will help you to understand why it is so easy and sensible for consciousness to be all that exists. But our great friend Max Planck really did a number on Newtonian physicists when in 1931 he said, “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.” 

Wow, that was pretty definitive, was it not? By then, the mainstream scientific gatekeepers understood that what they truly were protecting their precious against was the possibility that some scientist might inadvertently claim to have found the God of the Christians and the Jews. So they clamped down on enforcing their materialist/atheist dogma ever more strictly as the twentieth century wore on.

And, sure enough, Max Planck at last did indeed come to understand the ever deeper implications of what he had found. In 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Bingo! God had at last been found. So then, how far does this penetration of consciousness go? What about animals? Are they conscious as well? Of course they are. Even the birds at the feeder outside my window will look in through the glass and cock their heads at me with what clearly is awareness. That has to be true of animals and birds, when it is true even of plants!

The most transformational book that I ever have read is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first read that amazing book in 1973, its year of first publication, and I didn’t realize until years later the way that book had helped to form a basis for my fifty years of afterlife research. And it primed me to accept the evidence that what we experience as human conscious awareness truly is universal among all living things! The fact that such a seminal masterwork which is so fundamental to our understanding of life has been so steadfastly ignored by mainstream scientists because it doesn’t fit their predetermined materialist/atheist narrative was my first clue that the mainstream scientific emperor is sadly altogether naked. And that scientific emperor appears now likely to remain resolutely naked, not only for the rest of your life and mine, but perhaps naked even for our children’s and our grandchildren’s lifetimes as well.

The Tompkins and Bird book’s fundamental insight is that plants are conscious, they mentally communicate with one another, and they also mentally communicate with us. And what an amazing revelation that is! Consider only the work of Cleve Backster, who in the nineteen-sixties was one of America’s leading experts on lie detectors. One morning in 1966, Mr. Backster decided on a whim to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached a galvanometer to one of its leaves. And, what do you know? He found that the plant in his office was reacting very much as a person would react as it sat there contentedly in its pot having its transient and amazingly human-like thoughts. Backster soon found that the most extreme reactions in his plant were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves. Its frantic reaction was less if Backster only imagined burning the leaf, without actually intending to do the plant harm. His plant would react, too, if other living things in the room were mentally threatened with harm. And Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these strong reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants can read the minds of their own particular keepers even from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing discoveries are now nearly sixty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to pick up and read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in human history.  

Here is an astonishing video that gives you some sense of just how sensitive and mutually cooperative, and even how oddly aware and almost human-like plants actually are as they work and live together in their wild communities, right there in our own backyards. Please do take the time to watch this video, since I cannot do it justice. I only can tell you that after you have watched it, you will forever after see each patch of forest as a thriving community of sentient individuals in communication with one another, sharing their resources and caring for their young. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again.

I spend my days working on my laptop computer in a big bow window as part of a mutually supportive community that consists mostly of houseplants, both large and small. Of course, this way of life is healthy for all of us. Plants exhale oxygen and they breathe in carbon dioxide, while people do the reverse; and it has lately been shown that plants also help to improve indoor air quality in tightly-constructed modern homes. And surprisingly, these plants in my mixed person-plant community actually miss me when I am gone! I practice business law in Massachusetts, and I travel to see my clients for a week at a time several times a year. I leave my plants well-watered; but still, no one comes into my office for that week, so, depend on it: some of the smaller plants will drop a leaf or two whenever I am away. Is that loneliness? Or is it worry? Should I ask my human family to come in here every so often and talk to the plants while I am gone?

Oh yes, what we experience as consciousness is the base creative force (there are five great Hillfaith videos at the link).  Consciousness is all that objectively exists, which means that it should not really surprise us to find that every living thing is in some way conscious. And in fact, that may also be true of even what we consider to be some non-living things. If Consciousness is the base creative force and all that exists, then perhaps even things like rocks might also be in some way conscious, too? One of the things that we generally do when we first return to our eternal home is to go sightseeing, and often on random distant planets. After all, there is neither time nor distance in our eternal home, so we can easily travel to very far away places. I recall long ago reading an account by someone who had been enjoying doing his post-death touring, and he talked about having visited a planet where the life was not carbon-based, but instead it was silica–based. That entire planet teemed with life! But you didn’t realize at first that anything on the planet that he was visiting was alive, because it all moved so ve-e-e-ry sl-o-o-wly. And, you know, come to think of it now, the rocks all around us on planet earth are moving ve-e-e-ery sloo-o-owly too-o-o….

When we fully understand that Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay, and truly nothing else exists, it does not surprise us at all to learn that life is a core attribute of consciousness. It is difficult to fully understand everything that this most fundamental sentence of all Apex sentences in this post actually means, although, wow, we are coming to realize more and more completely some of what it means. Even the bit that we can see is boggling!

I have been an eager science hobbyist for most of my life. So I can tell you with confidence that all through the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first, traditional scientists have been sure that they were just about to figure out how life began. The theory on which most bets have been placed has long been that lightning must have hit just the right random mix of chemicals in some primordial pool, and Presto! We had life. So they would try to replicate this or that mix of chemicals and then zap it in their laboratories. But the problem with solving this most difficult of all scientific problems was figuring out how that spark of life, even if it might have begun this way, could have maintained itself for long enough to have randomly evolved over time a self-sustaining living cell with all that cell’s necessary components. Those popular-science magazine articles of late are less common and not nearly so hopeful.

My dear ones, those materialist/atheist scientists’ primary problem lies in the fact that they long ago turned what should have been an open field of unrestricted inquiry into just one more closed-minded, dogma-driven religion. And what good is that to anyone? They still even today are forcing working scientists to spend effort trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, where of course no such thing ever will be found. Scientists remain stuck with their foolish “fundamental materialist dogma,” even a hundred and twenty years after a few panicked gatekeepers first adopted it as a stopgap measure to try to protect quantum physicists from finding the religionists’ God. So even more than a century later they still are forced to come up with endless arbitrary nonsense. Like, for example, a “Big Bang” of something from nothing as their explanation for the origin of reality, even though of course any reasonably intelligent twelve-year-old child can simply ask, “So, what came before that?” And the scientists are undone. That child’s question is one that no scientist can honestly answer. Scientists are going to have to give up their artificial materialist/atheist dogma eventually, whether it’s now or another thousand years from now! And from now until they eventually do give it up, every bit of the science that they claim to be doing in the interim will be severely tainted by the fact that their dogma always insists that they get “One free miracle; then we’ll explain the rest.” This is true of the Big Bang, and of most other areas of inquiry as well. Frustrated materialist scientists still are forced to defend the nonsensical proposition that all of reality is just an ephemeral nothing.  

Consciousness is all that exists. And since consciousness is both timeless and eternal, and life is a fundamental property of consciousness, once mainstream science as a discipline stops adhering to its silliness of materialist/atheism, and it frees all scientific researchers to at last do open-minded scientific research, then in very short order the answers to every question that they even now still have to fudge will be honestly found. In non-time and non-space, all reality lies in the simple underlying certainty that consciousness truly is all! 

… He can grant a wish or make a dream come true.
He can paint the clouds and turn to gray the blue.
He alone is there to find a rainbow’s end.
He alone can see what lies beyond the bend.
He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold!
He knows every lie that you and I have told!
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Richard Mullan & Jack Richards, from “He” (1969)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Being Conscious

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Whether I’m right, or whether I’m wrong,
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong,
I gotta be me, I’ve gotta be me,
What else can I be but what I am?

I want to live, not merely survive.
And I won’t give up this dream of life that keeps me alive!
I gotta be me, I gotta be me,
The dream that I see makes me what I am!

That far-away prize, a world of success,
Is waiting for me if I heed the call.
I won’t settle down, won’t settle for less,
As long as there’s a chance that I can have it all!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

Working scientists of every stripe simply cannot get over their frustrated wonder at the plain fact that you are aware that you are reading and making sense of these words. I kid you not. This fact clearly bothers them very much. They still cannot explain how it happens, so they call this central fact of our lives “the hard problem”. And in truth, it is a very hard problem for them! But that is true only because more than a century ago, the scientific gatekeepers, the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, unfortunately began to require that the only trustworthy scientific proofs for anything that they ever will accept must be material in nature. They created what they then called the fundamental scientific dogma that all of reality must be matter-based. But it turns out that not even what our senses perceive as material is actually solid in any meaningful sense. Matter is composed of atoms, and atoms are by their nature almost entirely empty space because even the subatomic particles of which atoms are composed are just whirling specks of energy.  So scientists have given themselves an unnecessary problem which they never will be able to solve.

What’s more, since consciousness is not composed of atoms, as any matter-based form of energy would be composed of atoms, working scientists have long been certain that your conscious awareness must be a mere emission generated by your material brain. So for the better part of the last century, scientists have sought a source of human consciousness inside the human brain, only always and forever to come up empty. Of course, they will never find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, because for matter to generate consciousness would be an impossibility for reasons that scientists cannot understand because they have no scientifically acceptable way even to study what consciousness is. This just-published interview with one of the leading scientific researchers in this field yet again makes that simple fact quite clear. But instead of accepting the fact that, well, of course the brain doesn’t generate consciousness, some neuroscientists have lately decided that, okay, so then your conscious awareness must be  an emission generated by some combination of reactions inside your material brain plus the sensory and emotional reactions of other aspects of your material body as well. Put all of that together, and somehow, Presto! Awareness arises in your whole material body and brain put together. Omigod, what utter and complete nonsense! The scientific community has so narrowly circumscribed its acceptable description of the reality in which we live our earth-lives that much of what is very important is going to remain forever beyond its grasp.

I have spent the past fifty years researching the afterlife. Unlike a working scientist, I have put no limits on what I could study or how I would allow myself to study it; but still, my biggest handicap in doing this research has been the simple fact that I am by nature highly skeptical. In trying to figure out whether an afterlife exists, I was only seeking to make some kind of sense of my childhood experience of light. Even a decade or two after that event, my experience of light still felt as real and immediate as if it had happened only last night, so I had a pressing need to better understand where that light and the voice might have come from. Where else could it have come from, I thought, other than from where the dead are now… that is, if the dead might be still alive somewhere?

Luckily, it turns out that there is a truly amazing amount of consistent evidence that human life is eternal. And figuring out not only that in fact we all do indeed easily survive our deaths, but also that we can learn what happens to us after our deaths, and where and how it all happens, even down to what happens during the many long centuries after each of our deaths on this earth, is actually easy for any disciplined researcher who is willing to devote sufficient time and effort to doing the research. This has been for me by far the most compelling and enjoyable lifelong avocation that you can imagine! You may be surprised to discover that real evidence for the afterlife does not include near-death experiences, which are just spontaneous out-of-body experiences that may include travel into the gigantic astral plane; but NDEs never include visits to the actual afterlife. NDEs are therefore useless as evidence for anything except for the fact that we easily can travel out-of-body. As indeed we can! All of us travel out-of-body during our deep-sleep phase, and we generally do that almost every night.

A few other careful researchers have shared my same wonderful hobby over roughly the same few decades, and we have reached about the same glorious conclusions, which fact has been so greatly reassuring! Two of these peer afterlife researchers who deserve special mention are, of course, Dr. R. Craig Hogan, who does such a wonderful job with seekreality.com, our shared website which at this point is the best and most thorough source of information on death and the afterlife that exists anywhere; and also Australians Victor and Wendy Zammit, whose website, victorzammit.com, is also full of wonderful information. The Zammits’ weekly afterlife newsletter is truly a must-read!

All right, so now my Thomas wants me to tell you some of what – besides him – long ago convinced me that human life truly is eternal. I began to do this research in the early seventies, when I was first living in Boston and browsing used and new bookstores every weekend. Just anywhere that I could find books about death and the afterlife. I consulted mediums, too, finding that a few were good but most were awful, and little by little I came to see that I was putting together a picture of a strictly evidence-based afterlife reality that was consistent and that began to feel real. Here are a few of my high points:

  • Old books about the great early-twentieth-century deep-trance mediums. For example, Gladys Osborne Leonard, who was my favorite, worked with a bossy spirit guide named Feda, as I recall. These grand old mediums had developed their incredible gifts before the development of electric lights, and they could go into a deep trance and turn their bodies over completely to their spirit guides, who then would chattily entertain newly-dead folks who could converse easily and in detail with their relatives in the room. Each book about one of these mediums would contain dozens of vivid conversations between the living and the newly-dead. And all those hundreds of different adventures in all those books about the work of all those mediums were happening in precisely the same wonderful, gigantic place. They all talked about the same process, the same physics, the same clothing, the same surroundings, and all the same minuscule bits of information across the whole gigantic afterlife. The details, both great and small, were all the same.
  • Deathbed Accounts. Experiences of the dying who are not heavily drugged as their death approaches are amazingly consistent, and they seem always to include the comforting assistance of dead loved ones who have come to take them home. These accounts go back as far as the early nineteenth century, when Thomas Jefferson transitioned on the morning of July 4, 1826, and then he appeared to John Adams on that same afternoon to invite him to come and join him in the afterlife. Dead people who appear to the dying this way will usually appear in the upper corners of the room, looking young again and healthy; and once they appear, the dying person will typically stop talking to the living, but will talk only to the new arrival. The dying will even see dead people who, as in Jefferson’s case, have only just died, so the dying person could not possibly know that the deathbed visitor is dead. John Adams’s last words heard by the living were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives!” Those words were no doubt exclaimed by him as a smiling young Jefferson appeared to him in an upper corner of the room.
  • My adventures with mediums. What we want when we consult a medium is a bit of absolutely spot-on evidence that the person that medium is talking with is our own transitioned loved one! And to be sadly frank, nearly all of the mediums that I ever have consulted have given me information that was much too general. “Your Mom is here. She says she’s very proud of you!” Yeah, well, great, but I need something that is a lot more specific than that. The best communication I ever have received from my mother came through a medium not long after my mother’s death. The medium said, “This is your mother. But why does she keep pointing to her eyebrows? Oh. She says she doesn’t need to paint them on anymore.” Bingo! My mother was always embarrassed that her eyebrows were so sparse, and she would paint on these big, black eyebrows. That was the one key thing that she could have said that she would have known would have given me definitive proof of her survival. But this medium could not possibly have known that.
  • Books by extensive astral-travelers. Here I confess that I found some accounts that were so weird they were likely fiction, but I also have read some books by people who have learned to go out-of-body at will, and they could enter the gigantic non-afterlife parts of the astral plane, which is most of the astral plane, and tell us their wonderful travel tales. The more of this literature you read, the more you can see how it paints a picture of a gigantic, largely still unexplored new reality.
  •  My own astral experiences. I cannot go out of body at will, so it wasn’t until April of 2022 that my Thomas first took me to the astral plane and let me remember the experience, because Jesus wanted to talk with me. Now, just to be clear about this, all of us go out of body on most nights during the period of deep sleep that generally comes first each night, but we simply don’t remember doing it. We might chat with our spirit guides and our dead loved ones, but generally we don’t leave our bedroom, or perhaps our immediate neighborhood. Sometimes some of us might astral-travel with the help of our guides, since the astral realms are more or less where we are but just at a higher vibration. Easy to find, if you know how to get there; and easy to get back to your body, since you can follow your silver cord. In any event, I have recently been there, and I know how vastly familiar it is going to feel to you when you yourself go home. The astral plane truly is our eternal home! And once you have visited the astral plane with awareness of the event, you will understand without question that, of course silly bunny, human life is eternal! And these few minutes that we spend on earth for each brief lifetime here are the dimmest shadow of what it feels like to be alive in the astral plane.
  • The Gospels. I have studied the Gospels extensively, even majoring in early Christian history in College, and I am familiar with the rest of the Bible as well. And yet it is only relatively recently that I have come to see how closely Jesus’s Gospel words align with what we learn from the afterlife evidence. It is clear that Jesus was familiar with, and His Gospels reinforce, the details of our eternal home.

As we afterlife researchers have done all this research, of necessity we have also made some side-discoveries. Most notably, in the process of researching death and the afterlife, we have come gradually to understand that what human beings experience as consciousness is the grounding of all reality. Everything that actually exists is composed of and made by consciousness. There really is nothing else. Think of that old cartoon of two swimming fish, where one says to the other, “How’s the water today?” and the other says, “What’s water?” That is us, really. Consciousness is the water in which we swim. And that is true for clueless, oblivious  scientists as well. They cannot study consciousness because consciousness is both the water and the swimmer. They cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

When I was in kindergarten, they taught each student to recite our home address. I recall that back then sometimes after school I would play alone in the empty lot beside my house, and an extremely tall, kind man who wore a long robe was sometimes waiting to talk with me there. He taught me to add to my home address, “the earth, the solar system, the universe, and the Mind of God.” And actually, he was precisely right! All of reality, including the whole of every level of the astral realities, all of it is within the Mind of God, so therefore all of it is One Consciousness. And nothing else but that One Consciousness exists.

Of course, if you think for a moment, you will realize who that long-ago kindly tall man in the woods next door who taught me so much must have been….

 

I’ll go it alone. That’s how it must be.
I can’t be right for somebody else
If I’m not right for me. I gotta be free, I’ve gotta be free!
Daring to try, to do it or die, I’ve gotta be me!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Ours to Do

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies,
for the love which from our birth over and around us lies;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For the beauty of each hour of the day and of the night,
hill and vale, and tree and flower, sun and moon, and stars of light;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of ear and eye, for the heart’s and mind’s delight,
for the mystic harmony, linking sense to sound and sight;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child,
friends on earth and friends above, for all gentle thoughts and mild;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

When we read Thomas’s answer given last week to our sweet friend Lynnette‘s wonderful question about who Jesus really is, we soon see that answer as what it is in fact. Once it satisfactorily answers Lynnette’s question, it then goes on, and it becomes in fact a gigantic challenge to each of us, does it not? It is Jesus saying to you and to me, “Oh beloved child of God, I achieved the seventh level of reality naturally, not even knowing what I was doing. And from there, I looked back at the earth, and I saw so many people struggling on earth through lifetime after lifetime because they had no idea how to do for themselves what I had so easily done for Myself.” So, from the heart of our Lord Jesus’s pure, holy love for humankind, He begged of the Godhead the gift for us of that one more lifetime for Himself that He wanted to live here only for us. He wanted to come back to earth, my dear ones, just as our Teacher! For all of us living on earth at that time, our life was still what Gautama Buddha had called just an endless “turning on the wheel.” We would come back over and over again, for pointless lifetime after pointless lifetime, never knowing why we kept coming back, so for lifetime after lifetime we made almost no spiritual progress.  So our beloved Elder Brother took upon Himself all the struggles and pains of that additional lifetime that He lived as Jesus, and all and only for His great love for each of us!

Even Jesus’s death on the cross as He was exiting that additional lifetime as Jesus was by His Own choosing, and it was done for us. His original plan that had been made for that lifetime had included His simply slipping away when His earthly teaching work had been completed, and being subsumed once again up into the astral plane. But Jesus had been unsuccessful in persuading the people that He was trying to teach that their lives would be eternal. Because, of course, they all thought they knew better. The custom of the day was to lay out the bodies of the newly-dead in caves to decay down to just their bones; and then when there were only bones left, those bones would be collected into bone-boxes, called ossuaries, which would be labeled with the decedent’s name and stored away. So don’t tell us that we don’t die, Lord Jesus! We love you, sir, but we know better than that! We have watched all those bodies decay down to their bones!  

So Jesus changed His life-plan while He was living here on earth. He decided that instead of just walking away, He would die a very public death on a cross, so everyone would know that He had become stone-cold, flat-out absolutely as dead as a doornail. Then He would reanimate that dead body while it lay there in the cave where it had been laid out to rot away (see e.g. MT 28), so Jesus could reoccupy his own rotting corpse a couple of days later and walk it out of that cave under His own power. “Ta-da! See? I am not dead after all!” Of course, that body was not actually alive again, was it? Not at all. It was already rotting! He used it for just a day or two to prove His point that He Himself was alive! Then He cast His material body aside and used an astral body for the forty days or so before He bodily ascended.

I have written elsewhere about the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium (face-cloth) of Oviedo, in Spain. The modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant, and at this point I consider that evidence to be irrefutable. Here is some of what has persuaded me:

  • Both relics date to the time of Jesus. The linen of which they are made can be carbon-dated to His lifetime, it is of a weave then in common use, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
  • The blood on both relics is male and of type AB. Surprisingly, only about two percent of modern people share Jesus’s blood type.
  • The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they covered the same man, that He was Jewish and He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report that Jesus suffered.
  • The Shroud carries an image which is a photographic negative of a man. That image  appears as smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed; whereupon, the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image of that crucified Man.
  • No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it does not penetrate the fibers at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim is said to have happened well after the blood had dried. So… a couple of days later.
  • Something amazing to consider. Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce them would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body after its death that was roughly equivalent to or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge. This energy would have come not from the physical body, of course, but from Jesus’s astral body, returned after two days to reanimate His corpse.

We can see from closely reading the Gospels that Jesus’s reanimated physical body was not made actually alive again. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated and its flesh was decaying. The Gospels suggest that those who had known Jesus did not readily recognize Him when He appeared wearing his own rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His body to be so fragile that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could briefly re-inhabit and re-animate that body to the extent that it could again walk and talk, and that was enough for Him to prove His point: He could demonstrate that He had survived His crucifixion, and therefore we also will survive our own deaths. He also was able to manage to guard and preserve those two pieces of cloth for two thousand years thereafter, with enough evidence on them that He can prove to us now that He did indeed live and teach as Jesus, having been born in Bethlehem from out of the Godhead. Jesus’s story and His teachings as they are preserved for us in the Biblical Gospels are absolutely real, and He can indeed prove the truth of all of it now!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Jesus. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then by His Own choice and as a gift to us all He allowed Himself to be tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists as His gift of proof for us to this day, and His body was laid in a tomb. Two days after that He re-animated His dead physical body with an extraordinary burst of energy from His eternally living astral body, and that energy was at least equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on this earth being generated in one amazing blast! He then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and to us, and to all of humankind that human life is indeed eternal, and that none of us ever is going to die.

And my very dear ones, all of this is Jesus’s great gift to each one of us! This much is His gift! All of it was His alone to do, because that was what He was able to do, and only He could have done it for us. it was what, clearly, you and I could never have discovered for ourselves. He did everything that He could do for us, and He gave us all of Himself gladly and in full measure. What Jesus could not do, however, was to force us to understand everything that He was actually teaching, to learn the deeper meanings of all of His words. To put together all the great and glorious truths that could help us to rally and to learn and to actually grow spiritually! No, learning all of what Jesus taught us, and using it to at last grow away from fear and hatred and forever toward ever more perfect love, clearly all of that is still necessary for each of us to do individually. That part still is yours and mine to do. 

Jesus has very well lit the way ahead for us all. He taught us that what we were here to do was to raise our personal vibrations away from fear and hatred and as close as possible to love and joy! Or, as Jesus was fond of putting it, to make the earth more like the kingdom of God. He uses the term “kingdom of God” fourteen times in Mark and thirty-one times in Luke, where He specifically says, “The kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:21). So, how can we more easily make that be true right now, and how can we follow the teachings of Jesus closely enough to raise our own vibrations sufficiently to make this our own last necessary earth-lifetime? These two big steps are crucial:

  • We must remove all negativity from our lives. This is not optional, nor is it a “do your best” sort of step, but if you are serious about raising your spiritual vibration, you must from this day forward eliminate every form of even somewhat fear-based or rage-based entertainment, every lazy habit of negative thought or action, and every bit of me-vs.-you or us-vs.-them warlike feeling from your life forevermore. Some adversarial feeling seems harmless to us, especially the political and the sports-type variations, and a lot of that even can feel enjoyable. But it does negative things to our minds emotionally, so all of it has to go! To harbor any of this emotional negativity at all is like carrying a leaden weight around your neck that makes it impossible for you ever to rise.
  • Forevermore, we can think only loving thoughts and undertake only loving actions! Working toward our personal spiritual perfection is not a part-time effort. And it is emphatically not for sissies! Jesus says to us, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (MT 5:43-44). And that is that. For the rest of your life. The beautiful instrument that you truly are must play only one high, pure note of love! The love that Jesus requires of us now is not just the pretty sort of “love God and love your fellow man” that we enjoy reading about in Gospel passages like this: “‘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’” (MT 22:37-39). No, the true love of God that Jesus talks about is like sunlight and rain: God gives it equally to us all. And so we also must in God’s image impartially forgive and equally love all people, no matter what they may do to us, and for the same reason that Jesus gives for forgiving those who were even in that moment driving the spikes through His flesh at His crucifixion. He said, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:34).

So Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago to give us the greatest set of spiritual lessons that ever has been given to humankind. He could teach us how to perfectly forgive and love, but what He could not do was to personally force-feed to us how best to apply what He had taught us to our own daily lives in ways that would most efficiently and rapidly elevate our own spiritual vibrations! That part of this process is ours to discover. And then it remains for each of us to do Jesus’s work in our own lives in order to make of this our last necessary earth-lifetime.

 

For Thy church, that evermore lifteth holy hands above,
offering up on every shore her pure sacrifice of love;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For Thyself, best Gift Divine, to the world so freely given,
for that great, great love of Thine, peace on earth, and joy in heaven:
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

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