Author: Roberta Grimes

Hearing Jesus #1

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.

Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning,
Born of the one light, Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.
– Yusuf/Cat Stevens, from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

The thing that vexes and confounds my beloved Thomas and me most of all about modern Christianity is the fact that, while it loudly and everywhere proclaims the name of Jesus, the religion does so very little to share any of the teachings of Jesus. And this is true, even when Jesus Himself tells us that sharing God’s Word is the reason why He returned to earth from the Godhead as Jesus two thousand years ago! He was then a perfected Being, and troubled very much by the fact that so few people on earth understood why they were living on earth at all, so they learned very little in each earth-lifetime. As a result, so many of them were spending so many additional and unnecessary lifetimes, as the Buddha had said that so many people then were doing, just “turning on the wheel” unproductively. Jesus tells us that it was His purpose in being born on earth with the name of Jesus, which was then a common name, and as a simple Jewish preacher, well-educated but poor and living here dependent on the kindness of others. Jesus came as God’s messenger to the Jews, who were God’s chosen people and the world’s first true monotheists, to teach them how they could spiritually achieve the kingdom of God in this earth-lifetime.

As Jesus still insists to you and me, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). He tells us that if we only will listen to His teachings, and if we then will follow His teachings, we can make this our last necessary earth-lifetime! But, what? You aren’t finding what you need to make rapid spiritual progress in your own open Bible? Jesus says that all you need to do then is to, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). My darling friends, our beloved Lord, the risen Jesus Christ could not possibly make this process any simpler for us! But the problem is that none of the more than forty thousand different versions of Christianity actually makes a priority of the sharing of all of Jesus’s teachings in a way that makes them useful to us. Catholicism certainly doesn’t do it! I was a Catholic for twenty-five years, and I even was a Lector, doing formal readings as part of each week’s Mass, so I can tell you that what teaching ever was done in those Catholic churches was primarily sin- and retribution-related. Even Protestants will read brief sample passages from the whole Bible during their church services, rather than treating the important long passages of the Gospel teachings of Jesus as the pearls of great value that they are.  

Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells all that he has and buys that field” (MT 13:44). But he bought the whole field, for heaven’s sake! Dribbling to people these few words from Jesus that we get in our churches each week is like tossing crumbs to people who are starving. Yes, we each desperately seek for ourselves that spiritual pearl of great value. But to get it, we need to buy the whole precious field. It is just not up to some church or other to decide that these few words, or those other few words from Jesus’s more than three years of teaching, are all that you or I in particular might need to read this week of Jesus’s teachings.  So, Thomas and I have thought about how we might best help you to find a sufficient way to feast on the Lord’s whole banquet of teachings, and without any more delay. As we look now toward the time of year when we will celebrate the great gift of Jesus’s birth to us, let’s pause and consider what an amazing gift all those teachings of our greatest Teacher ever born truly are!  

While Jesus’s teachings come to us throughout all four Gospels, the gift appears in its most concentrated form in what is called “The Sermon on the Mount”, in the Book of Matthew, Chapters 5-7. So it now occurs to us that what we might do is to give you The Sermon on the Mount in comfortable, sermon-length sections over the six weeks of late November and early December that remain between now and when we will celebrate the birth of Jesus, our beloved Teacher. Some of you have told us that you use our weekly blog posts as your alternative to a Sunday sermon; so for the next six weeks, we will try more seriously to live up to that responsibility for you. (Thomas has just remarked as we are writing this that we will need to add an organ processional for you, too, then. I giggled.)

When Jesus was here on earth, He was the most charismatic speaker you can imagine. He had His twelve official male Disciples, of course; but once He began His public ministry, He soon was followed by a crowd that very soon grew to thousands of people, mostly men but also women and children, too, who were mesmerized by the things that he was saying, and by the brilliant and profoundly authoritative way that He said those things! They followed him for days, more and more of them, trailing along the hillsides, stopping sometimes in little villages to eat, but mainly just following Him, until their groups amounted to crowds of followers numbering in the tens of thousands. They won’t even notice when a few thousand more of us join them now. And so, with this little prelude, let’s begin this week to read together Chapters Five through Seven of the Gospel Book of Matthew. 

(Our suggestion is that in reading these Gospel words below the first time through, you might include our parenthetical explanatory notes. But then, go back and read just Jesus’s precious words, in dark print. Literally, sit on that hillside and hear Jesus speak!)

5 When Jesus saw the crowds, He went up on the mountain (it was the side of a hill); and after He sat down, His Disciples came to Him. 2 He opened His mouth and began to teach them, saying, (Envision His Disciples close around Him, and a hillside and valley full of many thousands of others, milling and then sitting down in groups around us, all listening….)

The Beatitudes (This term roughly means “blessed attitudes” in Latin. Here Jesus powerfully begins by listing nine perhaps sometimes unpleasant-seeming situations in which His listeners might find themselves, as His followers. And yet, He is telling them, and us, that in these situations we are in fact uniquely blessed, and uniquely able to find an even deeper and more joyous relationship with God. And all these organizing titles are not spoken by Jesus, but rather they are in the Bible.)

3 “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (“Blessed” in these nine Beatitudes means “fortunate” or “favored”. And “Poor in spirit” means something like “meek” or “humble”.)

4 “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall be comforted.

5 “Blessed are the gentle, for they shall inherit the earth. (Here again, He tells us that the meek, and not the strong and powerful, will prevail.)

6 “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they shall be satisfied.

7 “Blessed are the merciful, for they shall receive mercy.

8 “Blessed are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.

9 “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they shall be called sons of God.

10 “Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. (We might think of our achieving “the kingdom of heaven” as our achieving so much personal spiritual growth away from negativity and toward love in this lifetime that we never will need to incarnate on earth again.)

11 “Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me. 12 Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

Disciples and the World. (Jesus is speaking to the whole crowd, whoever will listen, and also to us and to the World. He is not speaking just to His Twelve Disciples.)

13 “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. (Salt was very important and valuable in that time and place, not just to enhance flavors but also to preserve food. So in calling us “the salt of the earth”, Jesus is saying something both complex and empowering.)

14 “You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; 15 nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house. 16 Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven. (This is such an immensely powerful statement! Jesus is saying here that YOU, my very dear one, are a literal light unto all mankind! Here you and I are, thinking that Jesus came into this world to be that light unto the world. But now He is telling us that, no, it is the people that He is speaking to now, the ones sitting on that hillside, and YOU AND I as well, my beloveds in this twenty-first century, who have come into this world to be the light of the world! And Jesus tells us that it is our task now to further glorify our Father, who is in heaven.)

17 “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill. 18 For truly I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away, not the smallest letter or stroke shall pass from the Law until all is accomplished. 19 Whoever then annuls one of the least of these commandments, and teaches others to do the same, shall be called least in the kingdom of heaven; but whoever keeps and teaches them, he shall be called great in the kingdom of heaven. (We will have more to say about this below….)

20 “For I say to you that unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. (Not surprising to hear. We know how low is Jesus’s opinion of the scribes and Pharisees, the clergymen of His day!) (MT 5:1-20)

…Wow! And so ends the first part of the Sermon on the Mount. Now let’s pause here for a week, still holding our place on that hill, perhaps passing around a basket of bread and a jug of water or wine as we ponder what we have heard of Jesus’s teachings today. But our best-beloved Teacher has only begun what will be a long day of sitting on that hillside and speaking, while the crowd of thousands of us listens to Him, sitting ranged along the hillside and below us in the valley, and that crowd will gradually grow ever larger as word spreads that the Teacher is teaching nearby. A few of you are looking over at Thomas and me, though, and are wondering about something. “What?” Someone now whispers to Thomas. “What was that He said about ‘The Law and The Prophets’? I thought we were going to be past those old laws?”

Thomas smiles at his questioner. He says, “Ah, but remember that the Pharisees are always listening to Him.” And Thomas points out a few of those feared clergy, close by Jesus even now, farther up on the hill from us and doing their spying. Remember what the Master has told us privately of the Law and the Prophets, which is the whole of what Christianity will one day in the far future call the entire Old Testament. Jesus has told us that there are really only two commandments, in the end. Remember that? He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And so, our very dear ones, simply love and trust God with your whole heart, and allow Jesus now to be your wise Elder Brother and Teacher, which is what He returned to earth two thousand years ago to very gently be for us all. We’ll return together to hear Him on His hillside next week, since He has barely begun!

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
– Yusuf/Cat Stevens, from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Our Declaration

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

… O beautiful for spacious skies,For amber waves of grain,For purple mountain majestiesAbove the fruited plain!

… America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,And crown thy good with brotherhoodFrom sea to shining sea!

O beautiful for pilgrim feet,
Whose stern, impassioned stress
A thoroughfare for freedom beat
Across the wilderness!

America! America!
God mend thine every flaw,
Confirm thy soul in self-control,
Thy liberty in law!
– Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929), from “America the Beautiful” (1893)

Ours is a spiritual, and never a political blog. But Thomas and I hope you will indulge our wish to talk this week about something that matters to us very much indeed, because unless Americans can remain free to think for ourselves, then a healthy spiritual life will not remain possible for any of us. And, my dear ones, next Fourth of July in the United States we will celebrate the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of this nation’s very fortunate birth. For two and a half centuries, through great and also through some pretty awful presidents; through the kind of strife that we are witnessing yet again; and through even a bloody nationwide civil war: the United States of America has seen the steady, ongoing election of presidents every four years, and the ongoing protection of each precious citizen’s sacred personal rights and freedoms by a strong Constitution administered by a Congress of the people, and by a highly respected Supreme Court. And by now, all of our sacred institutions have been battered enough to have been proven to be soundly able to withstand whatever we can throw at them. There is no other nation on the face of this earth that has had such an amazingly long, unbroken stretch of one continuous government. And our winning that longevity contest is not even close!  

It is time for those of us who are privileged to be Americans to marvel together at what we possess, and to stop just taking it all for granted. Because it did not have to turn out this way. In every other country, even now, if you slip and say the wrong thing in public, you risk jail time. But not in the United States, where we know that our First Amendment will protect us. Some people tease that Donald Trump might get a third term as president, if maybe JD Vance is elected president with Trump as his vice president, and then Vance resigns. But, nope! We know we’ve got our Twenty-Second Amendment safely in their way. And we know by now that no foreign country is going to attempt to conquer this nation, since our Second Amendment right to individually bear arms means that Americans own tons of guns and bullets, so any foreign army would have to conquer us house by house and street by street. It’s wonderful, the way so many Americans can rattle off even the numbers of these Constitutional amendments that protect each of our sacred rights.

 But the key founding document of the United States is not its Constitution. Instead, it is the faded sheet that was signed on the Fourth of July in 1776. Our Declaration of Independence from Great Britain’s monarch, who before that day could claim to own the thirteen north American colonies, is this nation’s true founding document. And it has set our country’s flavor and tenor ever since. Only marvel at the way it begins, with two paragraphs that bring a new and better dawn for all of humankind!

In Congress, July 4, 1776. The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America. When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness….

This document is literally over-the-top amazing! In that much younger world, in which no united people anywhere on the face of this earth had ever before that sacred date been free from a strong, overbearing, often brutal, and always highly fallible government of and by the very few, our Declaration of Independence does not only declare our colonies’ separation from Great Britain. Also, and very far more importantly, for the first time in history, our Declaration of Independence claims FOR EACH OF THE PEOPLE INDIVIDUALLY who were living in these colonies a whole new human reality! It sets forth the overriding principle that ONLY THE PEOPLE have the power and the right to rule themselves, individually! And furthermore, if the people as individuals are ever not happy with their government, then it is their absolute and unfettered right as individuals to peacefully change their government, whenever and however they like. In colonies in which some people were still being held as slaves by other people, it also sets forth the overriding principle that all men are created equal! And to deny slaveholders the right to declare other human beings to be their property, this document revises what had always until then been the standard mantra of rights from “life, liberty, and property”, and instead it proclaims our universal rights now to be “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness”. This seems actually to invite those still being held as slaves in the American colonies to claim the great happiness of their own freedom, and it urges them to make that claim just as soon as they can manage it.

This extraordinary preamble to the Declaration of Independence is followed by a long list of the colonists’ grievances against the British king, the most prominent of which in the first draft of the Declaration of Independence is this:

He (the British King) has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating it’s most sacred rights of life & liberty in the persons of a distant people who never offended him, captivating & carrying them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation thither. this piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the CHRISTIAN king of Great Britain. determined to keep open a market where MEN should be bought & sold, he has prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this execrable commerce: and that this assemblage of horrors might want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty of which he has deprived them, & murdering the people upon whom he also obtruded them; thus paying off former crimes committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes which he urges them to commit against the lives of another.

Of course, this tirade against slavery was not allowed to remain in the Declaration of Independence. Indignant representatives of the Southern slave-holding states removed it right away. But those same Southerners missed the anti-slavery nuances that the Declaration’s clever principal author had hidden in the Declaration’s preamble, so there those words remained. And that principal author of the Declaration of Independence was a Southerner himself, and someone who had inherited hundreds of slaves. He was thirty-three-year-old Thomas Jefferson. The same Thomas who, soon after he later finished one final earth-incarnation as a Welsh farmer, which he tells me that he took in order to “get back into balance” after his extraordinary Thomas Jefferson lifetime, he then became my spirit guide. My Thomas now co-authors these weekly blog posts, and while he is not any longer Thomas Jefferson – more on that later – the way Jefferson got so much anti-slavery language into the Declaration of Independence right under the Southern slaveholders’ noses still to this day makes my Thomas smile.   

Long before I knew that Thomas was my spirit guide, he guided me in researching and writing an accurate account of Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage to Martha Wayles Skelton, which marriage neatly spanned the Revolutionary War. Thomas and Martha were married on January 1, 1772, and it truly was a love-match. But Patty – her nickname – was repeatedly pregnant, and she became ever more sickly with each child she bore. Her father was an importer of slaves, and her mother had died young, so Betty Hemings, her father’s half-white slave mistress, and the woman who had raised Patty, had made of Jefferson’s future wife into an adamant abolitionist. And so, apparently, was Thomas Jefferson a pretty ardent abolitionist as well, at least while his adored wife was alive. Thanks to Jefferson, the colony of Virginia became the first place on earth to ban the importation of slaves, even before Great Britain did it. And we have seen above what Jefferson did with the first draft of the Declaration of Independence! In fact, my research at Monticello suggests that he was starting to plan to make abolition the great cause of the rest of his life. Jefferson made it clear in his contemporary writings that as soon as the Revolutionary War ended, he meant to retire “to my family, my farm, and my books.”

 But all of that was not to be. Patty’s illness was diabetes, and in September of 1782, just as the Revolutionary War was winding down, she delivered her last child, Lucy, and four months later Patty died with her husband at her side, at the age of just 34. Jefferson never really was the same man again. And he burned all their letters to one another, and all her personal papers, no doubt to protect her from the judgment of those who might not share her fiercely abolitionist views.

 Martha Jefferson’s death may have had major historical ramifications. Before her death, it was her husband’s clear intention to devote the rest of his life to the abolition of slavery in the nation that he had helped to found. The primary problem was that racism was rampant, so whenever slaves were freed, they were horribly treated. Jefferson’s first sympathetic thought, to offer to send the slaves back to their native countries, would never have worked because they had been here for generations. So, by the time of Patty’s death, Jefferson was looking at experimenting with how we might do a proper emancipation by giving the newly freed slaves their own state initially, where they could live on farms checker-boarded with farms owned by sympathetic white farmers in the still-wild interior perhaps, and people could get to know one another and come together gradually, peacefully, and with appropriate Christian customs and supports in place. Personally, I have no doubt that if fixing this racial problem had become his and a healthy Patty’s whole life’s goal, they could have fixed it all by, perhaps, 1820 or so. Then there would have been no American Civil War. And no ongoing Jim Crow racial strife for most of the whole century thereafter. Then Thomas Jefferson would be known only for his Declaration of Independence, and for his brilliance in having so well and properly freed the slaves and created the healthily race-blind United Stated that we are blessed with only now, 250 years later. But instead, that poor man fled Monticello for decades after his wife’s death. He helped to negotiate the peace in France. He then became the first Secretary of State, the second Vice President, and the third President of the United States. Thomas Jefferson was a great American Founding Father, but it was a consolation life, and not the life he had wanted.

When I researched My Thomas at Monticello, I discovered that Jefferson had been a rather surprising slaveholder. He had inherited this institution that he deeply hated, and for much of his life, emancipation was not even legal in Virginia. So his hundreds of inherited people lived communally with him at Monticello on family plots where they grew vegetables that they then sold to their master’s kitchen. Yes, really! And since Jefferson often didn’t have the cash to pay them right away, he would keep account books, which I saw, listing what he owed to his slaves for their vegetables. They had Sundays off, and often Saturdays too, except in harvest season, when everyone had to work all seven days. Their overseer was himself a slave, since white overseers would treat slaves like, you know, actual slaves. There is no record of Jefferson’s ever allowing a slave to be beaten or mistreated, except for once, in his old age, when he allowed it for an insufferable young man. But just that once upset him so much that he never allowed it again.

When, in 2015, my spirit guide came out to me as having been Thomas Jefferson in an earlier lifetime, I had just one question for him. You may well know what it was. I had done enough research to be confident that the Sally Hemings children who had Jefferson DNA had been fathered by Thomas’s younger brother, Randolph, and not by Thomas himself; but I wanted to know that from him directly. My Thomas insisted that I must ask Thomas Jefferson himself that question. So that next night, while my body slept, Thomas whisked me to the astral plane, and to a small eighteenth-century-style reception room, where stood Thomas Jefferson himself. Wow! Picture this! Two tall men, Jefferson wearing his eighteenth-century garb for me, and my Thomas, even taller and in his long blue sixth-level robe and his Fu Manchu mustache. We recognize people in the astral plane by their spiritual vibrations, and these two vibrated almost identically, although Thomas did vibrate a bit higher and more rapidly than did Jefferson. But, notice that they are two different beings now! I find that fascinating! When I am in my astral body, I think I look as I did when I was about thirty years old, with long hair. Thomas nudged me to ask my question, so I did that, shyly.

Thomas Jefferson smiled gently at me. He could see that I was embarrassed to be asking him such a personal question. Then he said in his beautiful soft, southern voice, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings because she was my property so she could not have consented.” And I thanked him. What could I say? Above all, the man was a gentleman.

My dear ones, what Thomas Jefferson and his American generation of giants did most of all was to present to humankind for the first time in human history the notion that each man has the precious right to govern himself. That is why our Declaration of Independence and its upcoming 250th anniversary are so important, and not just to Americans, but really to all the world. Government must not be from the top, working too often for just a greedy few; but really, it can only be by each of us, working together, for the good of us all.

 

O beautiful for patriot dream
That sees beyond the years
Thine alabaster cities gleam,
Undimmed by human tears!

America! America!
God shed His grace on thee,
And crown thy good with brotherhood
From sea to shining sea!
– Katharine Lee Bates (1859-1929), from “America the Beautiful” (1893)

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Proving God?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My sweet Lord, Mmm,
My Lord, Mmm, my Lord,
I really wanna see you,
Really wanna be with you
Really wanna see you, Lord
But it takes so long, my Lord

My sweet Lord, Mmm,
My Lord, Mmm, my Lord,
I really wanna know you
I’d really wanna go with you

I really wanna show you, Lord
That it won’t take long, my Lord
(Hallelujah)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah)
Mmm, my Lord (Hallelujah)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah)
– George Harrison (1943-2001) & Billy Preston (1946-2006), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

What my Thomas and I have been talking about in this space for the past few weeks has prompted a few of you, my dear friends, to ask us whether in fact we can prove that there is a God. I think we can prove that God is real, although you should not be reduced to having to ask lowly us such a very important question! Oh, my dearly beloved Father, our Father not in heaven but within us, all around us and all through us! How You must be laughing at the absurdity of all your precious children, that we are reduced to such confusion, even now, in the twenty-first century! We could have proven Your existence a hundred thousand times over by now, and in at least as many ways, and it would not even have been hard. But those patently ridiculous scientific gatekeepers, the heads of the university scientific departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, they quite literally destroyed their own discipline in their foolish panic over the advent of quantum mechanics at the start of the twentieth century. Their minds were boggled, because they thought that a very ancient arbitrary line between science and religion had back then been crossed.

Well, yes, true enough, that arbitrary line had indeed been crossed. But it was a stupid line in the first place. The line that the first quantum physicists had crossed was a kind of gentleman’s understanding that goes back some twenty-five hundred years, all the way back to those great Greek philosophers, Plato and Aristotle. When I asked AI, our handy new expert on all things, to summarize Plato’s and Aristotle’s gentleman’s understanding for us so I could better explain it to you, here is what it said: “Plato was an idealist who believed truth and reality exist in a perfect, non-physical realm of “Forms,” accessible through reason and intellectual insight. In contrast, Aristotle was a realist who argued that reality is found in the physical world and is best understood through observation, experience, and logic. Key differences include Plato’s focus on abstract ideals versus Aristotle’s emphasis on the concrete and empirical, as well as their differing views on the ideal state and the nature of the soul.” So, Plato was sort-of the father of religion, while Aristotle was more or less the father of science. It made some kind of sense to the ancient Greeks to follow their two great, heroic thinkers, and to split all human inquiry into the fields of religious inquiry and scientific inquiry. So western thought has followed that  artificial pattern forever after. And never the twain shall meet!

Therefore, when more than a century ago it appeared to the mainstream scientific gatekeepers that quantum physicists might be close to becoming too spiritual, they panicked and imposed their “scientific dogma of materialism” on all scientific disciplines, as a stark prohibition on any scientist’s ever discovering God. Nope! Can’t do that, even if the genuine Creator behind it all is staring right at you from one of your test tubes, and winking at you, and even waving to boot. Since in fact, of course, a Creator and Designer, a vastly clever Great Engineer does exist, and by now that Creator’s efforts are bountifully evident everywhere, watching scientists go about their work while they are still hobbled by that ridiculous old dogma, and therefore not allowed to notice that Creator’s work on pain of destroying their own careers is, quite literally, laugh-your-head-off funny, even despite the fact that it is also so tragic. Let’s look at just two current articles describing ways in which working scientists are still dealing with their by-now badly creaking materialist handicap:

Consciousness

OMG, talk about imposing a handicap! Here is a very convenient article from our personal favorite popular science magazine that catalogues more than three hundred and fifty different theories about the origin and persistence of consciousness, both materialist and non-materialist, which, taken together, detail what the current guesses are, since of course they still must ignore the fact that consciousness is primary. Consciousness is God. But their guesses here are boggling. They make your head hurt. Trust me on this: to attempt to read this article, and to follow out its charts, does indeed give you such a headache! Look, most of these hundreds of theories can be proven to be dead-ends simply by testing them against some of the ways in which we know that consciousness actually works. For example, life after death is a proven fact, based on so much overwhelming evidence that is now more than a century old. None of the materialist guesses at the sources of consciousness which have it originating in the human brain will allow for consciousness to survive the death of the brain, so all of those theories can now be safely ruled out. Phenomena like terminal lucidity, remote viewing, and near-death experiences are all frequently reported, too, so they also demonstrate that consciousness does not originate inside the human brain. If your theory of consciousness won’t allow for all of these commonly-occurring, consciousness-related phenomena, then it is a frank non-starter.  

 Advanced Physics Research

Some modern physicists have been reinventing their field, including attempting to put information at its center.  I am not sure why this is true, but I imagine it is because, to date, neither physics nor any other core scientific discipline has solved some of the most important remaining scientific questions, which seem to amount to these: What first prompted cells to begin to assemble themselves into organisms? And how did life begin? I would propose one more scientific question, which to me overrides them all: how is it possible that the human body is so exquisitely and complexly designed, with all its systems working so well together, if there is no Designer, and if our existence has no apparent purpose at all?  The team in the video linked at the top of this paragraph cannot answer any of these questions, of course, not with that atheist materialist dogma still in place; but you will enjoy the fresh zest with which the two in this video are at least trying to answer them! And my goodness, we can see how deeply they are struggling with that useless dogmatic limitation on their work, and how brilliantly they are trying to find ways to get around it. They cannot find a source for life, and you get the sense that they realize they probably never will find a source for life while their artificial professional restraint remains in place. These dear physicists are smart enough to be realistic about their sad professional handicap, above all.  

Yes, Dr. Max Planck, who was the father of quantum physics, did in fact find God more than a century ago. And he was so joyous about it! Even the death of his son Erwin at Hitler’s hands in 1944 after a failed assassination plot could not, in the end, stem his delight in his discovery. Dr. Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, insisted that it was impossible for us to “get behind” consciousness. He told us, in other words, that consciousness is the base, the grounding, the Source of all reality. In 1944, the same year that he lost his son, 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! That stupid artificial line separating science and religion that Plato and Aristotle had set up twenty-five hundred years ago was arbitrary and foolish to begin with, when reality is all of a single piece! It is past time for us to give Max Planck full credit for ending that old artificial split, since that he certainly did, a full century ago.

Max Planck discovered, too, that God is Consciousness. And a significant number of the more than 350 theories about consciousness that were cited in the New Scientist article linked earlier in this post also suggest something like that. Even my beloved spirit guide, Thomas, when I was four years old and he was teaching me to memorize my address, told me that we live within the Mind of God. And, so we do! This whole universe, and the entire gigantic astral plane which is our genuine eternal home, and much more besides: all of it is a thought in the Mind of God. And so when, early last century, those in the afterlife told us that dying and going to the afterlife was a lot like just changing to a different radio station, of course that idea made perfect sense!

The real problem with the materialist dogma that those scientific gatekeepers more than a hundred years ago imposed on some of the greatest scientific minds that ever have lived was that it largely halted the advance of open-minded scientific investigation altogether. For the past hundred and twenty-five years, no scientific query ever has been answered by positing a Creator behind what is clearly a deeply results-driven and highly purposeful creation, which therefore leaves all deep thinkers enmired in confusion. Only stop and think about this for a moment! We speak glibly about evolution, as if of course evolution happens. But why would life ever bother to evolve at all, if it never had a more complex creature in mind, toward which it was inspired to spur its own evolutionary changes? Why did all the aspects of our mouths, throats, and lungs evolve together toward human speech? Why bother? What was the point? Why did our bodies evolve toward bipedalism? For that matter, why did ancient sea creatures not simply continue to evolve, entirely randomly, in just the seas? Or, why did they bother  even to evolve at all? Why did any two or more unicellular creatures ever take the extreme trouble, at any point in all those billions of years, of ever bothering to combine into anything more complex?

By far the greatest proof that a Creator must exist is that YOU exist. And the odds against your existing at all are something like one in four hundred quadrillion, according to our AI friend, although given the extreme likelihood that this universe will either blow apart or collapse in upon itself in any given micro-instant if all those “cosmological constants” that keep this universe stable should ever stop micro-adjusting for even one tiniest speck of a second, even those odds seem to be underestimating the extreme precariousness of our shared situation. (And yes, they were called “cosmological constants” before scientists realized that they are continuously being micro-adjusted by… Guess-Who. Now scientists try to ignore them.) The Creator that our scientific gatekeepers are so terrified of inadvertently finding is also an infinitely loving paterfamilias to all eight billion of us, and to all of  created reality. Max Planck happily understood that. And so, by now and very long since, should we also understand and accept it, too. As we all learned back in high school, matter can neither be created nor destroyed, but it merely changes in form.

Indeed, our bodies are marvels of intelligent design! Here is the first in a series of videos that will show you just how unbelievably complex and efficient your own body’s divine engineering actually is (we begin with talking about our bodies’ use of oxygen). Again, my very dear ones, such incredibly complex engineering strongly implies that, without a God, of course a whole tribe of brilliant post-doc-trained engineers must surely have been transported from now to very far back in time! Or else, you know, one very brilliant Creator must love us very much indeed, to have designed humankind so supremely well. Which alternative seems to you to have been more likely?

 Personally, I know that God exists, because there was that horrifying night when I was eight years old, when God briefly withdrew from me, and I woke up to a black and terrifying nothing! So, OMG my very dear ones, God has given me the incomparable gift of showing me the difference. And then that glorious light flashed! So magnificent, so full of perfect and boundlessly beautiful love! It still feels, so many decades later, as if it happened only last night. And wonderfully, in all the many years since that night, God never has left me alone again.

I really wanna show you, Lord
That it won’t take long, my Lord
(Hallelujah)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah)
Mmm, my Lord (Hallelujah)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah)
– George Harrison (1943-2001) & Billy Preston (1946-2006), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

One and Done?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Here we all work ‘long the Mississippi
Here we all work while the white folk play
Pullin’ them boats from the dawn ’till sunset
Gettin’ no rest ’till the judgment day

Don’t look up and don’t look down
You don’t das make the boss man frown
Bend your knees and bow your head
And pull that rope until your dead

Let me go ‘way from the Mississippi
Let me go ‘way from the white man boss
Show me that stream called the river Jordan! 
That’s the old stream that I long to cross
– Oscar Hammerstein (1895-1960) & Jerome Kern (1885-1945), from “Ol’ Man River” (1927}

My experience of light at the age of eight instilled in me as a very young child a powerful need to understand what is going on. I have wanted ever since that moment to know everything! I have wanted to know not only Where that light came from, and Who had spoken from out of it, but also every bit of What in fact is behind it all. And not only What, mind you, but almost as importantly, as I grew, I also craved to know Why? Why does this universe even exist, and why does it go to all the trouble of maintaining itself within such tiny tolerances so as to sustain itself perfectly as a fit and stable habitat for human beings, over all the millennia? That gigantic supernatural light, which had been more brilliant than any light you can imagine, even though it did not affect my eyes – that light – had revealed to me, when I was too young to know that there are some questions that we are not supposed to ask – that light had made me see that this is all just a stage. Life on earth is something like a personal play, unfolding all around us. And therefore, obviously, there is a Very Big Guy who is lovingly staging it for each of us, who is pulling the strings behind that curtain that are making it seem so real in each moment. Even grown-ups who believe in God are used to taking this theatrical stage and its scenery a lot more seriously than I ever have been able to take any of it, ever since that long-ago amazing night. 

It is only in recent years that I have come to understand, and to discuss with my Thomas, what a powerful difference that experience of light has made in all the rest of my life. It turned me into an embarrassingly eager and ravenously hungry Seeker. Thomas has lately helped me to bring back memories from when I was even younger than eight. I was only four years old, and we were learning in preschool to recite our address, for just one example. I have a vague memory of a tall, thin man in a long blue robe sitting on a large rock in the not-yet-built and thinly wooded lot that was next to our house. Thomas tells me now that man was himself, and no one could have seen him but me. He would wait for me after school on many days when I was very young. I used to visit him there, and he would teach me things. I can recall just tiny snippets of this now. But the tall man would ask me what I had learned in school that day, and I would tell him. So, on that particular day, I told him that I had learned to recite my address, in case I was ever lost. I said to him, “101 North Street, Grafton, Massachusetts.” To which the nice man taught me to add, “The United States of America, The Third Planet from the Sun, the Solar System, The Universe, and The Mind of God.” Lord only knows what my teacher must have thought when I recited all of that back to her the next morning!

Much later, I came to understand that we have God’s invitation to ask all our deepest questions. The very reason why Jesus returned to earth was to teach us. He is for each of us that tall man in the wooded lot, in our shared private place; and Jesus invites us to come and visit Him and ask Him all our questions! Jesus says,7 “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. 8 For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened (MT 7:7-8).

That experience of light when I was eight years old remains ever-present and hyper-real, even all these many decades later. I realize now, too, that of course even long before my much-beloved Thomas ever came out to me, just more than a decade ago, and he told me who he was, he was very active in my mind, and I was following his prompts. In addition, because of that light and that voice, I am not afraid to seek answers, because I am confident that there are going to be answers worth finding! For a very long time, it used to amaze me that just about everyone else was not excited at all, as I have always been excited, to look for evidence of the afterlife. It is only fairly recently that I have come to see that many people are afraid to look for afterlife evidence; and I understand now that the reason is because they fear to discover that there might be nothing very good behind that curtain. Or, even worse, there might be simply nothing at all. No God. No afterlife. Which means that at death, we simply blink out like a light.

And of course, so many people’s fear of seeking this most important of all truths is also the fault of the American scientific community. It is science that shamefully insists – and in the twenty-first century, no less! – that there is no God. And it is science that also tries to make people believe that there is nothing after death. And in doing that, of course, the scientific community is not remaining neutral at all, as it always is supposed to remain neutral when any question at hand is still unproven. But rather, in this case, science is making up from whole cloth, and even is dramatizing, what we might by now with justification call The Greatest Lie in History.

Because of the Presence that was behind the light that I saw on that amazing night, I know with certainly that there is a Mind, an Intelligence, or what we generally call God. But you needn’t give that Divine Presence a name; and certainly, don’t call it God if you are an American, since calling that Intelligence “God” is such an intimidating concept for American scientists! More than a century ago, the mainstream scientific gatekeepers in the United States were so horrified by the possibility that Max Planck, who was the brilliant father of quantum physics, had found God when he announced that consciousness is primary – and in fact, so indeed Dr. Planck had found God! – that they declared that materialism was now “the fundamental scientific dogma”. And they thereby turned mainstream scientific inquiry into the religion of atheism. Literally. So, ever since the early twentieth century, by decree of the university scientific departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, scientists are required to believe that consciousness is produced by the human brain, and no other scientific finding is allowed.

So now, more than a billion dollars is being wasted in trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain. Which is the literal equivalent of trying to find Frank Sinatra still alive and singing inside your iPhone. This is the height of atheistic scientific silliness, when consciousness is so obviously primary and per-existent, just as Max Planck insisted that it is, a full century ago. And of course, another silliness in wasting funds and effort is the ongoing scientific search for how life began, while not allowing any reference to consciousness; which is too bad, when of course life is a primary property of consciousness itself. And the greatest scientific silliness of all is the fact that those scientific gatekeepers of more than a century ago so much feared inadvertently finding God that they turned science itself into a religion, the religion of atheism, when religion was the very thing that they were trying so hard to avoid! But, no worries. Once some new generation of working scientists eventually becomes sufficiently disgusted with wasting their careers on doing such nonsensically limited research, they will point out as a single body just how naked the emperors of the scientific community truly are; and then in a single day, this useless and stupid constraint on their work will shrink with embarrassment and be gone.

Meanwhile, for those of us who are not afraid to live in the beautiful and secure sunshine and joy of this God-created genuine reality, making this our one-and-done last necessary earth-lifetime is easily possible! We can decide now that we will work so hard at raising our own spiritual vibrations that we will achieve the fifth level in the astral plane this time around, and then we will be happily one-and-done! That can be true, even if you are in the late afternoon of your present earth-lifetime, if you really will put your full mind to it. Thanks to Jesus, and thanks to Max Planck and to some other modern researchers who have helped us to understand why we come to earth, and how this whole system of consciousness energy actually operates; if you choose to do it, you can raise your personal spiritual energy pretty rapidly. To give yourself the gift of sufficient spiritual growth that you can escape the need to ever return to earth after your next transition home, you will first need to understand what consciousness is, and how to work within it: 

  • Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality, without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore likely self-aware. There is no way around the fact that all of reality is a single thought within a single great Mind. It was the pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck who first said this, and he was right.
  • Like all forms of energy, emotional Consciousness vibrates; with intense love as its highest and most powerful emotion, and fear, anger, and hatred as its lowest and weakest emotions. This core fact is the key to understanding all of reality! We think of what we experience as human emotions as just throwaways, and meaningless; but in fact, emotions are what control reality. When Jesus tells us that our faith can move mountains, this is what He is talking about (see MT 17:20).
  • Consciousness is the Godhead at its top, where there is just perfect love; and at the very bottom are virtually powerless demons and other negative entities. All of our minds are ranged along consciousness between pure love at the top and pure evil at the bottom, depending upon where we ourselves are spiritually.
  • Consciousness is very active and creative. The thing is, as we know, that if we have the power to create, then we can create negative as well as positive things; but if we create what is negative, we dead-end our minds down into negative powerlessness.

And of course, before we begin to work to elevate your own spiritual energies, we will need to cleanse your life of  every source of fear and other negativity. And for many people – it feels awful to say this! – most of the negativity in your life may well come from your religion. The shortest course toward rapid spiritual growth is to follow the lessons that Jesus taught, and yet many Christian churches don’t teach those lessons. Instead, they teach guilt and shame surrounding the notion that Jesus had to die for our sins, and fear of judgment and our very possible condemnation to a fiery hell. If there is any of this in your church, then its negativity will likely prevent the spiritual growth that we are going to be working toward now. So, before we begin, it would be great if you found a more love-based church that could feed your heart.

 So now that we understand how Consciousness works, we can begin to see how we might indeed make this our last necessary earth-lifetime! The three powerful spiritual trainings that can transform us spiritually are GRATITUDE, FORGIVENESS, And LOVE. And while eventually we will be living all three for the rest of our lives, it is best to begin to work on them in that order, because each prepares our minds to better handle the next. 

We begin by developing An Attitude of Gratitude. Buy a small booklet of blank pages, and every morning for at least the next six months, write at the top of a page just one new thing for which you are grateful. Then below it, write a sentence or two about why you are grateful for that one thing. Then say a brief prayer to God, thanking God for that one thing that you have just written down. Doing this each morning is easy at first, because you can be grateful for each of your family members, and then for each kind of flower, ad so on. But by the seventieth day, since you are not allowed to repeat, you are down to being grateful for your neighbor’s dog that barks at night, because at least with his help, you’re never late for work. By the eightieth day, you are struggling to think of a reason to be grateful for mosquitoes! This instilling in yourself an attitude of gratitude is a wonderful exercise. If you will honestly stick with it for the full ninety days or more, you will find that it softens you spiritually to a surprising extent. It gentles you. It lightens your heart. And it helps to prepare you for the deeper work of forgiveness, which you can begin while your gratitude work is still ongoing.

Universal Forgiveness feels difficult for many of us. When someone harms us, even a little bit, there is a wound! And forgiving for the really big and awful things can feel almost impossible. But Jesus tells us that we have to forgive everything. And He is so right about that! When His disciple, Peter, asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). Don’t kid yourself about this. Whoever it is that you are having trouble forgiving could not care less whether you forgive him or not! The wrongdoers usually don’t care at all. Forgiveness of others is always the big gift that you give to yourself!

And fortunately, there is a mechanical method that makes complete forgiveness pretty simple. It’s called Forgiveness Balls. You just sweep whatever wrong you are confronting into a bundle with big swoops of your arms, and of course you include all the people involved. Get it all in there! And then you tamp that bundle down into a ball, nice and tight with your hands. Then with both hands, you slowly push that Forgiveness Ball away, saying out loud, and meaning it, “I love you. I bless you. I forgive, and I release.” You will probably have to do this several times at first. But do the whole exercise over again slowly, and do it firmly! What you are doing is retraining and teaching your stubborn mind that you really do mean it! You really do forgive whatever this infraction was. Each time you do a Forgiveness Ball about some very big thing, over and over again, and you sincerely mean it, you will feel your resentment of whatever it was lessening, until all that resentment just goes away.

This is how spiritual growth happens, but you cannot let anything get in its way. When the part of eternal Consciousness that is your own mind has been cleared of all negativity; when it has been softened by the patient and kindly every-morning thoughts that are Gratitude expressed directly to God; and when it has been purified of every resentment by complete and total Forgiveness: then your mind naturally is ready to fill you with the perfect Love that passes all understanding that Jesus came to teach. Jesus said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). That perfect love is your whole spiritual goal! And you will find that love now comes naturally to you, love even for perfect strangers on the street, in stores, and everywhere! Cultivate it, fine a way to express it, and it becomes ever stronger. For me, that cultivation has been spending decades teaching others what I have learned in my lifetime spent satisfying my hunger to ever better understand my childhood experience of light; and for you, there will be some way that you can give to humankind as well. Once you have used these key lessons in Gratitude, Forgiveness, and Love to carry you most of your spiritual journey, then satisfying your ever deeper desire to give love to all of humankind will carry you hone!

Ol’ man river, that ol’ man river
He don’t say nothin’, but he must know somethin’
He just keeps rollin’, he keeps on rollin’ along

Ah gits weary, an’ sick of tryin’
Ah’m tired of livin’, An’ skeered of dyin’
But ol’ man river, he jes’ keeps rollin’ along
– Oscar Hammerstein (1895-1960) & Jerome Kern (1885-1945), from “Ol’ Man River” (1927}

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

What’s It All About?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?

 And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023) & Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

In our blog post last week, I made what was perhaps a mistake when I used a couple of stories from my early personal life as illustrations.  A new blog commenter here then found reason to scoff at me about my tales, since, as a very young adult, I had felt personally wounded by my mother’s telling me that if she could have aborted me when she found herself pregnant out of wedlock prior to Roe v. Wade, she would indeed have aborted me. That commenter said that by my “looking at these subjects so deeply” from what he called “the viewpoint of the ego illusion”, I sounded to him “like a materialist”. He told me that if this body that I am still wearing now had been aborted, I would “simply be associated with” a different body, and I would now be experiencing this reality through that other body. So, no bigs at all! He told me that I should have just stepped back and related to my mother’s revelation not emotionally, but instead “as consciousness”, and in fact I should have reacted to all three of the negative examples in my blog post with no emotions whatsoever. Then I “would not have suffered through the negative emotions” that I felt when I heard what my mother had said about perhaps wishing that she could have aborted me, or my childhood pain of feeling like a boy in a girl’s body, or our shared horror of having witnessed Iryna Zarutska‘s murder on a North Carolina light-rail train. He told me scornfully that my whole blog post was based on what he called “the ego illusion”, which he implied that we can entirely escape by just skating along above the tops of our earth-lives, and never feeling any negative emotions at all. I have to admit that my own first emotion upon reading his comment was a pretty deep feeling of shame that, yup, he had caught me out. I had just confessed to all of you that when I was young, I was deeply – well – human. But then my Thomas, my beloved spirit guide, pointed out to me that our clueless-sounding commenter had just given us a great, and probably a now essential topic for our follow-up blog post this week!

Well, of course, when I was very young, and I was already deeply emotionally invested in the lifetime that am still living now, I reacted with strong negativity to being told that if abortion had been legal when my mother first panicked as she realized that she was pregnant out of wedlock, she would have rushed straight to a legal abortionist. Of course, I was horrified to receive this news! I was by then deeply and happily into THIS earth-lifetime! I was in my late twenties, as I recall, when she and I had this conversation. It was soon after I was married, and I was still in the first flush of love with the man with whom I have since shared more than fifty years of three children, five grandchildren, and more joy than I ever can find a way to express to you. But that commenter’s suggestion was that I should only have shrugged and thrown away the thought of my entire investment in this earth-life so far, as if it were only nothing at all, just valueless crap, my whole childhood and college and the man that I loved, all worth nothing, since I could always start over and begin an entirely different life?

Our new-commenter friend’s big mistake is that he believes it is possible for us to get what is good and useful to our spiritual growth from an earth-life by just watching it happen, as if from above, and without actually living or in any way experiencing any of it. I have never heard of trying that, but who would even want to try it? In none of what he says does he take into account the value of human emotions, when in fact emotions are all that exist. Consciousness IS emotions! From fear, anger, and hatred at the lowest and slowest consciousness vibrations, to extreme affinity and love at the highest and most rapid emotional vibrations, consciousness as you and I feel and express the emotions of it is in fact all that objectively exists. In our real and eternal lives, in the life where no time and space exists; in the life where, as A Course in Miracles tells us, into the mind of the Son of God came a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God forgot to laugh, in that life: it is all so perfect and love-filled in that true eternal life that, really, no further elevation in our personal consciousness vibration is possible there. Just as you and I cannot sit around in a quiet corner of the gym and shout, “Biceps! I will now make BIGGER BICEPS on this body! And, ABS ! Very much BIGGER abs right now! Come on, six-pack! Just APPEAR! I can do it!” So, in the very same way, you cannot exist in the astral plane in the eternal love of God forevermore, and simply think or say, or even shout, “Even more LOVE now! I love everybody even MORE now! Come on, higher love vibration! I’m vibrating even HIGHER now! YESSS”  You can say it or shout it for all eternity. But your consciousness vibration will not change at all.

I am sorry, my dear new-commenter friend. It simply does not work that way. If you want biceps and abs, you have got to not only go to the gym while never taking it seriously, but just sit around there watching others work their material bodies on those material machines, just as you don’t seem to be taking your precious life on earth at all seriously. In the gym, you have got to actually use those machines in the ways that they are meant to be used! And if you want to raise your personal consciousness vibration farther away from the lowest and slowest levels, and even more toward ever more perfect love, you cannot just thumb your nose at what you derisively call “materialism”, even while you are apparently also occupying a material body yourself on earth. But to use earth-life as it is meant to be used, you have to also really get down-and-dirty with the very materialism, and the material experiences that are all around you here on this material earth-plane. To get any spiritual growth at all from living on earth, you must make real use of the very earth-life that you seem to so much disdain!

I am sorry that you have so little respect for what could be so very useful to you while you are actually here. And it really does amaze and sadden me to find you writing about your own material body such insulting things, when you took that body for yourself, and apparently you now occupy it, and also apparently now you refuse to use it for its intended purpose, even though there are so many beings still stuck in the astral plane who wanted to use it for their personal spiritual growth, but you cut the line ahead of them and took it from them, but now you won’t use it? And now you say to me derisively, “You are looking at these subjects so deeply from the viewpoint of the ego illusion you sound like a materialist!” And, yup. You do have that perfectly right, my dear! While I am in the spiritual gym that this earth very deeply is, that is precisely what I am! I’m a materialist, to the core! And I am working these spiritual abs and biceps for everything that I’ve got. It’s not much, I’ll admit, but I’m workin’ ‘em hard, and every single day. You tell me that if my mother had aborted me, I just could have jumped to another body and “experienced this reality through it.” But I am not just an experiencer, dear new-commenter friend. I am a down-and-dirty DOER while I am here THIS time, and not just an above-it-all observer, which is what you tell us that you choose to be. The big difference between us is that I plan to ACE this lifetime, this time around. Because I do not ever intend to come back!

And the wonder of it is that this earth-plane, and these lives that we all have chosen to live here, are carefully designed to give us the opportunity, if we really will give it a good, hard try, to actually live one-and-done earth-lifetimes now. Sadly, though, most people don’t use their earth-lives that way. Most people instead come back repeatedly, over and over again, because they don’t take what Craig Hogan calls “earth school” sufficiently seriously. Instead, they do what our new-commenter friend suggests that we all should be doing, and they just hang around in this material earth-gym, watching, not taking their earth-lives seriously at all, and therefore not growing spiritually very much, if at all, from the experience. Or else, they do what he also is suggesting, and they live their lives in fear of their emotions, so rather than accepting, and even embracing these earth-experiences, and taking them in and learning from them deeply, and growing thereby ever spiritually much stronger; they instead run from them, learning little or nothing in each lifetime. Which is why they must come back again and again, a phenomenon which Buddhists call turning on the wheel.

So then, what’s it all about, Alfie? Why do we even come to this earth and plan and live these difficult earth-lives at all? And if you finally do know for certain the purpose of your earth-life, how can you actually make this lifetime that you are living right now your truly last necessary one-and-done earth-lifetime? Believe it or not, managing a one-and-done last necessary earth- lifetime in even just a few years’ time is apparently not all that difficult. Jesus tells us that He became so frustrated, after He was Himself perfected about six thousand years ago, just watching all the follies of humankind from His exalted place, that He wanted badly to help to simplify what was then a more complex process of spiritual growth. So He petitioned God to allow Him to be born again from out of the Godhead to teach His own ideas for a more simplified spiritual process, and at length God gave Him that permission, so He was born to us as Jesus two thousand years ago, specifically to be our Teacher. And if we now can follow Jesus’s teachings closely, what will we learn?

Well, Jesus tells us what we can learn, and how quickly we can learn it, if only we will take His teachings sufficiently seriously. His disciples came to Jesus and asked Him who was greatest in the kingdom of heaven, which is that aspect of the astral plane which is our eternal home. 2 “And He called a child to Himself and set him before them, 3 and He said, ‘Truly I say to you, unless you are changed and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. 4 Whoever then humbles himself as this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven. 5 And whoever receives one such child in My name receives Me; 6 but whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in Me to stumble, it would be better for him to have a heavy millstone hung around his neck, and to be drowned in the depth of the sea’” (MT 18: 2-6). In other words, my dear ones, spiritual growth is not about our becoming spiritual big shots on heavenly thrones! It is not about our rising above this material world, as our clueless new-commenter of last week would have us try to do; but rather, it is about our becoming as spiritually innocent and as perfectly loving, and therefore as high-vibrating as children.

 So, now let’s quickly summarize what the steps are that each of us takes as we plan for optimal spiritual growth in the earth-lifetime that we are about to enter. Each time we plan an earth-lifetime, we are aiming to grow so much in this lifetime to come that we can achieve the astral fifth level, and thereby end our personal cycle of endless rebirths. The afterlife evidence tells us quite a lot about this process, how it works in the astral plane and on this side as well. Of course, there are exceptions to every complex process, but in general:

  • We Very Carefully Plan Each Earth-Lifetime for Optimal Spiritual Growth. Life in the infinite astral plane is all love and light, but it also is highly stratified, and while we easily can go lower, we cannot move higher than the consciousness level at which we already are vibrating without being shielded in some fashion. And we want to go higher! So before long, we are gathering eternal friends and recruiting a personal spirit guide so we can plan another lifetime on earth. Our goal is to attain astral Level Five, because once we are able to vibrate so high, we can continue to grow spiritually by guiding others on earth, by teaching, or by doing other good things, without a need ever to return to earth as a learner.
  • We Must Contend for an Earth-Body, and Our Life-Plan Must Pass Muster. When we are at home in the astral plane, we feel invincible. So we want to plan very hard earth-lives, since the more bad things happen to us on earth, the more we are stressed and strained by our earth-lives spiritually, and the more we can grow from them spiritually. If an earth-life is too hard, however, with too many bad things happening to us, there is a risk that those awful events might break us spiritually, and thereby set us back. And also, there are far more people eagerly planning earth-lives in the most desirable places now than there are bodies being conceived that are unlikely to be aborted. So we consult with a council that must approve our life-plan, and might well require that we scale back its hardships; and as our plan is being approved, we work with those who have the authority to assign the few bodies being conceived on earth that are likely to survive and be born, in hopes of finding a body. 
  • We Come to Earth Stripped-Down Mentally for Optimal Spiritual Growth. In order for us to be finally born on earth, each of us must (a) accept complete amnesia for everything that ever has happened to us in all the millennia before this new birthday, and (b) leave behind what we calculate is even sixty to seventy percent of our vast, eternal minds, including all our past-life memories, so what we take with us to earth are just the efficient aspects of our minds that equip us for optimum spiritual learning and growth. Mikey Morgan, who is a frequent Seek Reality guest, is a sixth-level being who last lived on earth in the 1600s, and his fabulous book is a must-read for so many reasons! Mikey was born this time around in 1987, he died in a planned accident in 2007, and in his phenomenal book, he describes how his spirit went through the roof of the car as it crashed, his guide met him and took him to the afterlife, and then suddenly, Bingo! He was reunited with his entire mind, and he remembered everything.

Yes, it is possible nowadays to book-study consciousness, and to feel so very smart about it, as our new-commenter friend showed us last week that he had done, while he still lives in a meat-suit here on earth. But, you know, you are deeply privileged to live in that meat-suit here, that suit that so many people in the astral plane coveted, but you, dear new-commenter, actually won it. We all are here for a very important purpose! And feeling smug, as you clearly do, about ignoring that purpose, not attempting to use the precious facilities of this spiritual gym to grow spiritually, and even looking with disdain at those of us around you who are trying to grow spiritually, who take our reason for being here seriously, might make you feel very smart indeed! But still, for you to be doing that is not at all wise.

I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023) & Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Love’s Imperfect Fruit

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

ABORTION

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

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

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

TRANSGENDERISM

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

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

FREEING DANGEROUS CRIMINALS OUT OF KINDNESS TO THE CRIMINALS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Forgiving

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Love Above Politics

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Good Vibrations

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is my advice:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Your Mind

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

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