Author: Roberta Grimes

Who Is Jesus? (#2)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He lets me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.
He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
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.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anointed my head with oil. My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I shall dwell the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 23:1-6).
– David, Third King of the United Kingdom of Israel (1040 BCE – 970 BCE)

Jesus’s most important Gospel encounter is the tale of His meeting with the woman at the well. It comes as His ministry begins, and it gives us everything that we need to know about Jesus and His mission on earth, if only we can fully understand what we are reading. Jesus is speaking not to a crowd of Jews in a synagogue or on a hill, as later on He often will do. And nor is He sparring with Temple leaders or with clergymen, as He will be doing later. In fact, in this early and very rare case, Jesus is not speaking with men at all. No, Jesus’s earliest and longest Gospel discourse is a private conversation that He initiates with a least member of a despised ethnic minority. And she is, oh my goodness, just a woman to boot! What follows is most of the fourth chapter of the Biblical Gospel of John:

So then, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that He was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus Himself was not baptizing; rather, His disciples were), 3 He left Judea and went away again to Galilee. 4 And He had to pass through Samaria. 5 So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; 6 and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, tired from His journey, was just sitting by the well. It was about noon. 7 A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” 8 For His disciples had gone away to the city to buy food. 9 So the Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, though You are a Jew, are asking me for a drink, though I am a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus replied to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” 11 She said to Him, “Sir, You have no bucket and the well is deep; where then do You get this living water? 12 You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well and drank of it himself, and his sons and his cattle?” 13 Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.”15 The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw water.” 16 He said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” 17 The woman answered and said to Him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this which you have said is true.” 19 The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and yet you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.” 21 Jesus said to her, “Believe Me, woman, that a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. 23 But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” 25 The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us.” 26 Jesus said to her, “I am He, the One speaking to you.”

27 And at this point His disciples came, and they were amazed that He had been speaking with a woman, yet no one said, “What are You seeking?” or, “Why are You speaking with her?” 28 So the woman left her waterpot and went into the city, and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done; this is not the Christ, is He?” 30 They left the city and were coming to Him.

31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But He said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples were saying to one another, “No one brought Him anything to eat, did he?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are still four months, and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I tell you, raise your eyes and observe the fields, that they are ripe for harvest. 36 Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the one who sows and the one who reaps may rejoice together. 37 For in this case the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have come into their labor.”

39 Now from that city many of the Samaritans believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all the things that I have done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to Jesus, they were asking Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. 41 Many more believed because of His Word; 42 and they were saying to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One truly is the Savior of the world.”

43 And after the two days, He departed from there for Galilee. 44 For Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country. 45 So when He came to Galilee, the Galileans received Him, only because they had seen all the things that He did in Jerusalem at the feast; for they themselves also went to the feast. (JN 4:1-45).

For those of us now free from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian dogmas, there is so much richness in this wonderful story! My affection for this tale from the Gospel of John is first rooted in my childhood, when at the age of eight I had an experience of light, and a voice from out of that light assured me that God is real and God will never leave me. After that night, I spent the rest of my childhood attending grownup church and communing with a beautiful stained-glass depiction of Jesus talking with the woman at the well as I listened to Reverend Turrell’s love-filled sermons.

And then came the moment, almost forty years later, when I realized that all my afterlife research and Bible-reading had clashed head-on, and I closed my Bible for the next two years. I could no longer be a Christian, because nothing about the religion was supported by the afterlife evidence. I knew by then that the afterlife is real. But I could not bear to give up on Jesus! So one rainy day, very gingerly, I sat down and read just the four Biblical Gospels. And in reading just the Gospels, I could find no place where the words of Jesus were inconsistent with what I knew to be true about the afterlife.

Then I came to the Fourth Chapter of John. You really can read all four Biblical Gospels in one long sitting! Jesus was speaking with the woman at the well, and I was starting to relax. Christianity’s dogmas about sin and hell and the sacrificial redemption of humankind by Jesus and all the other religious nonsense that Constantine crammed into his Roman Christianity at First Nicaea in the year 325 CE do not jibe at all with the afterlife evidence! But at least Jesus’s Gospel teachings can live with the afterlife evidence just fine. So then Jesus said to the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water” (JN 4:10). And I about fell off my chair! One of the big things about the afterlife is that the water there is alive. It looks like water but it feels like silk, it is dry to the touch and rich in energy, and you can walk into it fully clothed and come out of it dry and energized. And Jesus knew all about the living water in the afterlife. Please read Chapter 4 of John again, with Jesus’s true purpose in coming t0 earth as He described it to us on April 6, 2022, fresh in your mind. And you will realize that what Jesus actually is telling the woman at the well is that He is going to teach her how to get to where the living water actually is. He is going to teach her how to grow and perfect herself spiritually. That is what He has come to earth to do! And once she has done that, she will never be thirsty again because once she is a spiritually elevated being, she can just walk into that living water in the afterlife and be refreshed. Having heard what Jesus told us last April 6th, everything that He says to the woman at the well in Chapter 4 of the Biblical Gospel of John makes complete sense to us now!    

This story is a beautiful time capsule message for us from Jesus given at the start of His ministry. It feels like His wink given to us across time for each one of us, from long before what was eventually going to become a very far off-track and sure to eventually dead-end Roman Christian religion. It is as if Jesus is reassuring you and me from before any of the past seventeen hundred years even happens. He is gently saying to us now, “Please don’t worry, My dear ones. Because I have got this for you. All is well!” But what else is He actually saying to us here? What are all the signs and symbols for us in the Gospel of John, Chapter 4? Well, let’s just see:

  • Ethnicity, Gender, and Rules. The woman at the well is a member of a despised minority, and a lowly female, who even is living in sin to boot. For Jesus to be having any sort of private conversation with such a person is extremely inappropriate! Yet He is here deliberately, and right at the start of His ministry He is signaling to all of us and to the world at large His complete departure from every old religious and cultural rule, both to break all social boundaries and to establish a new eternal spiritual system that is purely based in love alone.
  • Equating His Teachings with Eternal Life-Giving Water. Many modern Christians equate Jesus’s reference here to “living water” with baptism, which is certainly not what Jesus Himself has in mind! Note especially that the point is made at the start of this passage that it is only His disciples, and not Jesus Himself, who is baptizing His new converts. No, Jesus is thinking only about what He has come to earth to do, which is to teach us all how to raise our spiritual vibrations and achieve our own spiritual perfection, just as He Himself has long since done. That life-giving water on Jesus’s mind is the energized living water of the spiritually elevated afterlife that His teachings will enable the woman at the well – and then all the rest of us – to achieve.
  • God is Universal Spirit. Jesus even tells the woman at the well that God is universal Spirit, and from now on people will no longer be worshiping their individual gods. No more worshiping of the Jewish Jehovah in Jerusalem, and whichever private god the Samaritans worship on their mountain, but now everyone will worship the one true God of all, which Jesus tells us is Spirit.
  • Jesus is the Messiah. Having been born from the Godhead, Jesus knew and taught that God is Spirit; but I have wondered whether He was really calling Himself the prophesied Christ so early in His teaching mission. Son of Man, certainly. But since the Gospels were much later edited at the First Council of Nicaea, can we know now for certain what Jesus precisely was saying here? Well, yes we can. He tells me now that He did know, even so early, that He had been sent as the promised Messiah. And He adds that the Old Testament title “Son of Man,” which He did claim from the start of His ministry, was a softer way of saying the same thing.
  • Food and the Harvest of Souls. Jesus here is instructing His disciples, whom He has only recently recruited, that their food and His is to do God’s will, and to reap a fruitful harvest of the people that God has sown and nurtured on earth, and to teach them the Truth, so that all may grow spiritually and achieve the glorious bounty of eternal life. Here, in JN 4:31-38, where Constantine’s religion-builders were apparently unable to find it and to pollute it with their awful fear-based ideas, Jesus tells us that His true original mission is to bring in the harvest that God has sown and nurtured on earth by teaching all of God’s people how to achieve the Godhead level of spiritual growth, just as Jesus Himself had long ago achieved it.

Jesus’s remark that a prophet has no honor in his own country (at JN 4:44) is something that He knows from a very recent experience. In the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 4:16-24, we see Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah on a Sabbath morning in the Synagogue in His hometown of Nazareth just before He begins this journey that is described in the Gospel of John, Chapter 4. The Gospel of Luke says that Jesus was feeling full of the Spirit as He stood up and read,

“The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

Then Jesus handed back the scroll to the attendant as He said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (LK 4:21). And in the increasingly tense back-and-forth that followed between Jesus and some of His erstwhile neighbors, they became so enraged at His seeming presumptuousness that they tried to throw Him off a nearby cliff.

But Jesus was very clear from the start of His ministry about precisely what His true mission was! There is nothing in what He says to the woman at the well of any fear-based dogmas, judgment by God or a fiery hell, nothing about His future crucifixion or sacrificial redemption, or any reason at all for any of us ever to worry or to feel afraid. In that whole rich and beautiful conversation by the well, none of the dogmas of the Christian religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine invented more than three hundred years later are anywhere to be found.

Before last April I had figured some of this out. But once Jesus then gave us His human backstory last April, and I re-read this tale from the Gospel of John freshly with what Jesus had told us then in mind, I realized to my wonderment that really nothing more ever needs to be said! The whole of Jesus’s true earthly mission before Constantine ever messed with it is beautifully encapsulated in verses 1-45 of the Fourth Chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus revealed His entire earthly mission to the very least of these right at the start of His ministry when He told it all to that humble Samaritan woman at the well. And someone in my childhood church has just kindly sent me to share with you a photo of that stained-glass window. So now it heads this blog post….

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord anointed Me
To bring good news to the humble;
He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim release to captives
And freedom to prisoners;
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Isaiah 61:1-2).
– Jesus, reading in the Synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath (LK 4:18-19)

 

Who Is Jesus? (#1)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong.
They are weak, but He is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– Anna B. Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
(Popular Children’s Hymn, first Composed as a Poem for a Dying Child)

Last summer I experienced the most extraordinary few months of my life. They may have been the most extraordinary few months of anyone’s life who was born later than maybe 25 CE. And it is first now that I am far enough from those months to think about them with any kind of perspective. I can imagine that all of that might be behind me at this point, although my Thomas, my spirit guide, still will not assure me that time is finally over. But eight months have passed since I last visited with Jesus in the astral plane, and I am beginning now to mentally process those personal experiences that I shared with Him. Or, what shall I even call those moments that I could not believe were actually happening, even as I lived them and I knew they were happening? Without this blog, I likely would not have written them down as I did. But Jesus wanted me to blog about them for you. I am only now really seeing that. His opening Himself again to the world as He was only then just beginning to do is a part of Jesus’s moving beyond His seventeen hundred earth-years spent in working to heal the hundreds of millions of people who were damaged by the Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity.

Where Jesus is now, He encounters few people who are presently occupying earthly bodies. So He is not used to contending with our temporary amnesia. And while I still find it impossible to believe that I had ever met Jesus before last April, Thomas tells me that I have known Him as a friend and colleague ever since Thomas and I died together in a Roman massacre of some of the Lord’s first post-Resurrection followers. So apparently ever since the first century CE, I have been a part of Jesus’s inner circle. Which means that naturally, when Thomas took me to meet with Jesus on April 6th of last year, the Lord knew on an intellectual level that I would have no memory of any of that. But almost at once, He slipped into an easy familiarity with me that confounded me at the time.    

In person, Jesus has an overwhelming presence. He presents in an astral body that is only about five feet eight or nine inches tall, and He looks pretty much like the picture that we have been showing to you here, but with all-over curly hair. His personal energy is silken but it is extraordinarily  powerful, like a mammoth engine idling, although He can tamp it down when He thinks about doing that. As I recall, He did lessen his energy that night. Before last April, I had glimpsed Jesus when I was astral traveling with Thomas and he pointed Him out to me. But before that night I had seen Jesus only incidentally and from a distance. So to be suddenly so close to Him, and to be the sole focus of His attention, made me feel unbearably shy. I couldn’t look at His face. How do you look upon the face of God?   

Then right away the next morning I was trying to deny to Thomas that any of that had happened. I was driving to my first client meeting when I said to Thomas somewhat shakily, “That wasn’t the real Jesus, of course. Right?”

Just to orient you, the third level of the astral plane, which includes the entrance to the afterlife, is where Jesus spends most of His eternal time so He can greet each returning Christian. It is lit by God’s love, as are all the astral levels; and the higher they are, the more brightly they are lit. But to those who are used to sunlight, the third level has a cozy, late-afternoon sort of feel to it. And the sky and the vegetation are all kinds of colors. We were driving around eastern Massachusetts during that week last April, and as I was driving early that next morning, what had happened the night before was gradually more and more coming back to me. Oh my god. Jesus had been telling me on the previous night what He had called “the real Christmas-and-Easter story,” going back for thousands of years before His birth as Jesus, and beginning with His last earth-lifetime. His last earth-lifetime? What? He had been the middle in age of three princes in what He had said had been “a small city of no consequence.” He had said that “the one you call Thomas” had been His older brother. “The one you call John” – who later became the Apostle John – had been His younger brother. All three princes had died very young in a massacre, and… Wait, what? Back then, Jesus had been just a normal human being? This had all been news to me!

So that was when I told my Thomas that the Jesus we had visited the night before had not been the real Jesus. He could not possibly have been the real Jesus! A Jesus who once had been a regular, normal, just some ordinary human guy? And perhaps I should also further enlighten you about Thomas, my spirit guide. Whenever I have seen him in an astral body, he has looked like a handsome young man maybe thirty years old, but his presence feels strong and venerable to me. He has a deep and boomy voice when he speaks audibly, which is almost never; and he often gets impatient with me when I act “girly” (as he calls it), since he is used to relating to me as two males together beyond this one lifetime. When I told him that the Jesus we had seen last night had not been the real Jesus, he at once snapped, “You know who He was!” in his boomy spoken voice. So, that settled that. And I realized then like a clout to the head that I was still on some deep level a Christian. I still needed to believe in Magic-Jesus, and in the God with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So when Thomas insisted to me that what Jesus had said on the previous night had been true, then the last of my old blind Christian faith was shattered. So then, at the worst possible moment, I fell apart.

Although I practice law in my own way, I do wear a suit and I play it straight. My clients are sober business owners, they have worked with me for many years, they respect and trust and rely on me, and like Thomas they expect me to be reasonably serious and not foolishly girly and falling apart. And soon I was very upset as I drove, and ranting and raging at Thomas. “Who are we supposed to pray to, then? Is there even a God at all?” As I drove, I badgered him, feeling more and more distraught, while Thomas was saying nothing. I had tears on my cheeks, but I was trying not to cry because I had a whole day of seeing clients ahead of me.

In times of crisis, true friends try to help. Thomas is always behind my left shoulder, and soon I was aware that there was a second Presence, more toward the middle of the back seat. Omigod, it was Jesus! And then Thomas was audibly talking with Jesus. I drifted into silence as I tried to hear what they were saying. I found that they were discussing, using spoken words and for my entertainment, what they thought should be the name of Jesus’s future website. Jesus can speak American English, but with a slight, unguessable accent. Thomas has that portentous voice, but he was sounding less boomy at the moment. A glance in my rear-view mirror showed me that neither of them was there in a body, but they sounded as if they were right there. They almost sounded like a Vaudeville act. They sounded hysterically funny, to be frank. But I refused to be distracted and cheered up so easily.

I was wiping tears and fighting to stay grim. I said aloud, “You can’t use the word ‘Jesus’ in the website name. It has already been taken. In every possible combination.” And the plain injustice of that seemed to outrage the latent Jefferson in Thomas. It is, after all, Jesus’s personal name! I don’t recall precisely what he said aloud then. It was something about how I am a real lawyer, right? So, can’t we find a way to get Jesus legal standing so He can challenge in court the use by all those churches of Jesus’s own personal name? And then I just cracked up. There I was, stopped dead in the middle of a city street in Fall River, Massachusetts, doubled over with laughter in an apparently empty car. While morning rush-hour traffic honked and tried to squeeze by on both sides around me.

All of us astral travel at night while our bodies sleep, but with amnesia for the event. This generally happens during our body’s deepest sleep in the first part of the night, and ideally beginning well before midnight. What I didn’t know until these events of last April was that for my entire life, Thomas had been taking me along with him as if he were walking his dog, and meeting every night of my earthly life with Jesus in the astral plane while I would wait obliviously nearby. He was taking his spirit-guide duties seriously. He was supposed to be watching over me, but he had loyally stayed by Jesus for some six thousand years, ever since that last earth-lifetime that they had lived together as princely brothers. And so, every night he still visited and talked with and served as a supportive brother to Jesus, which is something that continues even now, although once again I have amnesia for these experiences. What was different about last summer, though, was that briefly Jesus wanted me to be aware and remember and report to you some of the details of their meetings. So you and I have had some privileged glimpses of the most amazing Brotherly friendship!

What is clear to me now, though, is that all our experiences with the Brothers were only ever Jesus’s idea, and never Thomas’s. My Thomas is a very private and highly dignified being, who in his Jefferson lifetime burned all his beloved wife’s letters and papers after her death. Like her, he was appalled by the institution of slavery that they had inherited, but her early death took the wind right out of his abolitionist sails. When she died at the age of only thirty-three, his entire focus was on protecting her private opinions from other people’s judgment.

Jesus, on the other hand, overwhelmingly and confoundingly loves people! Thomas has often remarked to me that his eternal Brother’s love for each individual human being is the whole of who Jesus is and who He always has been, for the past six thousand years. An obsessive love for each human being individually is Jesus’s sole salient characteristic. And unlike the rest of us, He has not had many incarnations. Jesus has not incarnated as a human being since that princeling lifetime long ago. When He then died in what Thomas guesses was His early twenties, He had already loved so perfectly and grown spiritually so much as a result that He was already a perfected Being, and He ascended directly to the Godhead level. And because He perfectly loved each individual human being who was still struggling to get by on earth, and for whom becoming perfected was not nearly so easy and so automatic as it had been for Him, He then spent the next four thousand earth-years petitioning the Godhead to allow Him to teach the rest of humankind how to achieve what He had achieved so easily. So then eventually Jesus was given the right to take an unprecedented incarnation from out of the Godhead in order to teach us all how to achieve the level of spiritual development that He had long ago achieved for Himself.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but will have eternal life” (JN 3:16). That passage from John is so completely misunderstood today! Instead of God, it was Jesus who had pleaded with the Godhead for millennia, and who at length had won the unprecedented right to be born on earth from out of the Godhead as the ultimate Teacher to show all of us how we, too, can attain our own spiritual perfection. And my Thomas so loved his brother that he had waited for Jesus in the astral, without himself progressing, for all of those four thousand years. 

What I never understood for that whole summer long, until eventually my Thomas explained it to me, was why he would sometimes unexpectedly call Jesus “Brat” and chase and bully Him, and even on occasion sort of beat Him up. Thomas performs the one essential service for Jesus that at this point no one else can do. Thomas calls it “balance.” The churches say that Jesus is “fully God and fully Man,” and that He is! But Jesus can maintain His human status now only with considerable effort, and only because there still is one being in all the realities that in Jesus’s Own mind still “outranks” Him. My Thomas is Jesus’s older brother from that ancient lifetime, right? And Thomas seems to be the only being in all the realities with any human connection that Jesus still completely trusts. I had never really thought about this, but nearly every human being that Jesus ever has loved and trusted has left Him and has ascended. His Apostles and all the Saints. And so many clergymen have lied about Him and about His teachings, injecting fear into what Jesus teaches in order to monetarily enrich themselves on earth. I think that if it were solely up to Jesus, He might like to have continued to blog with us, but my Thomas is a very private being and he is essential to Jesus’s maintaining His human balance. So when last fall Thomas wanted to stop including you and me in their meetings in the astral, at least for a while, Jesus assented to Thomas’s wish.

This brings up a thought from out of my childhood that feels especially insightful now. A wise old man long ago told me that, “My child, there are two kinds of people, and only two. One kind looks at you and says, ‘Here I am!’ The other kind looks at you and says, ‘There you are!’” And of course we all know people who, no matter what the topic at hand might be, can manage to turn that topic into themselves within two sentences. And then there is Jesus. Jesus loves you more than anyone else has ever loved you. Guaranteed. Jesus is the most extreme “There you are!” sort of Guy there ever was. He looks you in the eyes and wants to hear all about you and know you completely, and in that moment nothing else matters to Him. And this, even now, when His personal energy is even above the Godhead level. Jesus is literally God at this point. He is the ultimate megastar, the first or second most popular name on earth, but even now He only wants to talk about you, and never about Himself. The last time I saw Jesus was in the early fall. Thomas was off somewhere, and Jesus called to me, “Little One! Little One! Come here and tell me about your day.” And He switched on whatever it is that He can switch on to make me aware and able to remember this experience. I realized then that my astral body was wearing an astral robe and sitting on a little knoll about thirty feet away from where He was. I do that whenever I am there as just Thomas’s tagalong, I sit a distance away to give them privacy. So I stood and went and sat down beside Jesus. He was looking softly into my eyes and smiling at me. He didn’t take my hand, because the difference in our energies is such that unless He is careful to keep His energy tamped down, His touch can give me an uncomfortable buzz. I cannot remember now what I said about whatever day that had been, but it was just a bunch of stupid stuff. Still, Jesus listened closely, He asked me interested questions, He made wise remarks about the people, and He even chuckled. He is more interested in my life than I am interested in my life.   

So if it were up to Jesus, His website would be more about us than it is about Him. He has even experimented with having me do a question-and-answer thing, a channeling-Jesus sort of thing, so He might hold something like “Office Hours with Jesus” for the entire world of individual people on His website. And it actually worked, but it creeped me out. I am not a medium! Can you imagine if I told the world that now suddenly I can channel Jesus? So we are still playing with designs and ideas there. But as much as He might not be interested in Jesus, you and I are interested in Jesus! And this world is such an unbelievable mess, and apparently He is returning to it now. What is He going to do to try to help the world? What can He do, that might make any difference? Just Who really is Jesus today?

Jesus loves me! He will stay
Close beside me all the way.
He’s prepared a home for me,
And some day His face I’ll see.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– Anna B. Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
(Popular Children’s Hymn, first Composed as a Poem for a Dying Child)

Which is Real?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea!
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights every star that makes the darkness bright!
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night.

 He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
And though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Jack Richards (1925-2011) & Richard Mullan from “He,” (1954)

I get afterlife questions constantly. A common one is, “What can we ever find to do in the afterlife? It must be so boring, with nothing to do.” When in fact, the complete opposite is true! There is a whole endless circus in the afterlife of time-travel and space-travel and toys and research and playtime, and spending endless non-time with loved ones and actually meeting and even talking with Jesus, and with Elvis, and also attending and yourself even performing in concerts and shows, and learning to play the piano with Mozart, and skating and swimming and boating and snowboarding and generally having such infinite fun that it is a very good thing that our afterlife bodies never need to sleep! And then after I finish gushing over a great long list of endless afterlife delights, and I remark that it’s a good thing indeed that objective time does not exist in the afterlife, because if it did, it might take you a thousand years at least just to exhaust all these and so many other wonderful afterlife delights, one of the questions that I sometimes will get from some diehard cynic or other is this: “Well then. So, which of these realities is real? Because they can’t both be real. Both here and there. So, which is it?” Which one is real?

Scientists believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, with an uncertainty factor of only 200 million years, either way. But, who knows? This universe could just as easily have been created as an initial tiny habitat for primitive humankind only two hundred thousand years ago, and made to grow gradually larger and more complicated and seemingly older only after the fact, as that became necessary, as we human beings became steadily ever more sophisticated, and therefore more curious, so we never would find an edge. In fact, ninety percent of all the animal species on earth appeared at about the same time that the first humans did, only 200,000 earth-years ago. There were thereafter at least two near-extinction events for humankind, one caused by a severely adverse climate event around 150,000 earth-years ago, during the Marine Isotope Stage 6 period, so named because it was a specific type of ice age, when not only did the polar caps and glaciers around the world expand, but all the deserts did as well, since the atmosphere had so much moisture sucked out of it by the ice. And the area of the world most affected by this extreme ice age and extreme dry period combined was southern Africa, where the entire world population of human beings then still lived. It has been estimated that at the anatomically modern human population’s lowest point, there were probably fewer than 1000 people alive on this entire planet.

The second human near-extinction event was only about 74,000 earth-years ago. It followed the super-eruption of a Sumatran volcano called Toba that ejected roughly ten thousand times more ash and gas into the atmosphere than did the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980, dimming the sun globally for at least five years, killing off most of the vegetation worldwide, and threatening all human life on earth. It has been estimated that again the earth’s whole anatomically modern human population, still confined to the southern part of Africa, was reduced to between 1000 and 5000 people.

But this second calamity was actually a fortuitous event. Toba’s eruption deposited sufficient ash along the eastern edge of northern Africa and the Nile valley that a green corridor was created all along that edge, where there only had ever been impassable desert. And over the next sixty-odd thousand earth-years, wave after wave of human travelers wandered out of Africa and began to populate the rest of the world. The glaciers of the most recent ice age still covered most of Europe, so it wasn’t until about ten thousand years ago that anatomically modern people finally made it into western Europe. But it was Toba’s last eruption that made humankind’s African exodus possible. And it was only then that sufficient anatomically modern people began to live in enough different places on earth that the odds began to favor our species’s long-term survival.

When we realize how amazingly brief our history as a species actually is – only two hundred thousand years! – and how recently human beings made it out of Africa, then the possibility of the world as a human habitat deliberately created for spiritual learning begins to make more sense. Materialist scientists love to talk in terms of our universe’s history as billions of years in length, and our human evolutionary history as five million years long, but we know enough now to realize that such numbers are actually meaningless to us. We understand that within Consciousness there is neither time nor distance, so the genuine God, as the extreme Alpha of Consciousness, could easily have created us in the Now of two hundred thousand earth-years ago, and simultaneously built for us a backstory of billions of years, and we would believe it all without question. In truth, we would be none the wiser.

I am sorry to break this news to you so bluntly, but in fact there are an amazing number of little “tells” which suggest that we are probably living in precisely that 200,000-year-old God-created universe, and believing in a simultaneously God-created backstory. I will never forget my first “OMG!” moment, which happened even long before I first realized that nothing else but Consciousness exists. It was almost forty years ago now, back when I still was reading everything I could get my hands on in the field of afterlife evidence, and also reading about scientific anomalies. I think this fellow called his book something about “God signs,” and it was full of various kinds of weird phenomena. For example:

  • Creating Stars. The forty-odd-year-old moment that first got my attention was a story of someone who had pointed his telescope at an area of the sky that was then entirely devoid of stars. He first made certain of that fact. It was entirely blank! Then he left his telescope in place, and one year later to the day he returned and looked through it again. And now that same place in the universe teemed with billions of galaxies. As I recall his explanation, this was then a well known, if creepy phenomenon among astronomers. And so many people were testing it for themselves that astronomers expected that soon there would be no place left in the visible cosmos that was not well-populated with galaxies.
  • Punctuated Equilibrium. Darwin’s original nineteenth-century theory of many gradual, constant, minute changes that happen continuously and constitute evolution looks so silly now as to beggar belief, because in fact that is not the way that evolution happens. Instead, once a species appears, it will go through long periods of stasis before a new, related species appears and then goes through another very long period of little or no change at all. This “punctuated equilibrium” is frankly what you would expect to see if God were creating all these creatures anew, modifying them, and just sticking them into place in series. It is no wonder that materialist scientists don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about the details of Darwinian evolution.
  • Rhinoceroses. There are a few strains of animals – and rhinoceroses are one of them – which simply appear in the fossil record, and don’t have any discernible ancestors which connect them back to a very primitive first ancestral creature. It is almost as if God just had an idea for a funny animal one day, and went with it. And when we realize that nearly all the modern species of animals appeared at the same time, 200,000 years ago, we cannot help but wonder whether with some of these more peculiar kinds of animals, the existence of both punctuated equilibrium and especially odd creatures like rhinoceroses that appear out of nowhere might be evidence that something like that might actually have happened. They all seem to be perhaps evidence of a hurried kind of “good enough” wish to fudge things on the part of the Divine.
  • The Big Bang. Scientists tell us that the universe began in a Big Bang a very long time ago. But of course, something cannot really have come from nothing, or that is the biggest “tell” of all! So the “Big Bang” doesn’t really explain anything, does it? You can then ask, “What was before that?” and then “What was before that?” an infinite number of times, no matter how long ago or how recently materialist scientists want to tell us that the creation of the universe first happened. Occasional efforts have been made to explain what existed before the Big Bang, including perhaps prior universes which might have ended in a Big Crunch before they expanded outward again. But the fact is that since matter is almost entirely empty space, this entire universe is as insubstantial as a thought, in any event.
  • Daily Miracles. Had I realized that I soon would be writing this post, I would have captured more of these, but you know what I mean. We come across unlikely-seeming happy stories in our news feeds and in our lives all the time! And on the world stage, from the hair’s-breadth survival of those first human beings through their early repeated near-extinction events, right through the had-to-happen success of the Normandy invasion in the Second World War, to the remarkable fact that in the nearly eighty years since Nagasaki was leveled, no country has been allowed to explode an atomic bomb of any size in anger, we all have witnessed so many miracles that by now we simply take them for granted. But we never should take any of them for granted. God is intensively and minutely active in this world right now, and from moment to moment.

All right. So, after I hope I have at least somewhat convinced you that the afterlife reality must be more substantial than this clearly shaky and artificial-seeming material reality quite obviously is, let’s cross over and take a look at that other side, which from here we call the afterlife. The reality that we live in now is scientifically proven to be 99.9999999% empty space, for heaven’s sake! And there are a lot of little tells which suggest that this reality may well have been thrown together to become our habitat only a mere two hundred thousand earth-years ago. Perhaps it began as one planet, or even as a single flat plain only very recently, and then it was built outward from there as the human creatures in this little playpen meant for spiritual education took to exploring it, so they never would find an edge. Surely the whole gigantic astral plane, with its multiple solid-seeming levels which include the afterlife as a tiny part must be a whole lot more substantial than this is!  

Well, actually, not so much. The afterlife exists in the same physical location that we do, so when we die, we simply tune our minds to a higher vibration, very much as you might tune your TV to a higher-numbered channel, and there we pick up a whole new solid-seeming reality precisely in the same place where we are now. Dying is just as easy as that. But what is really amazing and wonderful about the astral plane which is our eternal home is that when we are there, and especially for the more spiritually advanced of us, our minds are much more powerful than our minds are when we are on earth. Consider these examples, gleaned from abundant afterlife communications:

  • You can have whatever you miss from your life here just ended. Someone who has recently died might think of a book, a trinket of jewelry, a treasured vase from a former earth-home, or whatever else you might miss, and just turn around, and there it is. I think the reason for this facility is so we will get past caring about material things. But for whatever reason it happens, it is flat-out astonishing.
  • Building is by mind. It is possible to stick-build people’s post-death homes, but why bother? When people in the afterlife or in the astral plane want to build a house, they will draw the plans for it, and then they call by mind for sixth-level beings to come and think it into existence. And a few of them, perhaps three or four, will appear and gravely study the plans, and study the place where the building is going to be. And then they will put their minds together, literally, and the building will shimmer into and out of existence briefly before there it stands, brand-new and as solid as can be!
  • Travel is by mind. People in the astral plane can travel from here to the edge of the universe in a literal heartbeat of non-time, simply by thinking the wish to be there. We cannot go higher in vibration than the level of the astral to which our level of spiritual development has suited us, but we can readily go lower. And many people there are inveterate travelers, especially soon after they have first returned home.

So then, which reality is real. Is it here, or is it the afterlife and the astral? Or it might make better sense to ask, which reality is more real? I think we would have to rate the answer to that question to be a toss-up. The material-seeming reality that we inhabit now is just what amounts to the lowest vibrational level of the astral reality, and these realities are so closely connected that it is impossible to separate them. Both of them are composed of and governed by and existing within the same Consciousness which is all that exists, of which each of our minds is a part, and which at its highest vibration is God . They are in fact both part of the same reality, just in two different expressions to make for our more efficient earthly spieitual learning. And Jesus told us all of this, we realize now. But then, didn’t Jesus tell us everything? The problem was that so often we didn’t know enough to have a way to understand what He was telling us at the time. Long ago our sweet Brother said, “Do not be afraid, little flock, because your Father has chosen to give you the kingdom! Sell your possessions and give to the poor; make yourselves money belts that do not wear out, for yours is an inexhaustible treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near nor does a moth destroy” (LK 12:32-33).

He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold!
He knows every lie that you and I have told.
And though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Jack Richards (1925-2011) & Richard Mullan from “He,” (1954)

Science’s Sad Suicide

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Climb every mountain, search high and low,
Follow every byway, every path you know.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream.

A dream that will need all the love you can give,
Every day of your life, for as long as you live.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Climb Every Mountain” (1959)

It is hard to watch the slow death of a friend, and especially if that death is by suicide. This suicide has been long in coming, and for most of a century we were sure that a deeper wisdom would sooner or later prevail. But more and more now, it seems that the death of modern mainstream science is going to be inevitable, and at this point it doesn’t seem that its death will be much longer in coming, because so many of modern science’s practitioners are unwilling to allow their profession to survive in anything but its present form. And in its present form, I am sad to say, investigative science is no longer of very much value to anyone anymore.

My husband and I have subscribed to popular science magazines for our entire marriage. My physician husband is a science hobbyist, and soon after we were married I picked up his addiction, which has meant that over these many years I have learned quite a lot about science in just a million delicious little article-sized bits. So I can tell you that until about thirty years ago, scientists were confident that what they were calling “a theory of everything” was just around the corner. And I also can tell you that for almost as long, I was pretty sure that was unlikely to happen. Because mainstream scientists were refusing to accept the certain fact that a century ago, Max Planck had made the most exciting discovery of the whole twentieth century, which was that what we experience as human consciousness is primary, and it pre-exists matter. Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics as the father of quantum mechanics. And then he made an even greater discovery. As he announced it in 1931, he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”

I think it was only the horrified scientific gatekeepers – the editors of the peer-reviewed journals, and the heads of the university scientific departments – and of course we few delighted afterlife researchers as well, who really were able to grasp the full significance of Dr. Planck’s discovery. And realizing that astounds me, frankly, since it all seems to be so stunningly obvious! How is it that not every person on earth can see what we are so well able to see? Dr. Planck had discovered the base creative force!  My goodness, the whole world should be dancing in the streets. But of course, those scientific gatekeepers have not been dancing in the streets at all. They thought even back in 1931 that Dr. Planck’s discovery meant that the religionists had won the ancient two-millennia-long battle for primacy between science and religions, because Dr. Planck now was apparently only a whisker away from discovering God, for heaven’s sake. And they absolutely would not ever let him go there!

So instead of embracing consciousness as a new discovery, as something natural to be further studied and certainly nothing to be feared, the mainstream scientific gatekeepers retreated into a silly materialist shell. They actually adopted materialism as what they have been stubbornly enforcing as science’s core dogma ever since. And mainstream science has since then spent a billion dollars in an effort to find a source of human consciousness inside the human brain. They are desperately trying to prove that Max Planck somehow must have been wrong, even though of course our dear beloved Max was so self-evidently and entirely right. How willfully stupid can educated adult human beings ever actually be? 

And today we modern science hobbyists have two different scientific research tracks to follow, since besides the popular science magazines that continue to follow the silliness of materialist mainstream science, now there are also the creationist scientists’ publications. Which are all online, of course, since these folks are as poor as church mice so they cannot afford to publish and distribute their own glossy print magazines. And they have their particular axe to grind, as they try to prove the existence of God, and also to prove that Jesus really did rise from the dead, and so on and so forth; but since they are trained scientists doing their work using traditional scientific methods and without the burden of dogmatic materialist constraints, what they produce is science of a high quality, even though they seem to be working almost without any funding at all. And it is such a pleasure to see scientists doing genuine dogma-free science so joyously!

One thing that you notice when you compare these two styles of scientists is that consciousness is so central to everything that when materialist scientists cannot use it in their work, that makes figuring things out much more difficult for them. Or even actually impossible, for all practical purposes. To give you just three examples culled from very recent news:

*  Fruit Flies Die Sooner When They See Dead Fruit Flies. As researchers seek to understand how the minimal minds of insects work, it would be very helpful to them to be able to take into account how consciousness interacts with the minds of fruit flies. What do the teensy minds of fruit flies actually understand about their own mortality that makes their seeing fruit fly corpses make them want to more quickly die?

* Six Huge Young Galaxies That Have Just Been Spotted Don’t Make Sense. I cannot even begin to speculate about this! But in consciousness there is neither time nor distance in any fixed sense, since there is only Mind. So while materialist scientists still don’t understand, and they resolutely refuse to even consider investigating consciousness, and they have no idea how it might be impacting their work, how can they possibly make any sense at all of some big new developments like these in the distant cosmos which are violating everything that they thought they knew?

* Dinosaur Feathers. Discovering that some dinosaurs actually were feathered creatures has become a hot topic in mainstream science in recent years. And as we know, modern birds are descended from dinosaurs. One significant question to be answered is how and why that all happened, and being able to understand how consciousness may have impacted the lives of the dinosaurs that were destined to turn into birds would be very useful now in helping mainstream scientists to answer a lot of questions.

One of the most frustrating questions in science has long been how life on earth actually began. For the past fifty years I have been watching materialist scientists attempting to answer this question, and more recently I have watched the modern version of more open-minded and genuine research scientists without funding and also without materialist constraints as they begin to take their crack at this perhaps most vexing of all scientific questions, with rather more success. Having read by now well over a hundred articles about the origin of life, it seems self-evident to me that this is one area of scientific research where all the easy theories that assume that some random things came together and got zapped and went “Presto!” simply won’t cut it at all. Materialists have always wanted to assume that lightning hit the right mix of chemicals, and – Zap! – Life! But they have never been able to replicate that event in a laboratory. And what is worse, even if they could, they realize now that they cannot see any pathway by which that first spark of life could have evolved from there into living cells. Personally, at this point I consider life to be just a fundamental property of consciousness. But try telling that to the materialist scientists! We might as well tell them that God simply did it.

I think that at this point we have got to concede the fact that the horserace that began some twenty-three hundred years ago between Plato and Aristotle is fizzling out at last, and neither side will ever win it. Neither of those endearing old codgers was right, because human-made religions and human-made science were both equally erroneous ways of looking at the world. Jesus came to us two thousand years ago to abolish human-made religions, and to teach us among other important things that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24), so it was time even back then for us to learn to relate to God individually. And then a century ago, Max Planck tried to lift mainstream science to its next sensible stage of intellectual development by showing us the essentially spiritual nature of reality. However, instead of making that critical leap, a century ago our scientific gatekeepers retreated into the silliness of dogmatic materialism. Still, no matter. Mainstream science is now self-evidently self-destructing.

Consciousness is the base creative force. The evidence for that simple fact is by now overwhelming. And the child has already been born who will win a future Nobel Prize in Physics for a consciousness theory of everything.

Old-style science’s terminal problem is the fact that it has so completely blunted its weapons by stupidly clinging to its materialist dogma that there is nothing important that it has the means to study productively anymore. And people are noticing that! Over the past century we have had a great many technological advances. My goodness, my first job out of college was programming an IBM 360 computer that took up an entire floor of a good-sized building. And that computer had just a fraction of the power that is in my husband’s smart wristwatch! But we haven’t had much in the way of big new scientific discoveries over the past hundred years. That search for a scientific theory of everything hasn’t panned out so far, mostly because while they could come up with theories, they had no way to test them. And the human genome was exciting to work on, but embarrassing to actually discover because our genome turns out not to code for the human mind so it is amazingly tiny. There are plants with much bigger genomes than we have! And discovering that fact has never raised red flags for those stubborn materialist scientific gatekeepers, because by now they have invested their careers in materialism and they still have to get their kids through college.  

 So you and I are privileged to be alive at a remarkable moment in history. We are now witnessing the apparent deaths of both man-made science and man-made religions.

Max Planck was deeply disappointed to find that his great consciousness insight was being ignored, but he later hopefully made the remark that science was going to advance by deaths. He thought that his discovery that consciousness is primary would be taken up by the next generation, or for sure by the generation after that, which of course would be familiar with what he had discovered. But thanks to the diligence of those gatekeepers who have been strictly policing the closure of every up-and-coming scientific mind, we have had four ignorant generations since Dr. Planck first announced his epic discovery of the primacy of consciousness. And counting! Still, a new generation is now being educated, so perhaps there still is a tiny bit of hope for science after all. As Nikola Tesla famously said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

A dream that will need all the love you can give,
Every day of your life, for as long as you live.
Climb every mountain, ford every stream,
Follow every rainbow, till you find your dream!
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979) & Oscar Hammerstein II (1895-1960), from “Climb Every Mountain” (1959)

Jesus Came to End Religions

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

On a clear day, rise and look around you,
And you’ll see who you are.
On a clear day, how it will astound you
That the glow of your being outshines every star!
You’ll feel part of every mountain, sea and shore.
You can hear from far and near
A word you’ve never, never heard before…
And on a clear day… on a clear day…
You can see forever… and ever… and ever…and ever more…
– Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) & Burton Lane (1912-1997), from “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (1970)

There is no religion that has anything to do with the genuine God. Religions are not about God at all! I majored in religious studies in college. I have put a lot of effort into studying religions, and I have spent time studying people as well. And then finally I have just asked Jesus Himself whether I might amazingly be right about this, and He has concurred with my conclusions. He wonders now why it took me so long to finally figure this out. In fact, our religions are all about us! We create our religions based on our own needs to feel safe and comforted, to feel empowered, and most of all to feel beloved. We build into them our own self-designed gods that we narrowly tailor to suit ourselves, and none of our gods is anything like the real God. I suspected even as a teenager when I first began to read the Bible that Jesus may have come to rid the world of religions, but that didn’t seem at the time to be possible. I do, however, see the truth of it now.

Jesus’s relationship with the clergy of His day was famously bitter and contentious. He was forever criticizing the clergy for their false pieties, for their petty public shows of religious snobbery, and for their stubborn fealty to what were meaningless religious traditions. Just everything about the clergy really got on His nerves! For example, Jesus said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20). And, “Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye” (LK 6:41-42).

The Biblical Gospels are full of these rants from Jesus! He also said, “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And, “Woe to you, religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). (Presumably He is talking here about entering the kingdom of God or the kingdom of Heaven, which terms both mean the same thing.)

He said, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). He said, “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your own tradition” (MK 7:8-9). And, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). And here is my favorite! Jesus said, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! Because you travel around on sea and land to make one convert; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves” (MT 23:14-16).

Jesus actually called the clergy of His day “sons of hell,” for heaven’s sake! My dear friends, He knew that there is no fiery hell, and this is one of the few times that He even uses that word in the Gospels. Please read over again the previous paragraph, and then try to tell me that this is not Someone who came to earth to abolish religions altogether. If I noticed this thread in the Gospels as an oddity even as a child, then why don’t other people see it, and talk about it? I mean, Jesus is supposed to be the founder of Christianity as a religion, so is it too much of a stretch for others also to spot this and suspect that He came to earth instead intending to abolish all religions? His deprecation of the clergy of his day is right there in the Gospels, and it always has been there in the Gospels. Why has nobody else ever made a point of this odd contradiction? Why are people so quick to jump on other things that Jesus may or may not even have said? I can only imagine that they find a kind of superstitious terror in the very idea that Jesus might no longer want to play their religious game. Or else, why has Jesus’s disdain and disgust for religions always been such a third-rail for so many people that they simply won’t touch it at all?

And yes, I am well aware that it is possible for us to have transcendent moments while we are practicing our preferred religions. Religions are designed to play on our emotions, and I have had a number of such joyously sacred moments myself, usually when listening to or singing favorite religious music. Or when I was alone with the beautiful stained-glass triptych that graces my childhood church, where Jesus is talking with the woman at the well. I love that window! When I was a child, I would sit alone in that church and commune with that window, and sometimes I would feel a soaring joy. But Jesus’s wisdom speaks to us much louder still! And He tells us now, as He was saying to us even two thousand years ago, that the emotional reactions that can come from religions are not where God truly is. And emphatically, they are not who we are. No, Jesus said:

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

 “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).

Please read those two paragraphs again. It was in those two paragraphs in particular that Jesus told us when He walked the earth that it was time to throw away all our religions, and to learn to relate to God individually. I first noticed those passages when I was a teenager. I was still just a child! I had begun to read the Bible over and over, from cover to cover, a couple of pages every night, so it was then that I was first noticing a lot of things, and giggling over some of them. Oh, but of course Jesus couldn’t actually have meant to say that! But now it has been backed up by all the other things that I have come to know and accept about religions, and about Jesus. So of course I can see it all now so clearly! I feel stupid that it has taken me so long. So then I finally asked Jesus plainly, “Lord, can this really be right? Is this really what You taught?” He tells me now that I have always known it to be right. But why would Jesus want to abolish all religions? Here are His three reasons why:

  • Every Religion is a Fly in Amber. Every human-created religion and its god are tailored for a specific time, place, and purpose, and each has preserved within it a set of human-created customs and traditions that all become more and more antiquated as time passes. None of this ever has had anything to do with the genuine all-powerful, perfectly loving and eternal God!
  • Every Religion is a Means of Human Control Over People. When any set of clergy claims to speak for God while keeping us focused on rituals and traditions, then what they really are doing is coming between us and God. This is why Jesus so much despises religious traditions.
  • Every Religion Keeps Us from Looking Within, Where God Actually Already Is. We know now that Consciousness is all that exists, and God is Consciousness at its highest vibration. Our own minds are all part of that same Consciousness, but simply at a lower vibration. So when Jesus tells us to pray to God in our inner room and in secret, and He assures us that God will hear us, He is telling us the perfect truth.

Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico (cac.org) identifies the Holy Spirit as a divine “yes” within.  Father Richard says, “We must first remember who we are! Our core, our deepest DNA, is divine; it is the Spirit of Love implanted within us by our Creator at the first moment of our creation (see Romans 5:5, 8:11, 14–16).  Those who have gone to their depths uncover an indwelling Presence. It is a deep and loving ‘yes’ inherent within us. Christian theology names this inner Presence as the Holy Spirit, which is precisely God as immanent, within, and even our deepest and truest self.”

And this has been my experience as well! God is in fact within us. Father Richard is very much caught up in the Trinity as a divine circle-dance with us, but I don’t think it is necessary to even talk about the Trinity. That feels too formal and ritualistic to me. What I did was to one day simply stop being a practicing Christian. Instead, I opened the top of my head, and I invited God inside, and now I pay attention to God’s constant presence. It feels a bit like living as a family dog must live, with one ear always cocked to hear My Master’s Voice. I’m not praying really, because even doing that would feel formal and distancing when God is actually inside me. If I ever feel the need to ask God for anything – for my son-in-law’s health, or for my granddaughter’s happiness – then I just pray in quick gratitude affirmations. (“Thank You that his cancer is cured!” “Thank You that she is happy!”) But as I answer emails from people, and as I work with my much-beloved legal clients, or as anything comes up in my life at all, I am aware that the top of my head is always open and all the love there is flows through me. By now, I am long since used to living this way. God is all there is, God is perfect love, God is inside me, and I am God’s conduit. Sometimes I even can feel God’s love flowing through me to someone who especially needs it. And the wonder is that anyone can live like this. Simply give your life to God, and then be a conduit of God’s love in gentle service!

The only real problem is that the abolition of all religions because they are not related to the genuine God was supposed to have happened two thousand years ago. And then of course it did begin to happen, when for three hundred years the Way of Jesus took hold around the Mediterranean Sea. But then Roman Christianity broke back in when Constantine re-established yet another religion; and while that religion is fading now, over all the world there still is the false sense that the genuine God of infinite power is in some way tethered, so the genuine God must be set free from human-made religions in our minds all over again.

It is likely to take awhile longer for our minds to sort Jesus back out from Christianity. And to remember once again that God is not just a subset of some religion or other, but instead the genuine God truly is all there is! God is the very water in which we swim. Oh my dear friends, God is the infinite love deep within you. (Scroll down for this video.) God is the Alpha and Omega and the bright morning star. When you look the deepest within that you can possibly look, you will find the true God smiling at you and wearing your own perfected face. As Jesus says to us now, “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 the one who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks, it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

You’ll feel part of every mountain, sea and shore.
You can hear from far and near
A word you’ve never, never heard before…
And on a clear day… On a clear day…you can see forever…
And ever…And ever… and ever more…
– Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) & Burton Lane (1912-1997), from “On a Clear Day You Can See Forever” (1970)

The Road Not Taken

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Not Taken” (1915)

No one who has any deep sense of the way the Roman Emperor Constantine hijacked Christian history at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE can keep from wondering about that other road not taken. We know now how Constantine’s Christianity turned out. And the religion that he established served as the basis for a Western civilization which has been very good for some of us, but it also has been destructive of so many earlier cultures, and recklessly destructive of the earth’s ecosystems. And beyond his religion’s inquisition’s and crusades, we’ve had seventeen hundred years of secular wars! So, what might have happened in the Western world if Constantine had not intervened so early, and if instead the first followers of Jesus had been allowed to continue along that other, gentler, and in hindsight much more promising road that was so early abandoned?

The first point to be made is that the followers of Jesus had already begun to take us down that other road for some little distance before Constantine wrestled them away from it. What was then often called the Way of Jesus had been spreading rapidly around the Mediterranean Sea, and it had gained millions of followers over the first three hundred years after Jesus’s Resurrection before Constantine held his First Council of Nicaea, and he there established his Roman Christian religion. And our second point ought to be the fact that the Way of Jesus which Constantine abolished and replaced by force was actually more radical than most of us realize! We have Jesus’s words in hand in a far different twenty-first century, when those words sound like beautiful common sense. But He first spoke them at a time when what He was saying was radical beyond belief. It is no wonder that Jesus’s message was spread so rapidly after His Resurrection, and it was so popular among the common people. He was turning the old world upside down.

We think of Jesus as a spiritual teacher. But Jesus when He was on earth flat refused to abide by the shame-and-honor-based system that had for countless generations dominated the cultures of that time and place. And it was really His refusal to play by those long-established societal rules that was the thing that most bothered the priests and elders of His day. He wasn’t just a religious nuisance, but He was such a social radical that the authorities were soon conspiring to murder Him (see e.g. Matthew 12:14; Mark 3:6, 11:18; Luke 19:47; and John 11:53). Few of us reading our Gospels now realize that Jesus walked the earth not as just a wise spiritual Teacher. Jesus came to earth nearly two thousand years too soon: He was in fact the quintessential nineteen-sixties radical. And what the Way of Jesus was spreading to the common folk after His Ascension was social chaos and revolution.

In that ancient time and place, shame-and-honor was the basis of the morality that people had long felt compelled to follow, not only for themselves, but even more for their families, their villages, and their tribes. If a situation called for retaliation, then people were expected to retaliate. Indeed, for them not to retaliate would have been immoral, because it would have been dishonorable. Therefore, for Jesus to have walked the hills of Galilee saying, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36) was to subvert the prevailing culture’s whole system of morality itself. Jesus’s listeners were being given a new place to find their identity, not in their civilly-granted positions of honor or shame anymore, but now directly in God. The least of these were being given by Jesus a place in society that was no longer being granted by man and by man’s long-established customs, but now directly by God. It was a new world order that was subversive of both the civil and the religious authorities, and it gave to even the lowliest a new place to stand in God’s presence beside the mightiest, since all were now equal in God’s perfect love. It is difficult for us to imagine just how radical these new ideas taught by Jesus really were in those ancient days!

So the Way of Jesus that was beginning to spread on that other road was not just a new version of Judaism.  For Jesus’s Apostles and their acolytes to be teaching these radical new ideas, and for these ideas to be spreading so rapidly was becoming a potential threat to the whole Roman Empire. Among those who heard the Apostles’ emissaries, and in the societies where they were teaching, which had forever been based in honor and shame and were solidly rooted in hierarchical family, village, and tribal ties, Jesus’s amazing new message of universal love and forgiveness and equality in God must have landed like a nuclear bomb. But for the lowly masses, who were most of the people, at last it was liberation day.

 A telling phrase used in the Acts of the Apostles shows in microcosm the problem raised by this new sect of Judaism that Jesus had founded. It gives us a better sense of why the Way of Jesus was so deeply upsetting to Constantine in particular, and why it had to be either radically transformed or altogether destroyed. The teachings of Jesus were so deeply upsetting to the old world order that followers of the Way were being dragged before the city councils in Thessalonika and elsewhere, and they were there being referred to as “These men who have upset the world have come here also … and they all act contrary to the decrees of Caesar, saying that there is another king, Jesus” (Acts 17:6–7). Multiply that reaction by all the towns and cities around the Mediterranean Sea! Jesus could not have gone around touching the untouchables, eating with the underclass, and healing on the Sabbath Day without playing havoc with all the deeply tradition-bound societies in which His disciples later were going to be teaching, even long after His Resurrection.  

It was this highly disruptive three-hundred-year Way of Jesus that Constantine sought to reorder with his First Council of Nicaea. And it was thought by those in authority that Constantine’s Council overall was a very good thing, establishing as it did a more mature Christian movement under the control of a more formal and better regulated council of bishops. But as we have long since established, the fear-based dogmas of the Roman Christian church of Constantine had nothing to do with what Jesus Himself had taught, probably because those teachings were just too subversive of the civic order of that time and place. And the resulting religion has by now splintered into more than forty-two thousand variations. After seventeen hundred years, Constantine’s Roman Christianity has brought us to a juncture where most evangelicals are so confused that they can now say that Jesus is not enough for them anymore, while half of modern Americans by survey are not even sure that they still believe in God. Whenever you plant such a crooked tree, eventually it is bound to fall.

But would things really be so much easier for us now if Constantine never had intervened, and if the Way of Jesus simply had continued along that abandoned (but at the time quite exciting) road not taken? Well, for one thing, we now know that almost right away, the Way of Jesus would have run smack into the fiercely expansionist first years of Islam, as it was then proceeding to temporarily conquer southern Europe. And the ferociously warlike Muslim religion and the entirely love-based Way of Jesus would have been completely incompatible. As I have tried to play out those possible encounters, the robust young Islam that had been exhorted to drive on to conquest by its Prophet, the religion that was offering either death or conversion wherever it went against the gentle missionaries of the Way of Jesus, alight with the radiance of faith and love, I can see only disaster for the followers of Jesus. All that they really could have done would have been to get as far out of the way as possible, to try to go into hiding perhaps, to find ways to disappear and wait out the turbulence. Just as it was that the mammals, small and agile and bright, found ways to survive the Age of Dinosaurs.

The first version of Christianity that would have been spreading along the road not taken would not have been much like the Roman Christianity that is dying today. The Way of Jesus of those first three hundred years was a set of spiritual movements anyway and not even a religion at all, and it was remarkably varied, with many strains and beliefs, but all largely based in the remembered teachings of Jesus, and love-based rather than fear-based. There is no way to know for certain where it would have gone and how it might have developed, but over the course of this past week as I have waited for Thomas to join me, as he always does by Friday, I have tried to game it out. Without Constantine’s First Nicaean Council, it would have taken them longer, but the bishops of the first converted cities were moving toward codifying their various beliefs. So Jesus would have been taken off the cross, where Constantine was determined to keep Him forever, and restored to His role of revered Teacher, rather than being treated as just a figurehead and sacrifice, as He still is to this day in Roman Christianity.

And that, my beloveds, seems to me to be the great difference between what we have had and what we might have had if the alternative Way of Jesus had been left free to wend its way along that beautiful road not taken. Without Constantine and his obsession with wielding Christianity as a means of fear-based control, there would have been no need to keep Jesus bleeding on that cross forevermore, shedding upon us the misery of our own imagined guilt and shame and lowering the consciousness vibrations of every Christian on the face of the earth. In the Roman Catacombs, which date to those first three hundred years after Jesus’s Resurrection, there is not a single cross to be seen! There are only depictions of Jesus, often with a baby goat about His shoulders to signify that He had come to bring His teachings and the ultimate good news of our eternal life to the goats as well as to the sheep. Until we first understood consciousness physics early in this new century, we never could have realized just how deadly it has been to our ability to raise our consciousness vibrations for us to keep rubbing our own noses in Jesus’s death for our sins and shortcomings by making the brutal means of His death the symbol of the whole Christian religion. That cross is always right there in our faces! So, dying in that ghastly way was the point of Jesus’s entire life? THAT was Jesus’s whole gift to us? His three and a half years of teaching, and His Resurrection, and His Ascension actually all amounted to nothing? We even wear gold crosses as jewelry on chains around our necks, for heaven’s sake!

But if only we had kept to that road not taken, then in all the Christian churches over all the earth, there now would never be a cross to be seen! Not even a bare crucifix. No crosses anywhere! Only statues of the teaching Jesus, and also sunbursts perhaps, as symbols of the beauty of the risen Christ. And the religion would not teach that Jesus died for our sins, but rather the Way would teach just what Jesus taught, God’s perfect love and universal forgiveness, and it would crown the Lord’s words with the certainty that Jesus came to prove to us that human life truly is eternal. He said, “I came so that they would have life, and have it abundantly” (JN 10:11). And as I think about it now, our Bibles might well be the New Testament alone, just the Gospels and perhaps Paul’s letters. And our churches would be places of teaching and celebration, open to all and free of judgment. Without those outmoded Old Testament rules, all those who follow Jesus would be models of His love and joy, every one of us more or less like Jesus.

All the guilt and judgment and the awful negativity that Roman Christianity has instilled in its followers is what has killed off the Roman Christian religion. I have no doubt about that! And in fact, all that negativity has killed it dead, I am afraid. I can see no hope for Christianity now. For more than a decade I have been getting emails from people who tell me that they cannot bear to attend a Christian church any longer, and nearly always they will say that they love Jesus more than ever, but they find the religion’s teachings to be no longer believable. Or they will say that they love Jesus even more, but they find the people who attend Christian churches to be judgmental, standoffish, cliquey, and unbearable to be around. This broad Barna poll gives you a sense of just how deeply negative the image of modern Christians actually is! And yet Jesus’s image remains wonderfully positive. No one sees Jesus as judging us, and they are right. Jesus is only love. I am somewhat alarmed that judgmental Christians seem to have tarnished God’s image for so many people, but Jesus tells us yet again that God does not judge us. Jesus says, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). And Jesus invites us now to “Come to Me, all you who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy, and My burden is light” (MT 11:28-30).

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Not Taken” (1915)

Miracles

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us. Above us, only sky.
Imagine all the people Livin’ for today.
Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too.
Imagine all the people Livin’ life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us, And the world will be as one.
– John Winston Lennon (1940-1980), from “Imagine” (1971)

All of humankind has every reason to grieve as we consider that year-325 fork in the road that sadly never was taken. Burdened as we all have been by the almost continuous wars and the senseless restrictions imposed on us by Western civilization, and burdened as we all still are by the Roman Emperor Constantine’s bloody Christianity, I think we always have known, at least on some level, that there must have been some better way! From my own perspective, I am finding that it is only now, after my two dear friends have spent that one week taking me back to visit again the place that I had almost forgotten, with people living free of restraints who never had heard of Jesus but who nevertheless were living as if He walked among them, that I even can begin to make some sense of the exotic Atlantican way of life. But might Atlantica ever have been in any sense real?

And that was the most amazing thing about it for me. Back in the early Seventies, I remember now that I found the whole Atlantican way of life to be so flat-out strange that it didn’t seem real, and I never connected it with Jesus at the time. And yet, by 1975 or so, after I had spent years of floundering, my experimenting with trying to reinvent civilization had at last settled down and begun to be stable. And it had become so detailed by then that it had on some level begun to seem like an actual place. But the people on Atlantica just kept on doing things that simply still confound me. Back in the Seventies, when I thought that I was inventing Atlantica all on my own, only about half of this made any sense to me at all. And I had no idea where most of these ideas were coming from. But as I shortly will tell you, I realize now that Atlantica was not after all my own invention. Here it all is again, in summary:

  • The people go naked all summer. Their clothing is unisex pants and tunics made of homespun wool. Think Medieval peasants. The summers there are hot, so in the spring of each year they just abandon clothing. Men who are running or logging or doing something else vigorous that might result in injury will tie things up, and nursing mothers bind their breasts so they won’t drip, but otherwise they are as naked as jaybirds all summer long. No one looks. No one cares.
  • They don’t have personal possessions. Everything is communal, including even clothing and things like hairbrushes. They don’t use toothbrushes because they clean their gums and tongue with a fresh twig from a specific kind of tree, and then they throw that twig away. Otherwise, everything is homemade, and it is all in common use. They teach a lack of attachment to objects with sharing-games for infants and toddlers, and all their stuff for general use in each village is kept in one big building where the children and young people sleep until marriage. There is no rule against having something of your own, but there is an Atlantican term that translates as “too big bother.” They take that saying to heart.
  • They never assign jobs. The most they will do is to announce that this or that kind of work is ready to be done. Someone will stand up as people are eating in the greathouse and say that fish are running, and there were only two boats out there this morning. Or someone else might say that they just came through the garden, and a lot of squashes need to be collected or they will soon be overripe. That, plus the fact that most people like to do a variety of things during any given day so they wander around looking for things to do, tends to ensure that everything gets done. Those who have favorite workshops will set them up so doing your own little bits of productive work in them is as easy as possible.
  • They don’t judge. If someone does something harmful to someone else or to the community, or if someone even acts in an inappropriate way, everyone is all over the miscreant at once, trying to help him or her feel better. Even whoever may have been specifically harmed will try to make the evildoer feel better, and for years thereafter the whole community will watch that miscreant to see whether she or he might do it again. This way of treating crime is so central to the culture that it seems to act as a deterrent to wrongdoing. As a wise Atlantican friend once put it to Marvina, “If you know that just kicking up your heels that one time is going to put a loving bull’s-eye on your back for years, don’t you think that might act as a deterrent?”
  • There are never individual standouts. They have all the children playing lots of games on constantly changing teams. Their teams are assembled on the spot – four, seven, ten children on each – and then they run, and the point might be that the team that can all manage to finish at the same time first wins. Or each team tries to get all the woolen balls of a certain color first through a hoop. Or they hold swim races to collect the most clams in their team’s bucket. But it is always the whole pickup team that is praised, and never just one child. This seems to foster in all the children a sense of strength in community, which is the likely point of it.
  • They consider a leadership talent to be a potentially dangerous trait. Well, perhaps not dangerous, but carrying some risk. As they approach puberty, a few of the children – and nearly always they are boys – will show signs of leadership abilities and charisma that in a different culture might have had them contending to become the next chieftain. But here, of course, there is no chieftain, so two or three of the old men and women will befriend each of these standout children as soon as they are spotted, and in conjunction with the boy’s parents, they will do and say whatever it will take to adopt them more fully into the culture of their birth. The real thing that likely solves the problem, though, is the Atlantican custom of early marriage and fatherhood.   
  • They are all married. That may be one reason why the nakedness is not a problem. Everyone is paired up. They marry at puberty, and falling in love with someone else later in life is fine, and it even is encouraged: that later love is your deepfriend, and deepfriends can be of either gender. You just don’t have sex with anyone but your original spouse unless that first spouse dies, at which point you can remarry. I don’t know how they make this system work, but they do, and apparently quite happily so.
  • Their minds are much better developed than ours are. They are able to communicate by mind by the time they are teenagers, and even over long distances. They also can easily join their minds. They drop in circles into a trance which seems to be quite powerful, and it can even work miracles. Its power is undirected, however. Marvina calls it circle-yielding. They call it getting out of the way so good things might happen.
  • They have no religion. Seeing the way these people live, it seems hard to believe that they have no religion, especially since they talk with the dead all the time, and their dead talk back to them. But they never pray to or refer to a god. When I first knew them and I thought I was inventing them, I found their spirituality to be rather spooky. But their degree of spiritual development seems to confirm that an absolutely free and simple way of life is what would ideally best foster our own spiritual growth.
  • They have benefited from very limited contact with Western civilization. Atlantica is far from shipping lanes, but it is located off the coast of Brazil and it was known of and claimed by the Emperor of Brazil in the early 1800s. I thought I had invented a fictional history in which the Emperor of Brazil sold the island to a slave-holding South Carolina family that was trying to escape the Civil War. I thought that was my idea, but maybe not. In any event, the island’s minimal contact with Americans has meant that many younger Atlanticans can read, although they treat their books about the outside world as high humor. They also have access to a small clinic now, although they rarely use it. At this point, I am no longer sure where reality ends and fiction begins.

   … All of which brings us to this past Tuesday. By then, we had written just the first two paragraphs as a lead-in to a post about Jesus’s year-325 road not taken, which is what we now plan to use as our topic for next week. Because sometimes, reality will intervene. Our blog-writing generally begins in earnest on Wednesdays, since Thomas is our lead writer and he seldom steps in to help until then. But I had been having severe pains in recent weeks, like knives in the middle of my chest and back, and pains that extended down both arms and sometimes recurred when I was trying to sleep. When I mentioned these pains to my retired-pathologist husband, he insisted that I have a physical exam right away that included an EKG. So I did that on Tuesday morning, and the nurse practitioner said I was fine. On Tuesday afternoon I had more pain, so Edward then told me to call their office again. When they suggested I just go to an emergency room, he demanded that they give me a referral to a cardiologist, stat, and they did that. And when the cardiologist’s office heard my symptoms, they told me to come in for a better electrocardiogram first thing Wednesday morning.

The definitive sort of electrocardiogram is now electronic and nuclear. Who knew? It is done first at rest, and then done a second time after physical activity that is chemically simulated to be more taxing than it actually is. I had a Zoom meeting scheduled for Wednesday afternoon, so we couldn’t wait for the test results. Edward and I raced home through a rainstorm while we talked about all the reasons why we were sure this was going to turn out to be nothing, as you always do. But it was not nothing. The cardiologist soon called me, sounding stressed. He said, “Your result was abnormal. Take four baby aspirins and do nothing to bring on that pain! Nothing to eat or drink after midnight. Be at Heart Hospital of Austin at five tomorrow morning.” I said, “Um, What?” Edward was standing in my office doorway. He said, ‘Just say, “Yes.”’ And so I did.

It is fortunate that we live just twenty minutes away from the best cardiac hospital in Texas, and one of the best in the country. Because goodness knows for how long one of my coronary arteries had been gradually filling with junk. When the cardiac surgeon later showed me my “before” photo, that coronary artery was officially 95% blocked, but it looked to be more like 99% blocked. My god, what an amazing picture! My husband is convinced that it is only the fact that I have been taking daily baby aspirins for years that in the end saved my life.

But my goodness, what a delightful experience that operation actually was! It began at seven on Thursday morning, and I was barely sedated at all. My body was draped, and there was a giant screen, maybe six by ten feet, suspended right above me to my left, and a machine maybe a foot and a half square just above my chest that moved all around in the air, making busy noises, while young male attendants flitted about and would lean in and whisper to me to be still if I moved at all. My cardiologist that I had met just the day before, and my cardiac surgeon that I had met only minutes before, were standing by my right hip, happily chatting and playing some cheerful video game with big squiggles on that gigantic screen. I never felt pain or pressure at the tiny wound site in my hip, or in my chest, or anywhere. And this is heart surgery? Are you kidding me? Some fellow paused and whispered to me that things were going very well as the machine in the air above my chest moved and buzzed, and moved and buzzed. The doctors chatted and the squiggles squiggled. The whole thing took about an hour from the time when they first rolled me into that room. And then the machine stopped and lifted. The cardiac surgeon came to my head and told me that it had gone very well (which must be their standard mantra). He took out his cellphone and showed me two pictures. One was of my coronary artery with what looked like a quarter-inch-long snip taken right out of the middle of it. And the second was of what was clearly the same artery, but you couldn’t even tell where the blockage had been. Wow, amazing! And that surgeon was grinning a great big grin! Are cardiac surgeons supposed to grin when they are on duty?

On Friday morning I felt terrific and as if I could run a Marathon, but we had no blog post yet to speak of, and not enough time left in the week to write one. Marvina’s solution was to make this post primarily about Atlantica, which I now realize has been her longstanding obsession. She channeled all the bullet-points above, while she encouraged me to – sure, go ahead – write about my operation, an experience with which I am now in love, and be sure to include my cardiac surgeon’s promise that I am good to go now for the next twenty years. My Thomas has let me know that when we accepted this body before my birth, we knew that it had that one health risk which now has safely been addressed. For my part, I cannot get over the fact that they do those video-game miracles all day, every day in that operating room that is just twenty minutes away from my house.

But having worked with Marvina on her bullet-points has made me even more curious about Atlantica! And I know now that there actually could be such a place, somewhere in the astral plane. We know, for example, that there is a permanent Dickens village in the astral, and I would not be at all surprised to find that there is a Harry Potter village there as well. So, have we also conjured our own fictional Atlantican Shangri-la into being? Just how difficult is that to do?  Marvina tells me that we have tapped into and adapted, rather than having conjured Atlantica into being there. And I kind of understand that now. One of the facts about the astral plane that is difficult for people in bodies to understand is that things there can be simultaneously true and not-true without contradiction. So, yes, it exists there. I do get that now.  

As you read our bullet-points, you may be thinking that you would be reluctant to give up some of the trinkets of your modern American way of life. Cars and airplanes. TV and video games. But doesn’t it seem that what is most important is to look at what each culture produces? The fruit of the Atlantican culture is universally gentle, loving, and happy people, and it is easy to see why that is true. Atlanticans make producing universally gentle, loving, and happy people the focus of their whole way of life! But the fruit of Western culture is too often tragic insanity. And we can see why that is true as well. A good and gentle father was bludgeoned to death last week by what were just your average middle-class American men as part of a schoolboys’ brawl over thirty dollars. And this is what America has now become? What are you and I leaving to our grandchildren? 

Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can.
No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people Sharing all the world.
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us, And the world will live as one.
– John Winston Lennon (1940-1980, from “Imagine” (1971)

 

 

What Are We? (#3)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Would you like to ride in my beautiful balloon?
Would you like to fly in my beautiful balloon?
We could float among the stars together, you and I.
For we can fly! We can fly! Up, up and away!
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon!
The world’s a nicer place in my beautiful balloon.
It wears a nicer face in my beautiful balloon.
We can sing a song and sail along the silver sky.
For we can fly, we can fly! Up, up and away!
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon!
Suspended under a twilight canopy,
We’ll search the clouds for a star to guide us.
If by some chance you find yourself loving me,
We’ll find a cloud to hide us.
We’ll keep the moon beside us.
– Jimmy Webb, from “Up, Up and Away” (1967)

One good thing about being in your twenties and having a planned role to play that is not scheduled even to begin until you are sixty years old is that you will have a lot of time to prepare for it. And in retrospect, it is clear that my Thomas intended to use all our intervening years both wisely and well! He was a rookie as a spirit guide, and the amnesia that we accept when we enter these earth-lives made me feel like a rookie as a human being, so he and I started out as rookies together. I had just come through the turmoil of the nineteen-sixties, so by the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was altogether disgusted with civilization. Thomas had prompted me to major in early Christian history in college – I can still remember his nudge from out of nowhere – and he chose for me a very Catholic husband with Asperger’s syndrome. I entered a crowded mixer one evening, and I spotted a nervous but nice-looking guy who had an amazing halo of light around him (I swear!), and right then and there I fell in love. I needed to learn to be a good researcher, and I also needed a stable career, so Thomas prompted me to want to be a lawyer. I needed to learn to write very well, and I think Thomas thought that writing fiction would help me learn to better understand people. So that was why he brought Marvina into my life.

It was clear from last week’s comments that our blog post failed to convey the message that Thomas and I had hoped it would convey. History is lived forward, so when it is viewed backward, people often miss noticing some of the most important historical events. Once again, my beloveds, what we are attempting to do with this brief numbered series is to try to determine what human beings really are at our deepest core. Scientists tell us we are just meat-robots, lacking even the most basic free will, while Christianity says that we are venal and fallen, at our core just nasty and malleable putty, which means that we must endure tight controls in order to live together in peaceful community. And I do like Linda Ellerbe’s book! I hope that one day you will read it. Perhaps if you were to read the whole book, you would grasp her points better than you ever can get them just from reading the excerpts that I chose, and that Thomas and I then used in that blog post. I was planning to move on from it now, but my beloved Thomas has persuaded me to take a detour for just this week. He wants to share with you some of our treasured friend Marvina’s contributions to our work. She is my only other spirit guide that I know by name, and it is long past time for you to meet her. We could have done none of this work without her!

But first, let’s quickly summarize what we were trying to do last week. As we know, the ancestors of these meat-bodies evolved over many millions of years. You might think of all the various creatures in this quick video (scroll down) as simply animals, not human nor even proto-human, but simply living as animals live, and gradually moving up the food chain in their experience of punctuated equilibrium until they became apex predators themselves. But then, amazingly recently – just 200,000 earth-years ago! – something happened that nearly wiped out all the hominids on earth. And then every human being living today, and even ninety percent of all the other animals and the plants that are now alive all appeared at essentially the same time, about 200,000 earth-years ago. There actually was something like a Garden of Eden event! And it is just those specific people who lived 200,000 earth-years ago and their direct descendants that we are trying to understand in more depth with this brief numbered series. But the problem is that those people were bright and sensitive enough to be fearful of the vast unknown around them, and the monstrous gods that they invented with the hope that those gods might be fierce enough to protect them from the vast unknown have given us an awful mental picture of those people themselves. Were the earliest true humans really as fearsome as the gods that they created for their own protection? Or were they instead more like sociable plants by nature, living in peaceful community and creating scary-seeming gods only as they might create scary-seeming spears as they prepared to go out and peacefully hunt in loving cooperation with their gentle companions?

The main point of last week’s blog post was the crucial fork in human history that occurred at 325 CE, and that would have been much more obvious to those who were living history forward than it was to our blog readers here. Prior to that year, we were still essentially the same creatures that had appeared in the Eden of 200,000 earth-years ago. And it is those basic humans that we are trying to better understand with this brief series! At that crucial fork in humanity’s history as it was being lived forward that was the year 325 CE, one branch would have taken us into two thousand years of living the teachings of Jesus. If we had taken that fork, we might by now be living in the kingdom of God on earth.

But on the branch of the fork that Constantine forced human history to take in that fateful year, he locked away inside his newly-created Christian Bible everything that Jesus had said. Every word! Then for the first thousand years of Roman Christianity, that Bible was published only in Latin. Even after the Reformation, lay people were strongly discouraged from reading the Bible. And in most modern-day denominations, Christians are urged not even to read Jesus’s words without adulteration by Paul’s letters. So since modern Western civilization is built on Christianity and its fear-based dogmas, it is almost impossible for moderns to study humankind in its natural state. As our beloved community here seems to have proven yet again last week.

And now, Thomas wants us to tell you my story. I graduated from college in 1968 and was married in 1972, and my oldest child was born in 1977. Chrissy was a very easy baby who was happy to amuse herself, so she would play beside me while I spent most of my time writing and doing research. She has Asperger’s syndrome, like her dad, but since much later she graduated from college at twenty and she is now a brilliant artist and a software engineer, her life has turned out very well. And before she was born, even before our marriage, Edward was drafted as a pathologist and he went to Vietnam, which also gave me lots of time to myself. There wasn’t much afterlife evidence available until after Raymond Moody’s Life After Life came out in 1976, and those were the days before personal computers, and I have always hated TV. So I spent most of the seventies more or less trying to reinvent civilization.

I didn’t think at the time that was what I was doing. I believed I was researching and writing novels. But I was so appalled by what I had witnessed in my then-brief lifetime that I spent a lot of the seventies experimenting with alternative ways of organizing human societies. I began by inventing an island in the South Atlantic that had been populated by shipwreck victims, and on that island everything was the opposite of the way things were in the United States. It would be another forty years before I would even meet Thomas, and twenty years at least before I would give much thought to what a spirit guide is and how this whole thing works, so I didn’t realize that none of what then was happening in my life was my own idea. But in fact, of course, none of it was. During this past week my Thomas has been helping me to reconstruct that time, which process has been a lot of fun all by itself. Who knew? But fifty years ago, there being no time where he is now, Thomas and I spent years experimenting with these very questions, in anticipation of today. And that was when Thomas invited Marvina to join us as my writing guide and my fiction channel, which she has continued to be for all these intervening years. I know now that most of that whole many-years-long series of experiments was conducted under her close tutelage.

The thing about fiction-writing is that, unlike real life, it always has to work. It has to be true to scientific realities and to human nature, and nothing ever can be miraculous. In real life, impossible things can happen every day! But if you try to use miracles in a piece of fiction, immediately you turn off your reader. And in fiction, your characters themselves also must all be true to life. Once they have their own distinctive personalities, they must continue to behave consistently, or – again – you will turn off your reader. And learning how to design people who had never been caged turned out to be the hardest part of this entire process.

So in retrospect, using these fictional vignettes was a surprisingly productive way to test alternative social organizations. Our testing ground, which is that little island in the South Atlantic, is twice as long as it is wide and about as far south as Virginia is north, so it has seasons. It’s a spent volcano with a grassy valley in the middle and small mountains at the northern end. I used to know its dimensions, but you could walk it from south to north and back again in one very long day that began before dawn and ended after sunset, although you never would actually do that. The only animals are half-tame long-haired sheep, horses shrunk to ponies, and dogs, cats, and rats, all off shipwrecks. The only possible name for such a place would be Atlantica, so we have called it that for fifty years.

To create a way to live that is the opposite of Western civilization is very much easier said than done. I am unclear on whether Marvina first said it or whether it was my own idea, but I began these experiments with the conviction that if I could create a way of life for Atlanticans that was the precise opposite of American life, they would then live together in a happy community. And I will spare you all the ugly details, but I created disaster after fictional disaster. Marvina never let me know that I was not alone in playing this game, so I went through months and then years of frustration while the Atlanticans kept getting into fictional wars and otherwise running off the rails. Then I would notice the elements of control over people’s lives that still existed, and which apparently were the reasons why what I was writing still was going wrong and things still didn’t work. It took me a couple of years to relax enough to create characters that were even capable of living in freedom. I think I was afraid of what they might do if I really let them go.

What I gradually learned is that it is very hard for those of us who live in Western civilization to imagine how it is possible for people to live without any controls at all. What, do you mean no laws for real? Are you kidding me? But very gradually I learned so much! The two things these people could not abide were gods and fixed leadership structures. Whenever I tried any form of civilization that included a religion or leaders in set roles, there soon were the usual civilization-style issues. What they seemed to like best was no actual leader, just an old and beloved wise-woman figure who helped them keep a kind of voluntary order, and casual debates held over communal meals that eventually resulted in a consensus that might take them years to develop. That style of civilization was spiritually happy, and it worked well, even over centuries.

The key thing I learned is that people really cannot abide living with any constraints at all.
And when we live with no constraints, we are peaceful, loving, and mutually supportive.

The more you try to restrict people with laws and rules and even customs, the more they fight to be free of them. And people living in absolute freedom are not raving crazies. Not at all! No, that sort of response seems to be what you get when you restrict someone’s freedoms, and his mental cage then chafes on his mind. We enter these lives in order to learn and grow spiritually. And even though we may not be consciously aware of that fact, at a subconscious level spiritual freedom is a core human need that is apparently as essential to us as food and breathing. On Atlantica, when we let them have as much freedom as they want, it turns out that they want freedom without any limits at all.

Here is a little more of what Atlanticans have learned about managing a rules-free society:

  • The Simple Life. Their communal work life is organized around workshops, and each workshop has its own system. Once you have learned all the systems, you can wander from shop to shop all day long, chatting and laughing and doing bits of work and never actually finishing making anything but having contributed to making several different things. They worked this system out all by themselves. I thought it was clever. They also worked out ways to make sure that only the right number of shoes in the right sizes are made, for example, without needing to have anyone actually being in charge. And if you don’t feel like working, you don’t work. People might take sabbaticals from working that last for even a year or two. No one cares. But they socialize over working, so most of them choose to work most of the time.
  • Making Decisions. They think each village should make its decisions by consensus, and everyone who wants to be a part of that consensus can be a part of it, including the children. A decision requiring a consensus would be anything that would affect even a few people’s lives, like where to put a new communal vegetable garden because the older one is getting played out. This is not, of course, a practical way to make decisions in times of crisis.
  • Sex and Marriage. Everyone is married. If a spouse dies, the survivor remarries within weeks. For women past childbearing age, remarriage doesn’t matter, but they have learned from experience that unmarried men can become troublesome, so all males of any age are urged to remarry quickly when they are widowed. They try to keep the children from knowing anything about sex, and they urge them to get married as soon as puberty hits, so girls are generally married by their fourteenth summer, and boys by their fifteenth summer. Illegitimate children are rare, but if any are born, there is no stigma attached to them. It is assumed that marriage is for lifelong sexual bonding, and they know that people need spiritual bonding as well so most adults also have as many as two or three deepfriendships with the opposite sex that they begin and maintain later in life. This shocked me quite a bit back then, but now I have deepfriends, too.

What my Atlantican years have given me to understand is that human beings living in a state of nature are neither meat-automatons nor sinful putty. Far from it! If people are allowed to feel themselves to be entirely free from shame and all constraints from earliest infancy, they are happy, loving, mutually supportive, wise, and simply delightful to know. Marvina and I have gotten to know a few Atlanticans pretty well over the past fifty years, although their several novels are now long out of print. My Thomas wants us to finish channeling that series now, and to put it back into print since most of my other work is largely completed. We’ll see. But we consider it to be beyond dispute that both Western civilization and Christianity with all their many fear-based laws and rules and shames and miscellaneous restrictions on people’s lives are the cause, and they certainly are in no way the cure of all the many problems and cares that burden people in the modern world.

Love is waiting there in my beautiful balloon.
Way up in the air in my beautiful balloon.
If you’ll hold my hand, we’ll chase your dream across the sky,
For we can fly, we can fly! Up, up and away!
My beautiful, my beautiful balloon! Balloon!
Up, up, and away!
– Jimmy Webb, from “Up, Up and Away” (1967)

What Are We? (#2)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know, and so I must go where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me, and no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way, and after the day,
The darkness will hide me.
And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow.
Beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn To?” (1965)

After learning that plants are sentient and loving, while scientists see people as soulless automatons who lack even the ability to make our own decisions, we can hardly wait to learn now how our dominant religion sees human beings. This faith-based view may be even more important, since it might well determine the extent to which we ever will be able to become spiritual beings. But the history of all of humanity’s religions as we have discovered and then recounted it here has been appalling. Our entire religious history since all of humankind once lived in caves has been full of nothing but fear-based, human-made gods that were created by us in our own image. And many of our gods have been the stuff of nightmares.

The problem with our ever being able to finally make complete sense of Christian history is that history is written by its winners. Which is why you and I have always been taught that the Romans are the heroes, and not the villains of the Christian story, and that the Roman Emperor Constantine brought “stability” to Christianity, and he did not much harm Jesus’s message. But my own view, gleaned from my college and post-college study of the religion, is that when Constantine presided over the First Council of Nicaea in the Year 325 CE, in which in fact he invented the modern Christian religion, is one that is far less flattering. Constantine kept nothing of the early Christian movement that had prevailed for the previous three hundred years, and he kept almost nothing of what Jesus had taught. And it is Constantine’s fear-based ideas about humanity’s unworthiness, and Jesus’s need to sacrifice Himself on the cross for humankind’s sins, that remain the core of the Christian religion to this day. 

I am by no means the only one who finds the history of the Christian religion to be horrifying. No less a light than Pope John Paul II was cited in a book that I consider to be essential reading for everyone who wants to understand Christianity’s views of humankind, especially since those views have shaped our whole Western culture to this day. And that last is an essential point! Western civilization is built on Christianity, and much more so than most people now realize. And Christianity, in turn, is built not on the love-based teachings of Jesus, but on Constantine’s iron will to rule, which from its founding made his religion something cruel and dark. As you will shortly see.

So now the long-overdue reckoning begins. And Saint John Paul II is a wise and good being. It is fitting that he should begin it for us. “In June of 1995 the Chicago Tribune reported that Pope John Paul II had urged the Roman Catholic Church to seize the ‘particularly propitious’ occasion of the new millennium to recognize ‘the dark side of its history.’ … (Pope John Paul II) asked, ‘How can one remain silent about the many forms of violence perpetrated in the name of the faith—wars of religion, tribunals of the Inquisition and other forms of violations of the rights of persons?’” So begins a book that must be read by every Christian who loves Jesus, and who hungers to understand this religion that now forms the entire basis of Western culture. The  historian Helen Ellerbe tells us in her 1996 expose, The Dark Side of Christian History, that “My intention is to offer, not a complete picture of Christian history, but only the side which hurt so many and did such damage to spirituality. It is in no way intended to diminish the beautiful work that countless Christian men and women have done to truly help others. And it is certainly not intended as a defense of or tribute to any other religion.”

When I first read Helen Ellerbe’s book, soon after the start of this century, it helped to precipitate the worst marital crisis of my life. If you ever doubt that God has a sense of humor, you should know that my treasured husband of more than fifty years attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through college, and for much of his life he went to Mass twice a week. So when it was no longer possible for me to enter a church that had a life-size, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above its altar, my husband fought me for the salvation of my soul. He couldn’t win, but I love him all the more for his having tried so hard. It took us years, but we learned to build a marriage that can encompass such tremendous religious differences, and can stretch to easily embrace a more mutually tolerant kind of love. Now my husband even sometimes asks me afterlife questions….

But it remains my firm opinion, an opinion that even he now accepts, that when Christianity was co-opted by Roman Emperors and warped into an instrument of bloody control, it lost whatever franchise it ever might have had from God. And no amount of Papal contrition ever can win that franchise back again. What strikes me most profoundly as I re-read Helen Ellerbe’s well-written and very scholarly book is the amazing devotion of so many innocent people to professing and living the Lord’s Gospel truths, even as they were being torn with pincers, broken on the rack, and eventually burned alive by the Christian church. Oh, to ever have even a tenth of their love, their fortitude, and their spiritual courage! In just 221 large-print pages, Ellerbe makes such a compelling case that Christianity’s greatest sin against humanity might well be the fact that it has warped the very meaning of what it is to be human!

(The emphasis in the following paragraph is all my own, since here Ellerbe gets to the point of our whole inquiry. I should note, too, that when I first took these extensive quotations from The Dark Side of Christian History, the book was available on a free website that is now closed. But I believe it to be still in the public domain, and therefore I have used all these quotations by permission.)

Helen Ellerbe says, “Ignoring the dark side of Christian history perpetuates the idea that oppression and atrocity are the inevitable results of an inherently evil or savage human nature. But that is emphatically not true! It is very important to emphasize the fact that (t)here have been… peaceful cultures and civilizations, …, which functioned without oppressive hierarchical structures. It is clearly not human nature that causes people to hurt one another. People of gentler cultures share the same human nature as we of Western civilization; it is our beliefs that differ. Tolerant and more peaceful cultures have respected both masculine and feminine faces of God, both heavenly and earthly representations of divinity. It is the limited belief in a singular supremacy and only one face of God that has resulted in tyranny and brutality.” And she notes that, “The Christian church has left a legacy, a world view, that permeates every aspect of Western society, both secular and religious. It is a legacy that fosters sexism, racism, the intolerance of difference, and the desecration of the natural environment. The Church, throughout much of its history, has demonstrated a disregard for human freedom, dignity, and self-determination. It has attempted to control, contain and confine spirituality, the relationship between an individual and God. As a result, Christianity has helped to create a society in which people are alienated not only from each other, but also from the divine.” Well, I guess she pretty much answers our question, doesn’t she? It clearly is Helen Ellerbe’s learned view that in a state of nature, we are as peaceful and loving as are the peaceful and loving plants around us.

It is so important that we never forget that the Christian Church that we are dealing with here has remained throughout its history the same one that the Emperor Constantine designed as his fear-based means of control in the year 325 CE. And in Ellerbe’s learned view, all of Western history was shaped in awful ways by the power of this Roman Christian Church. “As it took over leadership in Europe and the Roman Empire collapsed, the Church all but wiped out education, technology, science, medicine, history, art and commerce. The Church amassed enormous wealth as the rest of society languished in the dark ages. When dramatic social changes after the turn of the millennium brought an end to the isolation of the era, the Church fought to maintain its supremacy and control. It rallied an increasingly dissident society against perceived enemies, instigating attacks upon Muslims, Eastern Orthodox Christians, and Jews. When these crusades failed to subdue dissent, the Church turned its force against European society itself, launching a brutal assault upon southern France and instituting the Inquisition.”

And then came the Protestant Reformation, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation. And repeatedly as I read Ellerby’s book, I realize that a Christianity that had all along been living the teachings of Jesus on love and forgiveness never could have done any of this! Not any of it! This was all Roman Christian barbarity, which may be why the European nations never accepted it as more than a superficial set of ideas. “Only during the Reformation did the populace of Europe adopt more than a veneer of Christianity. The Reformation terrified people with threats of the devil and witchcraft. The common perception that the physical world was imbued with God’s presence and with magic was replaced during the Reformation with a new belief that divine assistance was no longer possible. … It was a three hundred year holocaust against all who dared believe in divine assistance and magic that finally secured the conversion of Europe to … Christianity.” In Helen Ellerbe’s view, the distant God of monumental power that Roman Christianity invented in order to establish and maintain its control of society became the model for modern human hierarchical dominance. And every Christian position on any topic was calculated primarily to enhance a rigid control of human society that is contrary to humankind’s essentially spiritual nature.

It was my initial reading of Helen Ellerbe’s masterwork that made me first understand that Christianity is deliberately antithetical to the Gospel teachings of Jesus on love, forgiveness, and spiritual growth.

My college major meant that my focus had long been on just the first five hundred years of Christianity, so  Ellerbe’s illumination of the period of the Dark Ages, the Inquisition, and the Reformation was a revelation for me! Let’s look here at three of her summary conclusions that are very relevant to our question at hand:

* Throughout Christian history, Jesus has been used, but He has never been much studied. Fear and suffering are Christianity’s means of control, so the Lord’s suffering to redeem us from the Christian God’s perfectly justifiable wrath, and from our well-earned punishment for our sins are all that has ever been extensively taught. I have long been struck by the fact that all the Christians that I ever have known have been amazingly ignorant of the Lord’s Gospel teachings. Now I can see that Jesus’s teachings are irrelevant to the religion, and they are actually inconvenient to Roman Christianity as the religion still is practiced.

*.All the worst aspects of modern society are the result of Christianity’s deliberate design. Christianity’s hierarchical nature during its Roman history, and its strict division and ranking of people by sex, race, age, class, and occupation, together with our modern science-driven, atheistic-materialist sense that if a God exists, He is separate from and even indifferent to the world, are all rooted in the Christian hierarchical and power-based model.

* Our Western cultural tolerance of brutality is a product of Christian religious teachings and practices. It has been estimated that more than twenty-five million innocent people have suffered death by torture and massacre at the hands of people who professed to be ardent followers of Jesus, and who believed that they  were acting in obedience to the Christian God. And if you can read that sentence without distress, then you have made Helen Ellerbe’s point.

I feel compelled to say here, as Ellerbe also says, that in spite of it all, there have been many good Christians who have done wonderful things. But of course, I also personally feel the need to add that if Christianity had always from the day of Jesus’s Resurrection simply concentrated on sharing His Gospel teachings over all the earth, and if it never had taken that awful fourth-century Roman detour into the religion that still is practiced to this day, then perhaps the love-based works of Jesus’s followers as they continued to share and live His Gospel teachings over the past nearly two thousand years could long since have brought the kingdom of God on earth. My obsession remains my dream with Jesus of what might have been.

Helen Ellerbe sums up her discoveries by saying “The dark side of Christian history has been and continues to be about the domination and control of spirituality and human freedom… Christians built an organization that from its inception encouraged not freedom and self-determination, but obedience and conformity. To that end, any means were justified. Grounded in the belief in a singular, authoritarian and punishing God, … Christians created a church that demanded singular authority and punished those who disobeyed. During the Dark Ages, civilization collapsed as the Church took control of education, science, medicine, technology and the arts. Crusaders marched into the Middle East killing and destroying in the name of the one Christian God. The Inquisition established a precedent in the Middle Ages for the systematic policing and terrorization of society. The Protestant and Catholic Counter Reformation sparked wars where Christians slaughtered other Christians, each convinced that theirs was the one and only true path… In 1785 Thomas Jefferson wrote: ‘Millions of innocent men, women, and children, since the introduction of Christianity, have been burnt, tortured, fined, imprisoned; yet we have not advanced one inch towards uniformity. What has been the effect of coercion? To make one half of the world fools, and the other half hypocrites. To support error and roguery all over the earth.’”

Amen, my precious friend.

So, in summary, the view of humankind that Christianity and the Western culture it has built gives to us is dishearteningly similar to the scientific view. Both scientific experts and Christian clergy have long seen people as essentially animals, venal and cruel, lacking in both wisdom and morality, and utterly lacking in common sense, without even the nobler tendencies toward love and mutual support that we have been surprised to find in the silent green plants around us. But, are things really so hopeless? Where else can we turn? What, perhaps, might the genuine God’s opinion be?

With you I could learn to.With you, what a new day.
But who can I turn to If you turn away?
With you, I could learn to.
With you, what a new day!
But who can I turn to If you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn To?” (1965)

 

 

What Are We? (#1)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What kind of fool am I, who never fell in love?
It seems that I’m the only one that I have been thinking of.
What kind of mind is this? An empty shell?
A lonely cell in which an empty heart must dwell?

What kind of clown am I? What do I know of life?
Why can’t I cast away this mask of clay and live my life?
Why can’t I fall in love like any other man?
And maybe then I’ll know what kind of fool I am!
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “What Kind of Fool Am I?” (1962)

What are you and I really made of? Last week we were amazed to discover that plants are actually sentient beings. And plants are even loving sentient beings! So now it is time for us to look again more closely at ourselves. Of what sort of stuff are human beings really made? Are we gloriously spiritual creatures as well, eternal by nature and only a little bit lower than the angels? Or on the other hand, are we basically animals, or even something like automated meat-robots? That is the core question about human nature that humankind is still attempting after thousands of years to find a way to definitively answer. Religions, of course, have been of no help to us as we have undertaken this greatest of all quests. And mainstream science has been similarly useless. Although each of our most prominent cultural modes of thought, mainstream Christianity and mainstream science, has long been sure that of course it has the perfect answers for us! And often hilariously so, in both cases. This is the first of three posts that will dig more deeply into why our understanding has gone so wrong in our broader mainstream culture.

(Of course, those who frequent this blog have a much higher and deeper understanding. But we cannot live in isolation from our mainstream culture! Please just hold on to what you know while we take this brief detour into what you will see is still an amazingly backward mainstream cultural wilderness.)        

It may surprise you to be told once again that while we have lately discovered that even plants are sentient and amazingly loving beings, mainstream science remains stubbornly convinced that human beings are just meat-robots under our skin. There is, to be sure, no proof ever offered that all the evidence for the primacy of consciousness and for the continuation of life after death that we have been receiving over the past two hundred years is entirely without merit, for the simple reason that the mainstream scientific community has never been allowed to consider any of that evidence, as a matter of self-righteous policy. So therefore, all the scientific gatekeepers – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – can straight-facedly continue to pontificate that consciousness is produced in the brain, and that at death we simply blink out like a light. This is why, almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century, you can consistently find weird articles in popular-science magazines that have titles like, “Surges of Activity in the Dying Human Brain Could Hint at Fleeting Consciousness.” Scientists hope that these anomalies might explain near-death experiences, so science can at last do away with that whole inconvenient NDE problem. Never, though, can any working traditional scientist who wants to keep his scientific career even hint that those dying surges of brain activity might be a threshold to life after death.

This is such a stupid child’s-level game!

Working scientists must claim to you and me that they are actually “doing science,” when they have not been allowed to do the full range of actual objective, investigative science for at least the past century. The problem is that there are some things that they simply cannot study. It is almost as if they have to pretend that all those dinosaur bones in the fossil record that are mixed with the bones that they are being allowed to study are not really there. Or as if they are under a scientific mandate to study all the gases in the atmosphere, except for methane. Or maybe except for carbon dioxide. Can you see how nonsensical any sort of limiting mandate at all makes the entire field of investigative scientific research?

What happened to wreck the field of objective investigative science was that a century ago, the father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, made an astounding discovery. As he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” In fact, Dr. Planck had discovered that there is indeed a base creative force. And rather than allowing the free and open-minded scientific investigation of this amazing new idea, the scientific gatekeepers of a century ago, being terrified of inadvertently finding (gasp!) that there might actually be a Creator, which very idea smacked to them too much of allowing religion to invade science (although why that might be the case, you would have to ask them), those gatekeepers absolutely would not allow the study of Dr. Planck’s big new idea. Instead, they chose to circle their wagons around a brand-new invented scientific dogma of atheistic-materialism. They decided to limit the field of mainstream science to the study of matter, and matter’s correlate energy. The scientific gatekeepers of a century ago thereby began what has turned into a full century – and counting – of science as no longer a field of free inquiry, but rather they reinvented mainstream science as a dogma-based atheistic-materialist belief-system. And for the past century, no idea and no concept that might not be consistent with atheistic-materialism has been considered for teaching in any university science department, or for publication in any peer-reviewed scientific journal. Most people outside the scientific community have never much noticed a difference. But mainstream science is now, and for the past century it has been, exclusively the dogma-bound religion of atheistic-materialism.

So, yes, atheistic-materialist science therefore now holds that you and l are made of matter exclusively.  And actually, it is even worse than that, since you and I are not even considered by mainstream science to be conventional animals in any real sense. Animals also are made of matter, but animals are assumed to be creatures in the natural state, and you and I are not seen to be precisely that. No, one of the tenets of this weird reinvented scientific religion holds that people are automatons who have no free will. I confess that when I first noticed this problem in mainstream science, I saw it as a transitory silliness. I wrote about it in The Fun of Dying in 2010 as an example of how completely around the bend that counterproductive “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” had driven the whole scientific community. Atheistic-materialism has fostered in mainstream science the certainty that the human brain must generate consciousness, since for those who are limited by that artificial scientific dogma, where else can our conscious awareness come from? So for at least the past eight decades, scientists have obsessively studied the gray matter housed inside our skulls. The idea that matter must generate consciousness is a staggeringly strange notion, on a par with believing that rocks must generate the sunlight that they reflect; but atheistic-materialist scientists remain undaunted by the fact that all their work to refine this idea over decades has yielded so little progress toward figuring out how the meat in your head creates who you are. One currently fashionable possibility suggests that the process must be “quantum,” so no wonder it is so hard for scientists to figure it out!

As they have been chasing their tails in a pointless study of mental gray matter, seeking something that in fact is not and cannot possibly be there, scientists have drawn a bogus conclusion that they oddly persist in believing, despite all the evidence there is that weighs against it. A researcher named Benjamin Libet showed in the 1980s that muscular and nervous preparations to move a digit begin about 350 milliseconds before we consciously decide to move that digit, thereby proving to many atheistic-materialist believers that human beings have no free will. There are some scientists who are sure that Libet’s work proves no such thing, but theirs is a minority view. Scientists who still stubbornly believe in human free will are mostly relegated now to the religionist side of the bogus battle between science and religion that actually goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle.    

I bought Sam Harris’s book entitled Free Will when it first came out in 2012, and I read it as the in-joke howler that I assumed that Harris meant it to be. Sam Harris was in his youth a bright and sophisticated man. He originally couched his career in the scornful anti-religious mold of the likes of Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens, but he is of the generation following theirs, and he used to strike me as just too smart to fall for the pseudo-religious, fake-scientific nonsense of atheistic-materialism. But, no such luck. An article  lauding Harris and his book explains why he holds these nonsensical views. He says there that “The phrase ‘free will’ simply describes what it feels like to identify with certain mental states as they arise in consciousness (he is talking here about the “consciousness” that he imagines must actually somehow “arise” inside the human brain) — and our ‘freedom’ constitutes nothing more than this illusory feeling of control.” And at this point, most of the modern scientific community apparently shares this absurd misconception.  We are being urged now to accept this bogus theory as correct, but to believe in free will anyway. Because scientists fear that if humanity’s prevailing view becomes the notion that individuals are simply not responsible for our actions, then civilization soon will fall apart.

On second thought, Sam Harris’s book, Free Will, is not even remotely funny. This absurd century-old religion of atheistic-materialism is now actually couched as what passes for mainstream science, believe it or not, just as very long ago the Early Medieval Christian religion became by default the prevailing science of its day, and physicians were thereby deluded into bleeding the sick in an effort to cure them. And in that very same crazy vein, our current scientific gatekeepers’ fear-based refusal to allow working scientists to examine the overwhelmingly detailed and consistent evidence that what we experience as consciousness is in fact the base creative force, that human life is eternal, and that our eternal life takes place in a greater reality that researchers have discovered and can describe for you in detail, have led the brilliant Sam Harris, this once-talented but now sadly deluded little man whose life is at this point being wasted on sheer nonsense, to write a paragraph that is breathtaking in its ignorance. Harris says: “Take a moment to think about the context in which your next decision will occur: You did not pick your parents or the time and place of your birth. You didn’t choose your gender or most of your life experiences. You had no control whatsoever over your genome or the development of your brain. And now your brain is making choices on the basis of preferences and beliefs that have been hammered into it over a lifetime — by your genes, your physical development since the moment you were conceived, and the interactions you have had with other people, events, and ideas. Where is the freedom in this?”

Indeed! Poor Sam Harris. Like nearly every working member of this almost entirely wasted early-twenty-first-century generation of research scientists, he has no freedom at all. Please take a moment to appreciate the fact that because Harris feels unable to go beyond the dogma-bound and entirely false beliefs-based religion of atheistic-materialism, in fact he does not know anything about anything. Literally! Every statement in his paragraph above is demonstrably wrong. In fact, as a part of your own infinitely precious eternal life, you chose to carefully plan an earth-lifetime before you were born on earth this time around. So you did indeed choose your parents, your gender, and the time and place of your birth. Therefore you controlled your genome as well, and in your pre-birth planning with your primary spirit guide for this lifetime, you masterminded in advance all the major events of your present lifetime. The human-made and entirely false scientific religion of atheistic-materialism makes it impossible for those who are stuck with working within that religion to investigate the truth about anything whatsoever.

But inevitably, the truth will win. The truth will win, even if the mind-controls imposed by these deluded scientific gatekeepers on folks like Sam Harris make it impossible for him and all those like him to open-mindedly seek what is true for as much as another thousand years! At this point, there is so much evidence that human consciousness is primary and that it survives our bodily death, just as very long ago there was abundant evidence that the earth is round and that it circumnavigates the sun. And the modern scientific community has sadly put itself in the position of the Early Medieval Catholic church, having to defend indefensible beliefs-based lies. Mainstream science’s enemy is no longer religion, for heaven’s sake. Now mainstream science IS the religion! So at this point, their enemy is the simple pursuit of the truth, untainted by anyone’s dogmas but its own. And if we are not seeking reality now, then whatever we are doing is a waste of good oxygen. The plain fact is that, as the great scientific genius Max Planck discovered a long, wasted century ago, what we experience as human consciousness is primary, and it pre-exists everything else. The only thing that all those old brain experiments prove is that these material bodies – which include our material brains – are just meat avatars, no part of which is aware or contains our executive function. Our eternal minds, quite apart from our bodies, are where we are aware, where we live and think and make our conscious decisions. And once we decide to move a digit, that digit and our brain are made aware of that decision almost simultaneously.

Proponents of atheistic-materialism continue to insist that you and I are meat-robots and nothing more, and that as robots we lack even the ability to decide what we will have for breakfast. Working scientists must insist that whatever evidence they might find to the contrary is anomalous, and nothing on which they might even offer an opinion, since otherwise whatever status they might have achieved in the atheistic-materialist scientific community in which they are trying to build their careers will be at risk. All of this may sound funny to us, who are not bound by their beliefs, but it is nothing to laugh about because our governments actually listen to them. We must never forget that fact.

And so, you and I forge on. Next week we will be considering what the alternative cultural belief-system of Christianity has to say about what you and I actually are. And nothing that modern Christianity says can possibly be any more ridiculous than what this atheistic-materialist scientific belief-system has had to say about human automatons! … Or can it?

What kind of mind is this? An empty shell?
A lonely cell in which an empty heart must dwell?
What kind of lips are these, that lied with every kiss?
That whispered empty words of love that left me alone like this?
Why can’t I fall in love, like any other man?
And maybe then I’ll know what kind of fool I am!
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “What Kind of Fool Am I?” (1962)

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