The Road Not Taken

Posted on June 3, 2023June 4, 2023 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 May 27, 2023May 28, 2023 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 May 20, 2023May 21, 2023 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 May 13, 2023May 14, 2023 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 May 6, 2023July 2, 2023 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)

Plant Love

Posted on April 29, 2023April 30, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

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

Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
– Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965), from “Morning has broken” (1931)

We talked last week about our need to learn to share an ever deeper human love as part of our effort at spiritual growth. So it seems to be only fitting to follow that discussion by talking about something that is also important, even though we take it entirely for granted, and that is the gentle, green and leafy love that is happening all around us. My office has a big bow window, and although it also has a desk, I prefer to work sitting in that window with my laptop and my two large plants. One plant began its life as a Realtor’s prop on a front-hall table nearly a decade ago, when my younger daughter’s family was selling their house. That plant has since become gigantic, having grown into a sturdy tree with its three wooden trunks twisted together and its leaves a rich and abundant display. Now it stands more than four feet tall in a big ceramic pot on the floor between my chair and the glass. The other plant is a pretty fountain of pink, white, and green ivy leaves that cascade from a large pot on a plant-stand two feet beyond my hassock. I have just returned from a ten-day business trip, and I have found that, sadly, once again my plants were worrying while I was away.

We don’t think of plants as loving their people. Although we do assume that cats love their moms! My older daughter, who lives with us, recently adopted two rescue kittens. She takes frequent business trips that were hard on her kittens in the beginning, even though we kept explaining to them that Mom was going to come right back. Fortunately, her adoptees soon adjusted, and now they spend their days with my husband and me whenever our daughter is traveling. But my plants will accept no substitute. Even though their watering schedule had been maintained, and even though they got abundant sunlight, when I came home after ten days away, there were leaves shriveled and dying on both of them.

The most transformational book that I ever have read is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. Nothing else comes close! I first read that amazing book in 1973, its year of first publication, and I didn’t realize until years later the way it had formed a basis for my fifty years of afterlife research. It opened my eyes to a deeper awareness that nothing ever is as it seems. It primed me to accept the evidence that what we experience as human consciousness is universal. And never again, for the rest of my life, have I cut a tomato or grated a carrot without wincing. The fact that such a seminal masterwork which is so fundamental to our understanding of life has been steadfastly ignored by mainstream scientists because it doesn’t fit their predetermined narrative was my first clue that the mainstream science emperor is sadly altogether naked. And that science emperor appears now likely to remain naked, not only for the rest of my life, but perhaps naked even for my children’s and my grandchildren’s lives as well.

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

This discovery that plants are actually conscious still fills me with wonder, to this day. It formed a basis for my research-based awareness that what we experience as consciousness must be primary. There is no other explanation that fits all the evidence! So when I read the ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner, and I found that the greatest of all quantum physicists had decades earlier reached the same conclusions, I had a profound and joyous eureka moment. As the genius quantum physicist Max Planck famously 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.”

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

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

I have been back home in our cozy bow window with my two plant friends for ten days now, which was as long as I had been away from them. Of course I cleaned them up, I got rid of the dead leaves, and since I have returned there has not been even one additional dead leaf on either plant. Not a single sign of stress at all, now that they have their human back, and in fact the tree here beside me has confidently begun to put forth some new baby leaves to replace those that were dropped during its time of crisis while I was away. I can see, too, that the ivy is happily beginning to flower again, for the second time this spring. It occurs to me to wonder whether these plants might have mentally communicated about their sudden loss of their human when I was so abruptly gone? Or do plants of different species unfortunately communicate in different plant-languages? But to answer one question that might perhaps now be occurring to you: No, of course not! Do I look like the kind of person who would give names to plants?

Actually, though, for people and plants to spend our days in close proximity to one another is healthy for all three of us. Plants exhale oxygen, and they breathe in carbon dioxide, while people do the reverse; and it has lately been shown that plants also help to improve indoor air quality in tightly-constructed modern homes. But now I am already beginning to worry about these plants’ mental health when I take my next business trip, even though that is not planned to happen until mid-August. Do you think that I ought to plan to Zoom with them the next time I am away from them? Or perhaps just hearing my voice by phone might be enough to comfort them? Am I starting to sound like a demented plant-lady?

I have never had much of a green thumb, but my mother had a remarkable way with plants. Her house was full of gigantic ferns and big, leafy trees in pots. She had flower gardens every summer, too, each year freshly grown from seeds, and she grew her own vegetables, corn and tomatoes and squash, and cucumbers from which she made the best pickles. I can recall thinking when I was a child that caring for plants looked like too much work, but these two plants have grown to be enormous so quickly, and all on their own. As I think about it in retrospect, my parents simply ran an old tractor to till the soil each spring, and then they stayed ahead of the weeds on weekends until their vegetables could take care of themselves. Perhaps they staked their tomatoes. There was not a lot of work to gardening the way they did it. Texas summers are too hot for growing vegetables, but we drip-irrigate bougainvillea plants each summer in pots in front of my big bow window. So at least these two will have those bougainvilleas to commiserate with through the glass when I am away in August. And maybe also having family members come in and talk to them when I am away the next time might help?

I had never before thought much about the fact that God must dearly love all of God’s green creatures, having made so many of them, and having made all their communities so love-filled and so heart-stoppingly beautiful. Some of these more recent insights about the symbiotic relationships among all our forest friends are making their way into professional forestry practices now, especially in the old-growth forests of Europe, and with results that are shaking up even the most determinedly unsentimental scientific types. The primary problem with mainstream science is that it took a wrong turn into willful materialistic cluelessness more than a century ago, when the scientific community as a whole first refused to accept the great Max Planck’s conclusions about the broader implications of quantum mechanics. But nevertheless, now here we are.

At this point, the best work being done in investigative science is being done not by materialist scientists, who are long since out of ideas, but by more open-minded creationist scientists. I receive the latter’s newsy emails twice each week, and what they have to say is often compelling. After two centuries of floundering, Darwin’s ideas about blind evolution and natural selection are looking more and more nonsensical, while the whole concept of design and a Consciousness-based Designer is making more and much more sense. Here is another video for your viewing pleasure!

We live in a house blessed by dozens of magnificent trees that shared with us our grandchildren’s growing-up. These trees were not much more than saplings in pictures of our next generation as young children, while now they are great oaks and cedar elms. Just because they always made so little fuss, we used to think of green plants as not sentient. But we realize now that these trees probably consider our family to be their own family, since we have lived in this house for the past twenty years. If we ever were to sell our house, they would mourn our loss the way my office plants mourn for me every time I am briefly away, so we have assured our trees that we will be leaving this house to our family’s next generation… which of course is also their own.

To paraphrase an ancient Chinese proverb, green plants hold up half the sky.

The likelihood that not just animals, but also plants are as sentient and as loving as people will rock your world if you allow the full implications of that fact to fully seize your mind! And in the afterlife there is no question about it. The plants there are conscious and extremely loving, and they will reach out and caress you as you walk by. But just look around you now! Look at this whole green and living earth! And look at the stars! Oh my dear friend, every kind of love in all creation is directed toward your own spiritual growth! And even the poor, foolish plants in my office love me, and they keep sadly mourning my repeated and always unexpected loss. And the grass beneath your feet, and the trees that line your driveway, all the vegetation in your life loves you! Oh, what dumb fools we always have been, never to have seen how absolutely, how utterly and overwhelmingly each one of us is so completely loved!

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning.
Born of the one light, Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning.
God’s recreation of the new day.

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
– Eleanor Farjeon (1881-1965), from “Morning has broken” (1931)

Growing Spiritually

Posted on April 22, 2023April 23, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

Amazing grace, how sweet the sound
That saved a wretch like me!
I once was lost, but now I’m found.
Was blind, but now I see.

‘Twas grace that taught my heart to fear,
And grace my fears relieved;
How precious did that grace appear
The hour I first believed.
– John Newman (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

It became apparent to Thomas and me as we were reading blog comments last Sunday that it was time for us to talk again about what growing spiritually actually means. Just a bit of a refresher course, since we haven’t discussed spiritual growth in much detail here in going on five years. And this is such an important topic! Giving people a place to grow spiritually is the reason why this material universe, with its billions of stars and its trillions of planets, even exists in the first place. Growing spiritually is the reason why you chose to be born in that material body to experience all these earthly pains. And teaching you how to better grow spiritually is the reason why Jesus even chose to be born from out of the Godhead two thousand earth-years ago. So you might quite justifiably say that this is the most important topic that anyone ever might conceivably choose to write about, hands-down.

As we said last week, Consciousness is all that exists. It is, as we said then, both the Sculptor and the stone on which that Sculptor works. And Consciousness exists in a range of emotion-based vibrations, from fear at the lowest and slowest vibration to perfect love at the highest and most rapid vibration. At its very highest vibration, Consciousness is what Jesus called the Father. It is the ultimate High God. Every human mind is a part of Consciousness, and exists somewhere along that continuum. And so, very simply put, spiritual growth consists in raising your personal spiritual vibration away from fear and more toward perfect love in the most efficient way possible. Of course, your personal spiritual vibration is going to vary in the course of a day. But its resting vibration, the set point to which it will naturally keep returning, can be raised if you will make the effort. And it is raising that set point as much as possible that you are eagerly bent upon doing when you and your primary spirit guide draw up your plan for spiritual growth in this lifetime.

Why can’t you simply resolve to grow spiritually when you are at home in the astral plane, so you can thereby avoid the need to live any more of these stressful lifetimes on earth? It turns out that growing spiritually is very much like exercising what amount to spiritual muscles. We cannot do it just by thinking about it. We have to do it by acting on it. Love and fear are not just theoretical forces! So in order to learn how the difference between love and fear actually feels in practice, how to cleave to the one and to push against the other, we come to this material universe, which is a place where we can experience that difference firsthand. Craig Hogan calls this planet Earth School, while I think of it more as a spiritual gym. But really, just one very stressful lifetime in which you can experience what it is all about should do it for you. You come here, you follow Jesus’s teachings as best you can, you raise your personal spiritual vibration to the upper fifth level of the astral plane with the help of some awful fear-based earth-experiences, and then you can cease incarnating on the earth forevermore. After that, your further spiritual growth can happen in the upper fifth and the sixth levels of the astral plane. So it is flat astonishing to me to realize that estimates have it that most of us have lived anywhere from several dozens to literally hundreds of lifetimes on earth!

How can we possibly be such dullards? Even given that we come back to earth with amnesia for the reason why we are here, you would think that we would keep some vestigial subconscious memory after a while that would make our learning just a little bit easier? After all, it is possible for you and me to get all the way to the top of level five, and past the need to incarnate again, in a single lifetime!

You can accomplish the requisite spiritual growth using Eastern spiritual techniques. But those methods generally require meditation, chanting, and other transformational processes that can take considerable time and a lot of personal commitment on your part, and they can sometimes take years before you notice measurable results in your life. By far the easiest method for Westerners to use is the one that Jesus taught, which feels familiar to people with a Christian background and is remarkably self-reinforcing, and which amazingly can show you noticeable effects in your life within a few months’ time. Very briefly, here it is again:

Gratitude. Jesus didn’t make a big deal of gratitude in the Gospel teachings that survive, but He did imply it. And beginning with gratitude greases your wheels for the heavier lifting of forgiveness, which comes next. Simply buy a blank booklet, and every morning write down one thing for which you are grateful, and also write down why you are grateful for it. No duplicates. For the first few months, this will be easy! By month four, though, if you take this exercise seriously, you will be down to keeping lists of random things that you still have not been grateful for, and worrying on the afternoon before each morning about how you can sincerely express your gratitude for things like ants and mosquitoes, or for your neighbor’s dog that barks at night.
Forgiveness. The entire key to raising your personal spiritual vibration is to learn prevenient forgiveness. Once you have forgiven everything before it even happens – and please trust me on this – you will already be approaching vibrational level five, because nothing ever will bother you again. In addition, forgiveness is great for your health! This entire process is better explained in The Fun of Growing Forever. And it is so simple. You just trick your lazy mind into no longer caring when someone does you wrong through the use of “forgiveness balls.” Set aside a few weeks to get the retraining process well started, and keep using it until forgiveness for you is entirely prevenient and automatic. Until then, whenever anything needs to be forgiven and your forgiveness process is not yet automatic, you simply gather whatever might be bothering you at all with big sweeps of your arms, including all the people involved and including yourself as well, and you squash it all down into a nice tight bundle with your hands, and then you slowly push that whole bundle away with both hands as you say aloud, “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.” Still not feeling that all of it has been completely forgiven? Then you just do it all again. You are retraining your mind to never again in your life ever resent anything! And believe me, this really works. When someone recently defrauded my husband and me out of hundreds of thousands of dollars, which was most of our retirement savings, I forgave both the criminal and the loss at once and without a thought. No forgiveness ball was even needed.
Love. Loving more and more as you master forgiveness is just your natural state. Try to help it along, but it will require little added effort on your part. As your spiritual vibration rises, though, one of the things that you might notice will be that you seem to be loving everyone more equally. I thought at first that I was losing some of my love for those closest to me, but that wasn’t it. No, it was more that my feelings for perfect strangers were coming close to approaching the way that I felt about even my cherished family members. I could look at a stranger’s face and love that stranger, care about her needs, feel compassion for him as I never had before. It was beautiful, and it was amazing to begin to see strangers as individual people and not as wallpaper! It was oddly alarming, too, because to care so much about strangers made me feel responsible for them now, as I never before had felt responsible for strangers. I learned to control those new feelings with time, which was a relief. But seeing people as I had begun to see people made me briefly see them all much more the way that Thomas tells me that Jesus always has seen people. Jesus sees each individual person as a cherished object of His personal love.

Spiritual growth is governed by simple Consciousness physics. Scientists have never been able to define Consciousness at all. More than a decade ago, before I ever knew Thomas, I began to wondered what Consciousness even was, since no good definition of it was to be found. Then from somewhere – I know now that it must have come from Thomas – but from out of nowhere came what is the best definition of Consciousness that we are likely to find. Thomas said in my mind, “Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware.” I thought, Wow!

Our minds are all part of that one Consciousness, so we are eternal by definition. Furthermore, because we all share a single Consciousness, as each of us raises our own Consciousness vibration within that whole, we each will minutely raise the Consciousness vibrations of all the other people on the face of the earth. It has been estimated that if only ten percent of the people on earth were to perfect themselves vibrationally, we could materially begin to raise the vibrations of this entire planet out of the fear-based danger zone where the population of the earth is at present. By removing more of the barriers to love’s awareness in the world, we can materially help to turn things around, very much as a bubble of air will rise in water toward the light.

All the divisions among people that we imagine are there are completely artificial, anyway. And this is especially true of all our perceived racial divisions! There is much more genetic diversity within the continent of Africa than there is between East Africans and Europeans, who began to lose the melanin in our skin via a set of genes that were introduced into Europe from the Ural Mountains less than eight thousand years ago, so recently that civilization had by then already begun. Europe was largely populated by East African migrants less than ten thousand years ago, as the last ice age ended. In fact, human beings almost went extinct altogether so very recently that every person on earth is descended from two common ancestors, a male and a female, who lived in Botswana less than 200,000 years ago.

So every human being on the face of the earth is your own close cousin. We all belong quite literally to a single extended African family. Yes, our lack of understanding of what spiritual growth is and why it is so important has allowed us to feel free to do terrible things to one another. Humanity’s past has been horrible in just about every generation since civilization began. And if we don’t begin to change course soon, it seems pretty clear that our future is likely to be even worse than our past has been. But the wonderful truth is that we know now for certain that there is no barrier to our uniting every member of the human family in the joy of literal familial love. All of us are members of a single family! And we know now that there is no barrier to our living as a single family. But only our universal spiritual growth can accomplish this ultimate goal. No worldwide government clumsily attempting to impose some sort of unity from above can do anything but to make our present problems even worse. You and I alone possess the power to uplift and unite the world. And the fastest way to make that happen will be for us to make our individual spiritual growth our first priority.

The Gospel teachings of Jesus are the simplest and most effective method for achieving rapid spiritual growth that ever has been devised. As I note in The Fun of Growing Forever, strictly following the teachings of Jesus can substantially raise your own spiritual vibration, beginning in a matter of months, and without the need for you to meditate, do yoga, chant, find a guru, or really do much of anything beyond using those teachings to reprogram your easily-reprogrammed mind. The Gospel teachings do this by removing the barriers to love’s awareness, since as soon as those barriers are gone, your level of consciousness rises naturally toward ever greater love as a bubble will rise through water toward the light.

Spiritual growth toward love and away from fear feels wonderful! Perhaps the best thing about the Gospel teachings of Jesus is that when you follow them and begin to feel their positive effects, those teachings are remarkably self-reinforcing. The key for me was to learn the easy trick of forgiving in advance every negative thing that might happen in the whole rest of my life. Resentments and angers of every kind are very low-vibration emotions, so they act as negative ballast. That was why when Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). It is essential that you get rid of every one of your angers and resentments, no matter how small, since they can keep your consciousness vibrating at the lower end of its range. Get rid of your every impulse toward anger, and soon you will have risen spiritually to such a level that nothing ever will bother you again.

Which is a big reason why growing spiritually makes you so happy! Even if you don’t feel a pressing need to raise this planet’s consciousness vibration before humankind altogether self-destructs, and even if you aren’t thinking about trying to achieve a higher afterlife level, the little effort that growing spiritually will take you is going to reward you richly, and pretty much right away. It gives you a life removed altogether from stresses, a kindly feeling for each new face, and perhaps above all a certainty that you yourself are supremely and eternally loved. Whatever it is that you think you are seeking, growing spiritually is going to help you find it.

Our frame-verse was written by a slave trader who was miraculously saved from a storm at sea, and he promptly gave up his former occupation and became an ardent abolitionist. John Newman saw the light of truth, but to this day materialist scientists remain stubbornly clueless. It is both sad and silly that even despite important insights given to them by the likes of Max Planck and Albert Einstein and other great twentieth-century physicists, the scientific community at large still refuses to accept the fact that all our minds are part of one vast eternal Mind. The scientific community remains so willfully brain-dead that even though they still cannot even begin to define Consciousness, they are currently spending a billion dollars trying to find a source for whatever Consciousness might be inside the human brain. But that clueless level of scientific folly need not hamper you and me! We know that we are eternal beings, and we are invited by Jesus Himself to live now, even while we are still on earth, in the perfect eternal peace of God. As Moses said almost 3500 years ago, “the eternal God is a dwelling place, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27).

Through many dangers, toils, and snares
I have already come.
‘Twas grace that brought me safe thus far,
And grace will lead me home.

When we’ve been here ten thousand years,
Bright, shining as the sun,
We’ve no less days to sing God’s praise
Than when we’d first begun.
– John Newman (1725-1807), from “Amazing Grace” (1779)

Beliefs-Free Spirituality

Posted on April 15, 2023April 16, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

There was a time in my life
I thought I had to do it all myself
And I didn’t know the grace of God was sufficient
And I didn’t know the love of God was at hand

But now I can say
If you are discouraged
Struggling just to make it through another day
You got to let it go, let it all go
And this is what you have to say

CHORUS:
I release and I let go
I let the Spirit run my life
And my heart is open wide
Yes it’s only up to God

No more struggle, no more strife
With my faith I see the light
I am free in the Spirit
Yes it’s only up to God
– Michael Gott, “I Release and I Let Go” (1990)

It seems apparent now that Jesus is preparing to take a more active earthly role. You might say that He is about to “Return.” But Thomas will never ask Jesus any of my questions about what He might be planning to do, because he tells me that mine are not the sorts of questions that Jesus is ever going to answer for people who are in earthly bodies. So other than noticing the revivals on college campuses, the “He Gets Us” ad campaign and the surprisingly successful movies and TV series, I have no idea what Jesus might be doing or about to do. Thomas does say, though, that Jesus never would do anything that could affect the earth by much, even in a positive way.

People have been looking for Jesus’s Second Coming for centuries. But Thomas believes that Jesus has been sufficiently distant from the earth for so long that the term “Second Coming” is meaningless to Him. It comes from the the Biblical Book of Revelation, which of course was written after His death. But apparently what Jesus is focused on doing is just what He began to do two thousand earth-years ago. He wants to begin again to teach those now living on earth how to perfect themselves spiritually, so every dear person on the face of the earth can achieve the Godhead level as soon as possible. Now that the religion will soon be out of the way and no longer coming between us and Jesus, Thomas tells me that Jesus wants to get back to doing the love-based teaching that is dear to His heart.

We are used to associating religions with spirituality, but in fact the two are polar opposites. There is no religion that can give us much, or even give us any spiritual help at all, but instead religions are human-made artifacts from an early stage of humankind’s development. Even the concept of religions is a fear-based hangover. When primitive people had no way to comprehend the reality in which they found themselves, which was cold and dark and full of terrors, people self-protectively invented gods that might be able to protect them. Those gods became more and more real to them as the ages passed, ever bigger and more elaborate. And as their human-created gods grew in people’s minds, those gods demanded from the people they were supposed to be protecting ever-fancier rituals and ever-greater sacrifices. But at least they allowed people to feel that they were gaining some illusory sense of control. And the shamans of those early religions were the earliest human manipulators and rulers: if you were someone who could speak for the gods, then you held a lot of power. And every modern religion can be traced back to those first stone-age religions in an unbroken line. They all worked the same way. They all were based in worshiping gods who created the world, and created us, and who made demands of us in return. So then eventually we got Moloch, who demanded the sacrifice of infants into his fiery belly; and then the YHWH of the Hebrews; and then the Christian God. Fear of what was unknowable, and sacrifices that were demanded in exchange for protection, have been at the core of every god to this day.

There can be no creation without a Creator. Something cannot have come from nothing. And although officially materialist science still insists that our reality must have begun in a Big Bang of something arising from nothing, a few scientists with more sense than the rest did discover in the twentieth century that in fact there is indeed a creative force. Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, found that Consciousness underlies everything. And it is legitimate for us to capitalize that word now, since our friend Max learned that Consciousness is indeed the base creative force. Max Planck thereby discovered the genuine God. 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.”

And now, thanks to Dr. Planck’s great insight, we have come to know so very much more! You live inside one great illusion, and you have no memory of ever having lived outside of it. No less a leading scientific light than Albert Einstein told us that this universe is indeed one heck of an illusion, but an illusion is indeed what it is. And it is important that you begin to see this illusion frankly, so then at last you will be able to begin to focus some of your attention on the much greater wonders that lie beyond it. My precious friend, you are so much more than you can possibly imagine!

Consciousness is everything that exists. It is the sculptor, and it is the stone. It is both the dancer and the dance. And since the Consciousness that is all that exists is a form of energy, Consciousness vibrates. It is governed by what we experience as emotion – go figure! – and at its lowest and slowest vibratory rate, Consciousness is highly negative, and it is governed by all the ishy emotions, like fear and rage; while at its highest vibratory rate, Consciousness is gorgeous and positive and it is governed by what we experience as perfect love. This is our objective reality that we are talking about here! It is the same objective reality that scientists busily study with their whiteboards full of mathematical equations.

THIS IS OUR REALITY. This is the ultra-super-solid reality that scientists assume has got to be just chock-full of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Or at least, you know, gluons. Or something. Doesn’t that solid reality even exist? Well, not really. Not so much. What scientists used to believe were solid particles are actually just miniscule vortices of energy. If the nucleus of an atom were the White House, where it is and the size that it is, its closest orbiting electron could be as far away as Denver. They would both be just vortices of energy. And there would be nothing whatsoever between them. Please just sit quietly for a moment and let all of this truly sink in. All of it is energy-like Consciousness. And it is all governed by what you and I experience as emotion.

Jesus said, “Whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted to him. Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you” (MK 11:22-24). And now you can understand why Jesus was perfectly right.

Jesus also said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship Him in Spirit and in Truth” (JN 4:24). And understanding, as you do now, that the genuine God is the highest aspect of Consciousness, and further understanding, as you also do now, that the highest aspect of Consciousness is perfect love, again you can see how, even two thousand years ago, again Jesus was perfectly right.

So at this point, and until it abandons its century-old materialist dogma which never made any sense to begin with, science seems to be in as much of a counterproductive blind alley as are all the human-made religions. We have talked before about the fact that materialist science has turned itself into just another beliefs-based religion. Science will continue to provide us with all our various useful electronic toys for daily living, our personal computers and cars and phones that have been vastly improving our lives over the past century and a quarter. But until mainstream science abandons the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism that it put into place more than a century ago to protect its physicists from ever inadvertently finding God, there will be no more fundamental scientific discoveries about reality forthcoming. So for our purposes, we can simply ignore science, just as we are ignoring religions.

No matter how solid it might look, and no matter how coldly clockwork-driven our reality might seem to us to be, all of this reality is, as Albert Einstein told us that it was, simply one gigantic illusion. And you and I find ourselves on our own with Jesus in this entirely beliefs-free and Consciousness-based illusory reality within a greater reality where we are able to see and understand the truth for what it is. We know that science can be of no help to us here, and all the religions are dying after the end of what has been a very long run of something like two hundred thousand years. We have no more need for any of it now, since at last we have found, and we so completely trust and adore the genuine Consciousness-based God. And we have various spiritual teachers who are able to help us to directly raise our personal spiritual vibrations away from the low and fear-based vibratory Consciousness range and toward the higher, love-based range of Consciousness. For many people willing to put forth a bit of effort, it will not be difficult to go most or even all of the way to the Godhead level in a single lifetime.

There are of course the various Eastern spiritual traditions on offer. They involve meditation, chanting, breathwork, and even altered states of Consciousness, and for Westerners they take some time and effort to learn and to perform; but they generally can work very well indeed. However, for most people who were reared in Christianity, turning to Jesus in an effort to grow spiritually really does feel like coming home. And the teachings of Jesus as they are preserved in the Biblical Gospels are the simplest and most effective method for growing spiritually that ever has been devised. Gratitude, forgiveness, and love, in that order. It is just a literal piece of cake. Oh, Jesus puts a fancier spin on those teachings, He makes it feel like wisdom to follow them, and He offers some tricks to make them easier to learn; but basically, that is all they are. And when you put your mind to it, the teachings of Jesus can begin to transform you spiritually in just a few months’ time.

The greatest wonder about the teachings of Jesus to me is that Jesus knew all of this two thousand years ago. It is quite literally as if a modern man had been transported back in time! But of course, Jesus was born from out of the timeless Godhead. And Jesus is more than God’s emissary. He is the genuine God in human form, come to dwell among the people of that ancient day so He could seek to better understand them and then teach them on their level and on their own terms. God among us, born in that ancient day, and the greatest Teacher who has ever lived.

And now Jesus is coming back to us as our Teacher once again. Not on a white horse and brandishing a sword, but apparently first of all in the hearts of the very young. He will tell us nothing of His plans, but that only adds to the excitement and the joy of it. And so we wait together now in wonder for that ultimate Christmas morning….

The Miracle of Jesus

Posted on April 8, 2023April 30, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

Christ the Lord is ris’n today, Alleluia!
Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heav’ns, and earth, reply, Alleluia!

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788) from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)

I can remember what it was like to be afraid to die. I was terrified of death when I was a child. Even after my experience of light, which is forever vivid in my mind, all through my childhood I always was fearing my potential imminent demise. And so I sympathize with Jesus now, thinking of Him so often telling the crowds that were following Him and hanging on His every word that their lives were going to be eternal. He kept trying to find a way to convince them that they truly never were going to die.

But Jesus faced a tough situation. The custom in that time and place was to lay out the dead in caves to decay until only their bones and nothing more would be left. And then the bones would be collected into bone-boxes, called ossuaries, which would be marked with the decedent’s name. Which was why the people of Jesus’s day, very much like my fearful little childhood self, always were especially afraid to die. Don’t try to convince us that we don’t die, Jesus. We love you, sir, but we have seen death first hand.

People and animals that are very rare overachievers are sometimes called “sports.” Secretariat was a sport. No other horse could run as fast as Secretariat could run, and none of his descendants has ever come close to matching Secretariat’s rate of speed. It is pretty clear now that Jesus, too, is a sport, and to an extreme degree. Jesus has a vast, all-encompassing, and uncontrollable love for His fellow man. My Thomas, who has known Jesus for what we calculate has been about six thousand years since he and what was then his little brother lived their last earth-lifetime together, tells me that Jesus has always been this way. It is a trait that Thomas considers to be uncomfortably freakish perhaps, but endearing.

It was Jesus’s obsessive love for His fellow man that drove just a normal perfected Being to insist on reincarnating from out of the Godhead. As soon as the Being who one day would be Jesus discovered that He had landed at the seventh level, the Godhead level, as a natural extreme overachiever in love, He was demanding that His own earthly brothers from that ancient lifetime, plus everyone else that He ever had known, also had to arrive there, too. And right away. Nothing less would satisfy Him. Jesus was determined from out of His pure and obsessive love for people to help everyone else to achieve what He had achieved! As soon as He Himself was perfected, He wanted to reincarnate on earth right now in order to figure out how it was that He had perfected Himself spiritually. And then He wanted to teach that same process to everyone. Apparently it took Jesus some four thousand earth-years to convince the celestial bureaucracies to allow Him to do what never before had been done by anyone, which was to reincarnate from out of the Godhead Itself. But He was persistent. He would not be denied. His overwhelming love for people was implacable.

And now His Jesus lifetime was nearly completed. He had done what He had come to earth to do. He had learned what He had set out to learn, He had taught what He had come to earth to teach, and like everyone who comes here and completes a life-plan, Jesus was ready to re-enter the greater reality, but at the Godhead level. For most of us, it is our higher consciousness that chooses to take our next planned exit point; but of course, Jesus always had been aware of who He was and what He had come to earth to do. Unlike us, He had no pre-birth amnesia, so He knew that His sojourn on earth was not the whole of His life. But His pesky, sport-level, obsessive love for people was at that point really tripping Him up. His earthly followers would not believe Him when He told them that their lives were eternal. And He could not bear to leave them until they were convinced that their lives were never going to end. You can actually see some bits of these conversations playing out in the Biblical Gospels that survive.

And so, as Jesus told me when Thomas took me to meet with Him a year ago, that was when He began to think about how He might demonstrate to them this fundamental truth of every human life. A public death that then is demonstrably reversed – “Ta-DAH!” – might conceivably do the trick. Jesus had been experimenting with reviving small dead animals. And he had been able to do that, although they never had remained alive for long. He did think, though, that once He got His dead body going again, and He was back inside it, that He would be able to keep it going. When He said this to me, I know I visibly winced. Ick! He wanted to get back inside His dead body? And as it turned out, you can see from the Gospel accounts that His revived body was already decaying and fragile by the time He was back inside it. And of course, it likely would not have had blood circulating again – it would not actually have been alive – so He very soon discarded it, and He took to using an astral body for the few weeks that He remained on earth before His Ascension. This is another detail that is apparent in the Gospel accounts, if you look for it.

And that is the truly extraordinary thing about the whole Easter story. It is not just a story. It actually happened. And the fact that it actually happened is something that is now a fact beyond all dispute. For most of my life, I have assumed that the Shroud of Turin was a likely fake. And while I loved the Gospels, I have always thought that we had to take the historical Jesus mostly on faith. That was all okay by me, natural skeptic that I am, because I knew that after two thousand years it was going to be the best that we could get. I had spent the decades of the eighties and nineties deep in researching death and the afterlife, and finding so much excellent evidence that by the turn of this century, the fearful child that I long ago had been finally knew for certain that we survive our deaths. It was at about that time, too, that I discovered that Jesus had talked in the Gospels about some of those afterlife details. Which made me wonder whether the vast trove of afterlife literature that we had accumulated by then might be a way for us to do some cross-checking and help us find and come to know the historical Jesus.

There are now more than eight billion people on earth. And it strains my imagination to believe that I am the only one of them who is simultaneously a Gospels scholar and an afterlife expert. However, for now that does seem to be the case. But this knowledge combination is highly useful! Who else would get what Jesus meant when He talked about “living water,” for example? Or the “many mansions” in His Father’s house, and the fact that He would be coming to the death scenes of each of His Apostles to lead them home? (And unfortunately, not even one of those Apostles was going to die a natural death.) There was one extraordinary day at the end of the nineties when I read just the Gospels and realized that the historical Jesus and the afterlife evidence could in fact validate one another.

For someone who cannot help being a skeptic, faith is thin gruel. In retrospect, I can see now that I had faith back then, sure, but I barely actually believed in Jesus. I first met Him on that rainy Saturday at the end of the nineties when my afterlife knowledge and my decision to sit down one day and read just the Gospels apart from the rest of the Bible made me realize that Jesus knew some things two thousand years ago that the afterlife evidence could validate. And then came the news that a more intensive scientific study of the Shroud of Turin was suggesting that it was likely genuine. Then in 2015, Thomas insisted that I channel Liberating Jesus, so I had Jesus in my mind for two weeks. And that was an intimate, unforgettable experience. The difference between Master Jesus inside my mind and moving my hands, and then Master Jesus gone again is something that I never will forget. And then, with no prior warning at all, came April 6, 2022.

I have blogged here extensively about that night, and about the amazing summer nights spent with Jesus and Thomas that followed it. What I never before had known was that my own spirit guide has been Jesus’s close personal friend for the past six thousand earth-years, since long before Jesus ever was Jesus. Thomas tells me now that I also am a part of Jesus’s inner circle when I am not in a material body, although that is something that I cannot even imagine. But nevertheless, Jesus spoke to me on that April night almost exactly one year ago today as if we were old friends. He seemed perplexed and a bit frustrated that I acted as if I was meeting the most gigantic rock star for the very first time. He told me that night the tale of His personal history, so now at last it can be publicly known. (It is posted on teachingsbyJesus.com under “Reincarnation.”) Because the thing about loving people the way Jesus loves people is that He wants to be thought of as only normal. He finds being worshiped and idolized as He is today extremely off-putting. And He wanted me to finally publish The Fun of Loving Jesus, which Thomas and I had written three years earlier; He asked me to launch seekreality.com, which was then already in development. He also asked me to create teachingsbyjesus.com, which I thought was a wonderful idea. And for me to go from actually meeting Jesus and discovering that Oh my goodness! He’s really real! to having all these marching orders from Him, all at once on a single night, was an earth-shaking experience from which I still have not entirely recovered.

For those who might be wondering, I do think that this is how it begins. Gently, and moving first in the hearts of the young. One of the Christian bloggers that I more or less follow tells us that Biblically there were two thousand earth-years from Adam to Abraham, and two thousand earth-years from Abraham to Christ, so there should be two thousand earth-years from Christ to Christ’s Second Coming. And therefore, here we are. It was very important to Jesus that we first prepare seekreality.com as a place where people can go to learn that their lives are eternal. Teaching that truth still matters very much to Him. And then teaching His own truths, shorn of Paul’s letters and the Emperor Constantine’s fear-based dogmas, which is what teachingsbyjesus.com is all about. Yes, I do believe that what is beginning now is Jesus’s long-anticipated Second Coming. All these college revivals. The Chosen. Jesus Revolution. He Gets Us. How did you think that Jesus would be coming back? Riding in on a white horse and brandishing a flaming sword is simply not His style. But He easily has the power to move on millions of individual minds and hearts at once, and to inspire people to spend money and to do things for Him. So He is beginning to do that now. All in His way, and all in His time. It may take a century or three, and it may happen so gradually that it will be obvious to the world only in long retrospect. But yes, I do believe that Jesus is now beginning His long-awaited return to the world.

So there back then was Jesus, about to attempt to carry out His demonstration. He delivered Himself up to be crucified, and He had planned it all out carefully. A normal crucifixion was a slow and agonizing death by asphyxiation that could take a day or two, since the victim would keep pushing up with his legs in order to breathe; but Jesus was crucified on a Friday, so He and the two that were crucified with Him were going to have to die before the Sabbath began that evening. Whether there was poison in the mixed water and vinegar that was given to Him in the sponge that was lifted to his mouth will never be known, but it would not have been needed. Jesus could simply have willed His own death. He needed to be able to revive a usable body that would be able to walk, so He died within three hours, before the soldiers would need to come by and break His legs in order to make it harder for Him to breathe and thereby hasten His demise. His body was laid out in Joseph of Arimathea’s new tomb, ostensibly to begin to decay away. And as the third morning after Jesus’s death dawned, He re-entered that body and re-animated it with a burst of energy so powerful that scientists tell us that even today, they would have no way to duplicate it. If Jesus had not managed to successfully carry out His dramatic rising-from-the-dead demonstration, you and I would likely not now know His name, a whole two thousand earth-years later. But as it is, Jesus is still the first or second most famous name on every list of modern famous names.

Jesus is indeed fully God and fully Man. And He is still very much alive! But the fear-based religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine invented three centuries after that first Easter morning is dying an apparently necessary death so Jesus can at last return. And as it fades away, we are coming to know at last the genuine Jesus! That He began His life so long ago as one of us, a fully human life, while at the same time out of His extraordinarily zealous love for people He has grown spiritually to beyond even the Godhead’s power is as unfathomable to us as it is beautiful to contemplate. And Jesus is returning to us now, free at last of all religions, and wanting only to be loved by us as completely as each of us is loved by Him.

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia!
Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia!
Foll’wing our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788) from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)

Palm Sunday

Posted on April 1, 2023April 2, 2023 by Roberta Grimes

I am weak but Thou art strong.
Jesus, keep me from all wrong.
I’ll be satisfied as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee.

Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– Traditional, from “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (1800s)

The more carefully I have studied the Gospel teachings of Jesus, the more obvious it has become to me that Jesus must have come not to start a new religion, but instead He came to abolish all religions and teach us to relate to God individually. And the fact that no other Gospels scholar ever seems to have seen this fact is astonishing to me now, when Jesus’s whole plan of action is so slap-your-forehead plain in His words. For example, He said things like, “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 6:5-6).

And Jesus despised religious traditions! He was forever saying things like, “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, “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 tradition” (MK 7:8-9). A careful and open-minded reader of the Gospels cannot avoid concluding that Jesus considers religions to be mere man-made constructs that only come between us and God. Religions do little to facilitate our relationship with God, but instead they just get in the way. It is nonsensical to imagine that Someone who talks this way is here to start just one more religion! No, indeed. By His very words, one of Jesus’s goals on earth can only have been to abolish religions altogether.

All the rest of Jesus’s teachings are profoundly spiritual, primarily individual, and centered on love and forgiveness. The question of how Jesus says that we should be living our spiritual lives is really another matter, and I have been fretting about that, to be frank, because I think He is calling us now to do two contradictory things at once. Somehow, we are to individually relate to God in community. Isn’t that what He is actually saying? We have been calling this conundrum “Future Church,” And the sweet, enigmatic Jesus of today seems to be able to wrap His mind around doing that just fine. But I cannot imagine how we are going to do it so easily.

Christian revivals have been enveloping many college campuses this spring, ever since early February. They are hitting mainly historically black colleges in recent weeks, sweeping across the southern states with an enigmatic and inexorable force that we can only watch and wonder about. This hasn’t happened in fifty years. But, why now?

Repeatedly in the Gospels, Jesus tells us to look to the young. He says that we will accept the kingdom of God with the open mind of a child, or we won’t be able to accept it at all. And I have trouble seeing that, since on the surface at least, Jesus’s words are so straightforward. I think that most people find their Bibles intimidating primarily because the book is so thick! So then, you simply buy a red-letter Bible. And if most of the printing in your Bible is not in red, then you know that you don’t need to read those parts of it. You don’t even need to read all the red, since the First Council of Nicaea added some things to the Gospels that Jesus never said. With practice, you can learn to spot and avoid all those suspect later additions. So then, once you have your red-letter Bible in hand, your spiritual life can be just you and Jesus. Just those four Gospels that you can read in one long evening while seated in a comfortable chair. And the best friend you have in all this world will gladly share your ever-richer spiritual life.

Today is Palm Sunday. Today we commemorate the day when Jesus rode into Jerusalem on a donkey to celebrate the Passover and allow Himself to be arrested and crucified so He could die a very public death, and three days later He could rise from the dead – “Ta-DA!” – in order to prove to us that death is an illusion and human life is eternal. Of course, that is not the way that Christians understand Palm Sunday. But that is the way that Jesus described the purpose of His death and resurrection to me almost a year ago today. So now I consider Palm Sunday to be the perfect day for each of us to respond to a precious call from Jesus to begin a closer spiritual walk with Him.

And I cannot stress to you strongly enough the fact that when you are ready to get serious about growing spiritually, you will need to tidy up your mind. Most of us have a private part of our mind where we think all sorts of embarrassing thoughts and fantasies, and a public part of our mind where we are prepared to receive our most exalted guests. Indeed, we would not mind at all having God and Jesus see everything that is going on in the public part of our mind! I used to think that way as well, but please stop kidding yourself. God sees everything. Jesus sees everything. Your spirit guide sees every part of your mind, every shabby thing that you ever might think, so it really is time now to clean up your act in every conceivable way. You came into this lifetime to grow spiritually. And now, at last, it finally is time to pull out all the stops! To eliminate every bit of negativity from your life, you should:

Stop watching television. I did this twenty years ago, and it is incredible what a positive difference it has made! Now I get my news from news websites in a few quick doses, and my evening time is all my own.
Restrict your movie-watching to benign oldies. I did see Avatar. The Downton Abbey series. Pride and Prejudice. But otherwise, I have not seen any movie or TV series that was made in at least the past twenty-five years.
No videogames, either. I was never into videogames, but if you still are, then it is long past time for you to stop zapping things for the stupid fun of it.
Cultivate only peaceful, happy, and loving thoughts. One of the things that watching television used to do to me was to fill my mind with negativity each night. Politics and the us-vs.-them of world geopolitics is all stressful, and it makes your spiritual growth almost impossible. What may be even worse, I think, is that it turns your mind into a kind of loaded gun full of negativity that you can aim at all the people and situations on the edges of your personal life. I can recall what it was like to listen to office and neighborhood gossip. But, never again.

Once your mind is a sufficiently tidy place that you can welcome God and Jesus into all of it, then simply do that. What I did was to imagine opening up the top of my head, and thereafter I have imagined that it has been wide open all the time. I call it living with an open prayerline, so every thought that I ever have is being actively shared. This is a kind of ultimate surrender that you may not feel prepared to do, but since I gave my life to God in April of 2009, and I have renewed that gift to God on every day since, it feels right to me now. And you quickly get used to this feeling that God is always in on your most private thoughts. You don’t even need to police your thoughts. They police themselves.

There is a profound joy to be found in at last getting down to doing the genuine spiritual work for which you were born. As I say, I first got serious about doing this only in 2009, when I had already reached retirement age, so I was a latecomer to this process. If you are younger than that, then you are at a wonderful advantage! Now you and God can get serious about your spiritual growth, and you can do it with a sense that this really can be your last necssary earth lifetime.

You might begin with the teachingsbyjesus.com thought for the day. We are circulating a month’s worth of thoughts by Jesus there now that are worth meditating upon. You might sit with that thought and consider it with Jesus. Perhaps open your Bible and read the red letters around it in context. And since today is the Sunday before Easter, you might especially reflect today on Jesus’s real reason for going to the cross for us, which had nothing to do with sin and redemption and everything to do with proving to us that our lives really are eternal. And He did it out of His pure love for people. As my Thomas so often tells me, there has never been anyone else ever born who has loved people the way his little brother loves people.

Death on a cross is a ghastly way to die. There have been theories that because Jesus was pure, because He was God, He didn’t suffer. Which is a nonsense idea! Jesus’s physical body went through the ordeal of crucifixion, the flogging and the nails and the hours of hanging on the cross in terrible pain through the slow ordeal of asphyxiation. And Jesus was well aware on Palm Sunday of what He was about to go through for His pure love of people. The Christian notion that Jesus was required by God to be a sin-sacrifice to God never made much sense, but we can forget all that now. As Jesus Himself explained to me, what He did for His pure love of people was all His own idea. God did not require it of Him. Instead, Jesus had never been able to convince His followers that our lives are eternal; and so, all unbeknownst to them, they were about to get a powerful demonstration. And Jesus was indeed born from the Godhead. He had been protected by invisible archangels all His life, but He was about to order them to allow Him to be arrested. We will talk more about His crucifixion and resurrection next week.

What would you be willing to do for the people you love most? For your mother? Or for your children? Would you be willing to go to the cross for them? Allow yourself to be publicly humiliated, crowned with thorns, flogged with multi-thonged, shard-tipped whips that cut pieces out of you with every blow, and then hung stark naked on a cross for hours until you can finally die? And men being crucified hang there with erections as their blood settles in the pelvis. They don’t depict those on the church crucifixes. It is no wonder that Jesus was in some distress in the Garden of Gethsemane as He awaited His arrest! But His love for people is such that He was steadfast in His determination to do this public demonstration.

My beloveds, this is yet another way to define love. Jesus had seen crucifixions, so He knew what was about to happen, but that was not His primary focus. What was most important to Him was that His doing this would be public enough, and it would be dramatic enough, that everyone would know at the end of it that He was really stone-cold dead. So then when He appeared again, alive, He thought that would be sufficient proof to His followers that they truly never would die. When He told me a year ago how He had planned it, not certain that it would work but determined to try it anyway, as He talked about it, and as I heard the quiet conviction in His voice, I am freshly amazed as I remember it now. Dying on a cross and then rising from the dead doesn’t seem to be something that you just decide to give your very best shot. But that was what Jesus did. He had experimented with reanimating dead animals successfully. He really thought that He could make this work. I do love listening to Jesus talk! He has a soft voice when He is speaking privately, and a bit of an accent that is unguessable. And He had very carefully thought this through. He was enjoying talking about it with me, and I cannot help smiling now, recalling hearing Jesus actually telling me how well He had planned His crucifixion and His resurrection. Who else on earth has such a memory?

But what strikes me now, and most of all, is what an amazing display of love this was! He didn’t have to do it at all. God never required or even asked it of Him, and in fact Jesus gave me the sense on that extraordinary night almost one year ago today that in escaping the protection of His archangels as He did, and dying in such an undignified way, He was defying the Godhead’s authority. But He loves people so much that He could not bear to leave those ignorant primitives and simply go home while they still were unable to believe what He had been telling them about eternal life. He had to find a way to prove it to them! And then, my dear ones, amazingly, Jesus even left that scorch on the Shroud of Turin as a gift to us that was going to make sense only when it was revealed to be a photographic negative almost two thousand years later. There truly is no greater love than the absolutely overwhelming love that Jesus, the Son of God and the Son of Man, the eternally risen Christ has for people!

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more.
Guide me gently, safely o’er.
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– Traditional, from “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (1800s)

Roberta Grimes

Author: Roberta Grimes

The Road Not Taken

Miracles

What Are We? (#3)

What Are We? (#2)

What Are We? (#1)

Plant Love

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