Author: Roberta Grimes

Finding God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
Richard Mullan & Al Hibbler (1915-2001), from “He” (1954)

Having faith in God can be a pretty thin gruel. I know that, because for most of my life I have had trouble finding a way to develop much faith in an actual living God that I could feel that I knew personally. I mean, a genuine faith that a God of love was actually, you know, really there. And this was true even after I had that experience of light when I was eight years old. I woke up in the middle of the night with the certainty that there is no God. And then I saw a flash of light out of which a voice said, “You wouldn’t know what it is to have me unless you knew what it is to be without me. I will never leave you again.” I understand now that what I heard that night was my Thomas’s voice. But even after an experience like that, and even though it still feels as if all of it happened just yesterday, I always had trouble really having faith that there was a God behind it all. I think my problem may have been that God seemed to be so distant, and so somehow alienly not human. As presented by Christianity, God so often seemed to be lacking in empathy, too, and unable to understand our world of fallible people. And appallingly, God was sometimes even actively and dispassionately cruel.

My office has a big bow window where I spend most days with my laptop computer. And right outside my window is a bird feeder. We do such active business at our feeder that I don’t know how the local bird population survived before it occurred to us to entertain my daughter’s cats by giving them a bird-watching spot! We get all kinds of birds there, from chickadees to mourning doves, and other kinds of birds that I don’t recognize. And I think that cardinals might be territorial, because we have one pair of fat cardinals which seem to believe that they own our feeder. They are there daily, and when hizonnor is on the feeder, big and bright-red, the smaller birds will give way. The female cardinal seems to be an oddly human-like thinker. I will catch her watching me through the window, head tilted, and she is the only bird who ever does that. When the feeder is empty and needs refilling, The missus might sit on the bracket that holds the feeder suspended, and she stares right at me, as if she is saying that I’ve got to get out there now and fill it. And that fascinates me. Does she perhaps see me as God, somehow? So, is she praying? What does a little bird understand?

I have written here previously about humankind’s historical human-made gods. I majored in early Christian history in college, so I also took courses in comparative religions, and I understand from what I learned in college that there are theories which suggest how essential it was for early human beings to have gods to worship, and to placate. Those earliest gods that the first people created for themselves were awful, and they were deliberately awful, since the first humans needed fierce and powerful gods as their protectors against the even much greater evils that were out there somewhere, arrayed against them and ready to destroy them as such helpless people tried to manage to survive somehow against a howling void. Back then, they understood no more about what was around them than does that female cardinal, sitting on our feeder and staring uncomprehendingly at me through the glass.  

And so, in their desperate fear of the unknown, early humans created to defend and provide for their survival some truly awful gods. Even the Old Testament’s Jehovah was a terrible god, sometimes arbitrarily requiring the destruction of whole populations, to the youngest child. I have on occasion mentioned Moloch here, who was worshiped by the Canaanites in the areas that the Israelites conquered as they came back out of Egypt in the thirteenth century BCE. Moloch required the sacrifice of his worshipers’ firstborn infants thrown into the fire in his belly as the extreme price of his reluctant favor. And so, in a sense we can empathize with the modern atheists who want to reject the very idea of having gods. Atheists are factually wrong, but humankind’s long history with gods has been so appalling that we should have little trouble understanding the atheists’ wish to dispense with the very idea of gods. The mistake that atheists make is an understandable one. They ignore the fact that although of course all religions are human-made, it still is possible – and even likely! – for there to be a genuine Creator God.

It is therefore easy to understand that when Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago, He was determined to free us from human-made religions, while at the same time He came to introduced to us the genuine Creator God. He came to bring what was intended to be the next stage of human spiritual evolution. Jesus, our dearly beloved Elder Brother, our Wayshower and our Best Friend whose Name ironically now is attached to the world’s most prominent human-made religion, came to earth determined to help humankind to move past religions altogether. And you can clearly see all of that in the way that Jesus so often talked to and talked about all the clergymen of the human-made religions He encountered.

Jesus was so impatient with those clergymen! He taunted and He insulted them, and they were the only people that He treated that way. For example, we find Jesus saying in the Gospels, “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And, “Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). (He is referring here to raising people’s vibrations sufficiently that they can enter the kingdom of heaven, which is the upper afterlife levels). Jesus said, “But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). Repeatedly He insulted and reviled what were some of the most respected men of His day and of that place, and they were the only people that He spoke of this way. It is no wonder that the whole religious establishment was soon so eager to be rid of Him!

Jesus could not flat-out tell His followers that He was replacing their false Jehovah with the genuine Creator God. Not without risking quick arrest and potential execution. So instead, He just patiently worked to change the whole image of God in people’s minds. And He changed the ways in which they were to relate to God, gradually and throughout His ministry. He would say things like, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). He simply referred to the truth as a set of new commandments. And to help His listeners to entirely re-envision what used to be a physical and idol-like Jehovah, He said, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24).

The genuine Creator God never judges us, no matter what we do, which was gigantic news! As Jesus said, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And then, of course, Jesus promptly added that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). And of course, we already know that what Jesus had come to save the world from was ignorance. That was what His three years spent in teaching us was all about! Jesus minimized the very concept of “sin” as an issue. He tied that outmoded religious concept of sin back to the human-made religions that He had come to us to abolish. And instead of ever saying anything religious, in order to help His followers understand the extraordinary importance of the Creator God, He said that, “all sins will be forgiven the sons and daughters of men, and whatever blasphemies they commit; but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit never has forgiveness, but is guilty of an eternal sin” (MK 3:28-29).

And Jesus tells us that our relationship with the genuine Creator God which is Spirit is meant to be a profoundly personal one! Which of course it now very easily can be, without religions and their attendant clergy in the way. Jesus said, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, to be noticed by them; otherwise, you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

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

Perhaps I have put so much effort into my study of Jesus for so many years, even long before I ever met Thomas, and then amazingly I even met Jesus in person. And I have put so much effort into my study of the greater realty as well, precisely because the very notion of God always seemed to be so unreal to me. For so many years, I can remember thinking that since Jesus, who always had seemed so real that I had memorized many of His words, since Jesus really knew God, He even could stay up and talk with God all night! So then at least I could latch my own puny faith on to Jesus’s great faith, and I could sort of be His tagalong. I realize now that I just deeply envied Jesus’s deep and intimate faith in God. There was a certainty about the way that Jesus talked about God, and a sweet love in the way that Jesus spoke with His Father that I could not even imagine feeling. 

The problem with religions is that while once, long ago, they served a purpose for humankind, now they have long since become nothing more than obstacles to what should be our own spiritual progress. Our religions once were humankind’s attempt to help us make sense of the howling dark that we could no more ever hope to understand than can the birds ever possibly understand the reality around them! But now, every religion only steeps us in negative emotions, in guilt and fear and shame. Religions just weigh us down spiritually. And Christianity, especially, with its fear-based doctrines acts as an active barrier that keeps most people from ever knowing and understanding what Jesus came to teach. And thereby, Christianity acts as a barrier between Christians and the most effective set of spiritual teachings we ever have been given. So, what to do now?

What my Thomas eventually did to help me was to prompt me to give the rest of my life to God. It was nothing that I ever had planned to do! Just, one day in April of 2009, when I happened to arrive a little early at the Unity Church that I was then attending, and I was sitting and reflecting in the pews, I just said, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it.” A simple gratitude affirmation. And of course this was still six years before I ever even met my Thomas! But I said it, then I stopped and thought, Wow. Did I hear what I just said? I did. And did I mean that? Wow, I guess I really did. It seemed to be only fair, after all that God had done for me.

Then Thomas, still trying to be of help, prompted me to stop going to church with my husband. I was at that point going to Saturday five o’clock Mass with him to keep him company, and then we would go out to dinner. Then on Sunday, I would go to my own preferred church as well. How much church is just too much church? But there was a life-size, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above the altar in that Catholic church. And within weeks, as I recall it, what was apparently still Thomas had arranged an amicable conversation with Edward that ended our old longstanding 5:00 Mass routine. I really couldn’t take that bleeding Jesus on the cross anymore, and my kindly husband understood. Then soon thereafter, I was writing The Fun of Dying. And within a year I had stopped going to my Unity Church as well. My reasons were complex, but in retrospect, they seemed to center around the fact that sometime around that time, just as an exercise, it had occurred to me to experiment with opening my mind to God and inviting God to come in for a visit. Just come on it and have a chat and share a cup of tea. This is something that I didn’t talk about with anyone at the time, and not for a long time afterward.

But with Thomas and sometimes Jesus there to facilitate our relationship, and as my memories of those terrible Christian fears and guilts and shames at their worst very slowly began to fade, at long last, over months and then years I gradually began to warm to God. It wasn’t so much that my faith deepened, but with Christianity the religion no longer in my life at all, I came to realize that God had always been right there. God had been within me all along! It was only then that I really began with a kind of feverish glee to put together all of what I had been learning over decades about Jesus, the afterlife, and the greater reality. And of course, it all fit together perfectly.

And slowly, and then more quickly after I eventually met my Thomas in 2015, I began to see that God is the very deepest and the best part of me. God loves me more than I can love myself, but I had been so devoutly religious all my life that all the self-revulsion and the profound lack of self-worth that Christianity had instilled in me had kept me from ever finding God where God has always lived, right here within me, all along. Does that make sense? I began to pray The Lord’s Prayer repeatedly, and even aloud and fiercely sometimes, listening to and then loving all the words. To this day, I own and I love my God’s Prayer. When I first truly understood that I am sinless and completely beloved, some terrible resistance to God broke within me, finally.

And that was just a dozen years ago. I have lived my whole life with Christianity between me and God. I was always just an intellectual Christian, without even knowing what that was. And it was only when I left Christianity that I could come to know and love the true God, Who is Spirit, Who is Love, and Who dwells within us, all of which was what Jesus came to teach us long ago! And so now I have become a crusader against the religion that I had always loved. Now I crusade for God! Although of course, I still think that having faith feels pale and unsatisfactory. But now I no longer need to have faith. Because now I know my dearly beloved eternal God as all the best of who I already am. 

He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold.
He knows every lie that you and I have told.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
Richard Mullan & Al Hibbler (1915-2001), from “He” (1954)

Nothingism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

The most vexing problem with atheism as a system of belief is that those who want to espouse it have to ignore the fact that there is so much good evidence against it. Although if an atheist is just someone who denies that there ever has been an actual Moloch who demanded that everyone’s firstborn must be thrown into the fire in his belly, or if an atheist is someone who denies that the old man with the long white beard painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel is an accurate depiction of the living God, then I guess that I am an atheist as well. Go ahead and sign me up. And of course, in discussing atheists we are not including agnostics, who simply say that they cannot be sure so they choose to think about something else. Well, fair enough. Keeping an open mind is an admirable position. But incredibly, in this day and age there still are some actually out-there, loud-and-proud people who claim to be flat-out atheists. As in, they insist that there is not, and there never has been an actual Creator God. They therefore take the position that everything that we see around us now can reasonably be claimed to have arisen randomly, from out of nowhere, and there is no intelligent creator behind it.

Perhaps I ought not to say this so bluntly, but here is a well-proven fact: to be that brand of atheist today is a fool’s errand. And this statement includes even the famous atheists who believe that they are on the side of science. Indeed, atheism as a belief-system is as much of a nonsensical religion positioned against the scientific evidence as is Christianity. It is juvenile nonsense for atheists to still remain atheists while they stand surrounded by abundant evidence for the fact that an extraordinarily complex reality in fact does exist, and apparently it has existed and been stable for billions of years, and despite its tenuousness and its appalling instability it amazingly remains remarkably stable. But yet those who fondly espouse atheism continue to say that we must not inquire into what caused this reality to exist in the first place, and nor is it permissible for us to wonder what maintains this reality in such stability, simply because we long ago chose to name its hypothetical first cause “God.” Well, okay then. Let’s play the atheists’ game. Let’s give God a friendly nickname, since we know that God won’t mind. From now on we will simply call God “the Uncaused Cause.”

And we also ought to call atheism what it actually is.  It calls itself a word which simply means not-God-ism, but that word misrepresents what atheists apparently believe. When you read their literature, you find them claiming that nothing in particular created the amazingly complex and profoundly beautiful reality that we can see around us now, which means therefore that all of what we see must have happened randomly. Never mind even talking about the stars! No need to bother to mention the exquisite beauty of a baby’s face! When her cat knocked over and wrecked my lovely amaryllis right before Christmas, my daughter as an apology fetched from the trash at our nearby Home Depot a half-dozen amaryllis bulb rejects, which was all that they had left. The bulbs looked hopeless, sprouted but white and dry and nearly dead in their boxes. My husband planted the two that didn’t come with pots, and I hopefully watered them all. And now, a month later, my office’s bow window is full of green stalks topped with buds that are opening to reveal gigantic bright-red flowers. I look at those plants which would all be dead if we hadn’t given them their chance at life, and I plan to do this every year!

But to atheists, all this easy and abundant life can only have sprung from nothing. My God, dear atheists, just look in the mirror! Honest scientists will tell you that our universe is fine-tuned for life. But this wonderful universe that the rest of us share is not the same universe in which committed atheists exist. They themselves somehow uniquely find themselves living in a universe which just gradually, randomly appeared from out of nowhere, and for no reason after it randomly appeared it simply grew like Topsy and without any form of intelligence guiding it. So let’s call their belief-system what it actually is. We will henceforth call atheism “nothingism.”

To me, simply the previous few paragraphs should be sufficient to demonstrate the folly of nothingism as a system of belief. However, perhaps the one particular famous nothingist that I have in mind but I have not named in reverence for his venerable age might need more persuading that his whole life’s work has been an exercise in absurdity. So let’s offer him some more specific evidence:  

  • Something must have caused this material universe. Since the universe demonstrably exists, something must have been its original mover. To say that the universe arose randomly is a considerable stretch for nothingists to make, in view of all the points given below which strongly imply that some level of intelligence and elemental thinking and planning has been involved. To simply say that you don’t know makes you an agnostic, but you, my dear fellow, claim to be a resolute atheist. And just as a point of observation, in nature we notice that anything that is random soon atrophies away. It doesn’t linger long enough for it to develop into something. Or else it seems never to arise in the first place.
  • Nothing in the universe is solid. Now, if this universe all were entirely random, it is hard to imagine how random particles, having sprung from out of nowhere and being entirely random and unguided, might have organized themselves into atoms at all, when even the simplest atoms which make up this universe have some level of a design element to them. What explanation might you offer for even the elemental organization and design of atoms? And never mind how those random atoms might then have come together and organized themselves into various types of molecules, and those molecules might eventually have come together to form planets and stars. And, long after that, what about living cells and the bodies of complex creatures like people? My goodness, sir, your whole amazing body with its complex internal organs is still 99.9999999% empty space.
  • Many scientists believe that the universe is fine-tuned to support life. Not only is it inconceivable for something to have come from nothing, but once scientists had identified the universe’s source in a Big Bang to their own satisfaction, many of those who have made their careers in studying the universe’s origins began to note that out of the nearly infinite number of ways in which it could have developed from there, this universe seems in the manner in which it has developed to be exquisitely fine–tuned to be able to support life. The argument from design is often a religious argument, but it need not be even remotely religious.
  • Nothingism is a cop-out when we attempt to answer what is really the ultimate question. How did life on earth begin? Scientists still cannot spark life to happen in a laboratory experimentally. And for them to then show how life, once it had entirely randomly been sparked, could then entirely randomly have remained alive long enough to altogether randomly have developed into a single-celled organism, with all of a cell’s essential component parts, and never mind into a multi-trillion-celled and entirely randomly-assembled human being, even in a trillion, trillion years of randomness, without any guiding intelligence behind the process at all, really more than beggars the imagination. Moving from the random life-spark to the sustainable living cell with no intelligence involved seems to be where the big leap of faith in nothingism truly lies.
  • We are in contact with dead people, who turn out not to be dead after all. I am sorry to break this news to you so abruptly, my dear nothingist friend, but while you were spending your life being a famous nothingist and championing your impossible belief, there were others of us who were studying a body of knowledge that, once it is more broadly known, will bring a new age of enlightenment and joy and a fundamental freedom from fear to all the world. Thousands of thoroughly verified communications from the dead received through physical mediums primarily in southern England and in the eastern United States between the 1850s and the 1930s all report to us in detail on precisely the same afterlife reality. Such close agreement across all the evidence received independently in two different areas of the world would not be possible if the afterlife were not real. And now, as the veil amazingly thins, daily contact with those that we used to think were dead is becoming almost commonplace. So ours is the first generation to be able to demonstrate with certainty that all our lives are in fact eternal.
  • We have discovered where in relation to the earth the not-actually-dead happily go on living their eternal lives. Those of us who are not tied to any religion, and also are not professionally policed by the scientific gatekeepers, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals, are beautifully free to put together all the widely available public information. And in doing that, we can make some truly wonderful discoveries! We who have done considerable afterlife research know that the not-really-dead are physically in the same place that we are, but just at higher energy vibrations, much as television programs are all available on one television set but just on various different channels. And we also know that scientists have discovered that our universe is composed of roughly 5% ordinary matter, 27% dark matter, and 68% dark energy, all blended harmoniously together.  There is nothing sinister about those “dark” components of course, but it is just that they are not material, so they don’t react with photons of material light. And amazingly, the proportions are precisely right for “dark matter” to be what we refer to as the astral realities, which are humankind’s eternal home. As for “dark energy”? Perhaps that might in fact be our beloved “Uncaused Cause.”

René Descartes (1596-1650) was a French philosopher, scientist, and mathematician who can help to shed some material light on this subject. He said, “Cogito, ergo sum.” Or, being French, what he actually said was, “Je pense, donc je suis.” But Descartes lived in a more pretentious time, so he ended up becoming eternally famous for having said his immortal words in Latin. And Descartes’s point was this: in any language, “I think, therefore I am” is an undeniable fact. We belittle that fact, however, and we belittle and trivialize ourselves when we attempt to make less of our existence on this little speck of matter in the five percent of the greater reality which is the only infinitesimal bit of it which is material, and in the tiny bit of time that we will have to live on this bit of matter. To choose to be a nothingist is to choose to make nothing of yourself.

When my daughter brought those six amaryllis bulbs home with their dead-white tops twisted helplessly in their boxes, as they first were fished out of the trash they looked hopeless. My son laughed at them. One of them even, desperately, was trying to open a flower into the dry dirt in which it had been planted. I work in my office’s bow window with my laptop, so I got to watch those plants recover. They untwisted themselves, but slowly. They gradually filled with green chlorophyll. As the stalks started to grow, and then the buds swelled, each plant seemed to realize with a relief I could feel from feet away that at last it was going to get to become what it always had been meant to be. I grow, therefore I am! And don’t minimize the fact that on some elemental plant level they now feel loved. So now I see before me each day only whole and beautiful amaryllis plants in bloom. You cannot even tell that these ever were the pathetic rejects that were rescued from the Home Depot garbage just a few weeks ago.   

The question of whether there must be an Uncaused Cause is settled. No scientist rationally disputes the fact that the universe exists, it is 13.7 billion years old, and it is and still remains stable against what are now scientifically established to be monumental mathematical odds against its ongoing stability. So something must have caused this universe, and something must be maintaining its stability! But scientists still refuse to take seriously what seems to be the next sensible question. When they are pressed to identify the universe’s Uncaused Cause, their answers generally boil down to something like, “Nobody really knows and shut up.” Or, as the brilliant Rupert Sheldrake sums up the general scientific attitude, “Just give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.”

The pioneering father of quantum mechanics, Max Planck, 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.” And Jesus said two thousand years ago, “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24). Even a thousand years before Jesus’s birth, the forebears of His earthly body knew that “The eternal God is a refuge, and underneath are the Everlasting Arms” (Deut 33:27). The Consciousness that both the ancient Hebrews and Max Planck discovered, and that Jesus called “God,” and that you and I might just as easily call “the Uncaused Cause” is living and infinitely creative Energy. And the fact is now being discussed more and more seriously among scientists that of course Consciousness does not originate inside the human brain! Of course not, even though the sillies who pass for scientists at this point in the United States are now spending more than a billion dollars trying to find its source in there somewhere. No, instead our brains only receive and transmit Consciousness, which makes these material bodies of ours nothing more than avatars that we use while we are having our brief earth-lives. And meanwhile, early in the twenty-first century God is steadily more and more revealing Godself to us, and God is perfect and infinite Love! Look again at that pie chart of the universe as scientists have come to understand it. In reality, of course, all three components are variously blended  together. And sixty-eight percent of our universe is looking more and more as if it is going to turn out to be the Uncaused Cause. We live surrounded by, immersed in, and actually composed of God’s infinite Love.

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

 

Better Understanding Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

There is Someone walking behind you. Turn around. Look at Me.
There is Someone watching your footsteps. Turn around. Look at Me.
There is Someone who really needs you. Here’s My heart in My hand!
Turn around. Look at Me. Understand, understand.
And there’s Someone to stand beside you. Turn around, look at Me.
And there’s Someone to love and guide you.
Turn around! Look at Me!
Oh, I’ve waited! And I’ll wait forever for you to come to Me!
Look at Someone Who really loves you! Yeah, loves you!
Turn around! Look at Me!
– Jerry N. Capehart (1928-1998), from “Turn Around, Look at Me” (1968)

As the Christian religion loses its followers, as it gradually shrivels and dies worldwide, a confident dance continues in Spirit of which we always have been unaware. For most of my life I have worried that the slow and writhing death of the Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christianity was bound to kill off the genuine Jesus, because naturally most people were likely to see Him as just another part of the Christian package. I thought that we were in a fight against time to separate Jesus from Christianity just as quickly as we possibly could! I never realized that Jesus has always known that this time in history was going to come. And He has been working on making this separation happen for a lot longer than we have been alive.

It turns out that Jesus and His followers in Spirit have been planning for the death of Constantine’s religion ever since at least the First Council of Nicaea, and that was way back in 325 CE! Thomas tells me that Jesus’s spiritual team even influenced the councilors who were assembling the first Christian Bible, as to which of the then-available Gospels to choose. And as the councilors edited those Gospels, and they added their sheep-and-goats and Apocalyptic bits, they were being influenced to keep their editing to a minimum. And to move what was not actually said by Jesus to the backs of the Gospels that were chosen for inclusion, so it would be easier for you and me much later to pluck those suspect additions back out again.

It is thanks to what Thomas tells me now has been a close group of about twenty members of Jesus’s inner circle who have been with Him ever since His Ascension that we have any of Jesus’s teachings left to us at all.  Although of course, what we have left still cannot be much. Jesus taught on earth for more than three years, and then it was at least fifty years past His Ascension before any of what Jesus had said was written down, so it is amazing that we have anything left of what Jesus said when He was here on earth. But He was teaching very simple folk a few important things that He had tailored to their level of understanding, so He said simple phrases over and over again. Jesus tells us now that He is satisfied with what has survived. The problem is less that a few aspects of what He taught have been lost to us altogether, and more that fear-based ideas have been added, and human concepts have been inserted that Jesus never would have embraced; and, what is harder to detect, subtly fear-based human thoughts have been stuck to the edges of Jesus’s ideas that were not in His original teachings. We are so used to using language to express our own ideas that we simply don’t realize how limiting language is as a method of precise self-expression.

It is only in the past few years that Thomas has made me see this language issue for the problem that it actually is, as I seek to truly and deeply understand our beloved Jesus across two thousand years of time. And as Jesus seeks to be ever better understood! Thomas and Jesus now think that their problems in perfecting this connection with humankind on earth over all the centuries really have been down to these two issues:

  • Those in spirit communicate mentally, in a universal lingua franca that is almost like reading one another’s minds. Thomas believes that this has meant that those who were doing the church-council monitoring were paying insufficient attention to what was going on verbally in those councils themselves. They missed some of the back-room politicking that we now know was happening with Jesus’s teachings.
  • As the translating of Jesus’s words was going on, first from Aramaic into ancient Greek, and later from Greek into Latin, and then finally into modern languages, the meanings of some of Jesus’s original teachings were being changed, and sometimes profoundly. I will give you the most prominent example of this major problem below.

As Jesus made plain to us while we were exploring these issues last week, He did not die for our sins.  Instead, Jesus was born to be our Teacher. To put a finer point on it, He was born to be our spiritual Teacher. After studying the topic of Jesus and sin in the Gospels in particular, I am convinced that every reference that Jesus makes to sin is either pro forma, in that He says it because it was expected of Him at some moment by the sin-obsessed Jewish clerics around Him, and not because He believed that sin mattered; or instead, it was a later addition by one of the first-millennium church councils. I think now that if we asked Jesus about sin, He would say that sin is a human-religious and not a spiritual term, and since God is at the highest vibration and God is infinite pure love, the concept of sin has nothing whatsoever to do with God.

And there is something else, too, that we will need to get straight. For Jesus to be born on earth two thousand years ago as the Son of God, which is the miracle that we celebrated two weeks ago, He had to be born into some human culture. And that culture was bound to worship one religion or another. But Jesus is an aspect of God, so whether He wants to claim all or any part of that existing human-made religion will be His choice. We know now that Jesus came to abolish religions altogether, and to teach us instead to relate to God entirely on a spiritual level. But given the time and place where He lived and taught, Jesus was not able to come right out and say that He intended to abolish all religions, so what Jesus said instead was that He was replacing what we now call the Old Testament with just two laws. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And that was it! Jesus did not in fact choose to import Judaism or any part of it into His teachings. He adopted just those two rules: Love God, and love your fellow human being as you love yourself. Therefore, no Adam and Eve with their associated original sin. No Ten Commandments, either. The Way of Jesus is Jesus’s Teachings alone. And your Bible is a whole lot lighter!

So the precise meanings of the words that Jesus actually spoke will be very important to us indeed! Just by even slightly altering the meanings of any of Jesus’s words, perhaps in the simple process of translation, we can hugely – and mistakenly! – alter Jesus’s spiritual teachings. And while I do not now speak any language but English, I have at various times studied Spanish, French, Latin, and a bit of Mandarin. So I do know that saying precisely the same thing in any two of those languages side by side is impossible, since each separate language simply “thinks” differently. And in addition, the words that people say in any language will change in meaning over time. For example, even as late as the early part of the twentieth century, you might have mentioned having seen a gay-looking fellow walking down the street that morning, and meant just that he seemed to be especially happy.

This problem of translation-distortion is of special concern as we try to understand what Jesus actually said. Our beloved Best Friend spoke Aramaic, which is an unusually spiritual and lyrical language. The modern English Gospels were first translated from Aramaic into ancient Greek, and then from ancient Greek into Latin, and then into modern languages. And we frequently see Jesus talking in the Gospels about repentance. The topic of repentance comes up seven times in the Book of Matthew, but an astonishing and even downright punitive fourteen times in Luke. Over and over we see Jesus talking there about “Repentance.” But is that what Jesus ever actually said?

Let’s look at a few of Jesus’s uses of the word “Repent” or “Repentance” in the Gospel of Luke. He reportedly said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick. I have not come to call the righteous to repentance, but sinners” (LK 5:32). This line is suspect not only because Jesus talks about repentance, but also because He probably did not refer to “sinners,” using that precise word. And He reportedly said in the Book of Luke, “Woe to you, Chorazin! Woe to you, Bethsaida! For if the miracles that occurred in you had occurred in Tyre and Sidon, they would have repented long ago, sitting in sackcloth and ashes” (LK 10:13). And what follows here is the worst mention of repentance in the entire Book of Luke! “Now on that very occasion there were some present who reported to Him about the Galileans whose blood Pilate had shed along with their sacrifices. And Jesus responded and said to them, ‘Do you think that these Galileans were worse sinners than all the other Galileans just because they have suffered this fate? No, I tell you, but unless you repent, you will all likewise perish’ (LK 13:1-3). Wow, that doesn’t sound much like the Jesus that you and I thought we knew, does it? All that talk about sinners and repentance and perishing? He sounds pretty harsh and unloving here, don’t you think? Oh my goodness, yes! And there is a reason for that.

Jesus never once suggested that we should “repent.” That word never actually passed His lips. The Greek word which was translated into English as “repent” or “repentance” in all those places is metanoia. And what “metanoia” actually means in ancient Greek is not “repent” at all, but it means instead “change,” “reconsider,” or – more precisely – “reform your mind,” “uplift your mind,” or “transform your mind.” I couldn’t find in a quick search any idea of what the precise Aramaic word or phrase that was first translated into metanoia might have been, but it would have been something more toward the “alter your mind” side of things, which was of course Jesus’s constant theme. And if in all those places in Luke where Jesus seems to be muttering, “Repent!” you simply put something softer like “open and uplift your mind,” you will have a far more Jesus-like, and a far more accurate, set of messages.

Laypeople were not allowed by the Christian church to read the words of Jesus on their own until at least the Middle Ages, and that proscription was enforced by the simple expedient of the church’s decision for its first fifteen hundred years not to translate the Bible into any language but Latin. The complete Bible was first published in English, most likely in Antwerp, in 1535, as a translation out of the German and Latin by an Augustinian friar from Yorkshire named Myles Coverdale (1488-1569) who had been educated at Cambridge. Now, I imagine that the beautifully educated Myles Coverdale was a lovely man. But at some point long before his day, sometime around 300 CE, there lived the man who first translated the words of Jesus into Latin from the ancient Greek in which it had first been written down, presuming that the Aramaic-speakers who had actually heard Jesus speak and had memorized His words had been illiterate. And that first scrivener in Latin was the guy who saw the gentle Greek word “metanoia” at all the places where Jesus had talked about His having come to expand, uplift, and transform the minds and hearts of all people, and to bring light and love to all the world. And that closed-minded and crabby first Greek-to-Latin translator – let’s call him “Igor” – saw only one obvious thing that Jesus must have meant by the word “metanoia.” Igor was working for the current Roman Emperor, and maybe even for Constantine himself, and helping Rome to build a fear-based Christian religion of power and control. What he saw in the Greek word metanoia was, “Repent!” Or in Latin, which is the language into which Igor was translating the ancient Greek, the word would have been “Paeniteat!” And the gentlemanly much later Myles Coverdale, even though he himself was surely a decent fellow, then felt obligated to put the word “Repent!” into Jesus’s mouth, without giving the matter much thought.

Igor’s mistranslation affected John the Baptist’s words as well. In the Gospel of Matthew we read, “Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.”  For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said, “The voice of one calling out in the wilderness, ‘Prepare the way of the Lord, Make His paths straight!’” (MT 3:1-2). Of course, what John the Baptist actually would have said was something more like, “Open and uplift your minds, folks, because the moment that Isaiah foretold has come, and the kingdom of God is at hand!” Now, that makes sense! The way that Igor mistranslated it makes no sense at all in Jesus’s terms, because it is sin-based, fear-based, and not remotely love-based. John the Baptist was Jesus’s messenger, and he would at the time have been inspired by Jesus’s mind and under His mind’s influence.

So now you see some of the problems that we face in reaching back toward Jesus from here as we attempt to deal with serial mistranslations, and also some of our problems of understanding associated with Jesus’s cultural surroundings. Our  much-beloved Elder Brother and Best Friend is an extraordinary Being, unique in all of human history. He is God born on earth and outside of time! When I first tried to apply Jesus’s teachings to my own life, without knowing that I had Thomas’s help in doing so because I had not yet met my spirit guide, my life was permanently transformed in only weeks. I was amazed at how completely and how fast that happened! It took me most of a decade to figure out what had happened, why it had happened, and how it could have been so self-reinforcing. And once I had put it all together, I fully understood at last that Jesus really did come to us as God on earth.

If we truly want to understand Jesus, we cannot just look back at Him now. There is too much that is human in the way! We have no choice but to go back ourselves for literally two thousand years, and study Jesus where and when He last wore a human body. We have to go back before all the mistranslations, all the human cultural and religious distortions, all the human mandates, and all the ego notions and fabrications, even especially including our own. We have got to sit down at the feet of God, and simply watch and listen. Seriously! If we want to know what made everyone who ever personally knew Jesus later willing, and even glad to die to ensure that Jesus’s Truths would live, then we will have to sit down respectfully at His feet and hear and see what all those earliest martyrs heard and saw.

As I have said before in this space, my weirdly obsessive lifelong twin hobbies of Gospel studies and afterlife studies turn out to fortuitously intersect. I can prove things about Jesus because of what I know about the genuine afterlife and its associated greater reality, things that I learned as a natural skeptic doing evidence-based afterlife research over fifty years of time. And incredibly, I can prove to you that Jesus actually knew things two thousand years ago that He could not have known if He had not been born with extraordinary knowledge which is beyond what even scientists know today. So I was certain that Jesus was genuine, even before the Shroud of Turin proved that He actually did rise from the dead, and even before I met Him in the astral plane twenty months ago and I felt His incredible personal energy.

Which is why I can tell you with certainty that Jesus was born as God on earth. I am Doubting Thomas. There are few things of which I am certain, but this is one thing that I know is true. And since Jesus told me His story twenty months ago, we know that He is even more amazing than that, if His being even more amazing is possible: He was once just an ordinary human being, and He actually has maintained His fully human status. Nobody at even half His spiritual level ever bothers to keep a fully human past! We all join collectives by the time we reach the sixth level, Mikey Morgan and a few others being the only rare exceptions. The effort that is required for Jesus to remain “fully God and fully Man” is extraordinary, but He continues to make that effort for us, so He can effectively minister to us and serve us. Jesus’s love for each of us as individual people, His love for you as a person and for me as a person, is beyond what we can understand. And this may be even harder for us to comprehend, but as Jesus has been planning for the past seventeen hundred years to separate Himself from Christianity now, He also has been planning for the Way of Jesus that will follow it. And now is when it begins.

We Begin Anew

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus, ‘twas in a cow’s stall
with wise men and farmers and shepherd and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
and the promise of ages it then did recall.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), from “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)

People have asked me why I so strongly denounce the story that lies at the heart of traditional Christianity. And of course, you and I know that story so well! It is the whole idea that Jesus was born to die for our sins, so if we don’t claim Him as our personal Savior, then tough luck for us because after we die, we are going to burn in hell forevermore. The milder, more moderate versions of Christianity have largely done away with the burn-in-hell part, but they keep the idea that Jesus did indeed “come for to die.” And why should you and I not believe that? It even says it in the Bible! Doesn’t it? “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (JN 3:16). And wow, that is some kind of wonderful love! Don’t you think? Why shouldn’t you and I believe that Jesus came to die for our sins? What harm does it do? Omigod, what harm does it do? Oh, where do we even begin? First of all, let’s just clear this whole mess up right now.  

JESUS DID NOT COME TO DIE FOR OUR SINS 

It is long past time for us to say that so plainly. There is nothing in the Bible that says that the long-promised Messiah is going to come to die for our sins, and nor is there anything in the Bible that tells us that our cherished Elder Brother and Best Friend, Jesus, actually did die for our sins. Instead, Jesus came with a different and much more wonderful purpose in mind, but we will get to that shortly. And Jesus tells us right there in the Gospel of John, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). Case Closed! Because if God doesn’t judge us, then God doesn’t hold our sins against us, so God does not demand the blood-sacrifice of God’s Own Son. To whom, then, is the sacrifice of Jesus being made, if not to God? When I was a lot younger, I used to ask this question of people who should have been able to answer it easily. Not trying to be a jerk, but just assuming that much smarter people than I am must have spotted this big contradiction at the center of Christianity a long time before I did. And I really wanting to know! However, all the various priests, Biblical scholars, and others of whom I ever asked my core question refused to even take it seriously. When to me, it is one of the most serious questions in all of human history. Since the Bible itself tells us that God didn’t require the blood-sacrifice of Jesus, then to whom or to what was Jesus being sacrificed?

Finally, a theology student who had gone through the same thinking process that I had was able to give me what I think is the only possible answer. He told me that Jesus was indeed being sacrificed to God, Who did not need or demand the Lord’s sacrifice. But that student told me it was the rest of us who needed it. We feel so sinful and unworthy because of Adam’s sin and all the sins that we commit every day. But now that Jesus, who is Himself sinless and was conceived without sin, had sacrificed Himself to God and made us pure, we had been washed in the Blood of the Lamb of God, so now we could believe that we were made worthy of approaching God. And do you know, I was young enough at the time – I was not a whole lot older than he was – that his answer actually satisfied me?

Okay, great! So God, within Godself, had just put on a little play for our benefit. Jesus, as an aspect of God, had put Himself through that whole charade of suffering and being punished in our place so we would feel that sufficient atonement had been made for Adam’s sin, and for our own sins as well, and therefore we would feel washed clean, and able to approach God at the end of our lives. All better! It was not until I was maybe fifty years old that the sheer, complete nonsense of this whole line of thinking landed one day like a rock on my head. Okay, so let me get this straight. We come into this world as infants, pure as the snow, but just in being born as human beings we acquire Adam’s sin. And just in being alive we commit other sins along the way. God see us feeling guiltier and guiltier. So instead of just saying, “I forgive you everything, my beloved child!” and giving us a big hug and a great big kiss and ice cream, which is what any loving human Father would do, God sends us Jesus to die on a cross for our sins? And all of that is supposed to make us feel better? But wouldn’t it instead make us feel even much guiltier, since now we feel guilty about Jesus’s otherwise unnecessary suffering and death as well? So the gruesome death under torture of a perfectly sinless aspect of the living God was made necessary from God’s point of view because you and I are such hopelessly sinful pieces of crap?

We are supposed to take everything about our religions by faith. But faith cannot triumph over common sense. When Thomas took me to meet Jesus in the Astral plane in April of 2022, Jesus told me that He had indeed come to us two thousand years ago as the Savior of the World. And Jesus said that what He had come to save the world from two thousand years ago was ignorance! And especially all this terrible religious ignorance. Jesus insisted that He had come to us as our Teacher. And what He came to teach us was how to do what He Himself had so easily done when, in His final lifetime as a normal human being in the Neolithic period, He was able to rapidly raise His consciousness vibration and become an Ascended Being. His teachings are now preserved in the Gospels, and when properly applied, they work amazingly well! But the teachings of Jesus have never been much noticed, because to us they sound like just nicey-nice aspirational platitudes. Love. Forgive. Be kind. So what? And His teachings seldom have been tried in the past seventeen hundred years because they are trapped inside a Christian religion that has remained obsessed with the nonsense belief that Jesus was born just to die for our sins.

When you hear the Truth spoken by the Man Himself, you slap your forehead. Of course! If the religion were right about Jesus’s reason for being born, then He would have actually told people that! “Watch Me, folks! I am about to make everything all better between you and God!” He never would have wasted one single breath on talking about all that loving and forgiving stuff for three and a half years. And that sentence on which those who are sure that Jesus died for our sins pin a lot of their hopes is really just a translation mistake. Remove the word “in,” and it reads: “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes __ Him will not perish, but have eternal life” (JN 3:16). So then that sentence would be only about our need to listen to and believe the words of Jesus. Which is, of course, the purest truth. (Well, the word “perish” there is still too strong.) But if you closely follow the teachings of Jesus, then instead of continuing to flounder through repeated lifetimes, when you return to the afterlife this time around, you will have made so much spiritual progress that you will advance directly to the fifth level of the afterlife, and you will be forever at home and at peace.

And it is in those two-thousand-year-old teachings of Jesus that the world is going to find its best, and perhaps its only hope. That is true, even buried as those teachings are now in a lot of old Bibles tucked away on bookshelves and never much opened anymore. If you doubt the need for us to open those old Bibles, just look at the world as it is today! It is a sewer of petty hatreds kept seething as just our normal way of life. In North America, college kids march and shout over ancient bitternesses that they cannot begin to understand. While the United States government is inexplicably unwilling to allow this nation to get past stupid racism, even a century and a half after the Civil War. We cannot allow big wars to even get started anymore for fear of a nuclear conflagration, so now the Middle East and also separately Asia, Africa, and even South America are now individual busy factories of little wars and disagreements which cause regular people just trying to live their lives almost constant disruptions and distracting pain. Imagine how things might change if even ten percent of the people in the world were living the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Or what if it were twenty percent? Or even, Omigod, on one bright future day as many as fifty percent?

But for the teachings of Jesus to transform the world, we first will have to do away with seventeen hundred years of Christian religious history. The religion of Christianity, as it now stands, is close to useless to us as a method for healing the world because it is fear-based and not love-based. It teaches its adherents to fear God, and to be needlessly suspicious of and widely separated from one another. The poisonous world that we are living in now is one that Christianity played a very prominent role in creating. But the persona and teachings of Jesus the Man are enormously appealing, as He proved to us during the first three hundred years after His Resurrection! And once we have re-started His original Way, it can be abundantly fruitful once again.

Then how did we end up so badly off-track, when the true Way of Jesus made such a great start? Jesus’s disciples, and those who had known His disciples and those that they had taught spread His teachings very rapidly all around the Mediterranean Sea. Most of Jesus’s earliest followers died martyrs’ deaths in the course of spreading His teachings. Our amusing friend Doubting Thomas seems to have made it the farthest away of all of Jesus’s original twelve, because when he finally did get it, he really got it! We are told that Jesus’s disciple Thomas was martyred by a spear in 53 CE in Madras, India. Jesus’s senior disciple, Peter, was executed by the Roman Emperor Nero in the mass executions that followed a big fire in Rome in the year 64 CE that Nero blamed on the city’s burgeoning Christian population. Peter requested that he be crucified upside down, because he felt unworthy of dying in the same manner as Jesus had died. And when Nero tried to grant the old man a reprieve and have him taken off his upside-down cross, Peter insisted on going through with his martyrdom. It is believed that Saint Paul, too, was martyred in 64 CE in Rome because of that fire, his death being by decapitation.

The flame of Jesus’s genuine teachings that He ignited in His disciples continued to burn in all the people they touched, and then in those that Jesus’s second generation of followers touched in their turn. History records that during the first two hundred years after Jesus’s Ascension, as His Way rapidly spread, so also did all those martyrdoms. For example, Clement had been taught by Jesus’s disciples Peter and John, and he worked with Paul and is mentioned in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. The Romans martyred Clement in 99 CE by throwing him into the ocean tied to a boat-anchor. Another of John’s students was Ignatius, and Peter made Ignatius the Bishop of Antioch. Then on July 6, 108 CE, Ignatius was martyred by being fed to wild beasts in the Circus Maximus in Rome for refusing to renounce his loyalty to Christ. Perhaps the best-remembered of these later-generation martyrdoms was Polycarp’s. In 156 CE, the much-loved Bishop of Smyrna first fed a feast to those who were about to burn him to death. Then, as they pleaded with that dear old man to renounce Christ, Polycarp instead climbed onto his funeral pyre. No need even to tie him to a post. He said calmly, “Eighty and six years I have served Him, and He has done me no wrong.” Such was the love and loyalty of those who followed the Way of Jesus.

Until the Romans took it over, the Way of Jesus was for the most part a persecuted underground movement; but nevertheless, it still grew rapidly. it is estimated that in the year 150 CE, there were between thirty thousand and forty thousand followers of Jesus in Rome. In 200 CE, that number was between a hundred and forty thousand and a hundred and seventy thousand followers. And in 300 CE, just before the Romans seized the Jesus movement and made it into the Roman state religion of Christianity that we know today, there were an incredible three million followers of the Way of Jesus in Rome! Many of them lived near the Christian Catacombs which were just outside the city, where there were more than six million burials interred from the third to the seventh centuries. And those Catacomb burials that date to the period of Roman persecution, before 312 CE, show no depictions of crosses at all, which suggests that the followers of the Way never believed that Jesus’s mode of death mattered.

The Catacomb depictions of Jesus from those early years show Him as He shows Himself to His astral plane visitors today, with brown eyes, olive skin, and short, curly hair. And He is often shown as the good shepherd who carries not a lamb, but instead a baby goat about His shoulders. Later Christian theology has Jesus separating the sheep from the goats and throwing the goats into an imagined hell (see e.g. MT 25:31-46, which passage was likely added to the Gospel by First Nicaea in 325 CE). But the deeply loving Jesus of universal kindness and salvation of all the goats as well as the sheep that was taught by the followers of Jesus’s Way is entirely consistent with Jesus’s own Gospel teachings. And it indicates that this is the version of Jesus Who was being ardently followed right through the end of the Third Century CE.

Of course, as the Way of Jesus grew and spread over thousands of miles and through three generations, slightly different ideas were bound to arise. One such different view, and a minority one, came from the ancient Jewish belief in the blood-sacrifice of animals for the forgiveness of sins. This notion as it was applied to Jesus may first have come from Paul, who was a bit of a fussy guy anyway. And it did make sense at the time to early followers of Jesus who had a Jewish background. Given that Jews had long believed that everyone was stained with Adam’s sin, didn’t it simply make sense that God might have sent His only Son as an unblemished sacrifice to wash away the stain of humankind’s original sin?

And that sort of fear-based, guilt-drenched explanation for the crucifixion of Jesus was one that the Roman Emperor Constantine really could use! As is true of all state religions, the Christianity that the Romans designed early in the Fourth Century CE was created as a handy means of fear-based mass control. There is only so much fear that armies can instill, since after a certain point, the people will find ways to tune it out. But owning the religion, too, lets those in power own both here and hereafter. And if, every Sunday, people hear in their churches that they are so sinful that God had to come down and die for them, and if they then hear that they must tithe heavily and give their second son to the priesthood and their oldest daughter to a nunnery and leave a lot of money to the church or else hell awaits them, well, then you, as the Emperor’s sidekick Pope, can really call the shots! The seven first-millennium Ecumenical Councils, beginning with First Nicaea in 325 CE, created a Christian church which was robust and immensely useful to the powerful, even if its core teaching about Jesus dying for our sins had nothing to do with the genuine Jesus.

So now, as Constantine’s Christianity fades, we who love the Lord can return at last to learning and teaching and living the true Way of Jesus that came before it. And I am delighted to tell you that just a couple of mentions in blog posts have gathered such a lovely group of people who are eager to work through establishing this three-month course that can effect their individual transformations under the guidance of our living Lord, and can help to begin the transformation of the world. If you would like to join us, please let me know, because registrations are soon to close. And we are eager to begin!

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
a star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
or all of God’s angels in heaven for to sing,
he surely could have it, ‘cause he was the King.

I wonder as I wander, out under the sky,
how Jesus the Savior did come for to die
for poor ordinary people like you and like I;
I wonder as I wander, out under the sky.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), from “I Wonder as I Wander” (1933)

The Prophesies are Fulfilled

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

O come, O come, Emmanuel,
And ransom captive Israel,
That mourns in lonely exile here,
Until the Son of God appear.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Rod of Jesse, free
Thine own from Satan’s tyranny;
From depths of hell Thy people save,
And give them victory o’er the grave.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Thou Dayspring, from on high,
And cheer us by Thy drawing nigh;
Disperse the gloomy clouds of night,
And death’s dark shadows put to flight.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), translator, from a 15th century Franciscan Processional.

Never in the long span of human history has there been a people more targeted, more hounded, and more generally all-around cursed and despised than the Jews, who for the past four thousand years have been God’s Chosen People. I like the way Tevye puts it, he who sings as the hero of that delightful musical story of precarious Jewish life amid late Imperial Russia’s persecutions and pogroms, “Fiddler on the Roof.” Tevye says, “It’s nice to be God’s Chosen People. But it might be good if once in a while God chooses someone else.”

And as you and I watch life for God’s Chosen People play out yet again across the twenty-first-century world, we can sympathize with Tevye’s point. When you read the Christian Bible from cover to cover, as I did often during the first half of my life, you see this extraordinary relationship between the Jewish people and their God as a loving, proud and desperate dance of pain and triumph over four thousand years, really ever since Abraham, the founding Patriarch of not just Judaism but also of Christianity and Islam. It is a relationship created by people, of course, and with a God of their own devising, since the genuine God is only love. And as with all such relationships, the Jews’ relationship with their God is fraught with human-created problems. But you can see that it was those very problems that have bound the Jews together as a people, have built their identity down through the ages, and have made them so devout, so resolute, and so unbelievably strong.

It is no wonder to me that Jesus chose to be born and to live His human life as a Jew. He has told me just that He wanted to be born from the Godhead in the same area where He had lived before, where there were settled cities, and where there would not be wars during His lifetime on earth, so He could spend that time first studying humankind, and then teaching what He had been born to teach about human life and the nature of reality, and about God. But He was especially eager to begin His mission by studying people, and there were things that Jesus could learn about being human by living as a member of a persecuted underclass that He never could have learned by being born near any society’s top. There even is some evidence that Jesus might have been born into slavery. And here were God’s Chosen People, the Jews, who perfectly filled the bill for Him.

I don’t know why it took so long after His previous death for Jesus to return to earth. From what little He and Thomas have told me, Jesus’s decision to be born out of the Godhead in order to teach all of us how to escape the cycle of rebirths was immediate: Jesus’s decision was made as soon as He became a Perfected Being and discovered that His earthly brothers could not follow Him. There was some sort of contest going on here that He had apparently won, but without even realizing that there had been a contest going on at all. He flat-out could not stand the unfairness of it! The very thing that had made Jesus such a winner – the fact that He was so naturally loving – made Him insist on going right back to the earth that minute, so He could teach everyone else how to achieve spiritual perfection, just as He had managed to do it, all on His own and without even trying. But yet, there was a delay of some four thousand earth-years between His death as a Neolithic princeling who had become a Perfected Being, and His subsequent birth two thousand years ago that we are once again about to celebrate.

Much is made of the fact that there are ancient Biblical prophesies of the sacred birth of Jesus. And, yes indeed, those prophesies are there in the Christian Bible’s Old Testament. There are not many, but they are there. Some are pretty obscure, like this one: “I see him, but not now; I look at him, but not near; A star shall appear from Jacob, A scepter shall rise from Israel, and shall smash the forehead of Moab, and overcome all the sons of Sheth” (Numbers 24:17). I call this one obscure, because in context you really have trouble seeing it as anything significant. In fact, I have to confess to doubting that it refers to the coming of Jesus at all.

But the two most commonly cited prophecies are in the Book of Isaiah, and they are not obscure! Isaiah is the greatest Old Testament Prophet. He lived some seven hundred years before the birth of Jesus. And he said, “Therefore the Lord Himself will give you a sign: Behold, the virgin will conceive and give birth to a son, and she will name Him Immanuel” (Isaiah 7:14). That name means “God with us,” which of course is precisely the significance of the birth of someone being born directly from the Godhead for the only time in human history. Well, that seems to be pretty profound. And Isaiah also said, “For a Child will be born to us, a Son will be given to us; And the government will rest on His shoulders; And His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over His kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore (Isaiah 9:6-7). And wow, that is powerful! Having heard now directly from Jesus that, unlike all the rest of us who ever have been born, He always knew while He was on earth Who He was and what His life-plan was, I have wondered over the past year and a half about some of these key Biblical players. Did Isaiah know that he was foreseeing Jesus’s long-term role in human history?

Or what about Micah of Moresheth, who is my favorite of the Hebrew Prophets? Micah was what was called a “Lesser Prophet.” He lived and prophesied at the same time that the great Isaiah was speaking to kings about the Messiah to be born the King of the Jews. And actually, the ruins of the city of Moresheth have lately been found in the same area of Israel where Hamas conducted their massacre of modern Jews on October 7th of this year. I have loved Micah ever since my childhood pastor, a humble man himself, printed Micah’s epic sentence in his bulletin one Sunday, and I cut it out and taped it to the wall above my childhood desk, where it remained for the rest of my growing-up. Micah said, “He has told you, Oh mortal one, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:8) Oh my dear ones, Jesus loves that sentence! Yes indeed, it is clear that Isaiah foresaw the Lord’s coming. But if any of the Prophets foresaw the Lord’s Message by seven hundred years, it was my beloved Micah and not the great Isaiah.

It is the numbers game, though, that comes at the start of the Book of Matthew, which suggests a reason why so much earth-time was allowed to pass before Jesus returned on His teaching mission. Perhaps God thought it might be a reassuring sign to those on earth who awaited the coming of their Messiah. We who read the whole Bible repeatedly will sometimes joke about always skipping “the begats,” which occur here and there where the Jews kept track of their lineages. One such list of three sets of begats occurs at the start of Matthew, and it traces the lineage of Joseph right back from Jesus to Abraham, concluding with, 17 “So all the generations from Abraham to David are fourteen generations; from David to the deportation to Babylon, fourteen generations; and from the deportation to Babylon to the Messiah, fourteen generations” (MT 1:1-17). And it should be noted here both that Mary also is descended from David, and that, um, it is more generally claimed in the Gospels that Jesus’s earthly body had no human father. Although why that should matter to anyone is something about which I frankly have no clue!

It might be noted, too, that until rather late in His time on earth, Jesus was shy about owning His Messianic role. If indeed Mary was born a slave, and Jesus was emancipated by law at the age of thirty, then His shyness about publicly calling Himself the Messiah might make some sense; and anyway, Jesus seems to have been more comfortable referring to Himself as the “Son of Man,” a term which comes up intermittently in the Old Testament with various and generally more modest everyman spiritual meanings. Perhaps Jesus liked that term because it was a way for Him to refer to Himself as the expected Messiah without being quite so in-your-face about it? He will say things in the Gospels like, “The foxes have holes and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay His head” (MT 8:20). And “so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins,” (MT 9:6) when He forgave a lame man’s sins as part of healing him, and “whoever speaks a word against the Son of Man, it shall be forgiven him; but whoever speaks against the Holy Spirit, it shall not be forgiven him” (MT 12:32), and “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” (MT 16:13). It was a clever way for Jesus to claim His Divinity while still not quite claiming the Messianic title just yet, in case there were people nearby who could have been made uncomfortable, or even hostile, by His doing so.

 He may have been made wary about this possibility by an incident right at the start of His ministry. Returning from His Baptism by John and feeling full of the Spirit, Jesus had naively read aloud from the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah in His hometown synagogue on a Sabbath morning. He had read a prophesy about the Messiah and then said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” Jesus then went on to discourse on that topic, thereby making His homies so irate at what they saw as His presumptuousness that they tried to throw Him off a cliff. (See LK 4:14-30). He soon learned to be more circumspect!

Please now read again those prophesies from Isaiah of Jesus’s holy birth. They are all about peace and justice and righteousness, and about bringing the genuine God among us, and therefore they are all about LOVE. Never can you find a single mention of Jesus coming to sacrifice Himself for our sins in those prophesies, no matter how hard you look for it. I am sorry, traditional Christians, and all those who still believe that God required Jesus to be born with that ghastly task before Him. I am sorry, too, for those who think that Jesus’s blood was needed to save us from the wrath of a God whose only actual emotion ever is perfect love! And those who believe that the blundering Roman Emperor Constantine, who founded the Christian religion, ever did anything right in his life. I am sorry to have to say this to those who still are trying to be religious, but the Christian religion is really not about Jesus. Not at all! And sadly, it is fear-based and not love-based, so there is little more of value that it can do for us now. The sooner we  can put it behind us, the better.

Jesus’s work and His life are all about His Teachings! I doubt that He was thinking during His lifetime  about the fact that a Roman Emperor bent on feeding his own power was three hundred years later going to usurp Jesus’s holy name and use it to create an unrelated religion.

Toward the end of the Lord’s earthly life, there came a remarkable scene. Jesus was with His disciples and lamenting the fact that He had given the people so many signs that He was their Messiah, and yet still, just as Isaiah had prophesied would happen, so many of them still did not believe. This was the moment when at last Jesus fully claimed and owned His role as the Messiah. He claimed it all.

But He was not looking forward to what was coming next. The “fully Man” part of Jesus was briefly transcendent in Him then, and you can see that He was deeply troubled and feeling humanly fallible. But He was not shirking anything! This whole passage is really remarkable, and I urge you to read it all; but it is long, so I will quote here just the end of it, which is relevant to our present discussion. Jesus said, “The one who believes in Me, does not believe only in Me, but also in Him who sent Me. 45 And the one who sees Me sees Him who sent Me. 46 I have come as Light into the world, so that no one who believes in Me will remain in darkness. 47 If anyone hears My Teachings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world. 48 The one who rejects Me and does not accept My Teachings has one who judges him: the Word which I spoke. That will judge him on the last day. 49 For I did not speak on My own, but the Father Himself who sent Me has given Me a commandment as to what to say and what to speak. 50 And I know that His commandment is eternal life; therefore, the things I speak, I speak just as the Father has told Me” (JN 12:44-50).

How extraordinary that whole passage is, because it is the purest truth! Jesus tells us right here and flat out as He is about to submit to His crucifixion that He is the Messiah, the Promised One of God. And that He came NOT to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins; but instead, He came to us as our Teacher! And every word that He taught us came through Him from God. And on the “last day” for each of us, when we will have our life review and we will judge ourselves, those words from God that Jesus spoke will be the standard that we will use to judge ourselves. Every word from Jesus’s mouth during His ministry on earth has been God’s Word, all along! Omigod, what I purely love about being a Gospels scholar and an afterlife scholar both at once is the fact that these two sets of knowledge keep validating one another. And you can take it or leave it now, traditional Christians, but Jesus says it all clearly right there in your Bibles, directly in the Gospel of John.

Emmanuel does indeed mean “God with us.” What we will celebrate tomorrow is the human birth of the Son of the Living God, who came to us as our Teacher, and who reveals All Things to us. It is no wonder that Isaiah’s prophesy of Jesus’s birth calls Him the “Prince of Peace,” and says that there will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over His kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. Would Isaiah have said that about some poor Lamb who had to die as a sin-sacrifice to a miserly and unforgiving God? Of course not! But about the holy Teacher who came directly from God to teach all of humankind at last how we can bring genuine peace to every human heart over all the world, using God’s Own Words? And whose kingdom truly is eternal? Even two thousand years later, it has only just begun? Oh my, yes!

(For those who have expressed an interest in taking Jesus’s course, there are more than sixty of you now, and we have modified our plan to include you all. There is room for a few more, so if you have been thinking that making this your last earth-lifetime sounds like a good idea, send an email to info@robertagrimes.com by Christmas night. I will send an invitation email to all of you next week. Please watch for it!)

O come, Thou Key of David, come
And open wide our heav’nly home;
Make safe the way that leads on high,
And close the path to misery.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.

O come, Adonai, Lord of might,
Who to Thy tribes, on Sinai’s height,
In ancient times didst give the law,
In cloud and majesty and awe.
Rejoice! Rejoice! Emmanuel
Shall come to thee, O Israel.
– John Mason Neale (1818-1866), translator, from a 15th century Franciscan Processional.

Our Very Personal God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
– Charles A. Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

On the morning of April 9, 2009, and on ecstatic impulse, I gave the rest of my life to God. It seemed at the time to be only fair, after all that God had given to me. In retrospect, I have to say that, wow, when you do that, God takes you at your word! Within months after that first April 9th, I was writing what became The Fun of Dying. Soon after that came The Fun of Staying in Touch and The Fun of Growing Forever. I met Craig Hogan, and soon he and I were giving afterlife conferences. Then Thomas came out to me through a medium. He insisted that I channel Liberating Jesus, which meant that unexpectedly for two weeks’ time I lived as Jesus’s fingers on my keyboard. So really, upon reflection I would have to say that when you give your life to God, you can look back after several years and realize that God does take your gift seriously.       

And God makes it all such a happy experience! I am so much loving my life that I am shocked to notice how old the calendar says that I have lately become. In only another decade or two, I will be what sounds to me like seventeen billion years old. And yet, after the heart surgery that I had last summer, I feel as if I am only maybe forty years old. Or, okay, I’ll admit to forty-two. I am delighted to be still practicing law for the family businesses that I adore, and I continue to podcast. I am writing this blog post in the middle of the night because I habitually split-sleep. I have plans now to share the truth with the world, and that will take another fifty years at least, which is where the age thing may be an issue. I have learned so much in my very long life about the afterlife, about God, about Jesus, and about the greater reality. And I feel charged now with sharing all this knowledge with as many people as I can!

I first personally met Jesus in the astral plane just twenty months ago, in April of 2022. I don’t know what it is about April for my dearly beloved Thomas and me! My childhood experience of light happened in April of 1954, and Thomas Jefferson’s earth-birthday is April 13th. My guess is that the month of April might have even more significance for Thomas than it has for me. But in April of 2022, I thought that even his taking me to the astral plane to meet with Jesus was too amazing a story for me ever to feel entitled to share it, although of course that wasn’t true at all. NDE-ers talk about meeting Jesus in the astral plane all the time. And back then, it was just simply meeting Jesus that absolutely freaked me out. His personal energy feels like silk to be near but it is so immensely powerful, and He was talking to me as if we were friends just casually collaborating on a project, when I was so overwhelmed and starstruck to be suddenly meeting Omigod the real Jesus! Because, of course, what I didn’t know then was that I had been Thomas’s tagalong charge just casually meeting with Jesus and my spirit guide in the astral plane on most of the nights of my earthly life.

Primary spirit guides are never supposed to leave their charges alone for long. And yet Thomas also has another, and a very much greater duty. He is a part of Jesus’s inner circle, and his role for Jesus is what Thomas calls “balance.” He helps Jesus to maintain His connection to the human aspect of Himself, which seems to me mainly as I (rarely) observe it to involve a whole lot of kidding around in what Thomas tells me is a pidgin of several obscure and probably ancient languages, and sometimes actually play-fighting on the ground like foolish teenagers, which apparently nobody else in the universe feels able to do for the Son of the Living God. So when Thomas became my spirit guide, he started to take me along at night when he visits with Jesus while my body sleeps, and he simply gave me complete amnesia for all those out-of-body nights. And his problem was altogether solved. But I had no idea that any of that was ever going on! So to Jesus, I soon became just one more of His many familiars. Thomas tells me now that I have been part of Jesus’s circle of familiars anyway for the past two thousand years, although not nearly to his own extent. But that amazing April night twenty months ago was just dropped on me from out of nowhere with no warning at all.

They had decided to let me remember some of that night, and also many of the subsequent nights of that summer, because it was time for me to start to work with Jesus on the plans that He had been brewing for a website to house His genuine teachings and eventually to become a meeting place as He begins to come out to the world more generally. We all think of Jesus as a million miles above us! He Himself is God, for heaven’s sake. He is fully God and fully Man. You cannot feel His personal energy, so utterly devoid of any human low notes, and not understand that Jesus is God. You are speaking with God. He looks at you, and you see God in His eyes. But as I have begun to know Jesus, I have come to see that what Thomas keeps telling me also is true: Jesus has a gentle servant’s heart. And He has no ego at all! Nothing about Jesus is an affectation. When He asks you questions about your day, He actually is eager to learn about your day. It truly seems never to occur to Jesus that the fact that He operates spiritually even above the Godhead level makes Him any more important than the simple person who is operating barely on spiritual Level Three. Jesus is always sweet and gentle and deeply respectful of everyone. And I cannot tell you how charming that is!

It was on that April 6th twenty months ago that Jesus first told me His genuine Christmas-and-Easter story. Now He wants us to tell it over again on all the Christmases and Easters to come, to gradually replace what He considers to be the Roman Emperor Constantine’s bogus version that prevails in Christianity today. So here it is again. Please read it, just as Jesus told it to me. We have put Jesus’s true story on teachingsbyjesus.com as well, but Jesus tells us that He never intends to make a major deal of it. He says that He understands that some people still find comfort in the old Christianity with all its fear-based stories, even as more and more people are becoming increasingly appalled by it all. Jesus tells us that in centuries to come, people are going to be relieved to hear the true Christmas-and-Easter story, that Jesus came into the world to teach people how they can easily become Perfected Beings so they can make this lifetime on the earth the last one that they ever will need to live here. It is Jesus’s wish for each of us that we will find and follow the spiritual pathway that leads us most directly to find God’s genuine peace in our own hearts.

And Jesus has made my Thomas know that He wants now to go back to teaching what He came two thousand years ago to teach to us. He wants to share His own original Way with those who no longer find Roman Christianity to be either sensible or satisfactory. The pure Way of Jesus still remains preserved in the four Biblical Gospels. The Nicaean Councilors did modify some of the Lord’s words, true enough, but mostly what they did was just to harvest a few random words that Jesus had said, and then they built the very different fear-based teachings that Constantine and other Roman Emperors had in mind on those single plucked-out sentences. Here is one especially awful example:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. (JN 3:16)

Constantine’s Christianity uses this beautiful sentence to proclaim that God is so barbaric as to require the blood-sacrifice of God’s own Son to Godself, or else God never will forgive us for our sins.  

But when we look at the Gospel passage from which this sentence was taken (it is the first of the two underlined sentences in the Gospel passage below), we see that it is about something else altogether! Jesus is actually explaining here to His loyal follower, Nicodemus, that He came to fight what He has told you and me is His own particular bane, which is our vast spiritual ignorance, and the fact that as a result of our spiritual ignorance, too many people even to this day must be born on earth repeatedly, having to reincarnate (i.e. be “born from above”) over and over again. We come back to earth repeatedly, while making very little spiritual progress each time.

What Jesus came to free us from WAS NOT the judgment and punishment of a vengeful God! Remember, Jesus tells us in that same Gospel of John that God never judges us! Jesus actually says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Which gives the lie altogether to Constantine’s Big Lie about what Jesus meant when He said the words at JN 3:16, does it not? No, what Jesus was born to fight was not our sins at all, but it was instead our own awful spiritual ignorance!

Or else, why did Jesus even bother to teach us anything? Why didn’t He simply step up and die on the cross right away, and then rise from the dead and head back Home? And Jesus makes all of this perfectly clear in the rest of this passage from John, where He says almost wryly that if people won’t listen to Him as He tells them how they can grow spiritually and thereby save themselves from having to keep on reincarnating forever – if they won’t “come to the Light,” as He says to Nicodemus in the passage below – then there is nothing more that He can do to help them. They have judged themselves to be unworthy of advancing spiritually. Or as He plainly puts it below, “They have loved the darkness more than the Light” (JN 3:20). But those who instead have listened to and followed Jesus’s teachings will find when they come to their post-death life-review that they have grown so much spiritually that, as was also true of Him when He lived His last earth-lifetime prior to His first ascension six thousand years ago, they have been practicing the truth so they have come to the Light, just as He says to Nicodemus in the second underlined sentence below, to the point where their deeds literally have been “performed in God.” And remember as you are reading this that the kingdom of God is the upper part of the afterlife.  Omigod, how much more obvious can any of this possibly be?

Please read Jesus’s words in their Gospel context for yourself!

31Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; 2 this man came to Jesus at night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a Teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” 3 Jesus responded and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again (or born from above), he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

4 Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a person be born when he is old? He cannot enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born, can he?” 5 Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. 6 That which has been born of the flesh is flesh, and that which has been born of the Spirit is spirit. 7 Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again (or born from above).’ 8 The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit.”

9 Nicodemus responded and said to Him, “How can these things be?” 10 Jesus answered and said to him, “You are the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? 11 Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you people do not accept our testimony. 12 If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? 13 No one has ascended into heaven, except He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man. 14 And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, 15 so that everyone who believes Him will have eternal life in Him.

16 “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. 17 For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that all the world might be saved through Him. 18 The one who believes in Him is not judged; the one who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. 19 And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light; for their deeds were evil. 20 For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light, so that his deeds will not be exposed. 21 But the one who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds will be revealed as having been performed in God” (JN 3:1-21).

Jesus was born to be our spiritual Teacher. He was born on earth two thousand years ago from out of the Godhead as a Divine Being, fully God and fully Man and literally God on earth, with a divine mission, which was His teaching mission, a life-plan chosen by Himself and blessed by God to teach all of us how to raise our spiritual vibrations to the point where this can be our last necessary earth-lifetime. And once His plan was completed, He chose to die a public death by crucifixion so He could then reanimate His dead body and literally rise from the dead in order to teach us that death is just an illusion. He then used that decaying body briefly before He discarded it and used an astral body for a month, after which He was bodily assumed into the astral plane, where He remains to this day. I am a skeptic by nature, so I have pretty thoroughly investigated all of this. And every bit of it is true!

I tested Jesus’s teachings on myself twelve years ago, and they worked within weeks to raise my spiritual vibration to an amazing degree. The effect was dramatic! And it has been permanent. Jesus has asked me now to begin to teach others to do what I have done for myself, so I am completing a course on how to teach a course. After having just once mentioned my plan here to do this, I received about fifty emails. Which was amazing! I had hoped to start with maybe ten people. But I am game, if you are. We will need first to learn what you will need to know and how much of it you will need to know in order for the Lord’s teachings to work their magic for you, just as they have done for me. The result is a literal transformation! And I am planning to guarantee that same transformation to every participant. We expect to begin Zoom classes in January, and to run this course for ten Wednesday evenings and then do support groups afterward. This is going to be fun! My transformation took just a few weeks, but my prior knowledge base was a factor. However, now that I understand how and why the teachings work, I am confident that our success rate can be one hundred percent. Most of the opt-in requests have come to our info@robertagrimes.com address, so to be sure that you receive an invitation, if your first email was to rgrimes@robertagrimes.com, please send a new email to the info address, and be sure to include your correct email address. Then, soon after Christmas, if you have expressed an interest, please watch your inbox!

He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
– Charles A. Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

Knowing God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My sweet Lord, Mm, my Lord, Mm, my Lord,
I really want to see you. Really want to be with you.
Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord.
My sweet Lord. Mm, my Lord. Mm, my Lord.
I really want to know you. Really want to go with you.
Really want to show you, Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord.
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Mm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)
Really wanna see you! Really wanna see you! Really wanna see you, Lord!
Really wanna see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord.
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Mm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My, my, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
I really wanna know you (Hallelujah!) Really wanna go with you (Hallelujah!)
Really wanna show you, Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

Beginning to find God scientifically, as we have been doing over the past two weeks, can be just the start of really coming to intimately know the genuine God. But the monstrous and distancing notions of God that our religions have been putting into our minds ever since long prehistory have made our being able to think clearly about God so hard! All our versions of gods down through the ages have been created by us in our own image as just bigger, sterner, and much more powerful versions of human beings. And our relationship with even what we thought of as the Creator God of Roman Christianity was always based on a primitive fear of a bearded, human-like and highly judgmental Deity that was loving, yes, but also quick to show anger, and was willing to throw us into a fiery hell for what seemed to be trivial crimes.  Even the fact that all our versions of gods have been housed in fear-based religions has made most of us tend to see God as just an abstraction and not as anything real, as if once we do away with religions, then God also likely will disappear.

But God is real, and God is independent of whatever religion-created view of God might have been planted in our minds. That fact should be obvious to us, but somehow it feels like a stunning realization! One of the things that Jesus came to do two thousand years ago was to teach us that God is indeed real. And in so doing, He wanted to move us past our old ways of relating to our human-created gods, and teach us to relate to the genuine God only privately, without religions in the way. This was why He taught us to call God “Father,” an intimate and loving name. And He said, “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). Jesus had little use for clergymen. And furthermore, it is clear from the Gospels that He actively despised religious rituals and traditions. The more you read the Biblical Gospels, the more you get the sense that Jesus was trying to get rid of religions altogether so we could begin to relate to God without any remnant of any religion in the way.

So, what we are talking about doing now is developing a much deeper individual relationship with the genuine God. And the first step is to do what Jesus attempted to do for us, which was to remove from our minds the last religion-generated remnants of what God is not. God is not a fear-based and judgmental human-like idol. Instead, “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24). And Jesus then replaced all those old fear-based ideas about God with one new and all-encompassing commandment. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (JN 13:34). And not only should we love one another, but we must especially love God, who loves us and who is so eminently worthy of our love! “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And Jesus made it perfectly plain that in replacing all the old, much harsher religious rules of what we now call the Old Testament, even including the Ten Commandments, He was fulfilling God’s loving plan for us. He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

What Jesus could not do, though, two thousand years ago, was to prove to us the existence of God scientifically. Back then there was no science to speak of! No, as we began to see in our last two weeks of posts, we had to come forward in human history by almost another two millennia, to a much more arrogant time in human terms, for people first even to begin to imagine that they could get to the point where they could scientifically explain everything, and thereby they thought that they could avoid the need to even posit the existence of a Creator God. When this peak confidence on the part of scientists was still in full swing, but it was first becoming apparent that science might not necessarily be able to explain precisely everything, which was around the turn of the twentieth century, theologians began to play with a “God of the gaps” idea, which gave a Creator God a real but steadily shrinking role. God still provided an explanation for the things that materialist science still had not yet figured out.

Nowadays, however, the joke is more and more on the materialist scientists! As trained scientists with a Christian bent find ever better funding, they are demonstrating not only the areas where mainstream science never has yet succeeded, and it likely never can succeed; but also, they are discovering that even what once had seemed to be some successful scientific theories and assumptions may not be the most workable explanations for even the most basic phenomena. Here are four core insoluble scientific problems:

  • The Origin of Matter. As we learned two weeks ago, the Big Bang is no explanation at all for where matter may have come from, since it does nothing more than to set an arbitrary starting point. It doesn’t explain the why or the how, and we always can ask what existed before whatever starting point the scientists might arbitrarily choose. In point of fact, their Big Bang idea explains nothing.
  • The Origin of Life. As we learned last week, the most intractable set of problems for materialist scientists is where life came from, how life got started, and what life even is. If the university science departments and the peer-reviewed journals had not weirdly set their system up a century ago as a battle to the death against God, literally, they could have given it up a long time ago. But how they can end it now, only God knows!
  • Random Evolution’s Evident Inadequacy. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution requires that natural selection must not be driven by a Creator’s guiding hand, so it depends upon an endless series of random mutations. It does seem, though, that other theories, including that of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck that heredity can be influenced by life experiences, may also be right. And mutations occur in nature too infrequently and much too randomly to explain what the fossil record indicates actually happens. What we see instead is a whole lot of what is now being called punctuated equilibrium. Repeatedly, new species appear in the fossil record with little or no discernible evolutionary history, and they remain stable, often for millennia, before being replaced by new and quite different species virtually overnight. Any honest scientist would at this point have to say that the fossil evidence for an intelligent Creator is overwhelming.
  • Evident Design. The God of the gaps still fills a great many gaps! For one thing, there are far too many parts of material bodies, from eyes and ears right down to the manifold wonders of each living cell, which cannot be explained by evolutionary theory because without all their pieces already assembled and in place, they cannot usefully perform their functions. Which means that all those pieces never would have gradually assembled in the first place if random evolutionary theory were correct.

Taken together, these four points by themselves are proof delivered by the materialist scientific community itself of the obvious existence of a Creator God. Mainstream scientists gave scientific materialism their very best shot for a century, and we certainly ought to acknowledge that fact! At the start of the twentieth century, shortly before Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, Dr. Planck realized that at the base of all reality is actually non-material consciousness. He came to call it Mind. He understood that he had found the Creator God, and the materialist scientists took these ideas voiced by one of their own as a direct challenge. They established their “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” to turn the whole scientific community into an atheistic army, and they set out then to prove the estimable Dr. Planck to be entirely wrong.

The worldwide lay community as a whole does not realize that for the past hundred years it has been witnessing a battle royal, but a battle is what has in fact been going on. And until well into this new century, the materialists had the upper hand, because they controlled the money and they controlled the press. The one thing that they cannot control is the truth, and in the end the truth always was going to win. As scientists with a Christian mindset have found ever better funding, a few of the best have banded together and have devoted their careers to doing the independent research that was going to be necessary in order for them to find and to publicize the truth. At this point, and with the healthy leveling of the playing field that the Internet provides, atheistic materialist science is in its waning days. Although they are not yet ready to admit this, the mainstream scientific community itself has conclusively proven that none of what they have been claiming are the best atheistic explanations for the reality that we see around us are in fact atheistic explanations at all. But rather, the irrefutable evidence for the existence of a Creator God that the materialist scientists themselves have produced can no longer be denied. 

And Jesus knew and told His disciples that this day would come! Shortly before He went to the cross, Jesus said to them,

“Whenever a woman is in labor she has pain, because her hour has come; but when she gives birth to the child, she no longer remembers the anguish because of the joy that a child has been born into the world. 22 Therefore you too have grief now; but I will see you again, and your heart will rejoice, and no one is going to take your joy away from you.

23 “And on that day you will not question Me about anything. Truly, truly I say to you, if you ask the Father for anything in My name, He will give it to you. 24 Until now you have asked for nothing in My name; ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be made full.

25 “These things I have spoken to you in figures of speech; an hour is coming when I will no longer speak to you in figures of speech, but will tell you plainly about the Father. 26 On that day you will ask in My name, and I am not saying to you that I will request of the Father on your behalf; 27 for the Father Himself loves you, because you have loved Me and have believed that I came forth from the Father. 28 I came forth from the Father and have come into the world; again, I am leaving the world and going to the Father.”

29 His disciples said, “See, now You are speaking plainly and are not using any figure of speech. 30 Now we know that You know all things, and that You have no need for anyone to question You; this is why we believe that You came forth from God.” 31 Jesus replied to them, “Do you now believe? 32 Behold, an hour is coming, and has already come, for you to be scattered, each to his own home, and to leave Me alone; and yet I am not alone, because the Father is with Me. 33 These things I have spoken to you so that in Me you may have peace. In the world you have tribulation, but take courage; I have overcome the world” (JN 16:22-33).

And my dear ones, so Jesus has indeed overcome the world! It is impossible for us to read these words that He spoke two thousand years ago, even though He spoke them in Aramaic and He spoke simply to very simple people, and not have the feeling that He was speaking to us with a clear understanding of the vastly different world that we would be confronting today. Jesus spent four thousand earth-years after his last fully human lifetime seeking to ever better understand the lush and overwhelmingly perfect love of God for imperfect humankind so He could come back to us, now from out of the Godhead, and teach us how we, too, have overcome the world. His love for us is perhaps as great as God’s love, if that is possible.

Know Jesus, and you will know God in truth! Your heart will swell to bursting if at last you can begin to understand that the God of all really does love imperfect You so much, because so it was also for me when I first understood what I am saying to you now. As hard as this may be to believe, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child, and you are treasured by God more than you can imagine.

So you know now that you fully possess God’s whole creation. You can truly trust it now! Every tiniest bit of what exists, God made for you in the fullness of God’s perfect eternal love for you. So, live in it! And truly own it! Know now, beyond all possible doubt, that none of this is random. And it isn’t even so much that, as we have conclusively demonstrated, the evidence for an intelligent Designer is everywhere. But the need for ongoing maintenance for so many of this Creation’s systems is such that without God’s continuous care in every instant, it would all long since have fallen apart. And every beautiful thing in this universe is yours to enjoy in the perfect splendor of God’s love.

So if you ever again have the slightest doubt of the Creator God’s existence, simply follow and read all the links in this week’s post and in the previous two weeks’ posts. Then go and have a long look in the mirror. Without a Creator God’s first designing and then continuously moment-by-moment maintaining the existence of this entire greater reality, including the universe and right down to all the cells and mechanisms in your own body, none of this could be here at all! Our whole mainstream scientific community has satisfactorily proven the existence of God, quite in spite of itself. Now the onus is on all the smug atheists to prove how any of this could continue to exist without the intelligent design and the ongoing close maintenance of a loving Creator God. Dr. Dawkins? Your move, Sir….

Let There be Life!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

To us and our good fortune! Be happy, be healthy, long life!
And if our good fortune never comes, here’s to whatever comes.
Drink l’chai-im, to life! To life, l’chai-im! L’chai-im, l’chai-im, to life!
Here’s to our prosperity, our good health and happiness, and most important …
To life, to life, l’chai-im! L’chai-im, l’chai-im, to life!
Here’s to the father I tried to be!
Here’s to my bride-to-be! Drink l’chai-im, to life!
To life, to life, l’chai-im. To Tzeitel, my daughter…   My wife!
It gives you something to think about…  Something to drink about!
Drink l’chai-im, to life! To life, l’chai-im, l’chai-im, l’chai-im, to life.
Drink l’chai-im, to life! To Tzeitel, my daughter…  My wife!
It takes a wedding to make us say, “Let’s live another day.”
Drink l’chai-im, to life!
– Sheldon Harnick (1924-2023), from “To Life” (1964)

We learned last week that materialist scientists are flummoxed by the question of how Something might have arisen from nothing. It seems almost unfair to beat materialist scientists up about their inability to deal with that core problem, except for the fact that their determination not even to try to understand reality except in materialist terms does kind of invite our ridicule, doesn’t it? When the fundamental problem with something-from-nothing is one that even a fifth-grader can spot, why can’t fully grown and educated scientists at least attempt to deal with it? And in any event, every bit as profound an enigma for traditional scientists turns out to be the question of how life first arose on earth. We might actually say that the origin-of-life question is an even more vexing problem for materialist scientists to deal with than is the origin-of-matter issue, for the simple fact that they know that they really ought to be able to solve this origin-of-life conundrum. It should be a relatively straightforward problem for trained chemists and biologists to tackle. Or so you would think. But the plain fact is that for the better part of a century, materialist mainstream scientists have been chasing the question of how life might have arisen on earth. And so far, they have made no progress toward solving any part of that puzzle at all.

Until the nineteen-fifties, the few articles that were published in popular-science magazines about the origin of life were taking an amazingly lazy approach. They assumed that life must have originated in some primordial pool, where just the right mix of chemicals was hit by lightning one day at just the right temperature, and – zap! – life began. It would have been just simple cells at first, they thought, which somehow magically assembled themselves; and then those cells would have begun to combine, and so on. Those old magazine articles looked a lot like eighth-grade science project reports. Then in 1953 there were what were considered to be three big scientific advances, which now, seventy years further on, some materialist scientists believe just might have put them right on the edge of an impending breakthrough. The first of those seminal advances came in April of 1953, when James Watson and Francis Crick published a paper on DNA which advanced a new understanding of how the double helix form of DNA could help to explain how life replicates itself. The second breakthrough came three weeks later, when news broke of the Miller-Urey experiment, which showed how a cocktail of chemicals could spontaneously generate the amino acids that are vital to building the molecules of life. Then in September of 1953, there was given the first reasonably accurate estimate for the age of the earth. Origin-of-life researchers felt that at last they had a great place to really begin to do their work.

But in the seventy years since that pivotal year of discoveries, almost no further progress has been made. The popular-science-magazine versions of scientists’ latest ideas of how life on earth might have arisen randomly still look like precisely the same sorts of dramatic diagrams they used to draw in those seventy-year-old popular-science magazines, where lightning would hit pond-scum, and Presto! And as is true of the Big Bang as a proposed origin-of-matter solution, these diagrams are singularly unsatisfying. The true building blocks of life would be chemicals with some of the same names as those that are given on the linked Scientific American diagram; but all the useful chemicals would need to be in a nearly pure form, and quickly able to combine properly and in the correct order and almost under laboratory conditions if anything like these events were to have any hope of taking place in a way that might actually get life started. And then, of course, once the spark of life is struck, you would need ways to feed that tiny flame and keep it alive. Both chemicals and conditions would have to be just right. So for life on earth to have begun this way, such sparks would need to have been struck repeatedly! So often, perhaps, that once in a thousand or even once in a million times, a spark might have persisted long enough and in such ideal conditions that it somehow survived, was fed, and began to be stable. But, then what? How did that spark become a cell, and out of perhaps a million such cells, how then did one cell learn to replicate itself?   

Seeing how plain foolish the materialists are being, once again the brilliant Christian origin-of-life chemist Dr. James Tour has called the materialist researchers’ bluff. Dr. Tour had become increasingly vexed by baseless claims that materialist origin-of-life researchers were beginning to make real progress, so he proceeded to make them a simple bet that, if any of their recent claims were true, they ought to have been able to win easily. He offered ten of the most prominent materialist scientists in the field of origin-of-life research a contest in which, in order to win his contest, they would need only to demonstrate how just one of a selected basic five of the essential building blocks of life could have arisen naturally. And he even suggested that three of the ten chosen materialist scientists could be the judges of whether or not his contest had been won! If they could show how even one of those building blocks could have arisen naturally, he promised that he would take down all his YouTubes in which he had repeatedly claimed that their whole field was out to lunch (metaphorically speaking). But alas, there was no winner. There was no contest in the end, since none of the ten scientists even tried to respond to his challenge. In fact, there has been no meaningful progress made by any materialist scientist toward understanding how life on earth could have arisen on its own in the seventy years since those three 1953 breakthroughs first were hailed.

So now let’s help James Tour spike the ball in his own end zone. He and others have created some wonderfully playful YouTube videos that he had offered to have taken down if the materialist scientists had accepted his challenge and then had won it; although, of course, there is no way that they could have won it. Here is one sample video that I think you will enjoy. Creationist scientists are much better funded nowadays, and they even have their own terrific online journal, called Evolution News & Science Today. Given how bollixed up mainstream science still is with its “fundamental scientific dogma” of atheistic materialism, the independent scientists who are published in Evolution News are doing beautiful and enlightened work that is fully on a par with the work of classic mainstream scientists of the free scientific age that is now more than a century into the past. It is such a joy to read their publication!

Now that we have seen how useless have been all the traditional scientific efforts to understand these two fundamental aspects of our reality, both the origin of the universe (last week) and the origin of life, I would like to point out one more thing. When you put together last week’s and this week’s blog posts and read them again, including their linked articles (and Rupert Sheldrake’s banned Tedx talk from last week), my dear friends, you now have incontrovertible scientific proof of the existence of a Creator God. Materialist scientists have accepted the existence of a great many things with far less proof than what we have delivered last week and today of God’s existence.

 Please consider these two core facts:

  • The reality around you exists and is stable. This universe has been here  for an estimated 13.7 billion earth-years, and during all that time its cosmological constants and everything else required to maintain it in stable existence have all been held within vanishingly tiny tolerances, or else the universe would either have collapsed inward upon itself or blow apart long since. And yet you will sleep well tonight, as you do every night, with a mind entirely free from worry as all those cosmological constants and many other controlling factors keep steadily doing their minute adjusting.
  • You exist and are alive and stable. The brightest scientific minds over the past hundred years have not been able even to begin to figure out how life began on earth, and they certainly have not been able to work out how life has developed from its first spark into its first cell, and then into all its complex modern variations. These questions seem to be simple ones until you actually do the research, and you begin to learn what is involved in bringing life into existence, and then creating it as it exists today in all its manifold complexity! Google some of James Tour’s YouTubes and consider the almost unfathomable difficulties that were involved in getting the earliest life to start to flourish on earth, and never mind developing it from that into the wondrously complex body and brain that you see now in your mirror.

So now you have incontrovertible proof of the ongoing existence of the loving Creator God. Not the Christian God, of course. Indeed, nothing to do with any religion because all the religions are human-made, and they are fading in this twenty-first century as we outgrow our need for them, and as we also grow beyond our leaders’ ugly and bullying lie of atheism. Now we once again can seek and find in our own hearts the God Who always has been quietly there. Before all religions there is the One Creator God, the One God that Jesus refers to as Father, and as Spirit. The One who is the highest aspect of Consciousness, and is only perfect Love. Please look around you now at each beautiful face, and know that those faces, those hillsides, those cities, literally nothing whatsoever that you see and not a single star could exist if there were no Creator God. Now that we can have God without the barrier of religions between us, we truly are entering a new age!

And add to all of this the fact that in this twenty-first century we also know for certain that we are eternal beings. We always have been eternal beings, but now in this new century, more and more of us while we are on earth know for certain this glorious truth! We know that we have nothing to fear, and we are able at last to hear the voice of God calling to us from where God dwells, deep within each of our own hearts… “Be still and know that I am God; I will be exalted among the nations, I will be exalted on the earth” (Psalm 46:10). That psalm was first sung three thousand years ago, but God has been inspiring people to sing variations of those words from even long before that, down all the generations. There always was going to come a time when we while on earth would grow past any need for religions, when we would realize that the true God always has been within us, all along, and when we would yearn for a closer and deeper Walk that we would at last be able to share with the One Eternal God. And more and more, my dear ones, it looks as if that time may soon be upon us now….

May you both be favored with the future of your choice!
May you live to see a thousand reasons to rejoice!
We’ll raise a glass and sip a drop of schnapps in honor of the great good luck that favors you!
We know that when good fortune favors two such men, it stands to reason, we deserve it too!
To us and our good fortune! Be happy, be healthy, long life!
And if our good fortune never comes, here’s to whatever comes.
Drink l’chai-im, to life!
– Sheldon Harnick (1924-2023), from “To Life” (1964)

Something from Nothing?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It seems we stood and talked like this before.
We looked at each other in the same way then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

I still can recall, and vividly, that when I first entered college as a religion major was when I first encountered and grappled with some of the Very Biggest Problems.  Even in my freshman year, we were made to wrestle with these new, grownup questions and issues that sometimes kept me awake at night and staring in the dark. I was still at my core a trusting Christian child, and never before had any of this gigantic potential for existential angst ever even occurred to me. How did all this Something arise from nothing? And it was already fine-tuned for intelligent life to evolve from what had been primordial dust? And if even so much as a single pixel in this whole complex picture were to shift by a shade, or if anything ever were to change by a jot, then everything could collapse in upon itself without warning, or else it all might blow apart? It was this new possibility that rocked me at the time, this sudden new awareness of the precariousness of it all. So, was God still even out there?

I mean, think about it. The original creation had happened so long ago! Was the crucial job of being God and remaining in charge to make sure that the universe continued to function a long-term commitment for the genuine God? When you are a child, you don’t want to have to worry about making sure that God remains sufficiently interested in God’s Creation to stay on the job forevermore!

So I look back now, and I realize that those fifty years of doing afterlife research that began for me almost right out of college were a more complex matter on an emotional level than I ever really knew. I still tell the story of my experience of light at the age of eight, and I have traced my wanting to research the afterlife back to that extraordinary night. But I think now that it has been more than that.  I think I may have spent my early life chasing a core need to establish a certainty that God really is always going to be there, and God loves me enough to never leave me again.

All of which is a meandering preface to a straightforward statement. There can be no question that God Exists. You can know that for certain, because you exist. And the whole stable reality around you exists. Something cannot come from nothing! So for us to be sure that a Creator exists is simple common sense, all based in the commonsense certainty that Something cannot come from Nothing. Of course, the bearded caricature of a God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does not exist. Nor does the cranky Jehovah boogeyman of the Old Testament exist, with all his brutal whims. God is not just a very big humanoid creature made in our own image!

For almost all of human history, though, that grotesque image of God was what we thought we were stuck with. And human leaders soon came to realize that they could imagine for that cartoonish version of God unlimited powers to reward and punish people to the extent of whatever the human mind can conceive, and their subjects would believe it all was possible for God. And so, enter the Roman Emperor Constantine and his Christian clergyman descendants. They could imagine even a loving God who will nevertheless burn your baby in hell alive and aware forever if you don’t get it baptized before it dies.

We came to understand definitively only toward the end of the last century that no such anthropomorphic Christian God exists. But what does exist is an Uncaused Cause without form, without size, and just as Jesus taught, with an immense energy of infinite power. And the True God will never leave us, because – again, just as Jesus taught – the True Creator God’s greatest power is Perfect Love. So the Genuine God does not need our worship. The Genuine God needs nothing from us. It was the bullying and petty old-style gods that we had created in our image as just big people, oversized in every way and even to their gigantic flaws, that were small enough to need our worship. The Genuine God delights in each of us the way a loving parent delights in the one most beloved infant child! Jesus tells us that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24).

But before we move on to talk about the True God that actually does exist, we should briefly mention the fact that the one belief about God that makes no sense is atheism. Think about it! Materialist scientists continue to hope to get around the pesky fact that the undeniable existence of this complex and longstanding and entirely stable reality gives us proof that a brilliant Creator MUST exist. Scientists try to defend their nonsensical atheism by putting their imagined creation-by-happenstance event extremely far back in time and making it happen really, extremely, gosh-darn quickly, and also very loudly. Materialist scientists even call their imagined first event the “Big Bang.” But of course, that doesn’t really help them, because no matter how far back it was and how quickly it happened, and no matter how loud was its bang, there still is going to be someone in the very back of the room who at some point is going to ask the obvious two questions. But, excuse me, sir, what caused that Bang? And what was there before the Bang happened? Materialist scientists of the atheist bent so deeply hate the fact that atheism is such a demonstrably flawed belief that they even talk about finding long-odds end-runs around the problems with it. Like, for example, the grasping-at-straws notion that maybe we are living in one gigantic simulation. A simulation wouldn’t need a definitive beginning, since it is never real at all!

And of course, right beside the problematic origins-of-the-universe question for atheists are the same continuation worries that plagued me in college. There are an amazing number of variables which must forever remain constant within tiny tolerances, or else this universe will either collapse in upon itself or blow apart; and yet they insist that those variables have all remained where they have to be for billions upon billions of years. Knowing that you and I are each the best-beloved Child of a God Who loves us infinitely, we are certain that God is real, so we can sleep each night without worries! God’s eye is on the sparrow – and on each of the cosmological constants – so we know that God is watching over each of us. But the truth is that the materialist scientists are very well aware by now that those “cosmological constants” which must remain the same are always nevertheless all minutely adjusting. Which fact very strongly implies that there has to be a Divine Cosmological Constants Adjuster out there somewhere, keeping this universe going.

Oh, but it implies nothing of the kind! Not to materialist scientists, it doesn’t. Those scientists just decided one fine day to give up on keeping track of all the essential cosmological constants as they keep on doing their minute-adjusting thing. The scientists have simply set each “constant” at one predetermined value and decided to assume that each of them never will change again, so even as the constants keep on minutely adjusting, now the scientists never will know about it. Rupert Sheldrake’s famously banned Tedx talk on this topic is laugh-out-loud funny because he plays it as a classic straight man. And if you have never seen this talk, please watch it now! I think Dr. Sheldrake may have missed his calling. He really should have been a comedian.

All right. So now, let’s talk about what the genuine High God actually is. Jesus told us, as we quoted Him saying above, that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and Truth” (JN 4:24). Notice that Jesus is not here insisting that we worship God in the old, fear-based way in which people used to worship God, with rote prayers and blind subjugation. No, since God is Spirit, if we choose to worship our Father who gives us life, which is entirely up to us, we are now to worship God where God is, and in Spirit and in Truth. When Jesus told us that God is Spirit, He was telling us what we now know to be true: God is the highest aspect of Consciousness.

Consciousness is all that exists, and each of us alike is also a part of that same Consciousness. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. Consciousness is a form of energy, and so it vibrates. At its lowest and slowest vibration, consciousness is fear and hatred, which we strive to escape. At its highest vibration it is the High God and perfect love. While people could not have known any of this two thousand years ago, they could at least have known that this new version of God that Jesus was calling Spirit is a departure from what they always had understood God to be, and this new way of praying to God was new as well. Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (MT 6:8-10).

Yes, it felt like a departure to those who first heard these words, but it was love-based and not fear-based, so it also felt liberating to Jesus’s first followers, just as it feels liberating to us. God now is no longer a scary human-like Jehovah, but instead God is a loving Father whose very name is sacred, or Hallowed. And thanks to Jesus, we are now on the path toward joining God where God is, as we work toward elevating our own spiritual vibrations ever closer to becoming one with God in Spirit, and thereby bringing the kingdom of God on earth and ensuring that fear and hatred will be no more. As it is above, so it also will be below. How easily we now understand this prayer which first was prayed two thousand years ago. The very highest aspect of Consciousness is the High God, while all of us also are aspects of that same Consciousness; and as we grow spiritually, we are growing toward what will be the end of our need to ever again incarnate on earth. So once every human being has completed that same journey, God’s kingdom on earth will dawn at last. Every word that Jesus speaks to us is meant to introduce to us our own coming spiritual perfection.   

I should add that I have been amazed by how many people have said after I mentioned it last week that they want to take our proposed course in spiritual growth that begins in February. I have tried to keep track, although I am sure that I have missed some people’s emails, but apparently this course-on-giving-a-course that I am now taking includes a way for you to sign up if you like, so please be on the lookout for that. Yes, if you do this course as Jesus intended it based upon His teachings, and then if you will (easily) maintain your elevated vibration, this can be your last necessary trip here, and you will understand why that is true as the three-month teaching phase of the course progresses. I think we will be doing simultaneous courses in the U.S. and Australia, and perhaps also in Europe/Africa, but that will depend on the final number of signups in each time zone. All of that being said, let’s do this now for Jesus! He went through a lot to bring the Truth to us, and I am amazed now to tell you, the Truth really works!

Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

What is Spiritual Growth?

Posted on 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)

We talk so often about spiritual growth that I get emails now from people who want to know what the term “spiritual growth” means, precisely. And what is the process of spiritual growth? These are such great questions! But they are difficult questions to answer until we understand what reality is all about. And when we do finally grasp what spiritual growth is, and how we can best accomplish it, the truths that our answers reveal to us about Jesus, and about what He must have known about reality in order to have been able to formulate His teachings so they work so brilliantly to elevate us spiritually, turn out to be flat-out astounding! As you will shortly see.

Soon after I published The Fun of Dying in 2010, while I was giving talks about that book in bookstores, people first began to ask me what spiritual growth is. What on earth was I talking about? So I started to think that I ought to try to figure the process out for myself. Or more specifically, I thought I should test-drive the teachings of Jesus, to see whether they might work to elevate us spiritually. This was four years before my Thomas first came out to me through a medium and introduced himself as my spirit guide. I didn’t know back in 2011 who or what it was that was prompting me to decide to do this. I had no thought back then that these ideas that I was getting were coming from Thomas in the way that he much prefers to work, which is subliminally, without his having to talk to me in words. So I thought that this was all my own idea back in the summer of 2011, when I set out to try to figure out how the teachings of Jesus actually might work to elevate us spiritually. But what happened to me in just a few weeks’ time that summer was extraordinary. Thomas gave me some spiritual hacks to try that I thought must be my own ideas. And by the fall of that year, I arrived at a point where, incredibly, I was no longer feeling bothered by anything.   

I still can vividly recall the moment when I first noticed how completely I had been changed. A Unity minister had invited me to lunch. On the way there, someone had cut me off in traffic. I used to be a lethally combative driver, a literal lunatic on the road, but I arrived at the restaurant that day thinking casually about the fact that I just had been cut off in traffic by some nutcase who nearly had killed us both. But… now nothing. I was not bothered by his actions at all. For the first time in my driving life, I was noticing this peculiar zone of peace in which I was living now. Very oddly, I had forgiven that lunatic driver so easily that what he had done had only barely registered on my radar screen. Since my luncheon companion was a minister, we talked about it briefly, but I didn’t yet really understand what was happening to me. But, no wonder the Lord’s disciples were so often baffled by Him! Two thousand years ago, Jesus knew things about reality that modern-day scientists have not yet managed to unravel, nor even to begin to try to understand.

I can see that summer so clearly now, in long retrospect. And I can tell you with the wonderment of certainty that in the summer of 2011, I spent six weeks in an intensive effort at living the teachings of Jesus, and that six-week effort was all the time that it took. In all the twelve years since that summer, I have not felt anger, hatred, fear, or any other negative emotion. Instead, I feel only an ever-growing and ever more deeply centered peace and joy. It is as if I have been spiritually bubble-wrapped. I still can see it all, and I feel compassion for people who are in the throes of feeling themselves being damaged by the world, but I am removed and above it all, and safe. Turn the other cheek? No problem! I could turn a hundred cheeks if my doing that were needed. I could forgive seven hundred times seventy times, dear Jesus, if my doing that were for some reason required.

And it is not as if nothing has gone wrong in my life in the past twelve years. To give you one example, a world-class swindler is currently serving a long prison sentence for having stolen a preposterous and life-changing sum of money from my husband and me a few years back, and I have never been the slightest bit angry about that. Seriously! But the best, and the sweetest part of it all is that six or seven years ago, my Thomas told me out of the blue that I have now raised my personal consciousness vibration to the point where this has become my last necessary earth-lifetime. And I know that would never in a million years be true if in the summer of 2011 I had not set out to try to live the Gospel teachings of Jesus.

And so, my beloveds, I now feel at least somewhat qualified to explain to you what spiritual growth is, how it works, and how you, too, can make this lifetime your last necessary earth-lifetime. What I am having trouble understanding, though, is how Jesus understood it all so well even two thousand years ago. Because His teachings turn out to be a mechanical process which your mind can use to act on the very fabric of reality itself. “Love” and “forgive” are not just platitudes! They are not make-nice words, and they certainly are not only aspirational ideas. They are instead the very core and driver of your own fundamental spiritual growth. And the fact that Jesus was born on earth already knowing what reality is and how it works is the most certain evidence there can possibly be that He is precisely who He claims to be. He is the Son of God, born from out of the Godhead. Jesus told us that the truth will set us free (see JN 8:32). And here is the truth about spiritual growth:

  • Consciousness is all that exists. We know now that energy underlies and makes up all of reality, and consciousness is in fact that base creative energy. Nothing else but consciousness exists. The greatest physicists of the 20th century came to this same conclusion when in 1931 Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness.” Albert Einstein said, “It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing.” And the British physicist and astronomer Sir James Jeans, who was their contemporary, said, “the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a machine.” How supremely right they were!
  • Consciousness vibrates. And it vibrates according to and resonates with emotion. The universe is God’s own continuous and emotional thought. At its highest and most rapid vibration, the consciousness energy which all three physicists realized also can present as matter is perfect love, while at its lowest and slowest vibration, consciousness is hatred, anger, fear, and all the other negative emotions. God is at the highest vibration of consciousness, and all the other emotions are somewhere in between its highest and its lowest vibrations. So all these emotions that we think of as trivial and ancillary to our daily human experience in fact turn out to be central to the creation and the maintenance of the solid-seeming reality that we believe exists around us.
  • Consciousness is the base creative force. Our emotional minds are all part of that same emotionally vibrating consciousness which is all that exists. And insofar as we can determine, everything that we believe exists is created instant-by-instant by the same creative force which we experience as consciousness. When I was in kindergarten and I was first taught to recite my address, I recall that someone taught me to add beyond my teacher’s finishing with “…State of Massachusetts,” and “United States of America,” also “the earth, the universe, and the Mind of God.” I think we can guess who that someone was. And for us now to envision all of reality as a continuous thought in the mind of an emotional God whose only emotion is perfect love is right-on accurate.
  • So your own spiritual growth consists in lifting your personal consciousness vibration farther away from fear and ever closer to more perfect love. Yes, it really is that simple! Various methods have been suggested for you to use in order to accomplish this task, and we will talk about that in a moment. But the farther you can move your emotional set-point away from fear, hatred, and anger and toward ever more perfect love, the more you can be said to have grown spiritually. And once your own spiritual set-point reaches about the midpoint of what we call level five (out of seven) of the aggregate afterlife levels, you will be able to continue to grow spiritually without the need to experience any further earth-based stressors. So then you can cease to incarnate on the earth altogether. What we from here call the afterlife is in fact the link to our real life, so you might say that you will then be spiritually developed enough to be able happily to complete your spiritual growth without again leaving home.

Please read those four bullet-points again, and even two or three times or more if that feels necessary to you. This is all so extremely important! For us to move away from what had been our belief in a solid earth-based reality and a solid universe here is essential if we are ever to take charge of our own spiritual growth. No, in truth nothing in this universe is solid matter. Our loved ones who have gone ahead of us insist that the home they have returned to is their real life. And this earth-life, and the universe of which it is a part, as amazing as perhaps this concept may seem to us now, truly is just an insubstantial dream.  

For much of world history, following Eastern religious traditions has been what many people have thought was the primary way to develop spiritually. But what Buddhism, Hinduism, and related Eastern religions have had on offer to help us to grow spiritually has involved meditation, chanting, and years of effort, and few people in the West really understood how any of that worked. What may have been even worse for Christians, though, has been the fact that those traditional methods were attached to foreign religions, so there was a vague sense of heresy about them for Westerners, a feeling of religious betrayal, so aside from a brief moment in the sixties and seventies when they were in vogue, they never have much caught on in the West. Some members of Christian religious orders have used their own versions of meditation and chanting to try to reach their own altered states, but they never much have offered their practices to the Christian laity at large. And the teachings of Jesus have always been seen just in moral terms in any event, and not so much in spiritual terms.   

Even more to the point, it really has been only in the past twenty-five years or so that we have first come to understand what spiritual growth even is! Because it is only in these past few years that we have first come to realize that our reality actually is consciousness-based. I own an embarrassing number of books, to the point where my poor, long-suffering husband has begun to joke that either some of them will have to go, or they might crowd us out of this house altogether. And when I lately checked the pub dates of some of my dozens of books that have “consciousness” in their titles, it seems that our bloom of consciousness awareness did indeed begin soon after the turn of this century. So even though putting the two-thousand-year-old teachings of Jesus together with a cutting-edge view of reality that is only less than twenty-five years old is not the first idea that might come to your mind, it does in fact make sense. And it proves to us for a certainty that Jesus is indeed God incarnate, since He always has known the true makeup of a reality that is beginning to dawn on us only now.   

Of course, I am coming to realize that my notion of out of the blue spending six weeks attempting to lift myself spiritually by using the Lord’s teachings, as I did twelve years ago, could not have been my own idea. No, it must have come from Thomas. I am more grateful to him than I can say, because I never would have done any of it otherwise. And the fact that it all worked so well just further confirms for us beyond question that Jesus knew two thousand years ago how reality works, and He knew how His teachings on love and forgiveness would work for us now, in the twenty-first century. Jesus gave us His teachings long ago so we could have a glorious spiritual next stage for humankind once Roman Christianity’s fear-based run neared its end.

So Jesus has asked me to start to teach the process of spiritual growth using His teachings, as Thomas first taught it to me. After twelve years, it is clear beyond question both that Jesus’s teachings work rapidly in a literal, mechanical way to raise our spiritual vibrations enough to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime, and also that the effect is – or at least that it easily can be – permanent. I feel as if twelve years ago I inadvertently opened a door into humankind’s next amazing stage, when fear is no more and we are only love! But I also feel so inadequate to this task that I am first taking a course in how to create and teach such a course. And wow, there is a lot involved in doing this right!

We expect our first course to begin in February, and to be three months long. If this sounds like something that might interest you, just send me an email and we will include you on the offering list.

When my feeble life is over,
Time for me will be no more.
Guide me gently, safely over
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)

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