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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There can be no creation without a Creator. Something cannot have come from nothing. And although officially materialist science still insists that our reality must have begun in a Big Bang of something arising from nothing, a few scientists with more sense than the rest did discover in the twentieth century that in fact there is indeed a creative force. Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, found that Consciousness underlies everything. And it is legitimate for us to capitalize that word now, since our friend Max learned that Consciousness is indeed the base creative force. Max Planck thereby discovered the genuine God. In 1931 he said, “I regard Consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from Consciousness. We cannot get behind Consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates Consciousness.” 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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