Author: Roberta Grimes

Building on a Rock

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

This land is mine.
God gave this land to me.
This brave and ancient land to me.
And when the morning sun
Reveals her hills and plains,
Then I see a land
Where children can run free.
So take my hand
And walk this land with me.
And walk this lovely land with me.
– Pat Boone, from “The Exodus Song” (1960)

You would think that building a website for Jesus would be a simple thing, but I struggled with the design for months. When you are asked to do something for Jesus, you want it to be completely amazing! I want people to love Jesus’s words as I love His words, and to see in them all that I see in them. I want everyone to easily find in those words each his or her own perfect pathway to his or her own more wonderful life, and I couldn’t find a way to make that happen. Eventually we came up with what I now think of as a starter version of teachingsbyjesus.com. I imagine that we will be working on this website for years, gradually making it work ever better for each individual user. Because the teachings of Jesus are at the same time both much more complex and a great deal simpler than they seem to be when you first read them.  

Please take, for example, the Lord’s teaching that Thomas and Jesus have been urging me to write about for weeks. They tell me that it is meant to be Jesus’s Ninth Core Teaching. And I tell them that, sure, but I don’t see enough in it even to make a half-decent blog post! “Just follow Jesus’s teachings closely and you can live a better life.” That is your entire blog post right there. So, how is that a Core Teaching?

“Therefore, everyone who hears these words of Mine, and acts on them, will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. And everyone who hears these words of Mine, and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. And the rain fell and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and its collapse was great” (MT 7:24-27). And there you have it! That is the whole blog post. Just do what Jesus says. Done deal. But still, they keep insisting. Oy.

What was Jesus really talking about when He talked about rock vs. sand? Well, anyone who knows Jesus would guess that He was talking about love. Build your house on love. Almost every third word out of Jesus’s mouth has something to do with love. But we know by now that for Jesus, love is not what you and I think of as love. No, for Jesus, love is not an emotion. It is an intense and profound and unchangeable way of being.

“Then His mother and His brothers came, and while standing outside they sent word to Him, calling for Him. And a crowd was sitting around Him, and they said to Him, ‘Behold, Your mother and Your brothers are outside looking for You.’ Answering them, He said, ‘Who are My mother and My brothers?’ And looking around at those who were sitting around Him, He said, ‘Here are My mother and My brothers!  For whoever does the will of God, this is My brother, and sister, and mother’” (MK 3:31-35).

A Course in Miracles was channeled to us in the nineteen-sixties by a team that reportedly was headed by Jesus. And in The Course, Jesus calls the kind of love that we have for our family members and close friends “special loves,” and He says that special loves are as spiritually counterproductive as are “special hates.” Believe it or not! No, the kind of love that Jesus teaches is universal. It is big enough to encompass all of humankind, as constant as the ground on which you stand, and important enough that you would give your life for it without a thought. I know that sounds counterintuitive, but I have seen that kind of love at work. That is the love that lives in Jesus.

As our wonderful friend Father Richard Rohr says, “The Kingdom of Heaven is really a metaphor for a state of consciousness . . . it is not a place you go to, but a place you come from. It is a whole new way of looking at the world, a transformed awareness that literally turns this world into a different place. . . The hallmark of this awareness is that it sees no separation—not between God and humans, not between humans and other humans. . . . When Jesus talks about this Oneness … what he more has in mind is a complete, mutual indwelling.” So Fr. Rohr calls the divine love that Jesus taught “Oneness,” which is a reasonable description of how it feels as it grows in you. The love that Jesus taught is a universal love that makes no distinction among people at all.

Here is what the love that Jesus taught is not:

  • Personal. If there is anyone that you are unable to love, then you are being too personal. It is time for a reset.
  • Stressful. The process of raising your personal consciousness vibration toward more perfect love is stress-free by nature. And in fact, it requires that you free yourself from all outside stresses as much as you can in order for it to work really well. And if you find yourself gritting your teeth as you try to forgive, then you are doing it wrong; it is time to start over and practice the basics of raising your consciousness vibration more patiently.
  • Enjoyable. Falling in love feels wonderful! We thrill! We soar! But none of those intense feelings of personal love is associated with the early stages of achieving the universal love for all of humankind that Jesus teaches. At first, to be frank, the love that Jesus teaches feels more like a flattening of your emotions. It feels like a kind of distancing from actively loving those closest to you. It is only later, from the space of universal peace that raising your consciousness vibration fosters in you, that your heart starts to swell until it encompasses all of humanity.
  • Variable. Approaching ever more universal love creates in you a more stable mood-base. It makes it so that you will less and less feel earth-life’s emotional ups and downs, but rather you will feel yourself to be at a little distance from them. And this includes even the great emotional highs and lows, like winning the lottery or the loss of a loved one. As this feeling builds, you come to transcend all earthly concerns, and you begin to feel a kind of deep and constant mild happiness, no matter what might be going on around you.
  • Fickle. We tend to think of love as something like a meter that measures how we feel from day to day about the people who are closest to us. We love them more when they are helpful to us, and less when they do things that annoy us. But the universal love that Jesus teaches is the exact opposite of the roller coaster of special loves! As the universal love that Jesus taught builds in you, you will be less and less annoyed or elated by those close to you, no matter what they might be doing.

My dear friends, raising your personal consciousness vibration is a deliberate process. It requires that you literally be love, every hour of every day. Some people do it using an Eastern religious practice, but I have found that by far the easiest method is the teachings of Jesus. By far! They work effortlessly, and within months I was seeing everything so differently. When I first began to cultivate Jesus’s genuine love for all of humankind, it felt as if I was losing some of my love for my close family. But instead, my love for everyone in the world was catching up to the way that I love my family members. And one of the first symptoms of this flattening was the moment, perhaps a dozen years ago now, when my husband picked me up at the airport as I was returning from a business trip. And I was feeling so much compassion for him, to think that he had been alone all week, that I spontaneously told him that if he found a lady friend to share dinners with when I was away, you know, darling, I wouldn’t mind. Poor man – he just looked at me funny. But that is what developing universal love can do.  

My two great youthful heroes were both radical ministers, and they continue to inspire me to this day. As I think of it now, each gives to us an extraordinary example of what it is to have built your spiritual house on a solid rock constructed of the teachings of Jesus. And then, perhaps inevitably, each was martyred in the spiritual house that He had built on that rock:

  • Dietrich Bonhoeffer fought the Nazis’ anti-Semitic murder-machine with everything that was in him, but his only real weapons were his pen and the universal love that Jesus taught. He was hanged at the Flossenburg extermination camp at the age of thirty-nine for plotting to assassinate Adolf Hitler, and he died only days before he would have been rescued. I fell in love with Dr. Bonhoeffer’s legacy in college, that persistent but reluctant hero, a budding intellectual and a beautiful writer.
  • Martin Luther King, Jr. also was martyred at the age of thirty-nine. Dr. King had such a sure connection to the radical power of Jesus’s love that when racists bombed his home while his wife and infant daughter were inside, he was peacefully able to tell an angry mob bent on revenge that fighting violence with violence gets us nowhere, so they must now peacefully disperse. I fell in love with Dr. King in college, too, when the Civil Rights movement was at its height, that slight young man and his magnificent voice.

You and I follow Jesus in the wake of giants. And now I realize of course that there can be no more ideal examples than these two amazing young men of people whose houses were built on the rock of the universal love that Jesus taught. And they lived at two of the worst moments in history, when Nazi Germany and the racist American South washed away so very many whose spiritual houses had been built upon shifting sand! So, yes, dear Jesus and Thomas, we can make a whole blog post out of your suggestion. And we likely can make a Core Teaching of it, too.

Both Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Martin Luther King, Jr. had only set out to live decent lives. They were not asking for trouble. As Dr. King said, “Like anyone, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place.” Most of the other people who were alive where and when they each lived their lives had built their spiritual houses on the unsteady sands of no solid principles, so when the Nazis and the haters came, those others had no rock beneath the houses they had built, and as the troubles rolled in for their respective generations, those troubles washed most of those others away. But the few who had built their houses on the immovable rock of the love that Jesus taught stood strong! My heroes did not enjoy being heroes. Watch Dr. King’s face in those old clips. He was never exultant. Never glad to make history. And I don’t know that I ever have seen a picture of Dr. Bonhoeffer wearing more than a half-smile that never reached his eyes. But living where and when each of them lived, there on that solid rock with Jesus, they did what they knew they had to do. They could have done no other.

And it is first now that I feel that I really begin to understand this teaching by Jesus. It is no trivial thing! To build our house upon the solid rock of the love that Jesus taught means loving enough to fight for the right with your whole being, and to love the least of these people with your whole heart and as if nothing else matters. I have just read that Dr. Bonhoeffer’s death was likely not by hanging but under torture. And Dr. King was hounded by the despicable J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI, who tried to ruin Dr. King’s reputation even long after his death. But even if they could have known their futures, neither of my heroes would have deviated from his course for a moment.

To love as Jesus loves is to love as Dietrich Bonhoeffer loved, and as Martin Luther King, Jr.  loved. Or else to miss out on the love that matters, which means to never really love at all.   

Though I am just a man,
When you are by my side,
With the help of God
I know I can be strong,
To make this land our home.
If I must fight, I’ll fight
To make this land our own.
Until I die, this land is mine.
– Pat Boone, from “The Exodus Song” (1960)

Postscript: All the photos but the first were taken in Jesus’s earthly homeland.

Whose Christianity?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I paused to watch a darting speck
That flickered in the yellow breeze
And came to taste my daisy bed
And touched with gold my lazy trees
And blessed all I had done.

And though I had to turn my head,
I watched it as it fluttered by.
And though I had to work instead,
I ached to be a butterfly
And frolic in the sun.
– Roberta Grimes, from “Butterfly” (1962, 2012)

Christianity is dying now in much the way that a serpent might die, writhing and churning as it seeks to maintain its hold on teachings that have nothing to do with Jesus. That image of Christianity as a dying serpent came to mind as I read a diatribe against what someone called “the heresy of universalism.” And what is this monstrous heresy, you might ask? What could be the worst heresy of them all? Why, it is the awful notion, so ghastly even to contemplate, that everyone might be going to heaven, even those who never have claimed the Lord Jesus Christ as their personal savior. But I can tell you now with certainty, after having spent more than fifty years studying the genuine afterlife, that universalism is no heresy at all. It is instead an absolute fact. The true God is a far greater God than any petty Christian ever has imagined, so everyone does indeed go to the self-same afterlife together, no matter what they believed in life. But tragically, it is this very sadistic pettiness of Roman Christianity that is the only thing that lies behind the whole concept of the Christian belief in a fiery hell.  Someone recently wrote a tongue-in-cheek post for Patheos, the Christian blogging website, about how relieved an imagined group of mean and petty Christians are to learn that hell is real after all, so some of the people those Christians thought ought to by rights be condemned to burn in hell are indeed roasting in hell right now. But in fact, of course, there is no hell, and the concept of hell has caused so many millions tremendous emotional pain.

Christianity has never recovered from the Covid closures. And traditional Christian practice – at least in the United States – has become a partially online activity, while it seems at the same time to have entered a more rapid stage of its writhing decline. I watch all this happen, and I feel as miserable about it as if I am the cause of it all. I apologize for having left off last week’s post with a set of enigmatic ellipses. But Christianity is dying fast, and I feel as if I am its executioner. I have loved Christianity since I was a child, and ever since my childhood experience of light I had assumed that I was eventually going to become a minister. And now, as I have been working on teachingsbyjesus.com, and feeling deeply called to do it, and even feeling called to do it by Jesus, even though the purpose of the website itself is the further destruction of the Christianity that I love, I had begun to hear faint whispers in my mind from someone saying, “Christian, love me more.” For days I tried to ignore that whisper. This is just what feeling guilty does to you, I thought. I kept telling myself that actually losing your mind is a conscious choice, so I could choose not to do it. “Christian, love me more.” But could feeling so guilty make you lose your mind? Was that a real possibility? That whisper would not stop, so then I Googled the phrase and it came right up. There it was: an old hymn from my childhood. It was the perfect theme for this whole series, so Thomas and I used it as our frame-verse last week.    

And then, as I was working on this post in the middle of last Tuesday night, I drifted into a catnap. And I had a vision of the pink child’s bookcase that was in my bedroom when I had my experience of light; but it was standing out at the curb with the trash, and oddly it was covered in moss. This was a vision and not a dream, since it has stayed with me ever since. When I asked my Thomas what the heck was going on, he told me that Jesus is dredging up these old memories for me. The hymn. The bookcase. He wants me to more intensely recall the Christianity of my childhood days so I can now more properly throw it all away.

What is astonishing is that even now, there are people who confidently believe that the Catholic Church carries a permanent franchise granted to it by Jesus. They say it smugly, as if just saying it with enough certainty might put more people back in those pews. Or Protestants in evangelical churches try to mix organ music with praise bands, in something they are calling the worship wars. Or then there is the megachurch theory, to overwhelm people with the smell of success. Or then, even possibly, what just might work is a return to the solidity of old-fashioned ways. Anything to put people back in those pews! But the plain fact is that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s idea for a religion that he could use as a weapon of mass control is just not working anymore, and it never is going to work again, no matter what we try. 

Seventeen hundred years ago, the Romans under Constantine seized and destroyed a spiritual movement that was then three hundred years old and thriving. Had they simply left that movement alone, it might have gradually overspread the world and made the universal love that Jesus taught the lingua franca of humankind. But emperors bent on conquest have no interest in teaching the world how to love. So the Romans cut down and reshaped the Jesus movement into a religion that they thought they could use as a more effective means of control, and they destroyed all its love-based variations. For how long did the Christianity of Jesus survive? Just to give you some idea, three hundred years ago was the year 1723, and Thomas Jefferson was born in 1743, so more than the lifetime of the United States until now was the lifetime of Jesus’s spiritual movement. And in those three hundred years after Jesus’s ascension, the movement that He and His followers had begun had already grown to millions of people when Constantine co-opted it. The Roman armies massacred whole villages of those first followers of Jesus, and they hung them on crosses or fed them to lions in coliseums in the process of creating their own new religion. Because the thing about organized religions that so often makes them evil is that they cannot tolerate competing ideas. But the Jesus Movement – which is what Jesus’s movement actually seems to have been calling itself in various languages by the time it was destroyed – had tolerated a host of widely varying beliefs. There was that one belief, though, that tickled Constantine’s fancy. He loved the idea that Jesus had been crucified for our sins, and that Jesus then had risen from the dead. It was not the central teaching of the Jesus Movement, but it ended up being the primary fear-based dogma of Constantine’s new Roman Christian religion. That was something the Romans knew they really could use!

So the Romans killed the Jesus Movement, but they did keep the figurehead of Jesus. Then Constantine presided over the First Nicaean Council in the year 325. It was the first in a series of seven Roman Christian Councils, and there they set about creating the Roman version of Christianity that is practiced worldwide today. In the Bible that the Councilors put together, we do have preserved the core of the teachings of Jesus, and a record of the start of the Jesus Movement. But the dogmas of Roman Christianity have nothing to do with what Jesus taught. I have asked a few Christians that I know well enough to actually ask them why Christians don’t, you know, actually read and follow the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Some of them protest that of course they do. Some admit that they don’t, but say perhaps they should. Although none of them think this is much of a problem. But, good grief! When the core of the Roman Christian religion is that Jesus died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, and Jesus tells us right in the Gospel of John that God never judges us for our sins so no sacrifice is needed, then I would say that is a pretty big problem!

Christianity as it stands now is built on a lie. And it is a gigantic lie. Jesus died for our sins, and unless you claim Him as your personal Savior, you are going to hell? Wow, that lie is epic. And you can sell a lie for only so long before people catch on and your lie falls apart. The Christian Bible, too, is an important book, but it is not the inerrant word of God. Sad to say, that is another big lie. So the Christianity that the Roman Emperor Constantine designed as a fear-based weapon to control the masses of his day is being practiced now by more than two billion people, nearly all of whom think that they are following Jesus. But none of these people has much idea of what their beloved Jesus actually taught.

After Jesus has endured seventeen hundred years of this treatment, I find it hard to even imagine the level of His personal frustration. I don’t know how He patiently manages it, but Jesus transforms Himself into church-Jesus repeatedly, something like every hour on the hour if there were hours where He is now, so as not to disappoint all the newly-transitioned people who keep coming to Him to receive His post-death blessing. He helps people on earth, He constantly answers prayers, He is always deep in service. Just a couple of nights ago, Thomas and I met with Jesus briefly, and something in the order of things had broken down so much that I remember that meeting. Which never is supposed to happen, unless there is some reason for me to remember a meeting with Jesus. And He was indeed Jesus. Omigod. I was feeling His overwhelmingly powerful and gorgeously silken personal energy. But He looked like a mix of church-Jesus and Mediterranean Jesus, with olive skin but lighter, longer, and almost-straight hair. He seemed a bit flustered, and He was speaking so rapidly to Thomas that I couldn’t register what He was saying. If Jesus is being so driven to distraction now that He can no longer manage smoothly transitioning back and forth between His astral bodies, then we really are in the midst of a crisis.

My dear friends, I wrote the first half of our frame-verse when I was sixteen years old. I found it among my mother’s papers after her death, and I actually remember writing that first half, sitting at a picnic table in my family’s backyard on a hot summer day. When I found it, I thought that poem needed a second half, so fifty years later I gave it one. And now modern Christianity, too, is ready for its second half. But so much more importantly, Jesus deserves the right to bring to completion what so long ago He so well began. Jesus’s own true Christianity looks nothing like our present Roman Christianity. And His Jesus doesn’t even look like our Jesus! When I first personally met Jesus last April, and I asked Him why He chooses to look as He chooses to look now, He said just that everyone looked that way back then. Well, of course they did. To tell you the truth, I am used to it now, but nine months ago His Mediterranean look was a shock.

And now, my beloveds, it is long past time for each of us to choose! Will we choose Jesus as He wants to look now, with His Bible which contains just His four Gospels and His love-based teachings that can transform the world? Or on the other hand, will we choose to remain with the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christianity, and his thicker Bible that the First Nicaean Councilors assembled at Constantine’s command? It must be one or the other. So, whose Christianity will you choose?

Now fifty years have come and gone
Between that butterfly and me.
I’ve done what I set out to do,
But still my fondest memory
Is what I wouldn’t try.

I’ve had enough of cheap success
And superficial days and hours.
Now what I want is gentleness,
The joy of decorating flowers
And trembling in the sky.
– Roberta Grimes, from “Butterfly” (1962, 2012)

“My Commandment” (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus calls us o’er the tumult of our life’s wild restless sea;
day by day his voice still calls us saying, ‘Christian, follow me.’
As of old Saint Andrew heard it by the Galilean lake,
turned from home and work and kindred, leaving all for Jesus’s sake.

Jesus calls us from the worship of the vain world’s golden store,
from each idol that would keep us, saying, ‘Christian, love me more.’
In our joys and in our sorrows, days of toil and hours of ease,
Jesus calls, in cares and pleasures, ‘Christian, love me more than these.’
– Cecil Francis Alexander (1818-1895), From “Jesus calls us, O’er the Tumult” (1852)

Last week  we heard Jesus say to His Apostles, “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (JN 15:18-19).

And in the Book of Matthew Jesus gives a longer pre-crucifixion charge to His Apostles that includes these words: “As you go, preach, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Heal the sick, raise the dead, cleanse those with leprosy, cast out demons. Freely you received, freely give. Do not acquire gold, or silver, or copper for your money belts, or a bag for your journey, or even two tunics, or sandals, or a staff; for the worker is deserving of his support. …

“Behold, I am sending you out as sheep in the midst of wolves; so be as wary as serpents, and as innocent as doves. But be on guard against people, for they will hand you over to the courts and flog you in their synagogues; and you will even be brought before governors and kings on My account, as a testimony to them and to the Gentiles. But when they hand you over, do not worry about how or what you are to say; for what you are to say will be given you in that hour. For it is not you who are speaking, but it is the Spirit of your Father who is speaking in you. 

“Now brother will betray brother to death, and a father his child; and children will rise up against parents and cause them to be put to death. And you will be hated by all because of My name, but it is the one who has endured to the end who will be saved. 

“But whenever they persecute you in one city, flee to the next; for truly I say to you, you will not finish going through the cities of Israel until the Son of Man comes” (MT 10:5-23).

Jesus even says, “Do not think that I came to bring peace on the earth; I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.  For I came to turn a man against his father, and a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and a person’s enemies will be the members of his household” (MT 10:34-36).

What on earth is going on?! All this hatred, and yet when we think of Jesus we imagine a kindly and loving Man teaching radical forgiveness and perfect love. Whether the version of Jesus in your mind is pale church-Jesus with blue eyes and light-brown hair to His shoulders, or is the sweet young Mediterranean-looking Man that Jesus prefers to present to His astral visitors today, this notion that Jesus was hated when He was teaching on earth is hard to imagine. But when you read the Bible through, you are unceremoniously dumped from the archaic Old Testament Book of Malachi directly into the Gospel of Matthew, and you are suddenly in the presence of a modern young Man teaching primitives. Unless you are blind and deaf, you really cannot help seeing their cultural friction. Jesus is the Son of God! His coming was foretold as the Son of Man (see e.g. Ezekiel 33), and Jesus Himself claimed that designation. The cultural shock is at least as extreme as it would be if a Man from the far future were to land abruptly in Times Square today. The people around Jesus were living in the Iron Age, many of them illiterate, deeply clannish, and highly superstitious. They were heavily oppressed by Roman rule, by their own ruler Herod, and by the rule of their clergy. And in addition, there are some peculiarities about Jesus’s life on earth and about the life of His mother that my favorite blogger, Keith Giles, may just have nicely explained for us. Mother Mary and Jesus may in fact have been slaves.

Slavery was common in Biblical times. And as Keith’s source explains, the Greek word that Mary uses to identify herself to the Archangel Gabriel in the Gospel of Luke is the word for “slave.” As I first read Keith’s recent post on this topic and the Daily Beast article on which he draws, I realized that the point he was making explains a number of things about Jesus’s life on earth that have never before made sense to me, including this odd question about why Jesus was so much hated by some for preaching with authority, especially near the start of His ministry. As the son of a slave mother, Jesus would have been born a slave Himself; but a law passed when He was a child would have freed Him at the age of thirty… which would neatly explain why He delayed beginning His public ministry until He reached the age of thirty. Omigod. And as an observant Jew, Jesus should have been married in His teens, but oddly that seems not to have happened. As perhaps it would not have happened if He was a slave when He was a teenager. And this also might explain why, when there was no room for them in the Inn, a stable was thought to be sufficient shelter for a slave-mother who was about to give birth.

And Joseph may have chosen not to marry a slave, even despite the Archangel Gabriel’s amazing announcement of the divinity of Mary’s coming child. And although Joseph may have had other children by Mary, he later may have instead married a free woman. Marriage for women in that time and place was an institution not much different from slavery, in any event. And if Mary was indeed a slave, that also might explain why Jesus from the cross asked His Apostle, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), assuming that He could not be certain that his father would dependably care for His mother after His own death. As indeed Joseph did not, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke.  

But Joseph did give Jesus a good education, to prepare his enslaved but still beloved oldest son for His legal emancipation as an adult. And meanwhile, Jesus’s status as a bondsman in His youth would adequately explain what are called the “lost years” of His twenties, when He would have been an enslaved carpenter. And I do know Jesus now! If the Jesus that I know and adore was planning to be born into a lifetime to be lived in a place where a significant percentage of the population was enslaved, then He would have wanted to be born enslaved Himself. Of that, I have not the slightest doubt. When I asked my Thomas if all of this was true, his answer was, “Do you really have to ask?”

So I take this new evidence as probably true. It makes a puzzle-piece that fits the whole puzzle of Jesus’s earth-life so neatly! And the complexity that this new information adds to our study of the teachings of Jesus is of crucial importance. It adds a layer of deeper debasement to Jesus’s lived status, especially in His home community. And it is no wonder now that the clergy and everyone else of higher rank hated Jesus for speaking out as boldly and as radically as He did. It wasn’t just that Jesus regularly dined and socialized with the dregs of society, but many people knew Jesus to have been born into the dregs Himself. Who was He to be speaking so far above His social status? Even now, Jesus is almost unbelievably charismatic. And Thomas tells me that He always has been this way. So as soon as He was emancipated at the age of thirty, Jesus then began to teach. And almost right away He was drawing crowds that soon, incredibly, numbered in the thousands.

“And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all. And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

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

And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him.  Now He began to say to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.’ And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, ‘Is this not Joseph’s son? ‘And He said to them, ‘No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: “Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.”’ But He said, ‘Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.’ And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. But He passed through their midst and went on His way” (LK 4:14-30).

The last part of that passage never made sense to me before. But it makes absolute sense to me now! This was just Joseph’s son, the local carpenter’s boy, who was a slave until barely a season ago, now claiming to be the fulfillment of prophesy? No wonder they wanted to throw Him off a cliff and be done with Him! Jesus soon learned to speak perhaps a bit more circumspectly. But our knowing this additional aspect of His personal history does explain so much!

And knowing Jesus’s countrymen’s disdain for Him adds even more power to the scene where John the Baptist recognizes Jesus as God’s own Son. And John says, “I have the need to be baptized by You, and yet You are coming to me?” But Jesus, answering, says to him, “Allow it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then John allowed Him. After Jesus was baptized, He came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and He saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and settling on Him, and behold, a voice from the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased” (MT 3:14-17).

Oh my, yes! If anyone around Him was going to be a slave, then the Jesus that I know and adore would have chosen to be born a slave as well. When He says in the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven” (MT 5:3) and “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth” (MT 5:5), Jesus well knows whereof He speaks, because He knows personally what it is to have been a slave-boy, once so belittled and so despised as to have felt Himself to be invisible.

It is only late in my life that I am coming to see that I have had one great advantage in this lifetime. I have known since I was eight years old that of course there certainly is a God. If you, on this beautiful morning, still have the slightest doubt of that fact, please let me give you a decided skeptic’s personal assurance of at least this much. Oh yes, my treasured friend, there is a God indeed! Like Moses with his burning bush, I first encountered God when I was eight, which has let me spend the rest of my life happily figuring out all these details. But what I did not know until much later was that religion was going to turn out to be perhaps God’s enemy, and not God’s friend….

Jesus calls us: by your mercies,
Saviour, may we hear your call,
give our hearts in glad obedience,
serve and love you best of all.
– Cecil Francis Alexander (1818-1895), from “Jesus Calls Us, O’er the Tumult” (1852)

“My Commandment” (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord,
Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Lawrence Schwartz from “Day by Day” (1970)

Preparing the materials for teachingsbyjesus.com is the hardest thing that I ever have done. Taking the Bar Exam over again at almost sixty years old was nothing compared to trying to puzzle out some of the radical new ideas that Jesus came to earth to teach us two thousand years ago! We must stipulate as a fact that Jesus is a consistent and coherent Being. And we further must accept it as a certain fact that despite the problem of those six decades of illiterates playing telephone with His words, and the two-step translations, and the obvious problem that we are dealing with four Biblical Gospels and not one, in the end there will be a single consistent and coherent Gospel message on every detail of His teachings. I have realized only in retrospect how naïve I was to assume that we were going to be able to discover Jesus’s original Gospel message now beneath all the religious distortions, so to find it there feels somewhat astounding. By wild guess, we might have as few as only ten percent of the public words that Jesus spoke still preserved. We cannot even imagine what glorious wonders might have come from His lips and been forgotten, and now they are forever lost. Even with the fact that there is a lot of duplication in the three synoptic Gospels, still those Gospels do vary a bit from one another. And of course, the Gospel of John is another kettle of petunias altogether.

And still with all of that, as you will see when eventually you can visit the website, Jesus’s words taken from the four Biblical Gospels do assemble into a remarkably detailed and consistent spiritual message. And to make that message easier to understand, we have broken it into eight core teachings. There likely are other significant points that can be ferreted out with more effort, but these eight do come together with surprising ease, and they build upon one another and create one set of teachings. Some of the things that Jesus says will astonish you. No more religions? No more rules-based sins? I have been so shaken by some of what I have found that I was allowed to check in with the Boss to confirm what I was learning, and He has confirmed it all. He was only surprised that I might need His confirmations. He thought His words had been perfectly clear, as indeed they are clear. But when I asked Him about one particular area, I found His answer in itself to be ambiguous. I think I must have framed my question wrong. I said, “So, what then is Your commandment, Lord?”

He said, “My child, what is it about love that you do not understand?”

And with that, my memory stops.

One of the problems with reading the Gospels is that those who heard Jesus speak were most likely to remember what they themselves thought was important. And that leaves out all sorts of connector events and surrounding details, the many things that people living in a given situation might take for granted, but that you or I, watching from a distance, might be very eager to know. For example, when I was doing basic afterlife research, one of the last things that I was able to confirm was that human bodies in the afterlife are solid! The newly dead who were communicating from there with their loved ones on earth assumed that their still-living loved ones would of course know that people are solid – Duh!  So very few statements about what people’s astral bodies are like have survived in the afterlife literature.

And my problem in this case was that Jesus had replaced the whole Old Testament with God’s Law of Love quite early in His ministry. He thereby, we assume, had done away with the Ten Commandments as stated rules. And we know that He also had done away quite specifically with all judgment by God, and He even had sort-of done away with rules-based sins. He had replaced it all with something that He called “My Commandment.” So as best I could determine, now the only sin was to do or say or even to think something unloving. I wish I had said that directly to Jesus! Was it possible that “My Commandment” meant simply that?  

Thomas keeps saying to me, “Stop being so literal!” My darling primary guide is much happier now. I gather that seekreality.com and teachingsbyjesus.com are a major part of what he and I have left to do in this lifetime, and with most of both websites well underway, he can relax a bit. He thinks my problem is primarily what he calls “Christian hangover.” People who were reared as Roman Christians can have trouble getting past that old habitual, religion-imposed need for rigid rules and limits. Thomas has referred me to Chapters 15 and 16 of the Biblical Book of John, where Jesus is preaching to His Apostles as He is about to go to the cross. But are those words meant for the rest of us as well? I wish I had thought to ask Jesus that question. I swear, the older I get, and the more steeped and drenched I become in these Gospel words, the less capable I feel of actually doing anything! But I took my Thomas’s suggestion, and I studied John 15-16 in particular. It starts with Jesus flat-out telling His elite team that “My Commandment” is that His Apostles will love one another as He has loved them. But is that also His Commandment to us all?

“This is My commandment, that you love one another, just as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this, that a person will lay down his life for his friends” (JN 15:12-13). Jesus also talks about their need to remain connected to Him. “I am the true vine, and My Father is the vinedresser.  Every branch in Me that does not bear fruit, He takes away; and every branch that bears fruit, He prunes it so that it may bear more fruit (JN 15:1-2).

My husband once had a hobby-vineyard. He made wine as an all-consuming hobby for years, so I am very familiar with that process. My goodness, if you ever want to have any spare time at all, never attempt to grow a twenty-acre hobby-vineyard!

And as Jesus says, if the Apostolic branches are to be fruitful, they must remain well connected to Him. “If you remain in Me, and My words remain in you, ask whatever you wish, and it will be done for you. My Father is glorified by this, that you bear much fruit, and so prove to be My disciples. Just as the Father has loved Me, I also have loved you; remain in My love. If you keep My commandments, you will remain in My love; just as I have kept My Father’s commandments and remain in His love. These things I have spoken to you so that My joy may be in you, and that your joy may be made full” (JN 15 7-11). “This I command you, that you love one another” (JN 15:17). You know, I read this, and all I can think of is Jesus watching these men as they then went out into the world and spread His teachings, and one by one they died for His Word. Thinking of that brings tears to my eyes. How proud He must have been of them! How very much He must have loved them! As He said to them, “If the world hates you, you know that it has hated Me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love you as its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, because of this the world hates you” (JN 15:18-19).

And now we come to the point of it all. As we move into Chapter 16 of the Gospel of John, Jesus says as much as He ever really does about sin. He even actually utters the word “sin.” “But now I am going to Him who sent Me; and none of you asks Me, ‘Where are You going?’  But because I have said these things to you, grief has filled your heart. But I tell you the truth: it is to your advantage that I am leaving; for if I do not leave, the Holy Spirit will not come to you; but if I go, I will send Him to you. And He, when He comes, will convict the world regarding sin, and righteousness, and judgment: regarding sin, because they do not believe in Me;  and regarding righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you no longer are going to see Me; and regarding judgment, because the ruler of this world has been judged. I have many more things to say to you, but you cannot bear them at the present time.  But when He, the Spirit of truth, comes, He will guide you into all the truth; for He will not speak on His own, but whatever He hears, He will speak; and He will disclose to you what is to come. He will glorify Me, for He will take from Mine and will disclose it to you. All things that the Father has are Mine; this is why I said that He takes from Mine and will disclose it to you (JN 16:5-15).

There is a bit more in Chapter 16 of John, but it is just comfort-words to the grieving Apostles. And I think we can assume that the word “Mine” refers to His teachings, which throughout the Gospels have been what mattered to Jesus. So, please work with me here! What do we make of this?  What does Jesus mean by “My Commandment”?

Ah! Sweet Jesus has made me laugh out loud. And in the middle of the night! He has just said clearly, “They are Christians. Give them First Corinthians Thirteen.” And so I shall:

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1Cor 13).

So I think now we can safely say that Jesus has made His point! It is clear from its placement in the Book of First Corinthians and from its very different language that this most famous of Paul’s letters is a channeled work. And Thomas has confirmed to me that it was channeled through Paul by Jesus. So this tender letter delivered through Paul is Jesus’s beautiful, final Word.

Humankind has grown beyond a need for religions. God in the person of Jesus the Christ has made that fact abundantly clear to us now. We are ready to live daily the teachings of Jesus in the twenty-first century, and in perfect intimate contact with God! Jesus is our Wayshower. He is our Elder Brother and our Dearest Friend. What should have begun two thousand years ago is ready at last to begin today.

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord,
Three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Lawrence Schwartz from “Day by Day” (1970)

 

You and 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.
– C Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

Today we all make our hopeful plans for a new year that is just beginning. A bright new calendar! Three hundred and sixty-five empty squares just waiting to be filled. And thinking about those empty squares when I have spent months studying the teachings of Jesus makes me know what Jesus would tell us is the most important thing that each of us should be planning to do with all that brand-new time. Jesus says, “Do not worry about your life, saying, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you” (MT 6:31-33). And it is time to take Jesus at His word. Before you fill in too many squares with lunch dates and shopping, with work trips and meetings and impromptu vacations and various courses, it is time to make some positive room in your life for the most important part of your life. It is time to make room in your life for God.

There was a time when we considered our Sunday mornings to be God’s time. Remember? And even if you are still attending church, that isn’t really giving much time to God in any meaningful way, since sitting in a pew and listening to a sermon, perhaps singing, and perhaps taking communion doesn’t amount to having much personal contact with the living God. It takes more than that, both in terms of time and in terms of spiritual involvement. Jesus often spent all night in prayer, and I am beginning to learn how to do some of that; and what I am coming to see is that our most productive time with God is spent not in worship or in talking, but rather in silently listening. God knows so much more than we do! So we ought to let God be The One Who Talks.  

My greatest revelation from all my time spent in developing the content for teachingsbyjesus.com is the amazing discovery that Jesus so perfectly understands Consciousness. No, He really does! This young Man barely thirty years old knew two thousand years ago some complex scientific things that still puzzle modern physicists. That is, if they even risk daring to Go There. No kidding! And all of this amazing information has been in the Biblical Gospels for two thousand years, and has been altogether ignored by Christians, and by everybody else as well. At first, I thought I was imagining things. But as I began to put it all together, and I realized that what I was seeing was real, I came to understand ever more deeply that this is the real treasure. This is God’s Gift! This impossible fact that Master Jesus, born two thousand years ago, is in fact and literally a modern Man in all respects, a time-traveler, Someone Who can prove that He lived back then, and Who also can prove that He lives and He speaks to us now.

There was a time when mainstream science was known to be a proud and prominent search for truths that could be universally acknowledged. That time, of course, is long since past, and we even can almost name the day of its passing. It was roughly a hundred years ago, and I have come to dramatize its final day in my mind. I fondly envision dear bald Max Planck sort of running through the corridors of MIT perhaps, with a faintly smoking test tube raised and desperately crying out, “We cannot get behind consciousness! We cannot get behind consciousness!” Of course, that never actually happened. But Dr. Planck knew on that final day what he had found. And I like to think that he was glad about it.  

For those who may never have heard of Max Planck, he won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. Dear Max rocked the world of Newtonian physics a century ago, and I have been quoting him in this space for years because his quotations are in themselves endearing. He has been much in my mind during the past few months, brother Max working together with Master Jesus, as I have been deep in studying the kingdom of God and trying to get my mind around conclusions that I was at the same time pointlessly fighting because I was finding them to be so boggling. Oh Lord, here we go again! My Thomas was leading me, trying to stay no more than a step or two ahead of me, and Roberta was knowing where this was going and knowing that Thomas was going to be right yet again. But fighting him, anyway.

It is one thing to know that consciousness is all that exists. I am used to that concept. I have known it for years. And, okay, I was used to reading Dr. Planck’s words. He said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” So, fine. So far, so good. But then I would read through those four Gospel books of the Christian Bible, repeatedly and minutely, watching and listening as two thousand years ago that entirely modern Man, so young and so brilliant, runs rings around those poor, befuddled Hebrew clergymen who could have had no idea what they were dealing with! Jesus would say to them things like, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one convert; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves! Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the Temple, that is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the Temple is obligated’” (MT 23:14-16). And the clergy would just stand there with their mouths hanging open. Then Jesus would say, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-22). And then it would be Roberta whose mouth would be hanging open, because my God, why did I never see this before? I must have read the Book of Luke a hundred times in my life, and the Book of Matthew as many times as well, and I never realized that Jesus was actually talking about Consciousness, for heaven’s sake! And especially in the Book of John? What ever was I thinking? It was only when I pulled together a great many things that Jesus had said in the Biblical Gospels that I realized that two thousand years ago Master Jesus, the genuine Son of God, had been working with Consciousness for His entire life, like any fully modern Man!

Consciousness is in fact God. They are one and the same. And Jesus knew that! Max Planck knew that! That was why dear Max couldn’t find a way to get behind Consciousness, no matter how hard he tried. What Dr. Planck had found was literally God Almighty! He won his 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for some trivial discovery related to quantum mechanics, for heaven’s sake. But it should have been awarded for his scientific discovery of the genuine Creator of All Things, The One Almighty God.

I think the scientific gatekeepers knew, or at least they strongly suspected that fact. I think they knew their jig was up. They understood back then that the Christians had won their two-millennia-long battle over God vs. not-God, which was why that was when the scientific gatekeepers resorted to imposing on all future scientific research their “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism,” a dogma that is now a full century old. But of course, the Christians themselves had no clue because they know so little about Consciousness, and – amazingly – they seem never actually to read the Biblical Gospels, anyway. All they do is to occasionally quote the few bits of the Gospels that they like. But at least, now you and I know the truth! We can look back over the past century, and we can smile to find the precise historical moment when mainstream science discovered the true and eternal, the genuine living God.

My frustration in all of this is the fact that we are still the only ones who know. They won’t award a second Nobel Prize posthumously, but our friend Max Planck ought to get some sort of mention somewhere in the history books for having discovered scientifically the existence of God. And we will be breaking the news about what Jesus knew, and when He knew it, when teachingsbyJesus.com goes live toward the end of January.

I don’t know who will be amazed by our news, but we will be breaking it, all the same!

And as for you, my dear much-beloved friends, my hope is to entice you to begin to experiment with making 2023 the year when you will begin your much closer walk with God. You know now that Consciousness is all that exists, and that God is in fact Consciousness. You know, too, that your own mind is inextricably part of that same Consciousness – as is my own mind, and as is everyone else’s – and you know that the only thing that creates any separation at all among us is our belief in what is just a trivial illusion of separation! My goodness, after working on teachingsbyJesus.com’s materials for so long and so intensively, I know that fact now, more than I ever have. Jesus said, “Truly, truly I say to you, the one who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in My name, this I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it! (JN 14:12-14). Jesus did an extraordinary amount of healing during His lifetime on earth, always by joining the powers of His mind with the powers of the mind of the person being healed. All Consciousness. All GOD.

And YES, Jesus did choose to be crucified. His body died on the cross, and He reanimated His dead body in order to prove to His followers that human life is eternal. I emphasize this fact yet again because a friend told me just this week that the Seth materials suggest that Jesus considered Himself to be above doing something so painful and messy for us, so He used a stand-in. If there is anyone else who still is confused about that, then I want to make this truth perfectly clear. And the Seth materials are apparently now shown to be bogus, sad to say.

But if you want to make this your year to accept Jesus’s challenge to “Seek, and you will find” (MT 7:7) a closer personal relationship with God, then here is what I suggest that you do:

  • Give up all screen entertainments. Especially all TV, movies, and videogames. Keep your phone only for communication, and your computer just for word-processing and doing essential research. Stop reading newspapers and newsmagazines as well. If you cannot cut the electronics cord forever just yet, then make your commitment for at least three months. Six months would be better. Or even a full year. You are doing this not only to free up time for God, but also – and even mostly – to free yourself from all stress-inducing stimulation of your mind.
  • Regularize your sleep habits to make room for God. Without TV, you may be able to negotiate with your life-partner for you to go to bed very early most nights. When I stopped watching TV more than 20 years ago and also started split-sleeping, we began to mostly sleep apart, which made sense. Now I am generally asleep by seven-thirty, and awake by twelve-thirty and ready to do my night-work session with Thomas. By three-thirty or four, I am ready to go back to sleep.
  • But on some nights now, between four and seven I will open myself to commune with God. I begin with The Lord’s Prayer, really thinking about the words as I say them. If I am weary, I will sometimes then fall asleep. But on some nights my mind will expand a little, and if I welcome that feeling of expansion, and I have been doing this for just the past week or so, I am already beginning to get the glorious sense of no-time and no-space. That awareness in your mind, the sense you have of being individually you, is in fact literally God as well. What I have found in the deep sacred night and being alone with God is the most extraordinary sense of my own preciousness that is beyond anything that I had heretofore imagined. Ideas will come and go, and I don’t try to hold them. It is my expectation that if I make a habit of this, God will use this new time with me in God’s Own way. I am eager to see what might come next!

Your own schedule with God will be different, of course. But it will be important that you get rid of screens, and important that you make a time mapped out on your new blank calendar at the same time every day or night over the next few months that belongs to you and God alone. And then really open yourself to God! Love God. Cherish God’s sweet and perfect love in return. As I say at the end of each Seek Reality podcast, God loves you in particular in all the universe, and God loves you most of all. And the wonder of it is, that is actually true.  

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.
– C. Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

Born Today!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Joy to the world! The Lord is come.
Let earth receive her King!
Let every heart prepare Him room,
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven and nature sing!
And heaven, and heaven and nature sing!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)

As I woke up last Sunday morning, my Thomas said loudly and clearly in my mind, “Hear O Israel, The Lord Our God is One God.” It was the ancient Hebrew invocation, the beautiful call to prayer of the world’s first true monotheists. After we had spent most of that previous week working through Jesus’s teachings about God and religions for His website, and coming at last to the stunning understanding that Jesus had come to abolish religions altogether; and then after we had spent our nighttime work-time polishing and watching our post on the Trinity go live; and by the time I had finished dressing for our walk on a bright but almost-freezing morning that was unusually cold for Austin:  by then all the bits that our many revelations of the previous week had shaken loose had fallen into place in my mind. Omigod. Now I understood why it was so important that Jesus be born a Jew, and why He had thought it was essential that He concentrate on teaching just the Jews. Now I understood why Jesus considered it to be crucial that in order for His teachings to be properly followed, they were going to need their own website, and why they would have to be taken way back and followed all over again right from the beginning. I thought that at last I understood everything. Joy to the World, indeed!!

Far from having been born to free us from our sins, Jesus had been born to free us altogether from religions. And my sweet Thomas was smiling now. I had been fighting this ultimate conclusion so hard! But I was finally getting it. Religions had been among humankind’s earliest inventions, our necessary comfort in the lonely dark as our fully human minds were developing. But just as we eventually outgrew using stone tools that we had learned to chip to create an edge, so we also finally outgrew the need to relate to God by means of religions. And so Jesus had come at last as God’s emissary to the world’s first true monotheists, to teach them how they could better relate to God individually and internally.

And then on Monday morning it first occurred to me that I had not heard from Jesus in months. Not since September, I thought. Or perhaps not even since August. I was trying to produce the content that we had laid out for His website. But instead, what I was getting from Him through Thomas was different from the teachingsbyjesus.com master plan. It was beautiful, though. I thought it might even be better than our original plan. I was sending it to Craig Hogan, whose design team was putting the website together, and Craig was sufficiently confused by what he was getting that on last Monday afternoon he sent me the website’s prototype again. And when I saw that prototype for the first time since September, I sat and looked at it. We had first begun to talk about this website last spring, when seekreality.com had been our focus, and Jesus had been telling us that He didn’t want His website to go live until next spring. And now I realized what Jesus’s problem might be.

So then on Monday night I had what I told my husband on Tuesday with a giggle had been “a come-to-Jesus meeting” with Jesus. I could laugh about it, because although Thomas wouldn’t let me remember the details of that meeting, I felt relieved to have the sense that it had gone well. I had needed to request a meeting with Jesus, because He never would have called me on the carpet Himself. But it was clear to me as soon as I saw it again that the prototype for the website must have upset Him. And we had to fix this right away!

Discarnate beings are subtly different from us in some ways, and that is true even of Beings at the highest levels. For one thing, they seem to think more literally in relation to earth matters than we do. And there had been a lot of me on that prototype website as its narrator and resident expert, so my first thought was that all of me should be removed. But when I woke up on Tuesday morning with crib notes from our meeting in my mind, I found that none of that had bothered Jesus. No, people would need a person living on earth to relate to, and He considered me to be a good choice. But as I had suspected, Jesus had been very much bothered by that prototype website, and what had bothered Him had been that they had included a large Bible just as casual decor, and also there had been that immensely horrifying word, “Christian.” So then, Jesus had seen what was supposed to be His own website as instead hexed and condemned to become just one more Christian website, and lumped together with everything else on earth that is Christian and only carries His name. So at that point He had mentally turned off on our project altogether.

People think of Jesus as the founder of Christianity, but Jesus the Man has had nothing to do with Christianity. Three hundred years after Jesus’s death, the Romans under Constantine appropriated Jesus’s name and destroyed His then-thriving spiritual movement, and they created from its ashes a religion to be used for their own purposes. Their religion is not Jesus’s religion. Even now, He doesn’t seem to take any proprietary pride in Christianity, although He does dearly love all the Christian people. And now, as the religion wanes, Jesus wants to resurrect His own spiritual movement from before the Roman Emperor Constantine stole it away, which He certainly has a right to do. But He wants to resurrect it from before there ever was a Christianity! And He cannot see why people find it hard to think of Him as just Himself alone, without the Christian religion attached to Him. Even I find that hard to do, so I can see why most people are going to find doing it to be almost impossible.

Thomas has been helping me to create the materials for Jesus’s website. We use the same sort of hybrid channeling process by which we produce these posts each week: I have the hands so I do the research and the writing, but a lot of the time he steps in and adds his thoughts and sometimes he even works the fingers. It makes for a very efficient collaboration. And Thomas knows Jesus a lot better than I do, so when it comes down to drawing some ultimate conclusions, Thomas has to do that. For example, I can see that he is right, and I can see how he gets there, but without his backup I could not alone come right out and say that Jesus was sent by God to abolish the very concept of religions and teach us to relate to God internally. For me alone, that is several bridges too far! In part, because the implications of even saying the words are so tremendous. I mean, it is one thing to separate Jesus from Christianity and tell people that Jesus is independent and we can relate to Jesus independently and that is what He wants from us now. But, God too? Give up on religions altogether, knowing that God is independently real and you can relate to God in your deepest heart at every moment, and God will hear and answer you?   

Jesus did in fact say, however, that we should pray to God directly. Naturally they don’t talk about this much in the churches, but there has never been anyone harder on religions and the clergy than our wonderful and much-beloved Master Jesus. That sweet and gentle soul called the clergy of His day knaves and hypocrites, and He told people simply to pray without them. 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). In fact, Jesus seems for most of His ministry on earth to have taught and prayed outdoors, rather than in any house of worship. Prior to His crucifixion, Jesus took His disciples to pray with Him, again outdoors, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

So really, all that Jesus had needed from me on Monday night was my fresh assurance that for the rest of my earthly life I would work for Him and never for Christianity. When I asked Him if He wanted changes to His prototype website, it turned out that He had thought about it, and He wanted a couple of changes that matched what Thomas and I had already been writing. He also told me – and I thought this was cute – that He wanted His website to look the way His personal website would have looked in the year 28 CE. Otherwise, He told me that all is well and all of our understandings are right.

I don’t know how amazing this feels to you, but I consider it to be news that rocks the world.

We have just now learned that Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago to teach the world’s first true monotheists how to get past the need for religions altogether, and how to relate to God individually and internally. Religions were a temporary and primitive stage of human spiritual development that should have ended two thousand years ago! Perhaps another Omigod might be appropriate here? And we are learning this on Christmas morning? This was also why Jesus was so obsessed with bringing the kingdom of God on earth. This was what all of that was about! The Lord’s Prayer itself makes as its most prominent plea the call for God to reign on earth: “Your kingdom come, Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (MT 6:10). And this is also why Jesus insists that the kingdom of God will be internal. He says, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-22). And as the kingdom of God overspreads the earth, we will at last joyfully stop being cringing creatures controlled by fears instilled in us by Pharisees and Sadducees – or, today, by Calvinist ministers and Catholic priests – and begin to be genuinely spiritual beings who are always in intimate contact with God!

You can clearly see this process beginning in the Gospels. Jesus is, even today, the most charismatic Man you can imagine, and soon crowds were following Him wherever He went. The Gospels tell us that He was “speaking to them about the kingdom of God, and curing those who had need of healing” (see e.g. LK 9:11). He soon began to send out emissaries to preach the kingdom of God, telling them, “Whatever city you enter and they receive you, eat what is served to you; and heal those in it who are sick, and say to them, ‘The kingdom of God has come near to you’” (LK 10:8-9). Or, “Whatever city you enter and they do not receive you, go out into its streets and say, ‘Even the dust of your city which clings to our feet we wipe off in protest against you; yet know this, that the kingdom of God has come near.’ I say to you, it will be more tolerable on that day for Sodom than for that city’” (LK 10:11).

Following His resurrection, Jesus gave to His disciples what is now called the Great Commission when He said to them, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, …  teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (MT 28:19-20). And so it was very well begun! Jesus’s nascent movement had millions of followers when Constantine destroyed it three hundred years later.

Jesus is indeed our Savior! He came to save this world from ignorance! And a two-thousand-year setback means nothing to Him now. Please, my dear friends, let’s all aid Him in this. We know now that Jesus came to open our hearts to a much deeper relationship with God. And we have just received the greatest gift of our lives.

Joy to the world! The Savior reigns.
Let men their songs employ.
While fields and floods,
Rocks, hills and plains
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat the sounding joy!
Repeat, repeat the sounding joy!
– Isaac Watts (1674-1748), from “Joy to the World” (1719)

Trinity

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty,
Early in the morning Our song shall rise to Thee.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty,
God in three persons. Blessed Trinity!
Holy, holy, holy! Though the darkness hide thee.
Though the eye of sinful man Thy glory may not see.
Only Thou art holy. There is none beside Thee.
Perfect in power, in love and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

Another week, another frame-verse battle. But at least this one makes reasonable sense. For our post this week, I had intended to build upon our mental experiment from last week by exploring how the peaceful society that the Jesus movement fosters in people might evolve into bringing the kingdom of God on earth. Thomas, however, had another blog thought, so whenever I tried to copy my chosen frame-verse, he made my computer malfunction. My spirit guide has become remarkably good at messing with electronics, for someone who last lived on earth in the nineteenth century. The frame-verse that he had chosen, I didn’t want because it talked about the Trinity. He told me then that it was past time for me to accept the fact that God is a Trinity. I retorted that I will go there as soon as he can show me how Jesus can be simultaneously available to eight billion people at once, while at the same time He is conversing with us and feeding His pet fish.

I snapped, “Explain that, if you can!”

Thomas said drily, “He does it the same way God can do it. You are forgetting that Jesus is God, little one, while you are stuck inside your little pea-brain head!”

“And you are forgetting that you are a male, and males fight dirty,” was what I retorted to him.

And that was the way our week began. But I considered my question to be both legitimate and important. And I knew that you would want to hear his answer as much as I want to hear it. How is it possible that just one God and one Jesus are able to know and intimately relate to each of the eight billion of us individually at the level of our deepest hearts?

This question first occurred to me last summer, when Thomas and I were spending a lot of time with Jesus. My Thomas was chasing his Brother among the deer, devotedly helping Him to keep in human balance, while I was discussing with Jesus plans for His website that I was having trouble back then even envisioning. And meanwhile, all over this earth there were people who were praying to Jesus. And, what? They were getting a busy-signal? 

And what was all this sudden talk about a Trinity? I have long been telling Thomas that of course there is no such thing as a Trinity. God is Consciousness, and all that exists! Christianity has that doctrine wrong. If Thomas disagreed with me, he should have said so at the time. And if I have the Trinity idea wrong, then what else do I have wrong?

I hear from people now and again who want me to tell them how to establish a relationship with their spirit guide, like the relationship that I have with Thomas. What I really want to say to them is, “Damned if I know.” All I know is that at this point in my life, there is a male voice from behind my left shoulder that is full of authoritative and sometimes vaguely exasperated-sounding opinions. And there is on rare occasions a soft and sweet male voice from behind my head that I now recognize as Jesus. They never shout. I could ignore them. But I don’t.

(Developing the sort of relationship that Thomas and I have is a long and subtle process, and the results can be quite wonderful. We have written about that process here.)

I think the problem that my Thomas has is the same problem that you or I would be having, if our kid brother were a mega-star. Thomas is left forever with taking what are mere supporting roles. Like, for example, taking the role of being a spirit guide for some ditz because she writes books and does a website for his mega-star kid brother. Thomas probably doesn’t love doing this for me. The role of spirit guide is deeply parental, heavily love-based and with lots of day-to-day and even minute-by-minute attention-paying. And my Thomas has taken this role for Jesus and for me both at once, I now realize, since although Jesus doesn’t need a spirit guide, there now is literally no one else in existence who is freely willing to call Jesus “brat” and treat Him as if He is a mere human being in order to help Him maintain a human balance. So for my whole life, Thomas has been rushing back and forth between us. It is no wonder that he looks vaguely worried a lot of the time, and he often sounds exasperated. And I love him! So I have lately resolved to be less of a pain in the neck to him. Resolve, of course, is only a promise that you are doing your best to keep. And perhaps in return, on Tuesday during our middle-of-the-night work time, Thomas told me that God is a Trinity because God is actually manifold. Just as there is no time and no space, so God has no limit.

He paused. Then he said. “That makes no sense to you, right?”

“Right. But that’s okay. Now, please explain how Jesus can be answering fifty million prayers at once while we are chatting with Him and He is feeding His fish.”

“Same answer.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

All of this is going to make sense to us once we are back in our expanded minds and after we die away from here! There are so many things that make ultimate sense, and yet they don’t make sense right now, but on a deeper level and when we are back possessing all our faculties, they are going to make sense. And I can see that Thomas is trying now to have more empathy for me. I am his first outing as a spirit guide, after all. He is just a beginner at this. And I suspect that his new effort at having empathy for me is being made at Jesus’s suggestion.

The next morning Thomas said to me, “What bothers you about the Trinity is that it is a closed divine loop. It leaves people out.” 

“Precisely!” That was a mental blurt. I hadn’t realized until Thomas said it – also mentally – that my entire problem with the Trinity has been that it leaves us out altogether. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit makes God into a divine little clique. What good is that?

He said, “As you know, but as people back then didn’t know, the Father actually is the Holy Spirit. So, imagine that the third person of the Trinity is you. Does that make a difference to the way you see it?”

“It makes all the difference.” But then came my “Aha” moment. “You talked this over with Jesus, didn’t you?”

When Thomas said nothing, after a little time I said softly, “I love you, my dear one. It’s okay.” Then a little later I said, “Will you tell me how He solved my problem?”

“I asked Jesus what He thought. He said the Trinity was just a Roman idea. As you keep telling me. He told me to make people the third person. He knows you better than I do.”

Of course, that isn’t true. But Jesus does seem to understand people. That is what comes of loving people the way that Jesus loves people. And my favorite Christian blogger posted something interesting last week about the concept of human deification in the very early church. Perhaps even more to the point, the fact that each of us is inextricably part of the same Consciousness which includes the High God means that in a very real sense, every one of us is a part of the great circle-dance that is the genuine Trinity. And each of us is entitled to be there! Jesus’s insight is much more than the instinctive kindness that simply is Jesus. Rather, His insight is the necessary ending of the ugly Roman Christian power-play that long ago cut us off from God’s love and replaced God’s love with the fear of hell and damnation, on that long-ago day when Rome co-opted control of the love of God and of Jesus and replaced it all with the Roman Christian dogma of the Trinity.   

Everyone’s favorite Catholic apologist, the wonderful Father Richard Rohr, has written extensively on the Trinity. I greatly admire Father Rohr for his graceful sow’s-ear-into-silk-purse skill with Roman ideas which are seventeen centuries old, and what he does with the Trinity almost makes it work. He says, “God for us, we call you Father. God alongside us, we call you Son. God within us, we call you Holy Spirit.” Of course, the reason why this still doesn’t work is that it makes the dogma important, and not the divine-plus-human truth. No amount of lovely playing with words can get us around that!

But, yes indeed, there is a Trinity after all. The genuine Trinity is a way for us to envision what is otherwise  inexpressible. It enables us to see in dramatic form the remarkable flow of consciousness energy that happens as you and I work to raise our personal spiritual vibrations to the Godhead level and above, all eight billion of us in an endless flow, while Jesus emphasizes to us His status as fully human and fully divine. And He incredibly maintains His fully human status, even though He is vibrating even higher now than the Godhead level. Jesus is our connection within Consciousness to God and to the endless flow of that energy, because from within all levels of Consciousness He can reach out now to each of us! And thereby, within the Trinity that includes God and Jesus and all of humanity, we can at last complete the entire circle-dance of love.

Jesus made a point when He was on earth of calling Himself the Son of Man. This term appears in the Old Testament for a man who has come from God as a fully human being. Which was always what I thought that Jesus meant His followers to see Him to be: He had come to us as the fulfillment of that prophesy. He was using the Old Testament term to explain to His followers that He was precisely that Man from God, made flesh. But I have lately read an article that suggests that  perhaps Jesus might have seen the term as meaning even something more. I am in touch with Jesus only through Thomas unless Thomas happens to take me to meet with Jesus, and Thomas sees some reason why I should be allowed to remember our meeting. When I asked Thomas to ask Jesus about the phrase “Son of Man,” the answer I got back from Jesus via Thomas was just that we should not discuss the term “Son of Man” on teachingsbyjesus.com. So, I leave all of this up to your judgment! 

Meanwhile, the Christian religion stumbles on like the unfortunate zombie that it has mostly become. I continue to hear the most awful stories! Just days ago, someone told me about a fire-and-brimstone preacher who had officiated at a woman’s recent funeral, wildly flailing his arms and with spittle flying as he condemned them all to hell, while the grieving family sat there, mortified. But there are some hopeful aspects to Christianity, too, and you can spot them here and there, like stubborn seeds of love in miraculous germination amid the smoldering ruins. The Unity Movement seemed more hopeful to me fifteen years ago than it does now, since it has become more concerned of late with the work of its early-twentieth-century founders than it is with the foundational work of Jesus. Still, Unity remains more youthful and creative than is the moribund Christianity that was its predecessor.

But I am coming to realize that the Christianity that Jesus taught does indeed need to begin anew. From the beginning. I do now see the Lord’s wisdom in that. His teachings when He first delivered them came through Him from God as a whole divine revelation, so no halfway measure of using them to try to modernize the Roman version of Christianity can ever do them justice. And for my part, the fun of feeling that I am sitting at Jesus’s feet day after day as we work on this website, and the joy of being reminded of how His mind works, is beyond what I can express. Oh, how I love Him!

Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty.
Oh thy works shall praise Thy name In earth and sky and sea.
Holy, holy, holy! Merciful and mighty.
God in three persons. Blessed Trinity.
Oh God in three persons. Blessed Trinity!
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)

 

And for the many who have requested and been given a PDF of The Fun of Loving Jesus, Thank You! It turns out that Amazon now won’t let you post a review there unless you have bought the associated book from Amazon, but I have been happy to give the book to everyone who requested it. And if you should choose to make a Christmas gift of it to someone, that might be an opportunity to post your review. Or perhaps Barnes & Noble has more lenient rules. I have been so buried in this beautiful work that I never notice the vicissitudes of book-sales and marketing. My whole focus now is on giving our beloved Jesus His website. I am sure that all of this will sort itself out eventually!

What If…?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

‘Til the moon deserts the sky, ‘Til all the seas run dry,
‘Til then I’ll worship You.
‘Til the tropic sun grows cold, ‘Til this young world grows old,
My Darling, I’ll adore You.
You are my reason to live! All I own I would give
Just to have You adore me.
‘Til the rivers flow upstream, ‘Til lovers cease to dream,
‘Til then I’m Yours. Be mine.
– Carl Sigman (1909-2000), from “Till” (1961)

As we mourn a religion that is frankly dying, and is far enough now down the fatal slope that its end seems to be inevitable, it seems suitable for us to pause and to look back briefly, and to wonder. What has gone wrong with Christianity? And how might things have turned out differently if the original Way of Jesus had not been hijacked by the Romans in the year 325, and if instead the Lord’s perfect teachings had been allowed to spread quietly from heart to heart and nation to nation beneath all the radar until they gently took over the world?

I have my own ideas, but my ideas are biased by my sense of betrayal by the religion that for most of my life I have loved so much. So I have been cruising around the internet this week in search of other theories. And I have found no end of theories! One in fact suggests that the internet itself is the problem, and that “Christianity is declining in America. Its root cause is outdated U.S. Internet unaccountability policy that imposes amoralism, a doctrine of not caring about right and wrong.” I guess I would say in response that if the religion is already so weak that the advent of the internet alone has been enough to kill it, then it must already have been pretty far gone!

Perhaps the most prominent theory, though, is some version of our having outgrown the need for religions altogether. As we have become more sophisticated as individuals and as a worldwide community, we have come to see through the excessively simplistic and fear-based dogmas of Christianity, and perhaps of other religions as well. We are at the point of freeing ourselves from being told scary and often internally contradictory fables meant to force us into pews each week. I understand how those fables have betrayed earnest Christians, since I have heard from so many people who have told me how they have felt betrayed. People have been writing to me, and have told me about what they once believed, and how those beliefs no longer feel right to them. Or how their former churches no longer feel welcoming. Or perhaps how something else has gone wrong in their old relationships with Christianity. And what feels to them like a sudden disconnect seems to trouble them very much indeed! The point is that they have not become atheists. And they certainly haven’t given up on Jesus. I don’t think that I have heard from anyone who has suddenly decided that there is no God! But for all of them, it is the religion itself that is no longer making sense. And this disconnect is happening fast.

 It has been estimated that sixteen million American women have left Christianity in just the past decade. Come to think of it, most of the people who have lately emailed me about leaving Christianity have indeed been women. So in recent years, we might say that this death of Christianity in the United States seems to be at least in part a phenomenon of women pulling away from churches where they no longer feel welcome, either because the dogmas feel barbaric – that was what finally chased me away – or because the church-people have become cliquish, snobbish, and self-righteous, which can be one result of horrific church doctrines like Calvinism. So whenever you do these investigations into why religions worldwide are dying, you end up finding good reasons why the process is ongoing, at least in the case of Christianity.

Christianity was clearly born to die of its own false and fear-based dogmas. When you plant a tree you must plant it straight, or eventually it will topple of its own crooked weight.

Our intended topic this week was to wonder what The Jesus Movement could have been like today if the Roman Emperor Constantine never had seized and usurped The Way of Jesus. But first we needed a frame-verse. That is how we start the blogging process each week. First of all, Thomas and I set out to search my mind for a frame-verse to give us some inspiration around our proposed topic, but this time we couldn’t find a hymn that adequately expressed the way that I have come to feel about sweet Master Jesus. So then Thomas found a non-Christian song in my larger mental database of songs and poems, and he suggested it to me with a chuckle because the lyrics sounded silly to him. He thought it was perfect, though, for our topic, what with worship and miracles among the lyrics, and with my promising Jesus that I would live for Him and promising to be His. But I rejected it at once. Good grief! I barely even remembered that song from when I was a teenager. He insisted that it was spot-on, but so what? It was a drippy teenage love song! I went looking for a suitable hymn on the internet. My relationship with Jesus is highly unusual, and the fact that I have a personal relationship with Jesus at all has grown from my spirit guide’s amazing relationship with Jesus, and from the fact that he now sometimes takes me with him when he visits with Jesus. Almost no one trailing a silver cord ever gets to meet with Jesus. And even at that, Thomas won’t let me remember most of our meetings. I only know that they sometimes happen.

And it was just when we started to look for a frame-verse this week that I realized the extent to which I have fallen completely in love with Jesus. Omigod. The word “charismatic” was literally invented to describe how it feels to be around Him. It is no wonder to me that He attracted crowds when He was on earth! Jesus is a people-magnet. And the way that He looks at you, the love that He expresses for you individually just by meeting your eyes is indescribable. It is God’s love, literally. I have never felt so much love from anyone! And yet, He has no ego at all. The one person who really deserves to feel self-important has no ego whatsoever. The more I looked for a hymn to use as a frame-verse, the more that gushy teen love song that Thomas had found and resurrected kept playing in my mind. I would do anything for Jesus. And so would you! Thomas and I have been bickering for years about how long I will be willing to stay on earth. But for Jesus, for God literally who is trying so hard now and so touchingly to maintain His status as a human being, I would live to be a hundred and twenty years old if He wanted that. I will teach the Gospels on earth for Him for so long as I can speak. That song, word for word, is what I would do for Jesus. So, there it is. Our frame-verse this week is a gushy teenage love song to the Lord.

And my rediscovering that song after half a century as I also am revisiting Jesus’s Gospel teachings and writing the scripts for teachingsbyjesus.com is giving me another revelation. Why on earth has Christianity ever even remotely ranked the merely derivative letters of Paul with the precious Gospel words of Jesus? Except for 1Cor 13, which Thomas tells me was channeled from God through Paul, and which you clearly can see was channeled when you view it in context – except for that one letter – all the letters of Paul are merely Gospels commentary! Only Jesus is God. There is no other. He came to earth so God could “look through His eyes” (as Thomas has expressed it to me), and come to better understand people on God’s behalf. So then Jesus could develop the teachings that He spent those three years and more delivering to us. The Lord’s Gospel words are sacred! By comparison, the words in all the rest of the Christian Bible are mere dross.  

And the historical record shows that Jesus did indeed have an amazing effect on those who knew Him personally. His Way spread rapidly during the first three hundred years after His death and resurrection, as far away as Rome and to millions of people in the Mediterranean region before the Romans under Constantine decided that a variant of the Lord’s message could be useful to the Romans as a means of fear-based control. So then they invented at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 what became Christianity. But let us imagine now that instead, Constantine came up with some other means of controlling the masses seventeen hundred years ago. And let us further assume that the teachings of Jesus were preserved in the canonical Gospels by some other means, and they spread peacefully under the radar of the powerful and the brutal – no Inquisitions; no Crusades – to then be passed along and taught over all the world, just as we have them today. What then would the world be like, do you think? Can we even begin to imagine that world now?

 I think that this would be something like the world as it would be today:

  • The Jesus Movement. There would of course be no Christian religion. Instead, people would carry a skinny black book – you can read it in an evening! – of the sayings of Jesus alone. And yes, it might be those same four canonical Gospels. People might be reading the other Gospels, too. They don’t add much.
  • A Lot Less Fear. Without that fear-based religion, we would never have had the worry of sin, but we would have had instead the certainty of God’s love and forgiveness and God’s kingdom overspreading the earth. Jesus talks about God’s kingdom overspreading the earth at least a hundred times through all four canonical Gospels, and that would have become most of our focus over the past two thousand years. It would have made a gigantic difference!
  • History Would Have Unfolded Very Differently. As I have experimented with living history forward with The Jesus Movement for the past two thousand years, I must say that all of history moves very differently. Most Christians don’t understand that Jesus actually abolished the very concept of sin. He did away with the Sabbath as well. He set about freeing us in so many ways that The Jesus Movement soon would bring to light, and He made of loving and serving our neighbor a kind of radical joy that really does upend everything. The first shall be last. The mighty fall away, and the gentle really do inherit the earth.

You can play with it yourself, once you internalize what Jesus actually taught! In no version of world history that I have come up with over the past week do we end up with a continent-wide United States. And we don’t have major wars, although we do get skirmishes, especially during the first thousand years or so, that courageous groups of people step in and talk down. Countries, yes, but they tend to be smaller and governed by consensus. Membership in The Jesus Movement grows and grows, kind of like a Boy and Girl Scouts thing for grown-ups. It becomes something that eventually pretty much everyone wants to do because it makes people happy. It includes a lot of gigantic get-togethers, like Thanksgivings, Christmases, Easters, and beachy backyard holidays all year round that virtually merge together and include a lot of singing and pep talks.

The thing is that leaders don’t seem to develop. People seem to want to do everything by consensus. That takes longer, but with nothing to measure it against, it feels normal. I think that perhaps people have an aversion to leaders except in times of stress, and living by love eases stress and makes people happier. And crime doesn’t entirely disappear, but it mostly does; and then crime becomes something like a socially embarrassing abnormality. Can you imagine a society in which people are choosing to live more varied and always peaceful lives, and by now that choice has been simply normal for at least the past thousand years? Men and women live essentially equal lives, both doing childcare, both supporting the family? Eventually you probably don’t really need either soldiers or police, because when necessary everyone helps to create immediate peace. People don’t go to gatherings just on Sundays, but it’s more a community sort of thing. A lot of spiritual sharing happens in people’s homes as well as in community centers, and in monthly and quarterly events in larger places, and annual events in off-season sports stadiums. There seem to be charismatic people who arise now and then and try to mimic Jesus and get laughed off the stage, and also modest people who are listened to because they give thoughtful discourses on what Jesus taught but they don’t try to replace the historical Jesus. I don’t know. At first, it seemed to be impossible. But the more I think about it, the more I think it really could have happened.          

 

And my dear blog friends, The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught is just now in print. This book is the companion to the upcoming website, teachingsbyjesus.com, so it is true to what Jesus actually said but if it is first found by evangelicals it is likely to get some poor reviews! Therefore I would love it if you would read it first, and would give it your own thoughtful Amazon review. If you will send me an email through the green contact block on robertagrimes.com, I will send you a review copy in PDF. Thank you!

God or Man?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I don’t know how to love Him. What to do. How to move Him.
I’ve been changed, yes really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself,
I seem like someone else.
I don’t know how to take this.
I don’t see why He moves me.
He’s a man. He’s just a man.
And I’ve had so many men before.
In very many ways He’s just one more.
Should I bring Him down? Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love? Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this! What’s it all about?
– Andrew Lloyd-Webber & Timothy Miles Bindon Rice, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)

To read a debate about whether Jesus is God or man, and to see learned people insisting that He has to be only one or the other makes your eyes cross. To see our beloved Father Richard Rohr trying to imagine a future for Christianity, which I love him for attempting to do even though I think he knows the religion has no future makes me sad for him. I grew up in a church in which we were taught that Jesus on earth was “fully God and fully Man,” and that still makes sense to me even now that, amazingly, Jesus has spent the past two thousand years healing all the millions of people damaged by Christianity, and He has thereby grown even vastly more spiritually elevated than He was when He was Jesus on earth, and I have actually met Jesus. I know Him personally. In fact, I don’t know how else you would describe the amazing Being that Jesus has become! His extraordinarily silken and immensely powerful personal energy, and His selflessness and grace are confounding. He is literally God now. That is beyond doubt. And yet, two thousand years past His final incarnation Jesus chooses to present in the astral body of a Man who looks amazingly young and mild. He looks Mediterranean, less than six feet tall, with curly hair and olive skin. He is nearly always barely smiling, as if He has thought of some lovely secret. And when He looks at you, the love in His eyes is indescribable. Not even your own mother ever has loved you the way that Jesus loves you. Fully God and fully Man. My childhood minister, dear Steven Turrell of blessed memory, was so completely right! But Jesus at the same time is so self-effacing that if it were not for the Lord’s amazing personal energy, you wouldn’t even much notice Him now. And that seems to be what He prefers.

Achieving the Godhead level has been easy for Jesus. The Godhead level of our astral reality is at a very high consciousness vibration, and Thomas tells me that Jesus has even surpassed that at this point in His personal spiritual development. But He always has loved people so much, just naturally and confoundingly, in the same way that some of us especially love puppies. Every human being deeply touches His heart, while my Thomas says that He himself mainly sees people’s flaws. Thomas has come to think that perhaps Jesus sees people’s flaws as simply adorable, in the way that some folks might see a puppy’s clumsiness as cute, perhaps; but for whatever reason, Jesus has always been obsessed with loving people. So over thousands of years, my Thomas has watched the being who six thousand years ago was his own little brother continue to grow spiritually from there to become Jesus the Christ, the King of Kings, and elevated spiritually far above all the rest of humankind. For my whole life on earth Thomas has told me no part of this story. But now apparently Jesus wants it to be known, so now Thomas is answering my questions freely and letting me share his answers with you. This is all still new to me, and it feels illicit, but apparently we will be putting much of this information on Jesus’s website. (Good grief.)

This feels like a kind of Catch-22. And in a minute you will see why I call it that. My whole business career has been spent as an attorney and general advisor to closely-held and primarily family-owned businesses. So naturally I have been thinking about what I might advise Jesus to do in this situation, if He ever were to ask for my advice. Of course, I never would offer Him advice unsolicited. But it seems to me that He could do a lower-key and positive version of a Second Coming thing. Why not? He has sufficient power over matter to demonstrate that He is in fact Jesus the Risen Christ, and not just some imposter; and perhaps He could be based at the Vatican for His temporal protection. He might then teach the world from there. He doesn’t have to have just some nobody like me create a website so He can gradually share His teachings with the world. He doesn’t have to start all over again from the beginning!  

So Thomas very briefly indulged my fantasy. Sixth-level beings are very tall and thin when they appear on earth, and they glow. Well, Jesus could create a church-Jesus astral body maybe ten feet tall and glowing. Thomas reminded me that Mikey Morgan once appeared at one of our nightly meetings in an astral body of a snowboarding kid, and he randomly kept switching into a ball of light and then back into a kid again. I said, “Great! Jesus can do that, too!” Thomas tried last Halloween to get Jesus to touch a pumpkin on earth and blow it up just for the fun of it, which suggestion had horrified Jesus. Thomas told me now that blowing up something at the Vatican by touching it with one finger would be a way for Jesus to convince the Pope that He really is Jesus. I said, “Yup! Good plan.” And I also thought that Jesus could materialize something for the Pope, because I bet that He could do that, too. Something holy-looking. Something in gold, perhaps? The Pope would love that!

So then Thomas gave me a frank look. He said, “You really don’t know Jesus at all, do you?”    

“What?”

“Ten-foot-tall church-Jesus? Something in gold? The Vatican?” 

He has to be safe…”

“Putting Jesus in the Vatican would be like putting matter together with anti-matter,” Thomas said, and he actually chuckled to himself. I hate it when he gets smug like that. It means he sees a gotcha in this for me somewhere.

“I do know Jesus! Stop toying with me!”

He said, “My confused little friend, our Brother Jesus is not a Christian. He died on earth three hundred years before the religion was even born, and Christianity teaches nothing that Jesus taught. And He certainly isn’t a Christian now. Not after He has had to love back into health so many hundreds of millions of damaged people! Damaged by the religion! What makes you think He would go anywhere near the Vatican? What makes you think He wants to look like church-Jesus for the Pope? He does it for Christians as they are coming home because He loves them and it makes them happy. But, for the Pope?”   

He was right, of course. What was I thinking? 

“I know you would love to find a way to get out of creating His website because you feel so unworthy of doing it. And of course you are not worthy! There is no one on earth who is worthy now of doing anything for Jesus. But, He cannot do it. And I cannot do it. I have been preparing you for your whole life to do this for Him. You worry that whatever you do will disappoint Him. But it will not disappoint Him. It will delight Him.” Then Thomas added – and here is what I see as the Catch-22 of this situation. “He wants you to see Him as just a man. I think He even tries to see Himself that way. Our Brother has the power to move on the hearts of all the world if He chooses to do that. He could transform the world in a heartbeat of time. But He wants to begin His ministry again from the beginning, and build it from there moving heart by heart, and erasing the false religion in the process. And who are we to tell Him that is the wrong thing to do?”

My God. If Jesus chose to do it, He could end every problem on earth in an instant. Just transform every heart, and then maybe touch The Empire State Building and blow it up to further make His point. Then He might say, “Any questions? Didn’t think so. Now open your Gospels and there are your lessons. Start learning.”

I sighed. I knew what this was going to mean. “So, no Second Coming. And I’ll have to take another lifetime. Maybe two.”

Thomas also sighed.  He said, “We both will.”

This is the whole thing about being Jesus. I have been thinking about it ever since Thomas and I had this conversation. Jesus really is God! He has the power to fix everything on earth in an instant, if He chooses to do that. But if He does choose to do that, then He destroys the value of the earth as a spiritual school, so therefore He never can do that. What He can do is what He first set out to do two thousand years ago. He can again establish His movement to recalibrate humankind toward positive spiritual growth. He first came to earth to study us and figure out how we can best grow spiritually.

And His teachings based on what He learned back then still work amazingly well! I know how well they work, because a dozen years ago I personally tried them, and I was internally transformed within weeks. And that transformation has been permanent. It forms a bright line in my life: I cannot even remember now what I was like before. So if Jesus wanted to do it, He could at once produce a similar transformation in every person on earth! But, then what? Bringing the kingdom of God on earth will be a slow process when we do it in His planned and deliberate way, and intentionally so, since once it is completed, the earth will then become useless as a spiritual school. Except for the fact that, of course, in a reality without time there will then be eons laid down into which people can continue to incarnate for their personal spiritual growth. Jesus had of course thought this all through long before.

But the thing that really astonishes me as I read again the debate linked at the start of this article is that both of the worthies taking part in it seem to be clueless about the primary role of consciousness. That really does confound me, because in fact the primacy of consciousness is central to everything! Since all that exists is consciousness, and since you and I are inextricably part of the one Consciousness that continuously manifests reality, in fact, each one of us is fully God and fully man! Just think it through. Of course, you know that insight is profoundly right, and Jesus is the eternally-living proof. People so desperately want Jesus to be Magic-Man! The Son of God! And NOT precisely one of us. Because then that lets us off the hook, don’t you see? But Jesus’s life story is of a normal man who simply has always loved people more than most of us love people. So over the centuries, and then over the millennia, Jesus has simply loved people so much that He has raised His personal spiritual vibration even above the entire Godhead’s spiritual vibration. So now Jesus is the exemplar for us all. What He has done, so can we do, too!

And Jesus did not only die for us. Dying for us once? That would have been so easy! No, for the past six thousand years, Jesus the eternally living Christ, our sweet and perfectly beloved Brother has been living for us, healing hundreds of millions of damaged Christians and rearing all those aborted children. And now, it is His full intention to teach every last eternal one of us to achieve the same spiritual level that He Himself has achieved. It doesn’t matter to Him a fig how we might see Him. He loves each one of us infinitely, and until the very end of non-time. He sees Himself forever as our Teacher. And that little seventeen-hundred-year interruption in our spiritual lessons that was Christianity has been to Him little more than just a single summer’s day gone by.

Fear’s Ghastly Harvest

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Nobody knows the trouble I’ve been through.
Nobody knows my sorrow.
Nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen.
Glory hallelujah!
Sometimes I’m up, sometimes I’m down.
Oh, yes, Lord!
Sometimes I’m almost to the ground.
Oh, yes, Lord.
– From “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had” in Slave Songs of the United States (1867)

By survey, it is estimated that more than eighty percent of the people on earth are still afraid to die. What an appalling statistic. Eighty percent! And the most important reason why that statistic is so devastating may not be readily apparent to you:

  • Consciousness is the base creative force, and objectively it is all that exists. Since consciousness is indestructible, and since each of us is a part of consciousness, the plain fact is that each one of us is literally indestructible. In simple truth, no one ever dies.
  • Consciousness exists in a range of vibrations, from base fear at the lowest and slowest level of vibration to perfect love at the highest and most rapid vibrational level. And since fear of death is the base fear, and since all our minds are part of a single consciousness, the statistic that I quoted at the start of this post means that fear now pervades the entire lower aspect of the one consciousness that is all that exists. So it weighs us all down, sinking all of us with a kind of leaden ballast.
  • That ballast of negativity that weighs down consciousness therefore affects all of humankind. It doesn’t matter that you and I might be entirely unafraid to die. The fact that so many people are afraid acts as a kind of ultimate pollution that sours the consciousness that is all of us with a sludge of general negativity that is expressing itself in the world right now in a number of subtle but powerful ways.

For example:

  • Mood. A general depressiveness and lack of hope pervades all of humankind. This negativity is especially apparent among the young, who lack the resources to combat it. There is a dour sense of hopelessness that is taking over modern societies like a cancer, especially in the Western countries.
  • Rage. From road rage to crudeness in politics to greater ethnic warring to more alarming sparring at the national level, we are becoming ever more furious with one another.
  • Global Catastrophes. Have you noticed that something or other is always just about to get us? If it’s not famine or global cooling or warming, then it’s Covid or aliens or something else. Young people might see this as a new phenomenon, but we who are older remember that in the nineteen-seventies we were facing both imminent worldwide famine and the advent of the next ice age.

And since everyone on earth shares a single consciousness, whatever affects even the least of us must on some level affect every one of us. The implications of this fact are so extraordinary as to almost beggar the imagination! Individually we are indestructible, but nevertheless we are susceptible while we are on earth to endless attacks of morbid negativity that our modern excellent communications have vastly compounded. I chose decades ago to cut myself off from television, radio, and newspapers altogether, and that does help. I urge you to try it. If an actual war ever does break out, you can be sure that someone will let you know.

The cause of all this vastly increased worldwide negativity is humankind’s heightened fear of death in recent decades. And that is something that we are going to have to address if we want things on earth to ever improve much at all. But why are modern people so much more afraid to die?  Let’s first stipulate the fact that there is no reason on earth why death should ever be feared! Life on earth is nothing but a very brief sojourn, and we have so much evidence now of what happens at and after bodily death, and of the fact that we all live forever, that no one should ever be afraid of the minimal transition that we erroneously call death. So, what is making people so much more afraid now?

Your first assumption is bound to be that this is not a new phenomenon. Didn’t people always fear death this way? Well, actually, no. Our frame-verse this week is a song that was sung by a people held in bondage some two hundred years ago and more, who looked toward death as a release from their present state of oppression. And while that may seem surprising to us, it was more usual for people in past centuries to see the next stage of life as an adventure, and not as something to be feared. Think of the ancient Egyptians, for example, who built their whole culture around getting ready for what was coming next. Even very primitive cultures often had folk tales about family reunions in a happy afterlife.  So, no, people didn’t always fear death the way people fear death in the twenty-first century. So what has happened of late? Why are modern people so much more afraid to die?

As I have investigated this problem, I have come to think that it has three primary causes:

  • Materialist scientists have been spreading a miasma of fear. People in Western countries are taught that scientists are honest and honorable people, highly trained, and therefore to be trusted in all their proclamations. And in recent years, materialist scientists have taken to proclaiming that life after death is scientifically impossible. In spreading their nonsense, they have substantially contributed to lowering the planet’s consciousness vibration from love-based toward ever more deeply fear-based.
  • Scary near-death-experience YouTubes erroneously insist that hell is real. I have heard of late from a number of people who were panicked by watching hellish NDE YouTubes. And if this many people have reached out to me, then there must be many more who have found those scary YouTubes and believed that they were documenting actual experiences. My dear friends, for the umpteenth time, (a) there is no hell, and (b) no one who comes back from an NDE to tell the tale ever has actually died.
  • The decline in Christian church attendance likely also plays a role. The number of children in America in 2022 who ever have attended church services amazingly is now in the single digits! And while you and I might rail against the false and fear-based dogmas of Christianity, for someone to believe in a God of any kind provides a sense that a positive afterlife is at least a possibility. While without the comfort of a God to believe in, it is easy to imagine nothing after death but the terrors of a howling void.

There may be other reasons, too, why so many more people are so much more afraid of death. But the point is that the shared vibratory level of our human consciousness has sunk to such an alarmingly low level of negativity that the result is manifold negative effects in human cultures worldwide. And our increased fear of death in the twenty-first century is the ultimate cause of every one of these problems!

So, how will having more of us know that we are all immortal beings make a difference?

This is a fascinating phenomenon! I first observed it in myself some forty years ago, and since then I have seen it happen for many other people as well. When I was young, I was terrified of the dark. I was actually afraid of many things. Then as soon as I graduated from college, I began to study the afterlife. My afterlife studies intensified with my discovery of the heyday of afterlife communications through physical and deep-trance mediums that occurred in the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries. For two years or so in the late seventies I prowled used-book stores and libraries, and I read as many of the accounts of after-death communications produced during that turn of the century heyday as I could lay my hands on. It took me about two years to really get past what I thought of back then as my normal fear of death, and my first-stage liberation from the fear of death first became apparent to me one evening. I was in my office. My husband was watching the news on TV, and our infant children were sleeping. It had grown dark as I was concentrating on writing on my computer. And for the first time in my life, I was sitting there alone in pitch darkness, and I was not afraid. I noticed that. I took quick stock of myself. Was it really true? It was true. Suddenly I didn’t fear the dark at all. It was then that I first understood that vanquishing the fear of dying automatically vanquishes all our other fears as well. And I became frankly giddy with my lack of fear! For a while I even had to be extra cautious, believe it or not, about retraining myself to be careful in situations where caution really is needed. Even as recently as nine months ago, I carelessly walked on glare ice, and I fell and hit my head and broke my wrist.

When you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything. 

If we want to improve the condition of humankind in all respects, there is just one magic bullet that can do it all. We will have to make certain that as many people as possible learn as rapidly as possible the truth about death and the afterlife, so they can altogether vanquish their fear of death. And surprisingly, it seems not to matter much to whom we teach these truths. Since our minds are all part of the single consciousness that continuously manifests this one reality, it has been estimated that for as few as ten percent of the people on earth to altogether lose their fear of death and thereby to significantly raise their consciousness vibrations will begin a benevolent feedback cycle for all of humankind. As few as ten percent! Just as this miasma of negativity has weighed down all of humankind, the difference that those ten percent can make will act to buoy and lift all of humankind. There is no other way that we can make this happen. And all of humankind is in such desperate straits that we ought at least to try it!  

Of course, the lame and entirely counterproductive battle that is now ongoing between materialist and religionist scientists that we discussed last week is going to make it harder to achieve any kind of positive result. We know that. But, truth is truth! And as Craig Hogan and I work to promote seekreality.com, as we prepare teachingsbyjesus.com, and as I blog and do my podcasting and day by week by month by year as we do everything possible to teach as many people as we can the glorious truth that there really is no death, at least we know that we are doing all that we can to try to lift the world. And if you will do all that you can do as well, then perhaps we might yet plant enough love to supplant and choke off sufficient weeds of fear, and we might soon manage to bring for humankind a very much brighter harvest day!  

Although you see me going ‘long so,
Oh, yes, Lord,
I have my trials here below.
Oh, yes, Lord.
If you get there before I do,
Oh, yes, Lord,
Tell all-a my friends I’m coming to Heaven!
Oh, yes, Lord!
– From “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Had” in Slave Songs of the United States (1867)

 

 

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