Author: Roberta Grimes

Born Again

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I used to think that I could not go on.
And life was nothing but an awful song.
But now I know the meaning of true love!
I’m leaning on the everlasting arms.
If I can see it, then I can do it! If I just believe it, there’s nothing to it!
I believe I can fly! I believe I can touch the sky!
I think about it every night and day. Spread my wings and fly away.
I believe I can soar. I see me running through that open door!
I believe I can fly! I believe I can fly! I believe I can fly!
– R. Kelly, from “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996)

Jesus’s insistence that those who are wealthy and want to be His followers must first give away all their wealth feels impractical to most modern people, as we saw in our last week’s blog comments. True, building a reserve and having to manage it is a distraction from the crucial spiritual work that brought us into these earth-lives in the first place. But here are two important points:  

  • Life is more financially complicated in the twenty-first century than it was when Jesus was on earth. And having to live hand-to-mouth today would be a bigger spiritual distraction than it is for us just to live simple middle-class lives and keep a modest nest-egg in the bank.
  • When Jesus was on earth, He was familiar with things that His followers – and all of us – cannot even imagine. The givens of His life were so different from theirs, and they are very different from ours as well. Think about it! Jesus knew from His own personal experience that we are all glorious eternal beings. And He knew for certain that God is real!

That second point, especially, is huge. The Gospel passages on wealth include some of those places where it feels okay to sometimes mutter under our breath, “Easy for You to say, Jesus.” I have done some of that muttering myself.

Here below is Jesus’s most prominent Gospel encounter with a wealthy man who was eager to become Jesus’s follower. This is a famous section of the Gospel of Mark, so we ought to spend a few minutes on it:

17 As He was setting out on a journey, a man ran up to Him and knelt before Him, and asked Him, “Good Teacher, what shall I do so that I may inherit eternal life?” 18 But Jesus said to him, “Why do you call Me good? No one is good except God alone. 19 You know the commandments: ‘Do not murder, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not give false testimony, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’” 20 And he said to Him, “Teacher, I have kept all these things from my youth.” 21 Looking at him, Jesus showed love to him and said to him, “One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.” 22 But he was deeply dismayed by these words, and he went away grieving; for he was one who owned much property.

23 And Jesus, looking around, *said to His disciples, “How hard it will be for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God!” 24 And the disciples were amazed at His words. But Jesus responded again and said to them, “Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” 26 And they were even more astonished, and said to Him, “Then who can be saved?” 27 Looking at them, Jesus said, “With people it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.”

28 Peter began to say to Him, “Behold, we have left everything and have followed You.” 29 Jesus said, “Truly I say to you, there is no one who has left house or brothers or sisters or mother or father or children or farms, for My sake and for the gospel’s sake, 30 but that he will receive a hundred times as much now in the present age, houses and brothers and sisters and mothers and children and farms, along with persecutions; and in the age to come, eternal life. 31 But many who are first will be last, and the last, first.” (MK 10:17-31)

Now let’s briefly consider this passage. As is true of many things that Jesus says, He is speaking just in this moment. But this is Jesus we are talking about! So each word He speaks is imbued for us with more import than He may have meant for it to carry. Let me show you what I mean: 

  • The rich man was using an honorific. And surely Jesus knew that. His calling Jesus “Good Teacher” was nevertheless seized upon and used as a teaching moment by Jesus when He announced that only God is good. Which likely embarrassed the poor guy.
  • Jesus calls it hard for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God. And this can be taken in either of two ways. Does God consider the ownership of wealth to be in itself a big sin that can bar someone from entering God’s kingdom? Or is the problem only that having wealth is a distraction that can make it harder for us to raise our consciousness vibrations while we are on earth? In fact, as we learned last week,  Jesus is talking only about the latter problem.
  • “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of God.” This passage has been misused as a big teaching moment for the past two thousand years! So many Christian preachers have used it to insist that Jesus was saying that owning wealth is in itself sinful. But in fact, that is not the case at all. In Jesus’s day, there was a narrow gate into Jerusalem called The Needle’s Eye. It was so narrow that camels had to be unloaded before they could pass through it. What a wonderful analogy this was for Jesus to use when He wanted to explain that wealth is a distracting burden that makes spiritual growth harder unless we first shed that wealth. He likely used this analogy often!
  • All things are possible with God. This is Jesus’s simple, shortcut way of explaining what we now know to be true, which is that even though wealth can be a substantial spiritual distraction, so long as we are not allowing anything – and especially wealth – to distract us from the process of growing spiritually, then the healthy process of spiritual growth can proceed according to God’s plan for us, even if we are wealthy. Jesus says all these things in the simplest possible terms, so His first-millennium listeners can best understand them.
  • In the age to come, the first will be last, and the last, first. Here Jesus is speaking about the fact that in the afterlife, our spiritual status will be what matters, and that future status is very likely to be the direct opposite of what our status is on earth. Nevertheless, in what we think of from here as the afterlife and from there as our real life, there still is a strict rank order. And what is immensely endearing is the fact that Jesus, who far outranks everyone, wears no insignias of rank at all when He often ministers in the afterlife today.

Jesus seems not to have asked self-impoverishment of all of His followers. As His reputation grew, some high-ranking personages became the Lord’s friends, and He did not ask the most illustrious of them to give their wealth away. For example, the wealthy Joseph of Arimathea, who eventually gave his new-cut tomb for Jesus’s temporary burial, and also the chief Pharisee Nicodemus, who argued for Jesus in the Sanhedrin when He was arrested, and who brought a hundred Roman pounds of myrrh and aloes to anoint Jesus’s body for burial, were among His followers, even if Nicodemus seems to have felt the need to meet with Jesus under cover of night. Here is the very much misunderstood “born again” story in the Gospel of John, which features Nicodemus. Let’s listen to what Jesus really is saying here:

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

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

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

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

This passage is the basis of the notion that some Christian denominations can change people’s status before God by designating them as having been “born again,” whatever that term might mean to each religious denomination. But actually, Jesus is talking here about something quite different. When the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE was assembling the first Christian Bible, it removed every reference to reincarnation that it could find. Although it did miss a few. And this passage is actually about the form of physical rebirth on earth that we call reincarnation. Witness:

  • “You have come from God as a teacher”; and “the kingdom of God.” Note here that Jesus agrees with Nicodemus that He has come from God as a teacher. Not as a savior. And Jesus uses the term “the kingdom of God” an incredible fifty-one times through all four Gospels, and the term “the kingdom of heaven” – which means the same thing – in the Gospel of Matthew another twenty-five times. No other term is nearly so important to Jesus! He is here straight-up telling Nicodemus that He came from God to teach us how to more efficiently achieve the kingdom of God/heaven. Which was in fact His actual mission from God on earth.
  • “Unless someone is born again he cannot see the kingdom of God.” This is a frank reference to reincarnation, and to the fact that achieving the kingdom of God takes more than one earth-lifetime. Jesus’s repeated references to the kingdom of God or heaven are to the upper levels of the afterlife realities. We know now that people can achieve that exalted level at death once they have sufficiently raised their consciousness vibrations. For most people, that process requires many earth-lives of gradual spiritual growth, but Jesus’s natural predilection for loving people had enabled Him to achieve that level very quickly: He and my spirit guide have told me that Jesus achieved it about six thousand years ago. He then petitioned God to allow Him to be born again on earth from the Godhead so He could teach all of us how to achieve the kingdom of God as easily as Jesus had achieved it. Without Jesus’s teachings, people keep reincarnating repeatedly and cluelessly, perhaps hundreds of times, while making very little spiritual progress in each lifetime. Buddhists call suffering this long, blind process “turning on the wheel.” But Jesus’s teachings work so well in raising our consciousness vibrations that they enable God’s kingdom to be achieved in as little as a single lifetime.
  • “Born of water and the Spirit”; “born of flesh and the Spirit”.
    Here Jesus talks first about the process of natural birth, the gush of amniotic fluid and the fact that what is born is a spiritual being. He thus emphasizes the fact that He is talking about a physical and not just a metaphorical rebirth, of the sort that the churches imagine when they talk about the phrase “born again.” And then Jesus adds the fact that we need these earth-based lessons in order to grow spiritually, since that is the entire reason why our time on earth is necessary. Jesus’s teachings are specifically designed to elevate our consciousness vibrations as rapidly as possible.
  • “The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit.” This sentence perplexes Nicodemus, and Jesus throws up His hands in exasperation. Jesus must be referring here to the between-lives period of preparation for a rapid return to earth that the researcher Michael Newton documents, and from which our loved ones often speak to us. Nothing else really fits.
  • “No one has ascended into heaven, except He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in Him will have eternal life in Him.” In the penultimate paragraph here, Jesus tells Nicodemus the same story that Jesus and my Thomas told me in April of last year. Jesus ascended into heaven very quickly six thousand years ago, and then much later He descended from heaven as the Son of Man in order to teach us how each of us can achieve rapid spiritual growth, just as He had done. If we believe Him and follow His teachings, then we, too, will be lifted up and will join Him in eternal life. It really is precisely the same story! Seeing that Jesus told Nicodemus the same story two thousand years ago that He and Thomas told me just last year gives me gooseflesh whenever I think of it.
  • “Son of Man.” Jesus referred to Himself as the Son of Man before He began to accept the mantle of the long-promised Messiah. He uses that term more than eighty times through all four Gospels. In the ancient Hebrew religion, the Son of Man refers to a prototypical human being, with all his frailties; although Jesus seems to have used the term more to refer to Himself as an exemplary human being come to earth as God’s emissary. He was setting Himself lightly apart before He later specifically claimed the Messianic title and role.
  • “For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son…” That final paragraph is religious fluff-words that were probably added by the First Nicaean Councilors. Notice how differently it reads from the rest, full of soaring pontifications. It may well be based on things that Jesus said, but the Councilors added so much that whatever Jesus may have said here is now unrecognizable. This is always a risk when we are reading the Gospels, since after Jesus spoke His precious words, they then were passed down orally for sixty or more years before they were first written down. After that, they spent additional centuries in the hands of people who often had their own religious agendas before their earliest translations into modern languages first were made.

Still, we can be grateful that respect for the Lord’s words has been such that the Gospel words that were messed with were usually only at the ends of whichever passages people wanted to change. And reading these wonderful Gospel passages from a devoutly spiritual viewpoint, which in fact was the viewpoint that Jesus had when He first spoke them, feels so remarkable today! Best of all, it brings us closer to the extraordinary spiritual Teacher come to us directly from God that Jesus actually is.

See, I was on the verge of breaking down.
Sometimes silence can seem so loud.
There are miracles in life I must achieve.
But first I know it starts inside of me.
If I can see it, then I can be it! If I just believe it, there’s nothing to it!
I believe I can fly! I believe I can touch the sky!
I think about it every night and day. Spread wings and fly away!
I believe I can soar. I see me running through that open door!
I believe I can fly! I believe I can fly! I believe I can fly!
– R. Kelly, from “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996)

Jesus and Wealth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The best things in life are free. But you can give them to the birds and bees!
I want money. That’s what I want. That’s what I want.

Your love is such a thrill. But your love won’t pay my bills!
I want money. That’s what I want! That’s what I want!

Money don’t get everything, it’s true. What it don’t get, I can’t use!
I want money! That’s what I want! That’s what I want!

I want money! I want lots of money!
In fact, I want so much money! Give me your money! Just give me money!
– Berry Gordy Jr. & Janie Bradford, from “Money” (1959)

The nineteen-nineties brought the first flutters of the tech boom, and the earliest young tech nouveaux riches. We weren’t yet seeing tech billionaires, but we were beginning to feel the first giddy effects of so much sudden wealth in youthful hands as the earliest dot-com startups were being bought up by larger companies, or they were going public. And with it all came an extraordinary lesson in what it means to be a follower of Jesus. I wish I could remember this fellow’s name. I was paying so little attention at the time that I don’t recall now whether I read an article about him, or if I only saw him on a television segment, tracked down and dodging away from cameras as he said a few indignant words and rushed on. What I best recall is my wonderment that here was someone who was absolutely taking Jesus at His literal word. Omigod. Would I ever be able to follow Jesus to this man’s extent?

If I am remembering this whole story correctly, they were a group of college friends who had written a program and started a company that had been bought up by some bigger tech startup. Now they were suddenly what in those days passed for very rich indeed! I think they may have made as much as a hundred million dollars apiece. There were three of them standing there in the spotlight, raising glasses for the cameras and grinning. And there also was that odd man out, who was refusing to be interviewed, and who oddly was determined to give away almost all of his windfall. When a reporter tracked him down, he indignantly said that he would keep a small part of what he had earned, but he could never justify before God keeping all that money. Wow. Just… Wow.     

Your first instinct may be to protest that since that young man had fairly earned his money, he had a perfect right to keep it. But in fact, the most difficult challenge that we can set for ourselves as part of any life-plan turns out to be wealth. Almost no one handles wealth successfully from a spiritual perspective. The late nineteenth century was another economic boom-time when there also were many newly wealthy people. And I recall that when I first was reading those many hundreds of communications received through deep-trance mediums more than a century ago which first convinced me that our lives are eternal, there was one poor fellow who stuck in my mind. He had chosen great wealth as his primary life-challenge, and then he had been devastated by just how badly he had handled his wealthy life-experience. He said to his family in the early twentieth century through a deep-trance medium soon after his death, “I really thought I could handle it! I thought I could do it! But I have set myself back by eons!” So, yes, that young man in the nineteen-nineties who was going to give away most of his wealth had fairly earned that money. True enough. But on the other hand, he was probably wise to have seen so much sudden wealth for the distracting spiritual poison that it was.

What follows the Lord’s Prayer in the Sixth Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew is so important that we are going to spend a little time now with Jesus’s next words. He clearly means those words to support the Lord’s Prayer, and to literally be almost a part of the most popular prayer ever said by anyone. And furthermore, the words themselves are so beautiful! We shortchange ourselves if we don’t pause and savor them. Okay, so Jesus has just finished reciting the Lord’s Prayer for us for the very first time. And now He goes on to say:

14 “For if you forgive other people for their offenses, your heavenly Father will also forgive you. 15 But if you do not forgive other people, then your Father will not forgive your offenses.

16 “Now whenever you fast, do not make a gloomy face as the hypocrites do, for they distort their faces so that they will be noticed by people when they are fasting. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 17 But as for you, when you fast, anoint your head with oil and wash your face, 18 so that your fasting will not be noticed by people but by your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

19 “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. 20 But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; 21 for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.

22 “The eye is the lamp of the body; so then, if your eye is clear, your whole body will be full of light. 23 But if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness. So if the light that is in you is darkness, how great is the darkness!

24 “No one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and wealth.

25 “For this reason I say to you, do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is life not more than food, and the body more than clothing? 26 Look at the birds of the sky, that they do not sow, nor reap, nor gather crops into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more important than they? 27 And which of you by worrying can add a single day to his life’s span? 28 And why are you worried about clothing? Notice how the lilies of the field grow; they do not labor nor do they spin thread for cloth, 29 yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these! 30 But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! 31 Do not worry then, saying, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear for clothing?’ 32 For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. 33 But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you.

34 “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will worry about itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. (MT 6:14-34)

Now Jesus stops speaking. And we sit with His words, feeling vaguely stunned by them. Can He really mean what He has said to us here? Actually, and quite literally, yes, Jesus does mean precisely what He has just said. Jesus considers wealth to be a nuisance distraction that risks coming between us and our ability to grow spiritually. And achieving optimum spiritual growth is the whole reason why we undertake these lives on earth in the first place! So before people of wealth can be welcomed by Jesus to be His followers, He first directs them to give away all their wealth. Just give it away. We see this happening repeatedly in the Gospels! Jesus sees wealth as a useless burden, a cancer, just a child’s shiny toy. Wealth to Jesus is a valueless distraction.

 After those kids fresh out of college with their mega-windfalls first made their big news in the nineties, eventually the tech billionaires who followed them became a normal part of the twenty-first-century landscape. So by now, if we care to notice them, we can find examples here and there of the wisdom of Jesus’s warning about the distraction that wealth can be in people’s lives. We read about billionaires who own even three or four mega-homes and a mega-yacht besides. All because, I guess, why not?

The thing about having so much money is that it likely feels as endlessly abundant as time feels to us when we are very young. If you are so extremely wealthy, perhaps you just want to use up some of that money. But for all of us who are born on earth, life itself turns out to be amazingly brief. And it is briefer by far when you look back at it from where I am now than you can possibly imagine that it will be! Six decades. Nine decades. What is that? It is nothing, really, in the scheme of things. And if you have filled that time first with building wealth and then mostly with buying things, what kind of satisfaction is that going to bring when you look back at it after all the sands have slipped through the glass? As a friend of mine wisely says, “We spend the first half of our lives accumulating stuff, and the second half of our lives getting rid of it.”   

And Jesus says, 15 “Not even when one is affluent does his life consist of his possessions.” 16 And He told them a parable, saying, “The land of a rich man was very productive. 17 And he began thinking to himself, saying, ‘What shall I do, since I have no place to store my crops?’ 18 And he said, ‘This is what I will do: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and I will store all my grain and my goods there. 19 And I will say to myself, “You have many goods stored up for many years to come; relax, eat, drink, and enjoy yourself!”’ 20 But God said to him, ‘You fool! This very night your life is required of you. And as for all that you have prepared, who will own it now?’ 21 Such is the one who stores up treasure for himself, and is not rich in relation to God” (LK 12:15-21).

So that is the real problem with owning wealth. Wealth is a distraction from what is our lives’ real purpose, which is to raise our personal consciousness vibration so each of us can grow spiritually as rapidly as possible in the little bit of time that we will spend on this earth. The problem isn’t so much that it is shameful for you and me to be eating so well when in Africa the children are starving. It is our own free choice whether we will notice and be bothered by whatever is happening elsewhere in the world. No, the problem is that each day of our lifetime on earth is so precious because our whole life here is going to be so brief! The most vigorous and productive part of our life consists really of just a handful of years. And if you have spent your first few decades in building fabulous wealth, and then you spend another few decades in building and furnishing homes, until suddenly one night your life is required of you? What then really, in the end, was the point of your life?

Some years back, I interviewed a guest on my Seek Reality podcast who ran a European hospice. She just had written a book about what the people there had been saying to her at the ends of their earth-lives. And what fascinated me was that her patients, as they were approaching their deaths, didn’t regret never having had the luxuries that they never could have afforded to buy. Not at all. No, what they regretted, and often bitterly, was that they had not done more in their lives for other people.

And that is the worst word in the English language. “Regret.” It is the worst word in any language, no matter how you might translate it. Our Jesus would gently remind us that, yes, my dear ones, you do have forever in which you can grow spiritually! You always have been and you always will be.

But on the other hand, here on earth is the only place where you can find the great spiritual stressors that will help you to rapidly achieve real spiritual growth. And gaining another body on this earth in which to live some future lifetime when you might take more seriously the words of Jesus and your personal walk with God might not be such an easy thing for you to do. There are so many waiting beings now who seek to live earth-lifetimes that your wait for a new body to be born on earth may be a long one.

So please don’t waste this precious earth-lifetime on playing with the petty distraction of wealth! Instead, please raise your consciousness vibration now, and joyously, while you are here and you can do that so amazingly easily! And then, my beloved, when you arrive back home to your real life, which many of those on earth call the afterlife, you will have gained the spiritual power to easily mind-create a palace of solid gold to live in forever, if doing that still matters to you. Although, of course, Jesus is pretty sure that it never will matter to you at all. Not once you have raised your consciousness vibration enough to spread your spiritual wings and eternally own the whole sky!

The Lord’s Gift

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

When the twilight is gone, and no songbirds are singing.
When the twilight is gone, you come into my heart.
And here in my heart you will stay while I pray.
My prayer is to linger with you,
At the end of the day, in a dream that’s divine.
My prayer is a rapture in blue,
With the world far away, and your lips close to mine.
Tonight, while our hearts are aglow,
Oh, tell me the words that I’m longing to know!
My prayer, and the answer you give,
May they still be the same for as long as we live!
That you’ll always be there at the end of my prayer.
– Georges Boulanger (1837-1891) Jimmy Kennedy (1902-1984) “My Prayer” (1954)

I have never been very good at praying. The problem is that God feels internal to me, so formally praying to God feels almost like talking to myself. Or when I was younger, and God seemed to be both external and infinitely powerful, formally praying felt presumptuous, as if I had interrupted God’s extremely important day with my selfish trivialities. And then there is the problem of what to say to God. Because, here is the thing: God can read your mind. You don’t even have to form the words! God knows what you want, and what you need. And you, in particular, are God’s best-beloved child, so you don’t even have to say, “Dear God, please give to me …” your dream job, or your perfect spouse, or the home on which you have just made an offer, because God is already on it. And God loves you to pieces, so God is falling all over Godself right now to give you whatever will make you happiest! If you don’t get the job, or if your dating life is rocky or your offer on the house falls through, it will only be because your spirit guide feels that you needed that little setback in your life as part of your larger spiritual growth process. Or because there is something even better in the offing for you.     

My comfort has been that other people seem to be having these same problems with prayer. Have you ever really listened to public praying? Even most clergymen, who should have some facility with prayer by now, will either read written prayers, or else they will stumble around, adding filler words and thinking as they speak, saying things like, “… and God, we surely do thank you so very much that we’ve got this nice day today to open up our new Civic Center…” while they are thinking fast, trying to make sure there is no one else they should be mentioning, and no remaining detail left to say. And of course, God doesn’t mind that at all.

My alternative, as I have said elsewhere, has long been to clean up my mental act, and then to live with the top of my head wide open and just to keep an open prayerline to God. Because since God can easily read your mind, you are always unavoidably in prayer mode, anyway.

The problem is, though, that if you never really pray, then you are taking God for granted. So as over time I have figured out more and more of what actually is going on, I have gotten into the habit of saying some little rote prayers. Like grace, for example. One day when my oldest was maybe five, she found a grace somewhere that we could say before dinner. Her choice was so good that even forty years later, my family still holds hands and says her grace before dinner every night. It goes like this: “Be present at our table, Lord. Be here and everywhere adored. These morsels bless, and grant that we will feast in Paradise with Thee.” The fact that people don’t eat in heaven is a mere technicality. And while we are talking about family prayers, I ought to mention our frame-verse. Perhaps a pop song is a tad unusual as a frame-verse when our topic is prayer, but I have always especially liked this one. Edward and I have lately celebrated our fifty-first wedding anniversary, and it occurs to me that in a Western world in which almost fifty percent of marriages end in divorce, if more couples had a little ritual of reciting this beautiful ditty together, perhaps that might help to keep their marriages strong. It can’t hurt.

Many people seem to have my same confusion about what the best way might be to talk to God. When people ask me about prayer – and they often do – I tell them that now I only ever recite the Lord’s Prayer. And I do it several times a day. I think of the Lord’s Prayer as ideal because it encapsulates in so few words everything that we need to ask of God. And since the Lord’s Prayer was given to us by God in the person of Jesus, for us to pray it to God in return makes of this prayer a sweet, divine circular sharing.

Jesus gives us the Lord’s Prayer at a place in the Gospel of Matthew where He is first beginning to build in His followers a genuine spiritual life. As I was repeatedly reading the Gospels as a teenager and a young adult, I was coming to see that perhaps there wasn’t a whole lot going on in most people’s minds before Jesus came. They seemed not to have, or really even to feel much need for a spiritual life or a personal relationship with God before they first began to listen to Jesus. So in the passage that precedes the Lord’s Prayer, Jesus first sets the scene for us by telling us that as we are beginning now to mature as spiritual beings, it is time for us to withdraw altogether from the presence of other people in order to better begin our spiritual relationship with God. And because Jesus is speaking to what amounts to spiritual children, notice that He couches this in terms of their wanting to have some tangible reward from their Father (i.e. their heavenly Daddy) for their better spiritual behavior:

6 “Take care not to practice your righteousness in the sight of people, to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven.

2 “So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and on the streets, so that they will be praised by people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 3 But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, 4 so that your charitable giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

5 “And 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 will be seen by people. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. 6 But as for 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.

7 “And when you are praying, do not use thoughtless repetition as the Gentiles do, for they think that they will be heard because of their many words. 8 So do not be like them; for your Father knows what you need before you ask Him.

9 “Pray, then, in this way:

‘Our Father, who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
10 Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
11 Give us this day our daily bread.
12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen’” (MT 6 1-13).

And then it is appropriate to add your own personal prayer to God, if you like. Whenever I pray individually, I do it in gratitude affirmations, so ever since I gave the rest of my life to God fifteen years ago, I have added to the end of the Lord’s Prayer, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it.”

Now let’s consider the simple perfection of the Lord’s Prayer, which was given two thousand years ago to spiritual children, but it still works as beautifully for you and me today:

‘Our Father, who is in heaven,

The Hebrew people of Jesus’s day had long been taught to fear an often angry and vengeful Jehovah God, whom they imagined to be a very much oversized and powerful human-like Being. Fear is the literal opposite of love, so before Jesus could teach His followers anything at all, He had first to reset their whole image of God into loving Spirit. In the end, of course, we got three God-versions: Father, Holy Spirit, and Jesus Himself. But at this early stage, it was helpful for Jesus to transform their notion of Jehovah into something more like a loving Daddy-figure.

Hallowed be Your name.

God’s very name is holy. Jesus taught that all other sins are forgivable, but to take God’s name in vain is an eternal crime.

10 Your kingdom come. Your will be done, On earth as it is in heaven.

Here is Jesus’s core teaching, which is the very essence of the reason why He was born on earth. As each of us learns to ever more perfectly love and forgive, and thereby raises his or her own consciousness vibration until we can graduate even beyond our need to be reborn again on earth, we will elevate the spiritual vibration of this entire planet sufficiently toward love to eventually bring the kingdom of God on earth. As above, so below. Jesus makes this longed-for happy result the first thing that we pray for, whenever we pray.

11 Give us this day our daily bread.

After we have first asked God to help us to make the earth a beautiful mimic of our love-filled heavenly home, we next ask God to give us what we will need to sustain our material bodies for this one day. But only for this one day! Not also for tomorrow. And certainly not also for next week. Jesus recognizes how dangerous an excess of wealth can be in distracting us from addressing what is really important in our brief earthly lives. And then He even will go on immediately after He recites this whole prayer for us to talk about why it is so extremely important that we not accumulate more in the way of worldly goods than what we will need for this one day. Jesus clearly intends His warning about the dangers of accumulating wealth to be a core part of His gift of this beautiful prayer, so you and I will talk about this problem and Jesus’s warning in more detail next week.

12 And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.

Jesus is mindful of the life review that we all will face when we first go home, during which we will experience how we made everyone else feel during our brief life just ended. He knows how important it is that we keep our focus on learning how to forgive everyone in preparation for that time when we will be asked to forgive ourselves, which is why He pairs our asking for God’s forgiveness with our promising God that we also are learning to ever better forgive others. We should note here that the word “debts” is often translated instead as “trespasses,” and our forgiveness is then of “those who trespass against us.” The Hebrew people of His day were big on forgiving both debts and trespasses. Every fiftieth year was for them a year of Jubilee, when debts and all else would be forgiven, the land would lie fallow for a year, and slaves would be set free.

13 And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.

For Jesus to pair a request that God protect us from both temptations and also all evils, as if those two requests might be related, may not make sense to you and me at first, but it does make sense to Him. And it also makes sense to us as well, really, after we have given it some thought. The reason it makes sense is that material temptations, and most particularly temptations of the flesh, such as what Catholics call the seven deadly sins of pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth, are at the root of every evil. If we can avoid them all, then we are already halfway toward making a great spiritual success of this lifetime. But on the other hand, to allow even one of the seven deadly sins to tempt us risks setting us on a downward spiral into a weakness and evil so intense that it might before long have us enmired in even more, or even in all seven of the deadly sins at once, so evil will then become our whole way of life. And worst of all, if we allow even one of these deadly sins to claim us, then our making much further spiritual progress in this lifetime is likely to become impossible.

For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen’”

The earliest version of the Lord’s prayer may not have included this last line. But even if it is a later addition, it is very old, and I am sure that Jesus considers it to be a welcome addition!

For much of my life I have wondered why there is no explicit “thank you” for God’s many gifts to us included in the Lord’s Prayer. I have never had the nerve to ask Jesus that question. But as I was writing this post, I did ask Thomas what he thought. He really does consider me to be such a dunce. And with good reason! He said patiently from behind my left shoulder, “Jesus came to us as God on earth, and Jesus taught us to pray that prayer. For God to be asking for our thanks and praise would make God seem to be rather petty, don’t you think?” And then of course I slapped my forehead. Why Thomas still puts up with me is beyond my ability to fathom.

Our discussion of the Lord’s Prayer will continue next week with what may be for us affluent Westerners its most difficult lines for us to swallow hard and sincerely pray. They are that for me, at least. Now that I fully understand what Jesus actually means by them….

Free Thinking

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
– William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), “Invictus” (1875)

One of the oddest debates in materialist science is about whether or not human beings have free will. This debate is a longstanding one, and it can be maddening to those who are watching it, since most materialist scientists claim that human free will is a mere illusion. We last discussed this issue here two years ago, when I mentioned professional atheist Sam Harris’s book on this subject. I was sure when I first read his book that he would think the whole idea of no free will was ridiculous. After all, Harris himself is such an adamant free spirit! But amazingly, I found that he had bought into the lie, hook, line, and sinker. This controversy first acutely arose when a researcher named Benjamin Libet showed in the 1980s that muscular and nervous preparations to move a digit begin about 350 milliseconds before we make the conscious decision to move it, thereby proving to many materialist scientists that human beings have no free will. There are some scientists who are sure that Libet’s work proves no such thing; but theirs is a minority view. So scientists who still stubbornly believe in free will are now mostly relegated to the religionist side of the battle between science and religion that goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle.            

But of course, you and I well understand that our decision to move a digit is not made in the brain. Rather, it is made in our mind, and our mind is a part of the great universal Consciousness which underlies all of reality. Then our mind notifies our digit to move, and only then does our mind make our brain aware of what our decision has been, so that 350-millisecond gap is actually quite easy to explain. And thus, you will be relieved to learn, our better understanding of the nature of Consciousness and its primary role in reality has given you back your free-will right to decide what you are going to have for breakfast.

What is very important, too, is the fact that our deeper understanding of the primary role of Consciousness lets us better understand the teaching role of Jesus in our spiritual development. Please think about this! If we come to earth primarily so we can learn and grow spiritually, but then while we are here all our spiritual challenges are confronted by mere automatons of people who have no free-will ability to make decisions because all our decisions are being made for us, then how on earth can any of us ever learn and grow spiritually, even by an inch? It is in our very need to learn and grow spiritually that our need for an unfettered free will is most essential!

Most of our basic human learning is what we might call simple rote-learning. During that first learning, which happens in babyhood and childhood, we are primarily in download mode. No free will really is needed there. Actually, during those first nearly two decades we spend a lot of time just learning to become successfully functioning human beings, able to live and to navigate in this complex material world, and becoming fully adapted to it and emotionally invested in it. This is all so we will be comfortable in our surroundings, and not distracted by them as our adult spiritual challenges begin to occur.

When my Thomas first took me to meet Jesus in the astral plane eighteen months ago, and Jesus then told me His personal eternal-life story, I was frankly blown away by it. Jesus had begun His existence in ancient times as a normal human being whose one great talent was an extraordinary ability to love His fellow Man. Jesus had always been so naturally good at loving, and so driven by His deep personal need to love, that He had become a spiritually perfected being fully six thousand years ago, easy-peasy for Him, and welcome to the Godhead Collective! But of course, if you are so deeply driven by such a profound love for all of humankind, you are not about to happily join the Godhead and just let the rest of humankind flounder on in ignorance through countless more lifetimes to come.

When Jesus first realized that the whole point of human life was to learn how to ever better love and forgive, and to thereby raise our spiritual vibrations, He was distressed to realize that everyone else was not already very well aware of that fact! People were living lifetime after lifetime, and making very little spiritual progress with each lifetime because they had no idea about even why they were here. So rather than joining the Godhead Collective, Jesus spent the next four thousand years convincing God to allow Him to return to earth in order to teach all of us how to do what He had so easily done naturally. He wanted each of us to be able to raise our own consciousness vibrations sufficiently to quickly become perfected beings, just as He had done. (This whole story as He told it to me is now posted on teachingsbyjesus.com.) Jesus had no need to die for our sins. No, that later Christian dogma was just part of the Emperor Constantine’s religion-building process. It was Constantine’s separate deeply fear-based idea. So then Jesus was by His own choice born from the Godhead two thousand years ago to be our spiritual Teacher.

And Jesus is such an extraordinary Teacher! Oh my goodness, He is truly amazing. When I first realized about thirteen years ago that His role on earth was to be our Teacher, and I took Him seriously in that role, I said, Okay, Jesus, so please let me be your guinea pig. Let’s see if Your teachings really work as intended. And I discovered that, yes indeed, they do work beautifully. And they work within months! I ended up putting them in The Fun of Growing Forever. It would have been trickier for Jesus to teach what He wanted to teach us when He was on earth, because the first step really has to be to leave your fear-based religion behind, and back then no one would have understood a spiritual teacher who was not a clergyman. But what a joy it is to watch that beautiful young man throw off every religious and cultural inhibition, and simply teach us the love-based truth!

That is actually what the story of Jesus and the woman at the well is about. It comes at the start of His public ministry, and in His encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus broke three important Jewish customs. First, He spoke to a female stranger. Second, she was a Samaritan woman, a member of a group the Jews traditionally disdained. And third, He asked her to give Him a drink, which would have made Him ceremonially unclean just from using her drinking vessel. All of this shocked the woman at the well. But Jesus lived in unrestrained love, free from all laws and customs. And the boldness and confidence with which He did these things right at the start of His ministry is amazing!

This comes from Chapter Four of the Gospel of John: “3He left Judea and went away again to Galilee. 4 And He had to pass through Samaria. 5 So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; 6 and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, tired from His journey, was just sitting by the well. It was about the sixth hour.7 A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give Me a drink.’ 8 For His disciples had gone away to the city to buy food. 9 So the Samaritan woman said to Him, ‘How is it that You, though You are a Jew, are asking me for a drink, though I am a Samaritan woman?’ (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) 10 Jesus replied to her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, “Give Me a drink,” you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.’ 11 She said to Him, ‘Sir, You have no bucket and the well is deep; where then do You get this living water? 12 You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well and drank of it himself, and his sons and his cattle?’ 13 Jesus answered and said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; 14 but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.’”

“15 The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw water.’ 16 He said to her, ‘Go, call your husband and come here.’ 17 The woman answered and said to Him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You have correctly said, “I have no husband”; 18 for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this which you have said is true.’ 19 The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. 20 Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and yet you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.’ 21 Jesus said to her, ‘Believe Me, woman, that a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. 22 You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. 23 But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. 24 God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’ 25 The woman said to Him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us.’ 26 Jesus said to her, ‘I am He, the One speaking to you’” (JN 4:3-26).

This is in some ways the most extraordinary passage in all four Gospels. Especially coming, as it does, right at the start of Jesus’s ministry. Not only is Jesus breaking every social convention in speaking to a Samaritan woman and asking her for water. But here, for the first time in His earthly life as Jesus, He is proclaiming Himself to be the Messiah. And He is choosing to make that very important initial announcement… to a despised Samaritan woman. Jesus is telling us in no uncertain terms that He will not be inhibited by any human conventions whatsoever, but rather that love is His only law.

Before Jesus told me His life-story, He still seemed like Magic-Jesus to me, as He had been for my entire life. He probably at one time seemed that way to you as well. Perhaps He still does. The whole born in a manger, and then the angels came, the Son of God, and crucified, rose from the dead, and all of that: If ever anyone was a not-real, larger than life individual, it was Jesus. To have my spirit guide tell me that he himself had once been Thomas Jefferson had been stretching things pretty far to begin with; but I had gotten used to that. We even had written a book about Thomas Jefferson together. But then Thomas took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane, which was so far off-the-charts unbelievable! And then came the story that Jesus told me, and I began to know the genuine person that He is, and that brought Him more down to earth and personal for me.

The thing about Jesus is that in person, Jesus is the humblest, really the least full of Himself Person that you can imagine. When you meet Him, He makes it all about you. Which is odd, because He has this overwhelmingly powerful and absolutely silken personal energy that shouts how important He actually is. And yet when He looks into your eyes, He does it as if in that moment, you are all that matters to Him. “But, but, He is God!” You might be protesting now. And the last thing you would expect of the Ultimate High God, Creator of the Universe, would be humility! I thought that at first as well. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that perhaps it would be rather like God to love each one of us deeply, as a mother loves her precious child. Think of it!  This whole universe is God’s creation. And God creates all of it to give us a place to grow spiritually. Wow. You had better believe that God truly and deeply loves each one of us!

There is something else, too, that is amazing about that moment between Jesus and the woman at the well. Jesus talks about giving her “living water,” and He says that “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” And the water in the afterlife actually is alive! When I first read that Gospel passage, I realized that Jesus knew about the living water in the afterlife. He actually had been to the same afterlife that my research had been revealing to me! And then, soon after that, I discovered that the Shroud of Turin is genuine, and it can be used to confirm that Jesus actually did rise from the dead. What a heady time that was for me, when I first understood that all my research could be used to confirm that Jesus is genuine in every conceivable way!

And then, of course, Thomas decided that it was time for me actually to meet Jesus. My Thomas was so wise in the way that he handled this! By the time I met Jesus, Thomas had already resolved all my potential reservations. I knew that Jesus was a genuine historical figure who had, moreover, actually risen from the dead. At one time I had been, if you will pardon the expression, a modern doubting Thomas of sorts. I wanted so much to believe! But even despite my childhood experience of light, and my second such experience in young adulthood, I was – and I remain – a natural skeptic. So then I met Jesus, and thanks to Thomas’s already having addressed whatever reservations about Him I still might have had, just my finally seeing Jesus, and feeling His amazing personal energy, readily resolved whatever doubts remained. Jesus is, and for you and me He carefully maintains Himself eternally to be, fully God and fully Man. I try to understand what it must be to love people as Jesus loves people. I really do try. But there are not enough words of love and praise in all the languages of the earth to express how I now feel for my beloved Jesus.

Trust

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus loves me! This I know, for the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong; they are weak, but He is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.

Jesus loves me! This I know, as He loved so long ago,
Taking children on His knee, saying, “Let them come to Me.”
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.

Jesus loves me still today, walking with me on my way,
Wanting as a friend to give light and love to all who live.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– William B. Bradbury (1816-1868), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)

The most difficult process for any of us is attempting to cultivate genuine trust. We live in a world where it seems that there is no one that we really can trust. We begin with our parents’ little loving lies, and we move on to the lies that schoolteachers tell us. The first few times that we realize that an adult has told us some untruth – and maybe those tales about Santa are the first real lies that we discover – being lied to by grownups feels devastating. But then, if we are wise, we learn to adopt a healthy skepticism that is self-protective, true, but it also makes us sad. Think of all the lies that you and I now hear every day! From politicians, and from governments at all levels. From commercials for all sorts of goods and services. From friends and relatives. From bosses. From employees. In big and little ways, and even if some lies might be acts of kindness, is there anyone in our lives who does not at least occasionally tell us some untruths?

And perhaps even worse than all the lies put together are life’s awful, unexpected betrayals. The job we have trusted for the past ten years has unexpectedly let us go. The perfect health that has been our comfortable status for our whole life long is all at once and forever gone, just with that look on our doctor’s face. The spouse that we love, and with whom we are rearing children who are only halfway grown, breaks the news that he or she is parting ways now, and there will be a divorce. Especially this last betrayal feels so unthinkable to me that I hesitate to type the words! And yet statistically, some version of that particular betrayal happens in close to half of American families.    

And then we have the worst destroyer of trust imaginable, which underlies the lives of many people who are now or who ever have been Christians. What about God’s betrayal? We were taught as little children that we could love and trust God! We likely sang our frame-song in Sunday school. And then, as we grew older, in many traditional Christian denominations we were taught that God might condemn us to burn in hell forevermore, even for what seemed to be trivial infractions. Stop and think about that. Christian doctrines have softened quite a bit over the last century or so. But for most of Christian history, and well into the twentieth century, even children were taught as they grew older that actually, you know, there is a fiery hell. And God will not hesitate to send you there. The Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity as he conceived it was ruthlessly fear-based. It used the constant threat of a fiery hell to keep Christians in line, and to such an extent that the fire-and-brimstone stench of sulfur lingers over many Christian denominations to this day. To give you some examples:

  • Calvinism includes the concept of predestination. Not only is there a fiery hell, but a considerable number of Calvinist Christians are born already predestined to go straight to hell when they die. No matter how good you are during your lifetime on earth, if you are a Christian born into that particular version of Christianity, you might well have been predestined for hell without knowing it, and there is nothing you can do to change your ghastly fate.
  • Unbaptized Catholic infants go straight to hell. Nowadays the Catholic Church is more merciful, and it sends unbaptized infants only to purgatory perhaps. But I recall reading a sermon that had been delivered around the turn of the twentieth century to Catholic parents who had not managed to get their infants baptized before they died. Not only are their babies now roasting alive forevermore, but those babies will be allowed to come up from hell for a moment to see the baptized-before-death babies playing happily in a sunlit heaven before the unbaptized babies are thrown back down into hell to continue to roast for all eternity.
  • Some Christian theologians insist that Jesus taught more about hell than anyone else ever has. They say this because they know nothing about the afterlife, and they mistake Jesus’s words about the Outer Darkness for His having talked about hell. In fact, the genuine Jesus never talked about hell at all! The Outer Darkness is the lowest afterlife level, and we might put ourselves there for a time if we cannot forgive ourselves during our post-death life review. When I first realized after I had done all that afterlife research that I could see from the way Jesus was talking in the Gospels that He actually knew about the post-death life review and the Outer Darkness that the dead were telling us about, I had literal chills! OMG! Jesus really is real! But the Outer Darkness is by no means a fiery hell. Not at all.

Instilling in people a fear of God is Roman Christianity’s worst sin by far. Fear is the opposite of love. In fact, you absolutely cannot love what you fear! Having spent fifty years doing afterlife research, and having networked with others who have also done considerable afterlife research, I can tell you for an absolute certainty these two central facts: there is no fiery hell, and nor is there ever any judgment by God. What you always get from the genuine God is nothing but infinite love! But none of us feels worthy of God’s love, and so we pull back, we turn away, we feel unbearably shy. In that painting on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, as God and Adam reach to touch one another, God’s finger is straight. It is Adam’s finger that is bent. Still, and believe it or not, you in particular are God’s best-beloved child.

All right. It is time to fix this now!

There are slightly fewer than eight billion people currently living on earth. And of all of those eight billion people, perhaps only a few thousand of them – maybe ten thousand? – are educated as Gospels scholars without being traditionally religious. Not many. And of those eight billion people, there also is a different, and a very much tinier group who have been sufficiently fascinated by the afterlife evidence and the evidence for a greater reality to become truly expert in those areas. These serious afterlife scholars cannot be more than a few hundred people worldwide. In fact, this second group is so small that I think I know who most of them are. Of course, what would be good would be if someone with a lot of Gospels knowledge and also a lot of afterlife knowledge could find ways in which those two bodies of knowledge might be used to validate one another, right?

But the odds are long against there being any one person with sufficient interest in two such different areas to spend enough time in both to become a useful expert in both of them. In fact, insofar as I am able to tell, out of the almost eight billion people living on earth, the only person who is sufficiently eccentric to have built her hobby-life around studying Jesus and also studying the afterlife simultaneously has been me. And it is only now that I realize what a handy thing this peculiar combined body of knowledge really is! Because, sure enough, all you deluded Gospels scholars, I can personally testify to you that Jesus knows all about the afterlife! Since, as it turns out, so do I.

Here is a typical passage in the Gospel of Matthew where Jesus talks about condemning people to the Outer Darkness: “And when Jesus entered Capernaum, a Roman Centurion came to Him, begging Him, 6 and saying, ‘Sir, my servant is lying paralyzed at home, terribly tormented.’ 7 Jesus said to him, ‘I will come and heal him.’ 8 But the Centurion replied, ‘Sir, I am not worthy for You to come under my roof, but just say the word, and my servant will be healed. 9 For I also am a man under authority, with soldiers under me; and I say to this one, “Go!” and he goes, and to another, “Come!” and he comes, and to my slave, “Do this!” and he does it.’ 10 Now when Jesus heard this, He was amazed and said to those who were following, ‘Truly I say to you, I have not found such great faith with anyone in Israel. 11 And I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; 12 but the sons of the kingdom will be thrown out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’ 13 And Jesus said to the Centurion, ‘Go; it shall be done for you as you have believed.’ And the servant was healed at that very moment” (MT 8:5-13).

What actually is going on here? I submit to you that this is not about judgment or punishment, and it certainly is not about hell! Once again, and emphatically, there is no hell. Let’s look at what is actually happening in this Gospel excerpt:

  • Jesus is praising the Roman Centurion’s great faith in Him. He is saying that the Centurion’s faith is exemplary, and that unless Jesus’s own followers can learn to emulate such great faith, they may end up judging themselves harshly during their individual post-death life reviews, and putting themselves into the Outer Darkness after their deaths for a time as a result.
  • Jesus speculates that others “from east and west” who are not even Jews may also become as faithful as this Centurion. And if they do, they may similarly after their deaths attain heavenly status with the Hebrew prophets, well ahead of Jesus’s complacent Jewish followers.
  • In the Outer Darkness there is weeping and gnashing of teeth. This sounds as if Jesus is describing a gloomy place of dismal regret. A place where people are unhappy, frustrated, and depressed, for sure! But is He saying that the Outer Darkness is a fiery hell where people are screaming as they are roasting alive? Clearly not!
  • As Jesus well knew, avoiding the Outer Darkness is a simple matter of keeping one’s spiritual vibration high. As long as His followers are loving and forgiving, and as long as they are showing faith like that Centurion’s remarkable faith in Jesus, their personal post-death spiritual vibrations will keep them far above the Outer Darkness level.

Jesus even tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges us! He says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And then when we understand that God doesn’t judge us, Jesus adds that He Himself doesn’t judge us, either. He says, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). I guess that all those theologians who keep saying that Jesus talked a lot about hell must never have bothered to actually read the Gospels, right? The only Bible bits that might give any support to their theory that Jesus talked about hell are a few spots at the back of some of the Gospels that were added at the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE at Constantine’s direction. Those later Roman additions have a wholly different flavor from the actual Gospeel words of Jesus, in that they show Him talking about judgment, sheep-and-goats, and such hard things that we know that Jesus never would have said. Or spots in the Book of Revelation that Constantine also added.  We simply snip off those obvious later additions, and we have back just what Jesus actually said.

Sometimes, while Thomas and I are writing a blog post, Jesus will read it over our shoulders, and then He might offer us His suggestions. In the case of this blog post, His suggestions were emphatic! As I was waking up on Wednesday morning, I heard Jesus’s distinctive voice strongly in my mind. He suggested the frame-verse, and the tale of the Roman Centurion (which I realized at once was a perfect choice), and He asked me to give you this message from Him: “Beloveds, you cannot fully trust anything that happens to you on the earth. What happens here is meant for your spiritual growth, and it will be painful, and you will often feel betrayed. So you can fully trust no one here. This is why I came to you! To teach you that you can always trust God. And you can always trust Me. And ‘Underneath are the everlasting arms’ (Deut 33:27).”  Yet again, our dear Jesus has blown my mind.

  Jesus loves me! He who died, heaven’s gate to open wide;
He will wash away my sin, let His little child come in.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.

Jesus loves me! He will stay close beside me all the way.
Thou hast bled and died for me. I will henceforth live for Thee.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– William B. Bradbury (1816-1868), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)

The Hard Problem

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Spring was never waiting for us, dear.
It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance,
Between the parted pages, and were pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron,
Like a striped pair of pants.
MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet, green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain.
I don’t think that I can take it, ‘cause it took so long to bake it,
And I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no!

I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees.
The birds, like tender babies in your hands,
And the old men playing checkers by the trees.
MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark.
All the sweet, green icing flowing down.
Someone left my cake out in the rain.
I don’t think that I can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no!
– Jimmy Webb, from “MacArthur Park” (1968)

What is most astonishing about the efforts of scientists in the field of consciousness research is the way these scientists never bother to study or try to fully define it. Their first step in studying consciousness should have been to do the research and seek a good preliminary understanding of what consciousness even is. And when you google the word “consciousness,” you don’t get much, which is testimony to the fact that mainstream scientists have never much bothered to take what should have been the essential first steps toward understanding their elusive quarry. Even Wikipedia defines “consciousness” simply as “awareness.” And this, in a day when every reasonably well-informed person who is reading these words has long since learned that consciousness appears in our lives in other ways than merely our individual awareness! For example:

  • Everything death-related is consciousness-based. Whether it be reports of ghosts and apparitions, or the many thousands of consistent and verifiable communications that Westerners have been receiving for more than a century and a half from those that we used to think were dead, the afterlife is by now undeniable. And it is all consciousness! But scientists simply do not want to know about it.
  • Near-Death Experiences and Out-Of-Body Experiences all are also consciousness-based. The fact that each individual’s consciousness can exist and operate readily apart from its related material body, and can have experiences, and can then return to that body and report on those experiences in detail, is by now an undeniable fact. That people blind from birth, and even those born without eyes, can see and can report on what they are seeing during NDEs and OBEs, is another undeniable fact. But, again, scientists do not want to know about it. And when they are asked about NDEs, they will stick their fingers into their ears, scrunch their eyes up tight, and hum loudly.
  • Our spiritual growth is consciousness-based as well. The more thoroughly people seek to understand the meaning and purpose of human life, the more that meaning and purpose seems to be revealed to be precisely what Jesus told us that it was two thousand years ago. It is simply to love more perfectly, and to forgive more completely. Nothing more, but nothing less. Which means that for each of us to raise our personal consciousness vibration away from the lower vibrations and toward the higher, more love-based vibrations is the very essence of our spiritual fulfillment. But, again, scientists have no interest at all in this tremendous swath of our universal human experience.

For mainstream scientists to have been adamantly materialist thirty years ago, or perhaps even as recently as twenty years ago, would have been understandable, and probably forgivable. But for mainstream scientists’ prevailing degree of willful ignorance about something so basic and so important to persist even now, when so much good information is so widely available on the internet and in well-researched and footnoted books and publications, is frankly inexcusable. Indeed, it is looking more likely to more open-minded researchers that consciousness is going to turn out to be not some minor product of the human brain at all. But in fact, it is pretty clear now that consciousness is going to prove instead to be crucially important. It seems that consciousness may indeed prove in the end to be the ground of being of all reality. Which means that materialist scientists may very well have things completely backward! Our meat-brains do not after all produce consciousness, but instead it is likely that they merely receive consciousness.

Scientists of the traditional materialist sort who study consciousness are making two core assumptions. They assume that:

  • Consciousness is only human-brain-based awareness. And moreover, they assume that consciousness can never be found in any other form. They know for certain that you and I are aware. And they assume that our awareness must be brain-based. So when they study consciousness, scientists assume that it actually makes sense to reason outward from ourselves. But we who are not materialist scientists understand that these scientists all must therefore be living in a pre-1976 world, prior to the publication of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life. It is a world in which no one ever has heard the term “near-death experience,” and no NDE or OBE ever has yet been reported.
  • Therefore, these materialist scientists reason, consciousness must somehow originate inside the structures of the human brain. There is no other possibility. The human brain is indeed vastly complex, but after the better part of a century of scientists having fruitlessly assumed that those complex brain structures somehow have to give rise to consciousness, it still never has seemed to dawn on any traditional research scientist that they might want to consider looking beyond the brain itself.

So it is no wonder that scientists have taken to calling their search for the source of consciousness inside the human brain “the Hard Problem.” I maintain that even if we were indeed still pre-1976, it still would make no sense at all to be proceeding to try to understand consciousness based upon the above two assumptions! It still would be important in any event for us first to try to better understand what consciousness actually is. 

My favorite definition of consciousness was given to me by Thomas, my spirit guide. He tells me that “Consciousness is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware.” So in other words, consciousness is the ground-of-all-being, and Consciousness at its highest vibration is God, which is perfect love. Scientists won’t be using this definition for a while, but they might begin to use some part of it. And someday all of us will use it. Mark my Thomas’s words.

In what other area of scientific research does reasoning outward from some random starting assumption like “consciousness must be brain-related, so, what the heck, let’s just look there” make sense to anyone? When consciousness is independently and objectively studied, it is found to have so many other and widely varied aspects beyond simple awareness that it would be found to be flat impossible for consciousness to originate inside the human brain! And yet, these blinkered materialist scientists are undaunted.

Stolidly, and apparently with little doubt in their minds that eventually they are bound to succeed, they still  look for that spark of consciousness to appear, magically generated somehow from the meat inside each human skull. Oh, they have come to understand by now that solving the Hard Problem is not going to be easy! But since these scientists have careers to pursue, and children still to educate, while there are sources of funds to pay their salaries, these materialist scientists will soldier on. They enter each new year with optimism, and they follow every new idea, no matter how crazy it might seem, with so much hope! Only to find that, over and over again, each new idea is yet another blind alley.

More genuinely hopeful, though, is the fact that there are some independent organizations that explore consciousness more intelligently, the most prominent of which is the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). IONS was founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a spiritual epiphany as he was returning from the moon. For half a century, IONS has been a leader in spurring interest in and seeking funding for research into genuine consciousness studies. Perhaps wisely, what IONS tries to do is to stay only a half-step ahead of the strictly materialist scientists, which is a tricky dance to do at best. And it is a dance that requires more patience by far than I possess.

For example, I notice that IONS is co-sponsoring with The Division of Perceptual Studies, the University of Virginia, and The Alef Trust a conference called Beyond the Brain. Apparently a group called the Scientific and Medical Network has been putting on this conference since 1995, and its specific, stated purpose is to explore consciousness, and specifically to address whether and how consciousness might extend beyond the physical brain. The conference’s promotional materials note that “speakers at the cutting edges of their fields (will offer) a deeper understanding of how consciousness research is expanding the horizons of science.” This conference bills itself as “The world’s premier conference series exploring new research on whether and how consciousness and mind extend beyond the physical brain and body. This year’s event covers children who remember previous lives, energy medicine and healing, spiritual awakening in scientists and academics, neuroscience and spirituality, terminal lucidity, DMT and consciousness, and the more general issues of nonlocal consciousness and the consciousness-brain relationship.” This is nowhere near the genuine cutting edge, of course, but when it is compared with what the materialist scientists are doing, it breaks the sound barrier.

This year’s online event takes place from Friday, 3 November to Sunday, 5 November. And reportedly, “Speakers are all at the cutting edges of their fields and will be discussing innovative research that probes the nature of consciousness. You will gain a vital overview and a deeper understanding of how consciousness research is expanding the horizons of science. This mind-stretching conference is not to be missed, so we greatly look forward to your participation!” Apparently it is all online. If you are interested, go to Beyondthebrain.org to learn more.

IONS is a fine organization, founded as it was by astronaut Edgar Mitchell and run for many years by the estimable Dean Radin. But nevertheless, it is difficult to be hopeful that it can do very much to change the meaningless direction of materialist science. The traditional scientific community is a closed system, and I flat cannot imagine that it is going to listen to anyone outside of it any time soon. Modern mainstream scientists do not in fact live in a pre-1976 world. In their everyday lives they live in 2023, and they are well aware of near-death experiences and all their manifold implications, and yet these blinkered fools still persist in taking the money and wasting yet many more decades in what amounts to a meaningless charade. The real question is, when what they are doing is at this point so obviously pointless, why do they nevertheless persist in doing it?

While science continues to wallow in self-imposed ignorance, you and I no longer need to continue to wait to begin to understand the truth. There are by now some brilliant researchers who have mostly figured out consciousness, and they are happy to share with us what they know! Here is a lovely series of videos by our treasured friend, Dr. R. Craig Hogan, which demonstrate (a) that the mind is not inside the brain; (b) that the brain is actually unnecessary; and (c) that in fact there is nothing but mind and experiences. As Jesus has been telling us all along, the truth indeed does make us free!

There will be another song for me, for I will sing it.
There will be another dream for me. Someone will bring it.
I will drink the wine while it is warm,
And never let you catch me looking at the sun.
And after all the loves of my life, after all the loves of my life,
You’ll still be the one.

I will take my life into my hands, and I will use it.
I will win the worship in their eyes, and I will lose it.
I will have the things that I desire,
And let my passion flow like rivers through the sky,
And after all the loves of my life, Oh, after all the loves of my life,
I’ll be thinking of you. And wondering why…
– Jimmy Webb, from “MacArthur Park” (1968)

We Create Our Own Suffering

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What kind of fool am I, who never fell in love?
It seems that I’m the only one that I have been thinking of.
What kind of mind is this? An empty shell,
A lonely cell in which an empty heart must dwell.
What kind of clown am I? What do I know of life?
Why can’t I cast away this mask of clay
And live my life?  Why can’t I fall in love,
Like any other man? And maybe then I’ll know
What kind of fool I am!
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) from “What kind of fool am I?” (1962)

For the past ten years I have been writing a weekly blog post, and also putting out a weekly podcast. My first blog entry was posted on November 21, 2013, while my first podcast went live in mid-June of that same year. And while this blog would skip as much as two or three weeks in the beginning if I had a lot going on, that podcast seems only once to have done reruns on a holiday weekend. For the most part, their audiences are different people. In fact, some who are reading this post may be surprised to learn that your blogger friend also does that podcast every week! The audience for Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes is larger than is our blog audience, since we send out just under five thousand weekly emails that carry each new blog post, while our podcast audience is in the hundreds of thousands. But still, I put considerably more effort into blogging for you than I put into delivering those weekly podcast episodes.

These blog posts take more time to write because each of them is a much-fussed-over think-piece. And I continue to practice law part-time as well. My law practice remains a central joy of my life! I have thought about retiring from the practice of law, but I am still having too much fun with my day-job, since some of my client businesses and their associated families have been a beloved part of my life for decades. I don’t practice courtroom law, so my practice leaves me lots of time for researching and thinking about aspects of the greater reality that I then can have the rare joy of discussing with my Thomas, and even sometimes with Master Jesus; and then eventually I will need to write about what the two or three of us have talked about, to enable us to pull it all together. And you, my precious blog friends, are graciously willing in the end to read and comment on whatever we write. My podcasts, on the other hand, are arranged just around outreach and teaching. They are meant to be times when I can do what Thomas tells me is what the rest of my life is primarily meant to be about, which is helping to share the truth about Jesus, and the truth about death and the afterlife. Although on occasion I have said some radical things on-air, at which times I have generally been my own guest. But mostly, I will interview authors, or I repeat my listeners’ favorite guests at regular intervals to talk about important educational topics that feature the afterlife and the greater reality.   

So it may not really be as surprising as it feels to me that this is the first time in more than a decade that my podcast seems to have something important to offer to my weekly blog post. But just this past week, I interviewed someone whose book gives us a great new way to approach and to use the Gospel teachings of Jesus. And I love his book! It’s called, If I Die Before I Wake – The Five-Step Roadmap to Enlightenment, Prosperity, and Your Life’s Purpose. And since Jonathan England is giving his book away for free at findyourpurposebook.com, I see no reason not to recommend it to you. With all the many hundreds of authors that I have interviewed on Seek Reality in the past ten years, his is only the second book that I have recommended to the world without reservation, because it gives you a different and worthwhile approach to using the Gospel teachings of Jesus. The first such book that I recommended was TJ Woodward’s Conscious Being, just a few years back. TJ Woodward is a wonderful spiritual counselor to those who struggle with addictions, and while I thought that TJ’s book was perfect in particular for people to whom the very notion of Christianity was likely to bring on a literal case of hives, Jonathan’s book contains marvelous insights into why Jesus’s teachings are so effective at raising our consciousness vibrations. Jonathan’s Seek Reality interview will be posted at webtalkradio.net for the week of October 10th, both in audio and in video. If you are curious, you might listen to it there.   

 It is seldom, if ever, that I learn anything new from my podcast guests. That is not why I do these weekly podcasts. And Jonathan England bills himself as someone who is going to help you learn how to earn your first million dollars, so I thought, Well, okay. I know the type. At this point, new potential guests are pitched to me by agents as often as twice a week, and a lot of those potential guests are in that mold. I generally turn them down, but Jonathan England was pitching himself, and he came from a fresh perspective on the teachings of Jesus, so I thought, Okay, I’ll play your silly game, and I penciled him in. But then I read his book! What Jonathan England was offering was a kind of post-Christianity, twenty-first-century approach to the teachings of Jesus that seemed to interest my two much-beloved Collaborators as much as it interested me. I know that it works. There are five separate steps to it, and I have personally lived all five of them in my own pursuit of spiritual growth. I think that for a modern seeker to begin with the Gospel teachings of Jesus as they are taught in The Fun of Growing Forever, and then perhaps to add Jonathan England’s five steps as they are taught in If I Die Before I Wake, has to take you at least to the top of level four, and probably into afterlife level five. How can that not happen? Because the primary thing that I have learned from Jonathan’s book, the elegantly simple thing that has been in front of my face for my entire life but it is so simple that I never before have seen it, is this: WE ARE ALREADY PERFECT. Of course we are! We come from God. How can we not be perfect?

Or to put it another way: We create our own unnecessary suffering. And since we create our own suffering, the great news is that you and I really are in control! Each of us is born as God’s Own best-beloved Child. We look upon the perfect face of Jesus, and we are looking in a mirror! But we forget that fact, once we are born on earth. All the epic struggles and pains of this place, the horrors and stresses and the battles that each of us fights every day of our lives is a roomful of mirrors of our own imagination that reflect to us our own desperate and despairing face. The sources of human suffering are manifold! Most of our suffering is fear-based, and it has myriad causes. For example, here are some of the sources of our own entirely self-created fears:

  • A reluctance to trust God sufficiently for us to love and forgive without reservation. Jesus would tell us that most of our earthly problems come from our pure lack of ability to trust God enough for us to love and forgive all people. Now, please read that underlined sentence again. How shameful is that? Each person on earth is God’s Own best-beloved Child! So, who are we to refuse to love and forgive them all? We believe that we are alone in the world, but we are never alone! What with God, our spirit guides, and our own loved ones not now in physical bodies, every one of us is a walking crowd.
  • Failure to make a sincere effort to raise our personal consciousness vibrations. There is no hell, and nor did Jesus ever teach about hell, but rather the lowest level of consciousness is what Jesus called the Outer Darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And if we are unable to forgive, we might end up there, simply because we have allowed our consciousness vibratory rate to sink so low. Not a pleasant place to be, but not hell at all, and a place from which eventually we all will be rescued.
  • Accepting fear-based and unloving religious ideas as real. Much of what religions teach is based in fear, to the point where it is not an overstatement to say that you should be careful about which teachings you follow from any religion. And that especially includes even innocent-seeming teachings like the Christian Apostles’ Creed, which seems to be just a bland statement of faith, but which can nevertheless be fairly easily turned into something divisive and unloving. It has spawned another version of the LGBTQ sort that has proven to be quite divisive. I don’t know the answer here. All I know is that if the Apostles’ Creed is being used to spawn other creeds which are divisive, then we stop reciting the Apostles’ Creed and all its spinoffs altogether. And if you find attending church to be at all negative or stressful, then simply stop going to church. The one time that Jesus talks about going to Synagogue on the Sabbath day, people try to throw Him off a cliff (LK 4:14-30)! Instead, simply turn to reading the Gospels on your own. Here is an article which suggests that the Gospel of Matthew is all that you ever will need to read and follow for your personal spiritual well-being. Or you might just graduate to teachingsbyjesus.com. Avoid all fears for the spiritual poison that they are!
  • Allowing fear-based governmental manipulation of our minds. We have no choice about living in human societies at the federal, state, and local levels, but we do have the right to choose whether or not and the extent to which we will allow our societies at all levels to affect our daily lives and our personal peace. When I stopped watching television two decades ago, it was primarily to get away from the minute-by-minute stress of all that political news! It is essential that we inform ourselves and that we vote, but we can do those things while avoiding all the fear-based drama that comes with TV political news. As Jesus tells us, we are to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s (MT 22:21).

The more we can free ourselves from all these completely unnecessary sources of fear and stress, the more we will begin to set right our entire lives! And perhaps the most joyous thing of all about this so deeply joyous time of my own life is how completely all the parts of it are coming together.  I feel so deeply at peace about it all, and so absolutely free from fear, so very far beyond joyous and clearly as if I am somehow the most fortunate person alive. Because it really didn’t have to be turning out this way at all!

 The truth about reality more and more is feeling for me something like just before dawn on the morning when I was six years old, and I got up on my very best-ever Christmas Day of my life. We are so close now to the point where scientists are going to have to give up on materialism for the complete crock that it actually is, even though (laughably) the older ones still are clinging to straws. And meanwhile, we are finding ever more beautiful evidence of the known events of the factual life of a Jesus who really is fully God and fully Man, and who is, by the way and incredibly, my own deeply cherished personal Friend! We are learning with ever more flat-out certainty that not only is each of our lives eternal, but each of us is inextricably part of God; and as such, each of us is ALREADY PERFECT! Simply reach out and claim the truth of who you already are, my dear one! Thank You, dear God! Ours is the very first generation on earth that is no longer ignorant of anything! There is no longer anything that has been forgotten, but instead there is only perfection beneath this ultimately bountiful Christmas Tree of your own blessed and complete eternal life!

 

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

Was Jesus a Slave?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My sweet Lord, my Lord, my Lord,
I really want to see you! Really want to be with you!
Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord,
My sweet Lord! My Lord, my Lord!

 I really want to know you! Really want to go with you!
Really want to show you Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)

Really want to see you! Really want to see you! Really want to see you, Lord!
Really want to see you Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My, my, my Lord (Hallelujah!)

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

As I have researched the life and teachings of Jesus, there were things that never made sense to me. But I was so engrossed in ever more deeply studying Jesus’s Gospel words, in blogging and podcasting and answering questions, that for a long time I ignored the things about the life of Jesus that didn’t seem right. Or I accepted the explanations we were getting from scholars, even though I thought those explanations were unsatisfying. There were a number of such puzzles in Jesus’s life, but the two things that most bothered me, and the ways in which most scholars have addressed them, were these:

  • Jesus’s lack of a wife. It is clear to anyone who reads the Gospels that Jesus was reared as a well-educated and religiously observant Jew. And in His day, properly brought-up Jewish males were married in their teens, but we can find no evidence that Jesus ever took a wife. Why was that? Some scholars assume that He did have a wife, that perhaps Mary Magdalen was His wife, and even that He likely had children, who were then spirited away to France or somewhere, either with or without their mother, and that some or all of the members of Jesus’s nuclear family survived His crucifixion. Some scholars even assume that Jesus joined His family in exile after His resurrection. But there is no evidence for any of this.
  • The “Lost Years.” It would have been assumed that Jesus would begin His teaching mission as a young adult, but the Biblical Gospels tell us that He did not begin to teach in Galilee until the age of thirty. That silent period of young adulthood that lasted for almost a decade is what is commonly referred to as “the Lost Years,” and naturally scholars have wanted to fill those years with some sort of useful activity. The most common ideas put forth have to do with His traveling to India or Nepal, perhaps. He might have networked with Buddhist and Hindu teachers, further learning and perfecting what He later taught. All of which I reject as nonsense! Jesus had things to learn on earth before His teaching phase began, but what He had to learn was only about humankind, so He could better understand and therefore better teach the people around Him. Jesus was born on earth from the Godhead as already a spiritually perfected Being.

As I came to better know Jesus last summer while we worked on material for His website, I tried to develop the courage to ask Him to address some of these questions about His personal life. After all, I had been charged with creating His website, and everyone is avid to know more about Jesus on a personal level. We were discussing His positions on doctrine, and He was  comfortable about doing that. And in the process, He was tearing down Constantine’s Christianity without reservation. But Jesus was reluctant to answer questions about His personal life. I had long wondered about John, for example, who was “the disciple that Jesus loved,” and who had leaned back against Jesus’s chest at a banquet to ask Him a question, and had taken other personal liberties with the Lord. When you pair that information with the fact that Jesus never married, you might naturally wonder about their sexual preferences…? But when that thought even barely entered my mind, I got an “if looks could kill” look from Jesus, and He stood up and walked away. Jesus has never looked at me that way either before or since, and I have never thought of asking Him even one more personal question. (And then I remembered that of course John was Jesus’s younger brother from His last pre-Jesus lifetime, the one in which Thomas was Jesus’s older brother, which should adequately explain why John was the disciple that Jesus loved.)

Jesus simply will not address the details of His personal life with me. Nor, I think, will He address them with anyone else. Jesus is private by nature, but more to the point, He considers His personal life to be unimportant. It is only His teachings that matter to Him. And when I ask Him questions in general, He usually won’t say a definitive “Yes.” The most that He will do is to give me a positive vibe. He will, however, say a definitive “No.” And sometimes – as you saw – His “NO” is emphatic! But soon after that if-looks-could-kill moment, I found an article somewhere that suggested that Jesus had been born into slavery. And when I asked Him in my mind whether this could be true, He gave me the comfortable sense that I might profitably investigate that question. Which is as close to a “Yes” as I ever will get from Him.

An open-minded researcher has to admit that the evidence that Jesus was born into slavery is strong. When the idea is first suggested to you, though, everything within you is repulsed by it! At least, that was how I felt. I thought there had to be some mistake. Jesus? If you want to dismiss the whole notion out of hand, all I ask is that you read the rest of this post with an open mind. And with the understanding that Jesus Himself gave me permission to investigate this question. I did the research, and I went from being a repulsed skeptic to becoming someone who is not only personally convinced, but who thinks that we have discovered some interesting new information about the Man Himself. Let’s look together at the evidence: 

  • Slavery was common in that time and place. But slavery in the area where Jesus lived two thousand years ago was a milder condition than is our image of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil-War American South. And for many of those held in bondage then, it was not a permanent condition. People often sold themselves or their children into servitude for a period of time in order to pay back a debt, or even because they could not otherwise afford food and shelter. The Greek word translated as “servant” generally did mean what we would call a bondsman, or an actual slave, but sometimes it meant just a person hired to do some task; and these people were often bound for a time and not for life. There were, moreover, strict Biblical rules about how “slaves” were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16).
  • Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave. She uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty. And if Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, then that very well explains both why Jesus was not married in His teens, and why He did not begin His teaching ministry until He reached the age of thirty, since He would have been Joseph’s bondsman working as a carpenter during all those “Lost Years.” And while Joseph may not have married Mary, he received and heeded Gabriel’s announcement, and he seems in all respects to have thought of Jesus as his beloved oldest son, protecting Him from the slaughter of the innocents when it happened and educating Him well in preparation for His free adulthood. We really have no complaint to make against Jesus’s nominal father.
  • A mere stable is considered to be sufficient shelter for a woman who is about to give birth. We fondly think that the “no room in the inn” story of Jesus’s birth is charming, but in fact it is a sign of Mary’s low status, especially in view of her late stage of pregnancy. Would a free woman of respectable rank have been shuffled off to give birth in a barn?
  • Joseph seems never to have married Mary. Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
  • Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. And his home-folks promptly try to throw Him off a cliff. Here it is:

14 And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. 15 And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

16 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. 17 And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

18 “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,
19 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

20 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. 21 Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 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?” 23 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.’” 24 But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 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; 26 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. 27 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.” 28 And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; 29 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. 30 But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30). A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely nothing less!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that we know would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor, and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His human life. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to very much better understand humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people when viewing us from the perspective of the least of these (see MT 25:44-46), by spending the first thirty years of Jesus’s life viewing us from the perspective of an actual slave?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He was thirty. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been a coincidence.

 So I have come to accept the probability that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life as a slave, and He did so by strategic choice, to better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand people. But I think it was also done by personal choice. I slapped my forehead when I realized that! The Jesus that I have lately come to much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, and who as recently as just last week could not stand to see that a member of this community was sad without rushing off to give her a hug, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He was going to be a slave Himself. Jesus has just lived the past seventeen hundred years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain!

 I get it now. I do. Late last spring, soon after I first personally met Jesus, when I was still trying to get my mind around all the details of knowing Him, I was asking my Thomas a lot of questions. Why did Jesus do this or that, or was this or that really true about Jesus? And the sense I got was that Thomas wasn’t always thrilled about these things either, but I just had to accept what Jesus did, and who He was. And I now realize that Jesus would have had to teach as a free Man. But until the public phase of His life began, He would have wanted to have the same status as the poorest people around Him. He would likely have wanted to be a slave, since He lived where so many people were slaves. And if I had asked my Thomas why that would have been so, since I would certainly never have wanted to be a slave, his answer would have been the same answer that I always got when I asked my Thomas these questions. He would have said simply, “That is why He is Jesus, and you and I are not.”

The Personal Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), from “How Do I Love Thee?” (1850)

Someone has recently asked me if I could channel Jesus, or if I knew of someone who could channel Jesus. I told her No, on both counts. And in an effort to temper her expectations, I added that Jesus is very busy, and we cannot cause Jesus to appear at our command just to chat. She emailed me back rather huffily that she would try to remember that Jesus did not have time for her. At once I sent her another email, saying that was not my point at all! But there are billions of Christians on earth, and there is just one of Him, and I don’t know how either God or Jesus can be receptive to all the prayers that they receive; but somehow they do manage to hear and to answer each individual prayer. I didn’t think that she would presume to ask if I could channel God, would she? And Jesus is no different!

Although perhaps that is not really true at all. Jesus is fully God and fully Man, and He is determined to maintain that human aspect of Himself, even though now He can continue to maintain His humanity only with tremendous effort. I have talked here about how Jesus has remained on the entrance level of the astral plane so He can welcome every returning Christian who wants to meet Him personally, and He and Thomas spend a lot of time together, even physically play-fighting as loving brothers will, all so Jesus can maintain Himself in human balance. So Jesus really is unique. Although He is vibrating now even above the Godhead level, His love for humankind is such that He puts tremendous effort into maintaining Himself as fully one of us. And His maintaining that gritty human touch does require a surprising amount  of effort!

Before last year, I guess I thought of Jesus pretty much as most people do, more or less as just another public figure. And you and I feel as if we own public figures, don’t we? That is the brutal price of fame: when you are famous enough, you give up your privacy. Before last year, Jesus was generic Jesus to me as well, so I would have expected, just as that woman who emailed me expects, that I could pray to Jesus and expect to get His personal attention. If someone were channeling Jesus, I would assume that as a cradle Christian I had the right to get in line and talk directly with Jesus as well. There is now an artificial intelligence Jesus chatbot app available, which frankly seems to me to be an abomination; but before last year, I think I would have seen a Jesus chatbot as just fine, and perhaps even inevitable. Technically Jesus is a deceased public figure who possesses no legal personhood, so He sadly lacks the standing even to sue in court to protect His good name.  

 But having personally met Jesus last year has made such a monumental difference for me that now I wish that everyone could also personally meet Him! Jesus is a complete and well-rounded, living and breathing Person. I have read articles about Jesus since the night when I first met Him, each talking about some little facet of Jesus based on Biblical evidence and various assumptions, but none of the authors has ever had the great good fortune of actually meeting Jesus, and therefore nothing that I ever have read has conveyed the fact that my treasured Friend is a whole living Person who has His own unique personality. And remarkably, the impression that He makes is not what you might think. Jesus is difficult to describe because He seems when you meet Him to be so young, and yet He has such obvious deep gravitas. He looks to be in his early thirties, and He is only maybe five feet nine or ten inches tall. You can feel people’s personal energies in the astral, and Jesus’s energy is like no one else’s, powerful and yet absolutely smooth, with no low notes at all. I think the reason Jesus seems so powerful and at the same time so mild is that He has no ego, as we think of an ego. No sense of putting Himself forward or wanting your attention, although of course there is no need for that because His personal energy makes it clear Who He is. Jesus focuses great attention on you, and He doesn’t expect you to focus attention on Him, which is not how people customarily act; but it is charming to have Him so delightfully interested in you! He looks deeply into your eyes when He talks to you. Indeed, talking with Jesus is such a different experience that it flustered me on the night when I first met Him. I recall that at one point I became so overcome that I blurted to Him, “Have you any idea what a big deal you are?” Then I was embarrassed about having said something so stupid. But He seemed not to have heard it.  Or perhaps He was just perplexed about why I had said it.

I think the best way to describe Jesus’s manner is to say that He makes me think of a self-made, very prosperous young man. I have worked with some very successful businessmen in my legal career, which has been spent advising the owners of closely-held businesses. And all the most successful business owners that I ever have met have been pretty much the way that Jesus is now. They were friendly, kindly, respectful, entirely focused on their visitor, and at the same time efficient and no-nonsense because their time was so valuable. Jesus is all of that. As I have said in other posts, my Thomas spends time with Jesus on most nights as part of his effort to help Jesus maintain His human balance, and since as my spirit guide Thomas also is supposed to keep watch over me, he generally takes me along, but with amnesia for the event. Last summer, however, He and Jesus were allowing me to remember some events from the nights that I spent with them because we were thinking through developing seekreality.com and teachingsbyjesus.com, the two websites that Jesus wanted me to create, so Jesus liked having me nearby where He could give me His thoughts on the websites. And what an extraordinary summer it was! I never remember dreams. And anyway, these experiences were not dreams. I would wake up on a couple of mornings each week with an awareness of having been with Jesus and Thomas by the river, and the actual memory would fill in over the next hour or so. In earth-time, no visit was very long. And some memories seemed to have missed the mark in terms of timing, in that I think I was remembering what had happened just before or just after Jesus had spoken to me and I would have His words separately. But they were real and amazing memories of having spent time with Jesus and Thomas in the astral plane.

One thing I have come to understand is that the Jesus I love so dearly has grown spiritually even a great deal more since He lived on earth two thousand years ago. The historical Jesus whose life’s work is described in the Canonical Gospels was and remains abundantly real. The evidence that Jesus was born from the Godhead as a perfected Being, powerfully and miraculously divine, and that He lived, died, and was resurrected in the first century CE is beyond question.  But my Thomas tells me that most of the extraordinary spiritual growth that is so evident in Jesus now is the result of His having spent the past seventeen hundred years patiently loving and healing the hundreds of millions of people who were damaged by Constantine’s Christianity as the Roman Emperor and his successors established and built their religion beginning in about the year 313 CE. During all that time, Jesus’s healing gardens in the afterlife were full of brutally damaged victims of the Inquisitions and the Crusades, and even victims of the fear-based lies about God and about reality that the Romans built into their version of Christianity so they could use the religion as a means of human control. All the centuries of boundless, selfless love that Jesus has put into healing those hundreds of millions of people since He was resurrected have made Jesus even immensely more spiritually powerful than He was when He lived on earth as Jesus, or so my Thomas tells me now. And Thomas knew our Friend on earth during His earth-lifetime as Jesus, so he is able to describe the differences this further growth has made in Him.   

One thing that I have long wanted to know from Thomas was how Jesus could possibly be hearing and answering the prayers of billions of people at once. And my Thomas, always a man of few words, used always to tell me just that Jesus did it the same way that God did it. Which of course told me nothing at all. So finally, and very recently, Thomas told me that when Jesus seemed to be sitting and gazing out at the river perhaps, or otherwise He seemed to be deep in thought, He was actually deep inside His mind and involved with all the people who needed Him. And I was suddenly aware that, of course, Jesus did that sort of brief withdrawal almost constantly, all the time, and in little bits of time. For example, if Jesus was having a conversation, He often would blank briefly, looking away, and then come back again. Thomas tells me that at this point, Jesus’s mind has become what is probably a close mimic of God’s mind. And yes, Jesus can hear our individual prayers, so no worries about that. I still don’t really get it. A billion is a lot of people! But earth-time is not astral-time, so things in the astral might be altered or compressed in some way. And whatever is going on seems to be working for Jesus. And therefore it works for us.

But I do so much love my precious Friend! I don’t think I ever understood the meaning of the word “charismatic” until I met Jesus in person, and now I think it is no wonder that He had crowds following Him all over Galilee. You just want to be near Him. You want to hear His voice, and it doesn’t much matter what He is saying. I think it is all because Jesus makes you feel so personally loved. So individually precious to Him. That seems to have been a theme throughout the Gospels, too, that Jesus called to fishermen to leave their nets and follow Him, and instantly they made that life-changing decision. Or He otherwise gave His attention to someone, and He got an instant positive reaction. And wow, I certainly know how that feels! When Jesus looks at you, the love in His eyes and in His face overwhelms you completely. And His is a personal, individual sort of love: it belongs to you alone, which may perhaps have been what bothered the clergymen of His day, who did not take it well. He was calling them to a standard so far above their own in terms of love and service to humankind. And since one of Jesus’s purposes in coming to earth was to abolish religions and teach people to relate to God directly, you can see why Jesus as a Teacher might have grated on them!  

Jesus calls me “Little One.” He is avid to hear about my day, and He listens closely and asks me questions as if the trivialities of my life matter more to Him than they do to me. You have never had a truer Friend than Jesus, or a better Teacher, or a more doting Parent. Since meeting Him, I have become a nicer person than I was before, kinder and a lot more patient with others. I have thought more than once that if only there were some way that we could clone Jesus so everyone could have his or her own personal Friend, the world would be at once a more perfect place. But when I first said that, both Jesus and Thomas said that we each do have that perfect Friend in the Gospels, and now further simplified in teachingsbyjesus.com. You will be amazed to know how much Jesus cares about the personal lives of each of those who love Him. It is not just me! So read the Gospels, and read His website. Speak to Jesus in your heart. You can tell Him about your day, just as I do! If you have questions, email them to me and I will try to answer them. Think of that Browning sonnet as Jesus speaking to you personally, and recite the sonnet to Jesus in return. Feel free to love Jesus with everything that is in you now, and for Him and for yourself do the very best that you can with your spiritual growth in this lifetime. Live His teachings every day. You know that when it is time for you to go home, He will be waiting to greet you as the eternally treasured personal friend of His that now and forever you truly are.

Adding Things Up

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Praise the Lord, my soul. Lord my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
He stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.
But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;
They flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them.
You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth.
He makes springs pour water into the ravines; it flows between the mountains.
They give water to all the beasts of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
The birds of the sky nest by the waters; they sing among the branches.
He waters the mountains from his upper chambers; the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for people to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens human hearts,
oil to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts.
The trees of the Lord are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
There the birds make their nests; the stork has its home in the junipers.
The high mountains belong to the wild goats; the crags are a refuge for the hyrax.
– (Psalm 104 1-18)

 

One evening eighteen years ago, before I gave up on television, my husband called me to our bedroom to check out the start of a PBS special. And a young astrophysicist said something that profoundly seized my mind. I remember that moment so vividly! This is the only thing that I can recall from 2005, other than fleeing Hurricane Katrina up the west coast of Florida and actually then ending up moving to Texas. It must have been early on a late-summer evening, from the way the light was falling in the room. Edward had called to me to come and check out what he was about to watch, so he was sitting comfortably against the headboard but I was perched just on the foot of our bed because I was ready to reject what was on offer and head right back to my office. A PBS special was beginning. They were running some beautiful pre-roll of the universe, and a young-sounding astrophysicist was about to speak. What he said was, “For some reason, mathematics can be used to study the universe.” I swear! He said, “For some reason.” And I was thunderstruck.

I have wondered during the intervening years whether I would have been as affected if he had not begun with that odd question. Remove his “for some reason,” and you have just a plain declarative sentence. But add it, and the listener’s own mind immediately wonders what that reason might be. I moved from perching on the end of the bed to sitting against the headboard myself. I watched that whole PBS special, although I cannot now recall the first thing about it. But those first three words the presenter had said were a revelation to me. Think about it! What reason could there be why we can use mathematics to study the universe? I for one was sure that I knew the reason, which was why I found that astrophysicist’s question to be so flat-out astounding. It felt like materialist science’s long-awaited concession that God has to be behind it! Because I had known since I was in high school that math is a human-invented science. So that young astrophysicist had just informed us that the universe also must be invented. And if humans didn’t invent it, then who did?

There are math-people and there are non-math people, and I am emphatically a non-math person. By the time I was in the second semester of Algebra II in high school, I had decided that this would be my final math course unless someone could convince me that I might need to use higher forms of math later on. And more and more I was coming to suspect that no higher math was likely to be useful in the legal career that I was planning, so one day I stayed after class and asked my Algebra II teacher whether math was a discovered or an invented science. That seemed to be a crucial question! But my teacher gave me an impatient look, as if I might be trying to trick her, and she told me that math was an invented science. I thought, “Aha! Well, forget that!” And I never took another math course. (Actually, I have more recently learned that my question was not as foolish as that teacher seemed to think it was.)

So there I was in 2005, all those many years later, hearing a bright young scientist wondering why math can be used to study the universe. And if math is invented, then so indeed must the entire universe be invented as well, which seemed to me, even eighteen years ago, to be a pretty good proof of the existence of God. And then I came across another excellent Hillfaith video which makes that point better than I ever could. In fact, math is everywhere in science, to the point where it almost feels safe to say that math is the language of science, every bit as much as math is the language of God. Math is the way in which God built reality, and certainly God could not have used math to build reality if God were not the ultimate mathematician. Coming to see God that way as an afterlife researcher, eventually I came to regret my rash decision not to take calculus in high school. I should at least have tried to understand what higher mathematical concepts were about! Yes, the sight of mathematical equations on a chalkboard still gives me hives and a headache combined. But if math really was God’s language, then for years I wished that I had at least tried to learn it.

But is math in fact God’s language? For a long time, I was sure that it was. And as I thought about it, I could envision God with what must have been multiple heavenly chalkboards, first working out the language that was going to become higher mathematics, and then using that language to work out reality. And you can imagine the God that I must have had in mind back then, with such a long beard that He would have had to repeatedly throw it over His shoulder to keep it out of His way. He had to invent mathematics first, and God could have done that easily. With chalkboards and not whiteboards. This was long before whiteboards! Big chalkboards, as befitted a gigantic God. I never imagined any of this concretely, but had I imagined it, this is what I would have had in mind.

And then, at about the time that I was giving up on television, I was coming to understand that my old vision of God was altogether wrong. Ditch the beard. Ditch the notion that God  would need something ponderous like mathematics with which to create reality. By the turn of this century, most afterlife researchers were coming to realize that Max Planck’s insights of a century before had been right, and consciousness is primary. Indeed, consciousness is all that exists, and reality is fundamentally non-physical. The more deeply we moved into the study of consciousness as primary and pre-existing, the more obvious it seemed to all of us that no other understanding of reality is possible. The more we studied what the dead were telling us, and especially the more we listened to what non-physical beings and our own spirit guides were telling us, the more the words of the first quantum physicists made sense. We are swimming in nothing but Consciousness!

Dr. Planck said, “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” Physicist Sir James Jeans simply said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”

Well, of course! God had no need to dream up mathematics in order to create reality! God is in fact the highest aspect of Consciousness, the very essence of pure Mind, and God could simply think all of reality into existence and maintain it in existence micro-instant by micro-instant, simply by Mind alone. Sir James Jeans was right. And maintaining the universe simply as a thought would be so much easier for God by far than what is actually happening, which is this kind of show-your-work situation where all of reality is constructed according to mathematical principles, so it can therefore be studied by us mathematically. Which fact brings us back to that young astrophysicist’s question of eighteen years ago.

If God never needed to use mathematics as God’s own tool by which to create and maintain this universe, then why can mathematics be used to study the universe? Why is the reality that God thought up deliberately created and refined in such a way that it obeys mathematical laws? Ah. That is the real question! And I invite your proposed answer in the Comments section. As for me, I can think of only one answer. I think that God wants us to have the ability to think it all through with our own earth-limited minds, and to seek and then to find the Creator behind it all. God made reality not as something random and without meaning, but as a set of puzzles that you and I have the ability to solve. Mathematics. Higher mathematics. And then the universe, in all its manifold complexities. All of this could have been thought up and maintained by a less loving God in each micro-instant as an entirely random thought, and much more easily for God. But that has never been God’s plan!

Our frame-verse was first sung at least three thousand years ago. Most weeks’ frame verses are just related to the post in some way, and are meant to entertain you; but this verse is an integral part of this post’s message. A thousand years before the birth of Jesus on earth, people were already making sense of God’s wisdom in arranging reality so they could live supported and sustained by it, and also so they could seek, find, and to at least some extent begin to comprehend and find God’s love in it. And if you will read Psalm 104 while seeing its message as God’s earliest call to people as it was being received and understood, and as it was then being first sung back to God in love and joy, it can bring tears to your eyes.

The best evidence for the existence of God is the fact that you are alive and you are comprehending these words.

As a further case in point, we have been discussing the Origin of Life debate between materialist scientists and scientific free-thinkers. On that front, things are heating up! And since we have been following that debate in recent weeks, I think it might be fun to follow James Tour’s new challenge to materialist scientists. He is giving ten materialist research scientists sixty days to come up with just one of five definitive proofs that materialism has a meaningful approach to understanding the origin of life. And the materialists themselves are even invited to be their own judge! My goodness, how rigged in the materialists’ favor could Dr. Tour’s quite honorable new contest possibly be? I am confident that nevertheless there is no way that the materialist scientists can win Dr. Tour’s new contest. I have done considerable research into the origin-of-life problem, and even if a spark of life can be ignited in some random way – lightning is the most likely method – for life to be sustained even briefly would be such a complex process that for life ever to have arisen randomly and then been randomly sustained and developed to the point of turning into the complex life forms that we see all around us, and that indeed we are ourselves, is close to inconceivable. But it is going to be fun to watch these chosen materialist scientists try to win Dr. Tour’s bet. If, indeed, they even will be willing to try! Let’s hope that of the ten that he has challenged, at least a few will be as honorable as he is, and will try to provide even one of the many more than five elements that would be necessary to sustain and develop life past that first unlikely spark. I’ll keep you posted!

 

He made the moon to mark the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness, it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they steal away; they return and lie down in their dens.
Then people go out to their work, to their labor until evening.
How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all;the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.
All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face, they are terrified;
when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;may the Lord rejoice in his works—
he who looks at the earth, and it trembles, who touches the mountains, and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
May my meditation be pleasing to him, as I rejoice in the Lord.
But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.
Praise the Lord, my soul. Hallelujah! – (Psalm 104 19-35)

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