Author: Roberta Grimes

“My Commandment” (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“My Commandment” (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

And with that, my memory stops.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

You and God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

(I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses.
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– C Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing.
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing. And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– C. Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

Born Today!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jesus did in fact say, however, that we should pray to God directly. Naturally they don’t talk about this much in the churches, but there has never been anyone harder on religions and the clergy than our wonderful and much-beloved Master Jesus. That sweet and gentle soul called the clergy of His day knaves and hypocrites, and He told people simply to pray without them. He said, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6). In fact, Jesus seems for most of His ministry on earth to have taught and prayed outdoors, rather than in any house of worship. Prior to His crucifixion, Jesus took His disciples to pray with Him, again outdoors, in the Garden of Gethsemane.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Trinity

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Same answer.”

“I was afraid you’d say that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

What If…?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

God or Man?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

“What?”

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

He has to be safe…”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fear’s Ghastly Harvest

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Religionism vs. Materialism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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)

 

For people who are seeking the truth about reality, this is such an awkward time to be alive. There is a pitched battle going on now between two groups of scientists who each want reality to align with their own preconceived ideas, and to start out demanding a particular result when what you claim to seek is objective truth makes no sense whatsoever. So for more than a century, theoretical physicists in particular have been producing ever more fanciful and entirely untestable theories. Which means that for decades we have been watching what amounts to a war between materialists wielding paper weapons and religionists whose weapons are razor-sharp, but unfunded and therefore also headed nowhere. I root for the religionists. How can you not? Even though the Roman Christianity that motivates them has bogus dogmas at its core, their science is so beautiful. Wikipedia, of course, calls Intelligent Design “pseudoscientific.” But so is a lot of materialist science equally pseudoscientific, at least until it shows some success. Like take, for example, the materialists’ search for a source of consciousness inside the human brain. There can be nothing more pseudoscientific than that!

The religionist scientists are as poor as church mice. They have nothing on their side except some excellent science. They started out fighting for creationism and against Darwin’s theory of evolution; but they have broadened their mandate in recent years, so now they look more mainstream. And this is a David-and-Goliath situation, if ever there was one! Almost every working scientist on earth is a materialist, while all the religionist scientists seem to be based at The Discovery Institute, at the Center for Science and Culture in Seattle, Washington. The religionist scientists’ primary publication is Evolution News & Science Today. I urge you to sign up to receive their emails, because reading about those religionist scientists’ work is such a treat! I also follow a couple of materialist scientific organizations, and I attend their online lectures when I can find the time. But the materialist scientists are so constrained by their gatekeepers that you always know beforehand pretty much what they are going to say.

And you and I have a pressing need to get past this foolish catfight between the materialists and the religionists and ever better understand what is true about reality. How else will we make sense of things, so we can better understand how it all fits together? For us, being science hobbyists is essential. Getting the science right is a huge part of making sense of the greater reality where we enjoy our eternal lives, since figuring out how all of that fits with this material universe is our most fundamental need. Until you can truly envision it all, you will find it hard to vanquish your fear of death. And to give you a tiny taste of how the religionist scientists can help, let’s look at some of the articles that they sent out for our delectation in just this past week:

  • Epigenetics. In the battle of ideas between Jean-Baptiste Lamarck (1744-1829) and Charles Darwin (1809-1882), I always have thought that Lamarck’s insight that some traits are acquired during life and are passed on in the genes must be right. And it turns out that indeed Lamarck was right!
  • Inflationary Cosmology. Materialist science is forever stuck with the problem of explaining how the universe got started, if in fact there is no creative agent. And here is yet another materialist scientist tackling what we might call the need for an Uncaused Cause. And for the umpteenth time, yet one more materialistic scientist amusingly comes up short.
  • The Placebo Effect. Each individual human mind is so powerful that the simple ritual of taking a blank pill can have measurable effects on the human body. Think about that! Yet again, we observe what we can only call Mind over Matter.
  • The Science of Purpose. Materialism insists that evolution must be random, but religionist biologists are finding truly elegant and complex purpose in the course of evolution that further reinforces Lamarck’s great insight.

 Those four articles were in the religionist scientists’ Monday morning email. Then came their Wednesday afternoon email:

  • Twelve Boosts for Intelligent Design. A religionist scientist states all twelve boosts in a kind of quick insider code, and then provides a video, no less.
  • Why Epigenetics Contradicts Evolutionary Theory. These Wednesday articles tend to be more sophisticated, and they sometimes make direct comparisons to materialist science, as this one does. Again, with a video.
  • More Unnatural Naturalism, and More Confusion from Naturalists. This article is a meditation on engineering feats as they develop in nature, things like honeycombs and animal paths, although the meditation was originally inspired by questions about the origins of Covid. When scientists’ careers are not dependent on the approval of materialist gatekeepers, scientists can on occasion indulge in some quite elegant visionary thinking.

I love it! Anticipating watching those carefree scientific minds doing their carefree scientific work makes me smile to see another religionist scientists’ email arrive; and reading about what they are up to now provides a couple of high points every week. And then I read New Scientist or Scientific American, and I see how those materialist scientific writers have to parse words to get around their censors, and to no purpose whatsoever but to maintain an utterly spurious crusade against finding a figurehead sort of creature that has become a bogeyman god developed and nurtured entirely in the minds of the materialists gatekeepers in all those mainstream university science departments. And I wonder for the umpteenth time what the point of any of this might be. We live in the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake, and not in the Middle Ages! Can you literally believe that adult human beings, and never mind trained scientists, are still putting up with this level of garbage? 

Look, dearly beloved Materialist Scientists, materialism is a fully discredited theory. I think that by now everyone can see that. Consciousness is the base creative force, whether you call it God or Tomato Soup. You materialists don’t have to fight the religionists, since you can simply call the creative force “Not-God” and refuse to worship it, but instead you can just study it and move on. Simply allow for Epigenetics, Intelligent Design, Something-from-Nothing, and all the other by-now-obvious effects of whatever that base creative force might be, and add them to your generally accepted scientific protocols. Why not? There was a very much earlier day when your scientific predecessors had to accept the demonstrable scientific fact that the earth is round, even though it looks flat. Surely you must remember that? And there also was a day when scientists finally had to accept the certainty that the earth revolves around the sun, even though it looks as though the sun revolves around the earth. Don’t you remember that as well? And all of this is no different. Just learn to deal with a new set of facts, get rid of the gatekeepers, start doing objective science again, and move on!

And now look at that, dearly beloved Religionist Scientists. You have finally sort of won. You can start doing your free science in the sunlight, which is where all objective truths belong. Just soft-pedal the religious stuff, okay? Nobody wants to hear it. What people want to hear about is the wonderful scientific discoveries that are going to be possible, now that all that stupid bickering is past. And talk about consciousness, not God. Don’t gloat. Don’t insist that scientists who still feel squeamish at the notion of talking about a creative force must personify consciousness in any way. I think you will find that God doesn’t mind.

How else, really, does this standoff ever end? It has lasted now for more than a century, at incalculable cost in time and treasure. I have never seen anything more stupid. If you were to break the news in any newspaper anywhere on earth that otherwise rational adult scientists have been fighting like bratty children for the past century over whether or not there is a God, and they have been funding their war to the tune of billions of research dollars, no one would believe you. And yet, that is precisely what is still going on, to this day.   

The most tragic aspect of their battle is the fact that neither side is seeking anything like the objective truth. The religionists are more objectively right, since they are not hampered by the materialists’ limiting fundamental materialist dogma; but since even they are all professed Christians and working with a Christian agenda, we cannot really call either side free-minded. So basic scientific research continues to be severely stymied, especially in two crucial areas:

  •  The Nature and Role of Consciousness. For materialist scientists to insist that what Max Planck discovered to be a fundamental force is just a product of the human brain, and to spend a billion dollars trying to find its source inside the brain, is plain tragic. Once materialist scientists are free to study consciousness, they are going to find that understanding the leading, and indeed the all-encompassing role of consciousness will transform humankind’s understanding of reality altogether.
  • The Origin of Life. Materialist scientists have put a lot of effort into trying to understand where life comes from, and into attempting to create life in a laboratory, but so far without success. I am pretty sure that life is a fundamental property of consciousness, and if that turns out to be true then the search for the origin of life will be at a dead end until materialist scientism at last bites the dust.

Truth is truth. The mainstream scientific gatekeepers – the university science departments and the peer-reviewed journals – have not changed what is true by one iota by insisting upon materialism as the fundamental scientific dogma for all of this past, lost century. They risk nothing if they now give up the reins. And if they don’t do that, their loss is certain. Since the day will come, inevitably, when scientists who are neither materialists nor religionists – scientists who are no longer in bodies, and many of whose names you would recognize – will finally figure out how to solve what have been some almost insuperable problems with the process of establishing easy communication between the earth and the place where those that we used to think were dead now reside. And then you will be able to ring up dead Aunt Mildred and get her recipe for turkey dressing. And then, too, she will be able to ring up her great-grandson, who now is working as a physicist gatekeeper in some university science department. And she will give him a dressing-down that he will not soon forget.  

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)

 

Parables

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

All hail the power of Jesus’ name! Let angels prostrate fall.
Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown Him Lord of all.
Bring forth the royal diadem, and crown Him Lord of all!

O seed of Israel’s chosen race, now ransomed from the fall,
Hail Him who saves you by His grace, and crown Him Lord of all.
Hail Him who saves you by His grace, and crown Him Lord of all!
 – Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” (1780)

I had planned to write about gratitude. Gratitude as a constant habit is the essential prelude to using Jesus’s teachings on forgiveness and love to raise our personal consciousness vibrations. But Thomas has been telling me for days that I have already written about gratitude. And, sure enough, he was right about that! What I wrote about gratitude two years ago was better than anything I could have written this week, so please simply read that post again, with thanks to our dear friend Hillis Pugh, our illustrious Guru of Gratitude.

But rather than giving me a pass altogether, what Thomas has asked me to do today is to share with you all of Chapter 13 of the Gospel Book of Matthew. What is irritating him now about that Chapter is two things in particular:

  • First, Thomas is freshly annoyed by the First Council of Nicaea, which claimed in 325 that the Lord’s parables had been meant to deceive His listeners, rather than being just a useful way to keep the Temple guards from understanding what Jesus was actually teaching. Some of what Jesus taught went directly against the religion of the day, so He used parables not to deceive His followers, but rather to deceive those Temple guards.
  • And second, Thomas is especially bothered by a certain internet preacher, who has of late been claiming that Jesus was calling down the wrath of a nonexistent Satan with His parable of the sower and His parable of the weeds. As we prepare to bring the Lord’s Gospel teachings to modern people using teachingsbyjesus.com, Thomas wants us to be ready to deal with these savage religious falsities coming from modern preachers spouting groundless fears.

So let’s look at those two parables. Please transport yourself far back, if you can, and stand among the people on the shore who are listening to that itinerant Preacher who has rowed out a little way into the water so everyone can better see and hear Him. Remember that Jesus back then looked nothing like church-Jesus, but He looked more as Jesus looks today, with olive skin and dark, curly hair:

“On that day Jesus had gone out of the house and was sitting by the sea. And large crowds gathered to Him, so He got into a boat and sat down, and the whole crowd was standing on the beach. And He told them many things in parables, saying, “Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and they sprang up immediately, because they had no depth of soil. But after the sun rose, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. But others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundred, some sixty, and some thirty times as much. The one who has ears to hear, let him hear.’

“And the disciples came up and said to Jesus, “Why do You speak to them in parables?” And Jesus answered them saying, “To you it has been granted to know the mysteries of the kingdom of heaven, but to them it has not been granted. For whoever has, to him more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but whoever does not have, even what he has shall be taken away from him. Therefore I speak to them in parables; because while seeing they do not see, and while hearing they do not hear, nor do they understand. And in their case the prophecy of Isaiah is being fulfilled, which says,

‘You shall keep on listening, but shall not understand;
And you shall keep on looking, but shall not perceive;
For the heart of this people has become dull,
With their ears they scarcely hear,
And they have closed their eyes,
Otherwise they might see with their eyes,
Hear with their ears,
Understand with their heart, and return,
And I would heal them.’

But blessed are your eyes, because they see; and your ears, because they hear. For truly I say to you that many prophets and righteous people longed to see what you see, and did not see it, and to hear what you hear, and did not hear it’” (MT 13:1-17).

But of course, you and I well understand now that Jesus spoke in parables not to confuse His own followers, which would have made no sense at all, but rather to confuse the Temple guards, who changed frequently. And whenever Jesus spoke of “having,” He was referring to spiritual growth and understanding, which to Him was the only thing worth having. Now let’s listen as He explains His parable.

 “‘Listen then to the parable of the sower. When anyone hears the Word of the kingdom and does not understand it, the evil one comes and snatches away what has been sown in his heart. This is the one sown with seed beside the road. The one sown with seed on the rocky places, this is the one who hears the Word and immediately receives it with joy; yet he has no firm root in himself, but is only temporary, and when affliction or persecution occurs because of the Word, immediately he falls away. And the one sown with seed among the thorns, this is the one who hears the Word, and the anxiety of the world and the deceitfulness of wealth choke the Word, and it becomes unfruitful. But the one sown with seed on the good soil, this is the one who hears the Word and understands it, who indeed bears fruit and produces, some a hundred, some sixty, and some thirty times as much.”

“Jesus presented another parable to them, saying, ‘The kingdom of heaven is like a man who sowed good seed in his field. But while his men were sleeping, his enemy came and sowed weeds among the wheat, and left. And when the wheat sprouted and produced grain, then the weeds also became evident. And the slaves of the landowner came and said to him, ‘Sir, did you not sow good seed in your field? How then does it have weeds?’ And he said to them, ‘An enemy has done this!’ The slaves said to him, ‘Do you want us, then, to go and gather them up?’ But he said, ‘No; while you are gathering up the weeds, you may uproot the wheat with them. Allow both to grow together until the harvest; and at the time of the harvest I will say to the reapers, “First gather up the weeds and bind them in bundles to burn them; but gather the wheat into my barn.”

“He presented another parable to them, saying, “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed, which a person took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all the other seeds, but when it is fully grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the sky come and nest in its branches.”

“He spoke another parable to them: “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened.”

“All these things Jesus spoke to the crowds in parables, and He did not speak anything to them without a parable. This was so that what was spoken through the prophet would be fulfilled:

“I will open My mouth in parables;
I will proclaim things hidden since the foundation of the world.”

“Then He left the crowds and went into the house. And His disciples came to Him and said, “Explain to us the parable of the weeds of the field.” And He said, “The one who sows the good seed is the Son of Man, and the field is the world; and as for the good seed, these are the sons of the kingdom; and the weeds are the sons of the evil one; and the enemy who sowed them is the devil, and the harvest is the end of the age; and the reapers are angels. So just as the weeds are gathered up and burned with fire, so shall it be at the end of the age. The Son of Man will send forth His angels, and they will gather out of His kingdom all stumbling blocks, and those who commit lawlessness, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. Then the righteous will shine forth like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. The one who has ears to hear, let him hear.”

“The kingdom of heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found and hid again; and from joy over it he goes and sells everything that he has, and buys that field.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a merchant seeking fine pearls, and upon finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold everything that he had and bought it.

“Again, the kingdom of heaven is like a dragnet that was cast into the sea and gathered fish of every kind; and when it was filled, they pulled it up on the beach; and they sat down and gathered the good fish into containers, but the bad they threw away. So it will be at the end of the age: the angels will come forth and remove the wicked from among the righteous, and they will throw them into the furnace of fire; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

“Have you understood all these things?” They said to Him, “Yes.” And Jesus said to them, “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure new things and old.”

“When Jesus had finished these parables, He departed from there. And He came to His hometown and began teaching them in their synagogue, with the result that they were astonished, and said, ‘Where did this man acquire this wisdom and these miraculous powers? Is this not the carpenter’s son? Is His mother not called Mary, and His brothers, James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? And His sisters, are they not all with us? Where then did this man acquire all these things?’ And they took offense at Him. But Jesus said to them, ‘A prophet is not dishonored except in his hometown and in his own household.’ And He did not do many miracles there because of their unbelief” (MT 13:18-58).

So immediately you see the problem. Since the First Council of Nicaea did not understand that Jesus spoke in parables not to hide His truths from His followers, but rather to hide what He was saying from the listening Temple guards, the First Council of Nicaea treated His parables as something like a secret code meant by Jesus to separate the saved from the damned. But their notion is absolute nonsense! Jesus wanted every person of good will to understand what He was saying. He sought only to deceive those Temple guards, who could bring Him on charges before the Sanhedrin if they heard Him say anything subversive of Judaism. And we now know that there is no hell anyway, and we know that the place of wailing and gnashing of teeth is only an outer darkness to which we might temporarily condemn ourselves if we find self-forgiveness to be too difficult.

And as we read more closely, it looks as if the latter part of this Chapter might well be bits of wisdom remembered at random from the Lord’s many sayings, and compiled here much later when this Biblical Chapter was eventually assembled. That remark about scribes who are disciples of the kingdom of heaven is certainly a later addition. The final paragraph is tacked-on, too, and it makes you sympathize with Jesus. Indeed, no one is a prophet in His own village!

I should note that I can’t find anything like the two passages that Jesus is said to have quoted from the prophets, nor did any of the prophets use parables much at all. But the crucial point that Thomas wants us to take from reading this Biblical Chapter is that all four of the canonical Gospels were edited when the Christian Bible was first assembled by Roman Councilors in the year 325, so we must be wary. We must always engage our growing understanding of Jesus as we read the Gospels, because the mistakes made by those Roman Counselors, whether they were innocent or venal, cannot be allowed to come between us and the precious truths that Jesus means to teach us. Indeed, we are fortunate to still have remaining any of Jesus’s genuine teachings at all!     

The fundamental truth that we receive now with joy is that everything is Consciousness. Which means that the righteous who will shine like the sun include every last one of us! Since we all are inextricably part of a single Consciousness, as each of us raises our own individual consciousness vibration, we all will minutely raise the consciousness vibrations of everyone else on earth. And so, as Jesus knew, the kingdom of God will then gradually and gloriously overspread the whole earth. This is indeed more like the process of leavening bread than anything else. As Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13:33). And that process of leavening, as we might well speak of it, affects even the upper realms as well. Because Consciousness is all that exists.

So never for a moment think that your efforts to raise your personal consciousness vibration are only a little thing. Those efforts that you make are EVERYTHING. Because YOU are everything. In some way that researchers are struggling now to better understand, it is you who encompass all of Consciousness. All of this is somehow happening in your own individual mind. And if each of us  sufficiently understood that this is how it all actually works, there would be only love, forevermore.

Let every tongue and every tribe responsive to His call,
to Him all majesty ascribe, and crown Him Lord of all.
To Him all majesty ascribe, and crown Him Lord of all!

Oh, that with all the sacred throng we at His feet may fall!
We’ll join the everlasting song and crown Him Lord of all.
We’ll join the everlasting song and crown Him Lord of all!
– Edward Perronet (1726-1792), from “All Hail the Power of Jesus’ Name” (1780)

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