When the moon is in the seventh house,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars.
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,
Age of Aquarius, Aquarius! Aquarius!

Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust abounding.
Golden living dreams of visions,
Mystic crystal revelation,
And the mind’s true liberation. Aquarius!! Aquarius!!
– Galt Macdermot (1928-2018), James Rado (1932-2022), from “The Age of Aquarius” (1967)

I remember that glorious time as if it were yesterday! There are a few decades that can be recognized right away as pivotal. In the United States, the 1770s and the 1860s were big decades, although not happily so, since they saw civil wars that pitted neighbor against neighbor and tore families apart. But to be young in the 1960s was such a glorious time that nobody who lived through the Sixties ever will quite get over it. Even though we are in our seventies now, just the thought of having been young back then can bring us a little secret smile. It was not only that we were able to get away with a whole lot more back then. But in the Sixties, being young had a lot more value than being young does now. It makes me sad for today’s young people to see how watered-down their big causes are, how awful their favorite music is, and in general how much less dramatic their coming-of-age is now than ours was back then. I mean, kids were marching in the streets in 1968 by the hundreds of thousands, burning bras and sticking flowers into rifle-barrels. I actually thought the whole world might be ending. Now, THAT was a youthquake!

• We had the music! There is nothing now to compare with Sixties music. We had not only the British invasion, but even bigger than that, we had Doo-Wop and Motown. The black singing groups that came out of the Sixties developed a beautiful meld of church, Civil Rights, and war protest music that was lively, fresh, and gorgeously danceable.
• We had Vietnam! A trivial and useless war for which they were drafting boys who then died for nothing gives you a genuine reason to march in the streets and make a gigantic fuss! Before the Federal government wised up to its mistake, they had a full-scale revolt of the young on their hands. They might on occasion talk about it, but they never again will bring back the draft, short of a genuine intergalactic invasion.
• We had rebellion for rebellion’s sake! There is a line from a James Dean movie where someone asks him what he is rebelling against, and he says, “Waddaya got?” That line perfectly captures the mood of the Sixties. Coming right after the battened-down Fifties, when our mothers all were chained to stoves, the push for women’s liberation really caught on in the Sixties. Congress didn’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment until 1972, but the drive for its passage began in the Sixties. Personally, I am glad that it never was ratified. As I told male friends at the time, women are “not equal, but better.” And the sexes are different enough physically that having made that amendment part of the Constitution would have raised repeated future issues. But the point had been made.
• We had Saint Martin! I grew up in a tiny town in central Massachusetts, and I never saw a single living person of any race but my own until I got to college. But the Civil Rights movement was my favorite TV show. I recall that once as a young child I pointed out to my mother that Nat King Cole looked exactly like our family doctor. My mother sputtered, “But he’s black!” Well, true. But other than that, they could have been twins. My mother wasn’t racist, but like me, before television she had not been much exposed to the outside world. And when I first met Dr. King on TV, it was love at first sound. I couldn’t get enough of the way he talked and the beautiful, magical things he said. That plain-spoken man, so young and so mild, made an epic TV hero. They were attacking his people with dogs and fire hoses, and still he spoke like Jesus. I vividly recall the morning when I learned that he had been assassinated. For real. They had killed Dr. King, and I was devastated! It was then that I personally met the ugly face of racism. We were college seniors, and the girl I was walking with to class had been my friend since freshman year. But she was from New Orleans, I was from Massachusetts, and when I told her in tears how appalled I was that Dr. King had been assassinated, she snapped at me, “He wasn’t assassinated! He was not a public figure!” I don’t believe that she ever spoke to me again.
  

It really isn’t easy to be young. As superannuated children, those who are young continue to see many things in only one dimension, while the world exists in not even three dimensions, but really in such a nuanced complexity that even now, at my age, I look at the world that my generation has made, and I am amazed by it. If you are not amazed by it, then you are not considering it deeply enough. What has made me think about this process of getting over being young has been a conversation with my beautiful granddaughter about her post-college career search last weekend, and also answering emails from some of our commenters about last week’s blog post. 

And I have spent this past week trying to digest the enormity of Jesus’s eternal life. 

When we were young, we thought that we understood love. We thought the decade of the 1960s was all about love! But Jesus has been living an intense and boggling seven-millennia-long love affair with all of humankind. And now I am being called upon to help the world to understand the Master’s beyond-epic kind of love?  

Almost four years ago, I began to write The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. This was a project that my Thomas clearly had decided upon, since it just started happening one day and it flowed right out of me. I thought at first this second book was unnecessary, since we already have Liberating Jesus. Then as it was being written, I began to see that, yes, it was useful. We completed it, and the cover was designed, but Thomas refused to let me publish it. I assumed that there was some revelation yet to come, so I simply put it aside. It was only after the whole seekreality.com website to teach about life after death was thought up, undertaken, and even completed, that my Thomas then proposed the idea of creating a website for Jesus as well. And the way that he did it made me think it had been a part of his plan all along.

So then he took me on that field trip to the astral plane to meet Jesus in person last April, specifically so Jesus could tell me His own version of the Christmas-and-Easter story. And, guess what? Jesus turns out to be a regular guy! Well, not precisely regular, but very long ago He was an incarnated being. That was Thomas’s missing piece. And since then, he and Jesus have made me feel comfortable with telling the story of Jesus’s life in a way that is so real and relatable, and at the same time so amazing that the mind quails. That Someone who began as a human being can always have loved His fellow man as much as Jesus loves His fellow man is simply impossible to imagine.

I am going to try to tell this story as simply as I can. It is not a simple story, because the Being Who is Jesus is so extraordinary in one salutary way. He loves people. I mean, He really loves people. I have met Him now. I know Him. It doesn’t surprise me that people slavishly followed Him all over Galilee, because Jesus is extremely charismatic. He makes you feel as if He loves you so much that you must be the most important person in the world. And apparently He always has been this way.

In about 6500 BC, in the area that we now refer to as Babylonia, a small walled city was overrun and its inhabitants were massacred. And the middle son of three princes of its royal family had attained all grace, so He was admitted to what we now call the seventh level of the afterlife, which is the Godhead level. The Being who would eventually become Jesus was upset to be separated from His brothers, but He was still in contact with them by mind. He asked them to wait in place while He figured out what was going on. His older brother, the future Thomas and now my spirit guide, waited. Their younger brother, who would one day be the Apostle John, waited briefly. But Thomas’s wait extended for 4500 years.  

Jesus refused to meld with the Godhead Collective, as all other seventh-level beings were melding. Instead, He asked a lot of questions, and He never got satisfactory answers. In that much younger reality, there was not even a folkloric explanation for what had happened to Him. But gradually He came to understand that there was some kind of contest being run in life, and He had won it. He had achieved spiritual perfection. But He refused to win a contest that seemed to be so unfair! So eventually He decided that He had to go back. He wanted to figure out how everyone on earth also could win this contest.

It seems to have taken Jesus almost 4500 earth-years to convince whatever Councils had to be convinced to allow Him to take an unprecedented extra earth-lifetime from out of the Godhead. This seems never otherwise to have been done, either before or since. He proposed it as a combination research and teaching mission: He intended first to study humankind while He was again on earth in a human body, so He could figure out how everyone could master the same level of spiritual development that had enabled Him to attain the seventh level; and then He would teach those steps to the world. Jesus told me that they thought He was crazy to want to do this (not His word choice). But over many centuries, and out of His pure obsessive love for humankind, He wore them down. They assembled for Him His personal Council for guidance. They insisted on sending the Archangel Gabriel to announce His birth to His expectant parents, and invisible archangels to protect Him on earth at all times, so when Jesus told His disciples that He could call up twelve legions of angels for His protection (MT 26:53), He was not bluffing. He wanted His two beloved brothers from His final earth-lifetime to serve as His companions in this lifetime as Jesus, and my faithful Thomas still was there waiting for Him in the astral plane; although apparently John had taken other lifetimes in the meantime. And so the three brothers were reunited, and together they planned that monumental divine lifetime. 

All of which means that Jesus was indeed born as the Son of God. He researched and then He gave us the easiest method for achieving rapid spiritual growth that ever has been devised. And when He could not convince iron-age primitives that they would easily survive their deaths, He deviated severely from the plan that He had agreed with His Council that He would follow, which had been to leave His body before its natural death. Instead, He ordered His archangels to allow Him to be arrested, and He endured  crucifixion and death so He could reanimate His dead body, rise from the dead, and prove to us that human life is eternal. But even with all that Jesus did for us in that single lifetime, what amazes me most is what He then did after His resurrection.

It is Jesus’s life of love over the most recent two thousand years – the life that the world doesn’t know about – that truly and completely boggles my mind. Yes, I understand why He did it. And my Thomas and I have talked about it more than we have talked about any other aspect of Jesus’s life. But still, I have not come up with a way to really wrap my mind around it.

Jesus has spent the past two thousand earth-years working with His much-expanded personal Council, doing nothing but nursing millions of victims of Roman Christianity back into mental and spiritual health. Many of these people died screaming in agony, burning at the stake or being broken on the wheel or on the rack, being tortured to death in Jesus’s name. Or they died in wars that were fought in His name, and all for a religion that had co-opted and was using His name, and that had murdered on crosses or in coliseums all the millions of His earliest followers. And that imposter religion was teaching now not the spiritual truths that Jesus had painstakingly discovered, but instead it was teaching only fear-based, human-made dogmas that amounted to lies. And Jesus has devoted Himself to all this deeply love-based healing over two thousand years without the slightest murmur of complaint to anyone.

Okay. Please read that paragraph again. I submit to you, my dear friends, that this is what real love is. This is love in action. We thought back in the Sixties that we were acting out of love, but my dear brothers and sisters, we never knew the meaning of the word! There was nothing that Jesus could have done as a discarnate Being about the fact that Rome had co-opted and corrupted His movement almost from the start. They had stolen even His name! Back then, He loved so much that He could spend literally every moment for the next two thousand years as just plain church-Jesus, constantly loving and comforting people who all had suffered so much at the hands of bastard Roman Christianity. The Roman Christian Church stole everything from Jesus. And He never has complained about that. His whole heart and soul has been devoted to repairing what has been done to all these people He loves.

So yes, I am going to give Jesus His website. And I will do with the rest of my life whatever my precious Friend asks me to do. I intend to plan more lifetimes to give to Him! But dear God, no matter how hard I try, I really cannot understand You, Jesus. And I am having a great deal of trouble finding a way to explain You to people. I cannot explain so much love to the world! I cannot begin to comprehend it myself, no matter how I try. But thank You for showing me how it feels to finally look upon the face of God.

When the moon is in the seventh house,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,
Age of Aquarius, Aquarius! Aquarius!
Aquarius!! Aquarius!!
– Galt Macdermot (1928-2018), James Rado (1932-2022), from “The Age of Aquarius” (1967)

Imagine there’s no heaven. It’s easy if you try.
No hell below us. Above us, only sky.
Imagine all the people Livin’ for today.

Imagine there’s no countries. It isn’t hard to do.
Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion, too.
Imagine all the people, Livin’ life in peace.
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us, And the world will be as one.
– John Winston Lennon (1940-1980), from “Imagine” (1971)

 It amazes me to say that Jesus easily could have sat down at the piano and written “Imagine” with our dear Brother John. Well, except for the “Imagine there’s no heaven” part, although Jesus wouldn’t call where He is living now “heaven.” He would call it simply reality. Just a few days ago I was in shock about what Jesus was saying, and with no idea of what He might say next. Here is a Man who has accepted the torture and murder by Roman Christianity of millions upon millions of people in His name over seventeen hundred earth-years. And I was used to that Jesus. How clueless I was! I assumed that He simply loves people. So He welcomed, and He patiently healed all those victims, and in the process He Himself became ever more personally powerful, as would happen to anyone Who is living such constant, intense and perfect love in a reality governed by Consciousness. Then all in a moment, He didn’t just turn over all the money changers’ tables in the Temple (MT 21:12). Oh no. One day He decided to turn over and smash the entire Temple altogether. And He did it joyously!

And Jesus did all of this just as we were in the process of finishing a book and preparing a website to showcase His teachings, and all at His request. But this is not personal. Actually, I wrote that book three years ago, and it was good of my Thomas to refuse to let me publish it back then, since He knew that Jesus was about to make it obsolete. Now I can revise it and make it accurate. And I will do that, because this does make sense. It is alarming, but also exciting, and beyond anything that I ever could have expected from our Friend; but it is consistent with the four canonical Gospels. And after a couple of nightly meetings that Thomas has not allowed me to remember, but that Jesus has pushed through the essence of anyway, I get it. I do. Traditional religions – and especially all the forty-two-thousand versions of Roman Christianity – all make our spiritual growth more difficult, or they even make it impossible. So we will abandon them now, and we will follow Jesus.

The revelation that has shaken me a bit at first is that the new Christianity of Jesus must be unstructured. It can have no leaders and no rules at all. It must be based only on the four canonical Gospels, after all the parts that later were added by Nicaea have been cut away. It is a movement and not a religion; it is a set of teachings meant to transform each of us internally. And I can see now how that might possibly work. Without the distractions of churchy political nonsense to bother and befuddle our days, perhaps for the first time in two thousand years, people with even just a passing interest in Jesus might read and begin to put into practice what He taught.

The notion of building an entire movement around the four canonical Gospels will seem nonsensical to many theologians. Those Gospels were chosen, only four out of many, by the Council of Nicaea in 325, and choosing those four now leaves out some things that Jesus reportedly said. Ignoring the letters of Paul leaves out some ideas developed by the early church. There is just one reason why building an entire movement around those four Gospels makes sense. And that reason is that Jesus wants us to do it. He believes that people coming out of Roman Christianity will feel safest and most comfortable at first with just the canonical Gospels. And Jesus adds that if those who have been lifelong Roman Christians never venture beyond the canonical Gospels, they will still have enough of what He taught to achieve the kingdom of God on earth. Therefore, what they have will be sufficient. And if they want more, then they also will have the other Gospels in publication and close at hand! But to do what the Roman Christians have done, and to distort the Lord’s message with admixtures from the Old Testament and from Paul all muddling through the sacred words of Jesus as if they carried equal weight is pure foolishness and plain sacriledge.

Jesus carefully designed His teachings as a prescription for rapid spiritual growth. He undertook that earth-lifetime as Jesus two thousand years ago specifically to study people in order to figure out how to help us to achieve the most rapid spiritual growth, and He tells that story in an Appendix to The Fun of Loving Jesus. Most importantly, His teachings really do work well! They work amazingly well, but they have hardly been tried because Roman Christianity soon intervened and added its fear-based ideas and dogmas, and thereafter hardly anyone has taken the Gospel words of Jesus seriously. I write this, and then I read it, and I am freshly horrified. We have revered the Man, while never once in two millennia caring at all what Jesus actually said?  

But if the Lord’s teachings are indeed the most ideal method for achieving rapid spiritual growth, why then did He not introduce them to us sooner and insist that we take them seriously? Of course, He has an answer for that question that shames Roman Christianity to its core. During all of the past seventeen earth-centuries, Jesus has sadly had a greater priority. In an astral reality without time, Jesus has spent the past seventeen hundred earth-years in healing the hundreds of millions of victims of Roman Christianity. First there were the pogroms against the millions of Jesus’s first followers, who were murdered as Roman Christianity was being established. Then there were the Crusades and the Inquisitions,  all the ways in which many millions of people over the centuries were murdered in the name of Jesus. (And my dear friends, if you never have read Helen Ellerbe’s book, then please, for the sake of all the people that Roman Christianity has martyred, try to find the time to read it now!) And then, of course, in the twentieth century came the Holocaust, and the torture and murder of almost six million Jews and another five million others, simply for their ethnicity. And the murderers of all these people were, as we know, Roman Christian Nazis. So let’s just say that Jesus hasn’t had the time to do anything about Roman Christianity until now, because for most of the past two thousand years He has been otherwise occupied.

So now at last Jesus is witnessing the slow death of the Roman Christian usurper of His name and His rightful place. Now we might say that He can choose to take over Christianity and the use of His own name at whatever point in the history of what should have been His movement He might like, and carry it forward from there. And as I think about it, He seems to have been considering how best to do exactly that, during the  months of earth-time that I have been observing Him since I channeled Liberating Jesus for Him in early 2015. We who are living on earth assume that upper-level discarnates know everything that we know about human life. But in fact, they seem to be entirely disengaged from it. And even our spirit guides are connected to what is currently happening on earth only through us, so I am amazed to tell you that a lot of Jesus’s exploration of current conditions on the earth plane seems to have been happening through my Thomas, the being that He still refers to as His brother even six thousand years after they actually last were brothers in the flesh. And of course, my Thomas in turn is connected to the earth through me. So the three of us are basically Texans. But I realize in retrospect that Jesus has been trying to find a way to introduce His teachings without disrupting the two billion Christians that He so much loves, only to see that there really is no way to remove the fear from Christianity. Fear is baked in the cake. And since fear is the opposite of love, what you fear you cannot love, so to follow any religion at all makes spiritual advancement close to impossible.

Once Jesus had worked out all of that, it didn’t take Him long to decide that His only option was to erase Roman Christianity from His personal vision altogether, and to allow the religion to quietly die on its own. And of course, for someone who has lived as Jesus has lived for so many centuries, feeding astral fish in an astral river and communing with those astral deer while He patiently loved all those millions of victims of Christianity back into spiritual health, for Him to go right back to teaching in Galilee makes sense. So that is what His website will be: a recreation of His canonical Gospel teachings, together with instructions about how to use those teachings to achieve the kingdom of God on earth in the way that He told us that it will unfold, not out there but rather in our innermost hearts. For as Jesus told one of the Pharisees, “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 17:20-21). It is the very same spiritual elevation that you came to earth to achieve. And once you steep yourself in the teachings of Jesus alone, and in the right order, and you simply trust Jesus – keeping your hand always in His – then I don’t care if you are eighty years old when you begin to take the Lord’s teachings seriously, you can make this your last earth-lifetime. That is how amazingly transformative these teachings really are.

Oh my dear ones, this is so simple! And it has always been simple. The religion has only ever been in the way. When each Christian stops fearing God as a deity so lacking in love that God could actually require the blood-sacrifice to Himself of God’s own Son, and when each Christian instead realizes and truly knows in his or her deepest heart that God loves you, purely and completely, as God’s own favorite and best-beloved child, then the kingdom of God can take root in your heart. The pure Christianity that Jesus taught is entirely devoid of fear, as Jesus first told us in some of the most beautiful and comforting words ever spoken. Jesus said:

“And which of you by worrying can add a single day to his life’s span? Therefore, if you cannot do even such a very little thing, why do you worry about the other things? Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither labor nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. Now if God so clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you? You of little faith! And do not seek what you are to eat and what you are to drink, and do not keep worrying! For all these things are what the nations of the world eagerly seek; and your Father knows that you need these things. But seek His kingdom, and these things will be provided to you. Do not be afraid, little flock, because your Father has chosen to give you the kingdom!” (LK 12:25-32).

Imagine no possessions. I wonder if you can.
No need for greed or hunger. A brotherhood of man.
Imagine all the people, Sharing all the world.
You may say I’m a dreamer, But I’m not the only one.
I hope someday you’ll join us, And the world will live as one.
– John Winston Lennon (1940-1980), from “Imagine” (1971)

“Pray, then, in this way:

‘Father, who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil.
For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’”
– Master Jesus, from The Bible (MT 6:9-13)

Our weekly Seek Reality podcast will be ten years old in June. And in those ten years I have received multiple thousands of emails from listeners that in retrospect have traced the long decline of Christianity. And that is surprising, given the fact that at least nominally, the reality that the podcast has been seeking has been the survival of death and the details of the afterlife. But we also have had a few Seek Reality guests with whom I have discussed the decline of traditional Christianity, so our listeners have learned that I have at least a passing interest in the religion as well. And I do invite emails from listeners. But still, so many who have emailed me have said some variant of the same three things:

• They have been devout Christians from childhood.
• They lately have fallen away from the religion.
• Yet despite that, they remain devoted to Jesus.

Then they say, “So, what can I do now?” Most of these folks are in their sixties or seventies. And when I correspond with them, it is clear that they are bright, sensitive, often college-educated, and vastly troubled by their situation. Most are Catholics or mainline Protestants. And if they haven’t stopped attending church, they expect to make that decision shortly. I wish I had started years ago to keep track of the problems they each were having with the religion. But as best I can recall, these have been their complaints:

• Churches are unwelcoming. Some of these people have moved, and the churches in their new area are cliquish. Or as they have developed concerns, there is no one able to answer their questions. Or when their former pastor died or retired or their longtime church was closed, they simply were left with no good options. But most of all, they are finding the congregations themselves to be standoffish and unwelcoming.
• Christian teachings are unbelievable. Modern Christians in general are finding traditional Christian teachings to be less and less believable. The notion that God could demand the sacrifice to Himself of God’s own Son before God can forgive us for Adam’s sin in eating the apple seems to be the hardest belief for most modern people to swallow, but there are other problems as well. People wonder whether the wine and bread really do become the blood and flesh of Jesus. And they wonder how it is possible for a loving God to condemn some of His children to burn alive in hell forever for even what seem to be trivial sins.
• They want a closer and deeper spiritual walk. This third problem is harder to pin down, but many Christians as they grow older find themselves wanting something more now than what is happening in modern churches of any denomination. Catholics find the homilies boring, and the Masses are just perfunctory. Even Protestants think their ministers are more and more flatly going through the motions. They want Jesus to be truly alive in the church! They want a sense of excitement and communion with the living Christ that somehow just isn’t happening for them.

So for them, and for Jesus, I am now going to try to give to my dear Friend His own Way. But apparently, Jesus no longer wants to call it His Way anymore. But instead, He wants to give it a whole new beginning. I talked last week about just how radical our beloved Friend has come to seem to me. So this fall we will publish The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. And then by the spring we hope to put the finishing touches on His planned website, called teachingsbyjesus.com. He seems just to want to walk the byways now, and teach and talk with and enjoy people. The last thing that Jesus wants to do is to start yet another religious variation! And after seventeen hundred years of Roman Christianity coming between Jesus and all the people who have been eager to know Him, He deserves the chance to speak directly with those who love Him, and in His own words to boot, without Roman Christianity any longer in His way.

 The picture that heads our post this week is a close approximation of Jesus’s face as He chooses to look today. The effect is different, and much diminished, since here you cannot feel His gorgeously silken personal energy. If you were as close to Him as you are to this picture, and if He wasn’t thinking about toning it down, you would feel a stunning and amazing power that, oddly, doesn’t seem to bother the children. But this is how He looks to His friends who are constantly coming and going by His river in the astral plane, and to all the millions of aborted children in all the children’s villages, with whom He spends a great deal of His time. And Jesus with toddlers climbing all over Him is a beautiful sight to see! Whenever possible, miscarried fetuses are reared by their own relatives, but nearly all the abortion victims grow to young adulthood in children’s villages over eight or nine years of earth-time. And since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973 in the United States, there have been so many babies flooding into the afterlife that their villages are everywhere. The children’s villages are off-limits to all but specially trained care-givers, and in the past fifty years Jesus has made those villages His personal mission.

But is the face in that picture how Jesus actually looked two thousand years ago? He says He is happy with the picture, but when I asked Him if that is how He looked on earth, He told me just that everyone looked like that back then. And of course, He may never have seen His own face in a mirror. I should add that when modern Christians who have just arrived in the afterlife come to Him to be blessed, He transforms at once into pale church-Jesus, with blue eyes and light-brown hair to His shoulders, and He blesses them. But the picture above is Jesus as He has looked to me whenever I have been allowed to remember a meeting with Him. Now I cannot imagine Him looking any other way.

Jesus intends to have us tell His story on His website from His own perspective.  I have told Him that in that case, we ought to hire a young man to be His website’s narrator. Even maybe someone who looks like Him? But He shudders at the thought of that. Oh no. He trusts me, but that is only because Thomas can control me. He has been betrayed so often that now He trusts no one in a material body, which is a sad commentary on human nature. 

Beyond His life story as He told it to me, the only other thing that He wants on His website is His Gospel teachings. No dogmas. No rules!  Not even that we must love one another? He says No. He says that if you have rules, then you introduce the concept of Sin, which means that Fear comes next, and then you start the whole religion cycle over again. Oh lord. I am so looking forward to seeing how this goes!

It is a miracle that we have the Gospel teachings of Jesus preserved for us even as well as we have them preserved. When Jesus was in my mind for those two weeks that He channeled Liberating Jesus, He showed us how to recognize and pluck out the parts that Nicaea and others had later added to the Gospels. We will never have the words that were not preserved, but Jesus said as we were writing that book that the words that have survived are enough. And now I stop dead and I think yet again, oh my God. Why me?  

The idea of giving Jesus a website came from Thomas. Jesus doesn’t seem to know what a website even is, beyond a way to get information to people more efficiently; but then, He is always very far beyond busy. He has learned by experimenting to put only enough of Himself in my mind that it doesn’t feel as if my head is exploding, and this time I am more than just an instrument to Him. But I really doubt that He has ever been anybody’s spirit guide! He reminds me of my old law professors. For example, I said to Him in my mind, “I think you came to earth to abolish religions and teach us to relate to God directly. Am I right?” He said in response, “Hmmm. That is an interesting proposition. Can you prove it? Where do I say that?” Oy. So now I am back in law school?

But I think I actually can prove it. There are four steps.

First, You were disgusted with clergymen. For example, You said, “Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And, “Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). And also, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13). Right?

Second, You routinely violated the Sabbath rules.  For example, you plucked grain and You healed on the Sabbath. And You said, “The Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (MT 12:8). True?

Third, You frowned on public worship. You said, “Beware of practicing your righteousness before men to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. … 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” (MT 6:1-5).

 And Fourth, You told us to worship God in secret. You said, “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 6:6).

Oh wait, And Fifth, You wanted us to get past worshiping idols!  You said, “But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers.  God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 23-24). That is also against religions.

 And you called clergymen snakes and vipers, but we don’t need to get into that. So, am I right? You came to teach us to get past all religions?  

 There was a pause. Then Jesus said, “It would be more impressive if you had all of that memorized.”

Distantly, I could hear Thomas chuckling. And Jesus has the driest sense of humor. What, so He was just teasing me?

There was a very recent time when that experience would have demoralized me. Jesus has to reduce His energies so much to be in my mind without overwhelming me that it was hard to tell, but I thought He was smiling and sending me a hug, although I could barely feel any of it. This working with Jesus feels as if I have coaxed the most exotic bird to perch on my finger, but He might at any moment fly away. I just sent Him the thought that we will get this all sorted out soon enough.

The long and winding road That leads to Your door
Will never disappear. I’ve seen that road before.
It always leads me here. Lead me to Your door!

The wild and windy night That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears, Crying for the day.
Why leave me standing here? Let me know the way!
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Paul McCartney, from “The Long and Winding Road” (1970)

For years I have read the blogs and newsletters of a dozen public clergymen and theologians. They range from the highly respectable and much-beloved Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico to an unfashionable and thoroughly by-the-Book, fire-and-brimstone fellow at the other end of the range. I respect and love them all for their sincere and wholehearted devotion to God, to Jesus, and to their fellow man. Even though I am no longer practicing Roman Christianity, all of those who love and serve Jesus are my cherished brothers and sisters in Christ.

 This year is shaping up to be the most astonishing year of my entire life. Oh my goodness, I have actually met Jesus! You don’t consider such a thing to be even possible, although now Jesus really is my friend. He has a voice that I know, with a minimal accent. He has a beautiful face that I adore. He has that overwhelmingly powerful silken energy, and He has mannerisms that I fondly recognize. I think of Him smiling a little and turning away when I said something flattering to Him. Never do that. Jesus just wants to be accepted and loved as one of us.

 And now I read those daily or weekly missives from my old-friend clergymen with some amazement. They write as if my new friend, Jesus, has been sitting on a shelf for the past two thousand years with a blank stare on His face, just gathering dust. Or they even confidently write as if He is a quaint relic of some earthly Middle Eastern past. Why has it not occurred to any of them even to speculate about what He might have been doing during all that time since He last went home? Each human life is eternal, and what with the Inquisitions and the Crusades and all the rest of Roman Christian history, might it not have been worth at least a speculative blog post about Jesus’s possible subsequent involvement in the world? And perhaps the Lord’s own resulting further personal spiritual growth?

And my clergyman friends still write from within the religion! This fact astonishes me sometimes, especially with the more sophisticated of them. Max Planck’s revolutionary discoveries about consciousness are now a century old, and even though the mainstream scientific gatekeepers still are stonewalling them, his ideas by now have permeated our culture. Father Rohr is a Franciscan priest, and He actually said during one of His more recent newsletter cycles that he had thought about making some radical changes, but he had decided to “stay defiantly,” or words to that effect. Sometimes, when I am reading what these beloved clergyfolks write, I feel as if I am reading missives from some distant land that is stuck in the past and holding my dear clergyfriends prisoner. While Christianity continues to decline worldwide, they all still fret about terms and timelines and apologetics, and they fuss about modern concepts like something called “harmonial religion.” And all that I ever see them say about Jesus the Man is centered around events two thousand years in the past. Even then, their observations often involve details that were peripheral to the Lord’s life and work.

But I am so far beyond all of that now! And wow, I have got to say it: so is Jesus, pretty clearly. I don’t know who first used the term “church-Jesus,” whether He said it or I did, but Jesus seems to be just about as done with church-Jesus as I am. And at this point, Thomas no longer can effectively impede my curiosity, so this week I have dared to ask more questions. What were Thomas and Jesus fighting about? Of course, they weren’t actually fighting-fighting. And with Jesus’s permission, Thomas has been telling me about some of their experiments as they have tried to understand why Jesus can’t seem to feel anger. They have determined that He must have disabled His ability to feel anger while He was helping all those victims of Christianity.

At least, that is their present theory. Here were all those suffering people! Anyone else seeing them arriving home in that condition and in their millions would have become enraged, but Jesus felt only love and compassion for the torturers as well as the victims. Not normal. But Jesus tells Thomas now that He probably thought that if He had let Himself feel anger at what He was seeing, He might not have been able effectively to help all those victims. Still, we know that Jesus was able to feel some righteous anger during His lifetime as Jesus (See e.g. MK 7:1-23 and MT 21:11-13). So He and Thomas then together looked back even further, at their last earth-lifetime together as brothers, just as all of us can look at the records of our prior lives once we are back in our greater minds.

So what I was allowed to witness last week that led to Thomas chasing Jesus and pinning Him in the grass was a bit of their effort to recapture their lives lived within that ancient family that Thomas now tells me actually happened about 6,300 years ago. Which goes to show you that sibling rivalries can be remarkably persistent! Thomas was the oldest son in a ruling family, but Jesus was their mother’s favorite. She was lobbying to get Thomas removed as their father’s successor and Jesus installed in his place, even though Thomas was a warrior and already a successful general, and Jesus had never been willing to fight. Their youngest brother, who later lived an earth-lifetime as the Apostle John, didn’t figure into this rivalry. And later of course it all became moot when their city was wiped out in a massacre, after which Jesus became an ascended being. But Thomas and Jesus were able to get pretty deep into their memories, including recalling and using again the epithets that they had hurled at one another as boys, which Thomas translated into English. So their using those memories to try to revive Jesus’s ability to feel some level of anger was the nighttime event that Thomas had allowed me to remember. And thus they have established the curious Freudian fact that all that Jesus has to do now is to say “Butcher-Boy” to Thomas, and it puts Thomas into an immediate rage.

Now of late, Thomas and I have been discussing what more he and Jesus have been learning about how the process of spiritual growth seems to work. This question has seized Thomas’s mind, and with his current occupational limitation he mostly has just me to share it with, so he has been pulling me away from my other work to debate the question at hand. And that question for him has come down to this: Knowing what we know now, can we say that Jesus has actually, literally become God, having once been actually, literally just a human being, and in fact what my Thomas has referred to a couple of times lovingly and probably mostly in jest as his own bratty little brother? Jesus has been part of our discussion too, but since we have been talking about Him and He seems to be devoid of ego, He won’t contribute a point of view. I just have sometimes been feeling His silken energy nearby. I think He is curious. And while there probably is no clear-cut answer to this question, Thomas and I agree that the answer seems to be yes. It is yes no matter which of two different angles we take.

First: Jesus was born on earth as Jesus two thousand years ago directly from out of the Godhead. He had earned that spiritual level even back then, and His service to God and to humankind as Jesus surely has earned Him a great deal more in terms of spiritual growth. The fact that He chose not to return to and meld with the Godhead after His Ascension does not reduce any of that; but if anything, it further enhances it.

Second: The unique life of selfless love, sacrifice, and service on lowly Level Three that Jesus has been living for the past two thousand years has led to extraordinary additional spiritual growth that my Thomas witnessed as it was happening, and that amazing additional growth is obvious to me just as a visitor. But it really is impossible to quantify, in part because Jesus seems to be unwilling to test it.

Jesus has inadvertently made of Himself an experiment in extreme love and service. I cannot imagine that it ever will be replicated. If someone loves and serves hundreds of millions of people intensely, unceasingly, and for two thousand years, and so selflessly that He doesn’t allow His own spiritual development to advance by levels as it usually happens naturally, but instead He does all of this without ever leaving the third level of the astral plane, then what happens? Then you get Jesus as He is today. I find it hard to describe Him for you. It seems to be first now that He even feels free enough of fixing the mess that the Romans made of Christianity to even know who He is, Himself. This experimenting with trying to help Him feel human emotions again beyond love and sevice that He and Thomas have been doing has been helpful to Him, I think. It has helped to loosened and relax His mind. But what they have mostly learned is that at this point, Jesus is a Being unique unto Himself.

My mother was very close to death at the age of eighty-eight. After she came out of her coma, she even told me that her parents had come for her, but she had refused to go with them. So then a few days later she had a visit from a classic sixth-level being who told her that she would be given a little more time on earth. My mother had no idea what that being had been! She called it just “the big tall man.” And on that crowded hospital floor, she was the only one who saw it. Classically, sixth-level beings who appear on earth are often eight or more feet tall, very thin, and vaguely male or female but androgynous. They wear what look like angel robes with fancy belts and hats, and they glow with either a silver or a golden radiance. Or they might prefer to be simply a ball of light that you recognize as an individual being by its energy signature.

Jesus has been to the sixth level, which we are told is indescribably beautiful. But Thomas tells me that Jesus finds it boring, as of course He would. There are no regular people there. I haven’t asked Thomas whether Jesus has traveled even higher than Level Seven, which is the Godhead level, but I believe that He could indeed travel higher, if He chose to do that. Thomas is as curious as I am about how much power Jesus actually has at this point; indeed, we speculate that He is more powerful now than the entire Godhead Collective put together. Remember that even back when He resurrected His crucified body as Jesus, it has been estimated based on studying the scorch on the Shroud of Turin that He used more power to do that than we would be able to produce, even today. But not only does Jesus have no interest in testing His present power, but the whole idea of His having any kind of power that you could measure actually seems to disgust Him. Oddly, He seems to have come to equate divine power with money in some way, the lust for which He sees as having harmed so many of His human friends.

Jesus lives entirely by His own lights. In all of the whole gigantic astral plane, achieving the top of the sixth level and becoming one of those ten-foot-tall beings in angelic robes and with the flashiest belt and hat, all of it radiant with the brightest possible gold and silver and showing what a spiritual big-shot we are is everybody’s ultimate goal. And then there is Jesus. By choice, He is barely six feet tall, with short, curly hair and a regular beard and He wears just a plain astral robe that doesn’t glow at all. The only signifier of Jesus’s spiritual status is The Big One. The one that no one can hide. It is His overwhelmingly powerful and perfectly silken personal energy. And He even tries to tone that down.

Jesus innocently defies every convention of human spiritual growth that we have learned, or even that we can imagine. Thomas tells me that as Jesus has begun to think beyond His two-thousand-year detour into His need to minimize the harm that was caused on earth by Roman Christianity, some of what seems to be an endless supply of friends always coming and going are advising Him now to simply leave our astral dimension altogether. And Thomas tells me that some of Jesus’s inner circle also are advising Him to take that advice and disappear. I have had no idea about this, but Thomas tells me that Jesus, together with the Buddha and Krishna and some other great Wisdom teachers I have never heard of who were developed on earth are greatly revered in other dimensions. And I have heard Jesus say something about preparing to teach in those other realms.

So on Friday I asked my Thomas what he thinks that Jesus is going to do now. “Do you think He really will go and teach somewhere else? I think I can do a website about His teachings all on my own based on the Gospels and Liberating Jesus, if He wants to leave something of Himself here.”

Thomas said, “You know Him. What do you think that He will do?”

“I know what He should do. After we’ve just given Him two thousand years of grief!”

“But what do you expect Him to do?’

I thought about the Jesus I know. His voice. His face. I said, “He loves people. I think what would make Him happiest is staying here with us. And God knows, no one needs His teachings now more than we do, right here!”

Thomas smiled. And to the extent that it is possible for someone who is actually internal to give you a hug, I think he gave me a hug.

Many times I’ve been alone, And many times I’ve cried.
Anyway, You’ll never know The many ways I’ve tried.
And still they lead me back To the long winding road.
You left me standing here A long, long time ago.
Don’t leave me waiting here. Lead me to Your door!
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Paul McCartney, from “The Long and Winding Road” (1970)

When morning gilds the skies, My heart awaking cries:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Alike at work and prayer, To Jesus I repair;
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Does sadness fill my mind? A solace here I find,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Or fades my earthly bliss? My comfort still is this,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
The night becomes as day. When from the heart we say:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
In heav’n’s eternal bliss, The loveliest strain is this,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
– Anonymous/Unknown, from “When Morning Gilds the Skies” (ca. 1744)

Jesus does not want to be worshiped. I mean, He really does not want to be worshiped! I have experienced the sting of the Lord’s aversion to being worshiped on a personal level, so I know whereof I speak. Feminists in the nineteen-sixties used to say that a woman needs a man the way a fish needs a bicycle, and that about sums up the way Jesus feels about being worshiped. It has been nearly half a year since I sat beside Him on that astral riverbank and helped him feed His pet fish, and over and over since that night I have replayed in my mind the moment when He blurted, “Why are you so afraid of me?” He sounded genuinely hurt that night, as if I had out of the blue told Him that He had a bad smell perhaps, or even told Him that I thought His precious Gospel words were garbage. But my only confounding problem was His overwhelmingly powerful personal energy. I couldn’t even look at His face.

 Jesus had been patient and kindly that night with the Christians who had come for His blessing. They could feel His energy just as I could feel it, since in the astral plane our personal energies are impossible to hide. Among the rest of us, Jesus was God on the riverbank. It is no wonder that the tall man who was first in line to be blessed tried to fall to his knees in worship. But Jesus had been ready for that, and He had kindly helped the man to regain his feet. So, why had Jesus taken my reaction to His energy so personally?

Thomas lets me figure out most things on my own. And this has taken me quite some time. Thomas and I have met with Jesus often over the summer while my body slept, but I have not been allowed to remember those meetings. Basically, I have spent some time in the doghouse. That meeting beside the Lord’s astral river happened without Thomas’s having briefed me at all, so I seem to have flunked whatever test that was. And then Jesus tried out the possibility of doing a kind of Mikey-and-Carol thing for His upcoming website, where people would ask Jesus questions, and it turns out that I can hear Him in my mind just fine; but no way would people ever believe that I can chat with Jesus in my mind! So I have put a panicky kibosh on that idea.  

 It is easy for us to understand a human being wanting to be God. But how much harder it is for us to understand God wanting to be human! I am trying now to better understand Jesus so I can do a decent job with His website. And when I asked Thomas for the umpteenth time to tell me what we have been talking about when we have been meeting with Him all summer, he told me that he has been doing for Jesus what Jesus needs, and doing for me what I need. Which helps me not at all.

 So then on Wednesday morning, I began to get bits of a memory of what I soon came to realize we must have been doing on Tuesday night. Thomas and Jesus were sitting together on a little astral hillock beneath an orange sky, talking and gazing over Jesus’s river; and I was nearby. I didn’t have a sense of having a body. I was fascinated to realize that they seemed to be speaking in a kind of pidgin, several languages at once, so I recognized what sounded like some English words, and also French words and Spanish words, and also many words that I didn’t recognize. They were speaking softly, and their voices were rich with affection for one another. As the memory deepened, I was enjoying just listening to them. They have told us they were brothers very long ago, in Jesus’s last earth-lifetime before He ascended to the Godhead level, and you could hear that familial affection in their voices as they talked. I didn’t know what any of it meant, or the mixed languages, or whatever they were saying, but it didn’t matter. And this went on for a while. Clearly, they were happy just to be together.

Then Jesus was saying something more loudly, and standing, and dodging away from Thomas. I heard my Thomas mutter, “Brat!” as he was reaching for Jesus, but he missed Him; and then he was chasing Him into a herd of deer that happened to be nearby. I was horrified! I seemed to be very tall, or else I was rising above them so I could watch the drama of Thomas chasing Jesus among the deer. The animals were tame, so although some were spooked, most just moved out of the way and dropped their heads again to graze. I could see now that Jesus was nearly doubled over with laughter, but Thomas seemed to be genuinely angry. Jesus was dodging, watching for Thomas, but my Thomas was taller and stronger and inevitably he was going to catch Jesus. Which of course he did, and then they both went down. I didn’t want to see whatever was going to happen next, but perhaps I was supposed to see it. I rose higher. And there they were, in astral robes, my spirit guide and Jesus, the risen Lord, fighting like teenagers in the astral grass. But they weren’t really fiercely fighting. And astral bodies cannot be damaged. Thomas was holding Jesus down. I thought I heard Thomas say “Smite me, brat! Go right ahead!” and words I couldn’t recognize. Jesus’s eyes locked on mine, and there the memory ends.

By Wednesday afternoon I had resurrected that whole awful memory. And of course, I wouldn’t have it unless they both wanted me to have it. But I had to know how all of that had ended! And what had they been fighting about? Were they back on speaking terms by now? Tentatively I said to Thomas, “Will you tell me more about last night?”

“That was back in July.”

That was all that he wanted to say, but I got right in his face, so to speak. So then he sent me more in a bolus of thought.

Thomas told me almost fiercely that Jesus has not been human for thousands of years. Even as Jesus, He was born from the Godhead. So now Thomas was helping Jesus recall how it had felt to be human. And how to communicate by speaking in words, rather than sending whole ideas. And how to feel human emotions other than love and bliss.

What? So they had just been play-fighting? Thomas caught my thought. He sent me a second bolus with the further information that Jesus is incapable of feeling anger. They have learned at least that much. That is why the whole religious notion of an angry God is “hogwash.” Thomas said that word separately. “Hogwash.” He was telling me that even in the last lifetime that they had lived as brothers, Jesus had been incapable of feeling anger, just as I was sending him the mental image of a ticked-off Jesus chasing money-changers from the Temple with a whip. Thomas said, “At least, now He cannot feel anger!” as I was saying, “Are you crazy? Remember who He is! If He really did smite you, you’d go up in smoke!”

So then Thomas said, sounding bitter, “You could be of some help, you know. Instead of hovering around like a fool every night!”

I was outraged by that, and with reason. I haven’t even known what was going on! But Thomas was on a roll. He said in words, “You know He doesn’t trust people in bodies. You could help Him. Teach Him. I last died a hundred years ago! I am reminded of what it was like to be human only by guiding you! He wants to learn better English. Converse with Him in English. Just stop being so uneasy around Him!”

“Is that so He can talk on His website?

“And what if it is? Would you deny Him that?”

Well, no.

But how is it possible to explain to Someone Who has not been on earth for two thousand years that the fact that He is the most popular person on earth will not translate to popularity on His website? People expect Jesus to stay in His lane! He is God, for heaven’s sake. He is a religious figure! But Jesus’s greatest wish is to find a way to shield His personal energy enough so He can walk into some random building on earth in an astral body, and be with people again. He wants to just simply talk with people in English. In Spanish. That is all that He wants. I type these words, and my eyes fill with tears. Because He knows that He really can’t do that now. His elevated personal energy would give Him away. Or, worse, what I most worry about is that people would think He was an alien being, and they would turn on Him. But even if what He is planning now is just some kind of Second Coming on His website, that is never going to work. No one would believe such a thing could be real. But who is going to explain that to Him? 

Thomas finally realized on Thursday that I am just too thick to ever figure out why Jesus treats me differently, so he said just two words. He said, “Inner circle.” And after another half a day, I slapped my forehead. We think in terms of these little lifetimes, but Jesus has been living one continuous astral lifetime for the past two thousand years. If you are Jesus, your life is a very long game. He is used to the fact that the people closest to Him will repeatedly come and go. And I have no memory of it now, but apparently Jesus has a much-loved inner circle of friends. After I figured out the basics, Thomas filled me in. I first met Thomas at the start of the Roman pogrom against nonconforming Christians, some seventeen hundred years ago, so that was when I first met Jesus. And I became a part of this inner circle of people who are His personal friends. I have come and gone in His life through repeated incarnations as I lived seventeen lifetimes with Thomas, all of which were centered around protecting the Gospel teachings, and the last of which before this one was lived in the nineteenth century. I have no conscious memory of any of this while I am in this body, of course, but now I know it to be true. 

Thomas tells me that Jesus’s inner circle is not composed of religious figures. We are just what Americans might call His buddies, or the British might call His mates. And we are all male, or nearly all male, so the fact that in this lifetime I am female has been a source of some amusement. When we are between lives, we are in our right minds, as Thomas puts it, but when we are taking earth-lives we are living with diminished minds and amnesia issues. And beyond the fact that Jesus has more time to be social now, and He wanted to discuss with Thomas and me some details of His upcoming website, one of the reasons why He wanted to meet with me on April 6^th and have me remember the meeting was that one of the Christians about to be blessed would be a mother who had died in childbirth, and who would be coming to Jesus with her baby in her arms. Jesus had thought that might be a bonding moment to help me feel more at ease with Him, since I might speak with the mother and hold the child. There seems to be something about this gender-change thing that has put me out of sync with Him. But of course, I still was so nervous to be with Jesus, and He couldn’t risk upsetting the mother, so instead Thomas took me with him down the river while Jesus blessed the mother and her child.

But at least, I finally do get it now, after having spent this whole earth-lifetime feeling awkward around Jesus. I understand why He uniquely trusts me. Why my mind syncs so easily with His that I was able to channel Liberating Jesus, and why when He wants to speak to me in my mind, I can hear His voice as clearly as if He is speaking to me on a cellphone. Thomas tells me that I have begun to give Jesus lessons in spoken English conversation at night, sitting there on the riverbank and talking with Him. Now I even will look at His face. When Jesus told me a little joke, Thomas says that I was able to smile. But I still have trouble believing that I am past being stupid about Him, so for now it seems to be just as well that I not be allowed to remember our meetings.  

Jesus the risen Christ dearly loves people! All that He has done for the past at least five thousand years, He has done for His pure, joyous love for billions of people as individuals. Jesus doesn’t want worship because worship distances people from Him. So, no, Jesus doesn’t need religion. He doesn’t want religion. And surely, after all that He has done for us, the least that we who love Him can do is to try to give Him what He actually wants.

Let earth, and sea, and sky From depth to height reply,
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Be this, while life is mine, My song of love divine:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Sing this eternal song Through all the ages long:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
– Anonymous/Unknown, from “When Morning Gilds the Skies” (ca. 1744)

The church’s one foundation
Is Jesus Christ her Lord;
She is his new creation
By water and the Word.
From heaven he came and sought her
To be his holy bride;
With his own blood he bought her,
And for her life he died.
– Samuel John Stone (1839-1900) from “The Church’s One Foundation” (1866)

It astonishes me to realize that no Christian reformer ever has thought to go all the way back to The Way of Jesus and start a fresh movement based upon His teachings alone. Surely the history has always been there! Those Roman Catacombs with their millions of burials entirely free of crosses have always been available to provide the evidence that a non-fear-based Christian theology was possible. And even as late as Miss Corwin’s day, and the time of those who taught Miss Corwin, there were scholars who thought as Jesus thought. But still, we have had only Protestant reformations that have tweaked, but never have very much changed the fear-based Roman religion that was built on the bloody wreckage of The Way that Jesus so hopefully began.

 My favorite modern theologian is my fellow Texan, Keith Giles, who writes an excellent blog that I follow at Patheos.com. Sometimes I will suspect that Keith and I might be on the same page on some issue, and I’ll be reading and thinking, “Preach it, Keith!” But he is a trained Christian minister, so he uses the whole Bible, while I am a tagalong of the first Apostles that Jesus charged with His Great Commission.

And so, in theory at least, I have never heard of the Apostle Paul. You know Paul, that resolute fellow who began as a persecutor of the followers of Jesus, but who saw the light (quite literally) soon after Jesus’s crucifixion? Paul was a relative latecomer who barely made it into the Christian Bible by writing all those earnest letters to the first churches planted at Corinth and elsewhere. And I am just some spiritual hobbyist that Jesus has very lately recruited when He took it into His hallowed head to go modern and teach twenty-first-century folks through an educational website.

We each meet with our own spirit guides on most nights. And I have been telling my Thomas of late that I am still altogether clueless about what I am supposed to be doing with this website that he and Jesus want me to create. Thomas has been telling me that I should just do some videos based on Liberating Jesus. And, no worries. Once I get into it, Jesus will guide me. But I still feel stupid about doing this, so they have been working with me at night. A few mornings ago, I woke up with my own voice reciting in my mind what I think they mean to be the intro to Jesus’s website. I was saying something like, “Before the Crusades and the Inquisitions. Before the martyrs and the saints. Before Saint Paul and the Apostles, and before Christianity was even a religion, there was Jesus, the Man. Please join me as we sit at His feet and hear what Jesus has to say.” I thought, Hey, that sounds like a pretty good start!

For at least as long as I have been doing my Seek Reality podcast, I have been receiving emails from disaffected Christians. Nearly all of these folks were cradle-Christians who shared more or less my history. They were devout in childhood, and for much of their lives they attended churches where the pews were full. Still sincere as adults, they began to question dogmas like original sin and transubstantiation and a lot of other Christian ideas that frankly don’t make sense at all, and that have no basis in the teachings of Jesus. And as Catholics, especially, these people found that their questions weren’t getting intelligent answers. Indisputably, and despite the feeling that they were growing ever closer to the Jesus they had loved since childhood, these people – every one of them – were coming to reject the religion they had been following for their entire lives. And they were writing almost identical emails. Often literally word for word.

I have had hundreds of such emails, and I could answer them only by agreeing with the writers. I used to suggest they find Unity churches, but Unity has become more and more ossified into mostly studying the words of the Founding Fillmores and their friends, which is the last thing Charles and Myrtle Fillmore would have wanted. Of late, all I can do is to send these people PDFs of Liberating Jesus. In truth, until Jesus has a website of His own, there is no place where I can send them because every form of Christianity is, as a friend of mine disdainfully puts it, at best some form of “Paulianity.” Last Wednesday night I was interviewed by a wonderful radio host who used the same term, and who actually had just read both The Fun of Dying and Liberating Jesus. Which was a refreshing change, since most interviewers hardly bother to even open the books. I’m sure I had heard that term before, but I don’t get out much. And I do feel for Paul. Like me, he had had an experience of light. Like me, he was close to people who knew Jesus, but he was not in their inner circle. But still, he tried his best. And he did channel some wonderful passages, especially 1Cor 13. He was close, but in the end no cigar for Paul.  

I seem to be meeting with Jesus and Thomas on many nights now as the planning for the Lord’s website takes shape, although Thomas won’t allow me to remember these meetings. Jesus really does want  to tell His own story, so He can separate Himself from the Roman Christian Jesus that seems to be fixed in people’s minds. But He is willing to allow His story to be given just as a link. His teachings are to be the focus. Thomas tells me that when the Lord was on earth as Jesus, He was always keenly interested in knowing what the people were saying about Him, which is not surprising when you know His actual story. And Thomas in that lifetime was a random civilian and not an official disciple, so he could come and go anonymously as Jesus’s spy among the populace. A little of this actually made it into the canonical Gospels. For example:

“Now when Jesus came into the region of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, ‘Who do people say that the Son of Man is?’ And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; and still others, Jeremiah, or one of the other prophets.” He said to them, ‘But who do you yourselves say that I am?’ Simon Peter answered, ‘You are the Christ, the Son of the living God’” (MT 16:13-16).

Two points should be made here. The first, of course, is that this is yet another reference to reincarnation that slipped past the First Nicaean Councilors’ efforts to remove all such references from the Bible as they assembled it. Clearly Jesus was talking about reincarnation, as were His disciples. And second, what follows is the most blatant piece of anachronistic nonsense that was added to the Gospels by First Nicaea. This is what the Roman church-builders would have dearly loved for Jesus to have said during His lifetime. He never said it, so they simply made it up three hundred years later:

“‘And I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven’” (MT 16:18-19).

It is clear that Jesus never said any of this. For one thing, “Petros,” would be a pun for “rock” in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic. There was no idea of a “church” in Jesus’s day. Jesus never referred to “Hades,” nor to the gates of Hades. Jesus referred to the kingdom of heaven as an internal concept, and not as something physical that would have had keys. And He certainly would not have felt able to personally empower any human being to bind or to loose anything in heaven! But, so it goes. When you are a fourth-century Roman councilor, and your boss is a Roman Emperor, you try very hard to do your part.

 The teachings of Jesus are masterful in their power. One thing that we are discussing in these nightly meetings that I am not being allowed to remember beyond keeping the barest gist of some of them is the fact that Jesus’s teachings have multiple levels of depth, and this is true of even His simplest statements. On the surface, a child can understand them. Take, for example, “Why do you call me good? God alone is good” (LK 18:19). Or, “Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven” (MT 18:3). Both are easy statements for even a child to read and to find understandable. And yet in fact, each statement is spiritually so profound that a study group could spend hours discussing each of them and never exhaust the possibilities. A lot of what Jesus says is like that, and most of His sayings are in addition interrelated. 

I have done very little studying of any religion other than Christianity, so a recent Patheos article about the Buddha’s wife caught my eye. Effectively, it suggests that enlightenment for a Buddhist comes from being closeted away from people and away from human life, which is astonishing, considering the fact that we enter these earth-lives specifically in order to experience the spiritual stresses of human life, and to use them to push against in order to grow spiritually. In fact, Jesus spent the first part of His life studying how best to use the stresses of human life to better effect our spiritual growth, and then He designed His teachings to make the best use of our everyday stressors to elevate our consciousness vibrations. Ever since I read that article, I have been thinking about that difference – meditating on it – and wondering. How is it possible that you might choose to either more deeply engage with the world, or to withdraw from it altogether, and still arrive at the same more spiritually elevated place?

When Jesus walked the earth two thousand years ago, He was such a very young man! He died away from this world at only thirty-three, and as I read over His teachings again, I am reminded of how very young in earth-years He was. And yet, how wise. For His earth-years, He was extraordinarily wise. He had studied humankind so closely and with such a specific purpose in mind that by the time He was thirty years old, He had figured out the primary role of Consciousness… or else He had learned it directly from God. And He used His knowledge of how Consciousness works to create teachings which can raise human consciousness vibrations with amazing efficiency. Had the Romans not gotten in the way, the kingdom of God would have overspread the earth long since.

But then, of course, came the stamping-out of the followers of The Way of Jesus, and then the Crusades and the Inquisitions, and millions of people were made to suffer and die for their crime of following Jesus. My Thomas has become concerned that I might want to slack off on working soon, my being on the older side after all, so he has made sure to tell me about the tortures especially, the hot irons and the slow-broken limbs, the parents made to watch their children being tortured and murdered one by one. And Jesus Himself personally tended to the most damaged of the sufferers in His rehabilitation gardens that filled the afterlife during those awful times. After death we never sleep, so there were whole centuries when Jesus quite literally did nothing else but lovingly care for screaming and suffering people. And since Thomas was His close confidante through all of that, my own spirit guide has been able to assure me that the Lord never has said a single unkind word, not even against the torturers. And Thomas has laid all of this on me just so I won’t slack off now. No, I get it. I do. Jesus abundantly deserves His own website. I am completely inadequate to the task, but since He has asked me to do it, I will try.  

Jesus came to a younger, more innocent world two thousand years ago. And since then, there can be no question that He has dealt with the very worst fruits of humankind. Toward the end of His earthly life, His followers said to Him, “‘We know that You know all things, and that You have no need for anyone to question You; this is why we believe that You came forth from God.’ ‘Do you now believe?’ Jesus replied. ‘A time is coming and in fact has come when you will be scattered, each to your own home. You will leave me all alone. Yet I am not alone, for my Father is with me. I have told you these things, so that in me you may have peace. In this world you will have trouble. But take heart! I have overcome the world’” (JN 16:30-33). Between the day when He spoke those words and now, Jesus has endured more personal pain in healing the awful pain of others than any of us can imagine. He has indeed overcome the world! And soon, He will return in what will be an unexpected sort of Second Coming. Although in truth, of course, He never really left.

Elect from every nation,
Yet one o’er all the earth;
Her charter of salvation,
One Lord, one faith, one birth;
One holy name she blesses,
Partakes one holy food,
And to one hope she presses,
With every grace endued.
– Samuel John Stone (1839-1900) from “The Church’s One Foundation” (1866)