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?
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)

The most astonishing thing about my recent visits with Jesus was the way that He presented Himself as just a usual inhabitant of the astral plane. He looked and acted and spoke as a pleasant young man maybe five feet ten inches tall wearing a simple white astral robe that didn’t glow at all. He wore no signifiers of rank, no hat, and no belt beyond a braided cord. The only thing about Jesus that was at all remarkable was His extraordinary personal energy, which is how we recognize one another in the astral plane. As we elevate ourselves spiritually over many lifetimes, our personal energies become ever richer, ever stronger, and ever much more powerful, but still there are always high notes and low notes, so everyone’s personal energy is a unique signature. You feel that complex personal energy from people whenever you are near them, so in the afterlife and in the astral it is really by people’s personal energies and not visually that we recognize them. And Jesus’s personal energy is extraordinary. It is just one consistent very high note, with no low points at all. Think of someone singing a sustained operatic high note. People’s personal energies are perceptible on earth as well, but here they are subdued and masked by the way we look, so we only know that this or that person feels nice, or maybe not so nice to be around. But Jesus’s gorgeous personal energy is so overwhelming that unless He remembers to keep it toned down, those who are not also very elevated find it almost painful to be near Him.  

One of the things that surprised me when I was first doing afterlife research several decades ago was my gradual discovery that the afterlife is a very status-conscious place. Who would imagine such a thing? The only status is, of course, our relative level of spiritual growth as that is measured by how high we are vibrating and, therefore, the level of the afterlife or the astral plane that we can comfortably attain. Some of us can get to and hold Level Four comfortably, and a few can make it to the top of Level Five. A very few can achieve and hold the top of Level Six, which is the Teaching Level, the level just below the Source. But Jesus is actually vibrating much higher even than the Source Level, or what is also called the Godhead level. Thomas tells me that once, when he teased Jesus into doing it, Jesus traveled and took Thomas with Him into the unknown territory that is far above our reality’s Godhead Level, and with no energetic resistance felt at all. But they didn’t stay there very long. Jesus found it boring to be so high, with no people up there who needed His help.

But the point is that each of these levels of spiritual achievement grants to us the right to wear specific indicators of merit that are honestly worn and highly respected by everyone. You might proudly wear astral robes that glow in significant colors, plus ever-more-important-looking hats and belts, extra body height, and even a distinctively-colored cape once your spiritual rank is high enough. What extra insignias Jesus might be qualified to wear, you and I cannot even imagine! And yet there He sits on His humble riverbank on lowly Level Three wearing no signifiers of rank at all, just warmly greeting new Christian afterlife arrivals and very occasional earthly visitors, telling us His remarkable stories, and of course from time to time feeding His fish. So at first, I had some trouble believing who He even was.

 That next morning after our first long meeting on April 6^th of last year, I said nervously to Thomas, “That really wasn’t the real Jesus, right?”

Thomas said, “You know exactly who He was.” My Thomas does not suffer fools.

And then of course Jesus did something that next morning to cheer me up that I have reported here. He and Thomas pulled off a sort of vaudeville act in the back seat of my car that had me stopped dead in the middle of a busy city street and doubled over with laughter. But even in the rank-conscious afterlife, Jesus needs to wear no signifier of His extraordinarily exalted rank. When you are vibrating even above the Godhead level, your personal energy is the only signifier you need.

I have learned so much more about Jesus in the past year! Just as the churches tell us, Jesus is fully God and fully Man, and we now understand how very true that is because He has shared with us His completely human history. And yet, since He is now vibrating at such an exalted level, the one aspect of His unique persona that requires maintenance – and a lot of maintenance! – is His humanity. In the natural course of things, Jesus would have either merged with an exalted aspect of the Godhead Collective five or six thousand years ago, or else He would have continued to raise His personal vibration even above our reality’s  Godhead level, until He lost touch with this universe’s reality altogether. That Jesus has continued to raise His consciousness vibration even without the usual earthly stressors has happened because he has devoted His past seventeen hundred earth-years to lovingly healing the horrendous damage among new afterlife arrivals that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity has done to so many hundreds of millions of people with its Inquisitions and Crusades and its appalling fear-based teachings, and most of that damage has been done in Jesus’s name. His doing such loving healing work has been a powerful driver of His further spiritual growth, so the Jesus that I first met last year is far more elevated spiritually than was the Jesus who long ago taught on earth.

And if that had been all that Jesus had done in the past two thousand years, He would by now be simply God. Period. We might be thinking of Him as seated at the right hand of the Father. And He would have lost touch altogether with earth-based humankind in any sort of personal way, as fully lost to us as a balloon would be lost that had long since slipped its earthly tether. He would have so immensely increased His consciousness vibration by lovingly healing those tens of millions of damaged people, and He would have become by this point long since no longer in touch with our reality at all, nor would He be in loving touch with anyone in it. But thanks to Jesus’s little band of friends, all of whom have been with Him for thousands of years, Jesus is still carefully being maintained in emphatic touch with His human side as well.

It is only lately that I have given much thought to Jesus’s friends and their ongoing role in His life. My Thomas, who is Jesus’s older brother from His final earth-lifetime lived six thousand earth-years ago, is the closest to Jesus of this little band. And since Thomas is my spirit guide, and therefore he is responsible also to me, apparently Thomas has been bringing me along  on many nights of this earthly life, whenever he has gone to meet with Jesus. I simply have had amnesia for the event. What was different about our visits to Jesus last summer was that Jesus liked the idea of having me remember those experiences, since at the time we were working on seekreality.com and on teachingsbyjesus.com. Jesus is not very knowledgeable about websites, but He wanted to talk about ideas with me. And I cannot recall ever seeing any of the other members of Jesus’s team when we were with Him, but gradually Thomas has answered my questions. Apparently there are about thirty beings in Jesus’s little group, nearly all of whom present in male astral bodies, and some of whom have lived earth-lifetimes with Jesus but none of whom ever was a famous saint or in any way very notable. My Thomas’s stint as Thomas Jefferson is the most famous past lifetime of their lot. But what they have in common is that all of them have sworn their loyalty to Jesus in preference to ever becoming perfected beings themselves. They will neither join an advanced Collective nor ever rise above our Godhead. Instead, they are pledged to work for love in service to Jesus for eternity.    

And together they help Jesus to maintain His humanity. Which, as I have glimpsed that process, turns out to be no easy thing. For night after night last summer, I accompanied Thomas to that astral riverbank with awareness for the experience, and I watched as my Thomas talked with his Brother, teased Him, tussled with Him, and treated Him as a regular human guy. As I watched, Jesus even once called Thomas some insulting name and then dodged away from him. I think the word that Jesus used meant “Butcher” in another language, since in a long-ago earth lifetime Thomas had once been a general. So then Thomas muttered “Brat!” and chased Jesus among His pet deer and caught Him, bigger and stronger as he is, and he actually play-beat Jesus up. I doubt that the others in Jesus’s loyal group ever take such liberties with the King of Kings, but in reality that is the kind of thing that Jesus really needs, that deeply regular human touch. He has not been on earth or interacted with people who are living in bodies for the past two thousand years, and He has no idea any longer about what that would even be like. Jesus has also asked me a few times to share with Him trivialities from my daily life, and He has listened to me as He always listens to people, as if I was for that moment the only person in existence and what I was saying was very important.He seems to want above all to be truly and deeply one of us.

What is really important for us to understand about Jesus, though, is how very far He has moved beyond religions. And especially how far He has moved beyond Constantine’s Christianity! If you go to teachingsbyjesus.com, and you see there how all of the Core Teachings together systematically destroy all the man-made dogmas of that entire religion, so only the genuine Gosprl teachings of Jesus remain, just know that those are Jesus’s Core Teachings. He has approved them all. Even today, the remnants of Roman Christianity try to hold on to fear-based, man-made dogmas that never have made any spiritual sense. And Jesus has never been any part of that religion, even in its heyday. Most importantly of all, Jesus wants nothing whatsoever to do with all the endless and pointless divisions in Christianity. Good grief! In 2010, when I wrote The Fun of Dying, there were more than ten thousand versions of Christianity, which at the time seemed shocking and shameful to me. How could there be so many little details of doctrine for Christians to argue and divide themselves over, when Jesus only ever taught forgiveness and love? Well, just thirteen years later there are now more than forty-two thousand different denominations of Christianity. We are bound to hit fifty thousand any day now, when the Methodists have just expelled two of their biggest churches from their organization solely for ordaining female ministers.  

And so it goes. Thomas and I continue to meet with Jesus nearly every night, and I accept the fact that while my present earth-lifetime continues, Thomas prefers that I have amnesia for those meetings. He considers them to be his private time with Jesus, and he knows that if I am allowed to remember them I will for certain blog about them. He does tell me, though, that lately I have been helping Jesus to improve His English, although to what end I don’t really know. What I do know is that whatever Jesus does now, it will not be based in man’s foolishly selfish and shortsighted doctrinal games.

Jesus really does want only to lovingly help us, to teach us, and He wants to do that on as intimate a basis with us as He can. Perhaps my most surprising memory from last year was my first stunned realization that the biggest rock star of all rock stars on earth has no ego at all. I mean, Jesus really has NO ego. He is the very definition of humility. And I had trouble at first getting my mind around that. How is it possible that the most famous person on earth is the most self-effacing soul that you can imagine? At one point on the night of last April 6^th as I was listening to Him, to the mild and courteous way that He talks and the gently loving and endlessly kindly things that He says, I blurted to Jesus, “Do you have any idea what a big deal You are?” He looked at me as if He was having trouble comprehending what I had just said. Then He smiled the barest smile, thoughtfully, as if perhaps I was a very young soul and I didn’t really understand, so my comment didn’t need a response. Then He modestly looked away.

 Don’t you think it’s rather funny I should be in this position?
I’m the one who’s always been so calm, so cool, No lover’s fool,
Running every show. He scares me so.
I never thought I’d come to this! What’s it all about?
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)

To dream the impossible dream. To fight the unbeatable foe.
To bear with unbearable sorrow. To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the un-rightable wrong. To love, pure and chaste from afar.
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star.

 This is my Quest! To follow that star! No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.
To fight for the right without question or pause.

To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious Quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

Perhaps we have well enough answered our question over the past two weeks. And I think that indeed we may have answered it definitively. Who Really Is Jesus? The Being who would one day be born from out of the Godhead as Jesus was almost certainly the only human being ever naturally born on earth who loved each individual person to such an extreme and unrelenting extent that He very rapidly achieved the Godhead level of spiritual development for Himself. And it was so easy for Him! But Jesus’s love for humankind was such that He never could have been content with simply joining the Godhead Collective, merging His Being with the Source, and abandoning all the suffering souls that He had left behind on earth and in the astral plane. What, so Jesus was supposed to simply leave them all behind to suffer pointlessly and for ages to come? So then they would each be required to, individually and one by one and in countless earth-incarnations to come, eventually figure out and very gradually achieve what Jesus had achieved for Himself so easily? The very thought of each human being having to go through that was anathema to Jesus! He was warmly invited to join the Godhead Collective. Then when He kept insisting that He needed to take another lifetime on earth so He could teach the whole world how to do what He had just done, He was ordered to instead join the Godhead Collective! That was the natural next stage in His spiritual development. It was an honor that He should have been eager to claim!

And yet, Jesus could not bear to accept God’s gift, if doing that meant turning His back on all of suffering humankind. My Thomas was in mental communication with Jesus back then, and it seemed to him that the Godhead Council that was managing his Brother’s spiritual growth went from at first being flummoxed and impatient with Him, that He was refusing to color within the usual lines, to gradually developing a reluctant reverence for this odd new creature, this Ascended Being who was so deeply loving that He refused to join the Godhead until everyone else over all the earth had managed to achieve the same level of spiritual growth that He had achieved. After all, being loving was the whole point of human spiritual development, was it not? So Jesus was in fact just an overachiever, simply carrying His love for suffering humanity to its logical, extreme conclusion. And the Godhead Council, as troubled and apparently deeply hidebound by its own customs as it apparently was by then, was unable to fault Jesus for His eagerness to help these people to advance spiritually.

We afterlife experts know very little about the upper levels of Consciousness. Fifty or more years ago, we believed that our universe’s seventh level must be its top, but meanwhile some who had achieved that level and were able to grow spiritually yet even beyond the Godhead level were finding that what our dear Mikey Morgan now is confirming for us is in fact true. Human spiritual growth indeed has no top! At its ultimate highest top is what Jesus calls Spirit. The Father. The Ultimate High God. Although even the actual top is not its actual top. And in any event, The Ultimate High God, which is indeed not the top after all, still does nothing quickly. So an amazing four millennia very gradually passed while Jesus patiently tried to sell the Godhead of this material universe, and the Ultimate High God That reigns above All, on this idea that Jesus had that He needed to be born again somehow from out of the Whole of It All into something altogether new. And something wonderful!    

Jesus Himself did not really know how He had achieved so much spiritual growth so easily. It just had come completely naturally to Him. So a part of Jesus’s need now to sell the Godhead Collective on His earthly mission meant selling the Godhead on Jesus’s need, and also on the Godhead’s Own need to better understand humanity. As my Thomas much later would put it to me, when Jesus was born from out of the Godhead and He first walked on earth, the Godhead was able to “look through Jesus’s eyes,” and learn to better understand the Godhead’s Own creation. But still, it took Jesus close to four thousand earth-years to convince the Godhead to allow Him to take an unprecedented Incarnation from out of the Godhead, first to study humankind in order to figure out how people born on earth could learn to achieve the Godhead level of  spiritual development, just as He had done; and then to teach those techniques on earth. So then all human earthly suffering could finally and forever be no more.

And all of That was Jesus’s Quest. And Wow, it was no less than the greatest of all possible human Quests! Just think of what a nuisance Jesus must have seemed to the entire Godhead Collective, at least in the beginning, wanting as He did to achieve nothing less than the entire spiritual transformation of all of humankind right now. He was like David going against Goliath. But at least Goliath had been some sort of evil dude! No, Jesus was going against God here, for heaven’s sake. Which One of them was actually on the wrong side? Who knew?

(And I should tell you here, my dear ones, that last Saturday afternoon I broke my right shoulder . And I have been in such a cloud of pain and medication ever since that my family kept telling me to give up on writing this. But I knew that I had to keep on writing. I had to write you something!)

And this is how Jesus was born on earth.  That was a haphazard thing as well. His earthly parents were Joseph and Mary, The Archangel Gabriel announced His coming. And Jesus was so simply born!

Thomas was watching it all from a little respectful distance by mind, and wondering what his little Brother was even thinking. That kid, for He was just a child then, and He was already a Perfected Being. Such a sweet boy He was, but altogether so completely out of His depth, so at what level actually was He now? Was there any way to even comprehend that? He even chose to be born to a slave mother, for heaven’s sake, to a woman of the lowest caste. So then Jesus moved in and was born and made all of this work somehow, He actually did, and indeed we have His Gospels as proof of that. It all does make sense! Jesus’s mission, and His Quest.

This is my Quest! To follow that star! No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.
To fight for the right, without question or pause.
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause.
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious Quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.

 And the world will be better for this: that one Man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars!
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He lets me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.
He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anointed my head with oil. My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I shall dwell the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 23:1-6).
– David, Third King of the United Kingdom of Israel (1040 BCE – 970 BCE)

Jesus’s most important Gospel encounter is the tale of His meeting with the woman at the well. It comes as His ministry begins, and it gives us everything that we need to know about Jesus and His mission on earth, if only we can fully understand what we are reading. Jesus is speaking not to a crowd of Jews in a synagogue or on a hill, as later on He often will do. And nor is He sparring with Temple leaders or with clergymen, as He will be doing later. In fact, in this early and very rare case, Jesus is not speaking with men at all. No, Jesus’s earliest and longest Gospel discourse is a private conversation that He initiates with a least member of a despised ethnic minority. And she is, oh my goodness, just a woman to boot! What follows is most of the fourth chapter of the Biblical Gospel of John:

So then, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that He was making and baptizing more disciples than John ² (although Jesus Himself was not baptizing; rather, His disciples were), ³ He left Judea and went away again to Galilee. ⁴ And He had to pass through Samaria. ⁵ So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; ⁶ and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, tired from His journey, was just sitting by the well. It was about noon. ⁷ A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, “Give Me a drink.” ⁸ For His disciples had gone away to the city to buy food. ⁹ So the Samaritan woman said to Him, “How is it that You, though You are a Jew, are asking me for a drink, though I am a Samaritan woman?” (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) ¹⁰ Jesus replied to her, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.” ¹¹ She said to Him, “Sir, You have no bucket and the well is deep; where then do You get this living water? ¹² You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well and drank of it himself, and his sons and his cattle?” ¹³ Jesus answered and said to her, “Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.”¹⁵ The woman said to Him, “Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw water.” ¹⁶ He said to her, “Go, call your husband and come here.” ¹⁷ The woman answered and said to Him, “I have no husband.” Jesus said to her, “You have correctly said, ‘I have no husband’; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this which you have said is true.” ¹⁹ The woman said to Him, “Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. ²⁰ Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and yet you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.” ²¹ Jesus said to her, “Believe Me, woman, that a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.” ²⁵ The woman said to Him, “I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us.” ²⁶ Jesus said to her, “I am He, the One speaking to you.”

²⁷ And at this point His disciples came, and they were amazed that He had been speaking with a woman, yet no one said, “What are You seeking?” or, “Why are You speaking with her?” ²⁸ So the woman left her waterpot and went into the city, and said to the people, ²⁹ “Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done; this is not the Christ, is He?” ³⁰ They left the city and were coming to Him.

³¹ Meanwhile the disciples were urging Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat something.” ³² But He said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” ³³ So the disciples were saying to one another, “No one brought Him anything to eat, did he?” ³⁴ Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work. ³⁵ Do you not say, ‘There are still four months, and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I tell you, raise your eyes and observe the fields, that they are ripe for harvest. ³⁶ Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the one who sows and the one who reaps may rejoice together. ³⁷ For in this case the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ ³⁸ I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have come into their labor.”

³⁹ Now from that city many of the Samaritans believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all the things that I have done.” ⁴⁰ So when the Samaritans came to Jesus, they were asking Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. ⁴¹ Many more believed because of His Word; ⁴² and they were saying to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One truly is the Savior of the world.”

⁴³ And after the two days, He departed from there for Galilee. ⁴⁴ For Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country. ⁴⁵ So when He came to Galilee, the Galileans received Him, only because they had seen all the things that He did in Jerusalem at the feast; for they themselves also went to the feast. (JN 4:1-45).

For those of us now free from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian dogmas, there is so much richness in this wonderful story! My affection for this tale from the Gospel of John is first rooted in my childhood, when at the age of eight I had an experience of light, and a voice from out of that light assured me that God is real and God will never leave me. After that night, I spent the rest of my childhood attending grownup church and communing with a beautiful stained-glass depiction of Jesus talking with the woman at the well as I listened to Reverend Turrell’s love-filled sermons.

And then came the moment, almost forty years later, when I realized that all my afterlife research and Bible-reading had clashed head-on, and I closed my Bible for the next two years. I could no longer be a Christian, because nothing about the religion was supported by the afterlife evidence. I knew by then that the afterlife is real. But I could not bear to give up on Jesus! So one rainy day, very gingerly, I sat down and read just the four Biblical Gospels. And in reading just the Gospels, I could find no place where the words of Jesus were inconsistent with what I knew to be true about the afterlife.

Then I came to the Fourth Chapter of John. You really can read all four Biblical Gospels in one long sitting! Jesus was speaking with the woman at the well, and I was starting to relax. Christianity’s dogmas about sin and hell and the sacrificial redemption of humankind by Jesus and all the other religious nonsense that Constantine crammed into his Roman Christianity at First Nicaea in the year 325 CE do not jibe at all with the afterlife evidence! But at least Jesus’s Gospel teachings can live with the afterlife evidence just fine. So then Jesus said to the woman at the well, “If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, ‘Give Me a drink,’ you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water” (JN 4:10). And I about fell off my chair! One of the big things about the afterlife is that the water there is alive. It looks like water but it feels like silk, it is dry to the touch and rich in energy, and you can walk into it fully clothed and come out of it dry and energized. And Jesus knew all about the living water in the afterlife. Please read Chapter 4 of John again, with Jesus’s true purpose in coming t0 earth as He described it to us on April 6, 2022, fresh in your mind. And you will realize that what Jesus actually is telling the woman at the well is that He is going to teach her how to get to where the living water actually is. He is going to teach her how to grow and perfect herself spiritually. That is what He has come to earth to do! And once she has done that, she will never be thirsty again because once she is a spiritually elevated being, she can just walk into that living water in the afterlife and be refreshed. Having heard what Jesus told us last April 6^th, everything that He says to the woman at the well in Chapter 4 of the Biblical Gospel of John makes complete sense to us now!    

This story is a beautiful time capsule message for us from Jesus given at the start of His ministry. It feels like His wink given to us across time for each one of us, from long before what was eventually going to become a very far off-track and sure to eventually dead-end Roman Christian religion. It is as if Jesus is reassuring you and me from before any of the past seventeen hundred years even happens. He is gently saying to us now, “Please don’t worry, My dear ones. Because I have got this for you. All is well!” But what else is He actually saying to us here? What are all the signs and symbols for us in the Gospel of John, Chapter 4? Well, let’s just see:

• Ethnicity, Gender, and Rules. The woman at the well is a member of a despised minority, and a lowly female, who even is living in sin to boot. For Jesus to be having any sort of private conversation with such a person is extremely inappropriate! Yet He is here deliberately, and right at the start of His ministry He is signaling to all of us and to the world at large His complete departure from every old religious and cultural rule, both to break all social boundaries and to establish a new eternal spiritual system that is purely based in love alone.
• Equating His Teachings with Eternal Life-Giving Water. Many modern Christians equate Jesus’s reference here to “living water” with baptism, which is certainly not what Jesus Himself has in mind! Note especially that the point is made at the start of this passage that it is only His disciples, and not Jesus Himself, who is baptizing His new converts. No, Jesus is thinking only about what He has come to earth to do, which is to teach us all how to raise our spiritual vibrations and achieve our own spiritual perfection, just as He Himself has long since done. That life-giving water on Jesus’s mind is the energized living water of the spiritually elevated afterlife that His teachings will enable the woman at the well – and then all the rest of us – to achieve.
• God is Universal Spirit. Jesus even tells the woman at the well that God is universal Spirit, and from now on people will no longer be worshiping their individual gods. No more worshiping of the Jewish Jehovah in Jerusalem, and whichever private god the Samaritans worship on their mountain, but now everyone will worship the one true God of all, which Jesus tells us is Spirit.
• Jesus is the Messiah. Having been born from the Godhead, Jesus knew and taught that God is Spirit; but I have wondered whether He was really calling Himself the prophesied Christ so early in His teaching mission. Son of Man, certainly. But since the Gospels were much later edited at the First Council of Nicaea, can we know now for certain what Jesus precisely was saying here? Well, yes we can. He tells me now that He did know, even so early, that He had been sent as the promised Messiah. And He adds that the Old Testament title “Son of Man,” which He did claim from the start of His ministry, was a softer way of saying the same thing.
• Food and the Harvest of Souls. Jesus here is instructing His disciples, whom He has only recently recruited, that their food and His is to do God’s will, and to reap a fruitful harvest of the people that God has sown and nurtured on earth, and to teach them the Truth, so that all may grow spiritually and achieve the glorious bounty of eternal life. Here, in JN 4:31-38, where Constantine’s religion-builders were apparently unable to find it and to pollute it with their awful fear-based ideas, Jesus tells us that His true original mission is to bring in the harvest that God has sown and nurtured on earth by teaching all of God’s people how to achieve the Godhead level of spiritual growth, just as Jesus Himself had long ago achieved it.

Jesus’s remark that a prophet has no honor in his own country (at JN 4:44) is something that He knows from a very recent experience. In the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 4:16-24, we see Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah on a Sabbath morning in the Synagogue in His hometown of Nazareth just before He begins this journey that is described in the Gospel of John, Chapter 4. The Gospel of Luke says that Jesus was feeling full of the Spirit as He stood up and read,

“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.”

Then Jesus handed back the scroll to the attendant as He said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (LK 4:21). And in the increasingly tense back-and-forth that followed between Jesus and some of His erstwhile neighbors, they became so enraged at His seeming presumptuousness that they tried to throw Him off a nearby cliff.

But Jesus was very clear from the start of His ministry about precisely what His true mission was! There is nothing in what He says to the woman at the well of any fear-based dogmas, judgment by God or a fiery hell, nothing about His future crucifixion or sacrificial redemption, or any reason at all for any of us ever to worry or to feel afraid. In that whole rich and beautiful conversation by the well, none of the dogmas of the Christian religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine invented more than three hundred years later are anywhere to be found.

Before last April I had figured some of this out. But once Jesus then gave us His human backstory last April, and I re-read this tale from the Gospel of John freshly with what Jesus had told us then in mind, I realized to my wonderment that really nothing more ever needs to be said! The whole of Jesus’s true earthly mission before Constantine ever messed with it is beautifully encapsulated in verses 1-45 of the Fourth Chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus revealed His entire earthly mission to the very least of these right at the start of His ministry when He told it all to that humble Samaritan woman at the well. And someone in my childhood church has just kindly sent me to share with you a photo of that stained-glass window. So now it heads this blog post….

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord anointed Me
To bring good news to the humble;
He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim release to captives
And freedom to prisoners;
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Isaiah 61:1-2).
– Jesus, reading in the Synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath (LK 4:18-19)

Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong.
They are weak, but He is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– Anna B. Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
(Popular Children’s Hymn, first Composed as a Poem for a Dying Child)

Last summer I experienced the most extraordinary few months of my life. They may have been the most extraordinary few months of anyone’s life who was born later than maybe 25 CE. And it is first now that I am far enough from those months to think about them with any kind of perspective. I can imagine that all of that might be behind me at this point, although my Thomas, my spirit guide, still will not assure me that time is finally over. But eight months have passed since I last visited with Jesus in the astral plane, and I am beginning now to mentally process those personal experiences that I shared with Him. Or, what shall I even call those moments that I could not believe were actually happening, even as I lived them and I knew they were happening? Without this blog, I likely would not have written them down as I did. But Jesus wanted me to blog about them for you. I am only now really seeing that. His opening Himself again to the world as He was only then just beginning to do is a part of Jesus’s moving beyond His seventeen hundred earth-years spent in working to heal the hundreds of millions of people who were damaged by the Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity.

Where Jesus is now, He encounters few people who are presently occupying earthly bodies. So He is not used to contending with our temporary amnesia. And while I still find it impossible to believe that I had ever met Jesus before last April, Thomas tells me that I have known Him as a friend and colleague ever since Thomas and I died together in a Roman massacre of some of the Lord’s first post-Resurrection followers. So apparently ever since the first century CE, I have been a part of Jesus’s inner circle. Which means that naturally, when Thomas took me to meet with Jesus on April 6^th of last year, the Lord knew on an intellectual level that I would have no memory of any of that. But almost at once, He slipped into an easy familiarity with me that confounded me at the time.    

In person, Jesus has an overwhelming presence. He presents in an astral body that is only about five feet eight or nine inches tall, and He looks pretty much like the picture that we have been showing to you here, but with all-over curly hair. His personal energy is silken but it is extraordinarily  powerful, like a mammoth engine idling, although He can tamp it down when He thinks about doing that. As I recall, He did lessen his energy that night. Before last April, I had glimpsed Jesus when I was astral traveling with Thomas and he pointed Him out to me. But before that night I had seen Jesus only incidentally and from a distance. So to be suddenly so close to Him, and to be the sole focus of His attention, made me feel unbearably shy. I couldn’t look at His face. How do you look upon the face of God?   

Then right away the next morning I was trying to deny to Thomas that any of that had happened. I was driving to my first client meeting when I said to Thomas somewhat shakily, “That wasn’t the real Jesus, of course. Right?”

Just to orient you, the third level of the astral plane, which includes the entrance to the afterlife, is where Jesus spends most of His eternal time so He can greet each returning Christian. It is lit by God’s love, as are all the astral levels; and the higher they are, the more brightly they are lit. But to those who are used to sunlight, the third level has a cozy, late-afternoon sort of feel to it. And the sky and the vegetation are all kinds of colors. We were driving around eastern Massachusetts during that week last April, and as I was driving early that next morning, what had happened the night before was gradually more and more coming back to me. Oh my god. Jesus had been telling me on the previous night what He had called “the real Christmas-and-Easter story,” going back for thousands of years before His birth as Jesus, and beginning with His last earth-lifetime. His last earth-lifetime? What? He had been the middle in age of three princes in what He had said had been “a small city of no consequence.” He had said that “the one you call Thomas” had been His older brother. “The one you call John” – who later became the Apostle John – had been His younger brother. All three princes had died very young in a massacre, and… Wait, what? Back then, Jesus had been just a normal human being? This had all been news to me!

So that was when I told my Thomas that the Jesus we had visited the night before had not been the real Jesus. He could not possibly have been the real Jesus! A Jesus who once had been a regular, normal, just some ordinary human guy? And perhaps I should also further enlighten you about Thomas, my spirit guide. Whenever I have seen him in an astral body, he has looked like a handsome young man maybe thirty years old, but his presence feels strong and venerable to me. He has a deep and boomy voice when he speaks audibly, which is almost never; and he often gets impatient with me when I act “girly” (as he calls it), since he is used to relating to me as two males together beyond this one lifetime. When I told him that the Jesus we had seen last night had not been the real Jesus, he at once snapped, “You know who He was!” in his boomy spoken voice. So, that settled that. And I realized then like a clout to the head that I was still on some deep level a Christian. I still needed to believe in Magic-Jesus, and in the God with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So when Thomas insisted to me that what Jesus had said on the previous night had been true, then the last of my old blind Christian faith was shattered. So then, at the worst possible moment, I fell apart.

Although I practice law in my own way, I do wear a suit and I play it straight. My clients are sober business owners, they have worked with me for many years, they respect and trust and rely on me, and like Thomas they expect me to be reasonably serious and not foolishly girly and falling apart. And soon I was very upset as I drove, and ranting and raging at Thomas. “Who are we supposed to pray to, then? Is there even a God at all?” As I drove, I badgered him, feeling more and more distraught, while Thomas was saying nothing. I had tears on my cheeks, but I was trying not to cry because I had a whole day of seeing clients ahead of me.

In times of crisis, true friends try to help. Thomas is always behind my left shoulder, and soon I was aware that there was a second Presence, more toward the middle of the back seat. Omigod, it was Jesus! And then Thomas was audibly talking with Jesus. I drifted into silence as I tried to hear what they were saying. I found that they were discussing, using spoken words and for my entertainment, what they thought should be the name of Jesus’s future website. Jesus can speak American English, but with a slight, unguessable accent. Thomas has that portentous voice, but he was sounding less boomy at the moment. A glance in my rear-view mirror showed me that neither of them was there in a body, but they sounded as if they were right there. They almost sounded like a Vaudeville act. They sounded hysterically funny, to be frank. But I refused to be distracted and cheered up so easily.

I was wiping tears and fighting to stay grim. I said aloud, “You can’t use the word ‘Jesus’ in the website name. It has already been taken. In every possible combination.” And the plain injustice of that seemed to outrage the latent Jefferson in Thomas. It is, after all, Jesus’s personal name! I don’t recall precisely what he said aloud then. It was something about how I am a real lawyer, right? So, can’t we find a way to get Jesus legal standing so He can challenge in court the use by all those churches of Jesus’s own personal name? And then I just cracked up. There I was, stopped dead in the middle of a city street in Fall River, Massachusetts, doubled over with laughter in an apparently empty car. While morning rush-hour traffic honked and tried to squeeze by on both sides around me.

All of us astral travel at night while our bodies sleep, but with amnesia for the event. This generally happens during our body’s deepest sleep in the first part of the night, and ideally beginning well before midnight. What I didn’t know until these events of last April was that for my entire life, Thomas had been taking me along with him as if he were walking his dog, and meeting every night of my earthly life with Jesus in the astral plane while I would wait obliviously nearby. He was taking his spirit-guide duties seriously. He was supposed to be watching over me, but he had loyally stayed by Jesus for some six thousand years, ever since that last earth-lifetime that they had lived together as princely brothers. And so, every night he still visited and talked with and served as a supportive brother to Jesus, which is something that continues even now, although once again I have amnesia for these experiences. What was different about last summer, though, was that briefly Jesus wanted me to be aware and remember and report to you some of the details of their meetings. So you and I have had some privileged glimpses of the most amazing Brotherly friendship!

What is clear to me now, though, is that all our experiences with the Brothers were only ever Jesus’s idea, and never Thomas’s. My Thomas is a very private and highly dignified being, who in his Jefferson lifetime burned all his beloved wife’s letters and papers after her death. Like her, he was appalled by the institution of slavery that they had inherited, but her early death took the wind right out of his abolitionist sails. When she died at the age of only thirty-three, his entire focus was on protecting her private opinions from other people’s judgment.

Jesus, on the other hand, overwhelmingly and confoundingly loves people! Thomas has often remarked to me that his eternal Brother’s love for each individual human being is the whole of who Jesus is and who He always has been, for the past six thousand years. An obsessive love for each human being individually is Jesus’s sole salient characteristic. And unlike the rest of us, He has not had many incarnations. Jesus has not incarnated as a human being since that princeling lifetime long ago. When He then died in what Thomas guesses was His early twenties, He had already loved so perfectly and grown spiritually so much as a result that He was already a perfected Being, and He ascended directly to the Godhead level. And because He perfectly loved each individual human being who was still struggling to get by on earth, and for whom becoming perfected was not nearly so easy and so automatic as it had been for Him, He then spent the next four thousand earth-years petitioning the Godhead to allow Him to teach the rest of humankind how to achieve what He had achieved so easily. So then eventually Jesus was given the right to take an unprecedented incarnation from out of the Godhead in order to teach us all how to achieve the level of spiritual development that He had long ago achieved for Himself.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but will have eternal life” (JN 3:16). That passage from John is so completely misunderstood today! Instead of God, it was Jesus who had pleaded with the Godhead for millennia, and who at length had won the unprecedented right to be born on earth from out of the Godhead as the ultimate Teacher to show all of us how we, too, can attain our own spiritual perfection. And my Thomas so loved his brother that he had waited for Jesus in the astral, without himself progressing, for all of those four thousand years. 

What I never understood for that whole summer long, until eventually my Thomas explained it to me, was why he would sometimes unexpectedly call Jesus “Brat” and chase and bully Him, and even on occasion sort of beat Him up. Thomas performs the one essential service for Jesus that at this point no one else can do. Thomas calls it “balance.” The churches say that Jesus is “fully God and fully Man,” and that He is! But Jesus can maintain His human status now only with considerable effort, and only because there still is one being in all the realities that in Jesus’s Own mind still “outranks” Him. My Thomas is Jesus’s older brother from that ancient lifetime, right? And Thomas seems to be the only being in all the realities with any human connection that Jesus still completely trusts. I had never really thought about this, but nearly every human being that Jesus ever has loved and trusted has left Him and has ascended. His Apostles and all the Saints. And so many clergymen have lied about Him and about His teachings, injecting fear into what Jesus teaches in order to monetarily enrich themselves on earth. I think that if it were solely up to Jesus, He might like to have continued to blog with us, but my Thomas is a very private being and he is essential to Jesus’s maintaining His human balance. So when last fall Thomas wanted to stop including you and me in their meetings in the astral, at least for a while, Jesus assented to Thomas’s wish.

This brings up a thought from out of my childhood that feels especially insightful now. A wise old man long ago told me that, “My child, there are two kinds of people, and only two. One kind looks at you and says, ‘Here I am!’ The other kind looks at you and says, ‘There you are!’” And of course we all know people who, no matter what the topic at hand might be, can manage to turn that topic into themselves within two sentences. And then there is Jesus. Jesus loves you more than anyone else has ever loved you. Guaranteed. Jesus is the most extreme “There you are!” sort of Guy there ever was. He looks you in the eyes and wants to hear all about you and know you completely, and in that moment nothing else matters to Him. And this, even now, when His personal energy is even above the Godhead level. Jesus is literally God at this point. He is the ultimate megastar, the first or second most popular name on earth, but even now He only wants to talk about you, and never about Himself. The last time I saw Jesus was in the early fall. Thomas was off somewhere, and Jesus called to me, “Little One! Little One! Come here and tell me about your day.” And He switched on whatever it is that He can switch on to make me aware and able to remember this experience. I realized then that my astral body was wearing an astral robe and sitting on a little knoll about thirty feet away from where He was. I do that whenever I am there as just Thomas’s tagalong, I sit a distance away to give them privacy. So I stood and went and sat down beside Jesus. He was looking softly into my eyes and smiling at me. He didn’t take my hand, because the difference in our energies is such that unless He is careful to keep His energy tamped down, His touch can give me an uncomfortable buzz. I cannot remember now what I said about whatever day that had been, but it was just a bunch of stupid stuff. Still, Jesus listened closely, He asked me interested questions, He made wise remarks about the people, and He even chuckled. He is more interested in my life than I am interested in my life.   

So if it were up to Jesus, His website would be more about us than it is about Him. He has even experimented with having me do a question-and-answer thing, a channeling-Jesus sort of thing, so He might hold something like “Office Hours with Jesus” for the entire world of individual people on His website. And it actually worked, but it creeped me out. I am not a medium! Can you imagine if I told the world that now suddenly I can channel Jesus? So we are still playing with designs and ideas there. But as much as He might not be interested in Jesus, you and I are interested in Jesus! And this world is such an unbelievable mess, and apparently He is returning to it now. What is He going to do to try to help the world? What can He do, that might make any difference? Just Who really is Jesus today?

Jesus loves me! He will stay
Close beside me all the way.
He’s prepared a home for me,
And some day His face I’ll see.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– Anna B. Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
(Popular Children’s Hymn, first Composed as a Poem for a Dying Child)