Author: Roberta Grimes

Fear’s Ghastly Harvest

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

Religionism vs. Materialism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky.
I think about it every night and day.
Spread my wings and fly away.
I believe I can soar. I see me running through that open door!
I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly!
– R. Kelly, from “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996)

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I believe I can fly. I believe I can touch the sky.
I think about it every night and day.
Spread my wings and fly away.
I believe I can soar. I see me running through that open door!
I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly, I believe I can fly!
– R. Kelly, from “I Believe I Can Fly” (1996)

 

Parables

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fishers of People

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The road is long, with many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows when.
But I’m strong, strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.
… So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear. We’ll get there.
… For I know he would not encumber me.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.
– Bob Russell & Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

Ever since my Thomas took me to meet Jesus last April on the third level of the astral plane, I have been thinking about the profound symbolism of all those neon-colored fish. As Jesus told me His personal story, He sat with Thomas and me side by side on a riverbank while deer grazed behind us, and we fed His fish with grain that just appeared in our hands. More symbolism. And why should anyone care that Jesus has chosen to live so simply now? Why should it be important that Jesus even has a backstory? Why isn’t it enough for us to just start a website to teach the Lord’s Gospel words to people who want to begin a closer walk with Him? To be frank with you, I got to the point by early May of trying to pretend it hadn’t even happened. It had all been just a dream, right? And Jesus now doesn’t want to look like church-Jesus? Come on! He has been hanging with my spirit guide for six thousand years? Everyone else sees Jesus as God Incarnate with a halo around His head, while in our little world He’s just a part of the family?

But my Thomas is such a practical man. I was going through what felt like stages of grief, and he handled it so matter of factly. When I was in the “Why me?” stage, he said patiently, repeatedly, “Why not you?” When I was in the “It was just a dream” stage, he would bring moments from that amazing night to my mind again, and in such detail that I knew freshly that of course it had not been a dream. Then when I stopped denying it sometime in July, and I finally began to try to make sense of what seems to be unfolding in my life, he was patient with me about that as well. He has lived this truth for six thousand years, and although incarnational amnesia blocks it for me temporarily, I have come to accept on an intellectual level that I have lived it with him and with Jesus for a third of that time. Thomas should long since have become a perfected being himself, but he has chosen instead to stay with Jesus. And he tells me that I have made a similar choice, although of course I have no memory of that while I am in a body.

What is most interesting is what I now understand is true about Jesus. When He ascended after His resurrection, He chose not to join the Godhead Collective or to go even higher, but rather He wanted to remain on the entrance level of the astral plane. The standard route for all of humankind is to endlessly elevate our spiritual vibrations through repeated incarnations. And as we do that, we rise gradually higher, and we add our energies to the various collectives, melding more and more, until eventually we achieve the perfection of level seven, at which point we can merge with the Godhead Collective. Or else we might choose to elevate ourselves even above the Godhead level, as Jesus easily could do, since He is vibrating even higher than the Godhead Collective. But these choices are irrevocable. Once you merge with the Godhead Collective or you elevate beyond it, there can be no coming back. And Jesus loves people! He loves people so much that He vowed long ago that He was going to stay with us and teach us until every last one of us is elevated. And His vow is beyond just an oath at this point. It has become His central joy. It is the core of who He is.

I am writing about Jesus intimately, so I should add that I write at His request. Jesus has come to see after He and Thomas and some few others of His circle have done a lot of talking about this that while a figure named “Jesus” has achieved ultimate fame on earth, that figure was shaped by Roman Christianity and is just a kind of magical Creature at this point, altogether disassociated from what Jesus taught. And knowing that bothers Jesus very much. So at His further request, we will be telling Jesus’s personal story in The Fun of Loving Jesus and on teachingsbyjesus.com. And the book is about to go to press. The website will be up by March.

You would think that it would be a simple matter for Jesus to maintain His humanity, but it is not. The fact is that all of us are aspects of Consciousness. So all of us are aspects of God exploring the human experience, and our natural cycle is to rise ever higher. Which means that for Jesus to remain in any way human when He is at the same time even above the Godhead Collective level in spiritual development is an experiment with Consciousness that needs constant maintenance. And that is in large part what His close relationship with Thomas seems at this point to be about. My Thomas calls his role for Jesus “balance.” He spends so much time talking with Jesus, teasing Him, even mocking Him sometimes, playing with Him, just whatever it might take to help Jesus maintain His solid human grounding. It shocked me at first to see how disrespectful Thomas could be to Jesus, but that is what the Lord wants from him. He gets nothing but worship otherwise. And worship is the very last thing He wants! But at least his pet fish and his deer don’t worship Him. The aborted children see Him as just some version of a doting Uncle, and even the Lord’s elevated energy seems to be only normal to all those gleeful toddlers, who giggle and play as they climb all over Him. Even the older children gladly crowd around what is almost the only father figure they have. Jesus is doing all that He can as God to maintain Himself as also human.

So His brother relationship with Thomas seems to feel very important to Jesus. My Thomas was Jesus’s elder brother in their earth-lifetimes that ended in a war almost six thousand years ago, but still their relationship is so tight that when you see them together their bond is clear. When Jesus first set out to call His disciples at the start of His public ministry on earth, He even called pairs of brothers.

“Now as Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, He saw two brothers, Simon, who was called Peter, and his brother Andrew, casting a net into the sea; for they were fishermen. And He said to them, ‘Follow Me, and I will make you fishers of people.’ Immediately they left their nets and followed Him.  Going on from there He saw two other brothers, James the son of Zebedee, and his brother John, in the boat with their father Zebedee, mending their nets; and He called them. Immediately they left the boat and their father, and followed Him.” (MT 4:18-22) So Jesus first called pairs of brothers. And John, the brother of James, was actually Jesus’s younger brother from the same earth-lifetime that they both had shared with Thomas, while Thomas would soon also join Him in His lifetime as Jesus to be His private witness, going out often among the people and reporting back to Jesus what the people were saying about Him. I can only imagine that Jesus expected that the bonds among all those brothers would further strengthen the bonds within His band of disciples.

And what really astonishes me is my Thomas’s decision to devote his eternity to Jesus. He won’t much talk about it with me, but it is clear that from the moment that Jesus first attained the seventh afterlife level some six thousand earth-years ago, this eternal being who is now my guide – but only so we can work together on their project of re-starting the spreading of the Lord’s Gospel teachings on earth – has given himself over to serving Jesus forevermore. Even his one little foray into fame – his Thomas Jefferson lifetime – was to him mostly about creating a country where Jesus’s teachings could finally prosper. My Thomas’s love for the Man that he still calls his Brother is beyond what I can ever fathom.

So our task now is to begin to spread these Gospel teachings! And I honestly don’t know how best to do that. To become fishers of people? I have no idea. You would think that it would be an easy task, with the name of Jesus already so famous on earth, but our problem is that Jesus is famous at this point mostly for dying for our sins and then rising from the dead, all of which is beside the point. All that Jesus ever has wanted, and all that He ever wants even now, is to be our Teacher. If Jesus came to save us from anything, it was from our ignorance of the certain truth that God is loving Spirit, we are eternally part of Spirit, and we enter these brief earth-lifetimes to raise our vibrations within Spirit. Jesus’s mission was hijacked by Roman Christianity, so then His mission took a seventeen-hundred-year detour. But it remains unchanged from what it was when Jesus first charged His disciples to spread His teachings, saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations …  teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (MT 28:18-20). As Jesus and Thomas have described their rejuvenated movement to me, it will be:

  • A movement, and not a religion. Crucially, therefore, Jesus’s new movement will be devoid of dogmas! There will be nothing that anyone is asked to believe beyond the Lord’s teachings themselves.
  • Based in the four canonical Gospels. People have asked me about the other Gospels, and I think that I have read all of them, but I don’t believe that they add anything crucial. And I have been given to understand that Jesus Himself oversaw the selection at First Nicaea in the year 325 of the four Gospels that made it into the Christian Bible, which should seal that deal for us.
  • Based in eradicating every fear. Fear is the opposite of love, and since spiritual growth requires that we raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward love, Jesus’s website will be associated with seekreality.com, our website which teaches the truth about death and the afterlife, and which thereby helps people to eradicate the fear of death.
  • Jesus intends this movement to be considered to be a new kind of Christianity.  I have used many Christian hymns as frame-verses here, and with just a few words changed, even more hymns could be used. If we emphatically insist that the Lord’s movement is not a religion at all, but it is instead a living movement without dogmas and its only doctrine is Jesus’s Gospel teachings, then everyone is invited to join us and to learn from the Lord Himself what He taught.  

So we begin here. We will have The Fun of Loving Jesus for our handbook, teachingsbyjesus.com as our source of the Lord’s words and our inspiration, and seekreality.com as a place to go for the eradication of all our fears. All three of these resources have been created at the Lord’s request. Jesus intends the modern-day dawning of the kingdom of God on earth to be a gradual process. His original movement had been growing for almost three hundred years and had millions of followers before the Romans under Constantine destroyed it and founded Roman Christianity in its ashes, so even though communications are rather better now than they were when Jesus sent His first followers to spread His teachings to the world, still our own role will be just to begin this work all over again, and Jesus will call others to carry it on after us. So now once again it begins! 

… If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart Isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another.
… It’s a long, long road, From which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, Why not share?
… And the load Doesn’t weigh me down at all,
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.
– Bob Russell & Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

Turn the Other Cheek

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are those who mourn, for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.
Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when people insult you and persecute you, and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of Me.  Rejoice and be glad, for your reward in heaven is great; for in this same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you.”
– Jesus (MT 5:3-12), from The Sermon on the Mount, “The Beatitudes”

To prove to Jesus that I would be able to channel Liberating Jesus, my spirit guide developed in me a fascination with Thomas Jefferson. It wasn’t hard to do. That whole period of American history is charming beyond reason, and so much of it has been preserved in place that you can tour and enjoy it at your leisure. My Thomas wanted me to write a channeled account of Jefferson’s ten-year marriage, which conveniently spanned the Revolutionary War, and that book eventually became My Thomas. It is the finest piece of writing that I ever will do, and I can say that since it is Thomas’s work and not my own. But since Jefferson had been a slaveholder, before I would have anything to do with his book, I had first to do considerable research into better understanding his attitude and practice toward his slaves. And I ended up reading everything that Jefferson ever wrote before the aged of forty. It was a remarkable tour of the mind of a complex and undeniably brilliant man.

Thomas Jefferson inherited slavery, and with it he inherited more than two hundred slaves. He hated slavery, but he couldn’t do much about it while he was busy with farming and rearing his family, so his only practical option was to treat with kindness and respect all the slaves he had inherited. His farm became a cooperative effort, with a trusted slave as its manager. You and I have inherited a society that is similarly screwed up in lots of ways, and in America at least, history will judge us harshly for not altogether replacing our horrible criminal justice system and our decrepit system of public education. But that is not the subject of this post. Although I do admit to a fascination with Jefferson’s facility with words, at a time when highly educated gentlemen were dirt-farming on the edge of the continental forest as they tried at the same time to forge a nation. And what especially fascinates me about Jefferson is that you and I know why he was drawn to studying the Gospel words of Jesus, and we can wonder at the part that his personal relationship with Jesus played in the founding of the Republic. Knowing how close they were, I am sure that they consulted very often at night, even though the usual lifetime amnesia must have kept Jefferson himself from ever knowing that. I can see it in the gentle and courteous way that he treated his slaves, some of whom were his family members, and in the way that he changed what had always been the standard right to “life, liberty, and property” into “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the United States Declaration of Independence, and he thereby avoided giving support to slaveholders while he offered hope to slaves. He was a wordsmith without peer.   

But what Jefferson and his generation were all about was gaining their own freedom, and sometimes that takes more than words. He was never good at fighting. He did poorly as a wartime governor of Virginia, and he was so careless of his personal safety that he was nearly captured several times. Writing about the way that he insisted on finishing a leisurely breakfast at Monticello as “Bloody Ban Tarleton” was even then riding into Charlottesville bent on his capture made for suspenseful reading, but I made none of that up. It seems apparent in the mild and egalitarian way that he lived his life that he was patterning it after the teachings of Jesus. Thomas Jefferson was one of the few Christians in history who have bothered to study the Gospel words closely. And in four languages, no less! Even though during his daily life as Jefferson, he clearly never knew why he made the Gospels such a focus.

In his inclination toward the Gospels, Thomas Jefferson reminds me of another of my favorite people. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was the greatest American of the twentieth century, and he rose to be that in significant part because he modeled his public life after the most difficult and confounding of Jesus’s teachings. Dr. King started out as a potential firebrand. Like Jefferson, he was a charismatic wordsmith. He was perfectly born for that time and place, and he could use words like no one else. And like Jefferson, he had studied the Gospels. The Lord said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth.’ But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. And if anyone wants to sue you and take your tunic, let him have your cloak also” (MT 5:38-40). Those words shaped Dr. King. He found echoes of them in the teachings of Gandhi, but even as a little boy growing up the son of a Christian pastor, Dr. King’s inclination was toward peace.

There can have been no more obvious injustice than what was being perpetrated in the nineteen-sixties in the American south! We look at it now, at all the dual facilities from schools to drinking fountains based purely on the shade of people’s skin, and with all the facilities that were dictated for the descendants of slaves so obviously inferior as to break your heart, and we wonder that such conditions can have existed within living memory in the United States of America. If ever a cause deserved a righteous war, then Dr. King’s was that righteous cause.

The thing about being very young is that time is born whenever you are born. You have no sense of history. I grew up in the American north so I discovered racial wrongs on television, and at the same time I met Dr. King and his beautiful, mesmerizing voice. I fell in love with a righteous man and a truly righteous cause. And I fell hard. I have said before that I was raised in a place where I never saw a living person of any race but my own until I got to college. Which meant that my whole introduction to the racial problem came from lying on my tummy on my living room rug night after night. So where race is concerned, I was raised to be strongly on Dr. King’s side of it. And there I am to this day. I feel as Jesus does in wanting to abandon His pale church-Jesus image. The sooner we are all one race, the better. But that is not the intended topic of this post, either.

What I had hoped to address today, if I ever can get to it, is the overriding wisdom of pacifism. And what has put that topic in my mind is an insane story about two fathers playing chicken in their trucks on a highway, and they got one another so riled up that eventually one actually grabbed his handgun and shot at the other fellow’s truck. He hit the other guy’s young daughter in the leg. Which further infuriated that other driver, to the point where he also drew his handgun and shot at the first fellow’s truck, and he hit the first driver’s young daughter, also non-lethally. At which point they both pulled over, and they were deep into fisticuffs by the time the police arrived. This story is weeks old so I cannot tell you their state, but of course they were both arrested.

Jesus Himself could have told that story. It is a perfect example of the utter pointlessness of fighting. And lest you think the problem was that they both were armed, here is another recent road-rage situation, this one involving a knife, that was de-escalated by a passer-by who fortunately had a handgun. So, no, the problem was not the guns. The problem was that both drivers insisted to the point of insanity on being the one to deliver the last cheek-slap. That difficult-seeming but essential teaching of Jesus about turning the other cheek when one cheek is slapped is that it ends the violence. It begins the peace. You and your antagonist are brothers, no matter what might be causing the strife between you, and turning your other cheek lets you begin the peace right now. Because, how else does it end? It ends with two screaming children and two trucks with shot-out windows beside the road, and two fathers arrested. And all for nothing.

But let us now consider what the difference might be between Thomas Jefferson’s situation and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s situation. Why is it obvious to us that Thomas Jefferson and his friends should have fought the American Revolutionary War, while in Dr. King’s case his peaceful resistance was the better course? What was the difference between their situations?

As I think about it now, there was no difference. I have studied the American colonial period, and their rebellion was just willful brattiness before event piled fast upon event. If Great Britain had been prepared to handle those thirteen colonies with more grace the colonies would never have seen the need to unite, and peace could have been maintained, but a king does not turn his other cheek, not even metaphorically. What the colonies gained from their rebellion was a continent-wide nation with a well-thought-out Constitution where there would likely be several smaller countries today. But Canada and Australia were comparable situations, and they have also turned out well.

Dr. King’s was far the more righteous cause, and yet even when his enemies bombed his home with his wife and infant daughter inside it, still he turned his other cheek. As he said, and as Jesus might well have said, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.” In order to have peace, we must be peace, in all things and in everything that we do. Dr. King was the greatest American of the twentieth century and one of the greatest people who ever lived because he truly lived the Gospel teachings of Jesus. He proved that when you are fighting for a righteous cause, then perfect love is your finest weapon.

The great tragedy of Christianity is that for the seventeen centuries of its existence, it has held within it the keys to creating a gloriously peaceful and loving world that could have become a literal heaven on earth. But Christianity has never shared those Gospel teachings as they should have been shared. Instead, Christianity has shared almost exclusively its man-made and frankly barbaric dogmas about Jesus having died to redeem us from its imagined cranky God’s imagined wrath, and a lot about our need to be “saved.” (Saved from what? Saved from a perfectly loving genuine God?) All of which bogus Christian fears, the abundant and consistent afterlife evidence now confirms for us are pure nonsense. What a gloomy and mostly human-made religion Roman Christianity has always been!

So, where were the Gospel teachings of Jesus in Christianity’s past seventeen hundred years? Why weren’t they always front-and-center? I was a Christian for more than fifty years. I heard a lot in church about the religion’s bogus and fear-based dogmas, but I hardly ever heard what Jesus taught. Love and forgiveness were preached to a limited extent, but they were posed as just-give-it-a-try suggestions. What I know about the Gospel teachings of Jesus came from studying them all on my own. Dr. King was a man whose pastor father reared him on the Gospel teachings of Jesus, including some teachings that seem to us to be somewhat hard to understand. And Dr. King took it all in as a child. Then when he grew up, he used the Lord’s teachings to transform the United States. And to begin the process of transforming the world.                                                  

“Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy.
 Blessed are the pure in heart, for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called sons of God.
Blessed are those who have been persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.”
– Jesus (MT 5:7-10), from “The Beatitudes” 

God’s Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

God hath not promised skies always blue,
Flower strewn pathways all our lives through;
God hath not promised sun without rain,
Joy without sorrow, peace without pain. 

But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way;
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

Our most confounding human trait is our ability to  keep on fooling ourselves. The plain fact is that so many of the basic attributes of the cosmos have been so precisely tuned to foster intelligent life that if the values of any of those parameters, such as the masses of elementary particles, the various electromagnetic and gravitational forces, or the color and mass of the sun were tweaked even slightly, just small differences in any of those details could have prevented the formation of the components necessary for life in the universe, or in other ways could have made life as we know it impossible. Which prompts scientists to conclude that there must be a multiverse! Of course! And in that infinite number of universes, this one just happens to be perfect for life. Since scientists insist that life must be random. They refuse to allow for a Creator. But all of that absurd atheistic nonsense has gotten really old at this point, so Occam’s Razor wins, for heaven’s sake, in the scientific sweepstakes of common sense. The simplest explanation is the best explanation. It is long past time for physicists to accept the fact that Max Planck was right a hundred years ago when he said that Consciousness is primary.

 And no, the universe could not have started in a single big bang. Even if there had been a bang at some point, we still would be left to ask what existed before the big bang happened, since it is a primary scientific tenet that something cannot come from nothing. The fossil record demonstrates that modern humans first came into existence in the area of modern-day Botswana only two hundred thousand years ago, together with more than ninety percent of all the other species of animals and plants. And the rest of history which preceded that event came into existence, together with a heck of a lot of “punctuated equilibrium,” as humans have become more curious about our past. A bigger and ever bigger illusory universe was created, too, as humans have needed it, so we never would find an edge. And, oh yes, it turns out that the attribute of life is a property inherent in Consciousness itself. All of these practical conclusions are inescapable.

Scientists still refuse to even cope with the fact that some of the most important “cosmological constants” are continuously and minutely adjusting! And if you watch for them, you can sometimes see other little ways in which a loving Creator is tweaking this habitat that is meant for our spiritual growth. That fanciful scientific notion of a multiverse in which this is just one of an infinite number of universes is, and it always has been, ridiculous. And in their saner moments, physicists on some level likely always have known this was true. But the problem is that, as happens with any human-made belief-system, by now mainstream science has more than a century of effort invested in its string of dogmas, and its primary dogma is atheism. It cannot find any honorable way to pull back from all of that nonsense now.   

 This singular illusory reality that we think we see around us has been lovingly created as a place for us to have experiences that can help us to grow spiritually. That is the reason why this universe exists. And these life-experiences are supposed to be hard! If they are not hard for us to deal with, then we won’t be able to grow very much. But this universe is designed around us and for us, just as a zoo’s habitats are designed for its animals. As tiny as it may make us feel, you and I are the reason why this universe exists.

And once you have swallowed the first part of this post, you will need to add to it the realization that this universe and everything in it, including your material body, are not as solid as they seem. All of it is in fact something like 99.99% empty space. Or to put it another way, this universe is actually, as our brilliant friend Albert Einstein pointed out, something like a pure illusion. Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” And he added, “It followed from the special theory of relativity that mass and energy are both but different manifestations of the same thing—a somewhat unfamiliar conception for the average mind.”

So in reality, as Einstein knew, matter is almost entirely empty space. Everything that we see around us is just another channel to which our minds can be tuned. In the room around you now, there are hundreds of different levels of reality existing at once. Your mind just happens to be tuned to this one.

The first discarnate being to make this analogy for us used radio signals, because television had not yet been invented. And discovering that insight when I was doing my earliest afterlife research was a real “Aha!” moment for me! Accustomed as we are to living with what we think is solid matter around us, our minds have become severely limited by the constraints of all of this illusory solidity. But all of us are astral travelers. The astral plane is a great many realities that vibrate higher than this one, and they are our true eternal home. In fact, although they also are illusory, all of those higher vibratory levels are far more real-seeming than is this reality. As your mother or your grandmother will happily tell you, whenever you visit with them through a medium.

The sooner you can back off from seeing this illusory material reality as important, the happier you are going to be. I know how counterintuitive that probably seems to you. We are so used to thinking of this little blue marble as all that we’ve got, and these eighty-odd years as our whole allotted time, when in fact our home is in the astral plane and we live there through eternity. We accept amnesia when we come here so we will take our earth-lessons seriously, but that makes these facts no less certainly true. I am going to say this again:

  • Each of us is an individual and eternal aspect of Consciousness. Even though we think we are not always aware, in fact we are always aware somewhere. Your material body and its brain need occasional sleep, but the same is not true of your mind.
  • The astral plane is our gigantic and indestructible true home. Insofar as we are able to determine, the astral plane consists of at least dozens of solid-seeming energy levels, each of which may be as large as this entire material universe, to the extent that size means anything. The afterlife area is the gigantic foyer through which we leave the astral to enter these brief earth-lives, and then we return home again through the afterlife area to process what we have learned on earth before we resume our real eternal lives in the many levels of the astral plane.
  • This universe – and more specifically, this little blue marble – is an illusory reality to which we come briefly to experience the kind of negativity that we cannot experience at home.  This is all just a pure illusion. As Einstein joked, it is one heck of an illusion. But it is an illusion all the same.

Just think of what this really means! There is nothing that ever can harm you. A nuclear bomb can land slap on your head right now, and you will only laugh. Once you understand what actually is going on, you will develop a sense of peace and security and pure joy so profound that it will defy every possible fear. Once you really get this, it is going to amaze and delight you! Look around you now. Nothing that you see is real. But you are real, and you are eternal, and you are infinitely loved. There is nothing in all of reality that is more precious and more beloved of God than you are.

But in order for you to claim the peace of God, you are going to have to give up the illusions.

If you have been reading these posts for a while, then you know that the very idea of religions is something that people invented in the first place as our bulwark against a howling void. But now we know that God is real! And we can safely blow out that little candle of religion, now that the sun of God shines bright. I know that. But still, I gave up Roman Christianity only with extreme reluctance. The religion was so much a part of my marriage that no longer going to church with my husband made me feel as if I was betraying him. I had already long since separated the religion from Jesus in my mind. That wasn’t hard to do, since it was clear from His own words that He had come to move humankind beyond needing religions. He certainly hadn’t come to start another one!

A Course in Miracles puts it this way: “Nothing real can be threatened. Nothing unreal exists. Herein lies the peace of God.” If you like, you might try an experiment. Just go back and read to this point again, and then read those three ACIM summary sentences and sit with it all for a bit. See if you can make your awareness of God dawn in you at a deeper level.

I can recall when, perhaps twenty years ago now, it first hit me hard that God is real, I am eternal, and all is love and peace and joy. I was deeply alone with God in that moment. And coming to know Jesus as an aspect of the Godhead, and planning His website out of love for Him, is making me think all of this through again. His pure and immense and overwhelming love for all of humankind simply defies imagination!  

The upper levels of the astral plane are glorious. They are beautiful beyond description, the colors and sounds and scents, the flowers, and the incredible intensity of love in the atmosphere. Of course, the energy there is so intense that we cannot bear to be so high until we have personally achieved those exalted levels, but we can be taken to visit the highest realms if someone who is vibrating at those levels will escort and shield us. When Thomas Jefferson spoke through Leslie Flint in the sixties, Jefferson described having been escorted on such a jaunt, and how amazing it was. It is no wonder that nearly all of those who ever have been close to Jesus have chosen to advance, rather than staying with Him. And yet Jesus continues to live on the lowly entry level, lovingly welcoming and healing damaged people, helping to rear the aborted children, constantly teaching and ministering and serving. My Thomas tells me that Jesus has visited the highest astral realms, but He never has stayed for long. Once, before I was born, Thomas went there with Jesus, shielded by Him, and He tells me that, yes, it was all so pleasurable that he would have been happy to stay, but Jesus couldn’t wait to leave. Thomas thought that was because there was no one there who needed Him. I said, “Wow. Does He need to be needed that much?” Thomas said, “No. It’s not that. But He knows there still is not enough love to match the need that there is for love. And until there is enough love, Jesus wants always to be where He can offer His.”

God has not promised we shall not know
Toil and temptation, trouble and woe;
He has not told us we shall not bear
Many a burden, many a care.

But God hath promised strength for the day,
Rest for the labor, light for the way;
Grace for the trials, help from above,
Unfailing sympathy, undying love.
– Annie Johnson Flint (1866-1932), from “What God Hath Promised” (1919)

Two True Things

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

People who need people Are the luckiest people in the world.
We’re children, needing other children,
And yet letting a grown-up pride Hide all the need inside,
Acting more like children than children.
Lovers are very special people. They’re the luckiest people in the world.
– Henry Robert Merrill Levan (1921-1998), from “People” (1964)

I wish that everyone could know Jesus personally! Even being in His presence feels overwhelming. When He looks at you, it is as if He has found at last His hundredth lost sheep (MT 18:12) and His pearl of great price (MT 13:46). But how is it possible that Jesus loves each one of us so much? The researcher in me is always at work, and just as I had to peek behind the curtain of my childhood experience of light, so I am feeling nagged now by a need to better understand this experience of personally knowing Jesus. How is it possible for Him to love each one of billions of people individually, and so much?

 My Thomas accepts it all with casual grace. He says that he could never love one person the way Jesus loves each one of us, and I couldn’t either. “And that is why He is Jesus and you and I are not.” When I asked Thomas if he has ever asked Jesus how He can love each person so much, he told me that of course they have talked about it. And Jesus always says just, “I can see their souls.”

It has taken me a while to accept what my role in all of this might be. Thomas has let me work it through on my own. Over time, I have come to understand that Thomas and I share a close male bond that goes back for nearly two thousand years, and for all that time I have been a part of Jesus’s inner circle as well. Although I’m sure I am just Thomas’s tag-along! But that was why I recognized Jesus at once. Even though He looks so different from church-Jesus, I always knew who He was. And His spot beside that astral river always felt familiar to me, despite the amnesia that we accept when we undertake a lifetime on earth. Everyone would assume that Jesus’s inner circle must include some Catholic saints, but apparently most beings choose to advance as they grow spiritually, and then they join the various higher collectives. It is only the most loyal of Jesus’s friends that have stayed with Him. Thomas tells me that Jesus’s inner circle amounts to perhaps twenty mostly anonymous beings. It is sadly ironic that a Man who so dearly loves everyone hardly trusts anyone at all.

I have been meditating on the Master’s entirely justifiable lack of trust in embodied people, despite His immense love for all the world, and the discordance that this must create for Him. The Romans stole, and then they freely used His name for their own purposes. And they committed in His name the most monstrous acts. It wasn’t just the physical things that they did, but they have also spread so many false and fear-based teachings that Jesus has never had a way to counter. And oh yes, Jesus has studied all those awful Christian teachings. As His need to nurse the returning sufferers lessened, He would visit Christian places of worship in disembodied form. I am struck by the image of all those fire-and-brimstone preachers calling down hellfire and damnation on their congregations, quite unaware that in their midst was the Prince of Peace. And what have been some of the false and fear-based Christian teachings that have for so long been attached to the name of Jesus? Here are just four typical ones. If you were raised in Christianity, do any of these bogus dogmas look at all familiar to you?

  • Substitutionary Atonement. The teaching that Jesus came to die on the cross as a pure sacrifice to God for Adam’s sin in the Garden of Eden, and for your sins and for my sins, is absolutely central to Roman Christianity. The religion would be unrecognizable without it. And yet no afterlife researcher ever has found a single bit of evidence that the death of Jesus on the cross has ever made an afterlife difference for a single human being. Substitutionary atonement is just a holdover from ancient Judaism, making Jesus into the ultimate sacrifice to Yahweh.
  • God’s Judgment and a fiery hell. Every Christian who ever has believed that God judges us has carried to church with him a Bible in which Jesus says “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23), and “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). So the fact that there is no divine judgment has always been a Biblical fact! And when we do any afterlife research at all, we also soon find that it is a literal fact as well. There is no divine judgment, and there is no hell. The whole notion of a hell to which we might be condemned by God is mere human folklore.
  • Calvinism and the Elect. Calvinism is the sort of thing that you get when you carry any set of very bad human ideas to their logical conclusion. I wrote about Calvinism three years ago, and I urge you to read that post again, because all the really bad human ideas that are at the T.U.L.I.P. core of Calvinism still exist in the world today. Until it is stamped out altogether, and the earth wherever it has been is salted, there remains the risk that some bit of Calvinism might come back.
  • The Rapture and Armageddon. The Book of Revelation is part of a collection of end-times literature that was produced during a period of extreme persecution, and it was included in the Bible by the Council of Nicaea in 325 as the Bible was first being assembled. Of course it was what those persecuted Christians were hoping for! But Armageddon never will actually happen, because its deeply fear-based vibration is the direct opposite of everything that Jesus taught, and if it ever did happen it would undo all the good that Jesus’s teachings ever managed to create on earth. And as we know, the Rapture idea was just a dream that some nineteenth-century teenager related to her pastor.

All four of these sets of Roman Christian dogmas are pure human-level nonsense! And yet, as was true of all the physical pain and death inflicted in the name of Jesus that the Master has spent most of the past two thousand years working so hard to heal, He never has complained to anyone about any of these false human ideas that have been taught by Roman Christianity in His name.

But I feel truly terrible about it all. Yes, He is famous. But what good is being famous if what you are famous for is lies and killing people? I was such a devout Roman Christian for most of my life that I almost feel as if I did all of this to Jesus personally. Even as we prepare teachingsbyjesus.com, we have to plaster all over the website and its companion book the fact that no Christian dogma is operative here. It would be easier in some ways for Jesus to start all over again with a new name. But as Thomas points out to me, the one good thing that the Romans did for Jesus was to make His name the most famous in the world, even two thousand years after His earthly death. Now we will just need to re-brand His name and get rid of all the fear the Romans have attached to it. And then Jesus can again use it happily!

To distract myself from all this guilt that I cannot help feeling for having remained a Roman Christian for so long, I have been trying to better understand what makes Jesus tick. He seems to be – and Thomas agrees with this – surprisingly childlike. Not childish, you understand, but rather as if Someone very old and profoundly wise had been stripped down to just His essential qualities. As if He had removed whatever adult sophistication would otherwise have gotten in the way of His becoming very close to us. And, come to think of it, He talks about our needing to become like children in order to enter the kingdom of God. Adult sophistication – or grown-up pride, as our frame-song says – just gets in the way of our coming together in perfect love. Jesus is a living example of what He says repeatedly in the Gospels! “Truly I say to you, unless you change and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven. So whoever will humble himself like this child, he is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.  And whoever receives one such child in My name, receives Me” (MT 18:3-5).

A dear friend of ours mentioned to me just this past week that someone is spending a hundred million dollars on an advertising campaign to fix Jesus’s brand. A hundred million dollars! And how, you might wonder, are they planning to fix Jesus’s brand? They are running an online video campaign that features ads showing Jesus as a rebel, an activist, or a host of a dinner party. These ads have been viewed more than three hundred million times. Our friend wanted to know what I thought of this, and I said the same thing that Jesus said when one of His disciples complained that a stranger was casting out demons in Jesus’s name. Jesus said, “Whoever is not against us is for us.” (MK 9:40) Sure, whoever is paying for these ads is almost certainly a Roman Christian. But the genuine Jesus is all of these things! He is a rebel. An activist. And a host. And depicting Him in any of these ways is hugely better than always showing Him as just a human sacrifice nailed to a cross.

Teachingsbyjesus.com will be up and running in the first quarter of next year. It will let you have the experience of sitting at the feet of Jesus and hearing His teachings as clearly as possible on every topic that He addressed. And there will be both a Q&A and a weekly thought (I hesitate to call it a blog). How I will manage to keep that going and this as well is yet to be seen!

I believe I have mentioned to you that my very irreverent spirit guide has tried to get his Friend to demonstrate His physical power, which shocked Jesus considerably. You might think that He would want to try it, just for the fun of it? Maybe blow up a very big pumpkin on earth by touching it with His pinkie finger? He would be disembodied. No one would see Him. But, no. Boys will be boys, but not Jesus. And even doing something very positive on the earth with His physical power seems to feel off-limits to Him. Perhaps it would disrupt the human balance. Jesus’s role is to teach. And only to teach.

But Jesus really is God. There is an angelic purity about Jesus that makes it almost impossible for me to speak to Him, or even to be very close to Him. How my Thomas can treat Him as familiarly as he does is beyond me. When I say that to Thomas, he says just that there is a little spark of God in everyone, and Jesus just has a whole lot more of that spark. Wow, amen to that! But Jesus needs someone who will be His familiar, and Thomas is that for Him.  

The problem most people will have with the teachings of Jesus is that they are not a Smorgasbord, but instead they are a System. And you even have to apply them in order and carefully if you want them to work optimally well. That was why Jesus kept saying that it was hard (e.g. MT 7:13-14). And it really is hard, at first, to change our ingrained habits. First gratitude, then forgiveness, and then love. And Roman Christianity focuses just on the love. But when the teachings of Jesus are properly followed, those teachings are absolutely transformational. I tried them eleven years ago, really expecting nothing. But when you give yourself at least three discreet months of focusing on those three key teachings in order, you can altogether transform your life! And this transformation is permanent.

In my entire life, there are two things that I have learned that I know now are certainly true. As the great quantum physicist Max Planck said, I cannot even be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow morning. But I know now for certain that Jesus is real. And I know that His teachings work wonderfully well to raise our spiritual vibrations. Only two things I know! And these two things are enough.

With one person, One very special person,
A feeling deep in your soul Says you were half, now you’re whole.
No more hunger and thirst. But first be a person who needs people.
People who need people Are the luckiest people in the world.
– Henry Robert Merrill Levan (1921-1998), from “People” (1964)

Love In Action

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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)

And No Religion, Too

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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)

 

The Lord’s Day Dawns

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“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.

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