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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?

 And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)

Even as Christianity fades in popularity, some of the religion’s sterner denominations continue to condemn people to hell just for doctrinal reasons. There also are Christian denominations whose views of God, or views of roles for women, or thoughts on communion formalities, or rules about making amends for sins are seen by some believers to not hit the right doctrinal notes to make others happy, even within the same denominations, so as to cause sometimes bitter debates. So it is no wonder why at this point there are more than forty-two thousand different Christian denominations worldwide! If I were advising the churches, and even putting aside the fact that afterlife researchers have found that there is in fact no hell, I would advise all versions of Christianity that all this hell-condemning and policing of the minutia of people’s various beliefs amounts to a set of terrible marketing choices, for heaven’s sake!  As Jesus Himself said, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions…You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” (MK 7:8-9) It is time now for those who are still trying to preserve what little is left of that old-time religion to take the Lord’s point, and to stop all this fussing over divisive doctrinal nonsense. The marketing optics of it all are frankly god-awful!

One might even ask where the whole hell idea comes from, when the afterlife reality itself as we have come to know it pretty well through communications from the afterlife’s residents so notably lacks any mention of a hell. Even Jesus in the Gospels never mentions a hell beyond the gloomy fire-free outer darkness, which does in fact exist as the lowest afterlife level; but it is a place to which only we ourselves might temporarily condemn ourselves. Or Jesus mentions the Gehenna garbage dump outside Jerusalem, whose references don’t look very hellish either. A couple of what look like references to permanent divine condemnations in the Gospels are clearly later suspect additions that were added at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. And, well, simply put, I just don’t get it! When fewer and fewer people are attending churches every year, why are those churches chasing ever more attendees away by instilling in them terror of a hell for which there is no evidence? And when fewer and fewer Americans are mustering any kind of belief in God with each year that passes, why make that problem any worse by insisting that only a God of a certain specific description can somehow win the right to reign on high?

There is no real cure for what ails Christianity now, other than a return all the way back to its true First Source. I have been reading a variety of Christian bloggers, looking for ideas about how we might begin to shape a viable post-all-schisms Christian movement, and over and over we see most modern Christian thinkers making the same key mistake. To their minds, “going all the way back” means reading just the early church fathers, all of whom lived and wrote after First Nicaea in 325 CE. By then, the pure thinking of Jesus Himself was not even a distant memory.

To his great credit, the modern Christian thinker who tries to hew closest to the Gospels’ true First Source is Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation.  Father Richard believes that when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it lost the essence of the Gospels themselves as what he calls “good news for the poor.” And of course I agree with him, although I consider that Gospels good news to have been not just for the poor, but for all of us! I do get his point, though, and I want to give him the chance to make it to us here. Father Richard says:

“In the early Christian Scriptures, the message of Jesus seems to have been heard in great part by people on the bottom. We see clearly in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels that people who are poor, in need of healing, or viewed as sinners tend to get the point. Those who are outside or at the edges of the system understand Jesus, while those who are inside or at the center are the ones who crucify him.

“We can date the turning point to the year 313 CE, when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The Church thought that linking up with power was a good way to spread the gospel message. In truth, it became embarrassed by Jesus, the powerless one. Most churches do the same, in their own way. We feel more comfortable with power than we do with powerlessness. Who wants to be like Jesus? Who wants to be powerless? It just doesn’t look like a way of influence, access, or one that is going to make any difference.

“After 313, Scripture interpretations do a 180-degree turn. Take the issue of war: a hundred years before 313, it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army. Jesus’s teaching on nonviolence is self-evident. As Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) observed, ‘I am convinced that [Christianity] has distorted the message of Jesus…. When it had the backing of a Roman emperor it became an imperialist faith as it remains to this day.’ Jesus taught nonviolence, lived nonviolently, and died nonviolently, but this goes right over our heads! We can’t see it because we’ve spent seventeen hundred years interpreting Scripture from the top. Reading Scripture from the bottom is the key to what liberation theology calls the preferential option for the poor. I just call it the bias from the bottom. Apart from conversion and until the ego is transformed, everybody wants to be at the top. Apart from grace, we don’t see anything valuable on the bottom.

“By the year 400 CE, the entire Roman army is Christian and we are killing the ‘pagans.’ After the Empire becomes Christian, there is a whole section of the Bible that we are structurally unable to read. We can’t read anything about nonviolence, powerlessness, or not being ‘winners.’ We can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t hear what we are not ready to hear. And if we are on the top, any critique of the top is un-hearable. This is where action and contemplation are linked together. In the contemplative journey, unless we see this necessary humiliation of the ego and defeat of the false self, we don’t undergo basic transformation.”

The gentle, kindly, and perfectly spiritual Man who is Jesus Himself was forced to watch the perversion of His pure Gospels message by the Roman Emperor Constantine beginning late in the third century. And Jesus understands people so well! He knew precisely what Constantine’s seizure of His burgeoning Jesus Movement was going to mean, and it breaks my heart to think of Him having to watch it happen. Simply put, love and forgiveness, kindness and peace, all those stellar virtues of the least of these, do not sell well among those who lust only for absolute power and control. Constantine cared not at all for the very teachings which were central to the love-based movement that Jesus had so well begun.

But what Jesus had taught was beautiful! He said, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). And Jesus said, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect!” (MT 5:43-48). When Peter asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).

Sadly, though, none of that was of any use to Constantine, who needed a fear-based way to control the masses as he conquered them. So as he built the Roman Christian religion that is our Christianity of today, Constantine suppressed and destroyed all the peaceful aspects of the Jesus Movement. He built the entirety of his new religion around what was a minor idea that had developed as an aspect of that Movement, an idea based in ancient Hebrew religious practice that proposed that Jesus had died as a pure sin-sacrifice to God. And Constantine thus built his whole religion around the notion of Jesus as the ultimate pure sin-sacrifice, which of course then imposed deep fear and penance upon us all. He did include Jesus’s Gospel teachings in the Christian Bible as He assembled it, but none of that was emphasized. Or even really taught. So all the fear- and guilt-based aspects of modern Christianity came from Constantine. None of that came from Jesus.

And since history is written by its winners, Christians down through all the generations have been taught and have lived our lives knowing things which never have been true. We were taught that Constantine was a hero! He had saved and protected and built the church, and done wonderful things for us and for Jesus as he spread Christianity throughout the world. I can recall how rudderless it felt to be a young Christian even in the nineteen-sixties, simultaneously reading the Bible over and over with an emphasis on the Gospels while I also attended Christian church services. Being taught to love and also to fear, not knowing which beliefs were right, and yet if you guessed wrong about what you believed, your soul might wind up in hell. Could that really be true? Oh my goodness, you never saw a more seriously devout religious seeker than I was as a teenager! But for someone who naively took Christianity as seriously as I took it then, the competing beliefs of Constantine’s fear-based religion and the earlier Jesus Movement still buried inside the Gospels simply never could be reconciled.

What fixed it all for me was the wonderful professor who was my college advisor. Miss Corwin was at the end of her long career, and growing bitter about the fact that her strongly negative view of Constantine’s role in Christian history, while factually correct, was going to remain a minority position. But she taught what was true, and she answered my questions, and while she wanted me to become a minister, I realize now in retrospect that she could see even then that I lacked the fire in the belly that entering the clergy would have required. But perhaps my doing what I am doing now is even more effective at spreading her point of view?

All I know is that the most famous Being Who ever lived came to us from the Godhead two thousand years ago to free us from all religions, and to give us the easiest method for achieving rapid spiritual growth ever devised. If we will follow Jesus’s simple teachings, we can achieve enough spiritual growth in one lifetime to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. And Constantine has only delayed, but he has not ended the moment when The Way of Jesus can prevail. As my Thomas tells us, Constantine did perform one service for us all. Now everyone on earth knows the name of Jesus! So now we need only to help the world to better understand what Jesus taught, and the true Jesus Movement can at last begin.

I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)

I don’t know how to love Him. What to do, how to move Him.
I’ve been changed. Yes, really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself I seem like someone else.

I don’t know how to take this. I don’t see why He moves me.
He’s a man, He’s just a man. And I’ve had so many men before.
In very many ways He’s just one more.

Should I bring Him down? Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love? Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this! What’s it all about?
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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