Author: Roberta Grimes

Fishers of People

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

“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

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

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

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

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

“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.

God Cannot Send You to Hell

People are often unreasonable and self-centered.
Forgive them anyway.
If you are kind, people may accuse you of ulterior motives.
Be kind anyway.
If you are honest, people may cheat you.
Be honest anyway.
If you find happiness, people may be jealous.
Be happy anyway.
The good you do today may be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.
Give the world the best you have and it may never be enough.
Give your best anyway.
For you see, in the end, it is between you and God.
It was never between you and them anyway.
– Mother Teresa of Calcutta (1910-1997), from “Do it Anyway” (Provenance Unknown)

A legal client of mine can recite today’s frame-verse from memory. She lives by it. As best I can tell via a quick Google search, these words were found on the wall of Mother Teresa’s spare little cell at the end of her life. And do you know, the more I think about them, the more they seem to be not a half-bad way to live a life of service. Whatever you do is always between you and God. And no matter how hard you work, you really cannot accomplish a blessed thing if you are worrying about what people think! Another bit of wisdom that a client shared long ago also has stuck in my mind. He said, “When you are twenty, you worry about what people think of you. When you are forty, you don’t care what people think of you. When you are sixty, you realize that nobody has been thinking about you at all.”  Liberating words to live by! Although on the other hand, someone else once told me that if you pick up a calf on the day he is born, and you continue to pick him up every day of his life, eventually you will be able to pick up a bull. I never have tried that, but intuitively it doesn’t seem to be wise. Especially as the bull gets friskier.

 But collecting aphorisms is one of the fruits of spending a lot of time with people who would like you to think they are very smart. And yet my beloved mother-in-law, who lived with us for the final decade of her life, actually gave me the greatest insight of all; short, of course, of the endless perfect wisdom that we have received from Jesus. She was forty years older than I was. And one day soon after her husband had a medical emergency that made them need to move in with us briefly – then he died soon thereafter, and she never left – she looked at me, and with an air of mild surprise she said, “You know, I don’t feel any older than you are.” I looked kindly at that dear and lovely woman who was then eighty-five years old, and who once had been a dancer so she sat and moved with dignity. But my goodness, she was eighty-five! And I smiled and thought, yeah, right!

It is only now, as I am closing in on eighty years old myself, that I realize that, you know, my dear beloved Mom was precisely right. I am no older in my mind than my own daughters are. I take walks with the daughter who lives with us. I pursue the same work-day that I did at forty, and the only concession I have made to my age is that I am more careful about avoiding injuries. I have given up horseback riding, for example, but I shrug about that, since I know it’s only temporary. And my Thomas has promised that I will ride out on Beau! So now my confident advice to forty-year-olds is to take care of your body and your mind. I may do a whole blog post of advice about that. I can see no reason why you shouldn’t live and work precisely the same way at eighty as you are living and working at forty. Because I do!

 There. That has given you a palate-cleanser, after we had a bit of turmoil in our comments section last week. And it occurs to me, too, that you might like to hear about the way that Jesus laughs. Thomas and I are meeting often now with Jesus as we talk about The Fun of Loving Jesus, which has been written and is in its revisions stage; and we also are talking about Jesus’s website, which is deep in its planning stage. I am not being allowed to remember our meetings, but I often wake up in the middle of the night with what I think of as marching orders. Have you ever known a bright and wholesome twenty-year-old? I have a grandson that age, and he reminds me of Jesus. Which is odd, when you think of it, given the rather dramatic difference in their ages, but Jesus has chosen to look and act about the same age as my grandson is now. Jesus has the most wonderful, delightful, and amazingly youthful laugh that sounds as if He is still a teenager, so His voice might crack at any moment. His laughter is loud and sweet and spontaneous, as if something had surprised and delighted Him. I woke up last night with the Lord’s laughter echoing freshly in my mind. I wish I could remember what the joke was about!

 And now, with our palates all suitably cleansed, let’s dispense forever with the thought that God might be able to condemn anyone to hell.  

First, of course, comes the plain certainty that God never judges us. Jesus tells us this simple fact in the Gospels the way He had to tell us a lot of things two thousand years ago, by breaking it into innocuous-seeming facts over days of time because He was always under observation by Temple guards. On one day He said, “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). Okay, fair enough. He wasn’t arrested for saying that because at least Someone was going to judge us, right? But then, on a different day with different Temple guards, Jesus said, “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). And no Temple guard was bothered by that, either. But when we put both statements together, we hear Jesus telling us what in fact is true. There is no post-death judgment at all by any religious figure.

Instead, you yourself will be your own judge. That fact didn’t have to be mentioned in the Gospels, but I get a kick out of the fact that Jesus brings it up this way. Especially when you consider all the ears and minds and mouths and hands through which the Lord’s words had to pass in order to reach us, it truly is amazing that any of those words have survived at all, and especially with such specificity! Each of us, when we return home, will undergo a life review and get to feel how we have made everyone else in our whole lives feel. And then we will be asked to forgive everyone, which we gladly will do. Last of all, we will be asked to forgive ourselves. And that, of course, will be the problem. When you see how awful you made a few people feel in some situations that you have long forgotten, I sadly guarantee that you are going to feel pretty awful about yourself. No wonder Jesus made such a point of stressing our need to learn to forgive, no matter what. When His disciple, Peter, asked him, “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 thinking of the life-review process brings to mind Jesus’s warning that we must not judge, lest we be judged. He said, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2). Because He knew that one day soon you were going to face this almost impossible task of having to forgive yourself.

So, now we understand that there is no post-death judgment by anyone but yourself. I think we have thoroughly made that case.

 But, is there a hell?

I wrote a blog post a year ago this weekend in which I explained how we know that there is no hell. I cannot improve on what I wrote back then, so I hope you will read it as if it were a part of this post. Please “incorporate it herein by reference,” as we lawyers like to say. And Keith Giles, my favorite modern theologian, does an effective job of demolishing the various theories that some have put forth that Jesus might ever have taught about hell.

That leaves us just a few suspiciously hellish-sounding Gospel references to something Jesus called “the outer darkness.” For example, I say to you that many will come from east and west, and recline at the table with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob in the kingdom of heaven; but the sons of the kingdom will be cast out into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:11-12). And, “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. Throw out the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 25:29-30). Oh, good grief! What is all that about?

The lowest level of the afterlife and the astral plane is cold, dark, smelly, disgusting, and exactly what Jesus called it: it’s the Outer Darkness. If we cannot forgive ourselves after death for the way we have made other people feel during our lifetime just ended, our consciousness vibration slows until eventually we will end up at that very lowest level, simply because we can fall no farther. And apparently we cannot raise our consciousness vibration unaided and manage to get out on our own. Eventually we will be rescued, but meanwhile our existence is miserable indeed.

So God cannot send you to hell because, first, there is no post-death judgment by God or by any other religious figure; and second, because there is no hell to receive you.

And meanwhile, our planning for Jesus’s website goes on. I have no memory of these apparently almost-nightly meetings that we are having with Jesus, but I can tell from my Thomas’s general mood and from the few little tidbits of memories that he lets me keep that progress is being made. But Jesus seems more and more to be thinking like a radical! I graduated from college in 1968. Smith, like most other colleges, ended classes early that year because in 1968 my generation was marching in the streets. We had seen what governments could do, drafting our high school friends to die for nothing, and we were out there trying to tear everything down. And now, insofar as I can tell, Jesus has come to feel every bit as radical about those in religious authority. My Thomas has access to the life-memories of Thomas Jefferson, who was another radical thinker who didn’t trust putting governmental power into the hands of just a few. And there my Thomas is, conspiring with Jesus, who has spent the past two thousand years healing the pain that too much power in the hands of a few caused to all those millions of martyred Christians.  

I have no idea anymore what my role in all of this is supposed to be. All I know is that, apparently, now Jesus no longer wants to call His planned new movement The Way of Jesus. He no longer wants it to have any rules, because if there are rules, then soon there are rulers. I just look at my Thomas (so to speak) and say, “Not even ‘Love your neighbor as yourself?’ What the heck kind of sense does that make?”

He is in his Jefferson mode at the moment, so he just says some of the more airheady romantic-dreamer things that Jefferson used to say in life, like calling for a revolution every twenty years. And an entirely new Constitution. He says that since Jesus will always be there, then why does His movement need to have any rules?  

“But I won’t be on earth to interpret whatever He says! How long do you expect me to live here, anyway?”

“Eat right. Then you’ve got another thirty years. Maybe more.”

Well, I have to say that at least now Jesus does seem to be a lot happier. That’s something.

Is Jesus God?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“But what do you expect Him to do?’

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

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

 

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

Jesus Needs No Religion

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“That was back in July.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Is that so He can talk on His website?

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

Well, no.

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

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

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

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

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

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