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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quality of mercy is not strained;
It droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven
Upon the place beneath. It is twice blest;
It blesseth him that gives and him that takes:
‘T is mightiest in the mightiest; it becomes
The throned monarch better than his crown:
His sceptre shows the force of temporal power,
The attribute to awe and majesty,
Wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings;
But mercy is above this sceptred sway;
It is enthronèd in the hearts of kings,
It is an attribute to God himself.
– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), from “The Merchant of Venice”

What has stuck in my mind for the past three months is watching Jesus bless a much taller man who had just died. Every detail of that moment was astounding to me. I have analyzed it from every angle, and learned from it, perhaps even more than Jesus intended for me to learn from it. In the end, I have concluded that the most saintly virtue of all – the one that really sets Jesus apart – is not love after all, but it is instead a titanic but still entirely natural, a deep and instinctive and all-encompassing kindness. 

It was kindness that made the Neolithic incarnation of my spirit guide’s younger brother which Jesus was long ago feel compelled to hunt for survivors of a massacre, and then find a way to save a woman and her children from the carnage all around them. Kindness that made that same Being feel unable to bear ascending to the Godhead unless He could find a way for everyone else in the world who ever would be born also more efficiently become perfected. So He took an unprecedented earth-lifetime from out of the Godhead in order to study us and figure out a way to make that same process happen more efficiently for us all. Et voila – in due course, we have the Jesus of today.

We flatter ourselves that such extraordinary kindness must be just a natural human trait. But sadly, it is not normal at all. In fact, the opposite is true. I am currently on a business trip, and a few days ago I missed a turn on an unfamiliar road. There were a few options that I might have taken to seek a way to turn around, so I hesitated. The driver behind me blared his horn. To make sure I fully understood his displeasure, he continued to blare it until after he had passed me, when he gave a final, separate blare. And on another day, amazingly, the driver behind me began to lean on his horn the instant the light turned green, even though he could see that the road was blocked by a gigantic tractor-trailer that was halfway through making its turn. When people are riding alone in their cars and they have a chance to show who they are to people they never will see again, they enjoy using their horns in full measure.

It is odd that we think of love as more important than kindness. Since I watched Jesus demonstrate to me in April what genuine kindness actually is, I have been meditating on the differences between love and kindness. In the end, all that I can come up with is that kindness is a characteristic, while love is an emotion. The dictionary definition of kindness is “the quality of being friendly, generous, and considerate,” which makes it seem to be almost a throwaway; while love is “an intense feeling of deep affection.”  Love is big and showy! Jesus tells us to love because He had worked out by the period of his public teaching that it is emotion that governs consciousness, which is the base creative energy. And love is the highest consciousness vibration. That is why He made such a big deal of love!

But an emotion can actually be a dangerous thing. And emotions are always subjective. Think about it:

• Emotions are personal. I know how I feel, but you can have no idea!
• Emotions are unpredictable. Even if you can surmise that, yes indeed, I do feel love, there is no way to say what my feeling of love might move me to decide to do.
• Emotions are fickle. I used to love, but now I find that I really don’t love so much anymore.

How many times have lovers ended up destroying the beloved? We have talked here about kinds of love, but all those conversations are unsatisfactory, because while they help us to define different kinds of love, still they don’t solve the problem of how easily love can go wrong. Love is an emotion. And emotions are ever-changing by their very nature.

Or what about someone who might be duly-elected in a country without a Constitution as sound as the one that blesses the United States, who is sure that he loves his country’s people more than anyone else ever could, and therefore he knows what is best for them? So he declares himself to be dictator for life. Then he closes all the banks for a week, and he open them again with accounts in the name of every man, woman, and child in that country, citizens and illegal aliens alike, and each account contains precisely twenty-five thousand, one hundred and thirty-eight dollars and forty-seven cents. An equal division of that nation’s liquid wealth, to the penny. Everyone from the formerly richest on down is now equal in liquid net worth. There have been more foolish, misguided, and nonsensical things done in the name of great love and at the height of passion than perhaps for any other cause.

So in the end, it is day-by-day kindness that must do all our heaviest lifting. While love is hot, kindness is cool. While love is passionate, kindness is caring. And kindness at least gives us some objective standard, a way to measure the effects that our acts have on people. The more I think about it, the more I realize that you could justify just about any barbaric and monstrous act as something that you were doing out of great love. Not enough food and no way to get more? Then you kill off all the grandparents of course, and you feed them to the children. Can’t have babies starving! Many parents who commit suicide will take their children with them, out of love. In fact, just weeks ago a woman in a Midwestern state came home to find that her husband had committed suicide. Whereupon, she drowned her children in a nearby lake and then killed herself. If great love is the standard, then even the greatest cruelties can make some kind of sense. But if kindness is the standard, then all of that is nonsensical.

Which brings us to what I witnessed on the night of April 6^th. After death, we can appear to others how ever we like, and normally nowadays Jesus looks very different from what you might expect. He appears now to be a kind of universal everyman. My oldest grandchild was adopted from Colombia, and Jesus’s skin is my grandson’s beautiful reddish-golden shade. He looks to be about thirty years old, with hazel eyes, a prominent nose, curly hair, full lips, and a short, efficient beard. He is perhaps five feet, ten inches tall, and I think of His look as what you would get if you put the entire human race through a blender. I have asked Thomas if that is how He looked in His lifetime as Jesus. Thomas tells me it is more that Jesus is experimenting with looking this way for the time that He is now moving toward, when Roman Christianity at last is no more and His life will be teaching in all the realms.

So we were sitting on that astral riverbank, feeding the fish, and Jesus was talking, and unexpectedly He simply transformed into pale church-Jesus, slightly taller and with blue eyes and light-brown, shoulder-length hair. I have trouble looking at Him directly, so I was aware of His change in appearance only when He stopped talking and stood and went to greet the little group of people that was approaching us.

My first though when Jesus left Thomas and me to welcome those Christians who had just come home was that this was something private that we were not supposed to see. Now, though, I feel that perhaps He was calling on me to watch Him do this. For some reason that I cannot fathom, this Being whose perfect goodness is beyond all comprehension has decided that I am worthy of the task of telling His story to the world in a website. It feels now as if He was saying to me something like, “Watch Me do this. Learn something new.” And as I think of it now, I remind myself that there have been tens of billions of Christians who have lived and died in the past seventeen hundred years. Tens of billions. With a B. Not all of them have wanted to be blessed and healed by Jesus at the ends of their earth-lives. But if even a tiny fraction of them – say, only several million of them – have thought this would be a special moment for them, then Jesus has put off whatever else He might have done among the endless fun things that there are to do in the astral plane, suspending His own life for seventeen hundred years in order to do this for every Christian who has wanted to meet Him and receive His blessing.

The people in the group were forming a line, and the first man in line was very tall. My guess is that he was six feet, five or six inches tall, and he clearly had been someone important in life. He wore a crisp white shirt without a tie, open at the neck, with creased dark slacks and shiny shoes. He started to fall to his knees before the Lord, but Jesus said, “Peace, my son,” and He slipped His hands beneath the man’s arms at either side. He didn’t try to lift him. It was a signal, and the man regained his feet. Jesus was smiling up at his face. Thomas and I stood maybe twenty feet away and to the side, so we could observe it all. Jesus then put both His hands way up on top of the man’s head and said, “Bless you, my son!” with a bit of a giggle in his voice, and He grinned. I think He was being playful to acknowledge how tall the man was, and to put him at ease about his almost-kneeling faux-pas. And the man said, “Thank You, Sir.” Thank you not just for your blessing, but even more for treating me as an equal. And they stood smiling at one another. That man could joyously grin down at church-Jesus, and he could look Him in the eye as I still cannot, until he was the one who ended that moment and made way for the next person in line.

And that was nothing, right? But I can’t stop thinking about it. Replaying every detail of it. That Jesus the risen Lord has done all of that so sweetly and gently and made that moment so perfect for even a million people, and perhaps for billions of people over seventeen centuries defies my imagination. He could get others to dress up as church-Jesus in His place. No one would know. When I said that to Thomas, he said, “But He would know.” The “Jesus” who appears during near-death experiences and other personal dreams and visions is a presentation by our own spirit guides, who know best what we would need. Whatever “Jesus” says during your own NDE is said by your guide and not by Jesus. But if you were devoted to Jesus during your lifetime, He won’t send an imposter to meet you when you die.

I had thought that after fifty years of research, I had nothing more to learn in this field, but Jesus had this one more lesson to teach. The fruit of spiritual growth is not love at all. Love is what produces spiritual growth, by raising our personal consciousness vibrations. No, the true fruit of spiritual growth is kindness. And when you realize that, and you begin to look for it in people, you glimpse it everywhere. Yes, there are low-vibration bullies who use their auto horns to try to make our driving miserable, but most drivers are more courteous. All my clients own closely-held businesses, and I have repeatedly seen them do kindnesses here and there for needy employees. My sister’s teenage grandson is taller than I am, but still he happily plays hide-and-seek with his much younger sister, and he cooks with her because it makes her happy. When you look for them, you see these little kindnesses. And I realize now that the ultimate fruit of spiritual growth is not angelic purity. No, it is this perfect, gigantic, all-encompassing kindness that can make Jesus willing without complaint to delay the advent of His own Way on earth for almost twenty centuries while He patiently waits out Roman Christianity, and He heals every one of that religion’s victims. And my Thomas tells me that never has Jesus even privately complained.

I have been trying so hard for my entire life to ever better understand Jesus. I majored in studying Him in college. I have read the Gospels until I can recite whole sections of them by heart. I have met Jesus in person. He has told me His story, and it makes a lot more sense than the Christian version of His story ever could. Sometimes I think I really do begin to understand the genuine Jesus. But then I recall the blissful peace of His face as He smilingly welcomed home that umpteen-billionth victim of this religion that has delayed the advent of Jesus’s Way on earth for the past two thousand years. I recall the perfect joy in His face, and I see how happy He was in that moment. And I realize that I still cannot understand Jesus as a Man at all.

And earthly power doth then show likest God’s
When mercy seasons justice. Therefore, Jew,
Though justice be thy plea, consider this,
That, in the course of justice, none of us
Should see salvation: we do pray for mercy;
And that same prayer doth teach us all to render
The deeds of mercy. I have spoke thus much
To mitigate the justice of thy plea;
Which if thou follow, this strict court of Venice
Must needs give sentence ‘gainst the merchant there.
– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), from “The Merchant of Venice”

A week later His disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said,
“Peace be with you!” Then He said to Thomas,
“Put your finger here; see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it into My side.
Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
– (JN 20:26-28)

What I have come to love most of all about our merry band of commenters here is that you so often help me think things through and come to a deeper understanding. This time around, you have helped me realize that of course Jesus has continued to grow spiritually throughout the past two thousand years! Since we now have been told that Jesus began as a usual human being, that added understanding is common sense. And in the reality without time that is the astral plane, my Thomas tells me that he watched it happen as he came and went at his Brother’s request, taking repeated lifetimes on earth meant primarily to try to protect the Lord’s precious teachings. But that is nearly all he has been willing to tell me.

 I forgive my beloved friend. I am coming to see only slowly that he has been keeping some fairly big secrets from me, but those secrets never were his to tell. Perhaps they are not yet mine to tell either, but at some point the Lord’s secrets will belong to humankind since the withholding of them has caused us so much confusion. For me, the central point is Jesus. He must make His Own decisions. He is the most famous, the most amazing person in all of human history, and almost every human being on earth now feels a connection with Him on some level, but still no one actually knows who He is? And despite my Thomas’s two thousand years of secrecy, now that Jesus has decided that He is going to tell His story, Thomas is beginning to open to me. Just a bit.

Almost the first thing that Thomas ever said to me when he first introduced himself through a medium was that we had shared seventeen earth-lifetimes. But he has never been willing to say much more than that. Although apparently we do go far back! In the first of those lifetimes of which I am aware, I was a teenage boy and he was a chieftain and we were early followers of the Lord’s Way who died together in a Roman massacre. In another of those lives, I was a French monk and he was some sort of pamphleteer in around the year twelve hundred. He was allowed to hide in our monastery and write his diatribes, provided that I vetted them. In what I believe was the most recent lifetime we shared, he was Thomas Jefferson, and in his old age I was a law clerk who worked with him on an early version of Liberating Jesus. He was so old at that point that he decided not to publish it. When I was writing My Thomas in 1990 and researching that book at Monticello, they told me they actually had such a manuscript, which fact still amuses me.

I have been asking Thomas what it was like, watching all those victims of Roman Christianity flood into the afterlife over all those years. He tells me that to Jesus they were all His chrished people. They arrived in pain and calling for Him, and He welcomed each of them, and He healed them. But, in the millions? How could He manage that? Thomas says that Jesus just managed it. He had His Council, after all, and the earliest comers helped Him love and heal the later arrivals. Don’t forget what the atmosphere is like in the afterlife. It is nothing but love and light!

 Jesus established an afterlife healing center for the victims of the Inquisitions. I had recalled that there was just an Inquisition or two, and it all happened a long time ago, but in fact Roman Christianity was torturing heretics to death off and on for most of a thousand years! And Thomas tells me that at first their astral bodies would mimic their damaged earthly bodies, so helpers pretending to be medical teams would sew back on whatever the torturers had lopped off, heal the victims’ remembered burns, and so on. Jesus found so much joy in righting the worst wrongs of Roman Christianity. He would sit at the bedsides of people who felt that they needed to be in bed, or more usually He would go from group to group in the beautiful healing gardens, just teaching them and loving them. Very soon He would have them singing and dancing the old Hebrew harvest songs together, which of course was what He would have recalled from the last time He was on earth. Thomas says He taught them to pray all over again. Many of them were angry, and He didn’t deny them their right to be angry. He simply taught them to also be grateful. He taught them to pray, “Thank You God for this flower.” “Thank You God for this friend.” The more questions I have been asking Thomas, the more his memories of those times have been coming back to him.

 But the crucial work of protecting Jesus’s Gospel teachings was something that the Lord did Himself. The Councilors of The First Council of Nicaea in 325 smugly insisted that they were “inspired by God,” and my Thomas tells me that actually they were right. It was Jesus who was working with those Councilors’ minds as they put together the first Roman Christian Bible. Thomas told me this just last Friday, and I slapped my forehead. Omigod. Of course! I feel like an idiot that I never thought of it myself! It was Jesus Himself who chose the four Canonical Gospels and rejected all the other versions. He allowed them to remove some references to reincarnation, but He made sure that enough remained that we would be able to puzzle it all out later. And everything that they wanted to add to the Gospels was added to the back of each in such a way that later on it could be plucked back out again. So then all that Jesus really had to do was to pay loose attention to what was happening on earth, send my Thomas to the various religious hotspots, and tune His mind back in closely to the Councilors’ minds whenever another church Council was later convened. His precious teachings were always under His divine protection.

 It is first now that I even think to wonder what my own role in any of this might have been. Thomas insists to me at once that I have had no role. But I have shared seventeen earth-lifetimes with him? And as I ask the question, I have the answer. Not from Thomas, but from Jesus. The Lord reminds me that in the first Appendix to Liberating Jesus, He outlines how we can recognize and remove what the Councils have added to the Gospels, and we can have again the words that He spoke as He now wants us to have those words. And He calls Liberating Jesus “our book.” I wish I could properly describe His voice.

Thomas tells me that he was so close to Jesus over all that time, and Jesus’s further spiritual growth was so gradual, that he didn’t realize the enormity of what it was that he was witnessing until we began to talk about it here over the past few weeks. And it wasn’t just that Jesus was loving back to spiritual health all the millions of victims of the Inquisitions and the Crusades who needed His comfort and His care. He also was loving and comforting those who had been made to suffer the lifelong terror of never knowing whether perhaps they might have been created by a monstrous God simply so they could populate a hell that of course does not even exist. By far most of the Roman Christians that Jesus has loved into spiritual health over the past seventeen hundred years have been just the billions upon billions of Catholics and Protestants of all those forty-thousand-odd fear-based denominations who have lived and died in Roman Christianity, and unfortunately they were cheated of Jesus’s perfect love-based Way because the Romans had exterminated The Way of Jesus just three hundred years after it began. In welcoming each of them individually, and in loving each of them into spiritual health, Jesus was – inadvertently perhaps, although I am coming to think more and more that He must have known very well what He was doing – Jesus was using Himself to demonstrate the value of His Own Gospel teachings in raising the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind. And what a demonstration it has been!

 In that two-thousand-year astral reality without time, my best guess is that Jesus has demonstrated something like the spiritual equivalent of a million years of humankind’s future spiritual evolution.

One of the emails that I accept daily out of plain curiosity is from a fire-and-brimstone traditional pastor who is sure that the End Times are upon us now. Jesus is about to ride in on His white horse and start right in at lopping off heads. Or whatever it is that the Book of Revelation tells us that Jesus is about to do. I must confess that toward the end of my decades of cover-to-cover Bible-reading, I took to skimming the Book of Revelation, just as I took to skimming the Begats. There are only so may Begats and Lakes of Fire that any sane person is able to take in one lifetime. But it is indeed possible that these are the End Times in one way or another, and indeed Jesus is about to return, since He has asked the most unlikely individual that you can possibly imagine to build for Him His Own website. I am giggling a bit, involuntarily, as I type this. Jesus has so completely perfected Himself that He is at once both infinitely powerful God and as sweet as a perfectly cherished child.

Jesus has certainly proven that His method for achieving human spiritual development works! If that was His goal, then He has succeeded. I can recall that when I used to read the Bible, each time I would end the Old Testament with Malachi and start right in with the Gospel book of Matthew, as I would again freshly encounter Jesus it would be like stepping directly from ancient days right into the modern world and beyond. And Jesus is our model now for what all of humankind is going to be in that blessed and far-distant day when we all have long-since abandoned not only wars and rumors of wars, but even the pointless fears that the Roman religion has brought to us, and we have returned with joy to the Way of Jesus, the Way that our beloved Lord has now proven to us is going to be The Way indeed! That bitterly sadistic and all-too-human fire-and-brimstone pastor would not recognize Jesus now.  

       We will close here with a few eyewitness details from the Gospel of John. When you read today’s frame-verse, you realize that Jesus had already shed His reanimated material body by the time He first encountered His bad-boy disciple, the infamous Doubting Thomas, just a week after His resurrection. By then Jesus had already begun to use an astral body on which He had created mimics of His crucifixion wounds. Which amusing detail purely fascinates me!

Of course, we know from little details given elsewhere, and from the fact that when Jesus first left the tomb He didn’t want His material body to be touched, that it had begun to deteriorate by the time of His resurrection on Easter Sunday morning. So He probably cast aside His material body as early as, say, the following Tuesday. But here, certainly, He could not have entered a locked room and simply appeared there unless He was already operating in astral form. And we know from the fact that mentions of His crucifixion wounds soon cease that He didn’t think it was necessary to keep maintaining them on the astral body that He used for the forty days before His final bodily ascension. But He had to make His point to Doubting Thomas!

 I love the fact that the Bible is so amazingly rich in these little first-person observations that it lets you play the detective, even two millennia later. And we will have more to say about that next week.     

A week later His disciples were in the house again, and Thomas was with them.
Though the doors were locked, Jesus came and stood among them and said,
“Peace be with you!” Then He said to Thomas,
“Put your finger here; see my hands.
Reach out your hand and put it into My side.
Stop doubting and believe.”

Thomas said to Him, “My Lord and my God!”
– (JN 20:26-28)

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by day” (1971)

On April 6^th I met Jesus in person. And He turns out to be a profoundly complex but amazingly relatable and even actually human Being. He is human not as you and I are human, but He is human because two thousand years ago He studied the elevated Beings around Him who even back then were of lesser rank, the members of the Godhead Collective and the tall and glowing Beings of Light, and He realized that He was about to be subsumed into the most elevated Collective. And once that happened, He would lose His chance to stay in contact with humankind, so He made the decision to take His personal Collective and live separately on the entrance level of the astral plane. And for the next seventeen hundred earth-years He lovingly welcomed and comforted and healed each of the billions of victims of Roman Christianity and many more people besides, and He taught and served  on Level Three and in the children’s villages.  He never claimed any of the privileges that His ever more exalted rank was earning Him.

Although the night of April 6^th has remained vivid in my mind, it has taken nearly three months for the strangeness of the Lord’s situation to dawn on me. And Jesus is such a remarkable Man! He is in some ways childlike, and as low-mileage as anyone on earth might be who at the age of thirty has lived an entirely solitary life in a forest. But at the same time He is deeply powerful, as if He were an immense engine idling. He is personally smooth, without rough edges, gentle and mild, at the pinnacle of power but nevertheless extraordinarily sweet and kind.

My Thomas never volunteers information, even if something is bothering me. One morning last weekend I blurted to him, “Why did you take me there? What was the point? Now I can’t get Him out of my mind!”

“So it is only now that you bring Him up?”

“Isn’t He lonely? He is all by Himself!”

“He is not lonely. He is never alone unless He wants to be alone.”

 “Is John with Him?”

Thomas didn’t answer that question. He threw me a kind of “It’s complicated” thought.

“Doesn’t he visit Jesus?”

Here I got the clear thought that John likes Roman Christianity and nothing more will be said.

But none of this is my business! We each were thinking that same thought at once, which seemed to soften my precious friend. I have come to see that he is in a difficult place. He is sworn to be my spirit guide for this earth-lifetime, and he loves me as all of our spirit guides love us, but at the same time I am coming to see more deeply that he is the close intimate of God Himself. And as we both had that added thought, he seemed to soften further. I can see what an immense relief it is to him that he no longer must keep these two parts of his eternal life separate. And I gather that the separation is ending now only because Jesus wants it to end. Surprisingly, Thomas then said many things in rapid boluses of thought. And as I was trying to take them all in, to my further surprise he told me that it would be acceptable for me to share with you a lot of what he had just told me. I realized as I was hearing him in my mind that of course he was in contact by mind with Jesus as he was talking to me. And he probably is constantly in contact with Jesus. So all of this must be what Jesus wants us to hear. And as I had that thought, I felt the Lord’s affirmation.

 Wow, the veil is really thinning now! 

Thomas told me that Jesus made the choice when He returned from His lifetime on earth never to rejoin the Godhead Collective. This universe exists as a place for human beings to experience the spiritual stressors that will enable us to better grow spiritually. And The Way that Jesus developed for us to achieve that result required that He maintain His identity as Jesus, and also maintain His personal Collective so He could better lead His new movement. By then He had achieved a status which allowed Him to make these choices. But He still was to remain at the Godhead level. That was His earned status. That was the established order of things, and the Celestial Council was in ultimate control. However, when Jesus realized how rapidly His being at that level was putting Him completely out of touch with the earth, He chose to permanently occupy a lower place. And so, once again He was making waves. 

Thomas has long since told me that the Being Who is Jesus, uniquely perhaps among all the beings who ever have been born on earth, loves people. I mean, He really loves people! So to be separated from where He could care for and nurture the followers of His precious Way was unbearable for Him, especially since already the nascent Roman Christian movement was beginning to deliver up its first victims as it assumed control on earth of the followers of the Lord’s Way. The Celestial Council soon found that it could not prevent Jesus from welcoming and comforting and healing those victims. And thus began the Lord’s seventeen-hundred-year ministry that is moving toward its end only now, as the Roman phase of Christianity apparently at last is nearing its end.

I don’t think that I fully understand what I am about to say, but Thomas wants me to try. God is infinitely powerful, infinitely creative, and perfectly loving Consciousness energy. The material universe consists of nothing else. Jesus told us as much when He told us that God is Spirit (JN 4:24). More precisely, God is Consciousness at its highest vibration. The Apostle Paul told us that it is within God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). And loving others, exercising love constantly, is how we all grow spiritually, so as Jesus loved all those  billions of damaged Christians into spiritual health over seventeen centuries, He became perhaps more personally powerful even than the entire Godhead Collective combined. It was a byproduct of the way He was ministering, and it was something that Thomas tells me now that he noticed more than Jesus did as Thomas was coming and going, taking repeated lifetimes on earth to do what he could to try to guard Jesus’s teachings as they had carefully preserved them within the Roman Christian Bible. He was with Jesus almost constantly between lifetimes as he watched with Him the development of Roman Christianity, and then its course through all those centuries.

Thomas has repeatedly told me, and he emphasized yet again to me last weekend, that none of Roman Christian theology has anything to do with Jesus. And it has little to do with God! But Thomas tells me that he never has heard the slightest complaint about any of this from Jesus, nor the least bit of resentment of the religion that was named for Him. And my Thomas has seen nothing from Jesus but perfect love for the billions of Christians who have returned home revering Him, although their religion has nothing to do with the Lord’s Own Way.

Jesus’s original Collective is vastly augmented now by a battery of Christian saints and clergy, and all those lay Christians who have returned home as His devoted followers. In the astral plane, Jesus now heads a gigantic spiritual family. So as we talked last weekend, I wondered to Thomas about what role he might still play for Jesus. He is just an earthly brother from the Lord’s final ordinary lifetime that I calculate must have ended maybe seven thousand earth-years ago, even before the Lord’s ascension to the Godhead level. So in practical terms, what might Thomas be to Jesus now? At that, my Thomas smiled. Even though I cannot see him more than vaguely in my mind, I can feel his emotion when he smiles. And he almost never smiles. He said thoughtfully, “He tells me that I am the only one who still outranks Him. I am His older brother, right?” Thomas even chuckled a bit, as if to himself.

I thought about that. Then I said, “He cannot be serious!”

“He is perfectly serious. He loves people with His whole heart, but all He ever gets is worship. The only one who can love Him as a human man seems to be me. So I am His pearl of great price.”

It was most of another day before I said to Thomas, “He really said that?”

“He says it all the time.” Then Thomas added, “He uses that term in the Bible (MT 13:46). And that is also why He loves those fish. And the deer. They don’t know that He is the King of Kings!”

I know what you are thinking now. Jesus can hear us talking about Him. So we shouldn’t talk about Him! We can talk easily in front of my family because our conversations are by mind. But when Jesus can hear us talking about Him, isn’t that embarrassing?

It was. But when I first had that thought, Thomas said, “You wonder why Jesus allows you to share what we are saying. My child, He is not a human man, who has a need to hide His thoughts. His thoughts are your gift! Jesus loves everyone, but He trusts almost no one in a human body because He knows their hearts. He sees how His name is used by clergymen to build their earthly wealth. It is the hardest thing for Jesus to trust anyone in a human body because money is the great human obsession (MT 6:24). When I took you to meet with Him in April, it was by His invitation. He would like you to become more comfortable with Him. But He believes that He can trust you.”

Wow. It may be my Thomas’s new pride in me, which I can feel, even more than the amazement of the Lord’s expression of trust that really makes me smile.

Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by day” (1971)