Why should I feel discouraged?
Why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart feel lonely,
And long for heaven and home? Continue reading “The Death Experience (Part I)”
Why should I feel discouraged?
Why should the shadows come?
Why should my heart feel lonely,
And long for heaven and home? Continue reading “The Death Experience (Part I)”
Oh Lord, my God, When I, in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made.
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder.
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art! How great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885)
Christian apologetics is a branch of theology that defends Christianity against objections to Christian thought. And the concept is well-named! If there is any area of thought that ought to be apologizing profusely at this point, and to everyone involved, it is Christian theology. I say this, having lived for most of my life as a devout traditional Christian. I learned Protestant Christian dogmas as a child, and then began to read the Bible over and over again at the age of twelve, and continued that practice until the age of fifty. I also studied Christian history in college before I fell in love with a Catholic in my twenties, and then I proceeded to try my best to convert myself into enough of a Catholic to pass sufficient muster, with the help of a confused but patient priest, to just barely squeeze through the Cathedral doors and manage a straight-faced Catholic conversion. So I have been around the apologetical barn a time or two! My husband is a cradle Catholic, parochial schools from kindergarten through Providence College, and so rigorous in his religion that if I had not converted, he would not have married me. And I was in love. We do crazy things when we are in love. In the end, the priest told me that I would have to accept a lot of Catholicism as “a sacred mystery.” Or, you know, I could marry someone else.
Well, okay. I converted. And for twenty-five years I tried my best to be a Catholic because I love my husband. So I didn’t just go through the Catholic motions. I was a Lector, and I sent my children to parochial schools because that was what the man I love wanted. And also, because I reasoned that any faith was better than no faith. The priest who converted me didn’t give our marriage much of a chance, but the joke is on him. We will be married for fifty years in August.
There comes a time, though, when enough is enough. For me, that time came when I was turning fifty, and I finally got it through my thick head that Jesus had told the woman at the well that He could give her living water (JN 4:11).
I had read the Gospel story of the woman at the well dozens of times before that day. I used to read the Bible repeatedly, from Genesis through Revelation, and then I would go back to Matthew and read just the New Testament over again before I started back in with Genesis. In later life I confess that I cheated a lot, and after Revelation I would re-read maybe the Psalms, and then the New Testament sometimes two or three times before I started over again with Genesis. Anything, to delay having to read the Begats even one more time! So I had read that story of the woman at the well repeatedly without seeing how it related to the afterlife evidence until one very significant day that literally rocked my world.
I have talked about this problem before. When you are a devout traditional Christian, and you also are pursuing as a hobby the obsessive sifting through of a couple of centuries of afterlife evidence, not yet having met your spirit guide so you still don’t realize that you have a purpose in this particular lifetime that requires that you be doing both of these things simultaneously, you fully expect that you will start to find that your beloved religion matches up with what the afterlife evidence tells you actually happens after death. But by the time I was turning fifty, I was forced to admit that Christianity was actually wrong about pretty much everything. In all that afterlife evidence, no matter how hard I looked for it, I could find no evidence at all for a throne room, or a judgmental God, or a fiery hell. And worst of all, I could find no evidence that the crucifixion of Jesus had ever made an afterlife difference for a single human being. And I had seen plenty of good communications from the dead by then. If it ever had happened, I would have found it.
When I was fifty, I stopped my daily Bible reading in what felt like a bought of existential despair. It was two years before I dared to pick up a Bible again. Then one rainy day I swallowed hard, and I trusted Jesus enough to read just the Gospels. I discovered then that while the big Christian dogmas like substitutionary atonement are altogether without foundation in the words of Jesus, His teachings on things like love and forgiveness and so much else agree so precisely with what I had been learning about the afterlife from communications with the dead that it took my breath away. I kept waiting to catch Him in some mistake. Perhaps He talked about a fiery hell? Or He might have mentioned a judgmental God? But no, don’t forget that He said, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son” (JN 5:22). Except for a few anachronistic spots at the back of each Book that I had learned in college had been added by the Council of Nicaea in 325, the Gospels could have been taken right from my dusty old books of early-twentieth-century afterlife communications. On that glorious day, I was already sold on the certainty that Jesus knew whereof He spoke! Then I came to Chapter Four of John, where Jesus tells the woman at the well that if only she had asked Him, He could have given her living water. And my jaw hit the floor.
My dear friends, what got me on that greatest day of my life was that passage in John where Jesus offers the woman at the well “living water.” Christians think He was talking about baptism. Silly them! I knew from the afterlife literature that the water in the afterlife has peculiar qualities. It is oddly dry and life-giving. And when I visited Jesus two weeks ago, and we had our bare feet in the river while we fed the fish, I didn’t think to mention to you the fact that the water was the odd, dry “living water” that He talked about to the woman at the well. The water in the astral plane is in fact dry, it feels like silk, it doesn’t wet your clothes. And it is alive. I wasn’t focused on the water at the time because I was so overwhelmed by the nearness of Jesus and His luscious personal energy, but my mind keeps bringing back these details!
As I suspected might happen, those moments that Thomas and I spent with Jesus have remained vivid in my mind. I think they always will feel like an event that occurred just last night. And the problem has become that at this stage, I am beginning to feel an inappropriate rage. The fact that the Romans co-opted the name of Jesus and distorted His spiritual movement into one of power and control has done such tremendous harm to the world! So I have just this morning turned to Thomas, and I have early on the Saturday morning before this post is due to go to you had the last answer that I would have expected from him. When I told him how angry I was at Christianity, he simply and calmly said, “Welcome to my world.”
I blurted, “What? That’s all you have to say?” There is an army of discarnates supporting Jesus, including even the Apostle John, who have incarnated repeatedly for two thousand years while they protect the Master’s teachings, and meanwhile Christianity continues to teach a bunch of bogus nonsense? And that is all just fine with you, Thomas? He is smiling at me now. And actually, he shows me that Jesus is smiling, too. What I find incomprehensible is that the whole blinking lot of them are smiling at me, as if I am somehow just naïve and cute to be discovering this only now? My dear Thomas is telling me that I am actually meant to discover this now, and please stop being so dramatic about it? Jesus is weary after two thousand years of having to make the sign of death on millions of Catholics’ foreheads when they come home to Him. Thomas is reminding me of that now. So it is time to go out and spread the Lord’s Way on earth, and I know that, so just go out and do it now, for heaven’s sake? Omigod, he is showing me a whole crowd of people smiling at me! Oh. I get it. I do.
–We are nearing the end of a very long process. In this case, one that has lasted for two thousand years. Each of us has a role to play, and Thomas has promised me that once the SRO website is finished, and the one that I have promised to do for Jesus, I can go home if I want to go home. We have worked out a compromise age. It’s okay. I am realizing that finding out so late in life that I have a tiny role to play in something that is apparently very large is comfortable. And in not telling me what was ahead until that was necessary, Thomas has given me the carefree gift of a full and happy earthly life.
Any honest person who knows much about Christian history must take it as a given that none of the forty-two thousand versions of the religion that modern Christians follow has much of anything to do with Jesus. The Lord has been seen to be just a pure sacrifice with a virgin mother, with no role in the religion that carried His name except to die. Which was an idea that came from old Roman and Hebrew religious customs. And everyone of every religion and of no religion goes to the selfsame afterlife anyway, so the death of Jesus on the cross really doesn’t seem to make any afterlife difference. His death on the cross has been irrelevant to Christian believers since at least the early 1800s, and probably for a great deal longer than that, which I guess is just something we are not supposed to be noticing? And I am still turning over in my mind the revelation that Jesus gave to Thomas and me that He had decided to be born from out of the Celestial Collective two thousand years ago as Jesus, having discovered how Consciousness physics works, so He could learn how best to raise people’s consciousness vibrations, and then teach that process to all of humankind. All of this is brand-new and amazing to me! So the religion is nothing anymore, if ever it even was anything. It is only His teachings that matter. His teachings are the miraculous wealth that the Gospels contain! Those teachings will give rise to the kingdom of God within each of us, which now is about to overspread the earth!
What angers me – and it enrages me! – is that fear-based Christianity, with its wars and hatreds, its Inquisitions and its baseless horrors, has delayed this beautiful moment for two thousand years. But where the Lord is, there is no time. A thousand years is not even the momentary flutter of a butterfly’s wings. Thomas is telling me again that we each have our part to play. My having been briefly so angry concerns him, since my part is a beautiful one, and since those who have imposed Christianity on the world also have their own part to play. And he tells me now that they have played it well. Incarnations are not linear, so Christianity has laid down for humankind twenty difficult and stressful centuries in which people can now plan lives of spiritual growth into the far future. Okay. I will try to let it go.
And now, the chrysalis that has been Roman Christianity is crumbling before our eyes. And Thomas tells me that soon on earth it will fall away altogether. He tells me, too, that the butterflies that are the perfect teachings of Jesus then will overspread the earth. But I do feel a little bit sad for those who are still trying to apologize for two thousand years of the fear-based Roman Christian ideas that have done so much harm to so many lives. I don’t see how they can still find much to say.
When Christ shall come, with shout of acclamation,
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow, in humble adoration
And then proclaim, my God, how great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art.
Then sings my soul, my Savior God to Thee,
How great Thou art, how great Thou art!
– Carl Boberg (1859-1940) & Stuart K. Hine (1899-1989), from “How Great Thou Art” (1885)
I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses.
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me. And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– Charles Austin Miles (1868-1946) from “In the Garden” (1912)
My meeting with Jesus on the night of April sixth caused the first spiritual crisis of my life. And if it happened to me, it may have happened to you. All I can say is that I am sorry! I wish we hadn’t posted about it right away, but that was what Jesus wanted. I was still listening to the Beings who were helping me as I tried to figure things out. I was past my crisis and exultant by the following Monday, but without their help, I likely would have done what probably many people did, and quit my website altogether. But I couldn’t quit myself. I had to deal with it. All I can do is tell you what my problem was, and tell you how Thomas and Jesus helped me through it.
Your first question is whether that Being is Jesus. Oh yes, indeed He is. And in telling me His story, He made me confront my illusions about Christianity straight-on. Especially including the fact that the benevolent Christian God that I had come to love as a child was only the last in a series of human-made gods that can be traced back to the chubby fertility goddess that is sometimes found in the caves of the earliest fully human beings. Some years back, Thomas patiently led me through blogging about the history of human-made gods, including the fact that there never is a moment when the Christian God becomes “a real God.” It is past time for humankind to understand that. We are living in and inextricably part of a human-created and consciousness-based illusion that is being maintained by a Godhead Collective of spiritually perfected human beings, and the most perfected of all the Beings of which we are aware is Jesus. He is the closest to a genuine God that we are ever going to know. And when He hit me between the eyes with that fact, I simply fell apart.
I can laugh at myself now. But I was terrified! Poor Jesus. There I was, so stupidly afraid of Him. By the end of that Thursday, just a day later, I was screaming at Thomas (internally, of course). Who was this “Father who art in heaven” that I had been praying to for my entire life? Whose bearded portrait was painted on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel? Thomas patiently didn’t shout at me, but that was what he should have done. I deserved it. I was abusing him to no purpose.
And then on that Friday morning, feeling frail and broken, I was driving to a client meeting when unexpectedly I had a second passenger in the car. Thomas is always just behind my left shoulder. Then all at once, I realized that there was the Lord’s perfect energy, too, although very much reduced in volume, right there next to Thomas but more toward the middle of the car. They were happily chatting for my benefit while I tried to ignore them so I could hear my GPS. Fall River, Massachusetts, is an old mill city of one-way streets so harrowing that if I can’t use my GPS I am immediately lost. But I couldn’t ignore the fact that they were playfully complaining that I was so late in getting Seek Reality Online started that they were letting me know that the two of them were just going to start their own website. Thomas was planning to name it after Jesus.
“Too late,” I called to him, aloud. “Churches have already used all the good names.” I was concentrating on my GPS, since the narrow roads were crowded and a turn was coming up.
Thomas said loudly in my mind, “We’ll call it ‘Jesus Speaks.’”
Jesus said, also in my mind, “So you ought to listen.”
Thomas mind-blurted, “For heaven’s sake.”
He was already laughing. Then they both were laughing, which made me laugh, too. And I missed my turn and stopped dead in the street, and people were honking. It was a mess. Of course, since no one could see or hear them, it looked to all those rush-hour drivers as if some demented woman was laughing hysterically, sitting there alone in her car.
The comedian Lenny Bruce (1925-1966) had a joke that he used to tell in the fifties. And we know now that the person who would have laughed the loudest and enjoyed it the most would have been Jesus. Lenny Bruce said, “If Jesus had died in this century, all the Catholic schoolchildren would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks.”
Thomas talked to me nonstop on Saturday as we polished last Sunday’s blog post. He told me how they are preparing to help the great volume of Baby Boomers who are soon to arrive in the afterlife, many of them also feeling frail and damaged, as I have been damaged by Roman Christianity. But fortunately, the Boomers are the last generation that will arrive there damaged to this extent. And then last Sunday morning when I woke up, I was feeling calmer. I knew at once that we had met with Jesus again the night before. I even had a fleeting glimpse of His face. I said in my mind to Thomas, “We met with Him again?” He said, “yes.” “But I won’t get to know what was said?” He said, “No need.”
And there really was no need. By the time I woke up last Monday morning, I was discussing with Thomas details of the reality that on some level I always have known was what was true and real. The notion that one God on some celestial throne could magically take loving spiritual care of seven billion people at once had always seemed to me to be suspiciously unlikely, so I was ready now to give up the cartoon Christian God that my mind was still trying to supply. By Tuesday morning, when I was hugging my sister and driving to Logan to catch my plane home, there was only that beautiful sunrise. And Jesus. Now His lovely energy is always with me, whenever I think to call Him to mind. And Thomas tells me that I still can pray the prayer that I have prayed every day since I was a child. The very much augmented Council that was first assembled to give Jesus guidance on earth two thousand years ago still faithfully hears every prayer ever prayed to the Christian God, anywhere on earth and in every earthly language. Thomas tells me that Jesus taught the Lord’s Prayer to the Jews of His day because He wanted to wean them from fearing Jehovah, and teach them instead to think of their imaginary god as a loving celestial father. And for so long as people pray to our father in heaven, Jesus assures us that there will be a Council dedicated to lovingly hearing their prayers, and to answering them through each person’s spirit guide. So I will continue to pray The Lord’s Prayer, and with the Lord’s sweet energy in my heart.
I cannot sufficiently describe to you the Master’s beautiful energy. The fact that each person who lacks a body can choose to go without a body in the astral, and appear as simply a ball of light and still be recognized by a unique personal energy, is something that I have known for decades, but I really only ever half-believed it. Then I learned to tell Thomas apart from Thomas Jefferson when I met with them both in the same nighttime meeting and realized that they did have different energies. My Thomas is more spiritually developed than Jefferson, but they actually are pretty close in development. Wow, you can tell a lot from people’s auras, and that felt like an enjoyable discovery! And I vividly recall the moment when I first was close to Jesus and I was feeling His extraordinary energy, which is nothing but the richest and sweetest, the most intense and ecstatic love. I cannot even describe to you how it feels! It’s soft but abundantly strong, so He seems full of light. The churches portray Him as sorrowful, but I don’t see how He ever can be sorrowful. He feels like joy abounding to me, and all I have to do is think of Him now, and that feeling of first being near Him comes back.
I have learned so much from Thomas, and through him from his Friend, in only this past week. For the first time, Thomas has been willing to answer my questions pretty freely, provided that I understand that some of what he tells me cannot yet be widely shared. All that exists is Consciousness, and every human mind is a part of that Consciousness. Not as separate dots, but inextricably all as parts of one whole. And the Lord loves each of us infinitely! I have been listening to old Seek Reality podcasts as we prepare to make them part of Seek Reality Online, and Thomas has had me make that a part of my podcast signoff right from the beginning. But it is only now that I realize how completely true it is. Jesus does indeed love you infinitely. And now I know how that love feels! When I asked Thomas whether Jesus minded my capitalizing His pronouns, he said, “No. He knows that is who you are. But He thinks you ought to capitalize the word Consciousness, too, since Consciousness is the genuine God.”
Jesus wants us to think of Consciousness as the true God in which we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). At the bottom of Consciousness is anything negative. And in reality, there is no top. There are many who have matured spiritually in our astral system and not joined our Godhead Collective, but instead they have advanced above it. And since we would not understand even the workings of the highest Godhead Collective of which we are aware, there is little point in our attempting to envision the even greater glories ever farther above. (To quote Thomas.) What we think of as the afterlife is in fact an intimate area cordoned off from the infinite astral plane, a part of which is closed off to visitors, but a part of which we can visit during near-death experiences or when we travel out of our bodies. Or when our spirit guide takes us to meet with Jesus. And now I can testify to that.
I have asked Thomas questions about his last earth-lifetime with the being who now is Jesus, in which he has told me that they died in battle. He doesn’t remember any of it after thousands of years, but he has consulted with his Friend. When I asked Thomas if Jesus had fought in that battle, I heard the Lord speak directly, which made me wince. He said distinctly in my mind, “You know the answer.” I do know the answer. He could not possibly have fought.
I am so used to thinking of Thomas as a part of me that this new fact that apparently Jesus sometimes hears our conversations is disorienting. When I finally got going again on that Friday morning a week ago after having caused a Fall River traffic jam, I was already fifteen minutes late for my meeting, and I had no idea where I was. I re-set my GPS, but they started right in again with their back-seat chatter and laughter. Good grief. They were teasing me, trying to lighten my mood, but I am horrified to say that I actually scolded two extremely venerable Beings aloud as if they were misbehaving four-year-olds. I said, “Stop it! I’m lost! Pipe down back there!” I hope that’s all I said. I don’t think I also threatened no dessert tonight.
Thomas tells me that what had been a stable astral system for millennia was altogether disrupted by Jesus’s resurrection. And I perfectly understand why! It has been eleven days now since I met the Lord Jesus face to face, and still that experience has not faded. Perhaps, like my childhood experience of light, it never will fade, and I will always live in those moments. The reason is the Lord’s magnificent energy. The love that He is, beyond my ability to express it. Filling everything, filling me when I was there, and filling me even now, whenever I think of Him. Thomas tells me that Jesus rose from the dead and ascended to the astral, and at once He effected there a permanent, universal transformation.
Had it not been for Roman Christianity, which began soon thereafter on earth and spread over all of humanity a gloomy fear of God and hell and death, what Jesus calls the kingdom of God overspreading the earth would have begun right away. But instead, for the next two thousand years of earth-time, the completely unnecessary fear of God and hell and death engendered by Roman Christianity was what has overspread the earth in its place. The Lord’s demonstration that human life is eternal when He rose from the dead on that first Easter morning was co-opted by Roman Christianity as a human sacrifice to a human-made God. So our beloved Jesus, and those like my Thomas who have been working to protect the Lord’s teachings have been patiently waiting Christianity out. Now at last, on this Easter morning two thousand years later, the Lord judges that the time is right. His teachings can be safely unwrapped as His ultimate gift to us, and His Way can now begin to overspread the earth. And those who serve Him have judged that the best way to begin the advent of the Lord’s Way is the eradication of as much of the fear of death from our lives as possible. Thomas tells me that for my whole life I have been preparing to be the Lord’s servant in this work. And now is when it actually begins.
I’d stay in the garden with Him,
Though the night around me is falling,
But He bids me go.
Through the voice of woe,
His voice to me is calling.
And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– Charles Austin Miles (1868-1946) from “In the Garden” (1912)
Christ the Lord is ris’n today, Alleluia!
Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heav’ns, and earth, reply, Alleluia!
Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)
For the twenty years that we have lived in Texas, I’ve been coming to Massachusetts a few times a year to see my longstanding and much-beloved clients. They are located all over eastern Massachusetts, so for about twelve days three times a year my Thomas and I do a lot of driving. And this past Monday, as we drove we discussed the odd fact that for two days after we posted the article that he allowed us to write about Thomas Jefferson, nobody wanted to comment. Which led us to think it was time to blog about why people on earth have spirit guides. And that conversation led to the most gigantic set of discussions I’ve ever had in my life!
We all assume that our own lives are normal. I mean, except for the fact that my spirit guide once was Thomas Jefferson. Although he isn’t Jefferson now. And he also is a rookie as a spirit guide. Usually, they have a lot more experience. And he knew Jesus personally. That’s unusual. And the avatar thing. But all of these odd bits have been rolled out gradually. And Thomas and I have become such great friends! My Thomas is my closest and best-ever friend.
And he is obsessed with helping Jesus. How can I not love him for that? I have learned by now that he won’t lie to me. And if he won’t say “No,” that means some version of “Yes.” But he won’t tell me what that version is, so then I have to guess. He wasn’t one of the Twelve, but he has never denied that he knew Jesus in the Lord’s lifetime on earth. Then on Monday as we drove, I chattily thought to him, “So, you knew Jesus in His lifetime on earth? What was He like?” And he thought back to me, “I knew Jesus in His lifetimes on earth.” “Lifetimes? With an “S?” “You heard me.”
Oy. A puzzle. That could mean just one thing. They had known one another while Jesus was still perfecting Himself? As a tease, I thought playfully, “So you were perfecting yourselves on earth together. And He was the star of the class? So you must have been the dunce?”
And then we heard the most amazing laugh! You heard that laugh in high school, when you and the other awestruck freshmen were watching the seniors tease one another. It was that laugh. And it had to be Jesus. Who else would have thought what I said was funny? But I had no idea that Jesus was listening! Thomas was chucking, too. Omigod. I knew that they had been close. But, wow! Thomas hadn’t known that Jesus would laugh. Or known that I would hear it. He quickly gave me his “it’s okay” vibe, and we kept driving. Fortunately, not off the road.
We know that Jesus is unique. He just is more unique than you and I have realized. Thomas knew that laugh had rattled me, so to calm me he began to tell me more of their story than I had ever heard.
I am relieved to tell you that my beloved Thomas is not a dunce. His friend was just a bit ahead of him. And unlike today, they had no idea what was going on as people used repeated lives on earth to foster their consciousness development. Remember that everything began only maybe two hundred thousand years ago, as we reckon earth-time. This was in the literal stone age. So when Jesus unexpectedly ascended to the Godhead level, it was a shock to them both. They were still in mental communication. Thomas remained in the astral, and Jesus asked him not to follow Him until He could figure out what was happening. Thomas doesn’t remember much about that time, but he does recall that his not progressing further required that he ask for and receive permission from a Council.
There is no time in the astral. But for some indeterminate amount of earth-time, whether it was a minute or eons, my Thomas waited while Jesus tried yet again to overachieve. We are talking the classic overachiever here, the most spiritual kid in the class by far, but Thomas tells me that Jesus has always been the most loving guy you can imagine. No way was He going to graduate and be happy if He had to leave everyone else behind. So finally, He knew that He had to go back. He wanted to teach everyone else on earth how to do whatever it was that He had done. It took a lot of talking to persuade whatever ultimate Council He had to persuade, because no one else ever had reached and entered, and then had left the Godhead Collective and incarnated again on earth.
I don’t know whose idea it was, but on this past Wednesday night, Jesus met with Thomas and me on a grassy astral riverbank, and He told me His version of the Christmas-and-Easter story. My hunch is that Thomas requested it, but that makes the event no less gigantic. It opened with us sitting side by side, wearing astral robes and dangling our feet in the water, and Jesus presented Himself to me at first as a kindly older man without a beard so I would be less intimidated by Him. My beautiful friend Thomas was on my other side, looking to me as he always has. That older-looking Jesus began to speak with words, but Thomas sent Him the thought that I would be able to understand His thoughts. Jesus then sent me the thought that as I became more comfortable, He would revert to looking like Himself. And, sure enough: as Jesus was sending this tale to me in boluses of thought, He gradually reverted to looking the way I have come to see Him of late, as a hazel-eyed and olive-skinned young man with curly dark hair and a short, efficient beard. The only sign that we were in the astral plane was the brilliant, many-colored sky. We were feeding the fish with grain that just appeared in our hands. And behind us, on an enormous plain, deer of various kinds were grazing, so perhaps they had internal organs. I never asked.
It was clear that Jesus soon was enjoying telling me this story, as anyone enjoys telling the triumphal tale of His great youthful struggles come at last to fruition beyond even His own most optimistic expectations. He said that the Councils had found it impossible to believe that a perfected Being might want to undertake all the risks and pains of another earthly incarnation. And Jesus’s reason made no sense to them. He had nothing more to learn! The fact was that no one then incarnating knew anything about anything. Jesus was loving and wise by nature, so His raising His consciousness vibration had happened easily and naturally. What He wanted to do now was understand a system that He hadn’t even known was in existence when He had beaten it. And no, just returning to the earth-plane in an astral body to have a look around wasn’t going to be good enough. He wanted gestation, birth, growing up, a whole life of poverty, and a human death. He wanted to know precisely how it all worked. And then He wanted to teach everyone still living on earth how to master the system, just as He had.
So a Council was created to work with Him. He told me He was patient and polite with them, but my sense is that in that younger world they were trying respectfully to understand this wondrous new thing: Jesus was a perfected being Who was so perfected and so overwhelmed with love that He could not be satisfied to be perfected Himself, but the whole of humankind must be perfected with Him. Eventually they negotiated a birth and an exploratory life under the guidance of His personal Council and in a culture of their choosing. He would have to agree to be guarded by Archangels who would be invisible to the people around Him, and He would be rescued from His body before its natural death.
Just as people on earth are protected by angels, so the Godhead is protected and served by Archangels. Once Jesus was conceived, the Archangel Gabriel announced His advent to His future parents so they would not be alarmed as some unusual things were happening around Him during His earthly lifetime. Thought is such an easy way to communicate! As soon as a question was occurring to me, He was answering it. Yes, He always knew who He was and what He was doing on earth. But no, He never confided in anyone. There were some, like my Thomas, that He could have told; and also John, the Apostle, who was another friend from a prior lifetime. When it occurred to me to ask Him whether He had married as Jesus, or whether He had been a homosexual (which is something that I have suspected but I never would have asked Him), He glanced at me and a smile flickered, but He sent me a small demurral.
Jesus soon passed over much of His earth-life with a wave of His hand to me. He said aloud, “It is in the Book,” as I could see that people were approaching Him because now He looked like the pale Bible-Jesus. He stood, and He was laying His hands on each of those people’s heads and saying aloud, “Bless you, my son,” and “Bless you, my daughter.” Thomas stood, too, and he offered me his hand to help me stand. Thomas said by thought, “We will give Him some time.”
We moved away, and Jesus soon rejoined us farther down the river, looking again like the Mediterranean version of Himself. He was followed in the river by those neon-colored fish. He sat down again on the riverbank beside me and tossed some grain to the fish. I realized that I was recognizing His personal energy now, just as I can recognize Thomas’s energy and Thomas Jefferson’s energy. And the Lord’s energy was distinctly elevated, but not overwhelmingly so. As an aside, I’ve got to say that Jesus has the most beautiful, sweet and loving energy you can imagine, with no low notes at all. Nothing of pain, sadness, selfishness, depression, avarice, anger, and no bit of fear. Everyone else is a distinctive mix, while Jesus is nothing but love and light. He said by thought what I think might be my real name, but it was a nonsense-sound. To it He added, “You must get past your fears! Are you not happy here with us?” Which made me realize how shy I was feeling again to be so close to Him.
“It is not my time to be here,” I said in words. I couldn’t look at Him. How do you make small-talk with God?
Jesus sighed and said by thought, “The book that we wrote together contains most of what I want you to say. My friend that you call Thomas can supply the rest.” He added, “Why do you fear me so?”
That irritated me. I looked right at him and blurted in words, “Do you have any idea what a big deal you are?”
And He grinned. He actually grinned. He opened my hand with His fingers and put some grain into it and said in words, “Here. Feed the fish.” There was a little buzz where He touched me.
His face went solemn as I felt His troubled thought. The Council that had guided His life on earth had been horrified about His crucifixion idea. He was trying to deviate severely from the plan that He and they had made together. He wanted to publicly humiliate a perfected Being, and He might negatively affect his own consciousness status and drop Himself below the Godhead level. He couldn’t even promise them that He could re-animate the body. All He knew was that there seemed to be no other way to convince the crowds that were following Him that their lives would continue after their bodies died. I wanted to ask Jesus why He thought that He could reanimate a dead body, but that seemed presumptuous. He caught the question anyway. He sent me the thought that He had succeeded in reanimating animals, although not for long. But once He was back in the body, He thought He could reanimate it and maintain it alive. Then He could soon cast it aside and appear to people in his astral body. I wanted to know how He had managed to persuaded His Council to allow Him to do what we know that in the end He did persuade them to allow Him to do. The thought He sent me was that He wanted to try. Then He glanced at me, and His thought was that He would have done it, with or without their permission. His Archangels were at His command, so once He let Himself be arrested, it was going to be done.
You might be wondering how Jesus sounded. And how was it possible that He spoke English? He did speak American English with a vague accent when He was speaking aloud, but one advantage of speaking in boluses of thought is that it is translated in your mind. And I wish I had been allowed to remember more of this meeting, but here is where my memory ends.
That was all on Wednesday night. I woke up on Thursday with no memory of any of it, but then it began to unfold, beginning with that older face that I knew had been Jesus. That’s what happens when Thomas lets me remember a nightly meeting. I don’t remember anything when I wake up, but then bits of it come back to me in order over the course of the day. I check with him as I remember things, and he confirms them. But this was such a gigantic meeting! If all the details are right, it rocks the world. So when Thomas told me on Thursday afternoon that Jesus was thinking about making this meeting my blog post for the Sunday before Easter, I really did nearly drive off the road. I asked him if Jesus had any understanding of what big news this was going to be, and Thomas said that it has to come out sometime. They have been dismantling the Roman Christian religion for the past two thousand years, while my Thomas and many others – it hasn’t been only Thomas and John – have patiently delayed their own ascensions, and many of them have fought and died through repeated lifetimes on earth to keep Christianity from destroying the truths that Jesus returned to earth to learn, and then to share.
For centuries they were sure that the whole idea that God had sent God’s Own Son to die as a sacrifice to God was so foolish that the Roman religion based on that idea was bound to fall of its own dead weight. And for two thousand years they have been weakening the religion. He reminds me that I myself have said that as it stands, Christianity is just a pretty wrapping that keeps the true teachings of Jesus safe, but imprisoned. So now we can unwrap His gift. At last it is the ultimate Christmas morning!
But I wanted to hear the rest of the story. Were they happy with Jesus when He went home? Thomas sent me a grin when I sent him that question. He told me that his Friend went at once from being the nuisance new kid making trouble to the very top of the Godhead Collective. And there He remains. Although His fundamental nature is to serve and to teach, what He mainly gets now is worship. He does some teaching in the children’s villages, and He loves doing that because the children don’t see Him as a part of the Godhead. But what people mostly want Him to do is what we saw. So He does it. All the time. He used to make the sign of the cross on people’s foreheads. He would say to His friends, “How would you like to have to keep drawing a sign of suffering and death on people’s foreheads?” But still, He patiently did it for the newly-arrived Catholics. All the time.
Thomas won’t tell me much about the Lord’s life before He ascended to the Godhead level. Mostly, I think, because He doesn’t remember. But he believes that they lived more than one life together in very primitive times. He does recall one incident from their last lifetime together. There was a battle, and their side was finishing off the men and raping and killing the women, and his friend was searching, and he found a woman who had hidden herself with her children. They were terrified. His friend protected them for days, and fed them, until he could find a man of their tribe who would take her as his second wife. His reason given to Thomas was that their quarrel had been with the men. The woman had harmed no one.
So, omigod a hundred times over! So many things have fallen into place and come to make sense to me now, that never really made sense before. What seemed to be a leisurely series of lifetimes that my Thomas has lived, delaying his own elevation by millennia, have all been in service to his Friend as he and others have preserved the Lord’s pure teachings while the Roman religion has held sway for lo these past two thousand years. Until now, when we can bring forth the Lord’s Way as Roman Christianity further weakens. And Thomas tells me that Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem from an especially high ranking in the Godhead Collective. But His having chosen to incarnate from the Godhead out of His overwhelming love for humankind was such an extraordinary decision, and He managed to achieve so much on earth with only that one lifetime, that He is of the highest aspect of the Godhead now. And He is the only Member of the Godhead who is teaching independently throughout the afterlife and the astral.
My beloved friend’s eternal Friend who fed astral fish with us on Wednesday night as we sat together on a riverbank while He told me His beautiful story has earned a lot more than our worship, dear friends. He has earned so very much more. The beautiful Being known as Jesus, above every other being in every universe and apart from any religion on earth, has earned every bit of our wholehearted love.
Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia!
Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!
Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia!
Foll’wing our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), principal author, from the Declaration of Independence (1776)
The above words were written by a superbly educated, extraordinarily thoughtful, and extremely punctilious young man who was only thirty-three when he became the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence. Please read those words again! They seem to be only common sense to us now, but two hundred and fifty years ago, the notion that ordinary people had the right to claim their personal freedom and to pursue their own idea of happiness was radical. And now read the rest of that paragraph, which is a frank blueprint for widespread rebellion. It claims that:
There is no petty bureaucrat, even today, who doesn’t wince to read those words! Yet the generation of giants to which Thomas Jefferson belonged was a peculiar bunch, uniquely well educated, idealistic, and determined to do it right for once. And the government that they founded, while bruised and battered, still stands today as the best-designed, longest-lived, and most resilient representative republic on earth. It even contains within itself a basic method of amendment and renewal so far-seeing that the same documents that have carried us this far can easily manage whatever more may come.
There was a time in my naive and clueless past when I considered my spirit guide’s famous prior lifetime to be my own personal property. I thought it was my right to do research and to write blog posts about Thomas Jefferson. Of course, I know much better now! And there was a time in his disciplinarian past when my spirit guide beat me about the head and insisted that I must never do anything like that ever again! But he has mellowed a lot as we have learned to work together more comfortably.
Everyone has one primary spirit guide through life. It seems to be quite literally true that you cannot be on earth without a spirit guide, just as a car cannot stay on the road without a driver. But very few people operate as I have learned to operate, as someone with a comfortably engaged and always-there co-pilot. And I have come to love living this way! At least, I am never lonely. And others who have learned, as I have learned, to recognize the voices of their primary guides, have found the same sort of joy in this relationship. There is always that voice from just behind my left shoulder. Prompting and encouraging. Correcting as I write. Commenting quietly as I speak. A smile, or sometimes even a chuckle, often unexpectedly. I depend upon the fact that if I don’t have time to do much with a blog post before Saturday, he will get it done on Saturday morning. And I never get upset anymore, because now he talks me through things. We are two people in one body.
My spirit guide is not Thomas Jefferson. I can see that they do share some traits, both loners by preference, deep thinkers, and very bright. But my dear Thomas has a lighter personality. I think he is further developed spiritually. And he is so emphatically past that life that my attempts to defend Thomas Jefferson when I first learned that through my spirit guide, I had a connection to the Founding Father, at first infuriated my Thomas, before he learned that I would respect his wishes. We had a pre-birth deal, or he never would have agreed to be my spirit guide. He would guide me for this lifetime in learning some spiritual lessons, since we are very old friends; and then, in my sixties, I would become his avatar to work on certain tasks that he had not completed during his lifetime as Thomas Jefferson. And those tasks had emphatically NOT included my wasting time and effort in defending Thomas Jefferson’s personal life against attacks by twenty-first-century philistines!
My Thomas doesn’t care about attacks on the personal life of one of his hundreds of lifetimes on earth. He has just piped up again and reminded me that Thomas Jefferson is not even the most important lifetime that he has lived. Or I have lived. Or, he says, no doubt that you have lived. He says that lifetime seems important to us now because of the prominence of the country in which some of us are now living. But my dear Thomas wants us to know that the work that we can do through Seek Reality Online in eradicating the fear of death, and thereby eradicating fear and war worldwide, and also the work that we can do for Jesus in spreading the Lord’s Way, will be vastly more important. And for eons longer! So he asks us to keep our focus on what it is important for us to be doing now. He tells us that the honor of the Founding Father will be defended in due time by the people in his life who love him, and who will speak for him once communication from their level is opened. But because my Thomas knows that speaking for Jefferson still matters to me, and he says that I have been a good soldier (cute!), he now ceases to object. He will allow me to say here what I have been wanting to say. Oh, wait: he now says that he and I together will speak to some matters that it has for a long time been important to me to address, because he was there and he has personal knowledge of those matters. Well, so here goes.
THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS NOT THE FATHER OF ANY OF SALLY HEMINGS’S CHILDREN
The father of her Jefferson children was his younger brother, Randolph, which is something that any honest researcher easily can conclude, simply by considering the fact that a highly fertile woman bore many children during her long life. Yet her Jefferson children were conceived only during the brief period between the death of Randolph’s wife and Randolph’s decision just a few years later to leave the neighborhood and head west. I further address the Sally Hemings nonsense in one of the articles linked earlier in this post. And the former President himself attended one of my nightly meetings with Thomas that I was allowed to remember that next morning. He said to me then in his soft southern voice, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings because she was my property so she could not have consented.” Spoken like a gentleman. That a servant’s room has lately been found near Jefferson’s bedchamber at Monticello tells us nothing more than that an old man wanted a servant at night within the range of his voice.
THOMAS JEFFERSON WORRIED THAT SKIN COLOR MIGHT SIGNIFY A DEEPER DIFFERENCE
I have a husband and two children with Asperger’s syndrome, which is a form of autism; and it is thought that Jefferson also was a high-functioning Asperger’s person. For example, for his whole life, Jefferson told a story from his childhood of having watched a gang of slaves trying unsuccessfully to pull down a shed. And then his own father picked up the rope and pulled that shed over all by himself. So his father was stronger than six slaves together! People with Asperger’s often lack the ability to understand how other people feel, and it is likely that Jefferson never realized why slaves might not want to try very hard. These odd (to him) differences between people of differing status seemed to trouble him for his entire life.
THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS CONVINCED THAT HIS SLAVES WERE BETTER OFF LIVING WITH HIM
During Jefferson’s lifetime, freedmen lived miserable lives on the edges of the stronger white society. And for much of his life, freedmen in Virginia were at continuous risk of re-enslavement. Jefferson freed those few of his slaves that he thought could live comfortably on their own; but for the most part, he was convinced that they were better off living with him. His slaves occupied a village of comfortable homes on individual plots where they could grow vegetables, chickens, and eggs that they consumed themselves or sold to Jefferson’s kitchen. (And yes, he did pay them! The account books that he kept with them still exist, and I – Roberta – have seen them.) He gave his slaves weekends off except at harvest time, he allowed no whipping or abuse, and until his old age, he still hoped that he would figure out some way to free all the slaves. More and more, he became convinced that an emancipation that offered all the slaves legal protection from the stronger white society would be necessary before he could safely free his own. He was paternalistic, to be sure, but he took good care of “his people.”
PATTY’S DEATH DERAILED THOMAS JEFFERSON’S PLANNED PRIMARY MISSION
Jefferson considered it to be the greatest failure of his life that he never solved the slavery problem. His personal life-plan included front-and-center the frank abolition of slavery, and to enforce this mission, his planned wife for that lifetime even inherited her enslaved stepmother and enslaved half-siblings. So Jefferson’s own enslaved family members, whom he loved, were to have given him added incentive. But his adored wife died before the Revolutionary War ended, and Jefferson was so bereft that he never remarried, and he abandoned Monticello for decades. If Patty had lived, it is likely that Jefferson would have retired from public life at the end of the Revolutionary War. And with Patty by his side, he would have made abolition his one great cause, and he might well have succeeded in ending slavery in the United States by the early 1800s. So:
If Martha (“Patty”) Jefferson had lived a normal lifespan, the United States of America might well have seen slavery ended peacefully more than two hundred years ago. And today, the probably somewhat expanded but still smaller United States of America would be a happier and far more equal nation in which shade of skin would be of as little remark as eye color or shades of hair.
And now, the final, hopeful words of the Declaration of Independence to which that generation of giants set their quills almost two hundred and fifty years ago….
“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), principal author, from the Declaration of Independence (1776)
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 (1914-1970) & Bobby Scott (1937-1990), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)
This planet orbits an ordinary star, just one among hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And our home galaxy is only one of at least two trillion galaxies, the largest of which is believed to contain more than a hundred trillion stars. That this little rock that we inhabit might be of any importance at all defies belief! And when I tell you that this universe is nothing like what it appears to be; and that far from being trivial, this rock in fact is extremely important, you will assume that I have lost my mind. But the size and scope and boggling complexity of this universe are just pure illusion. It’s one heck of an illusion. I will grant you that! But it’s an illusion, all the same.
If you understand that this universe is in fact an illusion, you can occasionally spot the illusion in action. Repeatedly, I have come across communications from beings not in bodies who have said things like, “This universe is not as big as you think it is.” Or, “Size and solidity are not characteristics of matter.” I recall reading long ago that there were many parts of this universe that were “empty of stars.” And once I read about an astronomer who had pointed a telescope at one of those empty spots, verified that it was empty, and then left his telescope pointed there for a year. When he returned a year later and looked at the same place again, he found that it now contained billions of galaxies. Then there is the curious fact that modern humans and more than ninety percent of modern animals and plants all sprang into being at the same time, about two hundred thousand earth-years ago. There also is the fact that the cosmological constants have to remain constant to vanishingly tiny tolerances, or else the universe will either collapse upon itself or blow apart. And they are not supposed to keep adjusting… but yet they do keep constantly adjusting. And of course, the Big Bang’s something-from-nothing problem makes it an unsatisfactory explanation for how everything began.
This universe is apparently a kind of habitat designed for human beings. It is only about two hundred thousand years old in terms of earth-time, and it is freshly re-created for us in each micro-instant. As we have needed it to seem older, or bigger, or more complex, it has been made to seem that way in its repeated instantaneous iterations in order to keep us from finding an edge.
This human-habitat illusion, which we continue to take seriously because it is such a good illusion and it still appears to us to be all that we’ve got, in fact exists just so we can have a place to experience negativity. And we need that negativity so we can more easily raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward love. Fear, anger, hatred, and all the other negative emotions simply don’t exist in significant amounts in our eternal astral home. And yet we need them so we can push against them in order to grow spiritually. Conceivably, there may be other uses for this universe, but they aren’t obvious to us. When I was young, at the height of the Vietnam War, there was a song whose refrain was, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” Well, war and all the negativity it produces have been wonderful tools to help to foster our spiritual growth! That system has worked well for millennia, until the repeated worldwide wars of the twentieth century dropped the ambient energies of this planet to such an extent that they put our home-planet into what upper-level beings not in bodies soon were calling interplanetary intensive care. Time not being a factor beyond this material reality, this planet’s guardians began working to raise the vibrations of this planet out of its present red danger zone even before the twentieth century began, and even as those wars were raging. And then, as the United Stated did the unthinkable, and used atomic bombs as weapons of war against Japan in August of 1945, teams of avatars with the help of their guides were rapidly being born on earth with specific life-plans that were meant to assist with this process of raising this planet’s consciousness vibration back toward a normal, negative-toward-neutral zone.
And that was when many of us were born on earth. I came in one year almost to the day after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Few of us have had any conscious awareness of the details of our life-plans, but together and apart we have been working toward playing our little roles for our whole lives. Whenever Craig Hogan, for example, has been frustrated, his guides sitting around their astral table have shown him a plan that he couldn’t really make sense of, and they would say, “Just follow the plan!” And for my part, I thought I was supposed to be teaching about the afterlife. But then more and more it looked to be Jesus that I was supposed to be teaching about. And there would be long stretches when there was no special hurry, and no special plan, and then there would be a need to hurry but I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing.
This idea for Seek Reality Online, with Craig and me teaching about the afterlife together, didn’t come up until just a few years ago. But it started as just a loosey-goosey thought, kind of an online afterlife conference. And then Covid happened, and soon everything was online. And meanwhile, I felt driven to write The Fun of Loving Jesus. And Craig felt driven to write a whole harvest of amazing books about how the greater reality works! This being avatars for beings not now in bodies who are themselves receiving even higher-level guidance is such a difficult and problematic thing, because those in charge aren’t actually in touch with us directly, nor even indirectly, nor even at all. In fact, Seek Reality Online apparently isn’t actually meant to address just the fear of death specifically, we now realize. (Silly you! Is that what you thought it was about? Well, so did we!) No, apparently Seek Reality Online is a direct weapon against negativity. Or, so we now think. And also, it’s meant to have an aspect that will develop the Lord’s Way for Jesus.
… And this has been more or less our state of play until just this past Saturday morning. Thomas gave me the title of this post a week ago, but I had no idea what it was supposed to be about, so I have been dithering with it for a week.Then I woke up on Saturday with the firm understanding that the purpose of Seek Reality Online is the eradication of fear and its replacement with the kingdom of God on earth. Don’t think about where it might end, Thomas tells me now, because you’ll be watching it happen from the bleacher seats. And don’t worry that the eradication of fear will mean the end of this planet’s usefulness. He tells me just to do my little part. Everything else is above my pay grade.
In short, what appears to be happening is that as humankind continues to evolve, so our planet needs to be evolving as well. And now that evolution has begun. He tells me that the guardians of this planet haven’t minded that for eons of time we were living our whole lives in the fear of death. We had mental mediums and soothsayers and such. If we were especially fearful, we had the means to mostly figure it out. But a new phase in the evolution of humankind began at the start of the twentieth century, and Craig and I and many others are part of that process. We enlisted in it back then, although of course I was not made aware of what we had signed up to do until this sunny Saturday morning. March 26th 2022, to be precise. And this morning Thomas has told me a great deal more.
The Godhead tries very hard not to interfere in human affairs. But seventy-five years ago, when humankind first used atomic weapons in warfare, the decision was made at the very highest level of Beings of which we are aware that humanity never will be allowed to use atomic weapons again. And so, my dear friends, despite the fact that there are some seventeen hundred quadrillion nuclear warheads on earth, and there always have been knuckleheads running the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and many other countries, you will notice that there has been a truly remarkable lack of nuclear warfare. Actually, quite beyond our awareness, we have repeatedly come close. And there are stories. There was a false alarm of an attack under way here or there. And always, in every case, someone was influenced not to push a button. Or there was a missile test that a phantom missile from out of nowhere took out of the sky. But with the world awash in atomic weapons and drenched to the gills in frank craziness, seventy-five years of no atomic warfare must be seen to be a remarkable feat by an infinitely loving Godhead!
How will Seek Reality Online make a difference? What we have learned in our few decades of teaching that human life is eternal is this:
Thomas tells me now that he and I and also Craig and his own master guide and very many others were enlisted as part of the much larger team that began to do this work at the start of the twentieth century. He tells me to stop fretting that we are about to lose the earth as a place for spiritual growth, because there are more than enough negative millennia laid down here by now that people can come here for many millennia more, and live their lives of spiritual stress within human history as it has already been developed. And meanwhile, the Lord’s Way that we will have begun for Him will be carrying on forever from here. Thomas says that Craig’s master plan and my own has always been to spend most of these earth-lives in preparation, to get the SRO website and the Lord’s Way well begun, and then eventually to turn this work over to others.
All that the Godhead has to do to keep a nuclear war from ever happening on earth is to hold it off for a little while longer. Just until this website has taught sufficient people all over the world that their lives really are eternal! And then, as fear recedes and love prevails, we can at last begin for Jesus the spread of the kingdom of God over all the earth.
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 (1914-1970), Bobby Scott (1937-1990), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)
I will follow Him, follow Him wherever He may go.
And near Him, I always will be, for nothing can keep me away.
He is my destiny. I will follow Him.
Ever since He touched my heart, I knew. There isn’t an ocean too deep,
A mountain so high it can keep me away from His love!
– Norman Gimbel (1927-2018) & Arthur Altman (1910-1994), based on “I Will Follow Him” (1961)
The problem with our presuming to try to give to the Lord His genuine Way, from before the Christianity the Romans designed when they seized the name of Jesus, actually boils down to just one word. And that word is WORDS. I look at all the words that Jesus spoke, and my mind quails! Who are we to presume to decide precisely what He meant when He said each word? Those living in the greater reality have the choice of communicating by mind, so they use boluses of thought to convey whole ideas. But you and I don’t have that choice! Using words is problematic, because a single word can convey both too little and too much meaning. Take the word “love,” for example. It might take you half a page to define that single word! But when you communicate by thought, you can choose the best version of whichever word you have in mind, and then you can perfectly convey what you mean.
An eighteenth-century wordsmith of note demonstrated how cleverly words can be used when he authored the American Declaration of Independence. The then-current formulation for the inalienable rights of man was “life, liberty, and property.” The battle at the time of the American Revolution was between those who wanted to keep slavery and those who were trying to abolish it, and Thomas Jefferson showed which side he was on when he opened his Declaration of Independence with a subtle twist on that old formula.
He wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And he thereby took from slaveholders their right to rely upon his document as a reason to later claim their fellow men as their property, while at the same time he granted to bondsmen their right to eventually pursue their own happiness. And he did this more than eighty years before Abraham Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation! You can imagine Jefferson’s internal giggles as he watched all those solemn slaveholders putting their quills to his version of our founding document.
But then much later, in 1960, Thomas Jefferson communicated with the living through direct-voice medium Leslie Flint, and he grumped about his having to leave off briefly his greater ease of communicating by thought when he was forced to go back to using words again. This was the first thing he said in his soft southern voice when he got control of the medium. “Very difficult for anyone in my position to manifest in this fashion to talk to people on Earth, and at the same time keep one’s equilibrium, if one can use that term and apply to the spirit. That you know when one comes back and one endeavors to speak in this fashion, it’s all very conflicting and complicated. Aligning with vibration, tuning in, remembering things that one wishes to say, transmission of thought into sound, words, words, often words which don’t indicate anything clearly, at least what one feels, I find extreme difficulty.”
Indeed, he did find it difficult! And using words was his main problem. A problem that we are going to find compounded now when we try to work with the reported words that Jesus spoke two thousand years ago, and which then had to go through the following hurdles:
But I think they are being charitable. In fact, there is only one interpretation of the words of Jesus that I consider to be reasonably faithful, and that is only because I personally witnessed its creation by Jesus, and then its confirmation.
It might surprise you to know that until recently I haven’t given much thought to how unusual my life has been. While normal women have been taking vacations, shopping, attending concerts and hanging out with friends, I have primarily been studying the Bible and researching death and the afterlife. And my Thomas, come to think of it, has had one pretty big obsession of his own. He and I have lived seventeen lifetimes together, and through most of them we have been serving Jesus. Thomas, I think, much more than I. If it might be said that Jesus has a most devoted groupie, then I think that of the trillion or more beings that must exist in all of reality, my own dear Thomas is a leading contender for the Lord’s biggest fan. That business about helping to found a country? All just a detour, apparently.
So it is not surprising that when Jesus reportedly decided that His Gospel teachings had been too simplistic, and that must be why so few Christians were following them, and He then led the team that channeled the much more advanced A Course in Miracles, only to see those powerful teachings soar right over most people’s heads, so He reportedly decided in the nineteen-eighties to give His more basic Gospels teachings another try, and He put out the word that He needed “a pure channel” – someone who had not been known to be a channel – that my previously very private Thomas didn’t hesitate to lead me in channeling an autobiography of Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage in order to demonstrate to Jesus that my dear Thomas had the Lord’s “pure channel” waiting for Him right here. My Thomas was happy to expose Thomas Jefferson’s private life to all the world for the Lord’s sake! The fact that he had no problem doing that, when Jefferson had even burned his wife’s papers and all their letters to one another to keep his private life private, never had made sense to me before. But of course, he would do anything for Jesus! And so would I. And so would you.
Whereupon, they reportedly spent the next twenty years preparing me to become the Lord’s channel. But no one said a word about any of this to me! Then in 2014, it was apparently time for me to step up and do my job. This announcement of the role for which my still-anonymous primary guide had volunteered me was made during a nightly guidance meeting. And reportedly I said, “No freakin’ way!” Or less polite words to that effect. No way was I worthy to channel Jesus! So Thomas had no choice but to break every spirit-guide rule of conduct. He enlisted the help of a medium and told me directly what a famous big-shot he had been in his previous life, and why I had to do this now. So in April of 2015, for two weeks I was Jesus’s word-processor to write Liberating Jesus. And then the beings serving Jesus asked for and vetted that entire manuscript. Word by word. When I asked the medium to give me their changes, she said that they had been directed by Jesus to say to me, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” So then I cried.
I have written the preceding three paragraphs without inflection because I have written them mostly for myself. Repeatedly, during that extraordinary year I kept reminding myself that, my goodness, I was having an extraordinary year, and I must not ever forget these events. But when something like that happens to you, it seems only normal at the time. You eat and sleep and live your life, and the sun keeps rising and setting. What I remember most vividly to this day, and what still brings tears to my eyes when I think of it, was what must have been the Lord’s private thoughts as He became more used to being in my mind. Jesus has feelings, too! As He was typing, using my fingers, He was thinking things like, “You say you love Me? Then, listen to Me!” And I knew He wasn’t talking to me. He was mentally talking to Christians. I felt so bad for Him! I was thinking, I love you, Jesus! But I was trying not to think, with tears on my cheeks, because I was supposed to be just His word processor. The power of His Being was such that I had no idea of what He was writing until suddenly one morning I woke up and He was gone. And I was a spent balloon.
So I trust every word of Liberating Jesus. But I really don’t trust much else. I have decided, however, that I do have to trust the fact that Jesus trusts my Thomas. I have come to believe they have a relationship that might go back a very long way. And by now, Thomas trusts me as well. This triangle was what my vision of a few weeks ago was apparently about. Jesus was watching Thomas fix His old jalopy – His old teachings – and smiling for me, but not looking at me because He has learned by now that if He looks at me, I freak. He had His arms folded to show me that Thomas would be doing the actual work. So again, I will be just their scribe. I can stop worrying about all the many things that I have been increasingly worrying about.
And this, my dear friends, is what blogging is for. Whenever, in the years to come, as we work with Thomas to help Jesus build the Lord’s Way, and you and I fret for the millionth time that we have no business doing something so gigantic, we can come back and read this post again and commune again with the endlessly patient and perfectly loving risen Lord.
And meanwhile, here is a palate-cleanser. If you ever have cause to wonder just how completely outmoded the Old Testament’s religious rules really are; or else, you know, if it ever starts to bother you that we actually won’t ever be allowed to own a Canadian, come back and read this again. The picture illustrating this seven-year-old post is a statuette of Samson in the process of killing a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone (Judges 15:14-16). And meanwhile, my dear ones, cherish today. We have it now, and we never will have it again.
I love Him! I love Him! I love Him!
And where He goes, I’ll follow! I’ll follow! I’ll follow!
I will follow Him. Follow Him wherever He may go.
There isn’t an ocean too deep.
A mountain so high it can keep me away from His love!
– Norman Gimbel (1927-2018) & Arthur Altman (1910-1994), based on “I Will Follow Him” (1961)
He touched me. He put his hand near mine and then He touched me.
I felt a sudden tingle when He touched me. A sparkle. A glow.
He knew it. It wasn’t accidental, no, He knew it.
He smiled and seemed to tell me so, all through it.
He knew it, I know He’s real, and the world is alive and shining.
He touched me. I simply have to face the fact.
He touched me. Control myself and try to act as if I remember my name.
– Ira Levin (1929-2007), from “He Touched Me” (1965)
Jesus is in fact an aspect of the Godhead, born long ago in a human body. It took me four years of college and decades of study afterward to reach that conclusion, and I don’t say it lightly even now! I can find no evidence that anything like an aspect of the Godhead’s being born on earth has ever happened before the birth of Jesus, and nothing like it has happened since; but there is enough evidence available now that I can say with certainty that it did indeed happen that one time. I don’t think that His was even a miraculous birth. Joseph the son of Jacob easily could have been His body’s father. And of course, Jesus was the firstborn of Joseph’s wife, Mary. But an aspect of the highest Godhead did indeed decide that He wanted to experience human life closely enough to “look through human eyes,” as Thomas has explained the facts to me. Jesus wanted to understand us well enough to come up with a way to teach us how we might best achieve more rapid spiritual growth, and thereby make the best use of each lifetime on earth. He also wanted of course to teach us to be less afraid. To teach us to think of God as loving Spirit, and to think of God as “our Father.” Thomas tells me that these were Jesus’s reasons for doing what has not been attempted by any other Member of the Collective Godhead in the entirety of humankind’s history.
And Jesus even chose on impulse to be crucified, just so He could die a public death and then arrange to rise from the dead and thereby prove to His disciples – and to us – that in fact there is no death! That He actually did this deserves special notice. I once saw a documentary about crucifixion that I wish that you had seen, because it would have forever banished every thought of pretty golden crosses from your mind. Crucifixion begins with a massive scourging with cords that end with sharp bits meant to tear the flesh open and shed a lot of blood so the victim will be weakened so much that death is hastened. This is meant as a kindness, apparently, since being hung by bolts through the wrists and heels causes spasms of muscular agony as the victim reflexively supports himself by pushing up with his legs so he can breathe. He is naked, of course. No loincloth. And something about his position on the cross causes an immediate permanent erection. And all of this went on for hours, until they broke the victim’s legs so he could no longer support himself, and he suffocated. There was enough awfulness to be said about crucifixion to fill an hour-long documentary, and Jesus would have known what He was signing up for when He chose to accept a public execution. Yet Jesus, who actually was God on earth, decided to endure all this pain, although He could at any point have summoned more than twelve legions of angels to rescue Him (Mt 26:53). Thomas tells me that the Lord’s original plan was just to study us, and then to teach us until He had done all that He could do for us at the time, after which He had planned to walk away and simply disappear. But He decided instead, and apparently on impulse, to put Himself through all that torture and pain and then stage the resurrection of His body in an effort to convince His skeptical followers that human life really is eternal.
I’ve been thinking about all of this a great deal lately. Seek Reality Online as it was originally planned was meant to teach all the world about just death and the afterlife, and I think it is going to do a bang-up job of it! Those teaching materials are coming along well. Wherever you are in the lengthy process of learning about death and the afterlife, and where it happens, how it happens, why it happens, and so on and on, this website will take you all the rest of the way. And even with automatic translations, no less. Unfortunately, I took a bad fall on ice a month ago, and I broke and bruised various bodily parts, which has forced us to stop production for a while. And meanwhile, as my face was returning to a shape and shade that will no longer scare the horses in the street, my Thomas has chosen to intervene and make a focus on teaching the Lord’s Way a primary additional task of Seek Reality Online. So now we have again had to delay the website’s launch date.
But who am I to lead a movement like this? And it is something that I am going to have to do by myself! Craig Hogan and I can together teach death and the afterlife, and we even can jointly teach the basic spiritual aspects of what Jesus and all the other great spiritual leaders over the ages have come to the world to teach. After all, spiritual growth is the reason why we even come to earth at all, so it’s a legitimate part of any thorough afterlife educational program. But teaching the Lord’s Way is another matter! That is going to require a Biblical scholar who is no longer a practicing Christian, and there are very few of those who can teach the Lord’s Way as I know that I can teach it.
More and more, it is becoming clear to me that as Christianity withers and fades, the original Way of Jesus is the natural vessel to carry forward His teachings and His truth. And Thomas, bless His determined little heart, has spent my entire life preparing me to deliver the Lord’s original message to the world.
So I have been trying as fast as I can to figure out who Jesus really is now. I can’t teach about Him and teach His Way unless I can know with certainty who He is now, so I can make sure that all of this will make sense to you! If He came to us two thousand years ago from the highest aspect of the Godhead, and no other Member of the Godhead Collective ever has done even so much as that, then who has Jesus become by now?
Mikey Morgan had achieved the sixth level before he ventured his twenty years on earth that ended in 2007. He came back to earth so he could communicate with us through his mother as a modern 20-year-old, and he could thereby counsel and teach us from there. His having done that is seen to be such a sacrifice made in love that now he has achieved the upper sixth level! Yet how much greater is what Jesus has done, and starting from a much higher level, so much longer ago, and with even very much greater work done for us while He was on earth? So Jesus’s post-earth-life ascendancy must be still greater, wouldn’t you think?
And we know that Jesus never really has left us. He is active in the astral now, teaching and caring for us, even today. But Thomas has not been willing to answer my questions about Jesus’s post-resurrection level. His title, if you will. He has wanted me to figure it out for myself. But at this point, we are out of time! Although when I said that, he did give me a hint. He said, “Jesus is the Lord of every universe. He is above all.” Okay. But what does that even mean? (Perhaps I needn’t explain that Thomas has trouble using the word “King.” That might be a hangover from a previous earth-lifetime.) Thomas hasn’t said any more to me about this, so now I just throw ideas at him. And whatever I say, he lets it be. Even when I recently suggested, “Jesus must be the God above all Gods by now,” Thomas actually let even that stand.
So I cannot say what the Lord’s present status might be. Whatever I write, Thomas lets it be. He always is quick to stomp on anything I write with which he disagrees, and especially anything that he finds to be even remotely grandiose, so I have concluded without much surprise that the Lord’s service to humankind has put Him above any human status calculus. He is by now indeed King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And I accept that as something that I can believe, for I have seen Him. The wonder is that He still bothers with us!
And Jesus smiled for me! He actually made a point of smiling for me. I think that was the reason why He gave me that vision, to reassure me that He wants me to work with Thomas on developing a version of His Way for modern people. And Thomas wants me to do it. He has spent my whole adult life developing me to do it. And now even Jesus has given me His approval. Please pardon my acting like a teenage groupie, but I still cannot get over that!
And another thing that I’ve been thinking about. Knowing that Jesus lived as God on earth, it is not surprising that when He lived among us He seems to have been extraordinarily charismatic. I don’t think that enough has been made of that fact! Wherever He went, He was a people-magnet. When His parents took Him to Jerusalem for the first time at the age of twelve, He ended up in the Temple, holding the teachers there spellbound (Lk 2:48-50). He called to fisherman that He would make them fishers of men, and they abandoned their nets and followed Him then and there! (MT 4:18-20) We are told that He spoke with authority, and not as the scribes (MT 7:28-29). And many of those who had followed Him in life found Him to be so compellingly charismatic that they then went on after His death to gladly die for Him! I submit to you that to have been in the presence of God on earth must have been an amazing experience two thousand years ago. Just as it lately has been for me!
And in case you are wondering about this week’s frame verse, Thomas is familiar with a lot of the music that I have heard in my life (not that he likes it, but that’s another story). He told me that he wanted a song called “He Touched Me.” And indeed, you can see that the Lord did touch me deeply when He gave me that vision – I can’t stop thinking about it. So for Thomas I found a hymn called “He Touched Me,” but of course it was all about how Jesus touched lowly little me and healed me. Instead, Thomas wanted this sixties song he had found in my mind about falling in love.
It fits, though. For two thousand years, the Christian Jesus has been a pale creature with no function but to be the limp-wristed Son of God. A human sacrifice. Born for to die. By contrast, the Jesus who was in my mind for two weeks and wrote Liberating Jesus was a powerfully Alpha presence. He spoke with authority. He was in fact God. My vision of Jesus who stood with His arms folded and watched Thomas tinkering with His jalopy was confident, kindly, and strong of body and mind. Again, He was Alpha. The women in the Gospels who flocked to follow Jesus, who sat at his feet and listened to Him, and who even washed His feet with their hair, had the same reaction to Him that He inspires in me. Yes, I will try my best to give Him His Way. But now comes the very hard part. We’ll talk about it next week.
He touched me, He touched me,
And suddenly nothing is the same.
‘Cause He touched me, He touched me,
And suddenly, nothing, nothing, nothing is the same!
– Ira Levin (1929-2007), from “He Touched Me” (1965)
Under a spreading chestnut-tree the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long; his face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat, he earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face, for he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night, you can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge, with measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell when the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge, and hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly like chaff from a threshing-floor.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), from “The Village Blacksmith” (1840)
So now we are left with a withering Christianity, failing worldwide at a rapid pace. I fought the decline of my beloved religion until the very recent moment when I realize that this entire process might well have been by divine design. Please follow this along with me!
It is an historical fact that the Christianity we practice now is not the Christianity that Jesus taught. This Christianity was created by the Romans some three hundred years after the death of Jesus, and it was originally codified by the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 A.D. Six more Roman councils are recognized to have followed First Nicaea, and all seven church councils self-importantly declared themselves to have been “inspired by God.” Together they built a fear-based religion around four dogmas that gave Roman Christianity a way to tightly control its world. None of those dogmas is any part of what Jesus actually taught. And yet all of them are central to the Christian religious message, even today. Briefly, they are:
None of these dogmas came from Jesus. All four of them are dead-end ideas based in fear and not in love, but they served manifold essential purposes. For the Romans, and for all Christian tyrants and kings for the past two thousand years, they have created an efficient means for controlling the masses. And for the Godhead, they have preserved almost entirely unmolested the name and the teachings of Jesus inside their protective Christian shell. For a long time, I considered the Romans to have been the great usurpers of Christianity. But my dear Thomas has helped me to see that the Christianity of the Romans has been a wrapping which has protected the pure teachings of Jesus from forces which could otherwise have corrupted and destroyed them.
Until now. It is only now, in the age of the worldwide internet, that it is safe for the protective wrapping of the Roman Christian religion to gradually shred and fall away, and for the true Way that Jesus came to teach to begin to spread as it always has been intended to spread, peacefully and from heart to heart. It is only now that it will be impossible for any force, however powerful it might be, to kill those precious teachings. The wings on which they will fly will be the same ones that Jesus spread for His disciples on that first Easter morning. They will fill all hearts with the triumphant certainty that, after all, there is no death. And once the world hears from its best-known personage the eternal truth that there is no death, it is going to be open to hearing Him as He shares His spiritual teachings with the world!
The first vision of my life was a happy lark that happen in August of 2011. I had spent a year making appearances to promote The Fun of Dying, and by then I was tired of it. Enough! So one morning, just as I was waking up, I saw a glow of light. In it was what I have thought of forever after as the four dancing clergymen.
When I was writing The Fun of Dying in the summer of 2009, a friend with mediumistic gifts called and told me she had been prompted by her guide to let me know that there were five dead clergymen helping me to write that book. She is a sweet and saintly person, and we both were astounded by what she had to tell me. She said that one clergyman was a very advanced being who had been so long away from the earth that “I’m surprised he’s still in contact with it.” Three were good men of God, very recently dead. And one, she was astonished to say, was one of my ultimate personal heroes. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I gasped at the name and asked her why the saintly Dr. King would bother to be helping me! She said, “He wants to set the record straight. They all do.”
So then, on that August morning in 2011 I woke up to a vision of a colorful astral garden in which four beautiful young men in astral robes were singing and dancing in unison. And laughing. The very advanced clergyman was above such foolishness, but apparently Dr. King was not. And he wanted to show me his participation, so the young man on the left was very slightly more beige. What they were singing was this:
“You’ve got a wonderful story to tell!
Life goes on forever. And there is no hell!
So go out there and share that beautiful sto-ree!
I have never seen my Thomas so upset as he has been this week. To see someone falsely claim to be Jesus returned, and claim not to have risen from the dead at all? (see last week’s comments) Instead, this imposter claims to have lied to, cynically tricked, and betrayed his own followers? Thomas is a being of such integrity that he has been unable to process that level of deceit. And then, for the imposter to have ascribed such deceit even to the Lord Jesus Himself, who is an aspect of the genuine Godhead? And this, after Jesus had planned and in fact had delivered His actual death and successful resurrection with much added trouble to Himself, in an effort to convince His followers that we all do indeed live eternal lives? I ached for my precious friend, but you can’t physically hug with your spirit guide so all I could do was just to let him be. I told him on Monday that we needed a frame, and I suggested maybe a Longfellow poem, and what about “A Psalm of Life”? He insisted instead on “The Village Blacksmith.” And it had to be the whole poem! Then on Friday, I thought of telling you about my happy vision of the four dancing clergymen. He thought that was okay. But there had to be more of a point to this post. When I said that, he gave me the two words that became its title.
“But, what does that mean?” I asked the question respectfully. He said, “Take things always by their smooth handle.” That’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson. I could tell he meant it as a joke. Which told me he must be feeling better. Then he added a bolus of thought.
“The blacksmith is your template for living on earth. Whether you are high or low here, you are all of one status where I am now. You must neither attack nor attempt to protect Christianity as it dies, for just as it was the Godhead’s strategy to allow Roman Christianity to form as a protective wrapping for the Lord’s Way, so now you must accept the Godhead’s strategy to allow Christianity to dissolve as The Way of Jesus emerges. And now that the name of Jesus has become the best-known in the world, you have only to do your part as it is given to you to share with the world the teachings of Jesus, and the kingdom of God will overspread the world in the Lord’s own time and in the Lord’s Way. From your perspective, this is all happenstance. But the Godhead thinks in millennia of time, and from the Godhead’s perspective all of this is happening in the perfect Now.”
I said, “I’ve learned in this lifetime that if there’s any fear in something, then Jesus didn’t teach it. That’s how you can tell what He said.” That’s when I learned that spirit guides can hug with us in our hearts, after all.
He goes on Sunday to the church, and sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach, he hears his daughter’s voice
Singing in the village choir, and it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother’s voice singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more, how in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes a tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin, each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done, has earned a night’s repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped each burning deed and thought.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), from “The Village Blacksmith” (1840)
The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
– David (1010-970 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Psalm 23
It has taken me a lifetime of practicing Christianity, and also studying and loving Jesus, to develop the conviction to say out loud that the Lord really does deserve His own Way. The Religion and the Man are entirely different. I have been so blind. But now I see!
Christianity has had a remarkable run. Only consider all the elements of its history, which began three centuries after the death of Jesus when the Romans seized a vibrant spiritual movement and ruthlessly remodeled it into a religion that was based in fear rather than in love so they could use it to intimidate and control. Then once you get past the unpromising start of Christianity, you’ve got to contend with the appalling nature of some of Christianity’s anti-spiritual dogmas. The notion that God might need to watch God’s own Son being murdered before God can forgive us for being human is insulting to a perfectly loving God! The idea, as the modern Christmas hymn has it, that Jesus came just “to die for poor ornery people like you and like I” is humiliating to Jesus. And it gives short shrift to the Lord’s precious three years of teaching us how to more perfectly live so we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. Perhaps even worse, it is past time for us to look frankly at the hideous nature of some of Christianity’s actions over the past two thousand years that have tainted the religion for a great many people who otherwise might be its ardent followers.
Christianity has seemed to me to be ever more awful the more I have studied it, from its earliest persecution of the remnants of the Lord’s own flock right through the Inquisition and the Crusades and down to the sadistic nineteenth-century priest who became for me its final straw! That nasty man told parents who hadn’t managed to get their babies baptized in time that their children would be allowed to leave Purgatory once, and for just long enough to watch the baptized infants happily playing in paradise before those unbaptized babies would be cast into hell, where they would roast alive forevermore. And this man was supposed to be working for Jesus? But still, I never have been able to say it. Not right out loud. It was not for me to say!
But now, at last I think I can accept it. Human-made Christianity has had its run. And my dear Thomas insists that it is finally time for us to lay the whole religion to its well-earned rest!
Thomas is the backup author of our weekly posts, as I think by now you must realize. All alone, I never could be so prolific! He gives me the topics a week or two ahead in the form of an article linked from the Internet, or a Bible passage, or maybe just a title; and then I plug away at doing the writing while I work at other things and live my life, and he occasionally looks in. By sometime on Thursday he is always standing directly behind my left shoulder. I don’t know why he is on my left, and he even is there when I sit against a wall. If I’m getting nowhere, by Friday afternoon he’ll heave the sort of exasperated sigh that people who don’t need to breathe will sigh, and he might give me a clue or two. If I’m still not getting it, he will step in on Saturday morning and finish the writing, even using my voice. In truth, we work pretty well together. But you hate to disappoint your spirit guide, so I try to finish these posts before then.
My Thomas has been fed up with Christianity for at least a couple of hundred years. I don’t know for how many lifetimes this feeling goes back, but now is when his patience ends. He wants to begin to give Jesus His Way while I am still young enough to do it in this lifetime. But still, I’ve been holding back because, to be frank, I don’t see how you can build a new religion without some fear behind it to drag people out of bed and put them in the pews on Sundays. We wrote the book four years ago, but then he didn’t want to publish it quite yet. He seems to be ready to publish it now. I can feel his swelling agitation, but this isn’t really my movement at all! I’m not feeling it the way he feels it. He tells me dismissively that it’s not a religion. “Stop calling it just another religion!” Well, okay. It’s not a religion. So, what is it then? Give me some kind of clue! And then, on Tuesday morning of this past week something extraordinary happened.
You know that we consult with our guides most nights, but we have amnesia for the experience. Before last week, I’ve been allowed to remember just a few minutes of only one meeting with my spirit guides, which was the one that Jesus attended following my two weeks of channeling Liberating Jesus. It was held in a paneled conference room where every seat at the table was taken, and I sat across the table from The Man Himself. He was an overwhelming presence, of no particular race and with brown eyes and dark-brown shoulder-length hair. He was the only one who spoke, but I was too starstruck to register what He was saying. He looked stern, and He glanced at me a couple of times but He knew that I was overwhelmed by Him so He did me the kindness of not seeming to looking at me directly. A lot of people talk about their cozy relationships with what I think of as friendly Jesus or chatty Jesus, but the only Jesus I knew before this week was this overwhelming God-version of Jesus who was in my mind for two weeks in April of 2015, when He used me as a rapid word-processor. And then a few weeks later He let me sit in as He met with my spirit guides. Beings who have achieved His spiritual level can show themselves to us in whatever way they choose to show themselves, and clearly Jesus knows that I see Him as a formidable aspect of the literal Godhead.
Then as I was waking up on Tuesday morning just before dawn, a bright light appeared in the darkness, and then a vision began to appear. It was Jesus, wearing a glowing spirit robe in an astral garden full of tall flowers. It was a gorgeous scene! He was standing there with His arms folded maybe twenty feet away from me, looking just to my right and smiling tenderly. I realized then that directly to my right was Thomas, although I didn’t look at him because I couldn’t look away from Jesus. Thomas was making some sort of loud racket with something in a shed. And Jesus had such a beautiful face! His smile was radiant! He seems to really love my Thomas. But then almost right away the vision was fading, even as I tried to hold onto it.
What the heck was that about? Thomas whispered in my mind that Jesus had wanted me to see that tableau. It was mine to think about and come to understand. The vision grew more vivid as I thought about it all that day, but I couldn’t make the least sense of it. My vision of Jesus had been radiant, gorgeous, and it had very much softened the Lord’s image in my mind after my experience with channeling Liberating Jesus. His face had been especially clear, a neatly bearded young man perhaps in his late twenties with playful eyes that were brown with flecks of gold. Brown hair with a bit of a curl and olive skin. He looked like the same Jesus who had overwhelmed me in the meeting that night in 2015, but very subtly different: now his expression was friendly. He looked like the star of your college class, the one who would tutor the slowest students for free and take the shyest girl to Homecoming. But what had Thomas been doing so loudly? And why had Jesus’s arms been folded?
It was only when I woke up on Wednesday morning, after probably talking it over with Thomas, and – who knows? – maybe also with Jesus, that I understood what that vision had meant. They had been acting out a buddy-show for me. Thomas had been tinkering in a garage with his friend Jesus’s old jalopy while Jesus watched him indulgently, bemused and delighted by Thomas’s determination to fix Jesus’s very antique vehicle and get it running again. The Lord’s arms were folded to show that He had done His part a very long time ago. The Lord’s face was loving, grateful, entirely approving. And smiling! I was realizing by Wednesday morning that my own view of Jesus had become so distorted by my reverence for Him that I had forgotten that even though He has ascended to the highest aspect of the Godhead, Jesus remains one of us. The first time on Wednesday that it occurred to me that Jesus actually had been smiling just for me, tears filled my eyes. I was embarrassed to have needed that attention from Him. And touched to my heart more than I can say that He had wanted to give me that reassuring smile!
And for the rest of the week I kept noticing more details. Thomas wasn’t seen because without a body, he can’t do this work. So it is just mine to do. And when that scary thought began to panic me, he said at once that at my age, I can only begin it. With Seek Reality Online, Liberating Jesus, and The Fun of Loving Jesus, most of my part already is done or is about to be done, and very soon others will be carrying it on. And as for him, this project to replace Christianity with The Way of Jesus seems to be the primary reason why he agreed to be my spirit guide, and it seems to be most of what he has seen to be his own unfinished work on earth.
Perhaps I never have mentioned the fact that people in the real life to which all of us will very soon return speak with one another mostly in boluses of thought. Thomas and I communicate that way when we have a lot to say, and it really is more efficient! So as he was reassuring me, he showed me a vast sweep of many thousands of years. There is no way to summarize it all, beyond saying that what we think of as Christianity is apparently what was born for to die, and what Jesus came to teach two thousand years ago is now safely past the period of history that could have killed it. So now as the old Christianity withers away, the true Way of Jesus is about to begin to overspread the world. Over the next few millennia of earth-time, it will indeed bring the kingdom of God on earth, just as Jesus promised it would do. When I was twelve, like many twelve-year-old girls I went through a period of writing some extremely bad poetry. I also wrote one poem that I thought at the time was weird, but it stuck in my mind and I know now that it must have been channeled. It was something about just doing your work, “and one day when all at last is done, you will see the little puzzle-piece that was your work and joy.”
So, here at last is my puzzle-piece. I have wondered about it for a lifetime! One of the six segments of Seek Reality Online is being built around Liberating Jesus, and now it also will include The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. This is the Lord’s own movement! His arms may be folded, but His heart holds us all.
Your rod and your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– David (1010-970 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Psalm 23
