Author: Roberta Grimes

Who Do You Say That I Am?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Faith vs. Knowing

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.
For poor on’ry people like you and like I…
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

When Mary birthed Jesus ’twas in a cow’s stall,
With wise men and farmers and shepherds and all.
But high from God’s heaven a star’s light did fall,
And the promise of ages it then did recall.

– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), collected in “Songs of the Hill-Folk” (1934)

In fact, it was the Roman version of Christianity that came for to die, and it breaks my heart to say it. I have loved Christianity since I was a child! I had an experience of light when I was eight, and from that night on I refused to spend my Sunday mornings with singing and a box of crayons. After that, I wanted Reverend Turrell’s sermons, and I made sure my family never missed a Sunday. I was going to be a minister when I grew up. I majored in early Christian history in college, and it was only when I studied the First Council of Nicaea under dear Miss Corwin, a professor who looked to me back then to be old enough to have been in attendance, that I first began to question whether my beloved Christianity might actually not be the religion that Jesus began when He launched His disciples out into the world, saying, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to Me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all the nations, teaching them to follow all that I commanded you; and behold, I am with you always, to the end of the age” (MT 28:18-20).

Of course, I know much better now. From the moment the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye upon the young and lovely Way of Jesus and chose her as his own, and then he began to remove from her and destroy every version of the Lord’s Way except for the awful Jesus-died-for-our-sins idea that Constantine thought that he could use to further his absolute power and control, the fear-based Roman remnant that remained of Christianity was doomed to die at some point. The fact that you and I are here to witness its dying is a painful coincidence of history. Nothing more.  

Having lately come to see Constantine’s seizure of Jesus’s Way more from Jesus’s perspective might give us perhaps a different view of it. My Thomas tells me that at first, from the Lord’s perspective Constantine’s takeover of Jesus’s spiritual movement produced a flood of victims. Thomas took an earth-lifetime at the start of it so He could report back to Jesus about what was happening on the ground, and it was then that Thomas insists to me that he died on a cross after two days of singing. Of course, I still insist to him that his memory is faulty because you cannot sing on a cross. You can barely breathe!

My own  view of pre-Roman Christian history through the eyes of anti-Roman Miss Corwin was of a vibrant and diverse spiritual movement. And Miss Corwin was right! There were millions of burials in the catacombs in Rome, for example, in the first four centuries after the death of Jesus, and with Jesus generally pictured in the grave-art as clean-shaven and with a baby goat around His shoulders. And with not a single depiction of a cross to be found. The Way of Jesus as He Himself taught it was based entirely in love and forgiveness. In caring for the goats as well as the sheep. But Constantine could have used none of that in his plan for ancient-world domination

And history is written by its winners. I learned from other college professors that the Romans under Constantine and his successors had “organized” early Christian beliefs in a “helpful” way at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 and at the six other first-millennium ecumenical councils, when in fact what they did was to destroy millions of the followers of Jesus so brutally that Jesus spent the next thousand years loving the followers of His Way and the victims of the various Inquisitions and Crusades back into spiritual health. At some point during those first few centuries of Christianity, my Thomas encountered an incarnation of me as a teenage boy when we died together in a Roman massacre of followers of The Way.   

My Thomas and I have talked about the coming death of Christianity. He is, shall we say, frankly unsentimental about the religion that I once loved. He tells me that at first, Jesus and those around Him found it impossible to believe that this most extreme of all possible views of the crucifixion of Jesus could become the basis of a whole religion that would lay deep roots and last for so long! And Jesus was so preoccupied by love and concern for the victims who continued to pour into His afterlife rehabilitation gardens that He had little attention to spare. And so the centuries passed, until we have come now to what is apparently the natural demise of the religion that the Romans installed seventeen centuries ago in place of The Way of Jesus. 

So I have been writing along here, and come to the place in this post that seemed to require bullet points and something about how Covid hastened the decline of Christianity in recent years. But then those bullets would of course include a lot more than Covid. As I was busily assembling them, Thomas called to my mind a vision of my childhood church on the morning of my father’s funeral.

My father died more than thirty years ago. He was much older than my mother, and he was a deacon of my childhood church. His funeral service filled every pew. I had married a Catholic and converted by then, but I gave the message, wearing red because it was my father’s favorite color, and I recall that full and vibrant church on the morning of my father’s funeral. But when my mother followed him twenty years later, and of course still well before Covid, we had a graveside service. I doubt that there were more than twenty people in attendance, even though she had been a more important figure in that church than my father ever was.   

An article about “the catastrophic decline in religious faith and what to do about it” is perhaps worth reading. It ascribes the decline during those two decades largely to cultural issues, and reading it makes me think that the solutions this article prescribes would be like shoveling pebbles against the sea.

My Thomas tells us now that this recent dramatic decline in the religion that I loved is not only about the end of Christianity. He says that the era of humanmade gods is coming to an end for all the old religions. The time when having faith alone was sufficient is passing for humankind, which means that the era of all religions and religious dogmas is coming to an end. The age is dawning now when we want to know the truth, and nothing less will satisfy us! As Jesus said, “If you hold to My teaching, you are really My disciples; then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

Which was an odd way for Jesus to phrase it, when you pause and think about it. But Thomas says now that The Way of Jesus which has been delayed for seventeen hundred years is actually meant to be freedom from all religions. Religious dogmas and beliefs are a poor substitute for knowing the truth about reality. Mere faith and beliefs are very thin gruel! If faith alone is to be the standard, then you might be talked into believing anything, even if it turns out to be nonsense. But the Way of Jesus was never intended to be a religion in the first place! It was Constantine and the Romans who added the dogmas and made it into a religion. The Way of Jesus is meant to be a way of thinking and living so as to more rapidly transform yourself, and then to transform the whole material world and to bring God’s kingdom on earth. As above, so below. Jesus told us all of this perfectly clearly in the Gospels. And He intends now to reiterate it in His website.

So the human need for any religions at all is ending, as we come to understand the truth about our own eternal selves. The religions were about the gods that we invented to comfort ourselves when we were powerless against the great unknown. Those old religions had fear-based dogmas, which was what made them good instruments for mass control. And the dogmas that we made up were often crazy dogmas. Take, for example, the whimsical notion that God created one man and one woman in the Garden of Eden, and then arbitrarily God told them not to eat the fruit of one particular tree. So then of course they ate that fruit anyway, and thereby they estranged all of humankind from a whimsically angry God. Until in the fullness of time, in order to reconcile humankind again to Himself, that God sent His Only Begotten Son to die as the perfect sacrifice to Himself, so now God can forgive all the rest of us for Adam’s having eaten that apple. And if there is any loving parent to whom any of that makes any sense, then I cannot imagine that parent!

These were all human ideas, of course. Every religious dogma is a human idea. None of them has anything to do with God.

And there is indeed an all-powerful God. But the genuine God at the highest aspect of consciousness will not be framed or defined by any human-made religious dogma. The genuine God will not submit to any human-made religion at all, and nor will God submit to any human idea of how God must be worshiped. God needs no human sacrifice! God will not submit to a human name, nor dwell in any human building. God said to the ancient Hebrews, “Be still, and know that I am God” (Psalm 46:10). God speaks to and dwells in each of us. It is God in Whom we live and move and have our being. But if any human being ever claims to speak for God, then know that you are hearing wind.

And something has just occurred to me. I have just now said to Thomas, “But, wait a minute. Are you saying that two thousand years ago, Jesus brought us His Way to replace all religions? He intended to replace all religions, even back then?” Thomas didn’t say anything. Then he smiled.

If Jesus had wanted for any wee thing,
A star in the sky, or a bird on the wing,
Or all of God’s angels in heav’n for to sing,
He surely could have it, ’cause he was the King.

I wonder as I wander out under the sky,
How Jesus the Savior did come for to die.
For poor on’ry people like you and like I…
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.
– John Jacob Niles (1892-1980), collected in “Songs of the Hill-Folk” (1934)

Kindness

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

– William Shakespeare (1564-1616), from “The Merchant of Venice”

The Silver Cord

Remember Him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
 and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
– Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

Please read our frame-verse a second time. The Biblical Book of Ecclesiastes was written about 935 BCE. Almost three thousand years ago. Three thousand years! That is even a thousand years before Jesus had to enlist all the powers of the Godhead just to reanimate His crucified and stone-dead body enough to resurrect it for a few days more on that first Easter Morning. Let us together briefly hold that thought.

Seeking to understand reality as deeply as possible is the most difficult thing for most of us to force ourselves to want to bother to do. And I am not sure why that is. But I guess the task of fully understanding things seems to be so monumental in prospect that most people would rather not even try. Most people would prefer instead to settle for superficial explanations for even the most gigantically glorious phenomena. They want just surface-level answers that can then be reduced to little human-sized bites. And then they try to tamp those bites down even more, so they can swallow them like pills that can be so well-digested that people barely need to pause before they can move right on. Take near-death experiences, for example. That term was coined by the wonderful and indefatigable Dr. Raymond Moody, who told me when he was my guest on a Seek Reality podcast some years back that he had given those phenomena that name because he knew they had nothing to do with death. Of course, however, since near-death experiences often involve amazing astral travel, and they can sometimes feel like dying and coming back to life, many near-death experiencers blithely assume that must be what has happened to them. They must actually have momentarily and amazingly died! And even many worthies who consider themselves to be near-death experience scholars will do little to try to disabuse experiencers of their demonstrably erroneous delusions.

I have never been able to understand this urge that so many people seem to have to slide right through life without trying to more deeply understand even their most extraordinary experiences. For me, it is the seeking, and the ever more profound discoveries that so often result from our deeply seeking that really make our lives worth living! When I had my two childhood experiences of light, they remained forever vivid in my mind, as all such extraordinary experiences will do. And they inspired more than fifty years of obsessive research that began right after college. I couldn’t rest until I had at least some idea of where that light and that voice had come from! I began by researching life after death, because that was all that I could think to do, which was how I first discovered the afterlife. And I fumbled and blundered on from there! The fumbling and the blundering are part of the fun. It wasn’t until I was thirty years old that Dr. Moody published Life After Life, and I discovered the existence of the astral plane. I said, “Aha! So that’s where that light must have come from.” And then I happily carried on.

It wasn’t until I was fifty years old that I felt that I had the physics and geography of the greater reality all figured out and verified and cross-checked. Of course, I wasn’t calling it that back then. I think I was probably calling it heaven. And the only problem was that at about the same time, I was realizing that none of what I had learned from this part-time study of whatever evidence I was turning up could validate my obsessive Roman Christian beliefs. Oh, on the contrary! I knew that what I was learning about the afterlife was right, which meant that Roman Christianity had to be dead wrong. And could you be condemned to hell for having discovered that there is no hell? I stopped reading the Bible at that point, stopped doing any more afterlife research, and for two years I simply tried to pretend that none of that had ever happened.

Eventually, though, on one rainy afternoon I bucked up my courage and I dared to trust Jesus enough to read only the  four Canonical Gospels. I wasn’t testing Jesus. I was doing that extra bit of Gospel-reading in the same spirit in which I had studied early Christian history in college. It was yet more basic research.

I have told you this story before, and how astonished I was to see that repeatedly Jesus refers in the Gospels to what I already knew from my afterlife research to be true. But then when I came to the story of the woman at the well, where Jesus refers to “living water,” I ‘bout fell off my chair. The water in the afterlife is oddly dry, it feels like silk to the touch, it gives off notes like music, and it is alive. Not only does Jesus say nothing in the Gospels that contradicts what I learned by doing afterlife research, but the fact that two thousand years ago He knew about that living water really sealed the deal for me. The afterlife is real! And Jesus is our living witness.

 So it was my determination to pursue the truth, and not to live my life just barely flitting along skimming the surface of it, that made it possible for me to find, and then to deeply research the afterlife. Which brings us to the night of April 6th. The more that hour recedes into the past, the more I realize that actually meeting Jesus on that amazing night was the most extraordinary thing that ever has happened to me.

And thanks to my having bothered to do such thorough afterlife research over decades, I know enough now to tell you that, as is true of our nightly meetings with our spirit guides and our transitioned loved ones, my meeting with Jesus took place in the gigantic astral plane. The astral plane is probably as much as twenty times the size of this whole physical universe, and it is all so densely interwoven with the material universe that it would be impossible to separate them. If I had thought to look behind me when I was with the Lord, I would have noticed that I was trailing my own faintly bluish cord. So in fact, despite the heavenly atmosphere, I was not actually dead! And nor was I even sort of dead-ish. Despite the wonderful, love-filled atmosphere that otherwise might have fooled me, just as it fools so many near-death experiencers, I know that I was just astral-traveling when I met with Jesus on that unforgettable night.

 Here is a news flash for you, all our dear beloved NDE experiencers! Well, perhaps it isn’t exactly news at this point, since it was first written about three thousand years ago. Are you able to speak up and tell us now what happened to you during your NDE? Then you never, even for a single moment, ever actually died. To “flat-line” on a monitor does not equate with being “dead,” since the same machine that has just gone flat on one of its monitors is also maintaining your material body’s functions, and therefore that machine is keeping your material body fully alive. If there were no such machine, however, at this moment you would be reading these words in spirit over a living loved one’s shoulder. Insofar as I have been able to determine, our frame-verse this week is the first written mention of the silver cord which connects your energy body with your material body and keeps it alive, and that ancient Biblical verse is testament to the fact that the silver cord has always been visible in dim light when people were out of their material bodies. So even back three thousand years ago, they were able to precisely define what physical death is, and when it occurs! The human silver cord is amazingly stretchy. During life, as the great Robert Monroe demonstrated, you can probably travel to the edges of the universe without having it break. In a more extensive near-death experience, NDE experiencers will often come to the edge of the afterlife foyer area, and they will be warned to turn back because if that NDE-er does not turn back, his silver cord will break, and his material body will die.

 The silver cord cannot be reattached. Physical death is always a one-way trip.

We are very seldom allowed to remember those frequent meetings that we have with our spirit guides and loved ones while our material bodies sleep. And even on occasion with the King of Kings. Having active memories of our frequent trips out of our material bodies would only distract us from the business at hand, which is to take these earth-lives seriously enough that we can learn and grow spiritually just as rapidly as possible. This is why books like Robert Monroe’s indispensable trilogy are so essential! I urge everyone who has even the slightest interest in better understanding physical death, the afterlife, and what actually happens during near-death experiences to read Journeys Out of the Body, Far Journeys, and Ultimate Journey. And if reading those three books piques your interest at all, then you might consider looking into the wonderful work of The Monroe Institute. Bob Monroe’s books are decades old, but  they remain on the intellectual cutting edge.

 When Jesus was crucified, He planned to die unusually quickly. He needed to resurrect a usable body, so it had to die before the soldiers went around and broke the legs of those dying on crosses who were still alive so they could no longer push up and keep on breathing. The soldiers wanted to finish all the executions and take the dead bodies down prior to sundown on the eve of the Sabbath, so Jesus and God had His quick death prearranged. But still, even with their careful planning, by the following Sunday morning Jesus’s crucified body had deteriorated so much that when He resurrected it with a gigantic burst of energy on that first Easter morning, His material body was such a mess that He had to abandon it within a few days. Even for God Himself, fully resurrecting an actually-dead body is a very difficult proposition.

And so, dear near-death experiencers, it is long past time for all of you to face one incontrovertible fact. You cannot sever your silver cord – which is the true definition of death – and then reattach that cord to your material body and move on with your earthly life.  If you are able to tell your own beautiful story, then you never for a moment have actually died.

We have known for at least three thousand years that death is always a one-way trip! So I hope that The International Association for Near-Death Studies (IANDS), will continue to help NDE-ers and the public to understand such basic things as the true definition of death and the crucial function of the silver cord. When all of this was crystal clear to Biblical folks as early as three thousand years ago, it is essential that clear and definitive education on these matters continues to be maintained. Near-death experiences are, as the wise and delightful Dr. Raymond Moody said during his Seek Reality podcast years ago, indeed wonderful spiritual experiences. But all the hundreds of NDEs and their messages that I have studied since 1980 have been just deeply personal to the experiencers themselves, and certainly no NDE that I ever have seen has had anything to do with actual death. For anyone to pretend otherwise misleads the public, it goes contrary to all the afterlife evidence, and it defies simple common sense.

Remember Him—before the silver cord is severed,
and the golden bowl is broken;
before the pitcher is shattered at the spring,
and the wheel broken at the well,
 and the dust returns to the ground it came from,
and the spirit returns to God who gave it.
– Ecclesiastes 12:6-7

My Lord and My God

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pearl of Great Price

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 “Is John with Him?”

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

“Doesn’t he visit Jesus?”

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

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

 Wow, the veil is really thinning now! 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Seeking Sense in Hindsight

Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
Let there be peace on earth, the peace that was meant to be.
With God as our father, brothers all are we.
Let me walk with my brother in perfect harmony.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995) & Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

Sometimes people try to imagine how the world will look in a hundred years. But what about a thousand years? And have you ever wondered how people living a hundred years from now might look back at us? Or what about people living a thousand years from now? Has it ever occurred to you to wonder how this moment is going to look in hindsight, when viewed from a thousand years from today?

Someone who was interviewing me about Seek Reality Online just this past week asked me what I hoped it might achieve over the next five years. And I miffed that question. Five years isn’t much time. But a thousand years is a whole different matter!

It has lately been estimated, based upon surveys, that close to ninety percent of all the people on earth are still afraid to die. To Craig Hogan and me, that is a horrifying statistic! If only the mainstream scientific community had listened to the illustrious Max Planck when he said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And then in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

Max Planck received the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. Just think how the world could have changed back then, if the scientific community had listened to him! Dr. Planck knew that the matrix of matter is consciousness. And at some point in the next thousand years, whether it happens sooner or it happens later, that fact will be seen to be incontrovertible. But meanwhile, as Dr. Planck also said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.” But we have already had three generations of scientists grow up since he said those words! And still, even today, more than three quarters of all the people in the world are so ignorant of the fact that their minds are eternal that, tragically, they remain terrified of death. The consequences of their fear are manifold. And they are tragic beyond words, as you will shortly see.

So Craig Hogan and I and our significant others are giving up our dreams of retiring in Tahiti. Instead, we have resolved to work until we take our final earthly breaths, and to knock down that awful ignorance-of-death statistic by using our Seek Reality Online platform to teach as many people as possible the glorious certainty that our minds are eternal, and that the life beyond this life truly is wonderful beyond their fondest imaginings. We don’t want to go home ourselves until we can leave behind a world where at least five percent more of the people on earth are as certain as we are that their lives are eternal!

But, what good will that do?

Well, first let’s look back from a thousand years from now at the world as it is today. I know that doing this is hard to get your mind around! But let’s be as frank as we can. Let’s look at all the political battling, at the wars here and there that cause so much pain, at the vast disparities between poverty and wealth, and at the places in the world where a few hold power and put multitudes in such desperate straits. Let’s notice the soulless power of transnational mega-corporations, although – true – in some parts of the west there is a healthier sense of middle-class ease. Some worry, though, that our middle-class lifestyle carries a risk of causing global warming. My particular gripe is that we are gradually choking the seas with plastic bits. And over us all hovers the minute-by-minute threat of nuclear annihilation! One way or another or in some combination, it seems impossible to imagine that this world and the human species that inhabits it can survive for another hundred years, and never mind another thousand years!

There is one word that describes what unites every one of these problems. From the wars to the multinational corporations carelessly spewing their carbon and plastics, and the plutocrats and dictators seizing power, and frankly every other mess in the world that we despair of ever solving. No matter what is wrong, FEAR is at its base! We know that, of course, because fear is the lowest consciousness vibration. It is fear that drives people and nations to seize and accumulate their money and their power, and yet they never have enough to ever really feel safe enough. Fear is at the root of jealousy, anger, avarice, and every other negative emotion you can name!

So we wallow in all the emotional filth that fear produces, not realizing until in some much more enlightened age it will be pointed out to us that:

  • All of these problems are loosely related, and they all stem from our existential fears; and
  • All of them have at their core our nameless terror of death and extinction.

Those looking back at us from a thousand years from now will understand all of this perfectly well. They will diagnose all of our current problems, trace them to their singular source, and justifiably blame the culprit, which is a shortsighted scientific community that barely a century prior to this benighted moment turned itself into a dogma-based belief-system in order to avoid the remote possibility that it might discover a Christian God.

So, no Tahitian bungalows for us! When I explained all of this to the reporter who had asked me that question about where I hoped to be in the next five years, I told him that once we teach as few as five percent more of the world’s population that they will live eternally, then since all human minds are connected, we will raise the consciousness vibration of the population of all humanity enough to stop all wars and immensely reduce the political problems and the oligarchic oppression worldwide. He calculated then that we were going to have to reach and teach more than three hundred million more people. So we had better get busy!

Of course, all we can do is the best that we can do. But apparently wise souls as diverse as Confucius and Eleanor Roosevelt have been quoted as having said that it is better to light one candle than to curse the darkness! So our candle is lit. And since all that we will have to do is to educate what amounts to the entire population of the United States, we plan to concentrate our efforts here.

Where Roman Christianity is concerned, however, the view from a thousand years from now begins to look increasingly dark. The religion’s stubborn insistence on clinging to its Roman version rather than returning to its roots in the teachings of Jesus seems to be cutting itself off from those roots together, and at a rapid rate: since 1944, when 92% of Americans still believed in God, the percentage of Americans believing in God has now dipped to an appalling 81%. I plan to build a companion website for SRO that will teach the Way of Jesus, but that likely won’t be nearly enough to stop what is an increasingly rapid decline.

It does feel ironic to think that when historians look back a thousand years from now, perhaps the greatest gift that Roman Christianity is likely to be thought to have given to the world during its so often benighted reign will have been its truly remarkable attempts at an open-minded science. Of course, they did it with a motive in mind. In trying to prove that this or that complex biological phenomenon could not have arisen without an active Mind involved, the Christian scientists that will be lauded then for their farsightedness were trying to prove the existence of the Christian God. But nevertheless, while heavily funded twenty-first-century materialist scientists were wasting billions of dollars trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, some really brilliant contemporary scientists with very little funding were doing groundbreaking work in abundantly proving that phenomena like DNA required a Designer.           I admire some of these unsung geniuses more than I can say!            

And it amuses me to imagine what a laugh those future scientists are going to have when they study these years. Think of it! The supposedly serious scientists of today will look like Luddite knuckleheads, seeking a source of consciousness inside the human brain, when it will long since have become self-evident that consciousness is the base creative force. Consciousness is who we are. It also is the water in which we swim. And the Christians, by contrast, will look like heroes, doing their pioneering work with almost no funding. I have attended a couple of their conferences, and have been blown away by the joyous pioneering scholarship of people who are free to do their science without the burden of that heavy hand of their own self-imposed dogmas.

And so we press on. But it gives you a new perspective on your own life and culture when you imagine the distant future watching you making your decisions, doesn’t it? I can’t think of any generation, with the exception perhaps of the American Founders, who lived with the conscious thought that people a thousand years hence were actively watching them going about their work!

Let peace begin with me. Let this be the moment now.
With every step I take, let this be my solemn vow.
To take each moment and live each moment
With peace eternally.
Let there be peace on earth, and let it begin with me.
– Jill Jackson Miller (1913-1995), Sy Miller (1908-1971), from “Let There Be Peace on Earth” (1955)

 

Seek Reality Online

Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
ACIM, Preface.1:1-3

Seek Reality Online goes live officially on Monday, June 27th. But if you go to seekreality.com before that date, you will find that we are hosting a friends-and-family open house this weekend. Thank you for being its final testers! If you find anything amiss, please send me an email through the green contact block on Robertagrimes.com. This project may not look big to you, but its six months of preparation have felt like getting ready to storm the beaches of Normandy!

 It is only now that we realize why no one else ever has attempted to do this. The greater reality to which we will be returning at the death of our bodies is at least as complex as the reality that we will be leaving behind when we go home, and it is immeasurably more enormous. Which means that in order for us to talk about the process of transitioning, we first must understand and teach almost every significant detail of what amounts to a whole new world! Nearly everyone who works in the broad field of death and afterlife research and education is a specialist in only one or a few of the fields of, for example:

  • Mental Mediumship
  • Physical Mediumship
  • Consciousness Studies
  • Astral Travel
  • Near-Death Experiences
  • Life-Planning
  • Electronic Communication
  • Orbs and Lights
  • Signs from the Dead
  • Post-Death Dreams and Visions

to choose ten fields of study at random, in each of which experts will typically spend their part-time, or even their full-time careers. There are other fields, too, that are more obscure, where knowledge must be gathered, such as researching the heyday of afterlife communications through deep-trance and physical mediums that occurred in the early part of the twentieth century, when so much good afterlife evidence was received. And each of these fields is fascinating! People go to presentations and sit and marvel at what the speakers have to say. But for Craig Hogan and me, the ten topic areas listed above, and many more besides, all had to be not only mastered, but also smoothly integrated into one unified field of knowledge before we could even contemplate how we might create Seek Reality Online.

Craig and I always have felt that the study of death and the afterlife had to be undertaken as one gigantic whole if you were going to attempt to teach any part of it. We both have thought that to do anything less made no sense. It is impossible to have any realistic concept of what happens at and after death unless you can make sense of that whole other world where these events are taking place! And how does that world fit with this one? I can recall as a child looking up and imagining that my great-grandparents must be sitting on clouds way up there above me, swinging their feet, looking down and likely bored out of their minds.

Our problem in working out how things fit together is of course vastly complicated by the fact that the scientific community always has refused to study any of the afterlife evidence. Their refusal is formal, rigidly enforced, and frankly as stupid as repeatedly hitting oneself in the face with a rubber bat. It dates to the first years of the twentieth century, when the scientific gatekeepers – the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals – were busy dealing with quantum mechanics at the same time that a flood of excellent afterlife communications received through physical mediums was being presented for scientific review. To avoid also dealing with the dead while they were at the same time having to cope with the quantum physics crisis, someone came up with what they were then calling “the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism.” And they thereby turned mainstream science, which nearly all civilians still naively assume is the open-minded pursuit of the truth, into the closed-minded religion of atheism. To maintain science as the religion of atheism, even a century further on, those gatekeepers to this day have consigned even the study of consciousness to the field of woo-woo, and they continue to insist that our brains must generate our minds, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. Indeed, scientists have in recent years sought and obtained research grants totaling more than a billion dollars to try to find a source of consciousness lurking inside the human brain. And they are doing this, even though it turns out now based upon overwhelming and consistent evidence that consciousness is in fact the base creative force that generates all of reality! So you see now why my reference to research scientists repeatedly hitting themselves in the face with a rubber bat is extreme, but nevertheless tragically apt.

But Craig Hogan and I are not daunted! With nothing but the actual evidence to guide us, and with only the genuine truth to pursue, Craig and I and a few other open-minded citizen-scientists are doing the work in the field of afterlife research that credentialed scientists are not allowed to do at this point in a great many fields. With each of us working independently, we have managed to put together what actually happens at and after death. And then eventually we have found one another and compared notes. I still recall the thrill of that glorious day back in 2008 when I discovered Craig Hogan’s Your Eternal Self, which then was newly published. And I realized with a flood of joy that there actually was somebody else in this world who seemed to share my peculiar hobby!

Why more afterlife researchers haven’t undertaken this crucial task of orienting people as to where the afterlife is in relation to this material reality, and how it all actually works, I cannot say. But of course, that step is essential! People cannot fully lose their fear of death until they have some understanding of where the dead go, and how the whole process actually works, in some believable way. A child can think of great-grandma sitting on a cloud and swinging her feet, but no rational adult can accept that explanation as sufficient. So you see, this work in helping to ground people in the genuine truth about the afterlife process is extremely important!

I think it was Craig who first coined the phrase “the greater reality.” But whoever it was who had that insight opened everything wide for us, since we realize now that not only is this universe not the center of all that there is, but it isn’t even a major player. Still, that is a topic for another day. Once we had used an abundance of consistent afterlife evidence, plus quantum mechanics and general scientific principles, to map out at last how everything works, we began to look with increasing interest at what scientists call dark matter and dark energy. Scientists tell us that roughly 68% of the universe is made up of dark energy, and 27% is dark matter, and they are dark not because they are sinister but because they don’t react with photons of light, which means that they are not material. And they are intrinsically part of the universe itself. Hmmm. The proportions do seem to be about right. It seems now to be increasingly likely that scientists have discovered the beyond-gigantic astral plane where we spend our eternal lives, of which the afterlife is only a part. But still, mainstream scientists must obey the core dogma of their materialist religion, which allows them to study just that five percent which is this material universe!

For Craig and me, figuring the last bits out was satisfying, but in hindsight it was where our personal crisis began. We know for a certainty now that all human lives are eternal. But how can we happily take this knowledge with us when we soon go home, and leave a blindly ignorant world behind? Yet how do we sensibly boil down and teach the fruits of our eighty years of combined research to people who have lived their whole lives fearing death?

It has taken us the past five years to work this out. And still, we have settled on a teaching program now with a sense of trepidation. But given our ages, we can’t spend forever fussing over getting it perfectly right, so now we are giving it our best shot. Seek Reality Online consists of:

  • A ninety-minute summary short-course in audio and video. We strongly suggest that everyone begin here! And for people who are dying, this short-course may be all that they can manage. For most people, though, there are four supplemental educational modules full of Craig’s videos and my own blog posts, videos, and podcasts. Those modules are:
  • The Design and Functioning of Reality.
  • Death and the Afterlife.
  • Communication.
  • Spiritual Growth.

We ask that you consume those four modules in order! And please, take your time with the first two especially. You are undoing a lifetime of negative conditioning. It is a tragic fact that your first step in learning the truth must be to un-learn the lies that you have been taught by our culture’s most trusted institutions. Science and religions have taught you that you are a sinful meat-robot. All omplete lies. In fact, you are a powerful, eternal being, and it is impossible for you ever to die. What you experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the base creative force that continuously manifests this material reality. There is no cranky Big Guy with a beard to judge you, and you need fear no fiery hell. Best of all, you in particular in all the universe are infinitely loved.

And for so long as Craig and I remain functional, we plan to conduct very frequent Zoom groups and lectures, and to offer a lot of coddling. I don’t know whether we can maintain that afterward into a new generation of managers, but we are going to try. My Thomas tells me that its modest monthly membership fee will allow SRO to maintain itself forevermore. Well, we shall see!

Moving On

Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored.
He has loosed the fateful lightening of His terrible swift sword.
His truth is marching on!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! His truth is marching on!
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

We really can move on now. As the Roman church continues to crumble, Jesus is planning a return that will be different from what Christians long have expected, based upon the Biblical book of Revelation’s dramatic depiction of a settling of scores. But of course, that makes sense. The Christian Bible was written mostly by men, and men settle scores. Jesus is of the Godhead, and He has instead spent seventeen centuries in the loving healing of all the harm that Christianity long has been doing to so many in His name.

Thomas is even saying now that the whole idea for Seek Reality Online came from Jesus. Silly me. I thought it was my idea, but of course the fact that it has felt so loose and vague for so long was a give-away. When something is your own idea, it dawns on you and then it fleshes out quickly. Our website’s developers worried at first that we were going to be teaching something that very few people would be interested in learning, since we had told the developers that we had no competitors against which they should be positioning us. How then could this be a significant topic? But on second thought, they had to agree that death and the afterlife is something that affects a fairly large swathe of the human population.

Thomas tells me that Jesus has a strategy. He has chosen to attach His website to one that will first teach the world about consciousness as a necessary part of teaching about death, the afterlife, and the greater reality where we spend our eternal lives. So, what SRO will teach will be an important precursor that will prepare people to better understand how Jesus’s Way actually works in raising our consciousness vibrations. And of course, Jesus is exactly right. When He first spent those thirty years studying us two thousand years ago, before He then spent three years teaching us, perhaps He didn’t entirely figure out what consciousness precisely is. But He certainly came to understand how it seems to work in practice! To be frank, His Gospel teachings are genius.

I am so excited for Jesus! Honestly, this feels like watching your dearest friend who has invented something glorious that will absolutely transform the world, and He is for sure going to win a Nobel Prize the minute that His work gets out. And now, at last, after two thousand years, He is finally going to have His chance at fame and fortune! I know how stupid that must sound to you. But that is exactly how this feels! He even has the timing worked out. He, who has lived without time for the past two thousand years, has decided that He wants His website to launch nine months after SRO goes live. I giggle a little as I type these words.

And meanwhile, He has left it to us to bury that old misbegotten religion. I can write no better epitaph for the past seventeen hundred years of Christianity than the Amazon blurb for Helen Ellerbe’s absolutely devastating The Dark Side of Christian History:

The Christian church has left a legacy, a world view, that permeates every aspect of Western society, both secular and religious. It is a legacy that fosters sexism, racism, the intolerance of difference, and the desecration of the natural environment. The Church, throughout much of its history, has demonstrated a disregard for human freedom, dignity, and self-determination. It has attempted to control, contain and confine spirituality, the relationship between an individual and God. As a result, Christianity has helped to create a society in which people are alienated not only from each other but also from the divine. This Christianity – called “orthodox Christianity” – has had a devastating impact upon the whole of mankind, and its study can help enlighten us as to the very core difference between religion and spirituality. When we understand how we have come to be separated from the divine, we can begin to heal not only the scars, but the very alienation itself.

I have read that paragraph repeatedly over the past week. I have tried to argue with it. Having been brought up as I was, in a steepled New England Congregational church that was headed by a pastor I dearly loved, I do have arguments to make! For most of my childhood I refused to go to Sunday school, but instead I attended grown-up church, where I would listen to Reverend Turrell’s gentle sermons about kindness, forgiveness and love while I gazed up from my sixth-row pew at the beautiful stained-glass window beyond him of Jesus with the woman at the well. It was then, as a child, that I fell completely in love with Jesus, with His wise and gentle stained-glass face. Never in that church did I hear hell mentioned. The Roman church never came between us at all.

There are some good things that we take from Roman Christianity! For one thing, Christian schools have taught a thousand generations of impoverished children efficiently and well. Missionaries have likewise helped many people worldwide. And as Thomas has pointed out to me, Jesus is usually first on every list of the most prominent historical figures. Jesus is a household name in nearly every house, which will make it easier for Him to launch His website. (And when my Thomas saw that Thomas Jefferson was tenth on one of those lists, he actually chuckled a bit. He is becoming more relaxed about a connection that until recently always irritated him.) But the core problem with Roman Christianity is that it was ignorant and simply wrong. More specifically, it was:

  • Rooted in Fear and Not in Love. Now that we understand that all of reality is based in consciousness and really nothing else objectively exists, and that consciousness is in turn governed by what we experience as emotion, with fear at the lowest and slowest vibration, we know that in fact Christianity’s fear-based teachings are especially wrong-headed. There is no hell, so Christianity’s use of the fear of hell to control people down through the ages has been inexcusable.
  • Based in Teaching Us an Awful Self-Image. Christianity has taught us that we are “fallen” and therefore unworthy of God’s love as another way to keep the masses controlled. In fact, each of us individually is deeply loved and cherished by God! The chasm that Christianity sets up between our imagined sinful nature and what is actually true is unbridgeable. It is too easy for people to imagine that God must hate us, when in fact God loves each of us individually more than we can imagine. The image that Jesus gives us in the Gospel of Luke of the shepherd who leaves his whole flock to find his one lost sheep because he cannot bear to lose even one is much closer to the truth (LK 15:3-5).
  • Not Built Around the Teachings of Jesus. In none of the more than forty thousand denominations of Christianity that are now extant are the Gospel teachings of Jesus given any kind of prominence. Actually, in no denomination that I ever have found are the teachings of Jesus and how and why they work so well in raising our consciousness vibrations given any seriously attention at all! Don’t you find that amazing, as you think about it? Jesus is the most prominent historical figure by every measure, on every list, and His name is trumpeted by every Christian preacher, but yet what He actually said, and what His words meant to Him as He said them, is nothing that anyone ever has bothered to take seriously?
  • Not Centered on Bringing the Kingdom of God on Earth. Jesus uses the phrase “the kingdom of God” or “the kingdom of heaven” something like eighty times through all four canonical Gospels. And He talks often of bringing the kingdom of God on earth. Clearly it was foremost in His mind! But it was not foremost in the Romans’ minds. Their fear-based religion was useful as a means of controlling the masses, but they had no interest in what Jesus taught, nor in whatever His own priorities might have been.

So, there you have it. Jesus was a mere figurehead in Roman Christianity for the past seventeen hundred years. But He will be the center and soul of His own future website, where He soon will resume the teaching of His Way as if there had been no intervening detour into Roman Christianity at all!

And what heartens me most is seeing that His followers already are rallying to Him. I have seen this happening over the course of the past dozen years or so in the emails that people have sent to me, and in articles posted by other heretical bloggers. Most people are unaware of the fact that in only the past few years, perhaps hastened by the COVID shutdowns, quite literally the religious ground has been shifting dramatically beneath our feet. We are seeing it happening all around us. I recall that when The Fun of Dying first was published, and that was only twelve years ago, here in central Texas there still were many strict Christians who wanted nothing to do with its message. But, not anymore. This seems to be happening everywhere! It has been estimated that half of the American churches that were temporarily closed in 2020 for health reasons will soon be closing permanently.

And the worldwide need for Seek Reality Online is acute! It has lately been estimated that between eighty and ninety percent of the people now living still have very little idea of what actually happens after death. Even worse, there are some near-death experiencers who are convinced that they died and miraculously came back to life. And there is one in particular who is lately terrifying people by saying that light-beings told her during her NDE that everything that Mikey Morgan reports through his mother is illusion, and that in fact there is nothing after death. Or at least, this is what I am hearing from people who are contacting me now in a panic, seeking reassurance that what this woman is saying cannot be right.

Oh, good grief! What we see on earth is in fact the illusion, and Mikey’s after-death reality, while also illusory, is a lot more real than this reality is! Many NDEs happen in the astral plane, which is so love-filled that NDE experiencers can be forgiven for believing that perhaps they have arrived where the dead actually go. But I will say this yet again. Near-death experiences have nothing whatsoever to do with actual death. They are spontaneous out-of-body phenomena with messages for the experiencers themselves and they can sometimes be lovely, but that is all. And even if we had no other reason for sharing the truth with the world at last, just stopping the spread of such foolish nonsense would be reason enough all by itself for us to be giving you this beautiful evidence-based website!

I have seen him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps.
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps.
I have read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps.
His truth is marching on!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! Glory, glory Hallelujah!
Glory, glory Hallelujah! His truth is marching on!

– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

His Turn at Last!

There is a time for everything,
and a season for every activity under the heavens.
          – from The Christian Bible’s Old Testament (Ecclesiastes 3:1)

For most of my life I was one of the most ardent Christians you know. I have read the Bible from cover to cover more than a dozen times. I majored in Christian history in college. I grew up expecting to become a minister, but I married a Catholic so I became a Lector. The first time it occurred to me that the religion has little to do with Jesus, I fully expected a lightning bolt to come right through the ceiling. And I have survived a few nights when I have gone to bed having fervently prayed – on my knees, no less! – for God to take me in my sleep if some manuscript of mine was not supposed to be published. This being a heretic is a hard row to hoe!

But I never wanted to be a heretic. I simply wanted to live the truth. And my experiences of light at the age of eight, and then again at the age of twenty, have made me know that there really is a definitive truth to be pursued. But of course, I know a lot more now. I have always felt devoted to Jesus, but of course everyone is devoted to Jesus. Every time I would read the whole Bible, before I started in over again, I would re-read the New Testament, and then I would read just the Gospels one more time before I started over with Genesis. I never knew who my spirit guide was until February of 2015, and for a long time I associated him with the Founding Father, without yet knowing that Jefferson’s own interest in the Gospels had much deeper roots.

It is only now, in just the past two months, that I fully understand that my spirit guide has always led a double life. While he has been guiding me, and I must say that he has done a decent job of that, in a greater reality where there is no time or distance, he also has often been nipping off to spend some non-time with his eternal Brother. Clearly, it is a relief to him now to bring the disparate parts of his life together. But for me, this spring feels in equal parts exciting and extremely peculiar. I am relieved to at last have Seek Reality Online almost ready to roll! We have been talking about doing this website for going on five years now, so to have it about to go live feels amazing. After my fifty years spent researching death and the afterlife, this website feels like such a useful gift to the world!

And of course, all the Christian websites are full of Apocalyptic rumblings this spring. I won’t link to them. Instead, I’ll link to a couple of my own articles from a few years back, when we also  had this same sort of political angst in the air that inspired similar Apocalyptic anticipation. The fact is, of course, that Jesus is never going to come back in a cloud of righteous vengeance, for the simple reason that in a reality based in Consciousness, His doing that would lower the vibrations of all of reality so much that His vengeance would be counterproductive. It would lower the vibrations of all the world! Jesus never is going to return on a white horse and with a sword in His hand. But in fact, apparently He is indeed about to come back now, and in the way that you might expect Him to come back in the twenty-first century, come to think of it. He is about to launch His own website.

Of all the things that I ever had thought could happen in my life, casually chatting with Jesus while we fed His pet fish was probably the least likely thing I could imagine. And now, my Thomas being the low-key fellow that he is, the implications of that meeting that he arranged for us with Jesus are finally dawning on me. That was not just a casual visit. “Come and meet my kid brother from my Neolithic lifetime!” No. It was vintage, classic Thomas. This is how he does things. Welcome to my world!                                                                                                                                                                                    “Jesus has decided that He doesn’t want us just to talk about His teachings as part of the spiritual growth section of Seek Reality Online. He wants us to put them in another website.” Okay. Sure. Then, a few days later: “Jesus wants that website to be His own website.” Oh. Of course. Then, a few days after that: “Jesus has decided that He wants to tell His true story in His new website.” Omigod, really? I thought it was going to be only about His teachings. But, sure. Then: “Jesus wants you to tell His true story in your next blog post.” But we just did that! “No, the whole story.” Oh. Okay. So, that was just last week. It brings us to today. And it is dawning on me now where this seems to be heading. A few weeks ago, one of our commenters asked a question, and Thomas said, sounding oddly giddy, “Jesus wants to answer it. Ask Jesus.” I said, “But I know the answer!” Thomas said, “Go ahead. Ask Him.” So I asked Jesus the question in my mind. “Jesus, is there a hell?” And I heard His distinctive voice say clearly in my mind, “There is no hell. There is only love and light.” Which freaked me out! Now I worry that they might be planning some sort of Mikey-and-Carol question-and-answer thing at Jesus’s new website. With me as Carol. And nobody ever would believe in that!

But with Thomas, nothing ever is random. And I always am the last to know.

The plain fact is that the religion is hollow. And it always has been hollow. It is an abundance of show on the outside. Lots of costumes and buildings, dogmas and fears enough to keep whole nations toeing the line for most of the past two thousand years! I recall as a child how the Catholic children had to fuss and worry about whether or not today was “a Holy Day of Obligation.” Those strictures have lessened, but still I look at the Vatican, which pulls in millions of dollars each year from parishes both rich and poor, and I think of how many children in the world are starving right this minute. Protestants are little better, with some online clergy living like pashas. And both sides have sex scandals galore! And yet, what are they producing? I have been a Protestant and then a Catholic and then a Protestant over again, and I used to travel a lot on business so I have attended services in many different Christian churches over the years. I can personally attest that there are no more cliquish, judgmental people on earth than Christians in their various denominations.

And essentially, they all teach more or less the same awful set of made-up dogmas:

  • God can’t forgive us for Adam’s sin in eating that forbidden apple, so we are “fallen.”
  • So then God had to send His own pure Son, miraculously sired by God Himself of a virgin human being, to die as a pure sacrifice to God Himself.
  • Due to the acceptable sacrifice of God’s own Son to God the Father, a supposedly loving God is willing to forgive us for Adam’s having eaten that apple.
  • There are other equally creepy refinements, such as the transubstantiation of bread and wine into the physical flesh and blood of Jesus for Catholics’ obligatory weekly consumption.

And throughout, spending eternity in a fiery hell remains a constant threat! If we die without receiving last rites in the Catholic church, or if we die in certain Protestant denominations without having been originally created by God as part of God’s limited Elect, or without having been “Saved” in one magical way or another, then burning alive and aware in eternal fire is our certain destiny.

Where are the teachings of Jesus in any of this? The ugly dogmas listed above all came from the fear-based Roman religion that was established three centuries after the death of Jesus. None of it is based in anything that Jesus ever said! And while in both Catholic and Protestant services someone will read from the Gospel words of Jesus, in all the various flavors of Christianity the actual teachings of Jesus are considered to be too difficult for most people to follow consistently, so they are treated as only aspirational. Nice ideas, but not to be enforced too seriously lest they thin the ranks of the faithful in the pews. The reason that Jesus gives to us for devoutly following His teachings – the eventual advent of the kingdom of God on earth – is generally taken to mean no more than just the spread of the Roman religion itself. So, do you see what I mean? Roman Christianity is, and it always has been, just as hollow on the inside as a gourd.

But the Jesus of the Gospels is a living Being! And back before the hollow religion that bears the name of Jesus, there was a genuine movement built on the actual teachings of Jesus that grew to be millions strong. That movement was so spiritually joyous that, as my Thomas insists to me now, it could inspire people who were nailed to crosses and devoid of breath to sing for two days before they died. Now, that was some deeply spiritual movement!

But then the Romans destroyed The Way of Jesus. After which they gave Jesus seventeen hundred years of deeply personal pain beyond anything that you and I can imagine.

First, Jesus welcomed home and Himself healed the followers of His Way that the Romans had tortured and murdered in their millions. And then Jesus welcomed, comforted, and healed all the victims of the Crusades, on both sides. And the victims of the Spanish Inquisition. And after that, it has been long centuries of the victims of Christianity itself, both Catholics and Protestants, who have died in terror of burning in hell even as late as the end of the twentieth century, each of whom has been stunned to arrive in the beautiful afterlife, alive and whole and into the waiting arms of Jesus. My Thomas tells me that it really is only now that the last of the victims of fear-based Christianity are no longer arriving home needing Jesus’s restorative care upon their arrival. So it is only now that He can plan His genuine Second Coming, when He will begin again freshly to teach His Way to the world through His own website.

So for the past seventeen hundred earth-years, in a reality that is based in Consciousness and where love is all that matters, Jesus has lavished so much love on so many billions upon billions of victims of the religion that bears His name that now Thomas tells me that the extent of the Lord’s temporal power is beyond all human calculation. So, at least there is that!

Oh my dear friends, even after a lifetime of study, and even after this amazing spring, I still feel as if I know so little, and now I understand even less.
I am sorry to say this, but I truly cannot understand how the Jesus with whom I fed fish that night, as powerful as He is and as good as He is, has not mounted that white horse in sheer exasperation a very long time ago! No, but one thing that I do know is this. After all the personal pain that the religion that bears His name has cost Him, if my Lord and Master Jesus the risen Christ asks me to do any least thing for Him now, then I will do it for Him. And with the greatest joy!

 

    a time to be born and a time to die, a time to plant and a time to uproot,
a time to kill and a time to heal, a time to tear down and a time to build,
a time to weep and a time to laugh,  a time to mourn and a time to dance,
a time to scatter stones and a time to gather them, a time to embrace and a time to
refrain from embracing,
a time to search and a time to give up, a time to keep and a time to throw away,
a time to tear and a time to mend, a time to be silent and a time to speak,
a time to love and a time to hate, a time for war and a time for peace.
from The Christian Bible’s Old Testament (Ecclesiastes 3:2-8)