Author: Roberta Grimes

Alleluia!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christ the Lord is ris’n today, Alleluia!
Sons of men and angels say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heav’ns, and earth, reply, Alleluia!

Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once He died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where thy victory, O grave? Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)

For the twenty years that we have lived in Texas, I’ve been coming to Massachusetts a few times a year to see my longstanding and much-beloved clients. They are located all over eastern Massachusetts, so for about twelve days three times a year my Thomas and I do a lot of driving. And this past Monday, as we drove we discussed the odd fact that for two days after we posted the article that he allowed us to write about Thomas Jefferson, nobody wanted to comment. Which led us to think it was time to blog about why people on earth have spirit guides. And that conversation led to the most gigantic set of discussions I’ve ever had in my life!

We all assume that our own lives are normal. I mean, except for the fact that my spirit guide once was Thomas Jefferson. Although he isn’t Jefferson now. And he also is a rookie as a spirit guide. Usually, they have a lot more experience. And he knew Jesus personally. That’s unusual. And the avatar thing. But all of these odd bits have been rolled out gradually. And Thomas and I have become such great friends! My Thomas is my closest and best-ever friend.

And he is obsessed with helping Jesus. How can I not love him for that? I have learned by now that he won’t lie to me. And if he won’t say “No,” that means some version of “Yes.” But he won’t tell me what that version is, so then I have to guess. He wasn’t one of the Twelve, but he has never denied that he knew Jesus in the Lord’s lifetime on earth. Then on Monday as we drove, I chattily thought to him, “So, you knew Jesus in His lifetime on earth? What was He like?” And he thought back to me, “I knew Jesus in His lifetimes on earth.”  “Lifetimes? With an “S?” “You heard me.”

Oy. A puzzle. That could mean just one thing. They had known one another while Jesus was still perfecting Himself? As a tease, I thought playfully, “So you were perfecting yourselves on earth together. And He was the star of the class? So you must have been the dunce?”

And then we heard the most amazing laugh! You heard that laugh in high school, when you and the other awestruck freshmen were watching the seniors tease one another. It was that laugh. And it had to be Jesus. Who else would have thought what I said was funny? But I had no idea that Jesus was listening! Thomas was chucking, too. Omigod. I knew that they had been close. But, wow! Thomas hadn’t known that Jesus would laugh. Or known that I would hear it. He quickly gave me his “it’s okay” vibe, and we kept driving. Fortunately, not off the road.

We know that Jesus is unique. He just is more unique than you and I have realized. Thomas knew that laugh had rattled me, so to calm me he began to tell me more of their story than I had ever heard.

I am relieved to tell you that my beloved Thomas is not a dunce. His friend was just a bit ahead of him. And unlike today, they had no idea what was going on as people used repeated lives on earth to foster their consciousness development. Remember that everything began only maybe two hundred thousand years ago, as we reckon earth-time. This was in the literal stone age. So when Jesus unexpectedly ascended to the Godhead level, it was a shock to them both. They were still in mental communication. Thomas remained in the astral, and Jesus asked him not to follow Him until He could figure out what was happening. Thomas doesn’t remember much about that time, but he does recall that his not progressing further required that he ask for and receive permission from a Council.

There is no time in the astral. But for some indeterminate amount of earth-time, whether it was a minute or eons, my Thomas waited while Jesus tried yet again to overachieve. We are talking the classic overachiever here, the most spiritual kid in the class by far, but Thomas tells me that Jesus has always been the most loving guy you can imagine. No way was He going to graduate and be happy if He had to leave everyone else behind. So finally, He knew that He had to go back. He wanted to teach everyone else on earth how to do whatever it was that He had done. It took a lot of talking to persuade whatever ultimate Council He had to persuade, because no one else ever had reached and entered, and then had left the Godhead Collective and incarnated again on earth.

I don’t know whose idea it was, but on this past Wednesday night, Jesus met with Thomas and me on a grassy astral riverbank, and He told me His version of the Christmas-and-Easter story. My hunch is that Thomas requested it, but that makes the event no less gigantic. It opened with us sitting side by side, wearing astral robes and dangling our feet in the water, and Jesus presented Himself to me at first as a kindly older man without a beard so I would be less intimidated by Him. My beautiful friend Thomas was on my other side, looking to me as he always has. That older-looking Jesus began to speak with words, but Thomas sent Him the thought that I would be able to understand His thoughts. Jesus then sent me the thought that as I became more comfortable, He would revert to looking like Himself. And, sure enough: as Jesus was sending this tale to me in boluses of thought, He gradually reverted to looking the way I have come to see Him of late, as a hazel-eyed and olive-skinned young man with curly dark hair and a short, efficient beard. The only sign that we were in the astral plane was the brilliant, many-colored sky. We were feeding the fish with grain that just appeared in our hands. And behind us, on an enormous plain, deer of various kinds were grazing, so perhaps they had internal organs. I never asked.

It was clear that Jesus soon was enjoying telling me this story, as anyone enjoys telling the triumphal tale of His great youthful struggles come at last to fruition beyond even His own most optimistic expectations. He said that the Councils had found it impossible to believe that a perfected Being might want to undertake all the risks and pains of another earthly incarnation. And Jesus’s reason made no sense to them. He had nothing more to learn! The fact was that no one then incarnating knew anything about anything. Jesus was loving and wise by nature, so His raising His consciousness vibration had happened easily and naturally. What He wanted to do now was understand a system that He hadn’t even known was in existence when He had beaten it. And no, just returning to the earth-plane in an astral body to have a look around wasn’t going to be good enough. He wanted gestation, birth, growing up, a whole life of poverty, and a human death. He wanted to know precisely how it all worked. And then He wanted to teach everyone still living on earth how to master the system, just as He had.

So a Council was created to work with Him. He told me He was patient and polite with them, but my sense is that in that younger world they were trying respectfully to understand this wondrous new thing: Jesus was a perfected being Who was so perfected and so overwhelmed with love that He could not be satisfied to be perfected Himself, but the whole of humankind must be perfected with Him. Eventually they negotiated a birth and an exploratory life under the guidance of His personal Council and in a culture of their choosing. He would have to agree to be guarded by Archangels who would be invisible to the people around Him, and He would be rescued from His body before its natural death.

Just as people on earth are protected by angels, so the Godhead is protected and served by Archangels. Once Jesus was conceived, the Archangel Gabriel announced His advent to His future parents so they would not be alarmed as some unusual things were happening around Him during His earthly lifetime. Thought is such an easy way to communicate! As soon as a question was occurring to me, He was answering it. Yes, He always knew who He was and what He was doing on earth. But no, He never confided in anyone. There were some, like my Thomas, that He could have told; and also John, the Apostle, who was another friend from a prior lifetime. When it occurred to me to ask Him whether He had married as Jesus, or whether He had been a homosexual (which is something that I have suspected but I never would have asked Him), He glanced at me and a smile flickered, but He sent me a small demurral.

Jesus soon passed over much of His earth-life with a wave of His hand to me. He said aloud, “It is in the Book,” as I could see that people were approaching Him because now He looked like the pale Bible-Jesus. He stood, and He was laying His hands on each of those people’s heads and saying aloud, “Bless you, my son,” and “Bless you, my daughter.” Thomas stood, too, and he offered me his hand to help me stand. Thomas said by thought, “We will give Him some time.”

We moved away, and Jesus soon rejoined us farther down the river, looking again like the Mediterranean version of Himself. He was followed in the river by those neon-colored fish. He sat down again on the riverbank beside me and tossed some grain to the fish. I realized that I was recognizing His personal energy now, just as I can recognize Thomas’s energy and Thomas Jefferson’s energy. And the Lord’s energy was distinctly elevated, but not overwhelmingly so. As an aside, I’ve got to say that Jesus has the most beautiful, sweet and loving energy you can imagine, with no low notes at all. Nothing of pain, sadness, selfishness, depression, avarice, anger,  and no bit of fear. Everyone else is a distinctive mix, while Jesus is nothing but love and light. He said by thought what I think might be my real name, but it was a nonsense-sound. To it He added, “You must get past your fears! Are you not happy here with us?” Which made me realize how shy I was feeling again to be so close to Him.

“It is not my time to be here,” I said in words. I couldn’t look at Him. How do you make small-talk with God?

Jesus sighed and said by thought, “The book that we wrote together contains most of what I want you to say. My friend that you call Thomas can supply the rest.” He added, “Why do you fear me so?”

That irritated me. I looked right at him and blurted in words, “Do you have any idea what a big deal you are?”

And He grinned. He actually grinned. He opened my hand with His fingers and put some grain into it and said in words, “Here. Feed the fish.” There was a little buzz where He touched me.

His face went solemn as I felt His troubled thought. The Council that had guided His life on earth had been horrified about His crucifixion idea. He was trying to deviate severely from the plan that He and they had made together. He wanted to publicly humiliate a perfected Being, and He might negatively affect his own consciousness status and drop Himself below the Godhead level. He couldn’t even promise them that He could re-animate the body. All He knew was that there seemed to be no other way to convince the crowds that were following Him that their lives would continue after their bodies died. I wanted to ask Jesus why He thought that He could reanimate a dead body, but that seemed presumptuous. He caught the question anyway. He sent me the thought that He had succeeded in reanimating animals, although not for long. But once He was back in the body, He thought He could reanimate it and maintain it alive. Then He could soon cast it aside and appear to people in his astral body. I wanted to know how He had managed to persuaded His Council to allow Him to do what we know that in the end He did persuade them to allow Him to do. The thought He sent me was that He wanted to try. Then He glanced at me, and His thought was that He would have done it, with or without their permission. His Archangels were at His command, so once He let Himself be arrested, it was going to be done.

You might be wondering how Jesus sounded. And how was it possible that He spoke English? He did speak American English with a vague accent when He was speaking aloud, but one advantage of speaking in boluses of thought is that it is translated in your mind. And I wish I had been allowed to remember more of this meeting, but here is where my memory ends.

That was all on Wednesday night. I woke up on Thursday with no memory of any of it, but then it began to unfold, beginning with that older face that I knew had been Jesus. That’s what happens when Thomas lets me remember a nightly meeting. I don’t remember anything when I wake up, but then bits of it come back to me in order over the course of the day. I check with him as I remember things, and he confirms them. But this was such a gigantic meeting! If all the details are right, it rocks the world. So when Thomas told me on Thursday afternoon that Jesus was thinking about making this meeting my blog post for the Sunday before Easter, I really did nearly drive off the road. I asked him if Jesus had any understanding of what big news this was going to be, and Thomas said that it has to come out sometime. They have been dismantling the Roman Christian religion for the past two thousand years, while my Thomas and many others – it hasn’t been only Thomas and John – have patiently delayed their own ascensions, and many of them have fought and died through repeated lifetimes on earth to keep Christianity from destroying the truths that Jesus returned to earth to learn, and then to share.

For centuries they were sure that the whole idea that God had sent God’s Own Son to die as a sacrifice to God was so foolish that the Roman religion based on that idea was bound to fall of its own dead weight. And for two thousand years they have been weakening the religion. He reminds me that I myself have said that as it stands, Christianity is just a pretty wrapping that keeps the true teachings of Jesus safe, but imprisoned. So now we can unwrap His gift. At last it is the ultimate Christmas morning!

But I wanted to hear the rest of the story. Were they happy with Jesus when He went home? Thomas sent me a grin when I sent him that question. He told me that his Friend went at once from being the nuisance new kid making trouble to the very top of the Godhead Collective. And there He remains. Although His fundamental nature is to serve and to teach, what He mainly gets now is worship. He does some teaching in the children’s villages, and He loves doing that because the children don’t see Him as a part of the Godhead. But what people mostly want Him to do is what we saw. So He does it. All the time. He used to make the sign of the cross on people’s foreheads. He would say to His friends, “How would you like to have to keep drawing a sign of suffering and death on people’s foreheads?” But still, He patiently did it for the newly-arrived Catholics. All the time.

Thomas won’t tell me much about the Lord’s life before He ascended to the Godhead level. Mostly, I think, because He doesn’t remember. But he believes that they lived more than one life together in very primitive times. He does recall one incident from their last lifetime together. There was a battle, and their side was finishing off the men and raping and killing the women, and his friend was searching, and he found a woman who had hidden herself with her children. They were terrified. His friend protected them for days, and fed them, until he could find a man of their tribe who would take her as his second wife. His reason given to Thomas was that their quarrel had been with the men. The woman had harmed no one.

So, omigod a hundred times over! So many things have fallen into place and come to make sense to me now, that never really made sense before. What seemed to be a leisurely series of lifetimes that my Thomas has lived, delaying his own elevation by millennia, have all been in service to his Friend as he and others have preserved the Lord’s pure teachings while the Roman religion has held sway for lo these past two thousand years. Until now, when we can bring forth the Lord’s Way as Roman Christianity further weakens. And Thomas tells me that Jesus wasn’t born in Bethlehem from an especially high ranking in the Godhead Collective. But His having chosen to incarnate from the Godhead out of His overwhelming love for humankind was such an extraordinary decision, and He managed to achieve so much on earth with only that one lifetime, that He is of the highest aspect of the Godhead now. And He is the only Member of the Godhead who is teaching independently throughout the afterlife and the astral.

My beloved friend’s eternal Friend who fed astral fish with us on Wednesday night as we sat together on a riverbank while He told me His beautiful story has earned a lot more than our worship, dear friends. He has earned so very much more. The beautiful Being known as Jesus, above every other being in every universe and apart from any religion on earth, has earned every bit of our wholehearted love.

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids His rise, Alleluia!
Christ hath opened paradise, Alleluia!

Soar we now where Christ hath led, Alleluia!
Foll’wing our exalted Head, Alleluia!
Made like Him, like Him we rise, Alleluia!
Ours the cross, the grave, the skies, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord is Risen Today” (1739)

Young Thomas Jefferson

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), principal author, from the Declaration of Independence (1776)

The above words were written by a superbly educated, extraordinarily thoughtful, and extremely punctilious young man who was only thirty-three when he became the principal author of the American Declaration of Independence. Please read those words again! They seem to be only common sense to us now, but two hundred and fifty years ago, the notion that ordinary people had the right to claim their personal freedom and to pursue their own idea of happiness was radical. And now read the rest of that paragraph, which is a frank blueprint for widespread rebellion. It claims that:

  • A government’s purpose is to secure each individual’s rights.
  • Every government derives its power from the individual consent of the governed.
  • When a government becomes destructive of the people’s rights, then the people as a body have the right to alter or abolish it.
  • The people then have the right to organize a new government based entirely on what is most likely to effect their own safety and happiness.

There is no petty bureaucrat, even today, who doesn’t wince to read those words! Yet the generation of giants to which Thomas Jefferson belonged was a peculiar bunch, uniquely well educated, idealistic, and determined to do it right for once. And the government that they founded, while bruised and battered, still stands today as the best-designed, longest-lived, and most resilient representative republic on earth. It even contains within itself a basic method of amendment and renewal so far-seeing that the same documents that have carried us this far can easily manage whatever more may come.

There was a time in my naive and clueless past when I considered my spirit guide’s famous prior lifetime to be my own personal property. I thought it was my right to do research and to write blog posts about Thomas Jefferson. Of course, I know much better now! And there was a time in his disciplinarian past when my spirit guide beat me about the head and insisted that I must never do anything like that ever again! But he has mellowed a lot as we have learned to work together more comfortably.

Everyone has one primary spirit guide through life. It seems to be quite literally true that you cannot be on earth without a spirit guide, just as a car cannot stay on the road without a driver. But very few people operate as I have learned to operate, as someone with a comfortably engaged and always-there co-pilot. And I have come to love living this way! At least, I am never lonely. And others who have learned, as I have learned, to recognize the voices of their primary guides, have found the same sort of joy in this relationship. There is always that voice from just behind my left shoulder. Prompting and encouraging. Correcting as I write. Commenting quietly as I speak. A smile, or sometimes even a chuckle, often unexpectedly. I depend upon the fact that if I don’t have time to do much with a blog post before Saturday, he will get it done on Saturday morning. And I never get upset anymore, because now he talks me through things. We are two people in one body.

My spirit guide is not Thomas Jefferson. I can see that they do share some traits, both loners by preference, deep thinkers, and very bright. But my dear Thomas has a lighter personality. I think he is further developed spiritually. And he is so emphatically past that life that my attempts to defend Thomas Jefferson when I first learned that through my spirit guide, I had a connection to the Founding Father, at first infuriated my Thomas, before he learned that I would respect his wishes. We had a pre-birth deal, or he never would have agreed to be my spirit guide. He would guide me for this lifetime in learning some spiritual lessons, since we are very old friends; and then, in my sixties, I would become his avatar to work on certain tasks that he had not completed during his lifetime as Thomas Jefferson. And those tasks had emphatically NOT included my wasting time and effort in defending Thomas Jefferson’s personal life against attacks by twenty-first-century philistines!

My Thomas doesn’t care about attacks on the personal life of one of his hundreds of lifetimes on earth. He has just piped up again and reminded me that Thomas Jefferson is not even the most important lifetime that he has lived. Or I have lived. Or, he says, no doubt that you have lived. He says that lifetime seems important to us now because of the prominence of the country in which some of us are now living. But my dear Thomas wants us to know that the work that we can do through Seek Reality Online in eradicating the fear of death, and thereby eradicating fear and war worldwide, and also the work that we can do for Jesus in spreading the Lord’s Way, will be vastly more important. And for eons longer! So he asks us to keep our focus on what it is important for us to be doing now. He tells us that the honor of the Founding Father will be defended in due time by the people in his life who love him, and who will speak for him once communication from their level is opened. But because my Thomas knows that speaking for Jefferson still matters to me, and he says that I have been a good soldier (cute!), he now ceases to object. He will allow me to say here what I have been wanting to say. Oh, wait: he now says that he and I together will speak to some matters that it has for a long time been important to me to address, because he was there and he has personal knowledge of those matters. Well, so here goes.

THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS NOT THE FATHER OF ANY OF SALLY HEMINGS’S CHILDREN

The father of her Jefferson children was his younger brother, Randolph, which is something that any honest researcher easily can conclude, simply by considering the fact that a highly fertile woman bore many children during her long life. Yet her Jefferson children were conceived only during the brief period between the death of Randolph’s wife and Randolph’s decision just a few years later to leave the neighborhood and head west. I further address the Sally Hemings nonsense in one of the articles linked earlier in this post. And the former President himself attended one of my nightly meetings with Thomas that I was allowed to remember that next morning. He said to me then in his soft southern voice, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings because she was my property so she could not have consented.” Spoken like a gentleman. That a servant’s room has lately been found near Jefferson’s bedchamber at Monticello tells us nothing more than that an old man wanted a servant at night within the range of his voice.

THOMAS JEFFERSON WORRIED THAT SKIN COLOR MIGHT SIGNIFY A DEEPER DIFFERENCE

I have a husband and two children with Asperger’s syndrome, which is a form of autism; and it is thought that Jefferson also was a high-functioning Asperger’s person. For example, for his whole life, Jefferson told a story from his childhood of having watched a gang of slaves trying unsuccessfully to pull down a shed. And then his own father picked up the rope and pulled that shed over all by himself. So his father was stronger than six slaves together! People with Asperger’s often lack the ability to understand how other people feel, and it is likely that Jefferson never realized why slaves might not want to try very hard. These odd (to him) differences between people of differing status seemed to trouble him for his entire life.

THOMAS JEFFERSON WAS CONVINCED THAT HIS SLAVES WERE BETTER OFF LIVING WITH HIM

During Jefferson’s lifetime, freedmen lived miserable lives on the edges of the stronger white society. And for much of his life, freedmen in Virginia were at continuous risk of re-enslavement. Jefferson freed those few of his slaves that he thought could live comfortably on their own; but for the most part, he was convinced that they were better off living with him. His slaves occupied a village of comfortable homes on individual plots where they could grow vegetables, chickens, and eggs that they consumed themselves or sold to Jefferson’s kitchen. (And yes, he did pay them! The account books that he kept with them still exist, and I – Roberta – have seen them.) He gave his slaves weekends off except at harvest time, he allowed no whipping or abuse, and until his old age, he still hoped that he would figure out some way to free all the slaves. More and more, he became convinced that an emancipation that offered all the slaves legal protection from the stronger white society would be necessary before he could safely free his own. He was paternalistic, to be sure, but he took good care of “his people.”

PATTY’S DEATH DERAILED THOMAS JEFFERSON’S PLANNED PRIMARY MISSION

Jefferson considered it to be the greatest failure of his life that he never solved the slavery problem. His personal life-plan included front-and-center the frank abolition of slavery, and to enforce this mission, his planned wife for that lifetime even inherited her enslaved stepmother and enslaved half-siblings. So Jefferson’s own enslaved family members, whom he loved, were to have given him added incentive. But his adored wife died before the Revolutionary War ended, and Jefferson was so bereft that he never remarried, and he abandoned Monticello for decades. If Patty had lived, it is likely that Jefferson would have retired from public life at the end of the Revolutionary War. And with Patty by his side, he would have made abolition his one great cause, and he might well have succeeded in ending slavery in the United States by the early 1800s. So:

  • Thomas Jefferson likely then would not have been the first Secretary of State, the second vice president, and the third president of the United States.
  • Had Thomas Jefferson never been president, we might not have had the probably unconstitutional Louisiana Purchase at that opportune moment, so there likely now would be two or three countries established in place of the one United States.
  • The United States would have been spared its bloody Civil War, its failed emancipation, and all the horrors of Jim Crow.

If Martha (“Patty”) Jefferson had lived a normal lifespan, the United States of America might well have seen slavery ended peacefully more than two hundred years ago. And today, the probably somewhat expanded but still smaller United States of America would be a happier and far more equal nation in which shade of skin would be of as little remark as eye color or shades of hair.

And now, the final, hopeful words of the Declaration of Independence to which that generation of giants set their quills almost two hundred and fifty years ago….

“We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), principal author, from the Declaration of Independence (1776)

 

Healing the World

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The road is long, with many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows when.
But I’m strong. Strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.
So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear. We’ll get there.
For I know he would not encumber me.
He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.
– Bob Russell (1914-1970) & Bobby Scott (1937-1990), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

This planet orbits an ordinary star, just one among hundreds of billions of stars in the Milky Way Galaxy. And our home galaxy is only one of at least two trillion galaxies, the largest of which is believed to contain more than a hundred trillion stars. That this little rock that we inhabit might be of any importance at all defies belief! And when I tell you that this universe is nothing like what it appears to be; and that far from being trivial, this rock in fact is extremely important, you will assume that I have lost my mind. But the size and scope and boggling complexity of this universe are just pure illusion. It’s one heck of an illusion. I will grant you that! But it’s an illusion, all the same.

If you understand that this universe is in fact an illusion, you can occasionally spot the illusion in action. Repeatedly, I have come across communications from beings not in bodies who have said things like, “This universe is not as big as you think it is.” Or, “Size and solidity are not characteristics of matter.” I recall reading long ago that there were many parts of this universe that were “empty of stars.” And once I read about an astronomer who had pointed a telescope at one of those empty spots, verified that it was empty, and then left his telescope pointed there for a year. When he returned a year later and looked at the same place again, he found that it now contained billions of galaxies. Then there is the curious fact that modern humans and more than ninety percent of modern animals and plants all sprang into being at the same time, about two hundred thousand earth-years ago. There also is the fact that the cosmological constants have to remain constant to vanishingly tiny tolerances, or else the universe will either collapse upon itself or blow apart. And they are not supposed to keep adjusting… but yet they do keep constantly adjusting. And of course, the Big Bang’s something-from-nothing problem makes it an unsatisfactory explanation for how everything began.

This universe is apparently a kind of habitat designed for human beings. It is only about two hundred thousand years old in terms of earth-time, and it is freshly re-created for us in each micro-instant. As we have needed it to seem older, or bigger, or more complex, it has been made to seem that way in its repeated instantaneous iterations in order to keep us from finding an edge.

This human-habitat illusion, which we continue to take seriously because it is such a good illusion and it still appears to us to be all that we’ve got, in fact exists just so we can have a place to experience negativity. And we need that negativity so we can more easily raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward love. Fear, anger, hatred, and all the other negative emotions simply don’t exist in significant amounts in our eternal astral home. And yet we need them so we can push against them in order to grow spiritually. Conceivably, there may be other uses for this universe, but they aren’t obvious to us. When I was young, at the height of the Vietnam War, there was a song whose refrain was, “War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing!” Well, war and all the negativity it produces have been wonderful tools to help to foster our spiritual growth! That system has worked well for millennia, until the repeated worldwide wars of the twentieth century dropped the ambient energies of this planet to such an extent that they put our home-planet into what upper-level beings not in bodies soon were calling interplanetary intensive care. Time not being a factor beyond this material reality, this planet’s guardians began working to raise the vibrations of this planet out of its present red danger zone even before the twentieth century began, and even as those wars were raging. And then, as the United Stated did the unthinkable, and used atomic bombs as weapons of war against Japan in August of 1945, teams of avatars with the help of their guides were rapidly being born on earth with specific life-plans that were meant to assist with this process of raising this planet’s consciousness vibration back toward a normal, negative-toward-neutral zone.

And that was when many of us were born on earth. I came in one year almost to the day after Hiroshima and Nagasaki were bombed. Few of us have had any conscious awareness of the details of our life-plans, but together and apart we have been working toward playing our little roles for our whole lives. Whenever Craig Hogan, for example, has been frustrated, his guides sitting around their astral table have shown him a plan that he couldn’t really make sense of, and they would say, “Just follow the plan!” And for my part, I thought I was supposed to be teaching about the afterlife. But then more and more it looked to be Jesus that I was supposed to be teaching about. And there would be long stretches when there was no special hurry, and no special plan, and then there would be a need to hurry but I still wasn’t sure what I was supposed to be doing.

This idea for Seek Reality Online, with Craig and me teaching about the afterlife together, didn’t come up until just a few years ago. But it started as just a loosey-goosey thought, kind of an online afterlife conference. And then Covid happened, and soon everything was online. And meanwhile, I felt driven to write The Fun of Loving Jesus. And Craig felt driven to write a whole harvest of amazing books about how the greater reality works! This being avatars for beings not now in bodies who are themselves receiving even higher-level guidance is such a difficult and problematic thing, because those in charge aren’t actually in touch with us directly, nor even indirectly, nor even at all. In fact, Seek Reality Online apparently isn’t actually meant to address just the fear of death specifically, we now realize. (Silly you! Is that what you thought it was about? Well, so did we!) No, apparently Seek Reality Online is a direct weapon against negativity. Or, so we now think. And also, it’s meant to have an aspect that will develop the Lord’s Way for Jesus.

… And this has been more or less our state of play until just this past Saturday morning. Thomas gave me the title of this post a week ago, but I had no idea what it was supposed to be about, so I have been dithering with it for a week.Then I woke up on Saturday with the firm understanding that the purpose of Seek Reality Online is the eradication of fear and its replacement with the kingdom of God on earth. Don’t think about where it might end, Thomas tells me now, because you’ll be watching it happen from the bleacher seats. And don’t worry that the eradication of fear will mean the end of this planet’s usefulness. He tells me just to do my little part. Everything else is above my pay grade.

In short, what appears to be happening is that as humankind continues to evolve, so our planet needs to be evolving as well. And now that evolution has begun. He tells me that the guardians of this planet haven’t minded that for eons of time we were living our whole lives in the fear of death. We had mental mediums and soothsayers and such. If we were especially fearful, we had the means to mostly figure it out. But a new phase in the evolution of humankind began at the start of the twentieth century, and Craig and I and many others are part of that process. We enlisted in it back then, although of course I was not made aware of what we had signed up to do until this sunny Saturday morning. March 26th 2022, to be precise. And this morning Thomas has told me a great deal more.

The Godhead tries very hard not to interfere in human affairs. But seventy-five years ago, when humankind first used atomic weapons in warfare, the decision was made at the very highest level of Beings of which we are aware that humanity never will be allowed to use atomic weapons again. And so, my dear friends, despite the fact that there are some seventeen hundred quadrillion nuclear warheads on earth, and there always have been knuckleheads running the United States, the Soviet Union, China, and many other countries, you will notice that there has been a truly remarkable lack of nuclear warfare. Actually, quite beyond our awareness, we have repeatedly come close. And there are stories. There was a false alarm of an attack under way here or there. And always, in every case, someone was influenced not to push a button. Or there was a missile test that a phantom missile from out of nowhere took out of the sky. But with the world awash in atomic weapons and drenched to the gills in frank craziness, seventy-five years of no atomic warfare must be seen to be a remarkable feat by an infinitely loving Godhead!

How will Seek Reality Online make a difference? What we have learned in our few decades of teaching that human life is eternal is this:

  • Once people understand that they will live forever, they begin to live in an eternal frame.
  • Money and material things cease to matter.
  • What begins to matter deeply is people, love, and kindness.

Thomas tells me now that he and I and also Craig and his own master guide and very many others were enlisted as part of the much larger team that began to do this work at the start of the twentieth century. He tells me to stop fretting that we are about to lose the earth as a place for spiritual growth, because there are more than enough negative millennia laid down here by now that people can come here for many millennia more, and live their lives of spiritual stress within human history as it has already been developed. And meanwhile, the Lord’s Way that we will have begun for Him will be carrying on forever from here. Thomas says that Craig’s master plan and my own has always been to spend most of these earth-lives in preparation, to get the SRO website and the Lord’s Way well begun, and then eventually to turn this work over to others.

All that the Godhead has to do to keep a nuclear war from ever happening on earth is to hold it off for a little while longer. Just until this website has taught sufficient people all over the world that their lives really are eternal! And then, as fear recedes and love prevails, we can at last begin for Jesus the spread of the kingdom of God over all the earth.   

 

  If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another.
It’s a long, long road from which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?
And the load doesn’t weigh me down at all.
He ain’t heavy! He’s my brother!
– Bob Russell (1914-1970), Bobby Scott (1937-1990), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

What Did He Say?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I will follow Him, follow Him wherever He may go.
And near Him, I always will be, for nothing can keep me away.
He is my destiny. I will follow Him.
Ever since He touched my heart, I knew. There isn’t an ocean too deep,
A mountain so high it can keep me away from His love!
– Norman Gimbel (1927-2018) & Arthur Altman (1910-1994), based on  “I Will Follow Him” (1961)

The problem with our presuming to try to give to the Lord His genuine Way, from before the Christianity the Romans designed when they seized the name of Jesus, actually boils down to just one word. And that word is WORDS. I look at all the words that Jesus spoke, and my mind quails!  Who are we to presume to decide precisely what He meant when He said each word? Those living in the greater reality have the choice of communicating by mind, so they use boluses of thought to convey whole ideas. But you and I don’t have that choice! Using words is problematic, because a single word can convey both too little and too much meaning. Take the word “love,” for example. It might take you half a page to define that single word! But when you communicate by thought, you can choose the best version of whichever word you have in mind, and then you can perfectly convey what you mean.

An eighteenth-century wordsmith of note demonstrated how cleverly words can be used when he authored the American Declaration of Independence. The then-current formulation for the inalienable rights of man was “life, liberty, and property.” The battle at the time of the American Revolution was between those who wanted to keep slavery and those who were trying to abolish it, and Thomas Jefferson showed which side he was on when he opened his Declaration of Independence with a subtle twist on that old formula.

He wrote, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” And he thereby took from slaveholders their right to rely upon his document as a reason to later claim their fellow men as their property, while at the same time he granted to bondsmen their right to eventually pursue their own happiness. And he did this more than eighty years before Abraham Lincoln signed his Emancipation Proclamation! You can imagine Jefferson’s internal giggles as he watched all those solemn slaveholders putting their quills to his version of our founding document.

But then much later, in 1960, Thomas Jefferson communicated with the living through direct-voice medium Leslie Flint, and he grumped about his having to leave off briefly his greater ease of communicating by thought when he was forced to go back to using words again. This was the first thing he said in his soft southern voice when he got control of the medium. “Very difficult for anyone in my position to manifest in this fashion to talk to people on Earth, and at the same time keep one’s equilibrium, if one can use that term and apply to the spirit. That you know when one comes back and one endeavors to speak in this fashion, it’s all very conflicting and complicated. Aligning with vibration, tuning in, remembering things that one wishes to say, transmission of thought into sound, words, words, often words which don’t indicate anything clearly, at least what one feels, I find extreme difficulty.”

Indeed, he did find it difficult! And using words was his main problem. A problem that we are going to find compounded now when we try to work with the reported words that Jesus spoke two thousand years ago, and which then had to go through the following hurdles:

  • People played telephone with those words for a generation or two after they heard Jesus speak them. Scholars keep shortening their estimated time before the first Gospel was written down, but still there was a certain amount of memory and human fallibility involved.
  • The words written in the various Gospels were then edited by First Nicaea in 325, and also by the later church councils. We know that the councilors removed some of what Jesus said, especially everything related to reincarnation; and they also added some things that they wished He had said, mostly passages related to church-building, end-times, and sheep-and-goats nonsense.
  • Jesus spoke Aramaic, but His works were generally first written down in Greek, and then translated from Greek into modern languages. Aramaic and Greek are so different from one another that direct translations from Aramaic to English are unrecognizable by those familiar with modern Gospel translations. Some of the folks that we used to think were dead tell us now that modern two-step English translations are the most faithful interpretations of what Jesus actually meant to say.

But I think they are being charitable. In fact, there is only one interpretation of the words of Jesus that I consider to be reasonably faithful, and that is only because I personally witnessed its creation by Jesus, and then its confirmation.

It might surprise you to know that until recently I haven’t given much thought to how unusual my life has been. While normal women have been taking vacations, shopping, attending concerts and hanging out with friends, I have primarily been studying the Bible and researching death and the afterlife. And my Thomas, come to think of it, has had one pretty big obsession of his own. He and I have lived seventeen lifetimes together, and through most of them we have been serving Jesus. Thomas, I think, much more than I. If it might be said that Jesus has a most devoted groupie, then I think that of the trillion or more beings that must exist in all of reality, my own dear Thomas is a leading contender for the Lord’s biggest fan. That business about helping to found a country? All just a detour, apparently.

So it is not surprising that when Jesus reportedly decided that His Gospel teachings had been too simplistic, and that must be why so few Christians were following them, and He then led the team that channeled the much more advanced A Course in Miracles, only to see those powerful teachings soar right over most people’s heads, so He reportedly decided in the nineteen-eighties to give His more basic Gospels teachings another try, and He put out the word that He needed “a pure channel” – someone who had not been known to be a channel – that my previously very private Thomas didn’t hesitate to lead me in channeling an autobiography of Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage in order to demonstrate to Jesus that my dear Thomas had the Lord’s “pure channel” waiting for Him right here. My Thomas was happy to expose Thomas Jefferson’s private life to all the world for the Lord’s sake! The fact that he had no problem doing that, when Jefferson had even burned his wife’s papers and all their letters to one another to keep his private life private, never had made sense to me before. But of course, he would do anything for Jesus! And so would I. And so would you.

Whereupon, they reportedly spent the next twenty years preparing me to become the Lord’s channel. But no one said a word about any of this to me! Then in 2014, it was apparently time for me to step up and do my job. This announcement of the role for which my still-anonymous primary guide had volunteered me was made during a nightly guidance meeting. And reportedly I said, “No freakin’ way!” Or less polite words to that effect. No way was I worthy to channel Jesus! So Thomas had no choice but to break every spirit-guide rule of conduct. He enlisted the help of a medium and told me directly what a famous big-shot he had been in his previous life, and why I had to do this now. So in April of 2015, for two weeks I was Jesus’s word-processor to write Liberating Jesus. And then the beings serving Jesus asked for and vetted that entire manuscript. Word by word. When I asked the medium to give me their changes, she said that they had been directed by Jesus to say to me, “Well done, good and faithful servant.” So then I cried.

I have written the preceding three paragraphs without inflection because I have written them mostly for myself. Repeatedly, during that extraordinary year I kept reminding myself that, my goodness, I was having an extraordinary year, and I must not ever forget these events. But when something like that happens to you, it seems only normal at the time. You eat and sleep and live your life, and the sun keeps rising and setting. What I remember most vividly to this day, and what still brings tears to my eyes when I think of it, was what must have been the Lord’s private thoughts as He became more used to being in my mind. Jesus has feelings, too! As He was typing, using my fingers, He was thinking things like, “You say you love Me? Then, listen to Me!” And I knew He wasn’t talking to me. He was mentally talking to Christians. I felt so bad for Him! I was thinking, I love you, Jesus! But I was trying not to think, with tears on my cheeks, because I was supposed to be just His word processor. The power of His Being was such that I had no idea of what He was writing until suddenly one morning I woke up and He was gone. And I was a spent balloon.

So I trust every word of Liberating Jesus. But I really don’t trust much else. I have decided, however, that I do have to trust the fact that Jesus trusts my Thomas. I have come to believe they have a relationship that might go back a very long way. And by now, Thomas trusts me as well. This triangle was what my vision of a few weeks ago was apparently about. Jesus was watching Thomas fix His old jalopy – His old teachings – and smiling for me, but not looking at me because He has learned by now that if He looks at me, I freak. He had His arms folded to show me that Thomas would be doing the actual work. So again, I will be just their scribe. I can stop worrying about all the many things that I have been increasingly worrying about.  

And this, my dear friends, is what blogging is for. Whenever, in the years to come, as we work with Thomas to help Jesus build the Lord’s Way, and you and I fret for the millionth time that we have no business doing something so gigantic, we can come back and read this post again and commune again with the endlessly patient and perfectly loving risen Lord.

And meanwhile, here is a palate-cleanser. If you ever have cause to wonder just how completely outmoded the Old Testament’s religious rules really are; or else, you know, if it ever starts to bother you that we actually won’t ever be allowed to own a Canadian, come back and read this again. The picture illustrating this seven-year-old post is a statuette of Samson in the process of killing a thousand Philistines with a donkey’s jawbone (Judges 15:14-16). And meanwhile, my dear ones, cherish today. We have it now, and we never will have it again.

I love Him! I love Him! I love Him!
And where He goes, I’ll follow! I’ll follow! I’ll follow!
I will follow Him. Follow Him wherever He may go.
There isn’t an ocean too deep.
A mountain so high it can keep me away from His love!
– Norman Gimbel (1927-2018) & Arthur Altman (1910-1994), based on  “I Will Follow Him” (1961)

Who Is He?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

He touched me. He put his hand near mine and then He touched me.
I felt a sudden tingle when He touched me. A sparkle. A glow.
He knew it. It wasn’t accidental, no, He knew it.
He smiled and seemed to tell me so, all through it.
He knew it, I know He’s real, and the world is alive and shining.
He touched me. I simply have to face the fact.
He touched me. Control myself and try to act as if I remember my name.
– Ira Levin (1929-2007), from “He Touched Me” (1965)

Jesus is in fact an aspect of the Godhead, born long ago in a human body. It took me four years of college and decades of study afterward to reach that conclusion, and I don’t say it lightly even now! I can find no evidence that anything like an aspect of the Godhead’s being born on earth has ever happened before the birth of Jesus, and nothing like it has happened since; but there is enough evidence available now that I can say with certainty that it did indeed happen that one time. I don’t think that His was even a miraculous birth. Joseph the son of Jacob easily could have been His body’s father. And of course, Jesus was the firstborn of Joseph’s wife, Mary. But an aspect of the highest Godhead did indeed decide that He wanted to experience human life closely enough to “look through human eyes,” as Thomas has explained the facts to me. Jesus wanted to understand us well enough to come up with a way to teach us how we might best achieve more rapid spiritual growth, and thereby make the best use of each lifetime on earth. He also wanted of course to teach us to be less afraid. To teach us to think of God as loving Spirit, and to think of God as “our Father.” Thomas tells me that these were Jesus’s reasons for doing what has not been attempted by any other Member of the Collective Godhead in the entirety of humankind’s  history.

And Jesus even chose on impulse to be crucified, just so He could die a public death and then arrange to rise from the dead and thereby prove to His disciples – and to us – that in fact there is no death! That He actually did this deserves special notice. I once saw a documentary about crucifixion that I wish that you had seen, because it would have forever banished every thought of pretty golden crosses from your mind. Crucifixion begins with a massive scourging with cords that end with sharp bits meant to tear the flesh open and shed a lot of blood so the victim will be weakened so much that death is hastened. This is meant as a kindness, apparently, since being hung by bolts through the wrists and heels causes spasms of muscular agony as the victim reflexively supports himself by pushing up with his legs so he can breathe. He is naked, of course. No loincloth. And something about his position on the cross causes an immediate permanent erection. And all of this went on for hours, until they broke the victim’s legs so he could no longer support himself, and he suffocated. There was enough awfulness to be said about crucifixion to fill an hour-long documentary, and Jesus would have known what He was signing up for when He chose to accept a public execution. Yet Jesus, who actually was God on earth, decided to endure all this pain, although He could at any point have summoned more than twelve legions of angels to rescue Him (Mt 26:53). Thomas tells me that the Lord’s original plan was just to study us, and then to teach us until He had done all that He could do for us at the time, after which He had planned to walk away and simply disappear. But He decided instead, and apparently on impulse, to put Himself through all that torture and pain and then stage the resurrection of His body in an effort to convince His skeptical followers that human life really is eternal.

I’ve been thinking about all of this a great deal lately. Seek Reality Online as it was originally planned was meant to teach all the world about just death and the afterlife, and I think it is going to do a bang-up job of it! Those teaching materials are coming along well. Wherever you are in the lengthy process of learning about death and the afterlife, and where it happens, how it happens, why it happens, and so on and on, this website will take you all the rest of the way. And even with automatic translations, no less. Unfortunately, I took a bad fall on ice a month ago, and I broke and bruised various bodily parts, which has forced us to stop production for a while. And meanwhile, as my face was returning to a shape and shade that will no longer scare the horses in the street, my Thomas has chosen to intervene and make a focus on teaching the Lord’s Way a primary additional task of Seek Reality Online. So now we have again had to delay the website’s launch date.

But who am I to lead a movement like this? And it is something that I am going to have to do by myself! Craig Hogan and I can together teach death and the afterlife, and we even can jointly teach the basic spiritual aspects of what Jesus and all the other great spiritual leaders over the ages have come to the world to teach. After all, spiritual growth is the reason why we even come to earth at all, so it’s a legitimate part of any thorough afterlife educational program. But teaching the Lord’s Way is another matter! That is going to require a Biblical scholar who is no longer a practicing Christian, and there are very few of those who can teach the Lord’s Way as I know that I can teach it.

More and more, it is becoming clear to me that as Christianity withers and fades, the original Way of Jesus is the natural vessel to carry forward His teachings and His truth. And Thomas, bless His determined little heart, has spent my entire life preparing me to deliver the Lord’s original message to the world.   

So I have been trying as fast as I can to figure out who Jesus really is now. I can’t teach about Him and teach His Way unless I can know with certainty who He is now, so I can make sure that all of this will make sense to you! If He came to us two thousand years ago from the highest aspect of the Godhead, and no other Member of the Godhead Collective ever has done even so much as that, then who has Jesus become by now?

Mikey Morgan had achieved the sixth level before he ventured his twenty years on earth that ended in 2007. He came back to earth so he could communicate with us through his mother as a modern 20-year-old, and he could thereby counsel and teach us from there. His having done that is seen to be such a sacrifice made in love that now he has achieved the upper sixth level! Yet how much greater is what Jesus has done, and starting from a much higher level, so much longer ago, and with even very much greater work done for us while He was on earth? So Jesus’s post-earth-life ascendancy must be still greater, wouldn’t you think?

And we know that Jesus never really has left us. He is active in the astral now, teaching and caring for us, even today. But Thomas has not been willing to answer my questions about Jesus’s post-resurrection level. His title, if you will. He has wanted me to figure it out for myself. But at this point, we are out of time! Although when I said that, he did give me a hint. He said, “Jesus is the Lord of every universe. He is above all.” Okay. But what does that even mean? (Perhaps I needn’t explain that Thomas has trouble using the word “King.” That might be a hangover from a previous earth-lifetime.) Thomas hasn’t said any more to me about this, so now I just throw ideas at him. And whatever I say, he lets it be. Even when I recently suggested, “Jesus must be the God above all Gods by now,” Thomas actually let even that stand.

So I cannot say what the Lord’s present status might be. Whatever I write, Thomas lets it be. He always is quick to stomp on anything I write with which he disagrees, and especially anything that he finds to be even remotely grandiose, so I have concluded without much surprise that the Lord’s service to humankind has put Him above any human status calculus. He is by now indeed King of Kings and Lord of Lords. And I accept that as something that I can believe, for I have seen Him. The wonder is that He still bothers with us!

And Jesus smiled for me! He actually made a point of smiling for me. I think that was the reason why He gave me that vision, to reassure me that He wants me to work with Thomas on developing a version of His Way for modern people. And Thomas wants me to do it. He has spent my whole adult life developing me to do it. And now even Jesus has given me His approval. Please pardon my acting like a teenage groupie, but I still cannot get over that!   

And another thing that I’ve been thinking about. Knowing that Jesus lived as God on earth, it is not surprising that when He lived among us He seems to have been extraordinarily charismatic. I don’t think that enough has been made of that fact! Wherever He went, He was a people-magnet. When His parents took Him to Jerusalem for the first time at the age of twelve, He ended up in the Temple, holding the teachers there spellbound (Lk 2:48-50). He called to fisherman that He would make them fishers of men, and they abandoned their nets and followed Him then and there! (MT 4:18-20) We are told that He spoke with authority, and not as the scribes (MT 7:28-29). And many of those who had followed Him in life found Him to be so compellingly charismatic that they then went on after His death to gladly die for Him!  I submit to you that to have been in the presence of God on earth must have been an amazing experience two thousand years ago. Just as it lately has been for me!

And in case you are wondering about this week’s frame verse, Thomas is familiar with a lot of the music that I have heard in my life (not that he likes it, but that’s another story). He told me that he wanted a song called “He Touched Me.” And indeed, you can see that the Lord did touch me deeply when He gave me that vision – I can’t stop thinking about it. So for Thomas I found a hymn called “He Touched Me,” but of course it was all about how Jesus touched lowly little me and healed me. Instead, Thomas wanted this sixties song he had found in my mind about falling in love.

It fits, though. For two thousand years, the Christian Jesus has been a pale creature with no function but to be the limp-wristed Son of God. A human sacrifice. Born for to die. By contrast, the Jesus who was in my mind for two weeks and wrote Liberating Jesus was a powerfully Alpha presence. He spoke with authority. He was in fact God. My vision of Jesus who stood with His arms folded and watched Thomas tinkering with His jalopy was confident, kindly, and strong of body and mind. Again, He was Alpha. The women in the Gospels who flocked to follow Jesus, who sat at his feet and listened to Him, and who even washed His feet with their hair, had the same reaction to Him that He inspires in me. Yes, I will try my best to give Him His Way. But now comes the very hard part. We’ll talk about it next week.

He touched me, He touched me,
And suddenly nothing is the same.
‘Cause He touched me, He touched me,
And suddenly, nothing, nothing, nothing is the same!
– Ira Levin (1929-2007), from “He Touched Me” (1965)

Tread Lightly

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Under a spreading chestnut-tree ⁠the village smithy stands.
The smith, a mighty man is he, with large and sinewy hands,
And the muscles of his brawny arms are strong as iron bands.
His hair is crisp, and black, and long; his face is like the tan;
His brow is wet with honest sweat, he earns whate’er he can,
And looks the whole world in the face, for he owes not any man.
Week in, week out, from morn till night, you can hear his bellows blow;
You can hear him swing his heavy sledge, with measured beat and slow,
Like a sexton ringing the village bell when the evening sun is low.
And children coming home from school look in at the open door;
They love to see the flaming forge, and hear the bellows roar,
And catch the burning sparks that fly like chaff from a threshing-floor.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), from “The Village Blacksmith” (1840)

So now we are left with a withering Christianity, failing worldwide at a rapid pace. I fought the decline of my beloved religion until the very recent moment when I realize that this entire process might well have been by divine design. Please follow this along with me! 

It is an historical fact that the Christianity we practice now is not the Christianity that Jesus taught. This Christianity was created by the Romans some three hundred years after the death of Jesus, and it was originally codified by the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 A.D. Six more Roman councils are recognized to have followed First Nicaea, and all seven church councils self-importantly declared themselves to have been “inspired by God.” Together they built a fear-based religion around four dogmas that gave Roman Christianity a way to tightly control its world. None of those dogmas is any part of what Jesus actually taught. And yet all of them are central to the Christian religious message, even today. Briefly, they are:

  • Sin and Judgment. Jesus told us that He was replacing the Old Testament’s focus on sin with a focus on love. And He said, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). “Do not judge so you will not be judged” (MT 7:1). Yet Christianity remains obsessed with sins of all descriptions. And in far too many churches today, Christianity’s focus on judgment extends even through all the pews and into the secular community.
  • Hell. We know now from those that we used to think were dead that in fact, no fiery hell exists. Instead, the lowest-vibration afterlife level is what Jesus very accurately described as “the outer darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth.” That lowest level is where we end up if we cannot forgive ourselves after death for something we have done in life. In that event, our consciousness vibration gradually slows until we cannot achieve any higher personal vibration than that very lowest level. We are the only ones who can put ourselves there; and when we are vibrating so low that we end up there, we cannot raise our vibration on our own. At that point, we will have to be rescued..
  • The Apocalypse. The final book of the Christian Bible was added by the Council of Nicaea in 325. It was the very worst of a set of revenge-porn literature then in circulation that was produced in a time of Roman persecution of every nonconforming Christian sect. Those who are not dead after all tell us that Jesus will never return to earth that way, since His doing so would spread terror and destroy His efforts to bring the kingdom of God on earth. Thomas does say, though, that there has been a small risk that adherents of the present false Christianity might attempt to trigger an apocalypse in an effort to force Jesus to return. Fortunately, he tells me that danger is receding now.
  • Penal Substitutionary Atonement. The whole notion that Jesus died for our sins is the heart and center of modern Christianity. Remove that, and you have little of traditional Christianity remaining. And to show you that the earliest followers of the Way put zero emphasis on His mode of departure from that lifetime, we might mention the fact that in the first three centuries after the Lord’s death, among the millions of Christian burials in the Roman catacombs there are reportedly no depictions of crosses to be found.

None of these dogmas came from Jesus. All four of them are dead-end ideas based in fear and not in love, but they served manifold essential purposes. For the Romans, and for all Christian tyrants and kings for the past two thousand years, they have created an efficient means for controlling the masses. And for the Godhead, they have preserved almost entirely unmolested the name and the teachings of Jesus inside their protective Christian shell. For a long time, I considered the Romans to have been the great usurpers of Christianity. But my dear Thomas has helped me to see that the Christianity of the Romans has been a wrapping which has protected the pure teachings of Jesus from forces which could otherwise have corrupted and destroyed them.

Until now. It is only now, in the age of the worldwide internet, that it is safe for the protective wrapping of the Roman Christian religion to gradually shred and fall away, and for the true Way that Jesus came to teach to begin to spread as it always has been intended to spread, peacefully and from heart to heart. It is only now that it will be impossible for any force, however powerful it might be, to kill those precious teachings. The wings on which they will fly will be the same ones that Jesus spread for His disciples on that first Easter morning. They will fill all hearts with the triumphant certainty that, after all, there is no death. And once the world hears from its best-known personage the eternal truth that there is no death, it is going to be open to hearing Him as He shares His spiritual teachings with the world!

The first vision of my life was a happy lark that happen in August of 2011. I had spent a year making appearances to promote The Fun of Dying, and by then I was tired of it. Enough! So one morning, just as I was waking up, I saw a glow of light. In it was what I have thought of forever after as the four dancing clergymen.

When I was writing The Fun of Dying in the summer of 2009, a friend with mediumistic gifts called and told me she had been prompted by her guide to let me know that there were five dead clergymen helping me to write that book. She is a sweet and saintly person, and we both were astounded by what she had to tell me. She said that one clergyman was a very advanced being who had been so long away from the earth that “I’m surprised he’s still in contact with it.” Three were good men of God, very recently dead. And one, she was astonished to say, was one of my ultimate personal heroes. The Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I gasped at the name and asked her why the saintly Dr. King would bother to be helping me! She said, “He wants to set the record straight. They all do.”  

So then, on that August morning in 2011 I woke up to a vision of a colorful astral garden in which four beautiful young men in astral robes were singing and dancing in unison. And laughing. The very advanced clergyman was above such foolishness, but apparently Dr. King was not. And he wanted to show me his participation, so the young man on the left was very slightly more beige. What they were singing was this:

“You’ve got a wonderful story to tell!
Life goes on forever. And there is no hell!
So go out there and share that beautiful sto-ree!

I have never seen my Thomas so upset as he has been this week. To see someone falsely claim to be Jesus returned, and claim not to have risen from the dead at all? (see last week’s comments) Instead, this imposter claims to have lied to, cynically tricked, and betrayed his own followers? Thomas is a being of such integrity that he has been unable to process that level of deceit. And then, for the imposter to have ascribed such deceit even to the Lord Jesus Himself, who is an aspect of the genuine Godhead? And this, after Jesus had planned and in fact had delivered His actual death and successful resurrection with much added trouble to Himself, in an effort to convince His followers that we all do indeed live eternal lives? I ached for my precious friend, but you can’t physically hug with your spirit guide so all I could do was just to let him be. I told him on Monday that we needed a frame, and I suggested maybe a Longfellow poem, and what about “A Psalm of Life”? He insisted instead on “The Village Blacksmith.” And it had to be the whole poem! Then on Friday, I thought of telling you about my happy vision of the four dancing clergymen. He thought that was okay. But there had to be more of a point to this post. When I said that, he gave me the two words that became its title.

“But, what does that mean?” I asked the question respectfully. He said, “Take things always by their smooth handle.” That’s a quote from Thomas Jefferson. I could tell he meant it as a joke. Which told me he must be feeling better. Then he added a bolus of thought.

“The blacksmith is your template for living on earth. Whether you are high or low here, you are all of one status where I am now. You must neither attack nor attempt to protect Christianity as it dies, for just as it was the Godhead’s strategy to allow Roman Christianity to form as a protective wrapping for the Lord’s Way, so now you must accept the Godhead’s strategy to allow Christianity to dissolve as The Way of Jesus emerges. And now that the name of Jesus has become the best-known in the world, you have only to do your part as it is given to you to share with the world the teachings of Jesus, and the kingdom of God will overspread the world in the Lord’s own time and in the Lord’s Way. From your perspective, this is all happenstance. But the Godhead thinks in millennia of time, and from the Godhead’s perspective all of this is happening in the perfect Now.”

I said, “I’ve learned in this lifetime that if there’s any fear in something, then Jesus didn’t teach it. That’s how you can tell what He said.” That’s when I learned that spirit guides can hug with us in our hearts, after all.

He goes on Sunday to the church, and sits among his boys;
He hears the parson pray and preach, he hears his daughter’s voice
Singing in the village choir, and it makes his heart rejoice.
It sounds to him like her mother’s voice singing in Paradise!
He needs must think of her once more, how in the grave she lies;
And with his hard, rough hand he wipes a tear out of his eyes.
Toiling,—rejoicing,—sorrowing, onward through life he goes;
Each morning sees some task begin, each evening sees it close;
Something attempted, something done, has earned a night’s repose.
Thanks, thanks to thee, my worthy friend, for the lesson thou hast taught!
Thus at the flaming forge of life our fortunes must be wrought;
Thus on its sounding anvil shaped each burning deed and thought.
– Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882), from “The Village Blacksmith” (1840)

Jesus Deserves His Own Way

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd. I shall not want.
He makes me lie down in green pastures,
He leads me beside quiet waters. He restores my soul.
He guides me along the right paths for His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil, for you are with me.
– David (1010-970 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Psalm 23

It has taken me a lifetime of practicing Christianity, and also studying and loving Jesus, to develop the conviction to say out loud that the Lord really does deserve His own Way. The Religion and the Man are entirely different. I have been so blind. But now I see!

Christianity has had a remarkable run. Only consider all the elements of its history, which began three centuries after the death of Jesus when the Romans seized a vibrant spiritual movement and ruthlessly remodeled it into a religion that was based in fear rather than in love so they could use it to intimidate and control. Then once you get past the unpromising start of Christianity, you’ve got to contend with the appalling nature of some of Christianity’s anti-spiritual dogmas. The notion that God might need to watch God’s own Son being murdered before God can forgive us for being human is insulting to a perfectly loving God! The idea, as the modern Christmas hymn has it, that Jesus came just “to die for poor ornery people like you and like I” is humiliating to Jesus. And it gives short shrift to the Lord’s precious three years of teaching us how to more perfectly live so we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. Perhaps even worse, it is past time for us to look frankly at the hideous nature of some of Christianity’s actions over the past two thousand years that have tainted the religion for a great many people who otherwise might be its ardent followers.

Christianity has seemed to me to be ever more awful the more I have studied it, from its earliest persecution of the remnants of the Lord’s own flock right through the Inquisition and the Crusades and down to the sadistic nineteenth-century priest who became for me its final straw! That nasty man told parents who hadn’t managed to get their babies baptized in time that their children would be allowed to leave Purgatory once, and for just long enough to watch the baptized infants happily playing in paradise before those unbaptized babies would be cast into hell, where they would roast alive forevermore. And this man was supposed to be working for Jesus? But still, I never have been able to say it. Not right out loud. It was not for me to say!

But now, at last I think I can accept it. Human-made Christianity has had its run. And my dear Thomas insists that it is finally time for us to lay the whole religion to its well-earned rest!

Thomas is the backup author of our weekly posts, as I think by now you must realize. All alone, I never could be so prolific! He gives me the topics a week or two ahead in the form of an article linked from the Internet, or a Bible passage, or maybe just a title; and then I plug away at doing the writing while I work at other things and live my life, and he occasionally looks in. By sometime on Thursday he is always standing directly behind my left shoulder. I don’t know why he is on my left, and he even is there when I sit against a wall. If I’m getting nowhere, by Friday afternoon he’ll heave the sort of exasperated sigh that people who don’t need to breathe will sigh, and he might give me a clue or two. If I’m still not getting it, he will step in on Saturday morning and finish the writing, even using my voice. In truth, we work pretty well together. But you hate to disappoint your spirit guide, so I try to finish these posts before then.

My Thomas has been fed up with Christianity for at least a couple of hundred years. I don’t know for how many lifetimes this feeling goes back, but now is when his patience ends. He wants to begin to give Jesus His Way while I am still young enough to do it in this lifetime. But still, I’ve been holding back because, to be frank, I don’t see how you can build a new religion without some fear behind it to drag people out of bed and put them in the pews on Sundays. We wrote the book four years ago, but then he didn’t want to publish it quite yet. He seems to be ready to publish it now. I can feel his swelling agitation, but this isn’t really my movement at all! I’m not feeling it the way he feels it. He tells me dismissively that it’s not a religion. “Stop calling it just another religion!” Well, okay. It’s not a religion. So, what is it then? Give me some kind of clue! And then, on Tuesday morning of this past week something extraordinary happened.

You know that we consult with our guides most nights, but we have amnesia for the experience. Before last week, I’ve been allowed to remember just a few minutes of only one meeting with my spirit guides, which was the one that Jesus attended following my two weeks of channeling Liberating Jesus. It was held in a paneled conference room where every seat at the table was taken, and I sat across the table from The Man Himself. He was an overwhelming presence, of no particular race and with brown eyes and dark-brown shoulder-length hair. He was the only one who spoke, but I was too starstruck to register what He was saying. He looked stern, and He glanced at me a couple of times but He knew that I was overwhelmed by Him so He did me the kindness of not seeming to looking at me directly. A lot of people talk about their cozy relationships with what I think of as friendly Jesus or chatty Jesus, but the only Jesus I knew before this week was this overwhelming God-version of Jesus who was in my mind for two weeks in April of 2015, when He used me as a rapid word-processor. And then a few weeks later He let me sit in as He met with my spirit guides. Beings who have achieved His spiritual level can show themselves to us in whatever way they choose to show themselves, and clearly Jesus knows that I see Him as a formidable aspect of  the literal Godhead.

Then as I was waking up on Tuesday morning just before dawn, a bright light appeared in the darkness, and then a vision began to appear. It was Jesus, wearing a glowing spirit robe in an astral garden full of tall flowers. It was a gorgeous scene! He was standing there with His arms folded maybe twenty feet away from me, looking just to my right and smiling tenderly. I realized then that directly to my right was Thomas, although I didn’t look at him because I couldn’t look away from Jesus. Thomas was making some sort of loud racket with something in a shed. And Jesus had such a beautiful face! His smile was radiant! He seems to really love my Thomas. But then almost right away the vision was fading, even as I tried to hold onto it.

What the heck was that about? Thomas whispered in my mind that Jesus had wanted me to see that tableau. It was mine to think about and come to understand. The vision grew more vivid as I thought about it all that day, but I couldn’t make the least sense of it. My vision of Jesus had been radiant, gorgeous, and it had very much softened the Lord’s image in my mind after my experience with channeling Liberating Jesus. His face had been especially clear, a neatly bearded young man perhaps in his late twenties with playful eyes that were brown with flecks of gold. Brown hair with a bit of a curl and olive skin. He looked like the same Jesus who had overwhelmed me in the meeting that night in 2015, but very subtly different: now his expression was friendly. He looked like the star of your college class, the one who would tutor the slowest students for free and take the shyest girl to Homecoming. But what had Thomas been doing so loudly? And why had Jesus’s arms been folded?

It was only when I woke up on Wednesday morning, after probably talking it over with Thomas, and – who knows? – maybe also with Jesus, that I understood what that vision had meant. They had been acting out a buddy-show for me. Thomas had been tinkering in a garage with his friend Jesus’s old jalopy while Jesus watched him indulgently, bemused and delighted by Thomas’s determination to fix Jesus’s very antique vehicle and get it running again. The Lord’s arms were folded to show that He had done His part a very long time ago. The Lord’s face was loving, grateful, entirely approving. And smiling! I was realizing by Wednesday morning that my own view of Jesus had become so distorted by my reverence for Him that I had forgotten that even though He has ascended to the highest aspect of the Godhead, Jesus remains one of us. The first time on Wednesday that it occurred to me that Jesus actually had been smiling just for me, tears filled my eyes. I was embarrassed to have needed that attention from Him. And touched to my heart more than I can say that He had wanted to give me that reassuring smile!

And for the rest of the week I kept noticing more details. Thomas wasn’t seen because without a body, he can’t do this work. So it is just mine to do. And when that scary thought began to panic me, he said at once that at my age, I can only begin it. With Seek Reality Online, Liberating Jesus, and The Fun of Loving Jesus, most of my part already is done or is about to be done, and very soon others will be carrying it on. And as for him, this project to replace Christianity with The Way of Jesus seems to be the primary reason why he agreed to be my spirit guide, and it seems to be most of what he has seen to be his own unfinished work on earth.

Perhaps I never have mentioned the fact that people in the real life to which all of us will very soon return speak with one another mostly in boluses of thought. Thomas and I communicate that way when we have a lot to say, and it really is more efficient! So as he was reassuring me, he showed me a vast sweep of many thousands of years. There is no way to summarize it all, beyond saying that what we think of as Christianity is apparently what was born for to die, and what Jesus came to teach two thousand years ago is now safely past the period of history that could have killed it. So now as the old Christianity withers away, the true Way of Jesus is about to begin to overspread the world. Over the next few millennia of earth-time, it will indeed bring the kingdom of God on earth, just as Jesus promised it would do. When I was twelve, like many twelve-year-old girls I went through a period of writing some extremely bad poetry. I also wrote one poem that I thought at the time was weird, but it stuck in my mind and I know now that it must have been channeled. It was something about just doing your work, “and one day when all at last is done, you will see the little puzzle-piece that was your work and joy.”

So, here at last is my puzzle-piece. I have wondered about it for a lifetime! One of the six segments of Seek Reality Online is being built around Liberating Jesus, and now it also will include The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. This is the Lord’s own movement! His arms may be folded, but His heart holds us all.


Your rod and your staff,  they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil; my cup overflows.
Surely your goodness and love will follow me all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– David (1010-970 BCE), King of Israel and Judah, from Psalm 23

 

Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways!
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of Being and Ideal Grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for Right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from Praise.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), from Sonnets from the Portuguese #43 (1850)

Perhaps by now you might assume that I don’t much care for the Christian Bible. It is obvious to anyone who has studied the Bible without a religious bias that, far from being all God’s inspired word, a lot of it is man-made ramblings. But there are parts of the Bible that came directly from the genuine God, speaking through God’s chosen prophets. And there are parts that are preserved from the time when God walked the earth as Jesus, who studied us through human eyes and thereby came to better understand us so He could give us the Gospel teachings that will help us bring the kingdom of God on earth. And then God in the person of Jesus chose to have His body die, not to save us from God’s wrath because of course no such sacrifice was needed; but instead, God in the person of Jesus chose to die a very public death so He could then reanimate His dead body and thereby prove to us that death is an illusion. And when the body that God had used was murdered, He left proof of His body’s having been truly dead so He could rise from the  dead in a resurrection which can be scientifically proven only now, in this much more cynical age, to in fact have been a real resurrection. It was a demonstration done two thousand years ago, but intended for the twentieth century and beyond!

The fact that the Bible is not a magic-book doesn’t mean that it is not God’s Book. I spent forty years of my life reading the Bible over and over again, a couple of pages every night, from the age of twelve until the age of fifty-two. I read that Book from cover to cover what was probably as many as twenty times, and the New Testament twice as many times. And in many parts, the Bible is beautiful! There are portions of the Christian Bible that are God’s love song to humankind. You cannot be me reading the story of Moses, imagining him staring at that burning bush that was not consumed, and not recall the way God called to me, too, from out of a light when I was eight. Or reading about Joseph of the coat of many colors, who was sold into Egypt so he could save the Hebrew people, and then seeing photos of the recently-unwrapped mummy of that very same Joseph who had the face of a Hebrew man, with his features well-preserved so I could see God working in the world, and not flat-out grin! Omigod, there was Joseph’s actual face! These were all real people! I had spent so much of my life reading about them, and I could see now that they had all really lived thousands of years ago! You could not read about David as a boy, and then King David as a man, and read all his beautiful, heartfelt Psalms, and not fall in love with the adorable human imperfections of him! And Isaiah the Great, whose words were the perfect words of God spoken seven hundred years before Jesus quoted those very same words! All those people were real, and they made God real. Oh no, my dear friends, I don’t despise the Bible! I love the Bible as I love my life!     

How could you not love the written record of such an amazing time? Over a period of sixteen hundred years, God spoke to the world’s first monotheists through a series of prophets, and Jesus spoke, and then the crusty but endearing and indispensable Apostle Paul wrote, and many of their words were miraculously preserved. As the American Founding Father Thomas Jefferson memorably said of the words of Jesus – and he was a farmer who had known dunghills in his time! He said that those genuine words of Jesus are as distinguishable in the Bible amid all that human-made dross as are “diamonds in a dunghill.” And so they are. But that dunghill holds so many words! You could use your Bible as a doorstop. If you then hit it with your foot, you could stub your toe. My New International Version of the Bible contains some 727,969 words. That is more than three million individual letters! I have read it over and over again over forty years of my life and on more than fourteen thousand evenings, so I am very familiar with it now. But you aren’t. And I can ask you please to trust me when I opine about the Bible to you; but still, the Bible is never going to mean to you what it means to me. I do so wish that there were a former Christian in the world who was as familiar with the Bible as I am, with whom I could discuss what I am seeing now. Because I can see something beginning to develop between clueless humankind and an infinitely loving God, and I am joyous about it! The dawning glimmer of understanding on our side. The effort on God’s side to proclaim love over and over again. And finally, the channeled proclamation on God’s part so beautiful that you cannot read it without feeling your heart soar. As we work on developing Seek Reality Online, we have decided to add a sixth segment for members that will be built around the Bible, and Thomas is really pleased about that! There isn’t room here to say very much, but I will share with you three samples taken from the Bible that illustrate what seems to be starting to  happen in the world.  

In my New International Version of the Bible, the word “love” appears 686 times from Genesis through Revelation. Micah was a contemporary of the great Isaiah, but he was a “minor” prophet, and one of twelve at that. Micah was just a simple, down-home guy. I loved him as a child because what he said was always sensible and to the point. At a time when there were different kinds of burnt offerings prescribed by fearful humankind for different kinds of sins, Micah kind of threw up his hands and said,

“With what shall I come to the Lord
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O man, what is good;
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do justice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-9).

When I was ten, one day I cut from somewhere the last four lines of Micah’s plaint above. I taped them to the wall above my desk, where they remained for the rest of my growing-up.

And then we come to Jesus, who spent three years delivering a Ph.D.-level course in spiritual growth, not all of which survives. He summed up the entire Old Testament in the twin Commandments that we love God and love one another.

“A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another” (JN 13:34).

“‘Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind.’ This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments” (MT 22:37-40).

And finally, one Saturday morning in May of 2019, when I had a blog post due tomorrow but I was running  on empty, I woke up with 1Cor 13 playing in my mind, and with Thomas saying over it that most of Paul’s letters were Paul’s own words, but this chapter had been channeled. I opened my Bible, and that fact was obvious: the chapters before it and after it are in Paul’s voice and on other topics, and between them comes this magnificence:

“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.

“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.

“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love” (1Cor 13).

The parts of the Bible that were channeled by God are about love, and only about love! No one who claims to be following the Bible will ever less than perfectly love anyone. Yet so often, people will split hairs about who they are willing to love, and who has wronged them so they can’t love them anymore. In 1943, a father watched as his wife and children were led away to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. And he still loves the guards who murdered his family, to the point where right now he is in the Outer Darkness trying to rescue those guards. True story! In fact, multiply it by the hundreds of thousands and you will understand why the Outer Darkness today teems with fathers lovingly trying to rescue hundreds of thousands of wailing concentration camp guards. You also will understand why I have no problem with sincerely forgiving and loving the woman who was arrested last April for having stolen most of my retirement savings. Now, please tell me again what anyone ever can possibly do to you that could be worth your refusing to forgive and love everyone?

I love thee with the passion put to use
in my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
with my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), from Sonnets from the Portuguese #43 (1850)

Mathematics

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.

Sweet the rains new fall, sunlit from Heaven,
Like the first dewfall on the first grass.
Praise for the sweetness of the wet garden,
Sprung in completeness where His feet pass.
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

The fact that mathematics is used in creating the structure of material reality is such a gigantic weirdness that it’s difficult to even get our minds around it. Of course, the first question to be asked and answered is what mathematics even is. Is math a natural science or an invented science? If you are sure that it’s natural, then please feel free to skip the rest of this post. But if you suspect, as I did when I was sixteen, that math is as human-invented as a screwdriver, then read on….

I still can vividly recall the moment when I stood in line after Algebra II class and asked my teacher whether math is a discovered or an invented science. She told me, sounding impatient, that math is an invented science. And she moved on to the next student in line. It was a nothing moment for her, but it was a monumental moment for me! People just dreamed it up? Well, who needs that? I never took another class in math. Then there was a moment twenty years ago when I was watching a PBS special on the universe. A young physicist was narrating it. He said in what was clearly a throwaway line, “For some reason, math can be used to study the universe.” And his “for some reason” caught on my mind.

The more I have learned about the greater reality over the past ten years, the more I have come to realize that my insight at the age of sixteen might have been one for the ages! What I am going to write for you today is a doodle. I’ve been doing these every year or two, just taking some concepts that make sense individually and putting them together to see whether a stretch of an idea that seems to be almost unimaginable can begin to make sense when separate sensible ideas are combined. Here are some things that we know are true:

  • Mathematics as a system is human-made. No one has ever found a piece of slate with calculations in primordial chalk and deciphered them in the same way that the genetic code of DNA was first deciphered. And the fact that human beings invented mathematics and mathematics actually orders the universe is gigantically weird! It’s like finding a precambrian refrigerator.
  • The entire material universe is less than 5% of what scientists tell us exists. Scientists call all the rest of reality “dark matter” and “dark energy” because it won’t interact with photons of light. And scientists assume that the more than 95% of the universe that is “dark” must be full of nothing useful, which fact is absurd on its face! We know that in nature everything that has no function soon atrophies and withers away, and yet scientists assume that fully 95% of the universe is made up of random exotic particles that do nothing useful? Why aren’t scientists even a little bit curious about what makes up 95% of reality? We know what it is. Dark matter is the non-material astral plane, which teems with life. And dark energy is Consciousness energy. Which is life.
  • Time does not run in the more than 95% of reality that is not material. And contrary to what we have been told to expect, living in an endless Now works just fine! In fact, you are living in an endless Now right now. Now is all that exists for anyone. We remember having read the first sentence of this post, but it is only that memory that we ever can own.

All right. So now let’s look at the clockwork material reality that mainstream scientists tell us is where we live. Scientists say this universe began when something came from nothing 13.8 billion years ago in a Big Bang, and it still carries on from there unassisted and within unimaginably tiny tolerances. For the past nearly fourteen billion years, and with no help at all, it somehow has managed to avoid either collapsing in upon itself or blowing apart. Scientists assure us that they are still in the process of figuring it out. Or as the great Rupert Sheldrake tells us they are wont to say, “Just give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.” But it is going to take a whole lot more than just one free miracle to make sense of the scientific creation story that has to cover fourteen billion years and counting! It is past time for us to accept the fact that the whole scientific fairy tale of creation is impossible. And imagining a religious God Who just says “Presto!” and makes it all happen and keep on happening isn’t really a whole lot better, is it? The plain fact is that both the scientific and the religious creation stories are so vastly unlikely as to beggar belief. They are both myths from a much more primitive time when myths were all that human beings could muster. But we know for a fact that creation must actually have happened. Demonstrably, this universe exists. So, what might we get when we demand a creation theory backed up by some actual evidence?  

When I first asked Thomas about creation a year ago, he drew my attention to three popular-science magazine articles that indicate that modern humankind and about ninety percent of all the other animals and plants first came into existence at about the same time, around 200,000 years ago. I blogged about it then. That seems to be astoundingly recent! Whenever he throws one of these ideas at me, I reel with it at first, as I did when he first hit me with his Godhead idea, and with his filmstrip ongoing-creation idea. But I am becoming used to all of it now. And I have come to realize that he is probably right! So let’s juxtapose what I think of as Thomas’s creation story against the theist and atheist creation stories. Part of the evidence we find in that overlooked valley between the theist and the atheist hills is the boggling certainty that material creation is based in and governed by, and can therefore be studied using… human-created mathematics?

And the more I think about it, the more that fact seems to be a kind of magic bullet.

More even than punctuated equilibrium and so many other glitches in creation that you can spot if you look for them, the fact that the universe is based in mathematics seems to show us its actual creator’s hand. And astoundingly, that hand is our own.

Before you laugh, please follow this through with me.

  • Consciousness is the only thing that is real. Consciousness is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality that exists outside of space and time.
  • Two hundred thousand years ago as we reckon earth-time, something happened. A Course in Miracles, which we are told was a project led by Jesus, tells us that “the Son of God” had a momentary thought of separation, and since Consciousness is infinitely creative and infinitely powerful, separation happened in that micro-instant. Maybe so. But whatever made it happen, this universe was then created.
  • The universe wasn’t much at first. Think of it as having been nothing more than a dot of Namibian plain that contained the first modern people and ninety percent of the first modern plants and animals lit by the white light of Consciousness itself.
  • Together with that first universe was probably also human-created both the earliest form of mathematics and also its associated Newtonian physics. With no better explanation, we can assume that Newtonian physics was created so our minds couldn’t mess with this reality, and we also can assume that quantum mechanics is the plug that connects this reality with the other 95% of what exists. We do know that in most of reality, even moderately developed minds can easily create stable objects from consciousness alone. We can speculate that Consciousness worked with the most advanced of the beings in that earliest cut-off bit of Itself to fashion the earliest Godhead of our Brothers and Sisters who then could work with the parent Consciousness to rescue the rest of us.
  • Creation in this bit of material universe is not one-and-done, but rather it is an ongoing process. So as people have become more curious over the past two hundred thousand earth-years, it was a simple matter for each new micro-slice of our continuously-created reality to remain ahead of our curiosity. And since this reality includes an artificial past, it has been easy to create that past as well. I have lots of ideas about how our ever more negative present may be creating an ever more negative past, but since that is not the subject of this post we can save all of that for another day!
  • This version of a creation story seems to solve the something-from-nothing problem as well. It’s all circular! And there is an ever more complex  history rich with proto-human, proto-mammal, and dinosaur bones to constitute a fabricated evolutionary history and satisfy our curiosity about our past.
  • And as each of us raises our own conscious vibration with the aid of our own spirit guides, we come ever closer to the parent Consciousness, the Spirit, what Jesus teaches us to call our Father. The history of the planet and the universe may be fabricated, but our spiritual growth is a genuine effort. It is only our own ignorant rebelliousness that ever has come between us and God!
  • As you better make sense of how this all has been happening, you should find yourself able to read the Gospel words of Jesus now with more understanding. In truth, I think that our clearing away both the theist and the atheist creation stories may be the biggest steps that we need to take toward finally finding our way to rejoin the Godhead so at last we all can go home.

Okay, so it’s a doodle. It’s a third version of the creation story that has been harvested from the valley of real information between those two false beliefs-based hills. It’s a creation story based in the astounding possibility that we ourselves are the genuine architect of all that we see. We ourselves are the part of God that was separated two hundred thousand years ago, and now we are rescuing one another and elevating one another spiritually so that one day, at last and forevermore, the kingdom of God will overspread all the earth, as if the separation never had happened. Mathematics may be a more important clue than we ever could possibly have known.      

Mine is the sunlight, mine is the morning,
Born of the one light, Eden saw play.
Praise with elation, praise every morning,
God’s recreation of the new day.

Morning has broken like the first morning.
Blackbird has spoken like the first bird.
Praise for the singing, praise for the morning,
Praise for them springing fresh from the world.
– Yusuf Islam (Cat Stevens), from “Morning Has Broken” (1971)

 

The Valley

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I see trees of green, red roses too. I see them bloom for me and you.
And I think to myself, What a wonderful world!
I see skies of blue and clouds of white.
The bright blessed day. The dark sacred night.
And I think to myself, What a wonderful world!
– Bob Thiele (1922-1996) & George Weiss (1921-2010), from “What a Wonderful World” (1967)

Perhaps a decade ago, I attended a conference headlined by creationist scientists. I was curious, but I was also hopeful! My focus of study had by then become an effort to put together all that I had learned in forty years of research, and to make some beginning sense of our whole reality as it actually is. So I was very briefly hopeful that trained scientists who were not bound by mainstream science’s materialist constraints might have begun to undertake the same huge task.

As you know, mainstream science reduced itself a century ago to studying only what can be seen as material. This foolishness seems to have begun as a protection against their inadvertently finding God, so I was sure that creationist scientists wouldn’t share their hang-ups. And of course they did not! There were wonderful presentations on the complexities of eyes, cells, and DNA, and other kinds of evidence of the fact that blind evolution is not sufficient to explain the rapid development and complexity of the staggering variety of life on earth. But by the end of the second day, I was struck by a horrifying realization. These good folks’ insistence on working from a Christian perspective was handicapping them in much the same way that materialist scientists are handicapped!

The attendees were a friendly group. Between sessions, I talked with some of them about this problem. I said something like, “You’re right about mainstream scientists. They’re over here on this materialist hill. They won’t study anything that’s not on their hill! But don’t you see that you’re over on this other hill that has a lot of evidence that materialist beliefs are wrong, which to you means the Christian God must be real? But if you limit yourselves to just that hill, you still are ignoring the enormous valley between those hills that contains a lot of useful information about reality that both you and the materialists are ignoring because it doesn’t fit either of your agendas?”

I soon felt like the skunk at their garden party. No matter how much I praised what I was hearing at their conference, and no matter how mildly and respectfully I spoke, reactions ranged from blank looks to outright hostility. Most of them seemed to be unable to comprehend my analogy involving the two hills and the information being ignored in the valley between them. Even worse, those few who got the analogy seemed to assume that I was anti-Christian.

I’m sorry, but I just don’t see any value in beliefs-based science of either kind, whether atheist or theist. There is ONE REALITY! It’s a complex and surprising reality, true, and most of it is not accessible to the senses, but it is the reality that we all share. And it doesn’t exist as convenient blocks of curated and readily accessible information! Instead, it is mostly densely interwoven non-material dimensions, and each affects and is affected by the others. So you can’t study just limited aspects of it if you hope to make sense of any of it!

Both hills harbor well-meaning scientists who are devoting their entire careers to doing research inside artificial and arbitrary limits. And if even this hobbyist researcher can see that, it surely must on some level be obvious to the scientists who are working on the hilltops!

A similar phenomenon exists in afterlife research. Nearly every expert in this field has made a career of studying and talking about communication with the dead, or physical mediums, or astral travel, or life-planning, or consciousness studies, or spiritual-growth techniques, or any of a half-dozen other fields that are genuine and useful, to be sure. But by themselves, these fields are all anecdotal. They are yet more evidence that the afterlife is real, but when the evidence is so fragmented by source and by method of study it is immensely less convincing! And yet, a hungry world is desperate to know the truth. The human death rate is one hundred percent! Multitudes are eager to know for sure that physical death is no big deal, and that what comes next is glorious. Hints are better than nothing, of course, but people would so much rather have it all put together for them in some fashion. And yet, in a world of nearly eight billion people, I know of only two rather eccentric folks already in their seventies who feel driven to investigate all the evidence for the afterlife and the greater reality, and to try to make sense of how it fits together. I comfort myself that there must be more than two. We just can find no sign of them. But at least there are two! Craig Hogan and I have done most of our work independently, so we can compare and discuss our conclusions now. And we are excited by the fact that in every significant detail, we have both reached precisely the same conclusions.

If it were only me, I’m not sure I would attempt to do Seek Reality Online. Even though there is a desperate need for it! But Craig has reached my same conclusions at a more sophisticated level. And as we work with the developers now, I can see that his vision for the website is also greater than mine. As an aside, this is turning out to be a lot of fun!

It is important to stress the fact that all scientific ideas are presented as theories. Even gravity is a theory! Nothing in any scientific field is assumed to be a proven fact about which nothing further can be learned. The scientific method requires the observation of some phenomenon, and then its investigation and the positing of explanations and details until a testable theory develops that can be even further refined. And that works fairly well for the scientists on both hills, with a couple of caveats:

  • What each set of scientists can study is limited, so all their theories are going to be constrained. Mainstream scientists have to come up with theories that don’t need an intelligent designer, while Christians assume a designer who must be the Christian God. That valley between their hills is full of information that rather forcefully suggests that both of their basic suppositions are wrong.
  • Mainstream scientists use mathematics as a primary tool. But in fact, math is a human invention. And what is in that valley of ignored information strongly suggests that reality is not math-based beyond the fact that it is Mind-based, and Mind uses mathematics to create an artificial physics in this material five percent of reality in order to give us a learning environment that our own minds cannot easily mess with.

Just as examples, here are four basic questions for which no scientist on either hill can form a viable theory without recourse to information from the valley that lies between their hills:

  • The Nature of Reality. Mainstream scientists continue to seek a source of consciousness in the human brain. Reportedly, they are now committed to spending a billion dollars more on this fools’ errand! I don’t know precisely how creationist scientists feel about consciousness as the source of reality, since I haven’t managed to make it to another of their conferences; but their public-facing work suggests that Christian deism remains central to their worldview. In fact, however, the valley that scientists of both persuasions still ignore is miles-deep in evidence that the two most illustrious scientists of the twentieth century were right when Max Planck said, “Mind is the matrix of all matter,” and Albert Einstein said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” Any scientist who persists in studying reality only through the lens of his own beliefs will find it forever impossible to develop a workable theory of what reality even actually is!
  • The Nature of the Godhead. I was a zealous Christian into my fifties, so I understand wanting the Christian God to win this war of potshots being taken from opposing hilltops! But that valley full of information that scientists of every strips are still ignoring is full of evidence that the creationists are on the right track, but the genuine creative force that continuously manifests our reality is not in fact the Christian God. Instead, it seems to be a Collective of Perfected Beings many thousands strong. In a reality without time, apparently the Godhead is effectively… US?
  • The Origin of Life. Mainstream scientists cannot come up with a theory to explain the origin of life beyond the notion that just the right primordial soup might have been struck by lightning. Creationist scientists just assume that their Christian God must have made life happen. But in fact, the evidence in that valley between them very strongly suggest that the animating force that we experience as life is a property inherent in the base creative consciousness which turns out to be the only thing that is real. The evidence for this theory is abundant, and its implications include the possibility that everything may be somewhat conscious. Once both theistic and atheistic scientists accept the unavoidable fact that what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force, every aspect of the genuine reality is suddenly going to open wide for them!
  • The Reason for the Universe and the Purpose of Human Life. Materialist scientists are too deep in their self-imposed weeds to spare much thought for wondering why the universe exists, or why we are here, beyond assuming that it all is entirely random. Creationist scientists seem just to assume that whatever happens is part of God’s plan. But what Craig and I have found as we assemble one theory of reality from the evidence that is on both hilltops and also in the valley between is that, once again, both sides are wrong. And instead, the probable answers to these questions are more glorious than either side can imagine!

What independent researchers have discovered in the valley that is still being ignored between the province of materialist science and the province of creationist science is a gigantic trove of information! There is so much evidence available there in so many different fields that once people with scientific credentials feel intellectually free enough to study it, they might well fairly rapidly more than double humankind’s store of knowledge. Or as the great polymath Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky,
Are also on the faces of people going by.
I see friends shaking hands, saying, “How do you do?”
They’re really saying “I love you.”

I hear babies cry. I watch them grow.
They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know.
And I think to myself, What a wonderful world!
– Bob Thiele (1922-1996) & George Weiss (1921-2010), from “What a Wonderful World” (1967)

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