Author: Roberta Grimes

The Greatest Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

No matter what they take from me, they can’t take away my dignity,
Because the greatest love of all is happening to me.
I found the greatest love of all inside of me.
The greatest love of all is easy to achieve!
Learning to love yourself, it is the greatest love of all.
– Linda Creed (1948-1986), from “The Greatest Love of All” (1977)

One of the most important tasks that each of us faces is our need to create a positive and wholly reality-based relationship with ourselves. Until we can know and be comfortable with who we actually are, it is hard for us to have the clarity, the self-confidence, and the daily peace that we are going to need if we are ever to really make the most of our lives. At first, as the song says, this doesn’t seem to be much of a problem. After all, since we spend a lot of time with ourselves, we should know ourselves pretty well by now. But for nearly everyone, our adult self-image is built on erroneous information and distorted assumptions that unfortunately have shaped our whole lives to date. For example:

  • Some of us never learn to tame our needy egos. The ego is a primitive instinct for self-preservation and self-aggrandizement that is part of our limited minds at birth, and that seems to be essential if we are to avoid a host of childhood dangers. It functions almost like a separate being that tells us that the ego itself, this fearful and grabby little gremlin, actually is who we are; and if we continue to believe that, we can grow up to be unpleasantly shallow and self-absorbed. Fortunately, though, our ego can be tamed once we reach young adulthood, and then it will no longer much distract us.
  • Traditional Christianity and mainstream science combine to give us an awful self-image. If we believe them, we internalize the fear-based certainty that we are sinful and fallen meat that will blink out when our bodies die, or else we will likely burn in hell forever. Even the best-case possibility that we might be lucky enough to spend eternity playing harps in God’s throne room starts to seem pretty lousy when you envision living it forevermore.
    * Our view of ourselves is heavily shaped by our cultures. We can see this phenomenon most clearly in the lesser status of women in some cultures, and in the way that indicators of wealth and class can affect our sense of who we are. We even are marked for life by subtle details like birth-order and city-vs.-country. Then on top of all that is piled our online culture, which strokes and batters our egos as it grotesquely distorts the way we see ourselves and plays havoc with what might otherwise have been our life’s more solid and well-considered priorities.
  • Our families were the first to tell us who we are, and we still believe most of whatever they said. I see this as the big one! Too many little children uncritically learn to see themselves negatively, and some of them spend all the rest of their lives still knowing that they are clumsy, not smart enough, inconvenient, or even flat-out bad people, simply because they heard words like these from a parent before the age of six. I had the opposite upbringing. My father wanted me to be the first female American President, and my mother wanted me to write the Great American Novel, so from my infancy they were praising me and telling me I could grow up to be whatever I wanted to be as they each tried to inspire me with a wish to fulfill their own respective dreams. You would think that sort of upbringing would make me feel like a failure for having missed both goals; but all it did was to make me grow up feeling very positive about myself. My own big dream has turned out to be to free the whole world from the fear of death. And thanks to those two sainted people, I never for a moment doubt that I am going to succeed at doing what I guess I already know is impossible.

So, each of us by young adulthood is essential an amalgam of all the cultural and personal information about who and what we are that has been bombarding us from birth. We may wind up feeling somewhat put together, and we may think we actually know and love ourselves; but in fact, for most of us what has been assembled into our present self-image is very different from who we might have seen ourselves to be if we had grown up with different cultural details and with a different set of parents. And then there are all the psychological pathologies that plague some folks, on top of (and perhaps because of) all these sources of bogus information! How can we even begin to discover and learn to love the eternal being that chose to be born in our physical body?

This problem has of late come to trouble me. I hear every day from strangers who have issues they hope I can help them address. I have neither the time nor the training to give them the kind of help that some of them need; and anyway, I am coming to realize that even the professionals they may have consulted don’t have the training that they would need to help these folks get at all the causes of their lifelong self-image problems. All the bogus information about ourselves that bombards us from birth is pure lies! Please read again the four points outlined above. It’s all lies. What is born in each sweet infant body is a powerful eternal being that is hopeful, bright, and already wise! All children arrive with a careful plan to achieve the maximum possible spiritual growth; but they arrive at young adulthood already battered by their ignorant parents and their degenerate culture. Each being is still, beneath it all, that very same eternal being! But sadly, each of them is now weighed down by a lot of confusing and mostly negative information.

This seems to be a problem as old as human civilization. Everyone is raised by amateurs! And when we grow up with an unpleasant understanding of who and what we actually are, it seems at first blush to be impossible for us to learn to truly love ourselves. Worst of all, a distorted and mostly negative view of ourselves that was built up in childhood from a variety of sources and is now familiar to us might become almost impossible for us to change! That was my first thought when, a week ago, I was dealing with my own emotional fallout from a very troubling counseling call. It was clear that traditional psychological theories and talk-counseling had been of no use to that sadly unstable soul. And with what I now understand about who we are eternally, it occurred to me that no mental-health therapy that is currently being tried is based in any real understanding of who each baby actually is and how it can go wrong. So it is no wonder that so many people now living are feeling so bruised and confounded by life!

And now I can see that Linda Creed and Whitney Houston have given us a potential way forward in their sweetly hopeful song. Two lovely women who died too young had wisdom far beyond their years! Like you, whenever I’ve thought of “The Greatest Love of All” I was hearing Whitney Houston’s voice, but the words seemed to be less important than the sounds. It was just another pop song to form a background for our daily lives. But please read those words! Whether they knew it or not, Linda and Whitney have given us what may be the most important piece of psychological advice of the whole twentieth century:

  • It’s important that we rear children carefully, so as not to impair the precious spiritual beings that they already are.
  • Inside each damaged adult is still that same precious eternal being who was once a newborn child.

Now that we at last understand what hampers so many human lives, what might we do to help each little child to achieve the best possible start, and how can we rescue more damaged adults? The more I think about it, the more confident I am that the best way for us to accomplish both goals will be to make the fact that we are all powerful, eternal beings and deeply beloved of a genuine Godhead the base and the core of our entire culture. That way, we can protect our children from all the worst clueless cultural lies, and we can help parents see their children not as high-grade pets, but as the sacred and joyous responsibility that they are. And we can take each damaged adult straight back to who he was at the beginning, once upon a time, and help him to expand and grow from there.

I can hear what you’re thinking. “Yeah, right. You’re a hammer, so to you everything looks like a nail.” Naturally, someone who was raised and inspired to try to achieve something really great, and who has seized on universal afterlife education, is going to see that mission as the cure for everything! But it’s more than that. I think this really will work, because we already have learned that coming to know the truth about death and about our eternal natures has a number of wonderful effects. Those who already know the truth are:

  • Free from fear. Fear of death seems to be the base fear, so when we no longer fear death, we no longer fear anything.
  • Thinking and living on a universal scale. The “life sucks, then you die” mentality that pervades most modern cultures is altogether gone once someone internalizes the fact that there really is no death.
  • Loving naturally. Since love is the opposite of fear, once we stop fearing death and thereby we lose all our other fears as well, we begin to love everyone more and more, as a bubble rises in water toward the light.

This combination of changes in attitude has been altogether transforming for many of those who have taken the trouble to learn that for certain there actually is no death. The changes we have seen in our earliest students have made me eager to share the truth with all the world!

Silver Birch is a popular disembodied entity who was channeled by a skeptical atheist turned involuntary communicator named Maurice Barbanell (1902-1981). I generally don’t use anything channeled after 1930 as afterlife evidence because the risk that the living might fake these communications for personal gain is simply too great. But I know experts who are as skeptical as I am, and who nevertheless consider Silver Birch to be genuine. And he tells us that from his perspective, we incarnate in order to learn who we are. He said, “Your world is full of millions of people who do not know what they are there for, who they are, what it is that they must achieve whilst they are incarnate on earth. You can help them to realize that they are spirits with bodies, that the real individual is the deathless spirit, that the spirit is there to gain the experience to equip it for its larger life in our world. That is the most important thing that you can do.”

And indeed it is! Even though we cannot yet know the extent to which such knowledge will help people who were sadly damaged in childhood, and how it will help to rescue future children from also being damaged, it certainly will improve many lives worldwide! From birth on earth until graduation, each infinitely precious human being deserves to know the far-beyond-wonderful truth about who and what we really are!

 

I believe the children are our future.
Teach them well and let them lead the way!
Show them all the beauty they possess inside.
Give them a sense of pride, to make it easier.
Let the children’s laughter remind us how we used to be.
– Linda Creed (1948-1986), from “The Greatest Love of All” (1977)

Truth Detector

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Everything is energy and that’s all there is to it.
Match the frequency of the reality you want,
and you cannot help but get that reality.
It can be no other way.
This is not philosophy. This is physics.”
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quotation (1948)

The above quotation from Albert Einstein shows a profound understanding of  what we now know is true. And for good measure, he also said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” There is a lot of evidence now that Einstein was right, but still most working physicists would be forced to deny his words because they violate the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism. And the quotation from Einstein that ends this post explains how he was able to achieve his exalted level of understanding! He was a sufficiently revered scientist that he could investigate reality with an open mind without risking his position in the scientific community. So he did just that. And in daring to explore as far as his mind could reach, he found the same basis for reality that afterlife researchers have independently discovered.

It’s the same underlying reality, too, that the second-greatest theoretical physicist of the twentieth century also discovered. Max Planck (1858-1947) won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics. He was the father of quantum mechanics, and a deeply brilliant man. In 1931 Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”  Then in 1944, near the end of his life, he summed up his greatest discovery, and in fact the greatest discovery of the twentieth century. He said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Max Planck discovered what materialist physicists call quantum physics, which is a variant of the consciousness-based physics that underlies all of reality. He found that quantum physics underlies reality in this material universe as well, although this universe has an additional overlay of what we might call Newtonian physics that keeps our minds from messing with the reality around us while we are having these earth-experiences.

So the two greatest physicists in history both independently discovered the same physics underlying all of reality that afterlife researchers also have found! And afterlife researchers have made our discoveries using neither math nor experiments of any kind, but simply by closely studying nearly two hundred years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. Here is what Albert Einstein, Max Plank, Craig Hogan, and Roberta Grimes have each discovered:

  • Nothing is solid. Everything is energy. This fundamental fact of reality is inescapable at this point, and yet it is unknown beyond the scientific community.
  • The base energy is what we experience as consciousness. Your personal awareness is an aspect of the infinitely powerful potentiality that is all that independently exists, and that gives rise to everything else.

But still, the foolish and clearly erroneous fundamental scientific dogma of materialism persists! It forces scientists trying to earn a living to publish scientific papers that are essentially gibberish; it has physicists still searching pointlessly for a way to unify their two incompatible theories; and it sees the whole scientific community forced to struggle with patently absurd random theories that have been suggested by the results of their nonsensical materialist explorations. Because mainstream scientists are not allowed to consider the most important discovery made by history’s two greatest physicists, they must still ignore the base force that underlies reality. So, ultimately, their theories are going to be nonsense. Even when they make what are actually interesting and important discoveries about consciousness, the rules of their profession require that they talk about them in terms of the material brain!

So you and I are positioned to witness a most peculiar situation. The limitations of materialist science are so obvious by now, and their effects on scientific research are so devastating, that it is impossible for us to imagine that any scientific researcher with even a modicum of sense doesn’t see them! But they can’t buck the gatekeepers. The university departments and the peer-reviewed journals. Academic scientists have families to support, tuitions to fund, and a hope to eventually retire; and any research scientist who even considers investigating the primacy of consciousness will soon find himself flipping burgers for a living. At this point, the entire scientific community is reduced to the position of courtiers forced to exclaim about the beauties of the naked Emperor’s imaginary new clothes.

I should mention at this point the leading crusader against all this scientific nonsense, whose next Seek Reality interview will be posted on November 29th. Craig Weiler is a researcher and entrepreneur who has for decades been fighting disinformation with facts. His book, Psi Wars: Ted, Wikipedia and the Battle for the Internet, is a must-read if this problem interests you. Craig is the very model of patient open-mindedness, but at this point I am finding it a great deal harder than he finds it to continue to suffer fools!

The fact is that mainstream science went off the rails a hundred years ago, when it turned itself into a belief-system. The only way it can right itself now is to renounce materialism and then turn every working scientist loose with instructions to pursue the truth wherever it may lead. To help to give those newly-liberated scientists a head start, here is a caution about some common methods of modern-day scientific inquiry that are very unlikely to work when we venture beyond this material universe:

  • Mathematics. From what we can tell, mathematical calculations are close to useless in studying the greater reality. Since consciousness there has all the power, it can make anything happen in any way at any time, so there probably are no fixed “laws of physics” to be discovered.
  • Replicable Experiments. We may eventually work out ways to experiment with a consciousness-based reality. But since the minds of the experimenters are going to affect the results of our experiments, we should assume for now that all experimental results must be considered suspect.
  • Commercial Research. We have already found that work in electronic communication that is based in a hope for earning wealth will be doomed. The genuine experimenters are the dead experts, they easily can read our motives, and they seem to be unwilling to work with anyone who is in it for material gain.

What we have learned works best when we attempt to study consciousness and the greater reality is for researchers to take a more deferential approach:

  • Distant Observation. You can learn about the greater reality the way you might study a black hole or a supernova, by staying out of the way and indirectly observing it.
  • Data Aggregation. When you can’t observe something directly without a fear that your own mind will affect your observations, the best way to study it is to collect a lot of testimony from the participants themselves. This is what the early-20th-century accounts through deep-trance mediums have done for afterlife researchers.
  • Trusted On-Site Observers. As we have come to better understand human life in the greater reality, we have encountered upper-level beings who know a great deal about where they are now, and they are eager to help us get our questions answered.

It will help, too, to have a base understanding of the greater reality already in place against which to test future scientific theories. For example, I have found that what we already know about the greater reality has worked wonderfully in testing what Christianity teaches! For the past twenty years I have been using the testimony of the dead to demolish Christian ideas as varied as judgment, hell, damnation, and the End Times prophesies. When we read the twice-translated Gospel teachings of Jesus in modern English, and we compare them with what the dead have said, what we can learn is especially amazing! It’s as if Jesus is Himself explaining and enriching our understandings. And the dead are anxious to help us in any way they can. Some of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century are still actively working today. So perhaps, when the mainstream scientific gatekeepers at last begin to get a clue, dead greats like Albert Einstein and Max Planck can give us guidance and can serve as a kind of Truth Detector for the far more sensible scientific theories that will soon be on the way?

“I want to know how God created this world.
I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon,
in the spectrum of this or that element.
I want to know His thoughts;
the rest are just details.”
– Albert Einstein (1879-1955), quotation (1925)

Seeing is Believing

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I believe above the storm the smallest prayer will still be heard.
I believe that someone in that great somewhere hears every word.
Every time I hear a newborn baby cry, or touch a leaf,
Or see the sky, Then I know why I believe.
– Ronnie Dunn & Craig Wiseman, from “I Believe” (1953)

The most dangerous word in the English language is “faith.” It seems ironic, doesn’t it, that we hold such a counterproductive word in such remarkably high esteem?

The word “faith” generally refers to an admirable level of religious piety. It is the highest virtue to have complete faith, and especially faith in God; while the inability to have faith is seen as a weakness, and even as a character flaw. Many people consider the fact that so many Christians seem to be losing their faith to be what lies at the root of much of what is going wrong in the world.

And many people would think the foregoing paragraph is just a simple truism.  But in fact, it is nothing of the kind! Far from being in any way admirable, our having nothing more than faith is a sorry admission that our religion of choice is not based in anything real. It would never stand up to objective scrutiny. No wonder so many modern Christians are feeling increasingly set adrift! I submit to you now that it is finally time for us to look frankly at the fact that what once was a rational way for humankind to make sense of an unfathomable world is now not only sadly outmoded, but it is in fact a perilous and unnecessary diversion from what should be our singular and unrelenting pursuit of the truth.

We tend to use “faith” and “belief” as near-synonyms. But in fact, they are near-opposites! The difference between them is, and always has been, evidence:

  • Faith means having complete confidence in someone or something based in little or no evidence.
  • Belief means holding an evidence-based opinion that some proposition or set of ideas is true.

And that difference is a gulf as wide and deep as the sea!

Having faith in something based in little or no evidence never has been a comfortable way to live. Of course, Christians have good evidence in the Gospels that both Jesus and God are real; and if our Christian faith were based only in the Gospels, it could reasonably rise to the level of belief. But beyond what appears in the Gospels, the entire Christian faith is based not in evidence, but instead in a set of human ideas. From the virgin birth through the God who insists that we learn to forgive perfectly, but that same God refuses to forgive us  unless He gets to see His own Son tortured and murdered: the whole religion is based in human ideas. Not only is there no evidence that any of those later Christian notions is true, but there is considerable evidence at this point that all of them are fear-based nonsense. 

Until quite recently, humankind has had to settle for faith alone. The urge toward coming up with gods may have been innate in the first modern humans as they emerged two hundred thousand years ago, and it likely was their best way to cope with a reality that was incomprehensible to them. Perhaps it even was based in part in inchoate pre-birth memories. But for whatever reason, people thought up gods, and we created especially tough and brutal gods to help us cope with a dog-eat-dog and saber-tooth-cat-eat-human world. Our developing the ability to maintain faith in such gods was our only comfort in a pitiless reality. Looking back from here, it seems that our having developed the ability to have faith without evidence was a useful early survival skill.

And until as late as the start of the twentieth century, we can be forgiven for having clung to being satisfied with faith alone. It was really only about that time that both the advent of modern science and our much-improved communication with those that we used to think were dead began to give us a lot of solid evidence of what actually is going on. And that evidence came together and began to make sense! We don’t yet have anything like all the answers. But for decades, humankind has had a sensible and rapidly improving understanding of a remarkable greater reality that includes our afterlife as a tiny part.

Perhaps we ought to pause here and remind any Christians who might be bothered by the thought of using “Jesus” and “evidence” in the same sentence that Jesus Himself urged us to seek and find the evidence-based Truth. He said:

“Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

How could He have made it any plainer than that? He did give some lip-service to the notion of faith, perhaps to placate the listening Temple guards; but then He plunged in and made the most profound call for us to acquire enough evidence for real belief that you ever will read anywhere! He said,

“Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted to you” (MK 11:22-24).

The only enemy of the kind of mental power that it would take to move a mountain is doubt. And it is impossible for most of us to sustain an abiding and largely evidence-free faith while never once doubting it. That’s especially true when what is required of us is faith in a set of dogmas that with just a bit of critical thinking can be seen to be plain nonsense. There is no evidence for most of what Christianity teaches. And given what Christianity teaches beyond the Gospel words of Jesus, the fact that it isn’t real is actually a good thing. Jesus had something to say about that, too. He said:

“If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

And in fact, He was entirely right about that! The Gospel teachings of Jesus are the most powerful and most direct method for growing spiritually that humankind ever has found. They can free us from every doubt and all fears. It is only when we complicate them with foreign ideas that never came from Jesus that we come up with a religion that in too many ways simply defies belief.

But it isn’t only Christians who are betrayed by and drowning in an antiquated faith. Modern mainstream scientists are even worse off! Mainstream science is based in a supreme faith in materialism, a theory for which there is little evidence, and against which the evidence  is overwhelming. Materialism has let scientists down repeatedly! There can be no hope that it ever will lead anywhere. But still, like devotees of some ancient sect whose faith in Moloch always lets them down, but whose fear of losing out to that upstart Christian sect is even greater, the scientific priests cling to their materialist faith and continue to toil away. They even are starting to investigate consciousness. We know by now that consciousness is the equivalent of the Gospel teachings where evidence-based truth is concerned; but still, even when they study consciousness, modern scientists’ materialist faith requires that they find some material connection. No Christian ever born has been so faithfully and so pointlessly dogmatic.

Rather than doing what they both should do, and deciding at last to transition from their faith in human-made, dead-end dogmas to an evidence-based search for humanity’s common truths, our two faith-deluded core institutions are only now wondering whether they might somehow keep their bogus faiths while they search for better ways to somehow get along.

In August of 1964, Lt. Everett Alvarez was the first American pilot shot down over North Vietnam.  After eight and a half years of misery, Lt. Alvarez finally got to come home. When he was asked how he had made it through, he said, “Faith in God, in our president, and in our country – it was this faith that maintained our hope.”

And that is the only rational use that there ever can be for any kind of faith! Faith belongs to the nearly hopeless, and not to Christians in their Sunday pews. Certainly not to scientists who claim to be engaging in the open-minded pursuit of the truth! What is needed now is some kind of truth-detector that can be used by both scientists and religious folks to begin to seek the actual truth. And that truth will of course be common to both disciplines. We’ll talk more about this next week….

I believe for every drop of rain that falls, a flower grows.
I believe that somewhere in the darkest night, a candle glows.
I believe for everyone who goes astray,
Someone will come to show the way. I believe.  Oh, I believe.
– Ronnie Dunn & Craig Wiseman, from “I Believe” (1953)

Living the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What’s it all about, Alfie? Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about When you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give? Or are we meant to be kind?
And if only fools are kind, Alfie, Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?
– Burt Bacharach and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

We talked last week about the fact that we are left by our two most trusted institutions to try to figure out on our own whatever the true about reality might be. You may bristle at my saying that, since science has been so good at improving our lives! We eat better and more reliably, and we live in far more comfort and safety, than did people even a century ago. And we certainly live a whole lot better than people did a few millennia ago! But none of that has changed our essential natures. Insofar as we can determine, humankind is not one whit kinder, nobler, or daily happier than were people who lived long ages before today.

 Our final frontier is not outer space. It is the deepest human heart! And despite our endless trying, we never have managed to find a way to actually improve human nature. Although we surely have learned what DOES NOT work.

By now, we have learned that you cannot order, persuade, or inspire people to behave for long in ways that are not consistent with their essential natures. And we really have tried! As people began to live in groups that were bigger than extended families, we could see that without a sense of some sort of biological connection, it was hard to maintain a natural will to cooperate and support one another. So we began to offer behavioral guidance. We made civil laws, established religious rules and bureaucratic regulations, and ever more creatively tried to order our ever-larger societies. But in all the days since our last common ancestor lived two hundred thousand years ago, none of what we ever have tried has turned out to be a way to change people internally! To this day, all of us will steal here and there if we think we won’t be caught. Everyone who is given power will engage in petty cruelties. And our secular and religious leaders by and large come nowhere near close to living up to even their own modest standards! To this day, it is our essential nature to fear and dominate one another. We continue to fight wars, large and small. Humankind has changed in some surface details as eons of human history have passed, but we have not changed in our essential nature since the day when it first occurred to someone that nicking flakes off a rock might make a sharper point.

This is the reason why Jesus came to earth. It was to save us not from God, but from ourselves! Thomas tells me that Jesus came from the highest aspect of the Godhead and actually entered a human body so He could “look through our eyes” and try to understand why we were still choosing to live so miserably. Why were we not using this opportunity of being immersed in the negative atmosphere of materiality to push against that negativity and make the choice for love and spiritual growth? His plan was essentially to figure us out, and then to teach us how to grow spiritually, which was what His endlessly mentioning “the kingdom of God” was all about. Thomas told me all of this a decade ago, when he could see that – just like everyone else – I simply wasn’t getting it.

And when you have this insight, suddenly the whole Gospel message makes so much sense! There has been no Christian scholar who seems to have grasped the enormity of Thomas’s insight, which is why we ought to just recap it quickly. Jesus refers to the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven some eighty times through all four Gospels. Clearly that kingdom is somewhere else, since He talks about bringing it to earth (LK 7:28; MK 14:25); and in fact, it is the highest aspect of the greater reality, which is perfect love. He told us His mission was to bring that level of love to this abased and negativity-filled level of reality (LK 9:27). He even taught us to pray for it, saying, “Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven” (MT 6:20). He told us the kingdom of God is “within us” (LK 17:21), and invisibly it will overspread the earth (LK 17:20). And Jesus even told us how to make that happen, by learning to forgive and love perfectly.

In the ten years since Thomas gave me that insight, he has coached me through learning how to live the Gospel teachings. And they really do work! When they are taken seriously and not seen as mere suggestions, the Gospel teachings do indeed have the power to transform us at the level of our deepest hearts.

But still, those teachings aren’t quite enough because they don’t address our fears. Since fear is the essence of negativity, we really have to kill all our fears if we hope to raise our vibrations much at all. I take it as a reasonable observation that every human fear is at its base the fear of death. And Jesus addressed our fear of death. He promised to come back for us when we die (JN 14:2-3), and He assured us that even the thief on the cross next to His was going to make it to heaven (LK 23:43). But the religion that bears His name, and the scientific belief-system that tries to erase Him, both only further gin up our fears. Neither does anything whatsoever to ease our primordial fear of death!

Fortunately, though, leading afterlife scholars have come at last to realize that we know enough now to teach the truth about the afterlife without needing further help from mainstream science. As we share our conclusions, we are finding that there is no longer much uncertainty. Our guidance is sound, and what we have been learning all fits together very well. So there is no need for us to wait any longer to begin to free the world from fear! Our goal will be to make knowledge of what happens at and after death a fundamental part of our cultural heritage. Just as broad swathes of the population are now aware of the Big Bang theory, the Jesus-died-for-our-sins theory, and other scientific and religious theories that eventually are going to turn out to be wrong, it is past time for us to start to educate as many people as possible about the our-minds-are-eternal theory. This is one theory that is actually right!

What is more, this will be the world’s first effective push to transform people internally. This time, it really is going to work! And when enough of us lose our fear of death and achieve that inner transformation, at last the kingdom of God can really begin to overspread the earth!

The reason we are so confident this will work is that we can already see it working. Those in the afterlife-education community who have managed to vanquish their fear of death are already being transformed in ways that are frankly extraordinary! For example:

  • We begin to live our lives in an eternal frame. That old “life sucks, then you die” mentality that generally underlies human thinking is, wonderfully, altogether gone. Instead, we live this life more deeply and care about making the best use of these lives on earth as part of what we know is going to be our personal forevermore.
  • We realize that no thought or action is private. Knowing that a lot more is going on and our minds are inextricably part of Mind can be disorienting at first. But then it feels liberating! If nothing can be hidden, then we are forever spared the bother of ever again trying to hide anything.
  • Our personal consciousness vibrations begin to rise naturally. Losing the fear of death sheds a lot of spiritual ballast that has kept us weighed down. I am realizing now that a lot of the change that I had thought had come from applying the Gospel teachings was just as much the result of my having shed the last vestiges of my own fear of death.
  • We are happy! My goodness, I can tell you now that there is no happiness so complete as being certain that you are living eternally as the child of an infinitely loving Godhead!

People whose minds have been transformed this way are essentially living just as our religious and secular laws have always meant us to live. They are optimistic, generous, loving, kindly, peaceful, unselfish, empathetic, and solicitous of the needs of others. You cannot force people to think this way! You only can give the world and yourself the gift of your personal transformation. And when you have done that, your own life will become more glorious than you can imagine. Knowing for certain that your life is eternal, and knowing the science and the truth behind it all, feels like sharing with very few other people what is truly the world’s most glorious secret. It’s a secret that transforms you from the heart, and it makes your whole life a song of joy!

Jesus is more than just a religious figure. Instead, and eternally, He is the world’s ultimate Teacher! He came long ago as the genuine Godhead, seeking to know us well enough to be able eventually to start to transform, and finally to save this desperate world. Even though mainstream scientists remain stuck in their materialist delusions, and even though Christianity still primarily ignores Jesus in favor of its own later dogmas, we realize now that there is no need to delay our sharing of the truth any longer. It is time for us to begin to do what humankind so desperately needs, which is to help as many people as possible to finally shed their fear of death and begin the internal transformation that, for the past two thousand years, has been the Lord’s eternally perfect gift.

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie, I know there’s something much more!
Something even non-believers can believe in.
I believe in love, Alfie. Without true love we just exist, Alfie!
Until you find the love you’ve missed, You’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way.
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie!
– Burt Bacharach and Hal David (1921-2012), from “Alfie” (1966)

Seeking Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Tell all the Truth but tell it slant –
Success in Circuit lies.
Too bright for our infirm Delight,
The Truth’s superb surprise.

As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind,
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or every man be blind –
– Emily Dickinson (1830-1886), from “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” (1865)

We have spoken at length about the fact that neither mainstream Christianity nor mainstream science has any wish to discover the truth about how reality actually works.  Both have cherished dogmas to support, and constituencies with interests that they must protect, so the body of evidence that afterlife researchers have developed over the past hundred and fifty years has been disparaged and dismissed or outright ignored by our two most trusted institutions. Sometimes you and I have actually chuckled about this situation. It’s like having a couple of elderly aunts living in the attic who create a nuisance by feeding stray cats on our back porch. They irritate us, but in a benign sort of way. Auntie Chris and her equally addled scientific sister are making a mess, but they are very old and living in a past that is irrelevant to us now. How much longer can this possibly go on? The intransigence of both science and Christianity has seemed for a long time to be nearly harmless, and ultimately self-limiting. Christianity is just a belief-system anyway, and science advances by deaths (as Max Planck so memorably said). Any minute now, this century-long scientific stonewalling of the truth will end when the last old materialist bull dies away. Or so I have thought. Right up to the moment when I couldn’t think that way anymore.

Christianity and science both claim to own the truth in their respective spheres, but both of their versions of the truth are based in self-serving falsehoods. From their positions of longstanding trust and respect, these two institutions continue to tell us fables that most people continue to believe. If science and Christianity were a pair of criminal enterprises fighting for control of our treasure, they would do nothing differently!

Christianity claims to be based in Jesus, but in fact it uses Him as a figurehead while paying little mind to what He actually said. It claims to be our worthy guide in spiritual matters, when in fact what it teaches is human-made ideas that are downright spiritually harmful. It won’t look at the afterlife evidence because it is so heavily invested in its own ideas that are based in little more than Medieval guesses. So, tell me. Why should we trust this institution?

Science claims to be our reliable source of information about the world around us, when in fact it chooses arbitrarily to investigate only what it considers to be material. Honest scientists have known for a century that matter is just energy and nothing is solid, but the scientific community won’t tell us that. Instead, they keep demanding more and more funding so they can pursue their baseless theories, undaunted by the fact that success still eludes them. Beyond bringing us myriad ways to make our lives more comfortable, what new truths have scientists really discovered in the past hundred years?

And these are the only widely trusted non-governmental institutions in Western culture! Both of them are demonstrably wrong and bent on flogging lame ideas, and neither of them will take responsibility for its own longstanding errors. People trust them primarily because we want to know the essential truths that no other source seems able to provide. But they have never accepted responsibility for actually investigating anything! And their guesses and fabrications are in no way harmless.

In fact, the ongoing refusal of both mainstream science and mainstream Christianity to investigate the afterlife evidence is the source of every evil that is currently loose in the world. Once most people realize their lives are eternal, everything will change for the better! But instead, to this day Western culture assumes that the competing scientific and religious views of the afterlife are our only options. And whichever horse you might choose to ride, whether it’s religious or scientific, the view that both institutions give you of yourself is awful! You are meat, or you carry original sin. Either way, you are venal, selfish and evil, and together all heading for the same pointless end. At your death, either you will blink out like a light, or you will face a choice between roasting in hell or tediously singing hymns forevermore. There is nothing about our lives that means anything.

Even when the guidance we are being fed is preposterous, most of us are stuck with using it to try to build our own views of ourselves and the world. And when the guidance we are getting from our two most trusted sources insists that only matter is real, and God is a cranky guy on a throne or else no God exists at all, then each of us is forced to build a worldview that is both erroneous and unpleasant. As our trust in those failing institutions has waned, our personal search for the truth has become more individual and more desperate. The result has been the alarming rise in recent years of the twin banes of atheistic nihilism and societal strife.

Atheistic Nihilism.  If atheism means that one does not believe literally in the Christian God, then I am an atheist. What open-minded researchers have discovered is a Godhead that is infinitely greater and far more loving than the petty and cranky Christian God. The scientific evidence is such that we should be excitedly investigating this wondrous new development! But overriding our happy news is the stark kind of atheism that is rapidly spreading in the West, and holds that not only is there no God, but also there is no point and no meaning.

Societal Strife. Since we are unable to build our worldviews around an open-minded search for the truth by our most trusted institutions, we each are forced to think through and construct our own individually-developed ideas. And then, of course, we defend our ideas against attacks by others who prefer their own ideas, until the only possible truth about anything is whatever you individually believe. We see this happening in our civic life, to the point where we needn’t even discuss it here; and it happens in our personal life as well. At this point,  even Christians are at war with one another over trivial details of their beliefs-based dogmas.

But even worse than the rise of atheism and daily strife, stonewalling by our most trusted institutions is forcing us all to live steeped in fear! Until the truth about death and the afterlife is much more widely known, humankind’s general default setting is one of stark terror of the yawning void. And, tragically, our societal terror of death seems to be hardest on teenagers and young adults. Even I was afraid, despite my two experiences of light! But those experiences at least emboldened me enough that I risked investigating what is true, taking literally the invitation of the Lord to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). And when I asked for the truth with an open mind, I found a whole new gigantic reality far greater than anything we have heretofore imagined! With the help of open-minded folks who have some scientific training, we could learn enough to begin a glorious dawning of the truth all over the world!

But sadly, more than ten years after I joined the public afterlife community, progress in the field of afterlife education still has gone nowhere. A lot more evidence has been developed, and we know in greater detail what is going on, but neither science nor Christianity still shows the slightest interest in investigating all this evidence. There have been no hopeful breakthroughs. At this point, those who were expecting to see breakthroughs have lost a lot of their enthusiasm. And what is worst of all is the fact that both Christianity and science are still giving us awful views of who and what we are! Not a syllable of what either institution tells us about ourselves is true. But due to the frankly evil nonsense they teach, too many of us still continue to live as if there is no point to anything.

It is going to be up to us to work together to begin a new age of actually seeking and finding the truth. We are currently developing a website whose purpose will be to educate people about the afterlife from every perspective, as the evidence actually reveals it to us. We expect to be ready to roll next month! But first, to help you better see how important these efforts are going to be, next week we’ll look at how the world around us is likely to change for the better once most people know for certain that every human life is eternal. I think you will be happily surprised to see just how much of a universal fix this single change might  be….

“If you hold to My teaching, you are really my disciples.
Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
– Jesus (JN 8:31-32)

Semi-Conscious

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Come gather ’round people, wherever you roam,
And admit that the waters around you have grown,
And accept it that soon you’ll be drenched to the bone,
If your time to you is worth savin’.
And you better start swimmin’ or you’ll sink like a stone,
For the times they are a-changin.’
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)

It is an extraordinary fact that even though we are already twenty-one percent of the way through the twenty-first century, the mainstream scientific community remains convinced that consciousness is produced by our brains. There is no scientific evidence that this even might be true beyond the fact that parts of the brain can be stimulated by conscious processes! And there is a lot of evidence that it isn’t true.

The fact that consciousness is the base of reality isn’t even a new idea. I have just interviewed Leonard Perlmutter for Seek Reality. He’s an expert on Eastern spiritual teachings, and he shared with us the amazing fact that those who invented the practice of yoga knew five thousand years ago that consciousness is primary and it pre-exists matter. It’s not an especially radical idea, either. Some of the greatest scientists of the twentieth century knew or suspected the primary role of consciousness, in part because this conclusion logically flows from some of the oddities of quantum mechanics.

It has been easy for afterlife researchers to come to appreciate the primacy of consciousness. We who spend a lot of our time in non-material pursuits are used to reasoning outward from the afterlife realities, which clearly are based in consciousness. But mainstream scientists are enmired in studying matter, so understandably their logical model is based in matter. But surely by now they must be getting a clue? I have of late been watching for developments in the field of consciousness research, and this week I attended an online IONS presentation with considerable interest.

If you don’t yet know IONS, you should. The Institute of Noetic Sciences was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in 1973, after he had a spiritual experience while he was returning from the moon. IONS has always been a serious science-based investigator of what used to be seen as woo-woo ideas, and the very word “noetic” refers to the human intellect. So last week with a lot of hope I attended an online IONS presentation by Joachim Kepler, Ph.D., who is a research director at the Department of Consciousness Research (DIWISS) in Roth, Germany. Both IONS and DIWISS are at the leading edge of consciousness studies, and Dr. Kepler’s talk was called Linking Consciousness to the Foundations of Physics: Toward a Self-Consistent Theory of Consciousness. Linking consciousness to the foundations of physics? Toward a self–consistent theory of consciousness? To someone who has for decades been waiting for mainstream science to catch up with reality, that title sounded like music! But what Dr. Kepler said turned out to be another painful reminder of just how completely lost mainstream science is as a belief-system. I have watched his presentation three times now, trying to find some way that my first reactions were wrong.

Sadly, Dr. Kepler’s ideas amount to a thoughtful rearrangement of the deck chairs on the scientific ship to nowhere.  And he ignores the implications of an enormous body of evidence that helps us to understand consciousness, including telepathy, remote viewing, near-death experiences, and two hundreds of years of abundant and consistent afterlife evidence. All his work amounts to just an attempt to explain how human beings are aware and able to think. And he still is reasoning outward from matter, and not from consciousness itself! How can anyone hope to understand anything if he isn’t trying to get inside whatever he is studying? Dr. Kepler’s presentation still requires matter for the creation of consciousness. He makes the zero-point field the place where consciousness is generated; which isn’t necessary, but as an idea it isn’t flat-out awful. However, he then includes the human brain as a kind of organizer of whatever is given off by the zero-point field. He still requires the brain for the creation of consciousness! And he refers to panpsychism, which is a Medieval idea that posits that all matter is by its nature somewhat conscious. He refines it into cosmopsychism, in which matter by its nature is potentially conscious, but not everything material is conscious. And thus this poor scientist who is trying to be relevant while he keeps his materialist bona fides clings firmly to matter, and he shies away from any thought that consciousness is primary and pre-existing.

But scientists are becoming more desperate now. As recently as a decade ago you could read smug articles in popular science magazines about how we would at any moment be celebrating the discovery of the source of consciousness inside the human brain. But that optimism has largely petered out. You still see cautiously hopeful articles which offer some trivial nothing of an idea that you know is going to lead nowhere; and you see more and more fatalistic thoughts by dead-ended materialist scientists. Here is a response by an “intelligent design” scholar to one such jaded materialist scientist’s article about the impending death of humankind. And his response was published just this month! When you know that the scientist being slapped down is considered by his fellows to be an important thought-leader, you realize that materialist science has arrived at the point of being entirely broken.

The fundamental fact of human existence can be stated in one sentence. What you and I experience in a dim way as human consciousness is the only thing that exists! Everything else that we think is real is created by consciousness, composed of consciousness, and set in place by consciousness. There is nothing else. And our minds are all part of that same consciousness energy, which is one of several important proofs that our minds are eternal. By definition.

The problem with the failed scientific dogma of materialism is that, no matter what we believe, we cannot change reality. Materialism as a strain of rational thought goes back at least three thousand years, and for a while grounding scientific inquiry in “solid” matter made sense. We have talked here at length about the fact that all religions are human-made, and against that backdrop the notion of studying anything non-material probably seemed for a long time to be veering dangerously close to superstition. Mainstream science and mainstream religions have been a pair of worthy adversaries! If there is anything nuttier than designing your system of inquiry around your need for everything to be material, then that nuttier worldview has to be designing all your beliefs around a god that you have thought up yourself and then imbued with superhuman powers.

It is time now for humankind to shun all beliefs and at last try to figure out what actually is going on. What scientists believe has no more value to us than does whatever the Pope believes! And when we investigate all of reality with a truly open mind, we cannot escape the conclusion that a base non-material energy must underlie everything. There have been some wonderful working scientists who have open-mindedly sought the truth and arrived at a similar conclusion, among them Thomas Campbell, Evan Harris Walker, Dean Radin, and now Bernardo Kastrup. And of course, it was the immortal Max Planck who came right out and said ninety years ago that consciousness is primary. So this is a theory backed by illustrious scientific minds who have persisted, even despite the fact that they were defying all the matter-based rules of the scientific playground.

And once you are used to the primacy of consciousness, you find that it explains so many things that otherwise NEVER will be explained! Let’s list here just a few of the basic questions that materialist scientists will never be able to answer. Not in a thousand years:

  • How did the universe begin? No matter how far back you go, you always can ask, “so what came before that?” And no theory ever advanced has been adequate, including the much-vaunted Big Bang.
  • How did life begin? The notion that lightning struck a primordial soup of just the right combination of molecules has been considerably refined, but the fact remains that every such theory has been demonstrated to be wrong. We frankly still have no idea how life began.
  • How and why did life evolve? Once you’ve got some form of life, you’ve still got to figure out how it turned into an elephant and whatever that elephant had for lunch!
  • What are our minds, and how are they created? For scientists to be searching for a source of consciousness inside the human brain is like taking apart an old transistor radio to try to find the source of Elvis Presley’s voice. Eventually some materialist scientist will win a Nobel Prize for having found a way to convincingly demonstrate the illusion that at last we may have figured it out.
  • What is making that funny sound from the middle of the galaxy? Because matter is seen as both finite and always obedient to human-deciphered laws, whenever something happens that is outside the box of scientific thinking, it confounds everyone.

All of this is going to end, just as deluded thinking always ends. We used to suspect that scientists were going to get a clue only when communication with the not-really-dead had progressed to the place where we were chatting through the veil with a cellphone app. But now I think it will be sooner than that. As Max Planck is reported to have said, science advances by deaths. And right now, in some fourth-grade science class there is a courageous little girl who soon will risk her career to develop a viable consciousness-based theory of everything. The timing will at last be right, and her work will hit this despairing world like a thunderclap of liberation. And then, gloriously, everything really will change!

 

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen,
And keep your eyes wide open. The chance won’t come again.
And don’t speak too soon, for the wheel’s still in spin.
there’s no tellin’ who that it’s naming’.
For the loser now will be later to win!
For the times they are a-changin’.
– Bob Dylan, from “The Times They Are a-Changin’” (1964)

Seeking Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“We must reduce our volume to the simple evangelists,
select, even from them, the very words only of Jesus…
There will be found remaining the most sublime
and benevolent code of morals
which has ever been offered to man.
I have performed this operation for my own use,
by cutting verse by verse out of the printed book,
and arranging the matter which is evidently his,
and which is as easily distinguishable
as diamonds in a dunghill.”
– Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826), from a letter to John Adams (October 12, 1813)

I have been hearing of late from people who wonder how we can distinguish what Jesus likely said from the corruptions of His words that followed His death. Then last week we performed a bit of analysis on something I had thought He likely hadn’t said, but now it seems that He probably did say it. And that prompted even more people to ask how I ever was able to figure that out! I want to empower you as much as I can, so I am happy to share with you how I continue to seek and to find an ever better understanding of the genuine Jesus.

First, of course, I should acknowledge that I have spent considerable time in self-education:

  • I majored in early Christian history in college. I graduated fifty years ago, and the wonderful professor who was also my adviser was already past retirement age, so I reckon that she likely was educated even before 1930. And what she knew was phenomenal! I learned so much from her that was so earth-shaking for me that it has shaped my worldview ever since. Among other things, she taught her flock that the Council of Nicaea tried to remove every reference in the Gospels to reincarnation “because if we thought we had just one life, we would try harder.” And the Councilors and their predecessors also added references to church-building, end-times, and sheep-and-goats toward the back of each of the three synoptic Gospels which were anachronistic and at odds with the primary things that Jesus actually taught. The Councilors at First Nicaea claimed to be inspired by God, based on nothing beyond their own extreme self-regard.
  • I was reading the Bible from cover to cover repeatedly from the age of twelve until I was in my early fifties. I would read the New Testament twice and go back and read the Gospels a third time, and then I would begin again with Genesis. So I became quite familiar with what is in the Bible, and especially with what Jesus is reported in the Gospels to have spent His greatest efforts in teaching.
  • I continue to read the work of a few Christian scholars. I follow only open-minded seekers who are trying to ever better understand the Lord, and foremost among these is the prolific Keith Giles, an ordained minister who walked away from the church to lead a home ministry. Unlike me, Keith Giles is a genuine scholar in both knowledge and temperament. For example, here he is talking about some of the same sorts of things that we talk about here, but Keith does it with scholastic discipline. He still is trying to reform an institution that I see as irretrievably broken.
  • I have spent the past fifty years in studying the afterlife and the greater reality. All of which could so easily have been an exercise in nonsense! But instead, the communications received through physical mediums and channels in the sixty-odd years before 1940 in southern England and the northeastern United States are all stunningly consistent. Together they paint an amazingly complete picture that we can build on and use with confidence. Best of all, the dead who have communicated with us confirm that much of what Jesus is reported in the Gospels to have said is stunningly accurate and surprisingly complete. In particular, the dead communicating from the highest levels are quick to affirm the Lord’s elevated status, and to corroborate what it was that He came to teach.
  • I make an effort to treat Jesus as a non-religious historical figure. Jesus didn’t start Christianity. Indeed, what He came to free us from was not sin – which is a human construct – but the fears and constraints of human-made religions. He spoke Aramaic. His words were then a folk-memory for years before they were written down in Greek, and much later they were translated from Greek into modern languages. And they could so easily have been garbled in so many spots along the way that we are indulging in magic-think if we don’t look at every word in the Gospels with a jaundiced eye! We want to know what Jesus actually said, and not what some church father wanted Him to have said. And finally, of course, we must never forget that the best evidence now strongly suggests that Jesus was in fact God on earth. His life may have been the only instance of this ever actually happening, which makes the teachings of Jesus even more significant. And our knowing that Jesus came as God on earth puts us into the odd but exciting position of figuring out how we can relate to the genuine Godhead without a religion in between.

So I have known from the age of twenty that we can’t take the Gospels at face value. And furthermore, Miss Corwin (I think that was her name) seems to have transformed me into a radical. She was adamant that her students must internalize her own sense of outrage at the grievous sins against the teachings of Jesus that were committed by the early church councils, and especially by First Nicaea. She was the first person I ever knew who was separating Jesus from Christianity at all, and never mind her defending Him against what I used to think was His very own religion!

With all of that said, let’s look at some Gospel passages and see where this level of analysis takes us. I have included here just four examples from Appendix I of Liberating Jesus:

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

This is an easy one! “Petros,” meaning “rock,” would have been a pun in Greek, but Jesus spoke Aramaic. Jesus intended to abolish religions and teach us to relate to God on our own, and He never spoke about or even hinted at wanting to found a church. There is no Hades. And of course He never would have given “the keys of heaven” to human beings of limited understanding, with the added authority to bind even God! From beginning to end, this is nonsense.

“If anyone wishes to come after Me, he must deny himself, and take up his cross and follow Me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will find it. For what will it profit a man if he gains the whole world and forfeits his soul? Or what will a man give in exchange for his soul? For the Son of Man is going to come in the glory of His Father with His angels, and will then repay every man according to his deeds” (MT 16:24-27).

This is one of many examples of the handiwork of Councilors who may have built their nonsense into things that Jesus actually said. But for Jesus to mention a cross here is a frank anachronism, and that reference to Him coming in glory and judging us is end-times nonsense of much later origin.

‘All authority has been given to Me in heaven and on earth. Go therefore and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I commanded you; and lo, I am with you always, even to the end of the age’” (MT 28:18-20).

The Great Commission is likely something Jesus actually said, but the words in italics are anachronistic. It was well after the Lord’s death that the notion of a Trinity came along and the Last Supper became a sacrament. But for First Nicaea and the other religion-builders, adding it here made this a charge for His disciples to go out there and spread a religion that during the Lord’s lifetime did not exist! Simply remove those words. Fixing this one is easy.

And finally, the whole of Matthew 24, Mark 13, and Luke 21:8-36 is devoted to end-times and other anachronistic nonsense. All of this was added soon after the Lord’s death, and much of it was probably added even before First Nicaea in 325. All we can conclude is that the earliest religion-builders wanted to tie the end-times prophesies that were in wide circulation during that period of Christian persecution directly back to Jesus, so they cribbed some of their own ideas into His Gospels. When Jesus came to teach us how to use our many earth-lifetimes to ever better grow toward spiritual perfection – when His mission was so far-seeing – it is beyond nonsensical that He ever would have said, “This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in the whole world as a testimony to all the nations, and then the end will come” (MT 24:14). Or “Truly I tell you, this generation will certainly not pass away until all these things have happened” (MT 24:34).

The fact that those who try to strengthen our belief in Christianity are called “apologists” should tell us something! It is their unenviable task to directly address all the criticisms of Christianity, and to show practicing Christians how they can answer those objections for themselves and for others who might question the religion. One of the articles by Keith Giles linked above gives you the six primary attacks against the religion that Christian apologists must try to address; and here, by way of example, is a very good apologist explaining why the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross doesn’t say anything negative about God. I get it, but I am not convinced. I doubt that you are, either. But still, Christian apologists play a useful role. They encourage us to engage with the religion in a non-superstitious way, and the fact that their explanations really don’t answer the core questions helps us to further see the religion as bankrupt. But there is one institution that, even beyond Christianity, is not only bankrupt but also allowing its stubborn adherence to useless ideas to do immense harm now to all of humanity. We’ll talk about that next week.

 

“Very truly I tell you, whoever believes in me will do the works I
have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these.”
– Jesus (John 14:12)

 

Changing

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Please God, make me good, but not just yet.”
– St Augustine of Hippo (354-430), from The Confessions of St. Augustine (400)

 The problem with every attempt ever made to inspire us to be better people is the fact that none of it changes us. We might try to be good and loving and forgiving, and if we try hard and keep at it we might even begin to see ourselves that way. But it always will be an effort from without. It never becomes automatic, from within. No law ever changes who we are inside! Back in sixteenth-century London, while they were hanging pickpockets in the public squares there generally were people in the watching crowds who were busily picking pockets. And in twenty-first-century Christian churches, where people profess to be followers of Jesus and they often hear the Lord’s words shared, there still are many who are quick to judge and smugly feel themselves to be superior to those they consider to be sinners.

And think of all the people who have thought themselves to be good and virtuous as they carried out the most horrendous acts! Blaise Pascal, the great seventeenth century French physicist, said, “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction.” Only consider the fact that the thousands of bureaucrats who murdered six million Jews during the Second World War went home at night and hugged their families. And the people who legally owned human beings two centuries ago in the American South were for the most part sincere Christians. We modern folks feel morally superior to the perpetrators of American slavery and the European Holocaust, but we have no right to feel superior! There are more slaves living now in the world than there were at the time of the American Civil War. And in China, good people are carrying out a new Holocaust of religious minorities that includes the live-harvesting and sale of their organs.

I often hear from former Christians. Many of them say they were once devout. They still love Jesus, and they want to keep Jesus while freeing themselves from Christianity, so when they come across some article or video of mine which invites then to begin to follow the Lord’s Way, they reach out and thank me. Most of these folks find traditional Christian teachings to be no longer believable; and many of them add that they can no longer bear the frank hypocrisy of so many church members who follow none of the Lord’s Gospel teachings on loving, forgiving, and never judging. But, why is that?  why can’t even practicing Christians let the Lord’s words change who they are?

Until we can solve this problem, all of civilization will be just a veneer over the frankly barbarian me-first mindset that always has ruled humankind.

Although, as you know, we have lately learned that one set of rules does have the power to change us internally if we will take them seriously. Christians don’t take the teachings of Jesus as more than maybe nice suggestions; but when those rules are zealously applied, their power to actually raise our consciousness vibrations is amazing. But the problem is that so few people know what the teachings of Jesus can do! And with Christianity’s off-putting dogmas in the way, even practicing Christians don’t take the Lord’s teachings as seriously as He means them to be taken.

As I have been thinking about this problem, Thomas has led me to reconsider my least-favorite words of all the surviving words that Jesus ever spoke. For most of my life I could ignore that whole passage! Jesus tells us we have to hate everyone we love if we want to follow Him? I use to put that passage right up there beside “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church” as an obvious later fraud that should be chucked at once. But unlike all the end-times, church-building, sheep-and-goats, and other bits of anachronistic nonsense that First Nicaea added as they assembled the earliest Christian Bible, that troubling passage from the fourteenth Chapter of Luke has no obvious fraudulence tells. It appears appropriately in context, and the English word “hate” could easily have been a mistranslation for something milder. “Disdain,” perhaps? Jesus knew that hatred is the lowest consciousness vibration, and He taught forgiveness as a primary virtue, so it would have been against everything He taught if we were to replace our love for anyone with hatred! And an included reference to carrying a cross is a frank anachronism that can be ignored. So with those changes, I have been freshly reading the end of Luke’s Fourteenth Chapter, and I am stunned to realize that it is in fact a very powerful teaching. And actually, it is precisely the answer to the problem of humankind’s inability to change.

Here is what Jesus said: “Now large crowds were going along with Him; and He turned and said to them,  ‘If anyone comes to Me, and does not disdain his own father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters, yes, and even his own life, he cannot be My disciple.    …    For which one of you, when he wants to build a tower, does not first sit down and calculate the cost to see if he has enough to complete it? Otherwise, when he has laid a foundation and is not able to finish, all who observe it begin to ridicule him, saying, “This man began to build and was not able to finish.”  Or what king, when he sets out to meet another king in battle, will not first sit down and consider whether he is strong enough with ten thousand men to encounter the one coming against him with twenty thousand? Or else, while the other is still far away, he sends a delegation and asks for terms of peace.  So then, none of you can be My disciple who does not give up all his own possessions. Therefore, salt is good; but if even salt has become tasteless, with what will it be seasoned?  It is useless either for the soil or for the manure pile; it is thrown out. He who has ears to hear, let him hear’” (LK 14:25-34).

Where else have we seen that bit about tasteless salt? It follows the Beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount in the Book of Matthew: “You are the salt of the earth; but if the salt has become tasteless, how can it be made salty again? It is no longer good for anything, except to be thrown out and trampled under foot by men. You are the light of the world. A city set on a hill cannot be hidden; nor does anyone light a lamp and put it under a basket, but on the lampstand, and it gives light to all who are in the house.  Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (MT 5:13-16). Jesus is here calling for us to put forth the effort to actually grow spiritually, and thereby to become the salt of the earth and the literal light of the world. He seems to be telling us that unless we grow spiritually, we become the equivalent of tasteless salt.

And where else have we seen Jesus urging us to give up what most matters to us so we can follow Him? When a rich young man asked Jesus what he must do to follow Him, “Looking at him, Jesus felt a love for him and said to him, ‘One thing you lack: go and sell all you possess and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow Me.’  But at these words the young man was saddened, and he went away grieving, for he was one who owned much property. And Jesus, looking around, said to His disciples, ‘How hard it will be for those who are wealthy to enter the kingdom of God!’ The disciples were amazed at His words. But Jesus said to them, ‘Children, how hard it is to enter the kingdom of God! It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God’” (MK 10:21-25).

We understand now that Jesus was referring to a narrow gate into Jerusalem called “the Needle’s Eye,” which no pack camel could use without first being unloaded. And the kingdom of God refers to the level of the afterlife just below the Source, where only people of the highest consciousness vibration can go. So Jesus clearly tells us here that being distracted by too many possessions is a burden that can hinder us from growing spiritually!

The more I study Jesus, the more confident I become that He is in fact of the highest aspect of the Godhead. The evidence is abundant and stunning, and I consider it to be irrefutable. Jesus walked the earth knowing many things that we couldn’t have learned on our own until now; and perhaps He even taught some things that we cannot understand, even today?

Please read again that passage from Matthews’s Fourteenth Chapter. It is clear that Jesus is telling us that in order to succeed at growing spiritually, we first must prepare a solid foundation and steel ourselves with the will to carry it through. Spiritual growth is a process, and it isn’t enough for us just to give it a try and hope for the best! It is clear, too, that He wants us to give up every conceivable distraction and devote our whole attention to following Him. And He has named for us two distractions as particular dangers:

  • Special Loves is the term used by A Course in Miracles for our family members and close friends. The Course tells us that Special Loves are as counterproductive to our spiritual growth as are special hates.
  • Wealth and Power are immensely distracting! If we possess either, we simply won’t be able to sufficiently concentrate on internalizing the sort of perfect love and forgiveness that makes our spiritual growth even possible.

That passage I have always assumed was bogus is in fact the Lord’s direct prescription for how we can use His teachings to effect a permanent change for the better in ourselves. As I have come to understand this over the past week, I even can see why my personal experiment in using the Lord’s teachings to grow spiritually worked so surprisingly well for me.

It could very easily not have worked! But to be frank, I really don’t care about money or anything that money can buy. And while I love my family members, I allowed the process of mastering universal forgiveness and love to spread my love for my dearest ones over the seven billion other people around them. So I didn’t actually give away everything I had or hate or disdain anyone, but apparently I gave myself distance enough to let me put Jesus first in my life. Without my being aware of it, I was following  the Lord’s prescription as it is laid out in the Fourteenth Chapter of Luke. And not only did it work for me ten years ago, but I have since then seen it work for many others.

You can do it, too! You can follow the Lord’s directions and use His teachings to effect a glorious change in yourself that will let you begin to really change the world.  What I learned most of all when I tried it is that once you put the Lord first in your life, before your special loves and all your earthly distractions, He is going to be there waiting for you. He will smile at you and take your hand.

 

“Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.”
– Denis Diderot, French Enlightenment philosopher (1713–1784)

No Middleman

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The Light of God surrounds us.
The Love of God enfolds us.
The Power of God protects us.
The Presence of God watches over us.
Wherever we are, God Is, and all is well!
 – James Dillet Freeman (1912-2003), from “Prayer for Protection” (1941)

Jesus wanted to abolish religions altogether and teach us to relate to God on our own. The Gospel evidence is plain to see, but very few Biblical scholars will consider its amazing implications. We tend to see religions as such a core human institution that they feel essential to us now. Without religions, how can there be a God? And if there still is a God even without religions, how can we find and know that God? I was a teenager when I first put together the evidence that Jesus came to abolish religions, and my own reluctance to believe it kept me silent until I hit old age. It was like the bits of evidence that Jesus may have been homosexual: they are there in the Gospels, and personally I tend to believe it was true and it doesn’t matter; but it disrupts the narrative for some people. And the last thing Christianity needs right now, at a time of so much stress and falling-away, is any controversial new ideas!

But the evidence that Jesus came to end religions is abundant in the Gospels and plain to see. Second only to His teachings about love, forgiveness, and bringing the kingdom of God on earth, it is what He mostly talked about. In fact, it was probably precisely because He was teaching us how we could bring the kingdom of God on earth that he was so frankly hostile to religions. Our fear-based relationships with human-made gods make it a great deal harder for us to ever come to know and love the genuine Godhead. So, He said it. He kept on saying it. And it is past time for us to consider the possibility that He actually may have meant what He said!

We have today so few of the precious words that Jesus spoke over more than three years of public teaching. But even at that, we can see that the Lord’s manner when something was important to Him was to preach about it repeatedly and from more than one perspective. He treated love that way. And forgiveness. And He mentioned the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven more than eighty times over all four Gospels! His effort to teach against religions was a harder task, since for Him to speak directly against the prevailing religion would have been a capital crime. So He had to speak around the edges, and He did that very cleverly. Let’s consider what He actually said.

He Spoke Against Religious Traditions

Every religion is built on traditions, and Christianity is no exception. The religion is centered on the notion that Jesus died to save us from God’s judgment for our sins, and in observance of that fact every Christian denomination participates in the ritual of communion at least occasionally. For Catholics, it happens every week. But what might Jesus say about that?

“Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9).

“Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).

Ouch. And Jesus was quoting the great prophet Isaiah, who had spoken similar words to the Jews a full eight hundred years before. Isaiah, too, had told us that God is disgusted and not charmed by all our human-made religious practices!

He Despised Religious Authorities and Clergymen

He was so firm about this, and so consistent, that it is hard to resist concluding that it was the very idea of clergymen that he really found to be so offensive! But, judge for yourself.

“Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40).

“Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52).

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of heaven from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13).

And who can forget the moment when Jesus altogether lost it? “Jesus entered the temple and began to drive out those who were selling, saying to them, “It is written, ‘And My house shall be a house of prayer,’ but you have made it a robbers’ den.”  And He was teaching daily in the temple; but the chief priests and the scribes and the leading men among the people were trying to destroy Him, and they could not find anything that they might do, for all the people were hanging on to every word He said” (LK 19:45-48).

At last, near the end of His life on earth, the Lord’s distress at the man-made religious details that He had been fighting all His public life had come to a head for Him. And the clergy for whom He had been an increasing bane were fed up enough that they were thinking about how to be rid of Him. We should note, too, that the Lord’s rant against the money-changers is another echo of words from God first spoken by an Old Testament prophet (see Jer 7:11-12). Which thought makes me more deeply realize that Jesus is frankly telling us now that God has been fighting to free us from fear-based human-made religions for what is now going on three thousand years! Oh, dear God. The genuine Godhead’s patience with us reflects a love that truly is beyond all human understanding!

He Told us Not to Package His Teachings with Judaism 

And He likely meant to include all religions. It is clear from the words He spoke that He was trying to keep the genuine Word of God entirely free from the old human-made ideas that are the basis of all religions.

“But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results.  Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17).

“Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old” (MT 13:52).

Christians have mostly assumed these words were a call to create for Him a new religion, but when they are put in context with all His vigorously anti-religious teachings it is clear that was the last thing He wanted!

He Gave Us the Basics of a Post-Religious Relationship with God

He taught us how to recognize the difference between human-made false teachings and the genuine Word of God.  He encouraged us to avoid praying in religious assemblies, and instead to seek privacy and pray to God on our own. He also suggested that the purpose of these changes was to establish a relationship with the genuine God that was based not in fear, but in love and trust.

“Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit…  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

“When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6).

“Consider the lilies, how they grow: they neither toil nor spin; but I tell you, not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass in the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, how much more will He clothe you? … And do not seek what you will eat and what you will drink, and do not keep worrying. For all these things the nations of the world eagerly seek; but your Father knows that you need these things. But seek His kingdom, and these things will be added to you. Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom” (LK 12:27-32).

God has chosen gladly to give us the kingdom! But Jesus makes it plain to us that unless we will give up the crutch of our old human-made religions, we never will be free enough from fear and ancient superstitions to have the ultimate joy of coming at last to know and love and trust the genuine God.

The Mind of God guides us.
The Life of God flows through us.
The Power of God abides in us.
The Joy of God uplifts us.
The Strength of God renews us.
The Beauty of God inspires us.
Wherever we are, God Is, and all is well!
– James Dillet Freeman (1912-2003), from “Prayer for Protection” (1941)

 

Hellish

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Love is but a song we sing. Fear’s the way we die.
You can make the mountains ring, Or make the angels cry.
Though the bird is on the wing, And you may not know why.
C’mon people now, Smile on your brother!
Ev’rybody get together, Try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), “Get Together” by The Youngbloods (1967)

The cruelest, stupidest, and most damaging idea that any human being ever has had is the notion that if you don’t obey God’s rules, you will spend eternity burning in hell. And it will be God who puts you there! God and His angels and all the good people who never once skipped church on Sunday will enjoy looking in from time to time and hearing you screaming as you roast, because you deserve what is happening to you. There are many sadistic variations on the hell myth, the worst of which I read decades ago and it haunts me to this day. A priest late in the nineteenth century was so frosted by the fact that some parents were not immediately having their babies baptized that he wrote a pamphlet for parents that announced what happens to babies who die unbaptized. I don’t recall most of what he said, but for sure those luckless infants go right to hell. And that isn’t all. Before their condemnation is permanent, after they have been in hell for a while, they are allowed to peek into heaven and see the children who had been baptized before they died all playing and laughing in a sunlit meadow. So those poor infant souls are going to know what their parents’ negligence has deprived them of as they roast in hell forevermore.

The people most terrorized by hell tend to be the sweetest and most earnest Christians. I get heartbreaking emails from Seek Reality listeners. And I met Ineke Koedam, a Dutch expert on transitional experiences, soon after the 2015 publication of her book  In the Light of Death – Experiences on the Threshold Between Life and Death. She told me that hospice workers often say that the people most terrified as death approaches are elderly Christians who have never so much as stolen a penny from a collection plate. But they had hell drummed into them in childhood, so they are desperately worried on the threshold of death that they haven’t been quite good enough so now the fires of hell await them. I haven’t been able to forget her stories, either. And we are told that fifteen percent or so of near-death experiences are hellish. Of course, near-death experiences are in the nature of dreams, they have nothing to do with actual death, but still it is appalling to know that so many people’s minds are willing to put them in hell. If this is what practicing Christianity can do to spiritual experiencers, to good-hearted parents, and to dear well-meaning church-ladies, then we would be better off without it!

In point of fact, there is no hell. There is no devil, either.  Those that we used to think were dead consistently tell us that neither exists; and a more accurate reading of the Gospels assures us that Jesus agrees with what the dead are saying. He encounters evil beings in the Gospels, true, but those beings by their descriptions are just demonish nasties, low-vibration gremlins that have no power at all.

The notion of a fiery hell where God will put us as punishment for our sins isn’t even remotely Christian! If you don’t believe me, then perhaps you will listen to our dear, wise friend, Fr. Richard Rohr, a Franciscan priest who heads the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. What I love most about dear Fr. Richard is that he tries to make traditional Catholic teachings more responsive to the actual message of Jesus. I know from experience how impossible that is. But I dearly love him for trying! Here is what Father Richard published last Sunday. I cannot improve on it:

Unfortunately, it’s much easier to organize people around fear and hatred than around love. Powerful people prefer this worldview because it validates their use of intimidation—which is quite effective in the short run! Both Catholicism and Protestantism have used the threat of eternal hellfire to form Christians. I am often struck by the irrational anger of many people when they hear that someone does not believe in hell. You cannot “believe” in hell. Biblical “belief” is simply to trust and have confidence in the goodness of God or reality and cannot imply some notion of anger, wrath, or hopelessness at the center of all that is. Otherwise, we live in a toxic and unsafe universe, which many do.

In his book Inventing Hell, Jon Sweeney points out that our Christian view of hell largely comes from several unfortunate metaphors in Matthew’s Gospel. Hell is not found in the Pentateuch, the first five books of the Bible. It’s not found in the Gospel of John or in Paul’s letters. The words Sheol and Gehenna are used in Matthew, but they have nothing to do with the later medieval notion of eternal punishment. Sheol is simply the place of the dead, a sort of limbo where humans await the final judgment when God will finally win. Gehenna was both the garbage dump outside of Jerusalem—the Valley of Hinnom—and an early Jewish metaphor for evil (Isaiah 66:24). The idea of hell as we most commonly view it came much more from Dante’s Inferno than the Bible. Believe me on that. It is the very backdrop of Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel. It makes for good art, I suppose, but it’s horrible, dualistic theology. This is not Jesus, “meek and humble of heart,” which is his self-description in life (Matthew 11:29). We end up with two different and opposing Jesuses: one before Resurrection (healing) and one after Resurrection (dangerous and damning).

Jesus tells us to love our enemies (Matthew 5:44), but the punitive god sure doesn’t. Jesus tells us to forgive “seventy times seven” times (Matthew 18:22), but this other god doesn’t. Instead, this other god burns people for all eternity. Many of us were raised to believe this, but we usually had to repress this bad theology into our unconscious because it’s literally unthinkable. Most humans are more loving and forgiving than such a god, but we can’t be more loving than God. It’s not possible. This “god” is not God!

We have talked here at some length about the simple physics of the base consciousness energy. That energy exists in a range of vibrations from the lowest, which is fear and rage, to the highest, which is perfect love; and we are learning that the physics of consciousness is as implacable and universal as gravity. Not only does the whole notion of hell and divine punishment altogether violate the teachings of Jesus, as Fr. Richard so well suggests, but it injects such fear into Christianity that it makes the use of the Lord’s teachings to elevate our personal consciousness vibrations effectively impossible. Jesus was born as God on earth in fulfillment of ancient prophesy, and His teachings are arguably the quickest and surest route to spiritual growth ever found. There is good evidence that He came to transform our relationship with God to the point where He abolished the very notion of sin! But still, the religion named for Him persists in making its core message the notion that God will not forgive us even for Adam’s sin unless He gets to see Jesus tortured and murdered?

The belief that sooner or later everybody gets to the Christian heaven is called universalism, or more precisely Arminianism, after the movement that arose in the sixteenth century in reaction to the born-predestined-for-hell nuttiness of Calvinism. Amazingly, the fight between Calvinism and Arminianism still goes on in a large segment of Christianity, even in the twenty-first century! We know now with certainty that there is one universal afterlife where every person ever born is eagerly welcomed and loved; but still, these fear-steeped, dogma-obsessed Christians must fight their hopelessly deluded battles.

There is no powerful devil, no hell, and no judgment by any religious figure. All that awaits you when you breathe your last is a stunning level of love and joy. And you can take that to the bank! So please, if you find yourself still troubled by the notion of the man-made hell that wiser Christian leaders should long since have banished, then give yourself a little break from church attendance. Let yourself at last come to know and love and perfectly trust the genuine Godhead.    

 When my husband of nearly fifty years heads out to attend Mass on Saturday evenings, he often says something about doing his part to keep us both out of hell. I smile and thank him. He has come far from the moment decades ago when he first learned that his good Christian wife was actually the world’s worst heretic! And he has opened up gradually to the possibility that what I have been learning since the day we were married, and what I now have the joy of teaching, might just possibly be right. I think I have helped him get past the terror that Christianity inspires in its followers. I urge him just to be open-minded whenever he makes his transition, and follow his mother when she appears, and he will be fine. But still, he hedges his bets. And I love him all the more for including me in his just-in-case Catholic Mass celebrations!

 

If you hear the song I sing, You will understand (Listen!)
You hold the key to love and fear, All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both. It’s there at your command.
C’mon people now, Smile on your brother!
Ev’rybody get together, Try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), “GetTogether” by The Youngbloods (1967)

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