Author: Roberta Grimes

Loving (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Some may come and some may go. He will surely pass.
When the one that left us here returns for us at last.
We are but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass.
Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
 -Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)

Strictly following the Gospel teachings of Jesus raises our personal consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, with the goal of achieving the spiritual level of the kingdom of God while we are still on earth. Yet as simple as those teachings are, and never mind the fact that Jesus insists that following His teachings is essential, the religion that bears the Lord’s name has for almost two thousand years ignored what He said and considered Him to be nothing more than a human sacrifice. And this is true, even though He makes such an emphatic point of the fact that if we don’t do what He tells us to do, we have no right to call ourselves His followers. He says, “If you love Me, you will keep My commandments” (JN 14:15). “He who has My commandments and keeps them is the one who loves Me; and he who loves Me will be loved by My Father, and I will love him and will disclose Myself to him” (JN 14:21). And even, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. He who does not love Me does not keep My word. And the word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me!” (JN 14:23-24).

So we have been trying here, insofar as we can, to understand the peculiar love that Jesus taught. As we said last week, in Chapter Fifteen of A Course in Miracles Jesus leads us to renounce all “special” relationships so we can discover the only genuine love at the center of the heart of God. This week, in Chapter 24 of the Course He teaches us to forgive universally because our brother is forever holy. No matter how flawed someone might seem when we look at him through the lens of our special hatreds, he is God’s stainless and eternally perfect Son. When you are seeing your brother truly, then your love for everyone will be pure and from the heart. Your forgiveness of everyone, no matter what they do, will be automatic and joyous. This chapter is easier to shorten than was the crucial chapter that we read last week; and the under-linings are my own.

ACIM Text Chapter 24: The Goal of Specialness
VI. Salvation from Fear

1. Before your brother’s holiness the world is still, and peace descends on it in gentleness and blessing so complete that no  trace of conflict still remains to haunt you in the darkness of the night. ²He is your savior from the dreams of fear ….

3. Nothing is lost to you in all the universe. ²Nothing that God created has He failed to lay before you lovingly, as yours forever. ³And no Thought within His Mind is absent from your own. ⁴It is His Will you share His Love for you, and look upon yourself as lovingly as He conceived of you before the world began, and as He knows you still. ⁵God changes not His Mind about His Son with passing circumstance which has no meaning in eternity where He abides, and you with Him. ⁶Your brother is as He created him. ⁷And it is this that saves you from a world that He created not.

4. Forget not that the healing of God’s Son is all the world is for. ²That is the only purpose the Holy Spirit sees in it, and thus the only one it has. ³Until you see the healing of the Son as all you wish to be accomplished by the world, by time and all appearances, you will not know the Father nor yourself. ⁴For you will use the world for what is not its purpose, and will not escape its laws of violence and death. ⁵Yet it is given you to be beyond its laws in all respects, in every way and every circumstance….

5. Look on your brother, and behold in him the whole reversal of the laws that seem to rule this world. ²See in his freedom yours, for such it is. ³Let not his specialness obscure the truth in him, for not one law of death you bind him to will you escape. ⁴And not one sin you see in him but keeps you both in hell. ⁵Yet will his perfect sinlessness release you both, for holiness is quite impartial, with one judgment made for all it looks upon. ⁶And that is made, not of itself, but through the Voice that speaks for God in everything that lives and shares His Being….

7. Choose, then, his body or his holiness as what you want to see, and which you choose is yours to look upon. ²Yet will you choose in countless situations, and through time that seems to have no end, until the truth be your decision. ³For eternity is not regained by still one more denial of Christ in him. ⁴And where is your salvation, if he is but a body? ⁵Where is your peace but in his holiness? ⁶….

8.Your brother’s holiness is sacrament and benediction unto you. ²His errors cannot withhold God’s blessing from himself, nor you who see him truly. ³His mistakes can cause delay, which it is given you to take from him, that both may end a journey that has never begun, and needs no end. ⁴What never was is not a part of you. ⁵Yet you will think it is, until you realize that it is not a part of him who stands beside you. ⁶He is the mirror of yourself, wherein you see the judgment you have laid on both of you. ⁷The Christ in you beholds his holiness. ⁸Your specialness looks on his body and beholds him not….

11. Specialness is the function that you gave yourself. ²It stands for you alone, as self-created, self-maintained, in need of nothing, and unjoined with anything beyond the body. ³In its eyes you are a separate universe, with all the power to hold itself complete within itself, with every entry shut against intrusion, and every window barred against the light. ⁴Always attacked and always furious, with anger always fully justified, you have pursued this goal with vigilance you never thought to yield, and effort that you never thought to cease. ⁵And all this grim determination was for this; you wanted specialness to be the truth….

13. You who believe it easier to see your brother’s body than his holiness, be sure you understand what made this judgment.²Here is the voice of specialness heard clearly, judging against the Christ and setting forth for you the purpose that you can attain, and what you cannot do. ³Forget not that this judgment must apply to what you do with it as your ally. ⁴For what you do through Christ it does not know. ⁵To Him this judgment makes no sense at all, for only what His Father wills is possible, and there is no alternative for Him to see. ⁶Out of His lack of conflict comes your peace. ⁷And from His purpose comes the means for effortless accomplishment and rest.  (ACIM, T-24.VI.1:1–13:7)

My guide, Thomas, insisted in 2011 that I learn to use the Gospel teachings of Jesus to raise my personal consciousness vibration. Those teachings released me from lifelong fears and rages to such an amazing extent that at his insistence in 2016 we wrote The Fun of Growing Forever. The Lord’s teachings work fast and amazingly well! But I was troubled by the fact that we had based so much of that book on our experiment with one flawed individual. So then Thomas set out to conduct for me a more dramatic experiment of his own.

With his encouragement, six years ago I began a business venture with someone I came to love and trust as a very dear friend. I had considerable savings intended for the advancement of this work of enlightening the world, and as I was investing in a project with her that looked solid, I kept checking with Thomas. He always said, “It will be fine.” But then in early May my friend was indicted for having defrauded a great many people. My experience through this has been the interesting part. At the moment I learned of her arrest, Thomas swooped in and enveloped me in a cocoon of warm light. It was an astonishing feeling! Still, I ranted at him. How could he have let this happen? Immediately and fiercely he said:

  • “You had too much money. This work is God’s. The money was making you think you could buy its success. Now you will listen.” And,
  • “You can’t teach forgiveness unless you have something big to forgive.” I told him that was a crock of crap! He said then, “It could have been the murder of one of your family members. We thought this was better.” (He did say that! Word for word.)

He told me I would be telling this story often. In the heat of my first indignation toward him I said, “Never!” But immediately I realized I had already forgiven the greatest wrong ever done to me. And now I am already telling the story, barely two months after my friend’s arrest. This woman who stole from me an unimaginable sum of money is my holy brother, the beloved Son of God, and I will not see her as less because if I do that I am judging against the Christ. Now I understand what He meant when He said, “But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41). And, “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). Jesus wasn’t telling us to grit our teeth and submit to the bad behavior of others. No, he was telling us that as we grow spiritually, we will start to think and behave this way as a natural fruit of our vastly expanded spiritual horizon. This at last is the love that Jesus taught! Without His teaching, we would let the occasional bad behavior of others destroy our peace and create an ever wider chasm between us and God. If I hadn’t used His teachings to raise my personal consciousness vibration, I would have let this wound inflicted on me by someone I had loved and trusted trouble my peace forevermore! Instead, I knew from the moment it happened that in fact I had suffered no actual wound. And all I ever have felt since that day is the triumphant joy of my more perfect understanding.

I sought my soul,
But my soul I could not see.
I sought my God,
But my God eluded me.
I sought my brother,
And I found all three.
–William Blake (1757-1827)

Loving (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

If you hear the song I sing, you will understand.
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.
Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)

It is difficult for us to comprehend the kind of love that Jesus taught. He says, If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? For even sinners love those who love them (LK 11:32). Instead of loving so narrowly, the Lord insists that we must “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men (LK 6:35). We read these words, and we are sure that Jesus cannot possibly mean them literally! Oh sure, God can love God’s enemies! God can lend, and then can forgive when the crook absconds with God’s savings. But you and I are not God! How does all this flowery high-mindedness apply to us?

We have struggled in this space to try to understand the peculiar love that Jesus taught. A love that is meant to especially focus on our enemies? We have pointed out that ancient Greek, the language in which the Lord’s Aramaic words were written down and from which they were later translated into modern languages, has at least eight words for love. But if we take the Lord’s words seriously, we realize that even agape – “love for everyone” – is not a sufficiently radical concept to satisfy what the Lord is actually saying. For one thing, Jesus insists that  our loving in the way that He loves comes before every other kind of love, and even before our love for those closest to us. It is the highest and purest form of love! He says, “He who loves father or mother more than Me is not worthy of Me; and he who loves son or daughter more than Me is not worthy of Me” (MT 10:37).

Read those last words again. If we are being honest, I think we must conclude that Jesus isn’t talking about any of the kinds of love that you and I ever have imagined. Instead, what Jesus means by “love” is the absolute transformation of our minds. When He talks about love and forgiveness, he is talking about the fruits of our minds’ transformations as we have used the Lord’s teachings to effect those transformations. Every Christian denomination tells us to try to love and forgive without first using the Lord’s teachings to transform our minds, which is something like telling us to play real piano music the first time we ever touch a keyboard. Jesus said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). And it turns out that our following those teachings matters a great deal more than any Christian leader ever has imagined!

 A Course in Miracles calls the kinds of love we have for friends and family members “special loves.” And it tells us that “special loves” are as spiritually negative as are “special hates.” In fact, as you will see, in this earthly illusion special loves are related to fear and hatred! They give us a way to continue to hide from the real love to which the Lord is calling us. Apparently this is what Jesus was trying to say in the Gospels in just a few words, but we never really grasped what He meant. So He said it again in the nineteen-sixties, and in profound detail! I can see no way to shorten or to summarize this teaching, so I apologize for the fact that this post is longer than usual. Please read what follows with reverence. Unlike the Gospel words of Jesus, which were part of an oral history that later went through two religion-based translations, this passage from A Course in Miracles is a literal, word-for-word message from Jesus, Who is an aspect of the Godhead Itself. God is speaking here directly! And to this day, I find it impossible to read to the end of what follows without being brought to tears. The boundlessness of the pure love of God for you in particular is beyond our ability to fathom it.

A Course in Miracles Chapter 16: The Forgiveness of Illusions
The Illusion and the Reality of Love

1. Be not afraid to look upon the special hate relationship, for freedom lies in looking at it. ²It would be impossible not to know the meaning of love, except for this. ³For the special love relationship, in which the meaning of love is hidden, is undertaken solely to offset the hate, but not to let it go. ⁴Your salvation will rise clearly before your open eyes as you look on this. ⁵You cannot limit hate. ⁶The special love relationship will not offset it, but will merely drive it underground and out of sight. ⁷It is essential to bring it into sight, and to make no attempt to hide it. ⁸For it is the attempt to balance hate with love that makes love meaningless to you. ⁹The extent of the split that lies in this you do not realize. ¹⁰And until you do, the split will remain unrecognized, and therefore unhealed.

2. The symbols of hate against the symbols of love play out a conflict that does not exist. ²For symbols stand for something else, and the symbol of love is without meaning if love is everything. ³You will go through this last undoing quite unharmed, and will at last emerge as yourself. ⁴This is the last step in the readiness for God. ⁵Be not unwilling now; you are too near, and you will cross the bridge in perfect safety, translated quietly from war to peace. ⁶For the illusion of love will never satisfy, but its reality, which awaits you on the other side, will give you everything.

3. The special love relationship is an attempt to limit the destructive effects of hate by finding a haven in the storm of guilt. ²It makes no attempt to rise above the storm, into the sunlight. ³On the contrary, it emphasizes the guilt outside the haven by attempting to build barricades against it, and keep within them. ⁴The special love relationship is not perceived as a value in itself, but as a place of safety from which hatred is split off and kept apart. ⁵The special love partner is acceptable only as long as he serves this purpose. ⁶Hatred can enter, and indeed is welcome in some aspects of the relationship, but it is still held together by the illusion of love. ⁷If the illusion goes, the relationship is broken or becomes unsatisfying on the grounds of disillusionment.

4. Love is not an illusion. ²It is a fact. ³Where disillusionment is possible, there was not love but hate. ⁴For hate is an illusion, and what can change was never love. ⁵It is sure that those who select certain ones as partners in any aspect of living, and use them for any purpose which they would not share with others, are trying to live with guilt rather than die of it. ⁶This is the choice they see. ⁷And love, to them, is only an escape from death. ⁸They seek it desperately, but not in the peace in which it would gladly come quietly to them. ⁹And when they find the fear of death is still upon them, the love relationship loses the illusion that it is what it is not. ¹⁰When the barricades against it are broken, fear rushes in and hatred triumphs.

5. There are no triumphs of love. ²Only hate is at all concerned with the “triumph of love.” ³The illusion of love can triumph over the illusion of hate, but always at the price of making both illusions. ⁴As long as the illusion of hatred lasts, so long will love be an illusion to you. ⁵And then the only choice remaining possible is which illusion you prefer. ⁶There is no conflict in the choice between truth and illusion. ⁷Seen in these terms, no one would hesitate. ⁸But conflict enters the instant the choice seems to be one between illusions, but this choice does not matter. ⁹Where one choice is as dangerous as the other, the decision must be one of despair.

6. Your task is not to seek for love, but merely to seek and find all of the barriers within yourself that you have built against it. ²It is not necessary to seek for what is true, but it is necessary to seek for what is false. ³Every illusion is one of fear, whatever form it takes. ⁴And the attempt to escape from one illusion into another must fail. ⁵If you seek love outside yourself you can be certain that you perceive hatred within, and are afraid of it. ⁶Yet peace will never come from the illusion of love, but only from its reality.

7. Recognize this, for it is true, and truth must be recognized if it is to be distinguished from illusion: The special love relationship is an attempt to bring love into separation. ²And, as such, it is nothing more than an attempt to bring love into fear, and make it real in fear. ³In fundamental violation of love’s one condition, the special love relationship would accomplish the impossible. ⁴How but in illusion could this be done? ⁵It is essential that we look very closely at exactly what it is you think you can do to solve the dilemma which seems very real to you, but which does not exist. ⁶You have come close to truth, and only this stands between you and the bridge that leads you into it.

8. Heaven waits silently, and your creations are holding out their hands to help you cross and welcome them. ²For it is they you seek. ³You seek but for your own completion, and it is they who render you complete. ⁴The special love relationship is but a shabby substitute for what makes you whole in truth, not in illusion. ⁵Your relationship with them is without guilt, and this enables you to look on all your brothers with gratitude, because your creations were created in union with them. ⁶Acceptance of your creations is the acceptance of the Oneness of creation, without which you could never be complete. ⁷No specialness can offer you what God has given, and what you are joined with Him in giving.

9. Across the bridge is your completion, for you will be wholly in God, willing for nothing special, but only to be wholly like to Him, completing Him by your completion. ²Fear not to cross to the abode of peace and perfect holiness. ³Only there is the completion of God and of His Son established forever. ⁴Seek not for this in the bleak world of illusion, where nothing is certain and where everything fails to satisfy. ⁵In the Name of God, be wholly willing to abandon all illusions. ⁶In any relationship in which you are wholly willing to accept completion, and only this, there is God completed, and His Son with Him.

10. The bridge that leads to union in yourself must lead to knowledge, for it was built with God beside you, and will lead you straight to Him where your completion rests, wholly compatible with His. ²Every illusion you accept into your mind by judging it to be attainable removes your own sense of completion, and thus denies the Wholeness of your Father. ³Every fantasy, be it of love or hate, deprives you of knowledge for fantasies are the veil behind which truth is hidden. ⁴To lift the veil that seems so dark and heavy, it is only needful to value truth beyond all fantasy, and to be entirely unwilling to settle for illusion in place of truth.

11. Would you not go through fear to love? ²For such the journey seems to be. ³Love calls, but hate would have you stay. ⁴Hear not the call of hate, and see no fantasies. ⁵For your completion lies in truth, and nowhere else. ⁶See in the call of hate, and in every fantasy that rises to delay you, but the call for help that rises ceaselessly from you to your Creator. ⁷Would He not answer you whose completion is His? ⁸He loves you, wholly without illusion, as you must love. ⁹For love is wholly without illusion, and therefore wholly without fear. ¹⁰Whom God remembers must be whole. ¹¹And God has never forgotten what makes Him whole. ¹²In your completion lie the memory of His Wholeness and His gratitude to you for His completion. ¹³In His link with you lie both His inability to forget and your ability to remember. ¹⁴In Him are joined your willingness to love and all the Love of God, Who forgot you not.

12. Your Father can no more forget the truth in you than you can fail to remember it. ²The Holy Spirit is the Bridge to Him, made from your willingness to unite with Him and created by His joy in union with you. ³The journey that seemed endless is almost complete, for what is endless is very near. ⁴You have almost recognized it. ⁵Turn with me firmly away from all illusions now, and let nothing stand in the way of truth. ⁶We will take the last useless journey away from truth together, and then together we go straight to God, in joyous answer to His Call for His completion.

13. If special relationships of any kind would hinder God’s completion, can they have any value to you? ²What would interfere with God must interfere with you. ³Only in time does interference in God’s completion seem to be possible. ⁴The bridge that He would carry you across lifts you from time into eternity. ⁵Waken from time, and answer fearlessly the Call of Him Who gave eternity to you in your creation. ⁶On this side of the bridge to timelessness you understand nothing. ⁷But as you step lightly across it, upheld by timelessness, you are directed straight to the Heart of God. ⁸At its center, and only there, you are safe forever, because you are complete forever. ⁹There is no veil the Love of God in us together cannot lift. ¹⁰The way to truth is open. ¹¹Follow it with me.  (ACIM, T-16.IV.1:1–13:11)

Please read this passage from A Course in Miracles a few times this week. Inhabit it. Try to make it your own. Then next week we’ll use it to seek a better understanding of the perfect love that Jesus taught.

 

Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)

Fearless

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,
Come on people now. Smile on your brother!
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)

 THE ONLY THING WE HAVE TO FEAR IS FEAR ITSELF

Those words are more than a political slogan. In truth, they are the one absolutely fundamental fact of human existence. We should recite them daily. Perhaps use them instead of just saying “hello” to greet our friends, and cross-stitch and hang them on our bedroom wall so they are the first words we will see each morning and the last we’ll see at night. “You are a powerful, eternal being. You never began, and you never will end.” My variation on those most important words is part of the signoff from my Seek Reality podcast each week. And once you have internalized the encouragement of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and its correlate truth that I share with you, the day will come when you have grown past your human tendency to manufacture fears. You will be fearless. And you will be empowered!

The fact that our egos easily manufacture fears was at one point essential to human survival. We have talked here about the fact that the ego is not part of our eternal minds, but rather it is an artifact of our material bodies whose primary purpose is to preserve our bodies’ lives. The ego is a literal furnace of fear! We were prey animals for most of the two hundred thousand years of our existence, so our ability to react with instant terror to anything that was at all unusual was crucial. We are alpha predators now, but still ghost stories and horror movies can produce in us a thrill of fight-or-flight terror. Even though there is no actual threat. And in just the same way, every fear in our lives – from financial worries through supernatural terrors – is ego-manufactured and utterly bogus. Our task now is not to fight our fears, but rather it is to teach our minds to stop reacting to the ego’s alarms. As is true of anger, fear is an ego-manufactured reaction that can be short-circuited to the point where your ego will no longer react with fear to any kind of threat. And simply avoiding being afraid is a whole lot easier than it is to keep reacting to irrational fears the same way primitive people reacted to real dangers.

Jesus told us this, although what we have preserved in the Gospels is somewhat obscure. Of course, we cannot now know all of what He said in His more than three years of public teaching, and it may well be that those who heard Him speak considered fear to be such a normal reaction that they ignored some of what He said about it. But as we read His words now, we can see that He was impatient with the people around Him who reacted with fear to anything. For example, when a storm rocked their little boat and His terrified disciples awakened Him, He said, “Why are you afraid, you men of little faith?” Then He got up and rebuked the winds and sea, and everything became perfectly peaceful (MT 8:25-27).

He also tried to help us understand that we really have nothing to fear, since we are infinitely precious to God. He said, “Are not five sparrows sold for two cents? Yet not one of them is forgotten before God. Indeed, the very hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not fear; you are more valuable than many sparrows (LK 12:6-7). And he told us not to worry about a lack of basic things, like having clothing or enough to eat. He said, “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 12:31-32). When we understand that fear is the opposite of love, and that it was therefore the Lord’s intention to move us away from fear so we will be empowered to love more perfectly, we can see His efforts in His Gospel words.

The Lord speaks about fear more definitively in His Introduction to A Course in Miracles. The Course was channeled in the late nineteen-sixties by a team of advanced beings that reportedly Jesus led. Thomas tells me that since humankind had been ignoring His Gospel teachings in favor of man-made Christian dogmas, it was the Lord’s intention to give us the same message at a more advanced level. And the Course is advanced, all right! It flies so far over our heads that few people can grasp all that it has to offer unless we read it as part of a study group. Here are its profound introductory words that came to us directly from Jesus:

This is a course in miracles. It is a required course. Only the time you take it is voluntary. Free will does not mean that you can establish the curriculum. It means only that you can elect what you want to take at a given time. The course does not aim at teaching the meaning of love, for that is beyond what can be taught. It does aim, however, at removing the blocks to the awareness of love’s presence, which is your natural inheritance. The opposite of love is fear, but what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.

This course can therefore be summed up very simply in this way:
Nothing real can be threatened.
Nothing unreal exists.
Herein lies the peace of God.
 (ACIM, T-in.1:1-2:4)

Those italicized words are as profound as anything Jesus ever says in the Gospels. It has taken me until now to realize that! A Course in Miracles is essentially a course in unwinding the ego’s power. In fact, when you do the Course with a study group you are warned that you will get to a point where your ego starts to fight back, hard! My study group called getting past that point “the extinction of the ego.” It does feel as if you have fought your ego and won; but rather than extinction, it is only the moment when you teach your ego that you are its boss.

Many students consider the Course’s central “miracle” to be forgiveness, but I realize only now that – just as is true of the Lord’s Gospel words – the entire subtext of the Course is freedom from fear. Whenever Jesus talks about love, that is really what He is saying. When He talks about forgiveness, that also is what He is saying! As He says just above in the Introduction to His entire Course in Miracles, “what is all-encompassing can have no opposite.”

Once you are only love, you will never again in your life be angry or fearful or in any way negative about anything!

When I told you I am only now realizing that the teaching of Jesus about love which is the basis of both the Gospels and A Course in Miracles is in fact not just one miracle, but two – it is both forgiveness and an absolute freedom from fear – I meant that literally. I first saw it only this past Friday. Thomas had taught me to stop being afraid without my ever realizing that our need to vanquish fear is in itself a central part of the Lord’s miraculous message!

What my guide did to prepare me to vanquish fear forevermore was something that you ought to begin to do for yourself. And right away:

  • Stop all television, fear-based movies, and video games. I have never been a gamer, but I stopped polluting my mind with recreational fears and panic-based news soon after the start of this century. Now I can’t even stand to be in a room where a TV is turned on!
  • Free yourself from religious fears. My husband remains a committed Catholic, but soon after I gave up television I found that I could no longer enter a church without having deeply fear-based Christian dogmas troubling my mind. I know there is no hell. There is nothing to fear! But still, being inside a church remains a fear-based trigger.
  • Free yourself from political fears. Especially in the United States, fear is the basis of politics. At this point I don’t think you even can discuss preferring one political party over another without polluting your mind with fears. So just say something like, “May the best person of any gender win.” And opt out. No matter what the result may be, all of it is but a moment’s sunlight, fading in the grass. Ultimately it doesn’t matter. And anyway, your personal spiritual growth comes first!
  • Convince yourself that your life is eternal. I know of no way to do this except through persistent study of all the afterlife evidence. You are going to have to wallow in it! But the good news is that once you have really internalized the evidence, you will never again fear anything.

Once you have taken these four steps, and as you work on learning complete forgiveness, your personal consciousness vibration will begin to rise naturally away from fear and toward more perfect love. And to answer the question that we asked last week, raising your personal vibration is the only way to really protect yourself against negative entities! Even if you are not yet at an above-average level of spiritual development, no non-material being can affect you unless you allow that being to make you afraid. It will feed on your fear, which will make it stronger; and meanwhile, the fear it has inspired in you will in itself make you vulnerable to negative influences. It’s a vicious and malevolent cycle, and the only way to break it is to retrain your mind to ignore the frantic efforts of your ego to make you angry and to make you afraid. When you have learned to short-circuit your automatic reaction to all your ego’s shrieking, you can get to the point where you never will feel fear or anger, ever again in your life.

And living your life in that beautiful place will feel wonderful! The reduction in stress, the increase in joy, and the freedom to love every other human being in the selfless and abundant way that is the natural impulse that lies beneath our hatreds and fears is what all of us came to earth to find! We aren’t there quite yet. But next week we will talk about how we will recognize the moment when perfect love has at last crowded out all of its illusory opposites….

Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
Come on people now, smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, try to love one another right now.
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)

 

Devilish

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers, on to victory!
Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices, loud your anthems raise!
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1865)

There is no powerful evil entity in opposition to God. It doesn’t matter whether you call him Satan, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Mephistopheles, or perhaps you just call him the plain ol’ devil. Unlike the Godhead, he does not and cannot exist in any way that matters. And this is true, even despite the fact that we can trace the notion of powerful devils back as far as there are ancient gods, and Wikipedia offers us more than seventy names for the Ultimate Bad Guy.

You can have no idea of just how much I didn’t want to talk about this! I have seen too much. Ghastly possessions and hauntings. I know the power that evil entities can have over our minds if we allow them in, so emphatically I will never use a Ouija board. I won’t watch a movie about evil, nor will I casually utter Satan’s name. So when Thomas first proposed this topic, my immediate reaction was, “Hard pass on that!” Who wants to offend the devil by announcing the fact that he cannot exist? But Thomas sensibly reminded me that for us to fear evil entities only further empowers them. He insists it is time that we trust God enough to give to evil no quarter. So, here goes!

Those that we used to think were dead confirm that the Godhead has no powerful opposition. They also tell us that there is no hell beyond the gloomy outer darkness that Jesus talks about, and no judgment by anyone but ourselves. This testimony from those who really know the truth is abundant, and it is comforting; but it is only as we come to better understand what we might call the physics of the greater reality that we begin to see why this must be so. We will need a quickie physics course here if you want to understand why a powerful devil is as absurd an idea as is the notion of dry liquids or burning ice.

What we refer to as “the greater reality” is simply understood to be all that exists. It is probably not really all that exists, but it is all that we have any way to access. The simplest way to envision the greater reality is as theoretical physicists do (although they have no idea that is what they are doing!). They calculate by the motion of planets and the universe’s speed of expansion that about 27% of what exists is what they call “dark matter,” and 68% is what they call “dark energy.” It’s dark because it won’t react with photons of light, so therefore we know that it cannot be particle-based matter or its correlate energy.

Less than five percent of what exists is the traditional matter that makes up this material universe, while the rest is the non-material aspect of the greater reality. So you see, the greater reality is twenty times the size of this material universe! Yet its footprint seems to be no greater than whatever footprint the material universe occupies. It is composed of many different dimensions, just as all the hundreds of TV channels are located together in your living room and separated only by their vibratory rates. Your TV can tune to the energy of any one channel and pick up a picture; and in just the same way, the greater reality is an energy spectrum all located right where we are. Aspects of it are solid, but they are not made of particulate matter. In fact, the entire greater reality beyond this universe is both sizeless and timeless. At this moment, your mind is tuned to that body on this material level of reality. When you sleep, your mind frequently tunes to a higher vibratory rate and you travel in one of the dimensions of the non-material astral plane. When you die, your mind will tune to the Summerland levels of the afterlife portion of the astral plane, and you will be in actual heaven! Do you see how the greater reality works?

It can be so simple because all that exists is Mind. All of our minds together, the living as well as those not now in bodies, are all together one vast, eternal Mind that is governed by the Godhead that continuously manifests what we think that we are seeing around us. Our better understanding of how good and evil work comes from our better understanding of the primary creative force that we refer to as Mind. Or we might as easily call it Consciousness. Briefly:

  • The only thing that independently exists is what we experience in a dim way as Consciousness.
  • Consciousness is an energy, and as such it vibrates.
  • Consciousness energy is governed by and experienced as what we call emotion.
  • At its highest vibratory rate, Consciousness is perfect love; while at its lowest it is fear, hatred, rage, and other ishy emotions.
  • At its highest vibration, Consciousness is infinitely powerful; while at its lowest, it has no power at all.

So perfect love is infinitely powerful, while abject fear and evil has no power. Wow, how corny that sounds! But it is beautifully true, nonetheless. In the battle between good and evil, love wins! And understanding this quick course in spiritual physics will help you to much better see how evil actually works in the world.

While there is no powerful devil to be blamed for it, there is for certain a lot of evil. There is so much evil, and it is often so insidious and so diabolical, that it is easy to see where the notion of a Big Bad Guy comes from. It is easy to see, too, how primitive people might have conceived of barbaric gods that required infant sacrifices and other ghastly gifts that would mollify them and make them like us better. Evil is indeed loose in the world! So, where does all of it come from?

The Dead Who Have Not Yet Transitioned

We are told by those that we used to think were dead that close to 25% of those who die on earth don’t transition right away. Some die in an unplanned accident, some are afraid of hell, some are attracted to a fake version of what they expect heaven to be, and some simply get distracted at the wrong time and lose sight of the loved ones who have come to take them home. Reportedly most of these folks will be rescued in short order, but there is one class of uncompleted deaths that amounts to the worst possible form of environmental pollution. People who are executed or murdered and people who die in battle generally die at the height of some combination of fear and rage; and in that emotional state they are likely to remain. Unavoidably, they pollute the one Mind of which each of us is a part, and some become demons and actively mess with living people’s minds.

Demons

A demon is a low-vibration being that lacks a material body. Some are not human, but most of them are apparently dead people who never transitioned; and their problem is that they must create in us and then consume human fear in order to survive at all. (I still have no idea why this is true.) During the decades when I was reading the Bible nightly, one thing that came to bother me was the claim that Jesus was casting out demons. I thought that had to be fiction! I was sure there were no demons, yet they are mentioned 18 times in the Gospel of Matthew, 17 times in Mark, and an amazing 24 times in Luke. For example, “He was met by a man from the city who was possessed with demons; and who had not put on any clothing for a long time, and was not living in a house, but in the tombs. Seeing Jesus, he cried out and fell before Him, and said in a loud voice, ‘What business do we have with each other, Jesus, Son of the Most High God? I beg You, do not torment me.’ For He had commanded the unclean spirit to come out of the man. For it had seized him many times; and he was bound with chains and shackles and kept under guard, and yet he would break his bonds and be driven by the demon into the desert. And Jesus asked him, “What is your name?” And he said, “Legion,” for many demons had entered him. … Now there was a herd of many swine feeding there on the mountain; and the demons implored Him to permit them to enter the swine. And He gave them permission. And the demons came out of the man and entered the swine; and the herd rushed down the steep bank into the lake and was drowned. When the herdsmen saw what had happened, they ran away and reported it in the city and out in the country.  The people went out to see what had happened; and they came to Jesus, and found the man from whom the demons had gone out, sitting down at the feet of Jesus, clothed and in his right mind; and they became frightened” (LK 8:27-35).

I now realize that indeed there are troublesome demons! Some are evil, but most are simply earthbound. And they can indeed be “cast out.” Dr. Allan L. Botkin uses induced after death communication protocols to free Vietnam War veterans and others from the spirits of possessing victims of wars, and he teaches his protocols to other therapists. Our dear friend Dr. R. Craig Hogan teaches a similar technique. And there is a lot of evidence that addicts of all kinds are addicted in part because deceased addicts have possessed their bodies and minds. I am coming to suspect that in a more enlightened age, the techniques once used by Jesus and now used by practitioners like Dr. Allan Botkin will be broadly seen as a shortcut way to heal any number of human ills.

Living People

Despite the theories of scientists who hold the mistaken notion that the mind is somehow generated by the brain, people who are now in bodies do have free will. Having the power to choose to do something negative and evil is an essential part of our eventually having the unrestricted power to do what is loving and good. And since our minds are all part of one universal Mind, those who individually choose fear, hatred, and rage can do a disproportionate amount of harm.

So there doesn’t need to be any organized Satan for evil to be loose in the world. Demons often act together, and if you think that you are interacting with Satan, you can bring a flood of awful gremlins into your life that can be almost impossible to evict. They have very limited power, but they can mess up your life. So, how can you protect yourself from evil as you seek to grow spiritually? We’ll talk about that next week….

 

Onward, then, ye people, join our happy throng,
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song;
Glory, laud, and honor, unto Christ the King;
This thro’ countless ages men and angels sing.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1865)

 

Substitutionary Atonement

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Onward, Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before!
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, see his banner go!
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1865)

Christianity itself is the central obstacle to the advancement of Jesus in the modern world. Jesus is an extraordinary historical figure! His is the only documented instance where an aspect of the genuine Godhead lived among us as a human being in order to better understand what it is to experience human life so He could teach us more clearly how to use our lives to achieve greater spiritual growth. The more we learn about the life of Jesus, the more gigantic that life becomes! God chose to be born as a human being. God lived among people as one of us. There never has happened, before or since, an event so extraordinary, so flat-out cosmic.

Please pause now and really think about this. As you think, you will find that worlds of amazing and empowering information about what God really is, what you and I are, and the depth and height of God’s perfect love will dawn in you, and will uplift and delight you. We aren’t talking about just some religious ideas! Jesus is a genuine historical figure. There is in fact a Collective of Perfected Beings that continuously manifests what we perceive as reality. And Jesus is of the highest aspect of that Godhead. All of this is TRUE. God chose to be born on earth out of love for each of us individually. You can sit like the Buddha in lotus position and contemplate this simple set of facts, and your heart will swell with joy. The name of Jesus has been widely known for almost two thousand years, but it is only now that we understand enough of what actually is going on to be able to start to appreciate what a truly gigantic figure He is!

But even to this day, very few people have any awareness of the genuine Jesus. He is silenced and belittled by the very people who claim to most revere Him. The Christian religion doesn’t teach what Jesus taught, except in vague and general terms; but instead, it teaches a barbaric doctrine that is the opposite of what Jesus taught, and also the opposite of everything that we now know about the Godhead. That brutal doctrine is the reason why our churches are filled with instruments of torture, why so many Christians are afraid of death, and why the most devout Christians so often seem to be truly unpleasant people, insular and judgmental of others. As Mahatma Gandhi said, “I like your Christ. I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ.”

Christian scholars refer to that despicable core Christian doctrine as “substitutionary atonement.” It is the primary teaching of the Christian religion, this notion that Jesus came to sacrifice Himself to God on a cross as a substitute for us, and His sacrifice means that if we are Christians we can escape God’s judgment and condemnation. Without the Lord’s sacrificial death, God would not forgive us even for Adam’s sin, and God certainly wouldn’t forgive us for our own sins. Incredibly, that barbaric set of beliefs is the core and heart of the religion that actually was named for Jesus! He told us two thousand years ago that the genuine God is perfect love, but even today the Christian God continues to demand that we claim participation in the torture and murder of God’s own Son or God will send us straight to hell. Please pause now and think about this. Was there ever a more petty, sadistic, and venal human-made idea than that? Was there ever any idea that more completely went against the teachings of the Lord Jesus Christ than the notion that God needs to see Him murdered before God can forgive us for being human?

Christian theologians have tried in various ways to put lipstick on this pig of an idea. Some have turned the study of the Gospels into a mere technical study of their words, with little effort made to use those words to better understand the events of that truly remarkable life that God spent on earth. Others have celebrated the concept of substitutionary atonement as the culmination of Old Testament law, and  challenged squeamish modern Christians to get past the off-putting ickiness of it and embrace it as God’s most powerful gift. But most Christians just try to accept it without having to think too much about it. Jesus is each Christian’s get-out-of-hell-free card. To question that is to risk damnation, so anyone who questions it must be cast away from Christian society and ignored.

I have heard from many hundreds of lapsed Christians over the past decade. Most of them were in their fifties or older, many had been lifelong members of one of the primary Christian denominations, and nearly all of them had fallen away from church attendance for one main reason. They no longer found the primary Christian teachings to be believable. That image of God as a loving Father Who nevertheless wants to watch His Son being tortured and murdered may have made sense to more primitive people. But it makes no sense whatsoever now.

And it is all bogus, anyway. It’s a set of entirely human-made notions, with no connection to the genuine Godhead. Christianity features the patriarchal and cranky human-made God of the Hebrew Old Testament, which bears not even a passing resemblance to our perfectly loving Godhead. And the Christian dogma of substitutionary atonement is solidly rooted in the basic Old Testament concept of providing sin offerings so the Hebrew God will forgive us for our shortcomings (see, e.g., Lev 4&5 and Num 6). We know where it comes from! And more to the point, we know that it is anathema to the glorious God on earth Who is Jesus the Christ. Let’s see how the basic Christian teachings that are attendant on substitutionary atonement directly contradict the words of Jesus. Christianity teaches that:

  • We are all fallen and sinful by nature. Nearly all versions of Christianity teach that every human being inherits Adam’s sin that was committed when he disobeyed God and ate that dastardly apple. But Jesus Himself was so casual about sin that we have speculated here that He might in fact have been trying to wean us from the notion of sin altogether, although with Temple spies so often nearby He couldn’t say that plainly. Jesus freely forgave sins as He healed people (see MT 9:2-7), dined and spent time with sinners (MT 9:11), was casual about breaking religious rules (MK 2:23-28), and informed us that His ministry was actually primarily to sinners (LK 5:32).
  • God judges us for our sins. If God doesn’t judge us, then the whole notion that God needs a sacrifice in order to forgive us goes right out the window. And in fact, Jesus tells us directly that God doesn’t judge us. He says, “For not even the Father judges anyone” (JN 5:22). This statement from the Lord is amply confirmed by the testimony of the not-really-dead; and since it has always been in the Gospel of John, the whole bogus idea of substitutionary atonement never should have gotten started in the first place. Sadly, though, no such luck.
  • Without the sacrifice of Jesus, we would go to hell. It is a plain truth known and verified now in abundant ways that there is no fiery hell, and no eternal damnation. Case closed!

There is no justification whatsoever for any professed Christian to continue to believe that “Jesus died for our sins.” Or needed to. That may have made perfect sense to iron-age primitives who worshiped a human-made and human-shaped God, and it might have made at least a modicum of sense to Medieval monkish scholars who had no way to get better information. But now it makes no sense at all. Christians can justify substitutionary atonement only for the sake of Christianity’s longstanding tradition. And what would Jesus have to say about that?

“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 heart is far away from Me. But in vain do they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (15:3, 7-9). Ouch.

You cannot objectively sit down and read the four canonical Gospels without realizing that Jesus was trying to wean us from outmoded religious ideas and help us to begin a new and more intimate relationship with Spirit. What else can He have meant when 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). I think it even can be argued that He was trying to abolish the idea of religions as outmoded by His Gospel teachings, but we needn’t go that far to see that He was trying to do some religious housecleaning! And He plainly considered His Gospel teachings – the same teachings that Christians now largely ignore – to have been the heart and core of His mission on earth. 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). Doesn’t it strike you now that His saying He had come to give us the “truth” that will “set you free” is rather a curious thing, if Christianity is right, and all He really was about was redeeming us from God’s judgment?

The Gospel teachings of Jesus on love and forgiveness are not just the easy platitudes that Christianity has made them out to be. When He gave us those teachings, no one could have known that we come to earth to raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, and that the Lord’s teachings are the most effective way to achieve the most rapid spiritual growth. But we know that now! And since we know that, we also now can see that the fear-based teachings of Christianity, based as they are in a false notion of God, have become the literal enemy of the genuinely saving work of Jesus as He teaches us ever more perfect love. Next week we will courageously consider the most fear-based Christian teaching of all….  

Like a mighty army moves the church of God;
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod;
We are not divided; all one body we,
One in hope and doctrine, one in charity.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1865)

The Power of Truth (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We are the world.
We are the children.
We are the ones who make a brighter day, so let’s start giving.
There’s a choice we’re making.
We’re saving our own lives!
It’s true we’ll make a better day, just you and me.
– Michael Jackson (1958-2009) & Lionel Richie, from “We Are the World” (1985)

The only way for humankind to entirely fix what is wrong with this world is to make it common knowledge now that every human life is eternal. No other attempt to repair a world gone so badly wrong would even make a dent, when compared with the transformative power of that one bit of crucial information! The truth about our eternal nature is far more than just peripheral knowledge. For everyone to know the truth right now would change everything.

 I used to wonder about this. But as I said last week, now I am certain that it is true. And the reason I am so confident is that I have been widely teaching the survival of death for more than a decade now. I have heard from many people who have described the transformative difference overcoming the fear of death has made in their lives, and I have heard from others so traumatized by Calvinism and other fear-based Christian notions that they are rather hoping their death will be extinction and not eternal hellfire! I especially recall one young man who had grown up in a fire-and-brimstone church, and now he lived in an agony of fear that the God he had learned about in church might exist, and might be gunning for him now. I laid out a reading plan for that fearful young man, and I offered to answer his questions as he learned; but he simply went away. I hear from so many people that I lost track of who he was, but fortunately about two years later he emailed me as a response to that earlier emailed reading list. And he was altogether transformed! I had suggested in my email that he keep at it because becoming certain of the truth about death could take as much as two years of study, and he was pleased to report when he emailed me back that it had taken him exactly two years. He had read not just my suggested list, but a good part of my appendix booklist besides. He told me that he knows what is going on now, he looks forward with pleasure to dying someday, and meanwhile he is dating someone and getting down to the business of living. Dear God, if I can help no one else, his email has made my whole life worthwhile!

But in fact, I have watched a great many people come to realize that their lives are eternal. This is a revelation quite different from the almost mechanical process of raising our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward ever more perfect love by applying the Gospel teachings of Jesus. And yet, the result in people’s lives and outlooks seems to be about the same. People who have learned enough about what actually is going on to become confident that death is an illusion, that God is love, and that their own lives never will end have the following characteristics:

 A Lack of Fear

It was when I lost my own fear of death that I first noticed this lovely phenomenon. Since childhood I had been afraid of the dark, to the point where I now wonder whether my fear might have begun with that sudden flash of light in my darkened bedroom at the age of eight. I recall once in college explaining my fear of the dark to some boy I was dating. I blurted to him, “There might be anything there! Or nothing there!” My fear was primitive, and it was so overwhelming that prior to my marriage I needed a night-light to sleep. Then eventually, at about age forty, I was working at my computer one evening as the room grew dark around me. I paused briefly and looked around, and I was astonished to find that the room was pitch-black but I was not afraid! After seeing this same phenomenon in others, I have come to conclude that fear of death is the mother of all fears. When you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything.

 Living in an Eternal Frame

 This term covers a cluster of characteristics. People who have internalized the certainty that they never will die begin to think in an eternal timeline. Death is going to end nothing for them! So:

  • They are no longer even vaguely sad. They lose altogether the life-sucks-then-you-die mentality that pervades so much of our culture, and in its place they develop a happiness setpoint that keeps them always cheerful. Life’s little setbacks mean nothing to them, and the big setbacks merit only a sigh. What could go wrong? You are God’s best-beloved child, and you are forever safe in everlasting arms! When it happens to you, this transformation is an exultant feeling that never altogether leaves you.
  • They are no longer grabby about getting their share. This shedding of selfish impulses happens to an astonishing degree! Most of those who truly are certain that they will live eternally actually seem to stop caring altogether about having money or having things.
  • They want to improve their own next stage. Being certain that there will be a next stage really opens up your whole horizon! Rather than wanting to buy more things, you start wanting to “store up treasures in heaven,” just as Jesus said would happen (you can see His words below). And actually, the notion of treasures in heaven turns out to be quite literally true!
  • They want to help others find what they have found. Really knowing what comes next has made such a difference in our own lives that people like Dr. R. Craig Hogan and I are thrilled to be devoting so much of our time to spreading the word about death, even into old age. And some of the people I hear from now who want me to know that they also get it will often say something like, “I’ve been telling people in my church.” Sometimes they will add, “The minister’s not too happy about it.” Hearing that makes me smile, although it shouldn’t!

As you can see, this shift toward living in an eternal frame is functionally close to the same as giving up on selfishness entirely. And in helping us to lose both fear and selfishness, our becoming certain that we never will die seems to be about as effective at raising our consciousness vibrations as is strictly following the Lord’s Gospel teachings.

What did Jesus say about eternal life? Actually, He said a great deal. As you know, Jesus told us that we must apply His teachings to our lives first of all! 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 He did in fact teach eternal living. We can’t be word-for-word certain about these quotations because we know that First Nicaea in 325 and some of the later first-millennium councils are guilty of editing the Lord’s words here and there; but these quotations seem to be largely genuine. He said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, if anyone keeps My Word he will never see death” (JN 8:51). And, “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (MT 6:19-21). And, “Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you and falsely say all kinds of evil against you because of me. Rejoice and be glad, because great is your reward in heaven, for in the same way they persecuted the prophets who were before you” (MT 5:11).

As Jesus was preparing His disciples for His impending crucifixion, He explicitly told them He was going ahead of them to prepare a place for them, in a process that afterlife researchers can confirm is pretty much what our loved ones are going to do for each of us! He said, “Do not let your heart be troubled. You believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also (JN 14:1-3). Then later, on the cross, He gave one of those who was crucified with Him the same promise that very soon He is going to be giving to each of us. He said, “Truly I say to you, today you shall be with Me in Paradise” (LK 23:43). And of course, proving that death is not fatal was the entire point of His Resurrection! I have lately come to think that a certainty that we live eternally may have been the actual “truth” that Jesus was promising to share with us. And what He assured us it would “set you free” from eternally was the fear of death!

We know that every one of our minds is part of the great eternal Mind that continuously manifests this universe. And because that is true, once as few as ten to fifteen percent of all the people on earth have sufficiently raised their personal consciousness vibrations, the change in them must inevitably begin to raise the consciousness vibrations of us all! But to get there, we have been thinking that we would have to convince maybe a billion people to want to raise their own consciousness vibrations. And it is a sad fact that the notion of “growing spiritually” has little broad appeal. We might point out that this universe exists just to give us a place to grow spiritually, and we might even add that unless we can raise the consciousness vibrations of at least ten percent of the earth’s population we can have little hope of improving all the horrors that now torment this world. But even at that, we get just yawns and a shrug more than seven billion strong!

So let’s decide now to stop talking about spiritual growth altogether. You can sell only what people want to buy, and what they hunger for now is just the certainty that they really never are going to die. So let’s begin now to talk only about how happy you, and you, and you are going to be when at last you conquer your fear of death! Let’s develop a quickie two-year course from which the graduation degree will be a certainty of your own eternal life. Let’s give people a joyful hook where they can hang their lives and every bit of their happiness. Step right up! Spend two years getting your Ph.D. in learning what really is going on, and you will be able to live your most joyous life, both now and forevermore!  Freedom from death is the Gospel promise of Jesus. And at this point, it is our one remaining hope if we seek to save humankind from its present death-spiral into extinction. The Lord said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, he who hears My word, and believes Him who sent Me, has eternal life, and does not come into judgment, but has passed out of death into life”  (JN 5:24). Amen, Lord!

There comes a time
When we heed a certain call,
When the world must come together as one.
There are people dying!
It’s time to lend a hand to life,
The greatest gift of all.
– Michael Jackson (1958-2009) & Lionel Richie, from “We Are the World” (1985)

The bottom two photos are from vecteezy.com, free and with no attribution required.

 

 

The Power of Truth (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I can see clearly now, the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Gone are the dark clouds that had me blind.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)

The only way for humankind to fix all that is wrong with this world is to make it common knowledge now that every human mind is eternal. No other attempt to repair a world gone so badly wrong would make a dent, when compared with the transformative power of that one bit of crucial information!

The truth about our eternal nature is far more than just peripheral knowledge. And it isn’t something we can safely ignore until our own death stares us in the face. For everyone to know the truth right now would change EVERYTHING. I used to wonder about this. Now I know it to be true.

To understand why, let’s first give some thought to what is basically wrong with humankind that has put us into our present worldwide state of misery and desperation. Opinions may differ, but it is my observation that there are two core human characteristics that feed on one another and together are the cause of everything that ever has been tragic about being a human being, and everything that has gone especially wrong since the start of the twenty-first century:

FEAR

For all of human history, to be alive and human has meant being afraid. The earliest fully human beings, a mere two hundred thousand years ago, suffered predators, hunger, disease, and the gnawing terror of the unknown that caused us to make and worship fearsome gods. And even for those earliest people, awareness of our rapidly approaching death has been our constant companion. Indeed, we may be the only species forced to live with the inescapable certainty that very soon we are going to die. And the advent of civilization reduced some fears, while it added additional fearsome layers. With civilization we acquired human overlords with the power to steal from us, force us to labor, and even take our lives; and the power to require us to carry out warfare on a scale that had hitherto not been imagined. Then eventually, of course, farming towns and fortress castles gave way to modern cities, and our lives as mere cogs in civilization’s wheel went from the plodding pace of horses to the lethal speed of cars and planes. Swords were replaced by ICBMs, and we even invented an “atomic clock” to better count down toward our certain doom. Even today, that doomsday clock stands at just one hundred seconds before midnight.

SELFISHNESS

Every one of us loves and worships the self. At the core of every human being is a deep, egoic craving for recognition, success, fame, money, and an ever-better place near the top of the heap of our fellow human beings. As with fear, that instinct toward selfishness appears to be innate in all of us. It’s a product of the ego, which is a part of the limited package with which we come to earth. The ego is hard to precisely define, but we know that its purpose is to keep us alive until we reach a chosen exit point, and then it dies when the body dies. Meanwhile, it sees every tiny infringement on even trivial status-related aspects of our lives as potential threats to its survival.

These two profoundly negative impulses are basic and innate in everyone! There is no human being who is never afraid, and no one who doesn’t strive and enjoy accumulating ever more of whatever that person most prizes in this earthly life. It is easy to see the ego’s efforts in those who are climbing the corporate ladder, working day and night to accumulate wealth, or pouring themselves into campaigning for office. But what about the beautiful, selfless people whose every impulse is to help others, and who then are given a recognition dinner, a Presidential Medal, or a Nobel Peace Prize? Just watch the ceremonies! That instinct toward self-aggrandizement is still there, even in the best of them. We all want to be important. We all want to be loved.

By way of illustration, we might consider the motivations of some of the worst people who ever have lived, the tyrants who have diminished and destroyed so many other people’s lives. We might quibble over whether humankind’s hunger to dominate others is an artifact of all our terrible fears or is more the result of a needy ego, but when we think of the worst people who ever have lived we see fear and selfishness intermingling to make the acquisition of power over others too often something that those who gain a bit of it will promptly aggrandize until they are monsters. As Sir John Dalberg-Acton so wisely wrote more than a century ago, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”

Adolf Eichmann was one of the organizers of the Shoah, the Holocaust that claimed six million Jewish lives. He was tried and hanged in Israel in 1962. In the title of her book, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil, the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt made one of the most profound observations ever made by anyone: she pointed out just how normal, how usual and boring even the greatest evildoers actually are. Eichmann looked like a mid-level clerk. Hitler smiled and patted his dog. The trains to the death-camps looked like usual trains, and perhaps they even ran on time. And if you are living in a Western country that is supposed to be run by its citizens, you are seeing elected officials now openly fighting the freedoms of others with deadly and tenacious efficiency. You see governors decreeing humiliating and business-destroying lockdowns, and police arresting churchgoers and pastors because fear of some illness that is little more than a new version of the seasonal flu has given them that power. Now, as vaccinations begin to erase whatever little threat there was, you see the most power-mad trying to make those temporary restrictions permanent, and you realize with horror how easily the egos of basically decent people, when they are further fortified by fear, can be seduced by even a little power into doing what you and I can see is cruel, self-important, and plainly wrong.

Fear and selfishness are to some limited degree useful. They keep us from stepping in front of moving cars, and they ensure that we will at least take our morning shower and try to work enough to survive. But fear is the opposite of love, so fear can make our spiritual growth impossible; and our selfish ego cares nothing for our spiritual growth, since its motivation is only its own survival. Worst of all, for the little good that they do, our impulses toward selfishness and fear tend to separate us from other people, which is why so many of us later in life live isolated and often mean-spirited lives.

Once again, we are grateful for a final key insight from the indispensable Father Richard Rohr, the head of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico. One of his recent newsletters talks about Edith Eva Eger, who was just sixteen when her family was transported to Auschwitz. Her parents went to the gas chambers on the day they arrived, while Edith and her sister survived. Eventually she arrived in the United States, where she was educated and became a psychologist and therapist specializing in the treatment of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In her recent memoir, The Choice: Embrace the Possible, she reminds us that each moment is a choice. She says, “No matter how frustrating or boring or constraining or painful or oppressive our experience, we can always choose how we respond. And I finally begin to understand that I, too, have a choice… The choice to accept myself as I am: human, imperfect. And the choice to be responsible for my own happiness. To forgive my flaws and reclaim my innocence. To stop asking why I deserved to survive. To function as well as I can, to commit myself to serve others, to do everything in my power to honor my parents, to see to it that they did not die in vain. To do my best, in my limited capacity, so future generations don’t experience what I did. To be useful, to be used up, to survive and to thrive so I can use every moment to make the world a better place. And to finally, finally stop running from the past. To do everything possible to redeem it, and then let it go. I can make the choice that all of us can make. I can’t ever change the past. But there is a life I can save: It is mine. The one I am living right now, this precious moment… And to the vast campus of death that consumed my parents and so very many others, to the classroom of horror that still had something sacred to teach me about how to live—that I was victimized but I’m not a victim, that I was hurt but not broken, that the soul never dies, that meaning and purpose can come from deep in the heart of what hurts us the most—I utter my final words. Goodbye, I say. And, Thank you. Thank you for life, and for the ability to finally accept the life that is.”

The words that follow those second ellipses are among the most profound ever written. In the end, this woman who is now in her nineties was able to surmount, forgive, and even be grateful for the death-camp that took her parents and her innocence because it helped her to learn and grow spiritually. As she puts it, she grew into accepting “the life that is.”

My weekly podcast is eight years old. I was promoting The Fun of Dying in the spring of 2013 when the kindly head of a podcasting company recruited me. We both assumed I was going to be podcasting about the afterlife, but when my new friend told me we needed a title, the Thomas within me blurted, “Seek Reality!” I hadn’t yet met Thomas in person, but I was used by then to having my unknown spirit guide unexpectedly interject his strong opinions. And soon I was glad that such an overbroad title let me entertain and learn from such a stellar range of wonderful weekly guests! It is only now that I realize that seeking and living in reality, as difficult as reality is for us even to find when both mainstream science and mainstream religions are flat-out lying to us, is the only hope left for humankind. And in seeking reality, we eventually find and begin to live in the true reality where death is not even a momentary pause. Like Edith Eger, we all can find “the life that is.” And in finding that life, we can at last do what Jesus came to earth to help us. do, which is to bring the kingdom of God on Earth. Next week we’ll look at the difference it will make when everyone knows the truth about death.

Look all around, there’s nothing but blue skies.
Look straight ahead, there’s nothing but blue skies.
I can see clearly now the rain is gone.
I can see all obstacles in my way.
Here is that rainbow I’ve been praying for.
It’s gonna be a bright, bright sunshiny day!
– Johnny Nash (1940-2020), from “I Can See Clearly Now” (1972)

All photos are from vecteezy.com, free and with no attribution required.

Devout Atheism

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear.
Here comes the sun, here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

A religion is a system of beliefs based in human ideas about what underlies reality. And by that definition, the most pervasive and destructive religion of all is whatever has become of mainstream science! To be frank, this is a problem so obvious, so destructive, and so central to everything that is going wrong in the modern world that the fact that we seem to be almost the only ones who are noticing it makes me feel like the little boy in the tale of the emperor’s new clothes. Academic scientists parade around in white coats with test tubes in their pockets and continue to assure us that very soon they are going to make progress on our most basic questions, even though it is ever more obvious to anyone who is paying attention that the entire profession of non-medical scientific research mostly stalled out a century ago.

Part of the problem is that the field of scientific inquiry is less hungry than it once was. There were so many world-changing breakthroughs in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that even now, a century later, broad societal respect and abundant funds with which to generate more breakthrough discoveries continue to flow into scientific fields that at this point really are not doing much. Nothing radically new and transformative has been produced by mainstream scientific research since Max Planck won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1918 for his work in quantum mechanics, and then Albert Einstein won the same prize in 1921, essentially for being Einstein. By now, the scientific community is reduced to trumpeting “discoveries” as irrelevant as stardust older than our solar system, and “advances” as tangential as better methods of gene-editing.

Another part of the problem with modern science is mission-creep. We have come to see science as so reliably productive of an ever-better way of life that we think it would be useful to apply its processes to just about everything. A recent article in The Atlantic calls for “a new science of progress,” saying that “Progress itself is understudied. By ‘progress,’ we mean the combination of economic, technological, scientific, cultural, and organizational advancement that has transformed our lives and raised standards of living over the past couple of centuries. For a number of reasons, there is no broad-based intellectual movement focused on understanding the dynamics of progress, or targeting the deeper goal of speeding it up. We believe that it deserves a dedicated field of study. We suggest inaugurating the discipline of ‘Progress Studies.’” Boy, talk about suffering an abject loss of focus on what should be the scientific mission!

But the primary problem with science in the twenty-first century is that, like every other religion, it is intellectually frozen in time. It reminds me of Spiritualism, which is a branch of Christianity based in communicating with the dead that was on the religious cutting edge in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Spiritualism still exists, but to attend a service and sing traditional Christian hymns with altered lyrics from hundred-year-old hymnals feels like stepping back a century in time.

Science has since the early part of the twentieth century been little more than the dead-end religion of atheism. With forty thousand versions of Christianity now fostering belief in their various versions of the Christian God, it is not surprising that a religion would be trumpeting its belief in what we might call “no-God.” Not surprising at all, but still a tragic diminishment of the once-proud field of scientific inquiry.

Mainstream scientific research is governed by the belief that all of reality is material, and that reality therefore can be fully studied and entirely understood using only methods designed to study what are exclusively material processes. I assume your jaw dropped when you read that sentence! By now, it has been pretty conclusively established that even what we think of as “matter” is not solid in any reasonable sense, and such early-twentieth-century scientific stars as Albert Einstein and Max Planck knew and said that matter is illusory, that matter is energy, and that matter has an underlying non-material matrix that ought to be studied. But to this day, those who control the funding for scientific research continue to enforce the matter-based assumption that consciousness is produced by the brain! To read articles about the search for a source of consciousness in the human brain that still are being published in prestigious scientific journals almost a quarter of the way through the twenty-first century can make you laugh and cry simultaneously. For example, here is an actual pair of sentences from an article published in Nature only three years ago: “What is it about a highly excitable piece of brain matter that gives rise to consciousness? Once we can understand that, we hope to get closer to solving the more fundamental problem.” Actually, there are a host of “more fundamental” problems that will never be solved until mainstream science stops its absurd insistence on the dead-end dogma of materialist atheism. As we will shortly see!

Meanwhile, we just ought to note that there was a chance at the turn of the twentieth century for science to establish and assert a modern commitment to the open-minded pursuit of the truth. I noticed early in my afterlife research this odd refusal  by anyone with scientific credentials to even look at the excellent communications from the dead that were being received early in the twentieth century through physical mediums and documented and published by serious researchers. I investigated further – this was decades ago – and I discovered that the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals had begun soon after the start of the twentieth century to enforce what they were then calling “the scientific dogma of materialism.” This was not a new idea. In fact, the absurd notion that what is material and what is not material can be separately studied goes back all the way to Plato and Aristotle; but even after more than two thousand years, at the start of the twentieth century that odd dichotomy was still informal. It was only then that the scientific gatekeepers announced and began to rigidly enforce a dogma that was fully as nonsensical as putting scientific consideration of rock-formation off limits, or barring scientific investigation of any phenomenon associated with the color blue. Speculation is that it was the shock of physicists’ discovery that they now had quantum physics to contend with that made them feel forced to concentrate on materialism. Personally, I think it was a worry that they might inadvertently find the Christian God. But in fact, there never was the slightest justification for the scientific community to in any way limit what it was willing to investigate in the reality that it  professed to be thoroughly studying!  

The result of that foolish century-old decision to limit what scientists can professionally believe has led to a mostly wasted scientific century. Think of all the effort that has been stupidly spent on seeking a source of consciousness inside the brain! And consider all the basic research and the endless speculation that has been invested in making sense of ideas that never will make any sense because they are based in nonsense. For example, here are just three of many core areas of research that can never be productive in a thousand years until the mainstream scientific gatekeepers turn modern science into what it always should have been: an open-minded search for the truth.

  • The origin and nature of life. Most research being done in this field is laughable. The plain fact is that for life to begin and be sustained in even the simplest organism would require so many different fortuitous developments that have no other purpose that no materialist scientific theory ever will get us there.
  • The true origin of the universe. The notion of a Big Bang might comfort us with the thought that we have learned something important, but in fact it tells us little. We still don’t know what existed before the Big Bang, nor where whatever that was came from, nor what caused it to explode in the first place.
  • A Theory of Everything. The current standard model of particle physics, Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, and Max Planck’s quantum mechanics are all well-studied and demonstrated, and they also are in some ways incompatible with one another. Since of course this makes no sense, the search for what must unite them is underway! And so far, it has turned up goose-eggs.

The sorry religion of atheism, which is what mainstream science has been for a century, is as useless as was the long-ago worship of Moloch. Sacrificing first-born babies won’t make us any more divinely favored. And taking care to make sure that, whatever research we do, we never are going to find a Christian God is an exercise in useless silliness.

Saint Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) was a Dominican friar and revered Medieval thinker. In his most prominent work, the Summa Theologica, Aquinas said, “Nothing is caused by itself. Every effect has a prior cause. This leads to a regress. This has to be terminated by a first cause, which we call God.” Every religion seeks to find that uncaused cause, and then it worships whatever it finds. For the religion of atheism that is modern science, the declared answer is that there is no “uncaused cause,” so everything that exists has happened randomly. And you and I know that notion is completely ridiculous on its face!

Here comes the sun, Here comes the sun,
And I say it’s all right.
Little darling, it’s been a long cold lonely winter.
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been here.
Here comes the sun!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “Here Comes the Sun” (1969)

Pigeon collisions photo credit: FotoGrazio <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94075184@N00/48922186542”>Pigeons collisions</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Seeking God’s Plan (Part V)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing.
Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing.
Dost ask who that may be? Christ Jesus, it is He.
The Lord of hosts His name, from age to age the same,
And He must win the battle.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

When we try to consider human history from the viewpoint of the Godhead Itself, we can begin to see the life of Jesus a bit more as the Godhead might see it. Working this out has been a series of revelations. What seem like throwaway lines in the Gospels have a background and a purpose, and the Lord’s core teachings can be traced back to words of the prophets in ways that make sense to us. From a more Godly perspective, the march of human history over the past 200,000 years looks to be spiritually arrow-straight and highly purposeful! If you have the time, please look back at the past articles in this series, in order. What we are trying to understand as deeply as we can and from the perspective of the Creator is the actual process by which this illusory universe has unfolded for humankind. All the invented past as it now exists is the Godhead’s attempt to educate us spiritually, and we know that because the entire history of this universe is freshly created in each micro-instant. So what is in the past is only and completely what the Godhead wants us to find there Now!

Reading the Gospels from this perspective is a great exercise. It reinforces for us even more deeply Who Jesus is in relation to the Godhead. At times, you almost can see His mind working! And it lets you glimpse a little of the Godhead’s thinking while an aspect of the Godhead, having been born in a human body, interacts with people who can have no idea of the miracle they are witnessing. This exploration by itself could fill a book! But we will here consider just a couple of topics. Let’s briefly watch and listen from our amazing new perspective as the Lord goes about His earthly life:

John the Baptist Was Elijah Reincarnated to Fulfill Isaiah’s Prophesy

 One of the things that we can do now is to look more closely at the role of John the Baptist. For Christians, the point of the Gospel narrative about the Baptist is that baptism itself is spiritually magical. But when we try to take the Godhead’s perspective, we realize that the ritual is beside the point: it could have been a handshake, a certain kind of hat, or almost anything that John was doing which allowed God to single Jesus out, tie Him to prophesy, and announce that He had come from God and was representing God on earth. There had to be such an anointing moment. Without it, the whole ministry of Jesus might not in retrospect have been seen as sufficiently special to have been marked out and remembered in such a way that even after two thousand years He remains among the world’s most beloved people. Note here that the word “repent” has been changed to “reform your mind,” which is closer to the meaning of the Greek word used. And John also talks about the process that was central to the message of Jesus. John the Baptist declares that the focus of his work and the Lord’s is to bring the kingdom of God (or heaven) on earth. Here is what Matthew says about the Baptist:

Now in those days John the Baptist came, preaching in the wilderness of Judea, saying, “Reform your mind, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” For this is the one referred to by Isaiah the prophet when he said, “The voice of one crying in the wilderness, ‘Make ready the way of the Lord. Make His  paths straight!’” (MT 3:1-3). Jesus says of John after His death, “A prophet? Yes, I tell you, and one who is more than a prophet. This is the one about whom it is written, ‘Behold, I send My messenger ahead of You, Who will prepare Your way before You.’ … For all the prophets and the Law prophesied until John. And if you are willing to accept it, John himself is Elijah who was to come. He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (MT 11:9-15). Especially note that final appeal for us to listen for a hidden meaning! I am coming to think that the truth of reincarnation is something else that Jesus had wanted to introduce to us, despite the obstacle of listening Temple guards nearby. The Council of Nicaea in 325 reportedly removed from the Gospels all the references to reincarnation it was able to identify, but these more subtle hints remain!

One thing that strikes you now is that Jesus didn’t simply begin to teach, but rather He burst upon the scene when John baptized Him in a tableau that seems to have been divinely scripted. As is true of so much that is in the Gospels, Christianity later added a nonsensical religious gloss by calling this the moment when the Holy Spirit entered Him; but we know now that Jesus was born in that body as a Being already perfected and divine. Here is a description of the Lord’s baptism:

Then Jesus arrived from Galilee at the Jordan coming to John, to be baptized by him. But John tried to prevent Him, saying, “I have need to be baptized by You, and do You come to me?” But Jesus answering said to him, “Permit it at this time; for in this way it is fitting for us to fulfill all righteousness.” Then he permitted Him. After being baptized, Jesus came up immediately from the water; and behold, the heavens were opened, and he saw the Spirit of God descending as a dove and lighting on Him, and behold, a voice out of the heavens said, “This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased” (MT 3:13-17). This appears to be the way that God chose to introduce Jesus as being an aspect of the Godhead. Of course, primitive people then took the word “son” literally and created a whole virgin-birth narrative, when what the Godhead seems to be saying is that Jesus is an aspect of God and is acting as God’s emissary.

Later in His ministry Jesus took Peter, James, and John to a mountaintop where they encountered Moses and Elijah. Jesus was there “transfigured,” with His face and clothes shining bright. Then “a bright cloud overshadowed them, and behold, a voice out of the cloud said, “This is My beloved Son, with whom I am well-pleased; listen to Him!” (MT 17:5). Christianity makes this scene all about the Lord’s bodily transfiguration, but in fact He just briefly showed Himself to His disciples in an astral body to match the astral bodies of Moses and Elijah. What was significant about this scene was the Godhead’s reiteration that the teachings of Jesus are the most important part of His mission. And even with that, those teachings are not being taken seriously by Christianity, even today! Jesus told us that His teachings are the point of His mission when 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 here we see the Godhead making that same point!

Jesus Was Establishing a Narrative About Who He Was

One of the things worth wondering about is whether Jesus always was aware that He was God on earth. I suspect that, like the rest of us, His life-plan was initially internal and not entirely clear to Him, but He was feeling driven toward it even in childhood. When He was twelve, His parents took Him to Jerusalem for the Passover and He stayed behind when they started for home. They returned to the city and spent three days searching for Him, and they found their little boy in the temple in learned discourse with the teachers there. “When they saw Him, they were astonished; and His mother said to Him, “Son, why have You treated us this way? Behold, Your father and I have been anxiously looking for You.” And He said to them, “Why is it that you were looking for Me? Did you not know that I had to be about My Father’s business?” (LK 2:48-49)

It seems clear that by the age of thirty Jesus fully understood His unique identity and His very special mission. Several times as He was carrying out His healing and teaching ministry, He asked His disciples who they thought He was, and who people in general thought He was. For example, Now when Jesus came into the district of Caesarea Philippi, He was asking His disciples, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?” And they said, “Some say John the Baptist; and others, Elijah; but still others, Jeremiah, or one of the prophets.” He said to them, “But who do you say that I am?” Simon Peter answered, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (MT 16:13-16).

As an aspect of the Godhead, Jesus should have been able to discern what people were saying about Him without His having to ask the question! But what He seems to have been doing here was getting them to think about it, and narrowing their possible choices until they themselves could arrive at His true nature. He even argued with their wrong guesses. For example, Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus asked them a question: “What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” They said to Him, “The son of David.” He said to them, “Then how does David in the Spirit call Him ‘Lord,’ saying, ‘The Lord said to my Lord, “Sit at My right hand, Until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet”’? If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He his son?” No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Him another question (MT 42:41-46).

That Jesus was the promised Christ seems to have been where His followers settled. Then after Jesus was arrested, the elders took Him aside and questioned Him, saying, “If You are the Christ, tell us.” But He said to them, “If I tell you, you will not believe; and if I ask a question, you will not answer. But from now on the Son of Man will be seated at the right hand of the power of God.” And they all said, “Are You the Son of God, then?” And He said to them, “Yes, I am” (LK 22:66-70). So, is this where Jesus finally settled? Knowing as we do now that He came to us as an aspect of the Godhead, and knowing how deferential Spirit actually is to our own thoughts and mindset, it seems possible that He found both “Christ” and “Son of God” to be close enough approximations to a truth that, even today, few people who are now in bodies are perhaps quite ready to understand.

Our five-week-long attempting to look through God’s eyes has taught us to understand God about as well as the cat dozing in your lap understands you. She has no way to envision your trips outside your home, your reasons for changing clothing, or what you are doing now on your computer. All she has learned about you is that you are worthy of her trust. You meet her needs. You are infinite kindness and perfect love. And that is quite a bit, as we think about it. Perhaps it is all that really matters.

That word above all earthly powers, no thanks to them, abideth.
The Spirit and the gifts are ours through Him who with us sideth.
Let goods and kindred go, this mortal life also.
The body they may kill; God’s truth abideth still.
His kingdom is forever!
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

Seeking God’s Plan (Part IV)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

A mighty fortress is our God, a bulwark never failing.
Our Helper He, amid the flood of mortal ills prevailing.
For still our ancient foe doth seek to work us woe!
His craft and power are great, and, armed with cruel hate,
On earth is not his equal.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

The first modern people date to about two hundred thousand years ago. And that is astoundingly recent! The whole of our human existence on earth is just a hundred times the number of years that have passed since Jesus was born. And for nearly all that time we have been spiritual infants and toddlers, born repeatedly and dying soon, probably learning little in each lifetime as we struggled just to survive.  But even with that, it isn’t accurate to say that the Godhead was ignoring our worship of the often-barbaric Gods that we kept creating in our own image. God’s relationship with each individual always has been intimate. Every human being ever born has had a primary spirit guide whose role was to act internally and help that person to grow spiritually; and through those primary guides we always have been directly connected with the Godhead. In any event, the most basic spiritual lessons likely were better learned without God’s even hinting while we still were spiritual babies that eventually we were going to be trying to earn our spiritual Ph.D.s!

And of course, here again we should mention that pesky concept of time. The Godhead appears to be so disconnected from time that we cannot entirely imagine the divine perspective, no matter how we try. For example, we are told that all our earth-lives are happening at once, which means that from every earliest human life lived 200,000 years ago and right on through every far-future final necessary lifetime of every being who incarnates primarily on this planet, everything is happening right now. Clearly, we who are currently limited to just our earth-minds cannot begin to imagine the Godhead’s no-time perspective! So for now, we will make our learning a little easier by taking the matter-based position that time and our earth-lives are as perfectly linear as they seem to us to be.

The Jews of the Christian Old Testament have left us a wonderful history of some of God’s earliest attempts to spiritually awaken humankind. The Godhead likely first revealed Itself in many places on earth at around the same time. Here is how it happened for the Jewish prophet Moses in about 1500 BC: The angel of the Lord appeared to him in a blazing fire from the midst of a bush; and he looked, and behold, the bush was burning with fire, yet the bush was not consumed. So Moses said, “I must turn aside now and see this marvelous sight, why the bush is not burned up.”  When the Lord saw that he turned aside to look, God called to him from the midst of the bush and said, “Moses, Moses!” And he said, “Here I am.” Then He said, “Do not come near here; remove your sandals from your feet, for the place on which you are standing is holy ground.” He said also, “I am the God of your father, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob.” Then Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God (Exodus 3:2-6). What Moses had that day was an experience of light, which is a powerful tool the Godhead can use to grab our attention. The same thing happened to the Apostle Paul when Jesus recruited him (Acts 9:1-9); and it also happened to me when I was eight. Go figure.

The Old Testament reads like a fear-based history shot through with cruelty and pain. There is in it, though, a consistent strain of prophets who claimed to be speaking for God.  With everything we have learned about how things work, we know that these prophets were recruited before birth, and their life-plans would have included doing this work for the Godhead. But they always had the free-will right to refuse the task at any point! I was assured by Thomas after I had tried to refuse to write Liberating Jesus that if I had not finally yielded, others were in line to take my place. There are roughly sixteen Old Testament prophets, although the count can differ depending on whether a few borderline figures are included. The prophetic period of Jewish history extends from 1450 BC until a century or so before the birth of Jesus, and for our purposes there are six main themes. Here they are, each  with an example of what the prophets claimed that God was saying to us:

  • There is one eternal and all-powerful God. Notions like spiritual growth and a Collective of Perfected Beings were beyond what any Bronze Age primitive could have comprehended, so the Godhead kept it simple. For example, Thus says the Lord, the King of Israel and his Redeemer, the Lord of hosts: ‘I am the first and I am the last, and there is no God besides Me’ (Isaiah 44:6).
  • It is time for us to know the genuine God. For almost two hundred thousands years we had made and worshipped our own false gods, but it was time at last for us to begin a closer relationship with the genuine Godhead.  “The Lord was very angry with your fathers. Therefore say to them, ‘Thus says the Lord of hosts, “Return to Me,” declares the Lord of hosts, “that I may return to you,” says the Lord of hosts” (Zechariah 1:2-3).
  • God is angry. Since anger is a low-vibration emotion and the Godhead is at the highest vibration, it is probably impossible for God to actually be angry; but for the prophets to say that God was angry put the situation in terms that people could understand. The prophet Ezekiel said, “They will fling their silver into the streets and their gold will become an abhorrent thing; their silver and their gold will not be able to deliver them in the day of the wrath of the Lord” (Ezekiel 7:19).
  • God is jealous. God wasn’t actually jealous, since after all God has all the power! But here again, jealousy is a human analogy to describe God’s feelings when we worship other gods. “All the earth will be devoured in the fire of His jealousy” (Zephaniah 1:18).
  • God is heartily sick of our ritual worship. Jesus will later use this passage from Isaiah to call for an end to religious rituals, and arguably for an end to religions altogether. “Bring your worthless offerings no longer. Incense is an abomination to Me. New moon and sabbath, the calling of assemblies—I cannot endure iniquity and the solemn assembly. I hate your new moon festivals and your appointed feasts, They have become a burden to Me; I am weary of bearing them” (Isaiah 1:13-14).
  • There will be a New Covenant. Those early Jews were promised a new and more direct relationship with the genuine Godhead. For example, “Behold, days are coming,” declares the Lord, “when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and with the house of Judah” (Jeremiah 31:31).

The greatest of the Old Testament prophets also gave us some hint of what life will be like when at last the kingdom of God arrives on earth. Here is my favorite passage in the entire Old Testament:

“And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
Also the cow and the bear will graze,
Their young will lie down together,
And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea” (Isaiah 11:6-9).

Isaiah also gave us a prediction of the coming miraculous birth of Jesus as God on earth:

“For a child will be born to us, a son will be given to us; and the government will rest on His shoulders; and His name will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Eternal Father, Prince of Peace. There will be no end to the increase of His government or of peace, on the throne of David and over his kingdom, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from then on and forevermore. The zeal of the Lord of hosts will accomplish this” (Isaiah 9:6-7).

And there was one prophet who foretold the next stage of humankind’s relationship with God by giving us an early version of the message of Jesus. What God wants from us is nothing more than just those last few lines:

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

Less than four thousand years ago the Godhead at last began to educate us. After having lived the first 200,000 years of humanity’s existence in superstitious fear of our human-made gods, at last we were past our toddlerhood and ready to enter spiritual kindergarten! And in order to make sure we would have the best start, an aspect of the Godhead descended in person and became our divine Teacher….

 

And though this world with devils filled should threaten to undo us,
We will not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us.
The Prince of Darkness grim, we tremble not for him!
His rage we can endure, for lo, his doom is sure.
One little word shall fell him.
– Martin Luther (1483-1546) from “A Mighty Fortress is Our God” (1529)

 

Vienna – Fresco of Moses in Altlerchenfelder church Pro Photo
Spring lambs relaxing – Vecteezy Pro Photo
Vienna – Fresco of prophet Micah Pro Photo

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