Author: Roberta Grimes

Seeking God’s Plan (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!
Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

All the gods that we ever have worshiped have been human–made. This is true even of the Christian God, who is based on the ancient Hebrew Yahweh. We have imagined the modern versions of our gods to be less cruel and a lot less scary, but still their ancient shape remains. And now I am wondering why.  Humanity has long since split the atom, journeyed to the moon, even begun to cure cancer; but still we envision the same static God for whom the first Christian martyrs died. We haven’t even progressed to the much more loving God-just-as-Spirit that Jesus introduced! Despite the tweaks of the Protestant Reformation, we still adhere to basically the same Christianity that ruled by superstitious terror, carried out the barbaric Crusades, and tortured and burned many infidels alive.

But why should it still have to be this way, when at last we know that there actually is a genuine Creator God unlike any god that any religion has imagined? Being reminded last week of the staggering eternal importance of the Easter events that we never could have fully appreciated until after the twenty-first century began has made me think that it might be time for us to reconsider everything. Two thousand years ago the Godhead directly intervened in human history in a way that was designed to be fully obvious to us only two thousand years later. It was a genuine divine revelation! But then, as with every other religion, Christianity was created and soon frozen in time. Its dogmas have changed little in a thousand years.  If God was watching our subsequent progress and later judged that the time was right for another major revelation, then unfortunately God would have been out of luck because the religion based in the incomparable divine events that were the life and teachings of Jesus has been sealed by its people for all time. If the Godhead has something more to say, how will any of us ever hear it? Isn’t it time for us to start to try to better understand what the living God actually wants?

Albert Einstein was a gigantic intellect, but at heart he was a relatable guy. One day in 1925 as he shared a walk with a young student he said to her, “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts. The rest are just details.” How perfectly wise he was! And now you and I want to know God’s thoughts about the Godhead’s eternal plan for humankind. We aren’t interested in physics, which turns out to be a mere detail of this limited illusion that seems to be solid but in fact is not. Nothing physical is objectively real, since all that actually exists is Mind; and the laws and details of human physics seem more and more to be just the Godhead’s inventions to keep us amused and distracted. And of course that raises yet another question! There have been increasing hints that the Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings that is continuously creating the universe freshly in each instant of artificial time, and is steadily making our past more complex in what seems to be an effort to stay ahead of our attempts to figure things out. But why is that? What on earth is going on?

A quick perusal of our archive here reveals that we have asked variations of these biggest of all human questions many times, but always just in limited ways. It seems that we had to tackle this process in pieces and build toward even knowing how to ask the biggest questions. And beings who are no longer in bodies have lately been telling us that the limited aspects of our vast, eternal minds that we bring into these material bodies are meant just for efficient spiritual learning. They say that we cannot possibly expect to use such puny earth-minds to address the very biggest things!

That may be true. But we are not deterred. Jesus invites us to ask our questions, not suggesting that we limit them by size; and already our trusting Him to give us answers has yielded some amazing insights! He says, “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). So now we ask Him to help us find some answers to the biggest questions of all, while knowing that we won’t fully understand whatever answers we might find. We trust that over time our perceptions will grow. And finally, when at last we get to go home, we are assured that we will know it all! Here is one way that we might frame our primary question:

 How is the Godhead involved in human affairs?

This always has been humanity’s core question, even though we seldom have posed it as a question. Religions have assumed all kinds of things, from gods that deal minutely with every one of our individual wishes and needs to gods that hold us on the edge of disaster and require that we placate them by throwing our firstborn infants into their belly of fire. The Christian version of God is both gods at once, since we confidently pray for things like no rain for some event on Thursday while we also know that because of Adam’s sin we might wind up burning in hell forever. And I cannot recall even once in all my years of being a practicing Christian being told that we should, in complete love and trust, pray only and always for what God wants!

No, that is not quite true. In the greatest prayer ever imagined, the prayer that God in Human Form taught us to pray, we do say “Thy will be done.” But have we ever seen any Christian take those words seriously enough to stop asking God for anything else?

Last week we talked about the life of Jesus. We know now that there was a time when the highest aspect of the Godhead lived a whole life as a human being in an effort to understand us on our own terms. And we are told that Jesus did that so He could then teach us how we could better grow spiritually. Knowing what we know now, it is not an overreach for us to see the life of Jesus on earth as a hinge of human history, since it was the first moment when we could have ceased our endless religious floundering and begun a real relationship with the genuine Godhead.

But, why then? And why just once? And also, here is an astounding question: Why was evidence given to us way back then in all the details of the Shroud of Turin that we would be unable to see as key evidence for an additional two thousand years?

 Since it is reasonable to assume there may be a divine plan, how does that singular gigantic event two thousand years ago fit with whatever came before it, and also fit with whatever divine events may have come after it? It seems to be extremely important that we seek now to know as much as we can! We have talked here about human religious history, but always just from our human perspective. Even when we thought we saw God taking some role, we clueless human beings have applied that role to whatever particular religious tradition we personally most favored. This is why Christians love the new evidence provided by the Shroud of Turin! They don’t yet see it as the reproof to all of Christian history that it might well be.

These musings are not sacrilegious. They are instead the height of loving respect for the only genuine Godhead! As humankind still continues to worship human-made gods in the very same ways that our human-made religions already were prescribing to us many centuries ago, we tell ourselves that we are honoring the genuine God. In fact, we are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, we are smugly telling God that we already know what God wants from us!

That fact is indisputably true. No clergyman can deny it! Many years ago, as I was converting to Catholicism and trying to do my best at it, I asked my priest a great many of the same questions that we have been asking here. And soon his answer was automatic. No matter what I asked him, he would simply say, “That is what we believe. You’re going to have to accept it.” Which is precisely the same thing that all our religions are saying now to the genuine Godhead! Every religious person is always telling God that we already know what God wants. And maybe we do, since after all Christians believe that God ‘inspired” all the councilors at the First Council of Nicaea. And perhaps all the other Christian councils, too. Maybe God has been whispering in human ears every one of the times that anyone on earth has assumed that any event at all has actually been a new divine revelation, from the Buddha’s moment of murmuring “I am awake” some five hundred years before the Lord was born to the amazing discovery of messages on “golden plates” in New York State in 1830. And we could name fifty other such “divine revelations,” just off the top of our heads! Convincing people we have received the Divine Word of God and then starting or revising some religion or other has long been a productive and highly satisfying role in life for a great many people.

But in trying to contain God in all these tens of thousands of human-made religious variations, we have been closing our minds and hearts to the love and guidance of the genuine Godhead. So we ought to begin to ask the question that we should have been asking all along:

How has God been relating to us?

I realize now that I was first prompted by Thomas to begin working toward asking these questions a couple of years ago, when I stopped blogging just when I got around to it and began to do it religiously (sorry!) each week. And just as I didn’t know where that was heading, so I have no idea where this is heading now.

But I do know that it is long past time for us to seek to know the genuine Godhead. Unless we at least attempt to understand what has been going on from God’s perspective, we will remain stuck forever in these human-made religions that will let us pursue a relationship with God only from our own perspective. And what kind of a one-sided love is that?

As Moses is quoted as having put it to the Israelites before they entered their Promised Land 3250 years ago, “The eternal God is a refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27). If there ever has been a time in the past three thousand years when all of humankind together desperately needed the comfort and safety of the genuine Godhead’s everlasting arms, it is now….

 

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

 

Sunlit sea foam photo credit: giopuo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75459497@N00/48758137336″>2019_09_19a</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Christ the Lord Is Risen Today

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christ the Lord is risen today, Alleluia!
Earth and heaven in chorus say, Alleluia!
Raise your joys and triumphs high, Alleluia!
Sing, ye heavens, and earth reply, Alleluia!
– Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)

At Easter we celebrate the most important set of events in human history. Insofar as we know, nothing else like it ever has happened, either before or since; and the significance of those events could not have been understood by anyone who witnessed them. Indeed, it is likely that even today we don’t yet know what it all really means! And the fact that a couple of centuries later a new religion created its own dogmas around that extraordinary set of events doesn’t make what happened any less the wondrous possession of ALL of humankind.

Two thousand years ago an element of the highest aspect of the Godhead was born in a human body as God on earth, both to study humanity and to teach us how to achieve the next stage of our spiritual development. To prove to iron-age primitives that death is an illusion, God in human form then allowed Himself to be publicly murdered so His body could lie in a tomb for two days before He re-animated it and rose from the dead. What an amazing story! And now we know that the miraculous events of that extraordinary life were indisputably REAL!

The fact that God chose to be naturally born and to live an entirely human life and death is important. We assume that God knows everything, but in fact my dear spirit guide, Thomas, has told me that once the more spiritually perfected members of the single consciousness that humanity shares cease to incarnate, they pretty quickly lose touch with what it’s like to be a human being. He tells me that Jesus came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead in part so God could “look through His eyes” and better understand why we were finding it so hard to do what our earth-life is designed to do, which is to help us grow rapidly away from fear and hatred and toward ever more perfect love.

Last Easter we talked about the fact that based upon very extensive modern studies of the Shroud of Turin, the Resurrection of Jesus can be treated as an evidence-based historical event. And in fact, there also is a lot of evidence that Jesus really did live on earth. Astonishingly, there even is evidence that His death in 33 AD was brought about in part by a financial panic (of all things!). And we know now based on evidence that the Gospels are real historical documents, even if they were somewhat altered by later Christian councils. We are fortunate that an army of Christian researchers has been working for more than a century, seeking  every possible confirmation that Jesus is a proven historical figure and the miraculous events of His life were real.

Anglican scholar and bishop N. T. Wright is one of those seeking to prove the reality of Jesus and His miracles. He has written a facts-dense and lengthy book called The Resurrection of the Son of God, where he makes a number of evidence-based claims. He specifically notes that the eyewitness accounts contain details large and small that strongly suggest that these were real events. For example:

* The idea of a murdered corpse dead for days suddenly reanimating on its own is found in no other religious tradition. Such an event is miraculous, true, but it’s also ghoulish and off-putting.

* The Gospel Resurrection accounts feel grounded in plausible facts. For example, the mentions of the discarded shroud and the face-cloth lying separately folded seem like genuine details that an eyewitness would have noticed and mentioned.

* Jesus’s body had been damaged by its death, decay, and subsequent reanimation. And damaged in ways that Iron Age people creating a story from whole cloth are unlikely to have  considered or known how to describe. People who had been in frequent contact with Jesus didn’t even recognize Him at first, which suggests that two days of decay had altered the body’s appearance and perhaps had interfered with His ability to fully re-animate it. Interestingly, Jesus also seems to have considered His risen body to be so fragile that He asked that Mary not touch it. These are such gritty eyewitness details that even you or I would have been unlikely to have thought of them.

The execution of Jesus was an unexpected disaster for His followers. They had come to believe He was the Messiah, the Son of God, perhaps God on earth. They were so demoralized by the Lord’s death that they hurried to huddle behind closed doors, bereft now of all the excitement and hope that Jesus had inspired in them. He had just been executed as a criminal! And now perhaps they also were criminals? For me, the way so many of them were immediately and altogether transformed by His Resurrection may be the most important evidence of all that Jesus did rise from the dead. Once they saw and talked with the risen Lord, His disciples were infused with implacable zeal! They went from cowering in despair to fearlessly proclaiming what they had witnessed to all who would listen to them, and many of them were eventually martyred. These people were the source of all those Easter stories. And nothing can explain their sudden transformation beyond a certainty that they had witnessed an event so miraculous that it was worth all their lives.

There are other scholars, too, whose work provides further powerful evidence that the Resurrection was real. For example, Timothy Keller is a noted theologian. His brand-new book on the Resurrection of Jesus is called Hope in Times of Fear: The Resurrection and the meaning of Easter. One of Pastor Keller’s many insights is that when English translations of the Bible talk about “hope,” the word doesn’t do justice to the Greek word used in the New Testament, which is elpida. Keller tells us that a more precise translation would be “profound certainty.” This may seem like a little thing, but the New Testament contains many references to “hope in the Resurrection of the dead” and “hope in God.” If we read these passages as “profound certainty” in God and in the Resurrection, they are very different and much more positive claims!

I have mostly dismissed the Apostle Paul as a naïve first-century fabulist who never even knew Jesus. And clearly, Paul never had access to anything like the Lord’s whole story! But Thomas has made me see that Paul was Jesus’s very useful servant. Paul organized and inspired His earliest followers as they preserved His earthly life and teachings, and some of what Paul wrote was actually channeled by Spirit. Now Timothy Keller has helped me see that some of the stories told in Paul’s letters are actual contemporaneous accounts! He says of Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians, Chapter 15, Verses 3-7:

One of the oldest theories is that the legends of Jesus’s resurrection developed only many decades after the actual events had faded from living memory. But the 1 Corinthians text is itself an important piece of evidence against that view. Verses 3–7 are now seen by most New Testament scholars as not an original Pauline composition but rather an early gospel summary used by the earliest church in its evangelism and instruction which Paul is citing. As he says in verse 3, these words were “received,” not created by him, and then “passed on” to others. Scholars also show that the vocabulary in these verses — “according to the Scriptures,” “on the third day,” “the Twelve” are not terms Paul uses elsewhere in his writings. So this was a gospel summary that was already in widespread use by Christians all around the Mediterranean world when Paul wrote. Since this letter to the Corinthians was written only fifteen or twenty years after Jesus’s death, the eminent biblical scholar James Dunn concludes that “we can be entirely confident” that this summary in 1 Corinthians 15:3–7 “was formulated . . . within months of Jesus’s death” (with thanks to Father Richard Rohr).

So there you have it. Two thousand years ago an aspect of the Godhead was born on earth as a human being and lived as one of us for thirty years while He studied the people around Him and came to better understand them. Then for a few years He publicly taught His flock how to overcome this world’s extreme negativity and use it to better grow spiritually. And finally, to prove to primitive people that human beings don’t really die, God in human form allowed Himself to be publicly tortured, murdered, wrapped in a shroud, and laid in a tomb. Two days later He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy, and He showed Himself to His disciples. The entire life of Jesus is a set of divine miracles unique in human history!

But there is no good evidence that Jesus meant to start a new religion. In fact, there is considerable evidence that He came to end our long dependence on our man-made religious beliefs and teach us to relate to God directly and entirely on our own. Jesus is in fact both God on earth and an adamantly non-religious figure. His amazing life is a timeless gift to all of humankind! And now, at long last, it is time for us to listen to the historical Jesus, and to seek to understand and then willingly defer to the Godhead’s wishes about what should come next….   

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

Mourning My Religion

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

I hear from many disaffected Christians. Some pour out their hearts to me, telling me they have been devout and happy in the religion for their entire lives until whatever age they are right now – usually they are in their fifties or sixties – but of late, they have become disillusioned. There are too many questions that lack good answers, too much that troubles them about Christian beliefs, and they simply no longer feel comfortable about being part of any Christian denomination. Many seem to see the way I have freed myself as their welcome inspiration to make the leap themselves. Some will ask me questions that suggest they are still nervous about suffering some level of divine retribution if they actually leave the religion; but most seem to think I can address their worries. After all, I successful broke away, and look how happy I am now! How close to Jesus! How spiritually fed and joyful and fulfilled I seem to be!   

And I am indeed joyful. But it hasn’t been easy. My leaving traditional Christianity altogether was a move that I resisted for as long as I could, until in the end I really had no choice. And leaving Christianity has brought me so much closer to God in a truth-based reality that at last makes perfect sense! So I have no regrets about leaving Christianity. But I mourn the religion I have lost. I’ve made peace with my grief over the past two decades, much as you would make peace with the death of anyone very close to you. But still, at this time every year just the thought of what I have given up for Jesus feels like a small cloud of sadness in my springtime sky. Despite everything, I still love my religion!

I know from emails that this pining for Christianity after leaving it happens to others, too; and since that is true, it is past time for us to talk about what for many years felt to me like a personal failing. I converted to Catholicism at marriage, and then I came to love it so much that I held onto it long after I should have let it go. I love Jesus with everything in me! And the more I have studied His life and His words, the more convinced I have become that the religion has nothing to do with Jesus. In fact, it is impossible to follow the Lord if you let the religion remain between you.

But Christianity still displays such a comforting face! Despite all that is wrong with that old-time religion, if you ever have been at all devout you will find that the religion you abandon for Jesus is going to have its roots in your deepest heart. The longer you follow the Way of Jesus, the more He will reinforce your choice; but still, and perhaps forevermore, Christmas and Easter can make you ache for your old-time Christian life. And for the joy of singing Christmas carols! For candle-lit Christmas Eve services that always fill your heart with joy! For glorious sunrise services at dawn on every Easter morning, when you discover once again that empty tomb!

And most of all, what I still miss is that old-time Christian certainty. Growing up in a traditional Christian home makes you know when you are too young to fight the lessons that you are a sinner, that hell is real, and that Jesus had to die so God would forgive you and let you into heaven. You grew up knowing the deal you had made, and you knew that God and Jesus would stand behind it; but to keep your get-out-of-hell-free card you would have to keep going to church each week. Eventually I had done enough research to be sure there is no get-out-of-hell-free card, and nor is there ever any need for one; but nevertheless, I kept going to Mass for years after I could have made the break.

I told myself I was keeping my husband company, but I realize now that I still craved that wafer! I had learned enough of the truth that I was sure that in order to get closer to Jesus I was going to have to abandon the fear-based religion that still came between us; but there remained that small, residual fear that I had internalized in childhood. And I still felt the relief of knowing as that wafer melted on my tongue that I had sealed my deal with God for one more week. It was only when our local parish completed work on its beautiful new church that featured a life-sized, full-color plaster Jesus bleeding on a cross above the altar that I was able to stop attending church. I couldn’t bear even to look at Jesus being eternally crucified,  so at last I welcomed into my heart the eternally risen Lord and asked Him to assume control of my life.

If you also find yourself still mourning your religion at susceptible times of the year, here are some measures that might lessen your burden:

  • You still can call yourself a Christian. When I first realized how harmful to the mission of Jesus all those fear-based Christian dogmas are, I began to tell people I was “an originalist Christian” (whatever that means). But in fact, I soon realized that following just the Lord’s teachings makes us even more profoundly followers of Christ than any traditional Christian ever could be! So now I simply call myself a Christian. If someone asks about my denomination, I say that I strictly follow the Lord’s teachings. Whatever that denomination is, that’s what I am.
  • Minimize your traditional celebrations. With our children grown, we don’t put up a Christmas tree or play carols in the house, but we still give Easter baskets to our grandchildren. We share some lovely family holiday dinners, but we keep them generic. No one seems to mind.
  • Find ways to duplicate the warmth of Christian fellowship. To be a Christian is to have a cozy Sunday family and share lots of weekly smiles and hugs! I finally left Catholicism when my oldest grandchildren were preschoolers, and I wanted them to have an early church experience so I joined a nearby Unity Church and enrolled them in its Sunday school. In retrospect, I realize now that having a pleasant and largely dogma-free church home for a time made my transition to spiritual freedom easier.
  • Find ways to duplicate the joy of Christian service to others. The fact that these messages arrive in your inbox on Sunday mornings is no accident! My faithfully writing these posts, producing Seek Reality podcasts, and answering every stranger’s email has given me a ministry. For you, your calling might instead be to volunteer in a homeless shelter or a soup kitchen, or perhaps to serve as a mentor somewhere. Just prayerfully do whatever feels right to you!
  • Continue to enjoy Christian habits that are not fear-based. My own favorite tradition is the fact that I began to give up chocolate for Lent when I was sixteen years old. I still give up chocolate for Lent to this day, and when my Catholic husband teases me about it I tell him that if I eat chocolate at Lent there will be a thunderbolt right through the ceiling. And he doesn’t want to have to pay to fix that. I never have been afraid to eat chocolate, but rather my habit seems to be a kind of joke that the Lord and I can share. If there is some habit that still feels special to you as a holdover from your former Christian practice, then so long as you aren’t doing it from fear, there is little harm in keeping it going.
  • Spend quality time with Jesus. I think it’s this craving I have to know the Lord better, more than any other single thing, that has helped me to keep my priorities right. If you simply give up practicing your religion and you never find anything to take its place, you are likely to be nagged by the emptiness in your life that you yourself have created. Of course you are going to mourn and feel guilty about having abandoned Christianity, and you’ll keep some residual fears besides! But if you invite Jesus into your heart and develop the habit of reading His words, sharing thoughts with Him, and simply building a closer and richer daily walk, you will find that He soon will nicely fill that briefly empty place in your heart.

It has been estimated that half of the Christian churches in the United States that closed for Covid last spring will be closed for good within the year. Our fading pandemic might be accelerating what already was a rapid decline. So it is time now for all of us to make real for Jesus the Christian Way that He taught us long ago. Next week let’s begin to celebrate the joy of at last really knowing and living the Way of our eternally risen Lord.

 

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

Vecteezy – Church in Singapore

 

 

Know Yourself

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, and sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood, and looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair, and having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear; though as for that, the passing there
Had worn them really about the same.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Less Traveled” (1916)

The strangest part of doing afterlife research is the fact that so much wonderfully consistent evidence is so easily found. You don’t even have to dig for it, so afterlife research is a lot of fun! Then as you pick bushels of low-hanging fruit and the puzzle almost solves itself, you start to wonder, since this is so easy, why everyone doesn’t already enjoy the certainty that human life is eternal. The first decades of the twentieth century were a time of vast progress in both afterlife studies and quantum mechanics; and yet the former went nowhere while the latter has thrived. Why is that?

My weekly podcast, Seek Reality, is nearly eight years old. Many of our guests are experts in afterlife studies and related fields with a recent book to share, and I have just read a book written by future Seek Reality guest Bob Gebelein. Bob is a learned gentleman in his eighties who has spent the past half-century in a fight with the scientific community. The result is his terrific book called Dirty Science – How Unscientific Methods Are Blocking Our Cultural Advancement. Of course, I long ago realized that mainstream science was refusing to study anything that was not material. But it was only when I read Bob’s book that I first could see the extent of the harm that is now being done by the scientific leaders we all so completely (but unjustifiably) trust.

Our discussion here last week horrified some readers. It is hard for us to imagine that an end-times war might be started by Christians in the United States just a mere seven generations from now! How could so much go wrong so fast? As I responded to emails and comments, I began to think Thomas had been off the mark in insisting that we share his Apocalyptic warning. But then I read Bob Gebelein’s Dirty Science. I have pointed out in this space that mainstream science transformed itself into a belief-system more than a century ago by decreeing that all scientific research must henceforth be based in “the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” (and yes, back then you could find those words in print). But I didn’t realize until I read Dirty Science that the key ingredient in the horrid stew of our twenty-first century reality that might actually end the world before long is that selfsame “dirty science.” To this day, scientists uniformly insist that we are meat and nothing more, that our minds are born and die with our brains, and that the only thing that needs to be studied is all the “solid” stuff we think we see around us. Bob Gebelein has very well described an alarming situation that absolutely could lead to the prompt destruction of our planet by its own inhabitants!

Mainstream science still refuses to investigate any non-material phenomenon. Funding is the lifeblood of scientific research, and except for just a few notable exceptions – reincarnation research at the University of Virginia first comes to mind – there is no significant funding available for scientific research in any non-material field. And yet scientists pontificate. They render dismissive judgments in areas where they are deliberately and proudly ignorant! Bob points out that “In fact, they have been so successful in studying the physical reality that they have asserted that the only way to do science is to explore the physical reality with the physical senses. And they have taken this one step further, to decree that the only reality is the physical reality. The spiritual does not exist, psychic abilities are impossible, and the mind is nothing but the physical brain, which must be studied with the physical senses. But, in fact, these other aspects of reality do exist, and there are other modes of perception besides the physical senses with which to perceive them and make scientific observations.”

He is precisely right. Mainstream science has been remarkably successful at making sense of the physical aspects of our reality, but the non-physical aspects are densely intertwined with the physical. And they are every bit as important! For scientists to study anything without also studying its nonphysical aspects will render any scientific opinion in even what seem to be the physical fields to be only limited and inadequate on its face.

Bob Gebelein gives us the four dirty methods that the organized scientific community still uses to keep everyone with scientific credentials from venturing beyond approved areas of study, and to keep the public ignorant:

  • Argument from authority. Bob prefers to call it “argument from status.”
  • Refusal to look at the evidence. Scientists can then say “No evidence exists.”
  • Ridicule. They dismiss researchers of nonmaterial phenomena and their whole fields of study with demeaning and insulting labels.
  • Power politics. University departments and peer-reviewed journals exercise tight control over what can be funded, studied, and published. Scientists are quick to say to one another, “Nice career you’ve got there! Too bad if something should happen to it….”

Bob also provides what he calls “the List” of fields where scientists claim to have solidly proven that this or that area of study is bogus, even though they have done no research at all. Here are some scientific claims often made based on no research whatsoever:

  • Intuition doesn’t exist.
  • Psychic abilities don’t exist.
  • Parapsychology is pseudoscience.
  • The spiritual areas do not exist.
  • The mind is nothing but the physical brain.

Yet amazingly, a few scientists have dared to buck mainstream science’s power and have investigated and spoken about some forbidden non-material fields. And these most courageous scientists of all have included a few immortal titans:

Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” Then in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such.”

Albert Einstein also came to understand that nothing is solid. He said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” He also said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”

The dirty methods employed by the scientific community to keep most people ignorant have come to pose an existential threat to the future of humankind. Despite having done little or no research, our culture’s most respected experts still insist that every bit of evidence backs the scientific certainty that:

* We are meat. And despite what so often feels to us like amazingly complex internal lives, our minds and our awareness arise from just the mortal meat enclosed in our skulls.

* Nothing spiritual exists. There is no God, no astral plane, no afterlife, no angels. Every spiritual encounter, near-death experience, out-of-body experience, and sign from a dead loved one is just a hallucination created by our meat-based minds.

* There cannot be any post-death life. Consciousness ends with the death of the brain. The only thing that exists is matter, so our only possible immortality might be as an upload into a machine.

With mainstream science erecting a deliberate wall between us and the possibility of better knowing the non-physical aspects of ourselves, we are left to cope with living a depressing cultural lie. All of us. Even afterlife researchers! Yours truly has spent the past fifty years reveling in so much afterlife evidence that I am more certain now of my own immortality than I am of the existence of Egypt; but still, I am daily confronted by our awful cultural certainty that I am mortal meat. Ultimately, this is the daily harm that dirty science inflicts on the world. The message we are being given about ourselves is poison! “This is all there is, so you’d better get yours!” “Life sucks, then you die, but stay alive at all costs because at death you will blink out like a light!” What else are these deadly scientific lies teaching us? What about, “Loving others is a burden on your freedom to grab more for yourself”? “Kindness to strangers is a sucker’s game”?

Dirty science is giving you an appalling vision of who you are! It’s a set of plain lies in place of the truth that you are an eternal and deeply beloved aspect of the Power that manifests reality.

This scientific barrier to knowing yourself is far more dangerous than it seems! Our resulting cynical and brutal culture creates a lot of the ugly negativity that puts our species and our planet at risk. Once most people start to get the fact that it is impossible for us to die, then our culture will be altogether transformed. We will go from having just a short, sad horizon to living in a joyous eternal frame. So please, for the sake of the world, come to know yourself! Know yourself, and then every beautiful thing will belong to you. Know yourself, in spite of science’s lies. Truly know yourself now! We have a world to save!

 

And both that morning equally lay in leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day! Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I— I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “The Road Less Traveled” (1916)

 

Yellow road photo credit: yooperann <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/99923398@N00/48901880077″>October road</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Fork in the road photo credit: MacBeales <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/53073903@N07/36188206372″>Which way now…..</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Coming Apocalypse

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.
From what I’ve tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To say that for destruction ice
Is also great. And would suffice.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “Fire and Ice” (1920)

If you had been told that the world will end in two hundred years, what would you do? I suppose your answer would largely depend on the credibility of the source; but let’s assume the source was credible. Would you keep it to yourself? Announce it to the world? Devote the rest of your life to trying to keep the end of the world from happening?

Six years ago this coming May I received precisely that announcement from a highly credible source. I have tried ever since that night to do what I could to delay the end of the world, but I acknowledge now that it hasn’t been much. I have, however, had that warning always foremost in my mind, so it amazes me now to realize that I seem not to have shared it with you beyond a couple of glancing mentions. I think I’ve felt embarrassed by the thought of saying something so alarming just on Spirit’s word alone. But, okay. Thomas has asked me now to tell you the story. He says it is something that you need to hear.

Late in 2014 I had the strong sense that someone in spirit wanted to talk to me. I made an appointment with a well-recommended medium for early in 2015. And after I had a great reunion with my whole extended family at my grandfather’s dairy farm in spirit that overlooks a celestial sea, the medium said that my guides now wanted to have a word with me.

I had lived for more than sixty years with the help of a primary spirit guide that I had met in childhood. He guided me internally, and mainly at night, and he had overseen the channeling of a series of books. The whole relationship was working so well that I had no wish to change it. But although I had no memory of it, apparently for the first time in all our long relationship I had been balking at Thomas’s nighttime guidance. So after the medium had introduced my lesser guides – there were ten, as I recall – I met my beautiful Thomas in person.

I am embarrassed to tell you that my big takeaway from that first face-to-face meeting with him was a groupie’s thrill at having just learned that my primary guide had been Thomas Jefferson in a prior lifetime. I was such a big fan! And apparently I have been his close male friend through seventeen other lifetimes, so he seemed that day to be creeped-out by the fact that I had no memory of our real relationship, and on top of that now I had a schoolgirl crush. I was so star-struck that Thomas said nothing to me. The medium soon ended the session, and Thomas waited for more than a month before he again reached out to us.

My second medium-assisted meeting with Thomas came on May 16, 2015. It began what has become a lovely daytime relationship with my primary spirit guide, but for quite some time that meeting was a highly traumatic memory.

  • Thomas began it by saying that he wanted me to channel a new book about the teachings of Jesus. He told me he had written such a book toward the end of his Jefferson lifetime, but he wanted me to write it again “for this new day.” I told him how unworthy I was to write anything about Jesus, but he insisted. When I still demurred, he added that a team in spirit had been preparing me to do this work for the past twenty years. I didn’t have the right to turn it down now! He seemed surprisingly agitated. I realized only later that my refusing to do what he had committed me to do, and what Spirit had spent twenty years preparing me to do, must have been a humiliation for him. So then he rolled out his bigger guns.
  • Thomas opened a theatrical curtain on a scene of devastation. All was black with drifting smoke, with ruined buildings and some little fires. Here and there were filthy people grubbing in the ground. I was only vaguely seeing it, but the medium rapidly described what she saw. Thomas told us this was how the United States will look in two hundred years. “A religious war . . . small populations . . . we have far fewer people in the world because many have lost the ability to reproduce. And all the food is manufactured. The so-called Christians caused the war to try to force Jesus to come back. We are working to prevent this war! This is a possible future to be prevented.”
  • The curtain closed, and then it opened again on a scene of unearthly beauty in diffuse white light. It looked like Level Three of the afterlife, complete with intensely colored trees and grass and gigantic flowers in unearthly shades. I stared, feeling stunned, as the medium gushed about how lovely it all was. Thomas said, “This is two hundred years from now if you will write this book. We will bring the kingdom of God on earth.” I was dumbfounded. I still was sure I wasn’t worthy! But I said, “I’ll try.”

Thomas and I then began to channel Liberating Jesus. At first it felt like all our other shared literary ventures, with him giving me a table of contents and then starting in on writing the book. He makes me feel so brilliant! No false starts and no need for corrections, just flawless words from flying fingers. But I had a lot going on at the time, and before we had gotten very far into writing Liberating Jesus, almost a month had passed. Then on the afternoon of June 9th the medium we had been using rang me up out of the blue. She told me Thomas had just possessed her body in a Walmart parking lot and said, “Please forgive the speed at which we are dictating, as your soulular self is working directly for the Master now, without benefit of the filters which would slow the transmission. And I hasten to add, you must please of course speak clearly should your physical suffer exhaustion.”

We speculated briefly about what that might mean. And I soon learned exactly what it meant! I came bolt-awake at two o’clock the next morning, ran to my computer, and began to channel a much more powerful entity. Thomas makes me feel smart while he does most of the work, but this new Being was so immensely powerful, and He moved so fast, that He could use me as a word-processor. I had no idea what I was writing, and I had no time to read any of it until He abruptly left me once the book was done.

I know this story is unbelievable. My primary spirit guide told me I had to write a modern version of something he had written when he was Thomas Jefferson, but his request was a trick because it was actually Jesus who later showed up and wrote the book? And the book that Jesus wrote has been in print for five years, and still it hasn’t been much noticed?

My Thomas by Roberta GrimesThomas later gave me the backstory. He told me that I entered this lifetime with writing a new version of Jefferson’s lost Jesus manuscript on my to-do list. But then in the eighties, Jesus decided that His effort to revive His Gospel teachings for modern people as A Course in Miracles had produced a product that was too dense and sophisticated for most of those living now to use, so Jesus decided to do for us just a frank restatement of His Gospel words. He put out a call for a “pure channel” – someone who could channel but had not yet been published – and Thomas nominated me. He channeled My Thomas through me to prove to the Lord that I actually could channel, and in the mid-nineties I was selected. I recall a time around then when I became freshly obsessed with figuring out the science of the afterlife. Was that the start of my closer work with Spirit?

Frankly, I wouldn’t believe any of this myself if I had not been there. I still recall some of what it was like having Jesus as a presence in my mind, and I kept telling myself I should pay close attention because this was so extraordinary. But you don’t remember it. Not really. I do recall that He was using my body as if it were an inanimate object that I had kindly lent to Him: He would direct my eyes to something previously written, and I would look at it but it would seem fine to me so I would try to move on. He would direct my eyes up again to that word or phrase that He didn’t like, and I would try some different phrasings. I would know I had fixed the problem when He moved my attention rapidly back toward finishing our current leading sentence. I remember hearing what must have been His thoughts as whispers in My mind. The only times He spoke to me were when I had some thought with which He disagreed; and then He was short, sharp, all-business. But as days wore on, He seemed to relax a bit and let me hear what He was thinking. It didn’t seem to be aimed at me, but rather He was addressing the world. He would think things like, “If you love Me, then listen to Me!” And my heart would break for Him.

What Thomas wants us all to know is that Jesus will never return in an End Times war. The Book of Revelation is a random piece of revenge literature that had been circulated in a time of great persecution, and it was added to the Bible a full three centuries after the Lord’s death. But Thomas wants us to know that the danger is real that misguided Christians living in a more desperate near-future time might see the Book of Revelation as a how-to guide and create an Apocalypse all on their own in a misbegotten attempt to summon the Lord.

Thomas warns us now that rather than summoning Jesus, the religionists’ attempt to start an end-times war risks bringing about the end of the world. And what alarms me now is that the decline in fertility and birth rates that Thomas prophesied six years ago already is beginning to happen! We cannot know the future. But we have been warned. There are many ways the world could end, but to know in advance that its present most likely ending is less than two hundred years away and will happen if we refuse to heed Spirit’s warning is a flat-out clarion call! Thomas says the hour is late, but if we will act now it still is not too late. All that Jesus ever has asked is that we listen to Him! And it is time for us to listen now. The Lord’s Way beckons….

Nature’s first green is gold, Her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf’s a flower; But only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf. So Eden sank to grief,
So dawn goes down to day. Nothing gold can stay.
– Robert Frost (1874-1963), from “Nothing Gold Can Stay” (1923)

(Postscript for those who think Thomas’s Apocalyptic warning here is excessively alarmist. Apparently his prediction of a plague of infertility is going to be right on the money! An article published five days after this one predicts that a profusion of hormone-disrupting chemicals will drop human sperm counts to zero by the second half of this century. No wonder the earth’s population will be dramatically reduced within two hundred years!)

 

Forest on fire photo credit: franzisko hauser <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/125814940@N06/49361418476″>The Forests are burning</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tropical fire photo credit: EU Civil Protection and Humanitarian Aid <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/69583224@N05/50013632122″>Throwback: EU’s response to forest fires in Bolivia</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Gloomy coast photo credit: Rennett Stowe <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10393601@N08/35270419294”>Coastal Environs</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Desert gloom photo credit: Rennett Stowe <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10393601@N08/33623057468”>Daylight Refraction</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Dark cathedral ruins photo credit: angelobrathot <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/147755034@N05/50110402698”>au bout de l’Europe           “on explore du 14-07-20”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <ahref=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
 

 

Considering Babies

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus loves the little children,
All the little children of the world.
Red and yellow, black and white,
They are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world!
– Clare Herbert Woolston (1856-1927), from “Jesus Loves the Little Children” (1800s)

Anyone who has spent time with a tiny baby has wondered where all the amazingly distinctive traits of newborn children come from. On a superficial level, every newborn child looks and acts like every other child; but parents will tell you that almost from birth each baby has a unique personality. As a mother of three, I am certain that when I looked into the eyes of each newborn bundle, the person that child later grew to be was already complete and inside there, calmly looking back at me.

Scientists believe we are just our material bodies, so they are certain our personalities must somehow arise as a natural function of those bodies. They think that who we are most likely happens in our material brains, although of course they still have no idea about the process or any of the details. And they cannot even hazard a guess as to why an entirely material humanity would bother to have separate personalities at all! Scientists live in a material world. To them, we are meat and nothing more. But you and I now understand that reality is not material. We know that we are eternal beings, that each of us lives many lives, and that every newborn in its mother’s arms is already an ancient being who has bravely planned to live yet another lifetime in which to learn and grow spiritually. Knowing the truth about who and what we are, you and I realize that each newborn child is the complex product of a long, mysterious, and probably fascinating history!

For us to talk about the traits of babies may seem at first to be a diversion from our discussions here that have centered of late on consciousness, Jesus, God, and the meaning and purpose of human life. But in reality, the innate characteristics of babies are at the nexus of all these topics! It is in babies that so much of what we are learning about the greater reality self-integrates. Babies are the fruit, if you will, and the ultimate test of all the truths that we have been researching and patiently trying to fit together in an effort to make some sense of it all.

When I was first researching life after death, what in the end convinced me that life goes on was hundreds of documented communications from the dead that had been received before 1940. They had come through physical and deep-trance mediums in southern England and in the eastern United States over at least half a century of time, and yet all the communicators were obviously speaking from the same gigantic place! The same process, the same physics, the same pastimes, and all the same details: it was like reading hundreds of communications from travelers who all had just arrived in Fiji. I realized then that for all these reports to be so entirely consistent would have been statistically impossible if the afterlife where they said they were now was not entirely real.

And each new baby gives us a similar opportunity to test our evidence-based understanding of humanity’s place in the greater reality. We know now that every human mind is eternal.  We know that each of us lives many different lives on earth – and elsewhere in this universe, too – with each life carefully planned and guided to give us the greatest opportunity to experience and push against negativity, and thereby to ever better grow spiritually. We know or suspect that a great many things might impact a child now entering a newly planned earth-lifetime. In fact, with all that we now know about the venerable being that chose to use that new life as a vehicle for spiritual growth, it would be amazing if new babies did not already have distinct personalities!

With all that we have learned so far about what might be influencing a newborn’s life, let’s look at how those influences could reveal themselves as each child starts to grow. The kinds of traits described here might be apparent from birth, or they may seem to arise later. And some of them will affect that child’s entire life:

  • The Being’s Eternal Nature. During our lives between lives, we are full-fledged and recognizably better versions of ourselves. We lack most of the negativity, whether fear-based or anger-based, that tends to plague us when we are in bodies. And we have access to our entire minds when we are there, which means that we can be comfortably certain that our lives are indeed eternal. So we are a whole lot happier! This nicer base personality that is who we are at home sometimes carries over as a base for our after-birth personality.
  • The Being’s Pre-Birth Spiritual State. People generally continue to incarnate until their personal vibratory rate is close to the top of the fifth afterlife level. This means that some tiny babies are already spiritually pretty advanced beings! The newborn’s spiritual state won’t be immediately obvious, but sometimes a child that is more advanced spiritually will display an especially peaceful and loving personality almost from birth.
  • Skills Learned Before This Lifetime. Many people who didn’t have the opportunity to learn music, painting, sculpture, or various crafts when they were living a previous earthly lifetime will have taken advantage of studying these things as an enjoyable pastime during their lives between lives. Then once they enter a new lifetime, their special skills may become evident even early in life. This is how piano and painting prodigies are born!
  • The Plan For This Lifetime. We come to earth to experience negative stressors so we can push against them and thereby grow spiritually. For a few of us there may be more going on, but for most of us that is the whole story. So when bad things happen to good people, those aren’t bugs at all. They’re features! We plan for illnesses, alcoholic parents, marital problems, career calamities, and any of a hundred other earthly crises as great potential spiritual stressors.
  • Designed-In Assets and Handicaps. As we plan the events of our upcoming lifetime, we also plan for personal characteristics that can make it either easier or more difficult to manage and triumph over our planned life-events. We might plan to be depressive, excitable, bipolar, or plagued by borderline personality disorder; we might have spina bifida, Asperger’s Syndrome, deafness or blindness or another congenital bodily deformity. On the plus side, we could choose to be beautiful, talented, or very bright. Or perhaps we will enjoy being all three.
  • Other-Life Personalities. Each of us has lived many utterly unremarkable lives, but for most of us there have been a few lives that were distinctive in various ways. That innocent little bundle in pink could have been a starlet or a ruthless general; and a babe in blue could have been a courtesan or robber baron or a Biblical prophet. And sometimes one or more of these prior personalities will bleed a bit into the lifetime just beginning.
  • Other-Life Traumas. People who have suffered in wars or died under torture will sometimes carry forward into this new lifetime some fears and angers that are rooted in those old traumas. For example, someone who once burned to death may have an irrational fear of fire; or someone who was buried alive might now be especially claustrophobic.
  • Other-Life Memories. Especially during the first few years of life, many children will have traces of active memories of a recent prior earth-lifetime, and especially of the violent death that ended it. Dr. Ian Stevenson of the University of Virginia made a specialty of studying and writing about such cases.
  • Other-Life Genders. Gender is so central to our human identity that we keep the same gender for most of our lifetimes so we won’t need to freshly adjust each time. And when we do have to adjust, the change can be traumatic! I have nearly always been male, and I have carried for this entire life a vivid memory of the moment when I first discovered this new body was missing something major. I must have been maybe eleven months old and freshly undressed for my bath. I was toddling down an extremely tall hallway as I randomly explored my body, and the shock of realizing what was not there was a trauma that I would never forget. My dispirited thought was, “Oh. I’m the other kind this time.” (I later realized that for a baby to have such a thought says amazing things, in and of itself.) Until I was maybe fourteen years old, I would have done anything to change my gender, but my puberty banished all such thoughts. As it does in more than three-quarters of such cases. Which is why for us to encourage or even to allow children to begin a gender transition before they have completed puberty is a monstrous betrayal of innocent trust.
  • Characteristics of the Available Bodies. As if all this baggage were not enough, we will want to be born in a specific time and place in order to make our life-plan work, so we will be choosing from a limited number of available bodies that each will have its own genetic burdens and potentially negative family issues. Thomas preferred a female body for me, but our best-choice female fetus was conceived illegitimately. Apparently that gave us an early worry, although fortunately the parents soon married so I grew up in a stable home.

With so many factors potentially influencing each newborn baby’s entire life, it’s no wonder that human beings at birth are so amazingly different from one another! And as we grow, all these different factors conflict with one another and wax and wane in us, so scientists who still willfully insist that each newborn is only meat and nothing more are flat unable to understand the complex psychology of all human minds. The study of the afterlife inevitably leads to the study of the greater reality. And everything that we have learned about the amazingly complex reality in which we live our eternal lives finds its complex fruition and its validation in the miracle of each newborn child.    

Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong.
They are weak, but He is strong.
– Anna Bartlett Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)

 

Asian baby with hat photo credit: Ted’s photos – For Me & You <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/90955804@N04/49361679528″>2019 – Vietnam-Avalon-Siem Reap – 29 – Mekong River Cu Lao Gieng (January) Island</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Baby in a red dress photo credit: Carlos Bustamante Restrepo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/65957926@N02/50559817057″>My niece Margarita wearing a red dress</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Believing vs. Having Faith

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I really wanna know You. I really wanna see You.
I’d like to see You, Lord. I wanna see You, Lord!
It takes so long, my Lord. My sweet Lord!
Oh my sweet Lord! My sweet Lord!
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

Seeking and relating to gods is a process as innate to human life as thinking and speaking. That is an amazing fact! We can trace organized religions back to at least 8,000 BCE, to the advent of farming and the first settlements; and the earliest archeological evidence for religious beliefs dates to at least 200,000 BCE. The notion of gods is fully as old as humanity itself. This fact suggests that our having lived before birth in a very much better place may always have been a kind of folk-memory. Perhaps we always have known on some level that there was Something Greater that called to us and nagged us with Its wish to be found. And we have had no way to imagine the Source of that call except as a mimic of ourselves, so every god created by humankind has been an extra-powerful human-like being. Naturally, all those human-made gods were imagined to also have outsized human flaws! Including even the Christian God. The God that you and I met in our childhood churches was envisioned as a strict but loving Father who insisted that we must learn to better love and forgive. He demanded love and forgiveness of us, even though the Christian God was Himself so lacking in love and forgiveness that He refused to forgive us for our human failings unless He first got to watch His Own Son being tortured and murdered. People have created some awful gods! 

We have talked here about the fact that Christianity has been declining rapidly in the United States and worldwide. Currently 43% of adults in the U.S. identify as Protestants, which is down from 51% in 2009; and 20% of American adults are Catholics, down from 23% in 2009. The forced lockdowns of 2020 seem to be accelerating this trend, so it is estimated now that fully one-fifth of the Christian churches in the United States that temporarily closed their doors last spring will close them for good within the year. This dramatic implosion of the world’s most popular religion seems to have a number of causes. But I think the primary reason why Christianity is desperately struggling now is the fact that it requires us to believe what to most modern adults is flat-out unbelievable.

People have learned a lot in two thousand years. When Jesus was born, human beings knew almost nothing about anything! And we had few intellectual skills with which we might begin to figure things out, so for religions to give us their dogmas around which we could build a bit of hopeful faith was better than accepting that everything was and would forever remain a puzzle. But after the advent of the scientific method, the Enlightenment and the first human landing on the moon, humankind’s default setting has been reversed. Today many people’s general assumption is that we already understand most things, and many in the West are sure that before long we are going to figure out everything else. From our present, much more  self-assured perspective on reality, many moderns are finding it harder to believe in anything that they cannot see. And what Christianity requires of us is even more of a stretch than mere belief! After all, each of us holds many “beliefs” that are supported by good evidence, from the notion that the sun will rise in the east to the theories that gold is worth more than lead and season will follow season in a predictable way. None of what we believe is an eternal certainty. In fact, everything that we believe with confidence is likely to one day no longer be true; but for purposes of planning our daily lives, our beliefs based in longstanding evidence have proven to be pretty reliable. Unlike our ancient ancestors, we have good reason to be confident now that we live in a stable and comprehensibly facts-based world.

It is precisely our experience that facts-based beliefs are reliable that is the enemy of religions. Each religion is based in its own dogmas, which are arbitrary ideas not rooted in evidence so they don’t rise to the level of actual beliefs. And yet they are essential, since without a broad acceptance of its dogmas each religion would topple like a paper house. And for us to firmly hold religious beliefs that are unsupported by evidence requires that we believe without needing evidence. Christians have a favorite word for that! Quite simply, “faith” means something like “confident belief not rooted in evidence.” The word is derived from the Latin “fides,” which means something like “trust that a concept or idea is true, even though we have no definitive evidence.” To the Christian ear, “belief” sounds cold and mechanical, while “faith” is the warm and spiritual way to describe our relationship to the religion and to God. This notion that believing without evidence is a virtue likely stems from what Jesus is quoted as having said to Thomas when His disciple put a hand into the spear wound in the side of the Lord’s risen body and then said, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said, “Because you have seen Me, have you believed? Blessed are they who did not see, and yet believed” (JN 20:29). So Christians have been sure from the founding of the religion that the highest virtue is for us to have faith in God, in Jesus, and in all the Christian dogmas, even without evidence that any of it is real.

This notion that “having faith” is a virtue lasted throughout Christian history until about the middle of the twentieth century. By the Sixties, that ancient cultural understanding that just about everything was inexplicable and required of us a lot of faith was being replaced by a modern confidence that since we even had learned how to split the atom, we were likely before long to work out everything else! So by the start of the twenty-first century, having faith without evidence was no longer seen as the virtue that it once had been, and many more sophisticated Christians were starting to look askance at a lot of the peculiar dogmas they still were being asked to take entirely on faith.

So then some of the most ardent Christian apologists sought to prove that Christian dogmas could indeed be supported by evidence. They found and trumpeted evidence that Jesus actually had lived on earth, and even that the Shroud of Turin could be used as evidence that He had been crucified and resurrected.  But of course, far from supporting the fear-based and frankly unbelievable central Christian dogma, all the evidence that Jesus was an historical figure who had died and then reanimated His body gave no support at all to the religion’s assertion that God had long ago required the torture and murder of His Own Son.

There are a number of reasons why Christian church membership is in such sharp decline, but the fact that having faith without evidence is such thin gruel for modern people is a big one. When you and I were learning in our childhood churches that Jesus had died as a sacrifice to His Father because God would never forgive us otherwise, perhaps we looked suspiciously at our own dads at the time, but we accepted that central Christian teaching. We also were accepting television, telephones, automobiles, and electric lights without knowing how any of them worked, either! But as we grew and finished our educations, we were figuring out a great many things. And then another generation came, and another very soon followed it, with each of them feeling ever more confident that truths require real evidence, and therefore they were ever more suspicious of Christianity’s insistence that we trust its dogmas. In the twenty-first century, any religion that demands that its adherents “just have faith” and offers no evidence to support its ideas is simply no longer viable.

Christianity’s dogmas always have been built on nothing but faith-based ideas. There was no need for supporting evidence when Christianity first began, and nor was there a need for evidence during most of the religion’s history. But emphatically, we need evidence now! And importantly, we do have evidence that, far from being bothered by our now seeking meatier evidence-based truths, the Godhead welcomes our curiosity and will gladly reward it!

The world’s greatest pioneers in the field of afterlife research are Victor and Wendy Zammit of Sidney, Australia. One of the Zammits’ own special teachers is an elevated collective in spirit that speaks through an entity called Silver Birch and gives us encouragement. Silver Birch says, “We never say to you ‘… do not use your reason: faith only.’ We say ‘Use that which the Great Power has given you. Test us. Examine us. If aught that we say is debasing, cruel or immoral, then reject us ….’ If we seek always to teach you to live nobler lives, lives of greater self-sacrifice and of idealism, then surely that demonstrates that the hallmark of the Great Power is stamped upon our teaching.” – (Silver Birch Anthology – p.43 The Divine Plan)

Even more importantly, Jesus says the same thing! He encourages us to “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8).

For most of Christian history, no amount of seeking with the primitive intellectual tools that then were available to us could have helped us learn much of anything! So these words of the Lord’s seem to have been spoken and preserved just for this beautiful day, when we can begin to seek and find in Christianity only the parts of it that are worthy of a rational and evidence–based belief. Now, in the twenty-first century, when so many things can be researched and will yield to our reason-based understanding, Christians who no longer feel able to believe the fear-based dogmas of a human-made religion can now take Jesus at His word. We can seek, and we will find inside the ugly shell of Christianity’s fears the real and abundant evidence we crave for the glorious truths that Jesus taught.

Then I heard the voice of the Lord, saying,
“Whom shall I send, and who will go for Us?”
Then I said, “Here am I. Send me!”
– The Prophet Isaiah (ca 700 BC) (Isaiah 6:8)

 

White peacock on a dock photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 54 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/46949504502″>Great Tail</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Blue peacock photo credit: Andy Magee <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/84272941@N00/4860975561″>Peacock Tail</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Peacock strolling photo credit: fishhawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/16502322@N03/48280164762″>Peacock strolling through a field.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
White peacock photo credit: joiseyshowaa <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/30201239@N00/49880832741″>Explosion of White</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Peacock on a roof photo credit: Taiga ISHIBASHI <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/68601213@N05/49887613387″>Blue Phoenix</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Peacock portrait photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 54 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/49415653341″>Like My Hat?</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Is Jesus Actually God on Earth?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Praise to the Lord, the Almighty, the King of creation;
O my soul, praise Him, for He is thy health and salvation:
Come ye who hear, Brothers and sisters draw near,
Praise Him in glad adoration.
– Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878), (translator from German), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1863)

There have been many beloved spiritual teachers and prophets down all the generations. Whenever I say or write that Jesus came to us as God on earth, you can depend on it: someone is going to say, “But what about the Buddha?” Or what about this or that other great religious figure? Weren’t all of them also God on earth? Actually, now that you mention it, every human being might be called God on earth. Every one of us is an aspect of the self-same Consciousness as the Godhead Itself, so all of us are of the Godhead’s Mind, from the lowest vibration to the highest. In the most fundamental and most beautiful sense, every one of us is God on earth.

What makes Jesus different from the rest of us is that according to a number of disparate sources, He came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead. We have lately been given to understand that the Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings, which likely is a simplification of what is a much more complex reality. Having been given that insight by my spirit guide, Thomas, I have since seen evidence for it everywhere. For example, Mikey Morgan is a sixth-level being who recently took an optional earth-lifetime so he could teach us in modern terms from the spiritual range just below the Godhead. When Mikey was asked to define God, he said, “God is the Unity of Absolute Pure Love which is Infinite. The Collective or Source of all that exists.” Wow. When Mikey and Thomas agree on something, that pretty well seals the deal for me! But for purposes of this discussion, the actual nature of the Godhead won’t matter. What is important is the fact that Jesus came to us not as just a “begotten Son” whose mission was to be sacrificed in order to redeem us from our Creator’s wrath. No! Every bit of that old Christian story is fortunately just human-made nonsense. Jesus is much more important than that. He came to earth in a human body as an aspect of the genuine Godhead. When you know that, you see His teachings and His mission in a whole new light!

For what follows to make sense to you, we likely ought to again explain how it is possible for us to investigate the greater reality with an open mind. You shouldn’t trust just this one reporter! But you also cannot trust either religions or science alone as authorities on anything factual. Here is why:

  • Mainstream science is only the study of matter and its correlate energy. Just over a century ago, the scientific community adopted materialism as what they called “the fundamental scientific dogma.” And since reality is fundamentally non-material and is grounded in the base energy that we experience in a dim way as human consciousness, most scientific conclusions are not worth much. In fact, to use any bit of evidence that was produced by traditional scientific research, we first must temper it with the product of research that is not in any way limited by science’s materialist constraints.
  • Religions are flies in amber which demand our faith in their old ideas. All of them insist that we make their dogmas the basis of our understanding, when the whole point of our doing independent research is that we aren’t satisfied with just believing anything. Now we really want to know! Jesus tells us that we must “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you” (MT 7:7). So for us to look beyond believing just religious notions is encouraged by the Lord Himself!

If we ever hope to understand what actually is going on, we’ve got to venture far beyond both mainstream science and traditional religions. We must investigate every possible source of information, and use only what can be demonstrated to be free of any beliefs-based taint. I hope you will do all your own research! But just to get you started, here are some of the bits of evidence that have convinced me that Jesus did indeed come to us as God on earth:

Jesus  Claimed That God Was in Him and Spoke Through Him

For example, Jesus said, “The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work” (JN 14:10). And, “The word which you hear is not Mine, but the Father’s who sent Me” (JN 14:24). And even, “Truly, truly, I say to you, the Son can do nothing of His own accord, but only what He sees the Father doing. For whatever the Father does, that the Son does likewise” (JN 5:19). All of us have spirit guides who effectively are inside us, too, and are able to influence what we think and say; so for Jesus to have had that sort of intimate relationship with Spirit is not surprising. But for the Godhead to have been in Jesus and speaking through Jesus is a different matter! For one thing, the Godhead is almost certainly a Collective of Perfected Beings. And for another, each of those spiritually perfected beings is so vastly powerful that even the most spiritually elevated beings of a consciousness vibration approaching the level of the Godhead are unable to bear the Godhead’s energy. So the spiritual energy that Jesus Himself was channeling so easily would have been something like the energy of the entire sun. Or even of a thousand suns. We have no way to imagine the power of the Godhead that continuously manifests this universe! So if the Godhead was in Jesus when the Lord inhabited a material body, then He Himself was of the Godhead’s spiritual level. There is no other possibility.

My Spirit Guide Tells Us Who Jesus Was and Why He Came

Thomas tells us that Jesus came to earth from the highest aspect of the Godhead. He agrees with Mikey Morgan that the Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings. And Thomas also tells us that Jesus came with a very specific two-part mission!  That was why He chose to be born in a material body and live a human life from His infancy, rather than simply appearing briefly as an adult and making His pronouncements. Thomas says that the Lord wanted to:

  • “Walk in our shoes” and experience human life in full as He sought to understand why the people of that day were finding it so hard to grow spiritually, and also why this planet’s collective consciousness vibrations were sinking so deeply toward fear. He also wanted to:
  • Teach us how to raise our personal consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward love. Once Jesus had learned whatever He could from living a fully human life, He set out to teach us how to eliminate most of what was making us fearful so we could move on to achieve much more rapid spiritual growth. He used a simple analogy to the kingdom of God – the spiritually elevated level just below the Source – to help His followers understand what our goal must be. And He urged us to free ourselves from religious fears and abandon the human-made and fear-based Jehovah so we could learn to better relate to the genuine Godhead as we also learn to ever better love and forgive. The Gospel teachings of Jesus as He gave them to us two thousand years ago remain the easiest and the most effective way for anyone to achieve rapid spiritual growth and help to bring the kingdom of God on earth.

We Have Evidence That Jesus Came From the Godhead

The evidence for the life of Jesus even beyond the Gospels is surprisingly strong. It is easy to demonstrate that He did live on earth. But for me, the most dramatic evidence that Jesus both lived on earth and also came to us from the highest aspect of the Godhead is the Shroud of Turin. The Shroud is the Lord’s purported burial-wrapping, and a close modern study of it can readily demonstrate that Jesus did indeed die on a cross and let His dead body begin to decompose. Then two days later He re-inhabited and reanimated that dead body and actually used it briefly. No one with less than the Godhead’s powers could re-animate and use a formerly-dead body! And consider these facts:

*The linen of the Shroud is authentic. It can be carbon-dated and dated in all its details to the lifetime of Jesus.
* The marks on the Shroud align with the Lord’s execution. The body the Shroud covered was a Jewish man who died on the eve of the Sabbath, and he had suffered all the Lord’s wounds.
* The Shroud carries smudges that turn out to be a 3-D photographic negative. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a 3-D negative even was! Then when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898, the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative. That image later turned out to be a mathematically perfect three-dimensional image.
* No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation given is that it was caused by a powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation” which happened after the blood on the Shroud had dried.

I have come to accept the divine nature of Jesus somewhat reluctantly, and only based upon evidence. For Him to have taught us God’s eternal truths, Jesus needn’t have been any more important than just a spiritually elevated being, perhaps no more advanced than your spirit guide or mine. It has taken me decades of finding many bits of evidence and assembling it, seeing how it all fits and what it can reasonably be telling us is true, before at last I am able to announce to you what seems to be a certainty. Jesus came to us as God on earth. I think we even can add that the life of Jesus was probably the only time in history when a Perfected Member of the Godhead chose to live an earth-life in a human body. And He did it as a beautiful, selfless gift to all of humankind. Praise to the Lord, indeed!

Praise to the Lord, who o’er all things so wondrously reigneth,
Shelters thee under his wings, yea, so gently sustaineth:
Hast thou not seen all that is needful hath been
Granted in what He ordaineth?
– Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878), (translator from German), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1863)

 

Ascension photo credit: MTSOfan <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8628862@N05/48187338901″>The Ascension, Detail</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
My Lord photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/48186354052″>My Lord and my God</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Task Before Us

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Praise to the Lord, who doth prosper thy work, and defend thee;
Surely His goodness and mercy here daily attend thee;
Ponder anew all the Almighty can do,
He who with love doth befriend thee.
– Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878), (translator from German), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1863)

Today’s topic has been a struggle for me. When the task is to put together what I have learned in fifty years of studying the afterlife evidence, the teachings of Jesus, and key aspects of materialist science in order to better understand reality, I can do that! And in truth, all this widely disparate evidence fits together so perfectly that it seems to be statistically impossible for the conclusions we can draw from it not to be right. But our task for today is to take the next step, and reason beyond our present reality toward establishing a process that can lead to a future we have no way even to imagine now. The kingdom of God overspreading the earth will be an explosion of love and joy!

Jesus gave us the method and the goal. And we begin to see now that His vision can work! For me, one clear proof of the divinity of Jesus is the fact that two thousand years ago He knew extraordinary things about human nature that we are discovering only now. So our mission and our method have been set for us by One whose wisdom and knowledge are perfect. But still, for us to achieve the kingdom of God on earth looks to be impossible!

Our problem is that the only way to bring the kingdom of God on earth is to spiritually elevate each of us individually. Person by person. Since every human mind is part of the one vast Mind that continuously manifests reality, we know that as people work to raise their own consciousness vibrations, the success of each will minutely contribute to the elevation of us all. So we can begin from our present state of deep negativity, and as each of us grows spiritually we can together elevate the consciousness vibrations of us all. And of course, the more of us who are growing spiritually, the more our growth will act to elevate that one collective human consciousness, whose further elevation then will prompt ever more and more people to work to raise their own consciousness vibrations, too. And so it will build, until spiritual growth is rapidly happening everywhere.

It has been estimated that when as few as ten percent of the world’s population has achieved spiritual elevation to the point where they will no longer need to reincarnate (which is to say, when they have achieved the spiritual development of what we call the fifth level), at that point all of human consciousness will be able to continue to rise on its own in a gloriously positive feedback loop of ever more people raising their vibrations and contributing to the elevation of everyone else. And then, before long, kindness and joy will break out like springtime all over the world! Even terrorists will be cuddling puppies. And we will begin to notice with delight that the kingdom of God is upon us now. It is within us and all around us!

Although of course, right now humankind is rushing headlong in the wrong direction. There is so much negativity and rage polluting all of human consciousness that some astral travelers have reported seeing the earth’s negativity from their non-material perspective as a dark-gray sludge that blankets the planet. And we on earth live in it and breathe it, especially in the United States, where every form of rage has become such a drag on our spiritual health that a recent poll finds that nearly half of the American public believes we are about to fight a second Civil War. We are told by people not now in bodies that the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind have been sinking fast in recent decades in the wake of the blood-drenched twentieth century. And they tell us that unless we can arrest the slide, we can expect our present extreme negativity to feed on itself and grow steadily worse, with ever more wars and all forms of hatred further deepening our planet’s negativity. Elevated beings are telling us now that unless we can rapidly turn things around, humankind has become so debased that it will destroy itself and this planet in about another two hundred years.

So we have before us a nearly impossible task that has a quick timeline. Either we give it everything we’ve got right now, or we live out the balance of our lives on earth always knowing that our grandchildren’s grandchildren’s grandchildren are going to inherit a ravaged planet and suffer a worldwide war that no member of our species can survive.

Do I have your attention now?

Our situation is stark, but it is not hopeless. Thomas tells us that we still have time. If we will work aggressively toward raising the consciousness vibrations of as many people as we can, it might take us no more than two hundred years to bring the kingdom of God on earth. And tantalizingly, astral travelers into the future (yes, that is a thing)  have come back to tell us that in two hundred years the negative scum that now sullies our planet is going to be altogether gone.

I began this week with the task of mapping for you the steps of a process by which we could move rapidly from here to there; but the more I considered it, the more impossible it seemed. There are 7.8 billion people on earth. Ten percent of that would mean that roughly 780 million people would have to elevate themselves to the fifth spiritual level of reality in order to begin a rapid transformation of our collective consciousness and thereby launch the kingdom of God on earth. We can describe the process. We can set the goal. But less than twenty percent of humanity now lives in first-world nations where people are well educated and speak English as a first or second language. So what we are saying is that for us to even start to move the meter on this, we will need to reach and persuade and then to rapidly spiritually elevate roughly half of the English-speaking world.

After a week of struggle, I begin to see now how we might get this done. These steps will need to be taken simultaneously, and for us to take them quickly enough is likely to require a substantial investment. To bring the kingdom of God on earth in time to save humanity, we will need to do the following things:

  • Spread the alarm. For years I have lived with a terrible warning. My spirit guide, Thomas, told me plainly as he was persuading me to channel Liberating Jesus that our present deeply negative course will lead to humanity’s extinction in an Armageddon of planetary destruction in about another two hundred years. I haven’t much talked about this. And I hesitate to sound like a New Age crackpot, but I don’t have the right to keep this warning to myself! Compared to an elevation in CO2 that is expected to raise global temperatures by a few degrees over a century of time, the utter destruction of everything we know within a period even briefer than the history of the United States is a flat-out worldwide dumpster fire. We have no right not to raise the alarm!
  • Help as many people as possible to altogether lose their fear of death. Fear of death is the base fear. When we no longer fear death, we no longer fear anything. And since negative energy is a sludge of fear-based emotions, the easiest way to fight negativity is to help people lose their fear of death. The Baby Boom generation has been leading Western cultural trends for seven decades. Now for Boomers the Next Big Thing is death. So let’s make death all the rage! It takes about two years of study for someone who is clueless at the start to become convinced that human life is eternal.
  • Share the truths that Jesus taught. Worldwide rankings of the most popular people nearly always show Jesus at Number One. He may be the only man whose name is known by everyone on earth. Yet most people know Jesus as nothing more than the central figure in Christianity. And since the religion downplays His teachings in favor of focusing on its own dogmas, the Lord’s greatest gifts to us are largely unknown. The most efficient way to help people understand why we need to raise our consciousness vibrations is to broadly share His Gospel teachings now.
  • Teach prevenient forgiveness. This practice of forgiving everything even before it happens is a natural outgrowth of the teachings of Jesus. He was firm about our need to do it, and Thomas has shown me how easily the trick can be learned. Forgiving things after they have happened is just too hard! Practicing prevenient forgiveness can shorten the time it takes to achieve the fifth spiritual level to as little as a single year. 
  • Establish support groups. When I set out to raise my own consciousness vibration, I was on my own. But I did have Thomas! And I realize now that his suggestions and support were essential to my mastering such rapid growth that I achieved most of it in two months’ time and I was able to sustain it and build it from there. The teachings of Jesus work so quickly and so well that  we can make the process of raising everyone’s consciousness vibrations both easy and a lot of fun.

If you share my sense of urgency about beginning now to fix the world, then living the Lord’s Way and teaching it to others is the surest route that we can take. The Way is what Jesus called His Gospel instructions for achieving the kingdom of God on earth, and as we practice The Way we will be further raising our own consciousness vibrations while we teach and help others. I urge you to read again what we have said about The Way. Please think about the five steps outlined above, and let’s ponder together how we can begin to make this process both manageable and scalable. Spiritually elevating 780 million people will be a daunting task! But it is in essence just the process of helping Jesus sell His world-saving instructions some 780 million times. We can’t solve this problem. But He can! And the time to help Him begin it is now.

Praise to the Lord! Oh let all that is in me adore Him!
All that hath life and breath, come now with praises before Him!
Let the Amen Sound from His people again,
Gladly for aye we adore Him!
– Catherine Winkworth (1827-1878), (translator from German), from “Praise to the Lord, the Almighty” (1863)

 

Jesus in silhouette photo credit: Geraint Rowland Photography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/33909206@N04/22531243995″>”Excuse me while I kiss the Sky…”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Lord’s Morality

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Crown Him the Lord of heaven, enthroned in worlds above;
Crown Him the king, to whom is given the wondrous name of Love.
Crown Him with many crowns, as thrones before Him fall.
Crown him, ye kings, with many crowns, for He is King of all.
– Matthew Bridges (1800-1894) & Godfrey Thring (1823-1903), from “Crown Him With Many Crowns” (1851)

As people moved from being hunter-gatherers to living first in tribes and then in towns, they began to need rules to govern their community social behavior. Such moral laws generally came from human-made gods, and most were similar to the Judeo-Christian Ten Commandments as they were written more than a thousand years before Jesus was born:

“I am the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You shall have no other gods before or beside Me.

“You shall not make for yourself a graven image or any likeness of what is in heaven above or on the earth beneath, or in the water under the earth. You shall not worship them nor serve them; for I, the Lord your God, am a jealous God, inflicting punishment for the wrongdoing of the fathers on the children to the third and the fourth generations of those who hate Me, but showing favor to thousands, to those who love Me and keep My commandments.

“You shall not take the name of the Lord your God in vain, for the Lord will not leave him unpunished who takes His name in vain.

“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy. For six days you shall labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Sabbath of the Lord your God; on it you shall not do any work, you, or your son, or your daughter, your male slave or your female slave, or your cattle, or your resident who stays with you. For in six days the Lord made the heavens and the earth, the seas and everything that is in them, and He rested on the seventh day; for that reason the Lord blessed the Sabbath day and made it holy.

“Honor your father and your mother, so that your days may be prolonged on the land which the Lord your God gives you.

“You shall not murder.

“You shall not commit adultery.

“You shall not steal.

“You shall not give false testimony against your neighbor.

“You shall not covet your neighbor’s house; you shall not covet your neighbor’s wife, or his male slave, or his female slave, or his ox, or his donkey, or anything that belongs to your neighbor” (Exodus 20:1-17).

Please read this list again. Note how rigid and cold, how devoid of compassion, how fear-based and largely lacking in love The Ten Commandments really are! They are so deeply of their own time and culture that arguably they are no longer useful to us on any level. Let’s consider them in light of our modern spiritual understandings:

* The first two commandments forbid polytheism and idol-worship. Three thousand years ago this was a great step forward! But it has been a long time now since either of those old ways of doing religion was any threat to spirit-based monotheism.

* The third commandment requires that we respect the name of God. Primitive cultures saw great magical powers in names! Now, of course, we know that the Godhead cares a lot more about what is in our minds and hearts than the Godhead cares about our use of Its name.

* The fourth commandment requires us to take time off from working. Not long ago, most people were spending most of every day just keeping themselves alive. We needed an occasional day of rest, and if we were to take our human-made gods seriously we needed to spend time with them as well.

* The fifth commandment requires that we care for our parents. Laws can tell us something of what life was like when they were first written. And this effort to tie caring for the elderly to longer-term stability suggests that the transition from living in roving clans to living in cities meant that the elderly went from being burdens on younger generations to being valued as sources of stability and wisdom.

* The sixth through the eighth commandments are black-letter laws for better organizing human societies. We have talked about the fact that strict and arbitrary laws like these can be nothing more than guidelines, since each of them has many possible exceptions.

* The ninth and tenth commandments are rules for structuring relationships in larger and more complex societies. Hunter-gatherer groups generally numbered fewer than fifty people, and they were often extended families. Such small groups of mostly relatives could share an us-vs.-them loyalty that was diluted as we began to live in larger settled cities, so now rules were needed to govern respecting the property of those outside our own clans and being honest in our interactions with strangers.

Arguably the most important moment in all four Gospels comes when someone asks Jesus to name the greatest commandment. For the Lord to speak directly against the prevailing religion would have been a capital crime, so He seems to have used answering pertinent questions as a chance to cloak His most important lessons in what might look to the lurking Temple spies like simple throwaway answers. For example, here He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments, but instead He gave us God’s new Law of Love. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets.” (MT 22:37-40). “The Law and the Prophets” was what the Jews of His day called the Christian Old Testament. So in just these few words, and well beneath the radar of the Temple spies, Jesus told us to throw away all the Old Testament laws – including The Ten Commandments – and put in their place God’s new Law of Love.

Jesus in His Gospels made a point of outmoding all the Old Testament rules and laws, including The Ten Commandments. He made our relationship with God a personal and not a public one (MT 6:1-6), He healed and worked on the Sabbath (MT 12:1-13), He disregarded rigid sexual taboos (JN 8:3-11), and He replaced the very idea of rules with the notion of living our lives in God’s love (MT 22:37-40). To help to foster that love, He stressed the moral importance of forgiveness (MT 18:21-23) and loving kindness (JN 13:34). The teachings of Jesus replace the old notion that God just tells us what to do with the personal empowerment of internal standards that we ourselves are responsible for applying by virtue of our own love-infused perspectives. It is impossible for us to sufficiently stress what a radical departure this notion was two thousand years ago! Indeed, it remains so radical today that most Christians still see the black-letter Ten Commandments as important, even a full two thousand years after Jesus told us He had replaced them so we could simply throw them away.

The Ten Commandments so deeply work against God’s Law of Love that the two cannot be lived simultaneously. The former morality is entirely external, demanding nothing more than that we know and obey the law as it was given to us; while the latter insists that we internalize what love is and what it might require of us in each new situation. Even beyond that, living by love calls upon us to trust in both our own ability to understand love and our ability to always discern in each moment what God’s love requires. God’s Law of Love is a more radical basis for morality than any set of laws could be!

And yet, this is what Jesus asks of us. He trusts us to be able to discern and live by an internal morality based in love that is divorced from every law. He can be confident about our ability to do this because He knows a lot more than we know! He is in fact an aspect of the Godhead living briefly here on earth. Two thousand years ago Jesus told us things about ourselves that we could not otherwise have begun to understand until well into the lifetimes of modern people who are still among us today.

There are several moments in the Gospels where Jesus shows us He possesses the Godhead’s knowledge, but for me the biggest one comes in Mark and toward the end of the Lord’s life on earth. On the previous day He had cursed a fig tree, perhaps so He could give His disciples this lesson. Then as they passed that tree on the following morning, they saw that it had withered from its roots. Peter said to Jesus, “Rabbi, look, the fig tree that You cursed has withered.” And Jesus answered and said to them, “Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and thrown into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted to him. Therefore, I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be yours” (MK 11:21-24). A full two thousand years ago Jesus taught His disciples the power of praying in affirmations! He understood and taught His followers how to use the creative powers of their minds, which is a modern understanding so cutting-edge that scientists still struggle with it today.

We should be reluctant to lightly put aside the Godhead’s ancient, divinely-revealed truths. But still, we must not deny to God the right to give us new revelations! And it is clear now as we read the Gospels that God’s Law of Love as Jesus revealed it is meant to be the root of a whole new morality based entirely in love. In the fullness of time, God asked us to move on from trusting written rules so we could embrace instead the powers of our minds to give us a whole new morality where each of us will be able to govern ourselves in a harmony of divine love. The Godhead’s only moral law is in fact the love that Jesus taught! This feels exciting, doesn’t it? But how might it work? We’ll begin to talk about that next week….

Crown Him with many crowns, The Lamb upon the throne.
Hark how the heavenly anthem drowns all music but its own!
Awake, my soul, and sing of Him Who died for thee,
And hail Him as thy matchless King thru all eternity.
– Matthew Bridges (1800-1894) & Godfrey Thring (1823-1903), from “Crown Him With Many Crowns” (1851)

 

Stained-glass Moses photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/50733250596″>O Adonai</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Ten Commandments photo credit: Richard Elzey <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/54602205@N00/15520102554″>Ten Commandments in Stone</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Stained glass commandments photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/47344250952″>Keep all His Commandments</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Old book photo credit: ER’s Eyes – Our planet is beautiful. <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/41111966@N04/44610757324″>The Oldest Manuscript, the Manuscript & Rare Book Museum, the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, the Mediterranean, Egypt.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Priest with scroll photo credit: Catholic Church (England and Wales) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/27340278@N03/29947473430″>Episcopal Ordination Mar Joseph Srampickal</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

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