Author: Roberta Grimes

Empathy

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The road is long, with many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows when.
But I’m strong, strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.
– Bobby Scott (1937-1990) & Bob Russell (1914-1970), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

If people were nothing more than different aspects of one group consciousness, then for a significant number of us to work at raising our consciousness vibrations would be pretty much all it would take for us to start to bring the kingdom of God on earth. But in fact, each of us is a complex individual who is living as a limited aspect of a much greater eternal Mind, and we are strongly influenced by the restrictions of these material bodies. While we are on earth, we have a lot going on! That being the case, there are concepts beyond the overarching goals of gratitude, forgiveness, and love that we will need to better understand if we hope to make optimum spiritual progress in this lifetime, and if we ever hope to much improve the world. This is the first of four reflections on topics that are likely at first to seem less than crucial. Please bear with me on this. We have a world to save!

We all think we know what love is. We love our life-partners. Our children. Our friends. Our pets. We imagine that just spreading those happy feelings to others beyond our personal circle must be what Jesus means when He tells us we must love our neighbors as ourselves (MT 19:19). We assume that once we have sufficiently raised our personal consciousness vibrations, we will just naturally love everyone! Sadly, though, it is not that simple.

What we refer to as love is actually many different warm emotions. In English, and also in the Aramaic that Jesus spoke, there is just one word for love; but ancient Greek is the language into which the words of Jesus were first translated, and there we find six handy words for love:

  • Philautia means love for oneself.
  • Pragma means longstanding love.
  • Eros means sexual or romantic love.
  • Philia means deep and close friendship.
  • Ludus means light and playful affinity.
  • Agape means genuine universal love.

The kind of love that Jesus wants us to cultivate is, of course, agape; and this sort of love for everyone really doesn’t just come naturally. How can we love everyone on earth when there are more than seven billion of us and we will meet no more than maybe a few thousand people in our entire lives? To love everyone, we will need to find ways to come to see all the billions of people that we will never lay eyes on as very much like the ones that we love, and also much like ourselves. If we think we can just spontaneously feel real love for strangers who look and act peculiar to us and speak an unfamiliar language, then we are kidding ourselves.

What we are being called to discover in everyone on earth is our innate shared humanity. So loving our neighbors requires that we cultivate empathy, which is the ability to understand and share the feelings of others. Empathy is different from compassion. We all can feel compassion for someone who is suffering, but we can feel real empathy only for those that we perceive to be pretty much like ourselves. Among other things, empathy requires that we realize and accept the fact that other people might reasonably see things differently than we do.

My husband of forty-seven years has Asperger Syndrome (we’ll refer to it here as “AS”). AS is on the autism spectrum, but many who have it are very high-functioning and even brilliant people. If you met my love, you would just find him to be a bit on the shy side. But most AS people share one confounding trait: they are unable to empathize with others. I learned this early in my marriage, when I might be crying and raging at him while he looked at me with bewildered concern. It was a turning point when I realized that if something was not important to him he was unable to imagine why it bothered me. Having AS is not the only reason why someone might find it hard to empathize, but it is a useful reminder of the fact that there are good reasons why we cannot expect people whose minds are influenced by being in material bodies to nevertheless rise above the limitations of those bodies and conceive a universal love for humankind. Another high-functioning AS person was apparently Thomas Jefferson. The trait is shed when we leave our bodies, so Thomas is not an AS person now; and in fact, he can read people’s motivations a great deal better than I can. But I think it was Jefferson’s inability to imagine living with a slave’s limitations that made him unable despite much effort to come up with a workable emancipation plan.

I have spent the past decade trying to raise my personal consciousness vibration away from fear and toward more perfect love using the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Within a few months I made three discoveries:

  • Completely forgiving is easiest if you teach yourself never to be bothered in the first place. I came to call it prevenient forgiveness. Suffering a wrong, becoming upset about it, then wrestling down our irritation and forcing ourselves to completely forgive it is much too difficult.
  • The process of learning prevenient forgiveness turns out to be surprisingly mechanical. Once you have taught your lazy mind never to see anything as a threat, you will no longer suffer any genuine anger, not even over awful life-changing events.
  • As your mind becomes more peaceful, your warmth toward others begins to rise. Within three months of my first beginning an active prevenient forgiveness practice, I realized I was developing an incipient tenderness toward strangers on the street that was easy to begin to build into a dawning universal love. Learning to love seven billion people is a whole lot easier once we have cleared our minds of the tendency to cultivate all the petty angers that we ourselves have taught our minds to breed!

 It turns out that for most of us there is a warm fellow-feeling already there, beneath all our ego-based and self-programmed annoyance triggers. When Jesus tells us to love our neighbors as ourselves, He is urging us to uncover and resume what is in fact a strong natural affinity for other people. And our need to pursue the rediscovery of that affinity is one reason why Jesus requires us to forgive the wrongs that we suffer even seventy times seven times (MT 18:22), no matter what others might do to us. As we work at closely following the teachings of Jesus, we come more and more to see the practical sense of those teachings, and how powerful they are! But we still must reckon with the eccentricities of these material bodies. And a man who can perplexedly watch the woman he loves weep with rage because what bothers her wouldn’t bother him is not someone who can naturally empathize. A man who hated the system of slavery and loved the slaves who were his family members, but who nevertheless was unable to see that the dullness and submissiveness of slaves did not reflect who they actually were had no way to imagine a path to emancipation that would not end in racial strife.

So, are we at an impasse here? If cultivating a strong sense of empathy is essential to our learning to love our neighbors as ourselves, and if for some people a lack of empathy is as disabling a trait as a missing limb, do we now need to sadly report to Jesus that His ambitions for us exceed humanity’s grasp? And even some people not born with traits on the autism spectrum might have trouble feeling an appropriate level of empathy. They might have suffered childhood abuse, or else they might be sociopathic. What now?

Our first task, of course, is to accept the fact that when it comes to our universal need to grow spiritually on an individual level, some people are going to find it harder than others. Yet this is a contest that all of us are going to have to win together, or humankind as a species will fatally fail! Of course, the fact that all our minds are part of one Mind much improves our odds because it means that even a small minority who are very good at skills like empathy can carry the rest of us a lot of the way. And apparently we can come to better understand how to be empathetic. Some are even sure that empathy is a skill that can be taught.

A few more of these complications are probably awaiting us as we work together to master and use the keys to rapid spiritual growth, which means three things:

  • We must redouble our own efforts to grow spiritually so we can help to raise humanity’s consciousness vibrations for those who find their individual growth more difficult to achieve;
  • We must keep looking for obstacles that might spiritually trip up some of us; and
  • We must never forget that there is no one who is unworthy of our love.

People with spiritual impairments that are related to their material bodies still are capable of spiritual growth. We just might need to help them a bit. And we can do that! Humanity is all one Mind, so we can carry those who need our help over their own particular rough spots. Jesus assures us that we can bring the kingdom of God on earth. He believes in us. So we can do this! And then for every one of us there will be only love, forevermore.    

It’s a long, long road, from which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?
And the load doesn’t weigh me down at all!
He ain’t heavy. He’s my brother.
– Bobby Scott (1937-1990) & Bob Russell (1914-1970), from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

Elevating Our One Mind

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

Twelve days ago, terrorists attacked an Afghan hospital and killed sixteen people, including two babies. That picture in The Wall Street Journal of a newborn in a bloodied blanket has been on my mind ever since. All I can think is that I failed those mothers. I should long since have been fighting for them!

We have talked here at length about the fact that one Mind continuously manifests reality. All our minds are part of that one infinitely creative Mind which is all that exists; and Jesus has made it clear that once sufficient people are following His Gospel teachings, we can bring the kingdom of God on earth.

For the first time in human history, researchers have figured out how to remake this world into one in which no mother need fear the murder of her newborn child. This is by far the greatest possible news! Thanks to our better understanding of the primary role of consciousness, together with the teachings of Jesus that perfectly act on the universal Consciousness that we now much better understand, this should be a time of celebration. At last we know how to fix the world! But instead, there is that baby in a bloodied blanket. The world still is full of awful barbarisms, from concentration camps and terrorist attacks to brutalities by governments against their own people to even the fact that ubiquitous human slavery still pollutes the world.

Our problem is that this greatest of all possible news is inconvenient for the institutions that we most trust, and therefore they both ignore it. More than a century after the pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck first realized that consciousness must exist prior to matter, working scientists still are searching for a source of consciousness in the human brain. Their doing that is the frank equivalent of your dismantling your television to find your favorite newscaster, or taking apart your iPhone in search of the source of all those YouTubes and videogames.

And Christianity is even more clueless! Christians should by now be sharing the greatest teachings ever given, miraculously preserved from the time two thousand years ago when God walked the earth in human form. But still, to this day the 2.3 billion Christians on earth ignore nearly all of the Lord’s Gospel words. For example, I often hear from two admirably ardent Christian leaders, one Catholic and one Protestant. These men profess to follow Jesus, but neither of them listens to Him! No names or details. It doesn’t matter who they are, since each is in the mainstream of his own denomination. And the italics in their statements are mine.

I much admire a Franciscan monk for his earnest efforts to create a less fear-based version of Catholicism. But this dear man actually said, “To love God by loving God’s world is epitomized for us by climate change, which is the central crisis of the twenty-first century. Too many of us are using too much energy and taking up too much space. We are changing the planet’s climate in ways that will make it uninhabitable.” Putting aside the fact that after studying global warming for years I still don’t understand what all the fuss is about, I would point out that this man has devoted his life to Jesus! Yet he considers climate change to be our “central crisis”? What about those babies dying in their mothers’ arms? For heaven’s sake, let others fight our environmental battles. It is time now for all of us who profess to follow Jesus to devote our lives to fighting for the Lord’s promised advent of the kingdom of God on earth!

The earnest Protestant clergyman I read is certain that every word of the Bible is God’s Inerrant Word… once it is filtered through the lens of his religious beliefs. Recently he said, “Jesus had one mission. It wasn’t to be a great teacher, although He was a great teacher. It wasn’t to be a great prophet, although He was a great prophet. It wasn’t to be a great miracle worker, although He did work miracles. No, Jesus came to this world to perform only one job. To die. The reason why Jesus had to be immaculately conceived by the Holy Spirit and born of a virgin was so He was not born with sin. He could then die as the perfect sacrifice for the sins of this world. That is why whosoever believes in Jesus shall not perish, but have everlasting life!” This man’s understanding of God has not advanced by one day or by one ounce of wisdom beyond the moment when Jesus spoke to Saul on the road to Damascus. The ancient Jews were required to offer unblemished animals as sacrifices, and until the Lord’s words were first written down some sixty years after His death it was pardonable for a clergyman to distort and dismiss the Lord’s Gospel words as this fellow does. But we know a lot more two thousand years later! And it is time for my preacher friend to live his professed devotion to Jesus by ditching all the Christian dogmas that conflict with the Gospels so he can join in the fight for the Lord’s promised advent of the kingdom of God on earth!

The only way for either of these clergymen to achieve any of what they want is for them first to actually follow Jesus. The Lord Himself has made that plain. He said, “seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (MT 6:33). If only every clergyman on earth who professes to love Jesus would follow Him! Just think of the army of Christian soldiers there would be to advance the kingdom of God on earth, and how easily that kingdom could begin! But because apparently I still don’t care enough about babies dying in their mothers’ arms to suffer the embarrassment of climbing onto a soapbox and shouting these truths to the world, it still won’t happen for a while.

The primary problem with all religions is that they cannot actually change people. Their rules don’t work because we cannot demand that any living creature act in a way that is contrary to its nature. Try training baby tigers to want to be vegan, or baby fish to always keep right in rivers, or human toddlers not to take another piece of candy when they think no one is looking. And try to order people filled with hatred to resist killing mothers and their babies! Right now, the consciousness of all humanity has sunk to such a fear- and hatred-based level that those who are vibrating at the most debased levels are having an outsize negative influence upon us all. It is impossible for so may people who are actively driven by fear and rage not to pollute the One Human Mind of which each of our minds is an integral part!

There is just one way to end forever the reign of terror and pain that has dominated all of human history and is arguably more debased than it ever has been. And that is for us to raise the consciousness vibrations of everyone on the face of the earth! We can do that, but only if as many of us as possible will concentrate on raising our personal consciousness vibrations enough to counteract all that negativity. And then raise them still more.

Here we ought to emphasize the fact that raising the consciousness vibrations of everyone on earth will be amazingly simple. The Gospel teachings of Jesus, when properly applied, can within just a few months’ time begin for you a profound internal shift; and if you stick with it, within a year you will have become altogether transformed at the level of your essential nature. Your personal consciousness vibration will be so much elevated that instead of bringing human consciousness down, you will now be countering the negativity of the nasties and haters and the baby-murderers. And as others also raise their own vibrations, you will be part of beginning a fundamental transformation of all of humanity at the level of each person’s essential nature.

Here is where my own culpability comes in. I have known for years that all of this is true! But rather than devoting every minute of my remaining time on earth to spreading these truths as broadly as I can, I have been resisting Thomas’s call that now is the time for us to fight. He has been emphatic about it for the past two years, and all the while I have been devoting my cozy retirement to producing Seek Reality podcasts and to privately teaching, including writing these weekly blog posts. I love this happy preaching to the choir, and I have used as my defense to Thomas the fact that I am old, for heaven’s sake. (He just shrugs and says, “I’m older than you are.” Never say our guides don’t have a sense of humor!)

So I never will know whether my having sooner begun to fight to bring God’s kingdom on earth could have saved those mothers and their babies. But my fight begins right now! And I hope you will join me. On the first Earth Day fifty years ago our slogan was “If you’re not part of the solution you’re part of the pollution.” Now today perhaps it becomes “If you’re not part of the love you’re part of the fear.” And starting today, we all together vow to broadly share what we know! Our fight to help the Lord to bring the kingdom of God on earth begins now.

In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me.
As He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free!
While God is marching on.

Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah!
While God is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)

 

 Madonna photo credit:  Slices of Light  <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/95282411@N00/48149693266″>Face of the Virgin</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Madonna and Child photo credit: Free Public Domain Illustrations by rawpixel <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/153584064@N07/45642521714″>Madonna of Humility (1440) by Fra Angelico (Guido di Pietro, 1395)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Madonna w/Saint Anne photo credit:  Slices of Light  <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/95282411@N00/48149781712″>Virgin and Child with Saint Anne</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Circular Madonna & Child photo credit: byb64 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/50879678@N03/48924022047″>”Vierge à l’enfant avec St Jean et St Jérôme”, 1519, Domenico Beccafumi (1486-1551), Musée Thyssen-Bornemisza, paseo del Prado, Madrid, Castille, Espagne</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Madonna, child, Saint John photo credit: dalianera <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/9907831@N08/46504816202″>2019-01-01_05-07-43</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Christ child photo credit: █ Slices of Light █▀ ▀ ▀ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/95282411@N00/48149693096″>Infant Jesus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Gratitude

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Oh Lord my God, When I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made;
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder,
Thy power throughout the universe displayed.
                   – Carl Boberg (1859-1940), From “How Great Thou Art” (1885)

The Gospel teachings of Jesus are the simplest and most effective way to grow spiritually to the point where you might even make this your last needed earth-lifetime. But simply reading and trying to follow the teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love isn’t enough to make your spiritual growth a truly simple matter. No, to make it work well there is one more thing you will need to do first of all.

I have had few earthly teachers in the past fifty years. Nearly all of what I have learned about death, the afterlife, and spiritual matters has come from doing a lot of research under Thomas’s guidance, and from his insights shared during our nightly meetings. But Dr. R. Craig Hogan has been my helpful Seek Reality guest thirty times in the past seven years; and another of my living teachers has been Hillis Pugh. Hillis is the Guru of Gratitude. I first met him six years ago when he was an earnest young man absolutely obsessed with the spiritual importance of gratitude, and at first I was mystified. Our definitive spiritual teacher is Jesus, and He mentions the concept of gratitude only a dozen times through all four Gospels. Eight of those times He is thanking God for food! He also thanks God as He raises Lazarus. He is disappointed that only one of the ten lepers he had cleansed has bothered to come back and thank Him, and His two other references to gratitude are incidental mentions in His stories. Compare that to more than thirty mentions of forgiveness in the Gospels, and more than sixty mentions of love. So if gratitude wasn’t important to Jesus, how could it be spiritually important at all?

We now know that cultivating an attitude of gratitude is essential preparation for our efforts to grow spiritually. To understand why this is true, please remember two points:

  • Your mind is a powerful part of one vast, eternal Mind. And at this moment, your mind is helping to create the fear- and negativity-filled reality that you think you see around you.
  • Christianity has taught you to be afraid, and to believe that you are evil and fallen. And until you elevate your mind above all that negativity, you cannot raise your consciousness vibrations much at all.

It turns out that gratitude is the crucial third aspect of the Gospel teachings of Jesus. Unless we begin with gratitude, we more than double the difficulties we face in making spiritual progress in this lifetime! As I have learned from Thomas – and from Hillis Pugh – cultivating an attitude of gratitude is like plowing the field before you fertilize it with forgiveness, so then finally you can plant seeds of love. And Jesus did talk about preparing the soil if we want to grow spiritually. “(He) spoke many things to them in parables, saying, ‘Behold, the sower went out to sow; and as he sowed, some seeds fell beside the road, and the birds came and ate them up. Others fell on the rocky places, where they did not have much soil; and immediately they sprang up, because they had no depth of soil. But when the sun had risen, they were scorched; and because they had no root, they withered away. Others fell among the thorns, and the thorns came up and choked them out. And others fell on the good soil and yielded a crop, some a hundredfold, some sixty, and some thirty. He who has ears, let him hear’” (MT 13:3-9). It may be that Jesus said a great deal more about our need to prepare by cultivating gratitude before we attempt to grow spiritually; and either what He said was less remarked by His listeners, or else it was removed by the first-millennium councils in favor of the showier virtues of forgiveness and love.

It is time for us to get rid of the rocks and clear those pesky thorns away! And the best way to do it all is with a gratitude practice. Here are some points to keep in mind:

  • Gratitude is independent of whatever you see as the current facts of your life. It is an attitude of mind, and because it is that you can be grateful no matter what is going on.
  • Living in gratitude will help to ensure that you spot all the good things in your life. Watching studiously for reasons to be grateful tends to crowd out negative thoughts.
  • Gratitude begins the process of raising your spiritual vibrations. When your focus shifts toward being grateful, you pay less attention to things that trouble you and a lot more attention to what is good and useful.
  • Gratitude is a way for you to begin to create your own best life. Your mind strongly influences the reality that you think you see around you, so concentrating on reasons for being grateful is a powerful way for you to lighten and lift what your mind is helping to create.

You will decide on your own best gratitude practices. But here are four key components that have been shown to work for many people:

  • Keep a gratitude journal. Write down at least one new thing every day that you are grateful for; then also write down why you are grateful for it. You’ll start with your loved ones, then move on to personal successes, your work, and your hobbies; and then eventually to things like the weather and elements of nature. You will find that sometime in the second month you are down to looking for reasons to be grateful for mosquitoes and the neighbor’s dog barking. Do this for at least three months if you can, without duplicating anything. Gratitude-journaling this way helps you go deeper into what gratitude even means.
  • Broadly share your attitude of gratitude. Never again agree with any negative thing that is said in your presence! Instead, whenever someone complains, don’t disagree but instead say at once what you are grateful for. Someone hates the president? Say, “I’m grateful that he seems to be keeping us out of wars.” Someone complains about a cranky old neighbor? “I’m grateful that he keeps his lawn mowed.” It’s been raining for a month? “I’m so grateful that the reservoirs are filling up.” Coronavirus has everyone feeling down? “My family gets to eat together every night now. I’m so grateful for that!” Not only will your always speaking from an attitude of gratitude reinforce your personal gratitude practice, but it also will help those with whom you share these thoughts to begin to cultivate gratitude in themselves.
  • Use gratitude to squash your irritations. Resentments will continue to rise in you until you have perfected your forgiveness practice, but your work on gratitude will help you to better deal with whatever is bothering you. Whenever you suffer a cranky thought about anyone or anything, immediately replace it with something that you are grateful for, even if you have to stretch a bit. When your old car really is dying so you face having to buy another car, just be grateful for the way it served you so long and so well. When your drunken uncle nearly ruins a family party, just be grateful for how special he made you feel when you were a child. Once you have mastered forgiveness, you will never suffer another resentment in your life; but until then, just use your gratitude habit to help you smother your irritations.
  • Pray only in gratitude affirmations. When you say, “Dear God, please fix this,” you affirm its brokenness, which just makes it even harder to fix. When instead your prayer affirms the gift of healing, that better outcome can begin right away with the positive power of your own mind! Instead of claiming the lack, claim the gift. And when you say “Thank you” for whatever gift or cure your affirmation prayer is claiming, you further turbo-charge your request. This glorious twilight of my life when I live in the perfect joy of service began when I started to pray, “Thank You for giving me work to do. Thank You for showing me how to do it,” and thereby gave my life to God. It was that simple! I still pray that mantra every day, and the pleasures that flow from my impulsive gift are beyond my ability to express them.

My suggestion is that you apply all four of these gratitude practices, and thereby begin to prepare your mind for the more rapid spiritual growth to come. You might choose not to continue to journal beyond the first few months, which is fine; but for you to continue the remaining three gratitude practices for the rest of your life will help you to forever maintain your grounding in ever greater spiritual health. Most people take to gratitude easily, especially since if you are firm about it you should find your mood lightening within only weeks. In making gratitude central to your life, you are preparing the soil of your heart to yield a bountiful harvest of forgiveness and love. Beginning with gratitude makes real spiritual growth so much easier!

Another of the wonderful friends I have made in the course of doing this work is Mary Holden, who is a gentle and graceful woman with a beautiful heart. She was one of the first people with whom I shared the forgiveness mantra that I still recite each day as I renew the gift of my life to God; and she has just shown me what she has done with it. She has turned it into a whole gratitude prayer!

Thank You for giving me work to do.
Thank You for showing me how to do it.

Thank You for giving me life to live.
Thank You for showing me how to live it.

Thank You for giving me people to love.
Thank You for showing me how to love them.

I am astounded. Mary’s prayer is such a perfect way to make your gratitude practice central to your life! And in praying it daily, you also will supercharge your mind. Perhaps when your own mind is at its elevated best, your learning to ever more perfectly forgive and love will be so effortless that this really can become your last necessary earth-lifetime. Dear beloved Mary, thank you so much!

When Christ shall come with shout of acclamation
And take me home, what joy shall fill my heart.
Then I shall bow with humble adoration
And then proclaim, my God, how great Thou art!

Then sings my soul, my Savior, God, to Thee,
How great thou art, how great thou art!
                       – Carl Boberg (1859-1940), From “How Great Thou Art” (1885)

 

Jesus alive photo credit: babasteve <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64749744@N00/33227686894″>HE IS ALIVE !</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

“I Am the Way”

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus loves me! This I know,
For the Bible tells me so;
Little ones to Him belong;
They are weak, but He is strong.
– William B. Bradbury (1816-1868), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)

The biggest handicap all of us face in seeking to know the genuine God is the fact that the historical Jesus is so closely identified with Christianity. The Gospel teachings of Jesus are the literal words of God on earth! But Christianity largely ignores those teachings. Instead of being based on the Lord’s divine words, all the primary Christian degmas are man-made and geared toward fear-based control. Yet the forty thousand versions of Christianity all claim the Person of Jesus while they continue to deny the primacy of His teachings. Christianity’s presumptuousness in claiming Jesus while ignoring what He said amazes me! Consider these facts:

  • Christians say that the entire Christian Bible is The Inspired Word of God. And they generally continue to insist on this despite the fact that they ignore parts of the Bible as outmoded – for example, the commands about stoning people to death – and they see other parts of The Inspired Word of God as hard to achieve so therefore just aspirational.
  • Christians consider Christianity’s dogmas to be more important than the Lord’s Gospel teachings. I get emails all the time from Christians who want to know where in the Gospels Jesus talks about such appalling human ideas as original sin, a fiery hell, God’s judgment leading to eternal damnation, and the need for Jesus to die for our sins. Just to name four human-made Christian ideas. I tell them Jesus talks about none of these dogmas in the Gospels, and in fact He flat-out negates them all by telling us that God doesn’t judge us (JN 5:22) and neither does Jesus judge us (JN 12:47). Most people are dumbfounded.
  • Christians insist on using the Old and New Testaments to modify the Gospel words of Jesus. For most Christians, the Lord’s Gospel words must bow to whatever they find in the Old Testament or in the letters of Paul. Which means that the Lord’s teachings lose their brilliance in what becomes a human-made mush.
  • Christians are trying now to redesign what they want the word “Gospel” to mean. After having largely ignored the teachings of Jesus for more than fifteen hundred years, Christians in general no longer even associate the word “Gospel” with those teachings. Rather, they assume their man-made Christian dogmas are the “Gospel,” so they are arguing now about which dogmas to include. It is time for Jesus to reclaim His Gospel! The word “Gospel” is an Old English translation of a Greek term loosely meaning “good news,” and it also is the title given to the only four books of the Christian Bible that carry the words of Jesus. For Christians to try to make that word mean anything but the Gospel teachings of Jesus is disrespectful to the genuine God.

Well, but what if we put all these problems aside? Would Jesus at least approve of the human-made religion that now bears His name? Hardly! The Christian religion does two things that Jesus tells us in the Gospels that He abhors. It clings to human-made religious traditions, and it utterly disregards the Lord’s Gospel teachings.

Jesus says of His teachings: “My teaching is not Mine, but His who sent Me” (JN 7:16). “Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46). “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21). “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32). And He says of religions that put their traditions above the Word of God: “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9). And “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). Does Jesus sound as if He would be happy with a religion that uses His name to teach human-made ideas while it ignores nearly everything He actually said?

The Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John are the only books of the Christian Bible where God clearly speaks to us. Other parts of the Bible seem to some extent to be divinely inspired, but the Bible beyond those four Gospels is so heavily influenced by human ideas that it cannot be placed in the same category as the four canonical Gospels! If you really want to know the God revealed to us by the Lord Jesus Christ, simply take a pair of scissors and cut from your Bible the entire Old Testament, as well as the New Testament beyond the Gospel of John. The early Christian councils added some fear-based nonsense to what Jesus actually said, so you can also cut from each of the Gospels everything about church management, judgment, and End Times. And there you will have it. Without the corruption of those human-tainted words that appear in other parts of the Bible, you will have on just a few precious pages what remains of the words that God spoke to us when He came two thousand years ago in the Person of Jesus to teach us how to live so the kingdom of God can begin to overspread the earth.

With all of this in mind we are better equipped to tackle what is the most outrageous corruption of the Lord’s Gospel message in all of Christianity. There is one idea often flung at us as a kind of evangelical trump card. Some Christians say that it doesn’t even matter if you follow the Lord’s Gospel teachings because Jesus Himself tells us that only if we claim Him as our personal Savior can we join God in heaven and not go to hell. “Because, look! Jesus says, ‘I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me’” (JN 14:6).

But is the Lord really telling us here that only good Christians can get into heaven? Let’s read that sentence in context. What Jesus actually says is this: “‘Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you. If I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also. And you know the way where I am going.’  Thomas said to Him, ‘Lord, we do not know where You are going, how do we know the way?’ Jesus said to him, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father but through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; from now on you know Him, and have seen Him.’

“Philip said to Him, ‘Lord, show us the Father, and it is enough for us.’ Jesus said to him, ‘Have I been so long with you, and yet you have not come to know Me, Philip? He who has seen Me has seen the Father; how can you say, “Show us the Father”? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works. Believe Me that I am in the Father and the Father is in Me; otherwise believe because of the works themselves. Truly, truly, I say to you, he who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I go to the Father. Whatever you ask in My name, that will I do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it. If you love Me, you will keep My commandments’” (JN 14:1-15).

This is among the most important and powerful passages in the whole Christian Bible. But there is nothing in it about your needing to claim that Jesus died for your sins. In the first paragraph He talks about preparing an afterlife place for His disciples and coming for them when their turn arrives to go home, which is something that we all do for our loved ones. In the second paragraph He affirms that He is from the Godhead, God on earth, and that God is working through Him, and He tells those who love Him to follow His teachings. But yet to this day, Christians ignore every word that Jesus speaks to us here… except for that one sentence taken out of context that clearly doesn’t mean what Christians want it to mean!

The teachings that Jesus spent more than three years risking His life to share were so important to Him that He might well have identified those teachings with Himself. Or else perhaps He said, “My teachings are the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through My teachings” (JN 14:6). Then during those sixty-odd years of what amounted to playing the telephone game, “My teachings” was shortened to “I” and “Me” before His words were written down. But either way, it is impossible to find in that passage the notion that our claiming that Jesus died for our sins is the only way for us to get into heaven!

It is interesting to note that the earliest Christians called the teachings of Jesus “the Way.” They might as well have called those sacred teachings “the Way, the Truth, and the Life,” since all three words apply to teachings far better than they do to the magical notion that claiming that Jesus died to redeem you from God’s judgment has made it all better so now you can get into heaven. What a preposterous notion that is! It insults our perfectly loving God while it humiliates humanity’s greatest teacher. And there is nothing in the Gospel words of Jesus that supports it.

For most of my life I have loved Christianity. It was the core of who I was, and at the center of it was the Person of Jesus. Then at the start of my fifties I finally had to accept the fact that Christianity has never followed Jesus, but instead it has fed us fear-based lies. Realizing that felt like learning that my beloved mother was an axe-murderer. But soon I found the courage to take Paul’s advice (1Cor 13:8-13), and I put away the childish thing that the Christian religion always has been. When I began to trust the Lord alone, at last I found the genuine God! And I found a love more glorious than any other love that I have ever known.   

Jesus loves me! This I know,
As He loved so long ago,
Taking children on His knee,
Saying, “Let them come to Me.”

Jesus loves me still today,
Walking with me on my way,
Wanting as a friend to give
Light and love to all who live.
– William B. Bradbury (1816-1868), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)

 

Jesus at 12 photo credit: IronRodArt – Royce Bair (“Star Shooter”) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/38745062@N02/4438098549″>Portrait of the Christ Child at age 12</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

 

The Joy of Living in Spirit

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I come to the garden alone while the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses…
– C. Austin Miles (1868–1946), from “In the Garden” (1913)

The more we learn about reality, the more we realize it is one seamless whole. There is no separation between the physical reality that we think we see around us now, and the spiritual reality that is all around us and within us, through us, and so deeply central to every moment of our lives that it may very well be all that is real. This physical reality is an illusion, and shown to be that by the fact that it is composed of atoms which are nothing but energy. If the White House were the nucleus of an atom, placed where it is and the size that it is, then its closest orbiting electron could be as far away as Denver. And there would be nothing between them! We look closer, and we realize that even that atomic nucleus and its orbiting electron are nothing but vortices of energy. Physicists still call them particles for nostalgia’s sake, but they are not solid particles. The only reason why you cannot put your hand right through your desk is that the vortices of energy in your hand conflict with the vortices of energy in your desk.

The more deeply you come to understand the truth about reality, the more often you find yourself experiencing unexpected bursts of joy. I still recall the thrill of reviewing all the accumulated evidence one morning and being dumbstruck by the realization that it was impossible for the afterlife not to be real. And then I recall all the separate thrills as I was discovering additional facts, each of them something like an odd-shaped piece of one amazingly complex puzzle, until eventually now we have the whole picture. Just a few small gaps remain to be filled. Even after all these decades, the wonder of just how beautiful the greater reality is and how devotedly each of us is loved still makes me grin to think of it.

I have told you a lot about what I have learned in my half-century of doing this work. But what I realize now is that I never have adequately managed to convey to you some sense of the chest-swelling joy that will be your mindset for the rest of your earthly life once you manage to get your mind around the truth of what actually is going on!

I receive many emails from people that I never will meet in life. Ever since The Fun of Dying came out in 2010, I have been answering afterlife questions from people who are desperate to believe that a love-filled afterlife is possible. And some of those who email me are angry! They are so steeped in religious fears or in rank scientific negativity that the bit of light I have brought into the unrelenting grimness of their beliefs feels to them at first to be an act of torment. “If what you are saying is true, prove it!” Of late, however, more of my emails are filled with the joyous wonder of people who are only now realizing that their whole lives have been suffused by the love of Spirit. They have learned enough about how reality works that at last they can see the spiritual overlay of every minute of their whole earth-lives. The daily workings of Spirit have always been so reverently done, so unobtrusive and respectful, that until they began to grasp the greater reality and their place in it, they hardly even noticed events that you would have thought would have rocked their lives!

Until recently, I had never much noticed the workings of Spirit, either. The love and care of Spirit has for most of my life been for me what it probably is for you: it’s just the water in which we swim. We carefully plan these brief forays on earth with the help of eternal friends who then undertake to guide us so we can use these lives to better grow spiritually. Most of the big decisions that we think we are actively making now actually are part of the life-plan that we and our guides established before we were born. I had never much considered all of this, but as I look back now, of course I can see the constant work of Spirit in my own life, too.

Everyone’s life is full of spiritual miracles! My life is an open book to you so I am going to use it as an illustration, but please be aware that what has happened to me is not at all unusual. Most of the daily action of Spirit happens seamlessly beneath our radar, but sometimes we resist the advice of our guides that comes mostly in meetings while our bodies sleep. So then they have to act in our lives more overtly! (Thomas wants me to point out here that I am especially stubborn, so if you have had fewer of these moments, just be glad that you are working with your own guides more smoothly than I work with him.) I will give you here just four examples of times when Spirit in the person of my treasured friend Thomas has had to jump visibly into my life:

  • My first experience of light. When I was eight I had an amazing experience. I was Moses with his burning bush! I now know that Thomas was the one who spoke to me from out of a flash of light, and he has let me know that he did it at my insistence. Apparently I was worried that I wouldn’t have the conviction to carry out my life-plan without the reassuring memory of having experienced that extraordinary event.
  • Choosing a college major. My life-plan required that I enter adulthood as a zealous Christian familiar with the Bible, so when I was twelve Thomas inspired me to begin a forty-year habit of reading the Bible repeatedly, cover to cover, just a couple of pages every night. He also prompted my college major. I vividly recall standing in my adviser’s office as I waited to declare my major in Christian history. Then I thought, Wait a minute! This is stupid! I should major in something practical! And at once there settled on me the leaden certainty that if I didn’t major in Christian history I would be blighting the rest of my life, together with an odd sense of confidence that the decision was right and perfect.
  • Meeting my future husband. After college I took a job in Manhattan, and I knew right away that I was in the wrong place. Within two months I had moved to Boston, and two days after I arrived there my new roommates invited me to a mixer. So I walked into a room full of people where the primary light source was an uneasy-looking man sitting across the room who was glowing. He was giving off so much light that he had a halo around his entire body. How was it possible that no one else saw it? I crossed the room and introduced myself. We have been married now for almost forty-eight years.
  • Writing Liberating Jesus. Thomas once lived a famous lifetime that he had hoped to keep hidden from me until eventually he will welcome me home. But in the nineteen-eighties he volunteered me as a channel for a revised interpretation of the Gospels, and he tells me that a team then spent almost twenty years preparing me; but when in 2014 he told me it was time, I refused. Who was I to be revising the way we interpret the Gospels? So he chose a medium, and in February of 2015 he revealed to me through her that he had once been Thomas Jefferson. He was rolling his eyes as he said it. Late in the eighties he had guided me in researching and channeling My Thomas so he could demonstrate that I could do the Lord’s book. He knew I was going to be annoyingly star-struck. He told me then why my channeling Liberating Jesus was essential, so I gave in and agreed to do it. I did it as much for Thomas Jefferson as I did it for Jesus.

Again I’ve got to emphasize the fact that everyone’s life is as carefully planned and as tenderly guided as mine has been! Each of us looks at a material world that seems to be solid but in fact is not, and we are here for a brief part of our eternal lives with a specific set of spiritual goals, marks to be hit, and people we have planned to be important in our lives. If we had more space, I could give you off the top of my head at least a dozen additional ways in which my primary guide has tugged and prodded me throughout my life! And if you will examine your own life from a position of knowing that Spirit has been guiding it, you will see your own set of such moments lifelong, going all the way back to childhood. And you will be suffused with joy.

The hymn that begins and ends this post is reportedly based on JN 20:14, where Mary Magdalene confronts an empty tomb and two angels. She asks them where Jesus is, and “When she had said this, she turned around and saw Jesus standing there, and did not know that it was Jesus.” I am sharing this hymn with you now as a source of a little added wonder. If there ever was a reason for us to feel overwhelmed with joy in the love of Spirit, that reason is this greatest of all events!   

“Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, why are you weeping? Whom are you seeking?’ Supposing Him to be the gardener, she said to Him, ‘Sir, if you have carried Him away, tell me where you have laid Him, and I will take Him away.’ Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to Him in Hebrew, ‘Rabboni!’ (which means, Teacher). Jesus said to her, ‘Stop clinging to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father; but go to My brethren and say to them, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.”’ Mary Magdalene came, announcing to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord,” and that He had said these things to her. So when it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and when the doors were shut where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ And when He had said this, He showed them both His hands and His side. The disciples then rejoiced when they saw the Lord” (JN 20:15-20).

This passage has always tantalized me. Such odd but very important details! Even the Lord’s closest friends didn’t recognize Him when they first saw Him in His risen body? And when Mary rushed to hug Him, He considered His risen body to be perhaps too fragile to be hugged? Jesus did die on that cross. He did reanimate His dead body, and He used it for just long enough to demonstrate to His disciples that His crucified body had returned to life. But even God on earth could not make a reanimated dead body stable again for long, which is another telling point in the NDE debate. He couldn’t make His damaged and formerly-dead body easily recognizable as Himself, either. Just two small but important details that were passed down orally for two generations before they even were written down. And they give us another little piece to add to the gigantic puzzle that is our glorious and entirely Spirit-based reality! I think about these two gritty details, what they tell us about the Lord’s great gift to us and the further measure of certainty they give us in the constant care of Spirit, and again unexpectedly my heart fills with joy. It is impossible for any of us to entirely grasp the tender perfection with which each one of us is infinitely loved.

And He walks with me and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am his own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
– C. Austin Miles (1868–1946), from “In the Garden” (1913)

 

Rose with dew photo credit: verchmarco <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/160866001@N07/48054300837″>Yellow rose with drops of dew (Flip 2019)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Pink rose garden photo credit: Derwisz <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8172958@N05/48200515556″>Rose</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Pink hydrangeas photo credit: Joanbrebo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/79805131@N08/49017887831″>Vacances_1000</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Pink roses photo credit: rverc <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/26270547@N07/49430007171″>Public Gardens NICE, France (1)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lotus with frog photo credit: Dis da fi we <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/63848257@N06/49625050978″>frog and lotus flower – Entopia Butterfly Farm – Teluk Bahang, Penang Island, Malaysia – Feb 2020</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Poppies at dawn photo credit: Schneidersphotography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/124918242@N04/48086881878″>Poetry of Red</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

What Good Is a Crisis?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Disaster is the mother of good fortune.
There is so much comfort in the usual, and so much risk in anything that’s new,
That our lives plod into the grave without our noticing their passage
Unless some fortunate tragedy blunders in our way.

One of the loveliest things about humankind is our zesty adaptability, our vast creative optimism that can make crises into opportunities. A recent Seek Reality guest is a very successful woman who told us that a dozen years ago her life had seemed to be over. She had been unemployed, in a failed marriage, plagued by health problems, financially bereft, and altogether without hope. To see her now, it is impossible to imagine that she ever has been less than a star! And there are so many stories like hers. As I think back, I realize that lots of our most inspiring Seek Reality guests have shared with us tales of dead-ended lives upon which the guests had built great successes that would not have been possible if some tragedy or other hadn’t cleared their former lives away.

The poem that begins and ends this post has no attribution because it is one of several that apparently I wrote in my teens. By now, I don’t recall most of them. But I loved this one, especially the counter-intuitive wisdom of “salutary calamities” and “the reckless despair of misfortune.” I still recall it more than fifty years later. Of course, no teenager has the depth of understanding nor the breadth of experience to write something like this! I had of late become convinced that I am misremembering having written it. I assumed that instead I must have read it somewhere, but I did a search and found nothing. The only other poem from that time that I recall is even more sophisticated than this one, so I realize that if in fact I wrote them, all those poems must have been channeled. Thomas was gearing me up to undertake the future that he and I had planned.

Covid-19 could be a nothing-burger, or it could be a long-term plague. It still is impossible to know. We do know, however, that the massive worldwide effort being made to address the illness is forcing us out of our established ruts. Just as efficiently as would a serious war or a good-sized meteor hitting the earth, measures being taken to deal with the pandemic are disrupting Western civilization. So now we are living through a hinge in history. A new and much better modern world is seeking to be born from the ashes of the industrial age that is dying now before our eyes. The process of this death and rebirth is likely to vary by country, but here are eight quick U.S. examples of the creative destruction that is now underway:

  • Working from home is a new normal. Our younger daughter and her husband are saving so much commuting and work-kibitzing time that they are getting a lot more done. Our older daughter lives in Seattle, an early hotbed of contagion, so she came to visit for a couple of workweeks in March that seemed to be mostly online meetings. She was surprised to see that her actual location made so little difference; and now many others are making that same discovery. A business-savvy friend is urging people to sell their office towers. She says the future for even the biggest non-factory businesses is going to be much smaller buildings and most employees working off-site.
  • Better alternatives to public schools are going to be a lot more common. Our public education system is a relic of the early-twentieth-century factory age, when workers needed a place to park their children and prepare them for the boredom of becoming factory workers, too. Public schooling is highly restrictive. It enforces a stultifying conformity, and it teaches our cleverest children to hate the whole idea of school. Its demise is long overdue! Many parents had already begun to use more exciting online schooling methods, and now many more are trying them and are becoming comfortable with them.
  • Most post-secondary education will be moving online. Our extraordinarily expensive and increasingly trivialized college system was already dying. Now, as even elite schools are being forced to educate their students online, more and more people are coming to see that much more and better information can be imparted more efficiently and at a fraction of the cost of old-style, four-year, on-site programs. Look for this nation’s second-tier colleges and universities to move toward becoming mostly or entirely online, and expect downward pressure on the absurd prices of even our first-tier institutions.
  • Many churches that have closed temporarily will before long close for good. My husband must be the eighth or ninth most religious Catholic in the United States. Now even he happily heads to his computer on Sunday mornings and attends Mass online. Whatever their denominations might be, very religious people are getting used to the fact that they don’t need to go to a church building every Sunday morning! And less religious but spiritually sincere people are devoting more of their Sunday time to reading and watching YouTubes, to experimenting with prayer and meditation, and to finding other ways that they can seek and relate to God more directly. The manifold positive effects to come as we free more people from fear-based preachers so they can come to know the God of love will contribute to our swelling spiritual transformation! Two thousand years ago Jesus said, “But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:6). Thanks to the present crisis, more Christians than ever are happily heeding the Lord’s call that we free ourselves from religious regimentation and relate more directly to the genuine Godhead.
  • Very big cities are now being seen to be cumbersome, risky, and probably unsustainable. As more people move toward working from home and enjoying ever better alternatives for shopping, socializing, education, and worship, our present felt need to live close together is going to decline by a lot. And the dispersal of communities over the countryside will be an advantage if a big crisis comes, a more deadly pandemic or a meteor strike. In the event of a war, it will be harder for an enemy to subdue a widely dispersed and well-armed U.S. population.
  • The global-government idea is dying, while U.S. federalism is thriving. It is simple common sense that the closer a government is to the people it serves, the more responsive it is going to be. The notion of moving toward a global government made sense fifty years ago, but now it is starting to look as weary and antiquated as a horse and buggy. Even the vaunted European Union has not been aging very well, and U.N. institutions like the World Health Organization are not covering themselves in glory. On the other hand, the fifty U.S. states have done a much better job for their citizens as they have worked to address our health crisis than have any of our bloated federal institutions that are trying to back them up.
  • Support for national borders and immigration controls has been revived. When people coming into your country might be carrying some deadly disease, of course you want to be careful! For every sovereign nation to defend its borders and admit just healthy folks who are not carrying drugs or contraband is being seen by more people as a needed precaution.
  • Our personal lives have been invigorated. I have worked from home for many years so my life hasn’t been much altered by this social-distancing program, but there is something about being made to stay home that makes you soon want to rethink everything! For example, late in March I began to do what is called “intermittent fasting.” Now I eat only between noon and six, and supposedly my body goes into ketosis each night. It’s a healthier way to live, and my clothes are getting loose! Then ten days ago I began to walk for half an hour each morning. Far from tiring me, regular walking seems to be giving me more energy.

Thanks to this fortuitous crisis, we are rapidly coming to see that a lot of our twentieth-century habits were in the process of dying anyway. Some of them were moribund even well before this year began. What our present restrictions have done has been to put a lot of ancient habits and weary institutions into a simultaneous spiral of creative destruction, and to clear away most of the resistance that would otherwise arise to trying fresh ideas. Thanks to our current crisis, we are entering a period of rapid change! The institutions of the twenty-first century already were being put into place, and now we are finding that they work a lot better, they are scalable, and they allow for a new age of personal freedom and opportunity that is unprecedented in living memory. Thanks to the wisdom of America’s forefathers in crafting our founding documents, all these changes are showing themselves to be positive, in the U.S. at least and probably in other developed nations as well.

And they will not be going away! In fact, this hugely disruptive pandemic may come to be seen in long retrospect to have been the dawning of a very much healthier, freer, entirely rethought, and far more glorious modern world.

Disaster is the mother of good fortune.
There is so much comfort in the usual, and so much risk in anything that’s new,
That our lives plod into the grave without our noticing their passage
Unless some fortunate tragedy blunders in our way.

There are many excellent disasters.
Bereavement is a wonderful one, and so is unemployment. Divorce. A major illness.
All salutary calamities for allowing new directions.
All tall, clear-headed moments of life
From which we can get high enough above the trees to see
All those other paths not taken.
And in the reckless despair of misfortune
We can leave our dead, familiar ways
And venture something new.

 

Eagle air show photo credit: Thomas James Caldwell <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/81643710@N00/29368739514″>Air Show</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lady Liberty photo credit: Brian Auer <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/29814800@N00/445626502″>Liberty Close-Up</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lovebird eagles photo credit: marneejill <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7675787@N06/48226903356″>eagle pair</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Eagle face photo credit: howzey <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10614970@N07/30382071174″>Bald Eagle</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Bring On The New Day!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

And the wolf will dwell with the lamb,
And the leopard will lie down with the young goat,
And the calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little boy will lead them.
                    – (Isaiah 11:6) Ascribed to the Prophet Isaiah (8th Cen BC)

We have talked at length about what Jesus told us was His primary mission in coming to us as our Teacher two thousand years ago. He mentions the kingdom of God or the kingdom of heaven no less than eighty times through all four Gospels! We know from people that we used to think were dead that both phrases refer to what we call the sixth level of the afterlife, which is the level just below the Godhead. And Jesus makes it clear that His teachings are meant to bring to all humanity that perfect divine kingdom. He tells us that if we will follow His teachings, we can sufficiently transform humankind that we will create a literal heaven on earth!

A year ago we talked about what it might be like to at last bring the kingdom of God on earth, and thereby help to complete the Lord’s mission as He began it two thousand years ago. Every interpersonal and political problem, every source of strife would be gone! Community life over all the world would be a symphony of kindness, harmony, and love so complete that all the social ills that plague us now would at last be no more. Since every human mind is part of one mind, it has been estimated that if as few as five percent of all the people on earth were to substantially raise their consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, then every other human mind on earth would begin to elevate as well, and we would thereby start a benevolent cycle that would make the advent of God’s kingdom over all the earth just a matter of time. So, let’s get right to it!

That is where I was a year ago. But after another year of watching humankind wallow in ignorance and fear, sadly my enthusiasm for this task has waned. There are seven and a half billion people on earth! To sufficiently elevate the minds of even one percent of all those people would require a public education campaign on an unprecedented scale; and then, once enough people had become convinced that spiritual growth was needed, it would require that they all work hard at raising their own spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. It seems to be clearer than ever now that if we continue to teach just a few at a time to begin to work at spiritual growth as we battle the dead-weight negativity of both clueless science and fear-based Christianity, at this rate we are going to have to spend at least a thousand years – and it might take us even longer than that! – just to raise the consciousness vibrations of enough of humanity to the point where we can even begin to affect the vibrations of everybody else on earth. And then what? Will it take us a further thousand years before we have raised the consciousness vibrations of all of humanity enough that we really can begin to transform the world?

I have been thinking of late that there has to be a way to get this done in less than two thousand more years! And I may have found one. See what you think.

We have talked endlessly about the fact that the primary problem underlying all our other problems is the fact that our lives and all our institutions are so deeply based in fear. To even begin to raise our personal consciousness vibrations toward love, and thereby begin to address the epidemic of fear and rage that has overrun this planet, each of us must first throw away all the awful anchors of fear that we have carried from our childhoods spent in atheistic science classes and in fear-based Sunday schools. And since the fears that we have carried from childhood are daily reinforced by all our religions and by the battering of worldly cares that distract us throughout our lives, helping people get rid of all their spiritual anchors is a heavy slog! I know that. I spend a good part of most of my days simply answering questions and giving advice to people who are now in the midst of battling their individual culture-based fears. As I work to help them, I have come to see that the fact that I haven’t had such fears for as long as I can remember likely stems from the fact that I have not since my first experience of light at the age of eight had much fear of death. Then in my twenties and thirties I did sufficient reading of the afterlife evidence that I became convinced that there really is something behind the curtain! To the point where my research then shifted to figuring out exactly what is going on and what the greater reality is like.

Fear of death is the base fear. When you no longer fear death, you no longer fear anything. I have been making that observation for years, but it is first now that I really get what it means!

It takes effort to ditch your fear of death to the point where you look forward to dying the way you look forward to your next vacation. Most afterlife researchers aren’t there yet, and very few psychic mediums are there, although all these people believe that there is some kind of life after death. To be certain that a glorious eternity awaits you takes more than having just a mere belief! To be certain that your personal life continues, you need to know in detail what the steps will be to get you to the afterlife, how it will look and feel to be there, what will happen first and what comes next, and above all just what your own place in eternity really is going to be. This is why keeping NDE illusions from polluting the evidence-based truth is so essential! It is only since the start of this century that the last details of all of this have become widely known, so it is only in the past fifteen years or so that there have been researchers who could honestly say they were looking forward to dying without reservation. These few lucky folks get up each morning and say cheerily to one another, “Well, one day closer!” They know that their lives are eternal just as surely as they know the sun will rise. This is the first generation in all of human history that has developed sufficient good information that being certain that life is eternal is possible.

Really knowing that you cannot die and you have a wonderful eternity ahead changes everything! There is no other event in anyone’s lifetime that can make such an amazing difference, since the fact that this certainty kills all your fears is only half of its transformative effect. What may be even more important is that once you are certain your life is eternal, you begin right now to live in eternity. It was only when I really got there – which was less than fifteen years ago – that I relaxed into the perfect goodness of living forever in the arms of God. It was like being again in my parents’ arms, but with the added certainty that the perfect love of God goes on forevermore! And when you live now in God’s eternal love, before you even actually die, the things of the world matter so much less. You forgive more easily. You realize that no thought or deed of yours is private anyway, so you tidy up your mind and open it to constant close communication with the Godhead.

And there is something else that I have just realized. As we have said in this space, people who have substantially elevated their consciousness vibrations are easy to spot. These people are:

  • Happy. Whenever you meet someone whose core happiness setting seems to be unusually high, you are dealing with someone who is more advanced spiritually.
  • Peaceful. They don’t seem to process events as threats to themselves, but rather they do what they can to address them and quietly allow the will of Spirit to prevail.
  • Humble. They have no interest in personal attention, beyond perhaps how they might use it in the service of others.
  • Slow to anger. People who are vibrating higher cannot be near people who are angry. When attacked, they won’t fight back, but they simply love and bless and withdraw.
  • Not interested in wealth. The people I know who are more developed spiritually prefer to live simply. If they have more, they want to devote their own surplus to helping others.
  • Loving and supportive. I have never known a spiritually advanced person whose first instinct was not to think well of people, and even of those who were bent on doing harm.

I am realizing now that these same traits also characterize those who have lost their fear of death! The reason why people who have no fear of death soon begin to think and act like people who have worked to raised their consciousness vibrations is predictable and easy to understand. Once they have lost their fear of death and thereby lost all their other fears as well, their consciousness vibrations just begin to rise naturally.

Everyone wants to be certain of a wonderful afterlife to come, so it seems to me that all we must do to begin the process of bringing the kingdom of God on earth is to offer abundant and efficient afterlife education to everyone. So we can right now begin the process of raising people’s consciousness vibrations! By my calculation, that ought to cut at least a thousand years from this task. Don’t you think?

Jesus seemed to be exhorting us to change all our behaviors, when in fact what He was doing was simply telling us how humankind will be be once we have brought the kingdom of God on earth. He said, “Do not worry … but seek first His kingdom and His righteousness” (MT 6:25-33). “Do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (MT 5:39). Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted” (MT 23:12). “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (MT 6:19-21). “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return… Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:48). And “Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has chosen gladly to give you the kingdom!” (LK 12:32). As we grow past the fear of death, we expand into a very much happier life. And once enough of us have ditched our fears, Jesus at last will say to us, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand” (MK 1:16). Then there will be joy on earth forevermore!

And the lion will eat straw like the ox.
The nursing child will play by the hole of the cobra,
And the weaned child will put his hand on the viper’s den.
They will not hurt or destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth will be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.
                – (Isaiah 11:7-9) Ascribed to the Prophet Isaiah (8th Cen BC)

 

Lamb with doe photo credit: Cruise-Pics.com <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31354286@N00/48390305941″>Hammy Lamb</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Resting lioness photo credit: Cloudtail the Snow Leopard <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/57256462@N07/49469922152″>Lioness</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Wolf photo credit: Mark Dumont <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/23661161@N02/49337080531″>G08A8517.jpg</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Mother and baby goat photo credit: Tambako the Jaguar <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8070463@N03/4384817853″>Baby kissing the mother</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

What Do We Celebrate at Easter?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

But on the first day of the week, at early dawn,
they came to the tomb bringing the spices which they had prepared.
And they found the stone rolled away from the tomb,
but when they entered, they did not find the body of the Lord Jesus…
Behold, two men suddenly stood near them in dazzling clothing;
 and as the women were terrified and bowed their faces to the ground,
the men said to them, “Why do you seek the living One among the dead?”
– Jesus’s Resurrection, from the Biblical Gospel of Luke (LK 24:1-5)

To be a human being is to live in fear. Like fish adapted to polluted water, for all of human history we have accepted the howling horror of knowing that each of us will soon cease to be. On top of that fear, we enter these lives with a powerful drive toward spiritual growth, and with an innate curiosity even despite our need to distract ourselves from our own mortality. Humankind’s spiritual restlessness has for all of our history demanded that we find ways to confront and address the terror of our imminent demise.

So, hundreds of thousands of years ago we began to try to bargain with death. And to do that we needed imaginary ways to personify the unknown. Modern humans came into being about two hundred thousand years ago, but evidence suggests that the idea of having gods is older by another hundred thousand years. It was then that hominins like Homo neanderthalensis began to formally bury their dead, often with jewelry and household goods or weapons, and with offerings of food and flowers.

Our relationship with the gods we had created was contentious. We envisioned powerful gods who were able to protect and provide for us, and it took us awhile to begin to trust them. Once we had developed the notion of bargaining with invisible entities, we would have experimented, giving them offerings as we prayed for good mammoth-hunting or a good run of fish. As nomadic groups shared their experiences, the gods that had seemed to be most successful would gain followers, while those that hadn’t performed well would fade. The only evidence we have now of prehistoric gods is respectful treatment of the dead, but those burials tell us so much! Valuable grave goods buried with the dead give us evidence of a developing belief that invisibly life goes on; and offerings of food and flowers show that human-made gods must have had a meaningful role in the imagined post-death process.

It wasn’t until the advent of agriculture about twenty-two thousand years ago that people settled in long-term communities with their powerful and whimsical gods. By then, most human leaders had learned to use stoking fear of the gods’ disfavor as an essential base for their own power. And as the tensions in our lives increased, our gods were soon demanding more. One indication of our societal stress as we became more civilized is the fact that the practice of human sacrifice soon was adopted worldwide. The earliest solid evidence yet found of an organized religion is Gobekli Tepe, a stone temple that dates to twelve thousand years ago. It was buried after a couple of thousand years in what may have been a dispute with its gods, so it has been well preserved.

Polytheism was the norm worldwide until shortly before the birth of Jesus. We think of the ancient Jews as monotheists, but references in their scriptures and excavations in Israel suggest that the original Yahweh probably had a wife and companions. The devotion of the Jewish tribes to a single powerful deity seems not to have been fully formed until the Babylonian exile that ended in 538 B.C. It was then that the genuine God chose to be born to the Jewish people. Their imagined deity was still human-made and fear-based, but in learning to relate to a single god the Jews had proven to the Godhead that they were ready to leave their man-made religion and begin to know the Un-Caused Cause.

It was to help us discover and begin to relate to the genuine God that an aspect of the Godhead was born two thousand years ago in the Person of Jesus. We can see in His Gospel teachings what He meant to do; and now that we better understand His mission we can contemplate its staggering importance! Jesus’s mission was apparently five-fold:

  • To experience being human so He could better understand how to help us use human life to grow spiritually. Thomas has told me it was important that God “could look through the Lord’s eyes” as a human being. Just as Mikey Morgan took a brief lifetime some four hundred years after his last necessary incarnation so he could communicate with us on our terms, so also apparently God was trying to better understand the stark human condition.
  • To use Jehovah as a way to introduce the Godhead to humankind. This is why Jesus told His followers that His mission was to the Jews. To be frank, that never made sense before, since the Lord’s teachings really are universal.
  • To transform the Jews’ understanding of Jehovah into truths about the genuine Godhead. He told us that God is Spirit (JN 4:24), that God never judges (JN 5:22), and that God’s only commandment is the Law of Love (MT 22:37). He also tried to get his listeners to drop all their human-made religious traditions (MK 7:8) and develop a personal relationship with God (MT 6:6). To this day, both Jews and Christians ignore all these revelations and continue to worship a modernized but nevertheless still fear-based deity of their own imaginings. But the tremendous effort that God made to reach out to us in the Person of Jesus still survives in the Gospels as a beautiful expression of the Godhead’s infinite love and amazing patience.
  • To teach us how to raise our personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. Jesus refers to this as “bringing the kingdom of God on earth.” The kingdom of God is what He calls the sixth level, the region just below the Source level, where there is only love and joy; and He told us that as we move away from fear and toward more perfect love, the earth will come more and more to mirror the love of heaven’s highest aspects.
  • To teach us that life is eternal. Fear of death burdens our lives with a host of anxieties and terrors. But once we conquer the fear of death, we no longer fear anything! Since fear is the opposite of love, eradicating the fear of death was then and still remains today our essential first step toward raising this planet’s consciousness vibrations.

Jesus was not the Godhead’s first emissary. The Old Testament indicates that God was reaching out to the Jews from at least the time of Moses, trying to better shape their human-made concept of God. There were many Old Testament prophets who carried out this task, including Micah of Moresheth, who delivered an early version of the Gospel message more than seven centuries before the birth of Jesus. He said, “With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8).

So now we understand why Jesus was born, and why He taught us as He did. But why did He choose to die in public and so horribly? And why did He re-animate His dead body?  

Thomas has told me that the Lord’s original life-plan didn’t mention how He would die. Its focus was on His mission. But even though He was trying to wean His followers away from their religious traditions, He was well aware of the impact it made when He fulfilled prophesies. He was having trouble convincing His first-century followers that our lives are eternal, so Thomas has told me that shortly before Jesus died, He decided in concert with the Godhead to alter His life-plan. He would die publicly so He could rise from the dead as a kind of “Ta-da! See? I didn’t die, and neither will you!”
(I offer this explanation with the caution that Thomas is only one reporter.)

Actually, there is some textual evidence that the Lord’s crucifixion decision may have been last-minute. Throughout the Gospels He is calm and confident as He repeatedly courts death by breaking religious laws; but on the night of His arrest “He knelt down and began to pray, saying, “Father, if You are willing, remove this cup from Me; yet not My will, but Yours be done” … And being in agony, He was praying very fervently; and His sweat became like drops of blood, falling down upon the ground” (LK 22:41-44). Even on the cross, after nine hours He blurted, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (MT 27:46). So He seems to have been less confident through His crucifixion ordeal than He ever had been before in His lifetime as Jesus, which makes sense if He was winging a last-minute plan. But He carried out the plan so well that I imagine Him now smiling to recall it.

At Easter we celebrate the fact that two thousand years ago God came to earth in the person of the Lord Jesus Christ and began a new stage of human development in which we can abandon all religious superstitions and live in the love of the genuine God. Humankind was growing up! We also celebrate the fact that by going through a public death and then re-animating His dead body, Jesus gave us indisputable proof that God is real and we are immortal. It matters little whether the Shroud of Turin is the actual burial cloth of Jesus. The Shroud bears on it signs that we could not have recognized for almost two thousand years, and that we still cannot reproduce. It is God’s message given two millennia ago and meant to open our hearts today. The Shroud of Turin is the greatest token of perfect love ever given!
This Easter each of us can celebrate our joyous newfound certainty that we are the Godhead’s best-beloved child and forever safe in Everlasting Arms.

“He has risen. Remember how He spoke to you while He was still in Galilee,
 saying that the Son of Man must be delivered into the hands of sinful men,
and be crucified, and the third day rise again.”
And they remembered His words, and returned from the tomb
and reported all these things to the eleven and to all the rest…
Peter got up and ran to the tomb. Stooping and looking in, he saw the linen wrappings;
and he went away to his home, marveling at what had happened.
           – Jesus’s Resurrection, from the Biblical Gospel of Luke (LK 24:6-12)

 

Three eggs photo credit: Theen … <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/57768536@N05/17035096001″>Egg Hunt</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Early man photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 48 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/17077752421″>Early Man</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Neanderthal man photo credit: edenpictures <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10485077@N06/45609419484″>Neanderthal Man</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Old Neanderthal photo credit: Allan Henderson <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/88019192@N00/29080690335″>Neanderthal</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
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The Easter Miracle

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One of the criminals who were hanged there was saying,
“ Save Yourself and us!” The other was saying,
“Jesus, remember me when You come into Your kingdom!”
And He said to him, “Truly I say to you,
today you shall be with Me in Paradise.”
– Jesus’s Crucifixion, from the Gospel of Luke (LK 23:39-43)

A question often asked at this time of year is whether the Easter story is true. Most people who ask the question consider the Resurrection to be the unbelievable part: they are sure Jesus cannot have died on a Friday and come alive again on Sunday. Actually, though, there is good evidence that Jesus did indeed rise from the dead. No, the part of the Easter story that turns out to be unbelievable is the Christian idea that Jesus died for our sins.

Jesus told us long before His death that God never judges anyone. For Him to speak against the prevailing religion was a capital crime, so He had to use some clever tricks to get the truth to His followers without alarming the Temple guards who were often nearby. For example, He used three different events to tell His flock what the dead now universally confirm to us is true about judgment, since the guards changed often but His followers were constant. And to further confound the Temple guards, He buried these essential truths in a blizzard of words! One day He inserted a potentially fatal statement into what the guards must have heard as just preacher-blather. He said, “For the Father loves the Son, and shows Him all things that He Himself is doing; and the Father will show Him greater works than these, so that you will marvel. … For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father. He who does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent Him” (JN 5:20-23).

That underlined statement that God doesn’t judge us went unremarked, so then on a different day Jesus elaborated on it by added that He never judges us either. He said, “He who sees Me sees the One who sent Me. I have come as Light into the world, so that everyone who believes in Me will not remain in darkness. If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:45-47). It was just more of what the guards would have heard as the ramblings of an itinerant preacher, with again that nugget of truth that Jesus doesn’t judge us slipping past their notice. Of course, at this point we can hear some ardent Christians saying, “Aha! So He did say He came to save the world!” But since Jesus has already told us that God doesn’t judge anyone, we can be sure He didn’t come to save the world from a divine judgment that never happens. No, it is clear from the Gospels that what Jesus came to save the world from was fear-based religious traditions. For example, He said, “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9).

Jesus even told us that each of us will be our own afterlife judge! Different day, different Temple guards, He said something that also failed to alarm them. Deep in His Sermon on the Mount He said, “So do not worry about tomorrow; for tomorrow will care for itself. Each day has enough trouble of its own. Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you. Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye?” (MT 6:34-7:3). We now understand that after our deaths no religious figure will judge us, but instead we will face the sternest possible judge. Each of us will judge ourselves.

The notion that Jesus had to die to redeem us from God’s judgment – what Christians call “penal substitutionary atonement” – is not based in anything that Jesus said. Indeed, it directly contradicts the truths that He shares with us in the Gospels! Even worse, it is a disgusting teaching. Try asking yourself which of your own children you would most like to watch being horribly murdered so you can forgive the rest of them for messing up your living room. And still, God insists that you and I must forgive every wrong ever done to us? Jesus tells us to forgive “not up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:22). So God insists that you and I forgive, while at the same time God demands that we participate in the sacrifice of His Son to Himself or else God will not forgive us?? I had a lot of trouble with this teaching even when I was an ardent Christian, and the emails I receive suggest that the repellent Christian teaching that God cannot forgive us without the murder of God’s Own Son is the single biggest reason why people are leaving Christianity now. The theory that God is unable to forgive us unless God first gets to watch His Son being murdered is an insult to the genuine God, Who in fact is infinite love. And the notion that the greatest Teacher Who ever lived was born primarily to be sacrificed is humiliating to Jesus!

Who is Jesus, anyway? When my primary guide came out to me in February of 2015, the first thing I asked him was whether Jesus really was the Son of God or in some other way unique, or whether He was only a wise prophet. Thomas told me that Jesus is a great deal more than just the Son of God! He said Jesus entered that lifetime from the highest aspect of the Godhead. So since the evidence suggests – and both Thomas and Mikey Morgan confirm – that God is a Collective of Perfected Beings, my beloved Thomas is telling us that God actually walked the earth in the Person of the historical Jesus. The Lord hints at His divinity in the Gospels, although those who heard Him speak and then passed His words down orally for a couple of generations before they were written down may not have fully understood what He was saying. He would say things like, “He who has seen Me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father, and the Father is in Me? The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:9-10). The fact that few of His listeners seemed to grasp the fact that God had actually incarnated on earth in the Person of the Lord is not surprising.

I am a skeptic by nature. I began researching death and the afterlife in the nineteen-seventies in an effort to understand my childhood experiences of light, and it took me more than a decade to accept the fact that hundreds of perfectly consistent communications from people that we used to think were dead – received on two continents over nearly a century – did make it pretty much statistically impossible for the afterlife that they all talked about not to be real. And although I was very familiar with the Gospels – and always uneasy about the fact that Christians mostly ignore the Lord’s teachings – it was only when I realized at the end of the nineties that the dead were actually confirming what Jesus had said, and in detail, that I was able at last to abandon Christianity and give my whole heart to the Lord.

So for a long time I have doubted the claim that the burial shroud and sudarium (face-covering) of Jesus still exist to this day. But here, too, I am a skeptic no more! As was true of all that afterlife evidence and the evidence confirming the Lord’s words in the Gospels, the modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant and irrefutable. Here is what has persuaded me:

  • Both relics date to the time of Jesus. The linen of which the Shroud of Turin (Italy) and the Sudarium of Oviedo (Spain) are made can be carbon-dated to the time of Jesus. It is of a weave in common use at that time, and it includes pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
  • The blood on both relics is male and of the same type. That type is AB, which is so rare that only about two percent of modern people share it.
  • The marks on both relics mirror the Lord’s injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they both covered the same man, that He was Jewish and He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report were inflicted on Jesus.
  • The Shroud carries a vague image that is the size and shape of a man. There is no image on the Sudarium, but smudges on the Shroud can be seen. More obvious to a casual observer are smoke and burn marks from a fire in 1532 and another in 1997, together with efforts that were made over time to mend and patch the damaged Shroud.
  • The image on the Shroud is a photographic negative. It was only when the Shroud was first photographed in 1898 that the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone even could have known what a photographic negative was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image.
  • No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it doesn’t penetrate at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim happened well after the blood had dried.

So there you have it. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being and lived among us for thirty-three years, and then He was tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a shroud, and laid in a tomb. Three days later He re-animated His dead body with an extraordinary burst of energy, and He showed Himself to His disciples. But why did He go to all that trouble? Next week we’ll give some thought to this question….

And a man named Joseph, a good and righteous man from Arimathea,
 this man went to Pilate and asked for the body of Jesus.
And he took it down and wrapped it in a linen cloth,
and laid Him in a tomb cut into the rock, where no one had ever lain.
– Jesus’s Crucifixion, from the Gospel of Luke (LK 23:50-53)

 

Shroud of Turin image photo credit: omnos <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/93625510@N00/10249668″>the Shroud of Turin</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Shroud on a stand photo credit: magro_kr <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8704943@N07/1414129408″>Kościół Zwiastowania NMP</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Preserving the Truth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

You may be surprised to see me fighting so hard to safeguard the evidence-based truth about death and the afterlife from efforts to “augment” it with NDE information. But the stakes in this could not be higher! As we said last week, near-death experiences (NDEs) have nothing to do with actual death. But they are such extraordinary personal experiences that of late more and more experiencers are claiming that they actually “died and came back to life,” which is flat impossible. They are then telling their aberrant stories of what they think happened during their NDEs as if they are giving us evidence of what happens at and after a genuine death.

This determination on the part of a few NDE-ers to muddy the truth with their own ideas is a direct existential threat to the dawning enlightenment of humankind. For the first time in our history, soon after the start of this century we at last amassed sufficient consistent and reliable evidence of what happens at and after death to be able to demonstrate the certainty of universal human survival! For the first time we had a vast store of truth about what actually is going on that fits together and makes sense.

We had already had to fight long and hard to protect more than a century’s worth of truth as it was being assembled. Even as recently as the first decade of this century, there still were occasional direct assaults by professional skeptics on anyone claiming to have real afterlife knowledge; and the brunt of those attacks fell on two intrepid Australian researchers, Victor and Wendy Zammit. Victor and Wendy are long-term fighters for the truth in the field of afterlife education. At one point they even posted a million-dollar challenge to anyone who could refute the evidence in their book, A Lawyer Presents the Evidence for the Afterlife. By 2010, the Zammits had won for us the last of the battles we ever will need to fight against the fading advocates of atheistic materialism. They deserve a world of thanks!

So by the start of this century’s second decade, we had at last assembled a pristine pool of information in the field of human survival that is consistent, sufficient, and irrefutable. The truth turns out to be eternal life and perfect love beyond our greatest imaginings! And just as we were able to begin to broadly share this glorious truth and all the evidence that supports it, a few NDE-ers began to dump their random and aberrant experiences into what had been an amazingly consistent pool of evidence-based information. These experiencers’ understanding is so limited that their contributions have begun to act on the truth like acid on a pearl of great price (MT 13:45). Unless we can soon find a bright-line way to insulate the truth about death and the afterlife from all these NDE falsehoods, NDEs will soon have muddied what we now know to the point where our present clarity will sink back into becoming again just conflicting opinions in a sea of confusion.

Oh, some people still will care about maintaining and sharing the literal truth. Books like the Zammits’, the work of people like Michael Tymn, Stafford Betty, Mikey Morgan, and Sandra Champlain, and my own books will remain immune to obfuscation. But far too many well-meaning people are going to assume that the lies are true and spread them even more; and in doing so, they risk sharply setting back humankind’s spiritual progress. So now, while it still is possible to protect the truth that has been so hard-won, let’s peek ahead and speculate about what human life on earth will be like when most of us at last have managed to know and love and live the truth.

Helping to bring the kingdom of God on earth is everybody’s main task now! The consciousness vibrations of this planet’s inhabitants have sunk so deep into negativity that unless we can turn things around pretty soon, we risk witnessing the earth’s destruction in the fear- and hatred-based swamp of pain that already is causing us so much harm!

And the easiest way for anyone to raise his or her consciousness vibrations and grow spiritually is simply to apply the Gospel teachings of Jesus. No need to learn to meditate, do yoga, chant, or even really pray; just follow three simple steps as you go on living your life:

  • Defeat your fear of death. Fear of death is the base human fear. Until we conquer it, our minds remain mired in negativity; but once we no longer fear death, we find that we no longer really fear anything. And Jesus told us flat-out that there is no death! He said, “Do not let your heart be troubled; believe in God, believe also in Me. In My Father’s house are many dwelling places; if it were not so, I would have told you; for I go to prepare a place for you … I will come again and receive you to Myself, that where I am, there you may be also (JN 14:1-3). Until enough of us have read sufficient consistent evidence to get past all our remaining doubts and entirely vanquish our fear of death, we won’t be able to raise our consciousness vibrations enough to materially lift the vibrations of this planet.
  • Master prevenient forgiveness. The core of what Jesus taught was our need to forgive, and our need not to judge anyone. When Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). Jesus also said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you … For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38). Forgiving only after you have already suffered a wrong is so hard! But reprogramming your mind to forgive everything that ever might happen for the rest of your life actually is pretty easy. As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., so wisely said, “Forgiveness is not an occasional act; it is a constant attitude.”
  • Master universal love. When the Lord was asked to name the greatest commandment, He gave us God’s new Law of Love: “‘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). Once you have defeated the fear of death and learned to forgive everything before it happens, your mind’s vibrations will rise so much that really loving everyone on earth is going to come to you naturally!  

So this program to raise our consciousness vibrations that is based in the teachings of Jesus is a straightforward process. It can be completed within a few years at most, and it works amazingly well. But defeating the fear of death is its essential first step, and becoming sufficiently certain about universal human survival that you altogether lose your fear of death is so hard! It isn’t enough to believe in an afterlife. Hoping for the best doesn’t work at all. No, what you need is the kind if certainty that your mind will survive your death that you feel about the rising of the sun each morning. You also need the same easy familiarity with what the afterlife is like that you have with the landmarks of London or New York. Even with an abundance of consistent afterlife information now so available, it takes real work for each of us to altogether vanquish our fear of death!

By the late nineties I had spent decades researching whole reams of amazingly consistent communications from the dead received before 1940, enough to be able to construct a believable model for what the afterlife is like. I had begun as a skeptic, but by then I believed that life does continue after physical death; but I was seeing, too, that even a deep and sincere belief still is nothing like knowing! Belief just gets you through the night and to another day of trying to know for sure. When people at last become certain that their lives will indeed go on after death – and even before they have mastered forgiveness, or focused on learning how to love – they begin to live and think in an eternal frame. I am such a skeptic that I wasn’t really able to give up all my doubts until the end of the nineties, when I discovered in the midst of a religious crisis that those that we used to think were dead were confirming what Jesus had said in the Gospels, even in minute detail. That was the day and hour when I became certain at last that human life is eternal. And my mind began to live in that moment as part of a timeless forevermore!

My reaction to becoming certain that I never will die was just what seems to happen to most people. I fell in love with Spirit! The God I found in the Gospels was reinforcing what I had learned from studying communications from the dead, and I knew for certain that God is perfect love. I knew that Jesus is an aspect of the Godhead. That was when I started to live my life with an open prayer-line, and I cleaned up my spiritual living room. Within a decade, in a bout of joy I gave the rest of my life to God, and the first fruit of that was a craving to share what I knew was true about death. So then I wrote The Fun of Dying. I developed a hunger for growing spiritually, and I turned to the Jesus of the Gospels for help so within another year I had figured out forgiveness. Within two more years I had discovered that the process of spiritual growth outlined above seems to work for anyone, provided that those applying it have first mastered a certainty about life after death.

So the linchpin of humankind’s entire future is our need to maintain the purity of the evidence for life after death. And this is true because only when we are so certain about humankind’s immortality that we begin to live in an eternal frame are we able to materially raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward perfect love. When we are certain that we will survive our deaths, our vibrations begin to rise naturally!

It will be fun to begin to explore how a general certainty about life after death in only ten or twenty percent of the human population is going to transform our lives as we now live them on earth. But our thinking about that will need to wait until after we have spent a couple of weeks considering the Easter season. Easter turns out to have been the Lord’s great effort to teach us about immortality. And it is time now for us to move past the fear-based nonsense that is Christianity and listen to what Jesus actually said….    

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

 

Astral pond with geese photo credit: Rusty Russ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/10159247@N04/49528222682″>New England in October</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Heavenly mountains photo credit: joncutrer <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/47121680@N00/49305982407″>Sierra Blanca Peak at dawn</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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