Author: Roberta Grimes

Selling Love-Based Living in a Fear-Based World

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world…
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
                                         – W.B. Yeats (1845-1939) from “The Second Coming”

Many people have an increasing sense that Western civilization is falling apart. Some of us trace this awful collapse back to the youth-quake of the Sixties, which was a decade so full of political assassinations and racial strife and so riven by a pointless war that it seemed to some to be the end of the world. Others trace our civilizational chaos to the polarization now being fostered by isolated pockets of conflicting information; and there even are those who put the blame on rhetoric coming from the U.S. President. But whatever reasons we might propose for the current collapse of order and basic decency in the Western world, I suggest to you that every one of these apparent causes is only a symptom. Our central problem is that human civilization was plunged so deeply into fear and negativity during the war- and strife-filled past century that it is now in an existential crisis. It has lost any sense of how to rise from here.

Please try to internalize how this works. If we cannot thoroughly grasp it ourselves, we can never help others to understand and address what has always been the central human problem! The only thing that exists is the creative energy-like potentiality that we experience as consciousness. All our minds are part of that potentiality, so effectively we all are part of one Mind. Like other forms of energy, consciousness vibrates, and its range runs from fear at the lowest and slowest end of the spectrum to love at the highest. We have said this here so many times that to see me recite it again has you rolling your eyes! But until you have so completely internalized this core fact of human existence that you stop seeing reality in any other way, you will not be able to get free of the illusion that you think you see around you. Everything is either love-based or fear-based.

Fear is not just a bogeymen thing, and love is a lot more than hearts and roses! You can take every bad or good thing and trace it back to the fear or love at its base:

  • Fear is the source of everything harmful. Fear makes us desperate for safety! And since through all of human history almost no one has known that the only way to escape from fear is to raise our personal conscious vibrations toward love, we have instead had dictatorial rulers, hideous tortures, brutal prisons, wars of conquest, greed for wealth, and every form of bullying. Our fears make us desperate to dominate others, but of course our doing that only makes those others more fearful and even more dangerous, which makes our own fears even worse. In the desperate need for safety that fear produces, a need that never can be satisfied, lies the root of every war and cruelty that ever has been visited upon humankind.
  • Love is the source of everything good. Love is a cycle too, but it is a highly benevolent one because the more you love, the less you fear. The more you love, the more you inspire love in others, and so the cycle builds. Throughout history, even those who have begun this cycle and followed it to sainthood have never understood why it works! But we understand it now. And we know now that everything we think of as in any way positive can be traced to the love that is its source.

This set of truths is the root of the Gospel teachings of Jesus, and in fact it lies at the base of most of what later became our fear-based religions. If you don’t like the thought of consciousness vibrating and having to raise your personal vibration, I’ll share with you a Native American story that is an especially beautiful way to approach the core of all human wisdom!

One evening an old Cherokee told his grandson about a battle that goes on inside people. He said, “My son, the battle is between two wolves inside us all. One is Evil. It is anger, envy, jealousy, sorrow, regret, greed, arrogance, self-pity, guilt, resentment, inferiority, lies, false pride, superiority, and ego. The other is Good. It is joy, peace, love, hope, serenity, humility, kindness, benevolence, empathy, generosity, truth, compassion, and faith.” The grandson thought about this for a minute and then asked his grandfather, “Which wolf wins?” The old Cherokee replied, “The one you feed.”

This decision about which wolf to feed, the choice between loving or dominating others, the dilemma of whether to seek money and power on earth or the eternal greater wealth of Spirit: giving us a place where we can learn in an infinite number of ways to always feed the good wolf is the reason why this material universe exists.  

Just a casual review of human history will show you that for the most part, humanity has sadly preferred to feed the evil, fear-based wolf. We seldom even notice his love-based brother lurking nearby, only bones and skin and by now desperate for us to throw him even a scrap! Every one of our institutions, and especially including our religions, is based in fear and not in love. And what may be worse, both science and religions are fostering in modern Western cultures an appalling level of fear-based ignorance! Religions instill in people fear of the wrath of their imaginary gods, since feeding our fears and then offering safety is the way all religions stay in business. Mainstream science also fosters fear, but it does that primarily by advocating for the three spurious propositions that reality is matter-based, that consciousness is produced by our brains, and that at death we will blink out like a light. Since fear of death is the core human fear, these ignorant dogmas that govern what is supposed to be an open-minded search for the truth are just as effective as religions are at cranking up all our ambient fears!

Every human evil is the result of people making fear-based choices. You can never think from fear and produce anything but greater harm! But our problem now is that while we finally understand why evil exists, few people on earth as yet are ready to hear this simple and logical explanation. Say to someone stuck in Christian terrors that Jesus came to do away with religious fears and teach us to relate individually to a love-based God, and he will be blindsided and horrified. Say to someone cowering behind locked doors that all the thugs outside were born as sparks of love, so once every child is properly reared we will do away with locks forevermore, and the poor soul may well reach for his gun.

Building love-based institutions in a fear-based world will need to be a stealth process. We cannot at first mention love or fear without being ridiculed for spouting woo-woo nonsense, but what we can do now is to advocate for the simple fact that love-based institutions work so much better. We can talk about the proven evils of our present institutions and suggest that we learn from these mistakes how to build institutions that really work:

  • Bottom-up. While fear-based institutions generally consider their subjects to be just problems to be managed, in a love-based institution those same subjects are precious individual stakeholders whose needs and concerns must be addressed first of all.
  • Responsive to society’s overall needs. While regimenting and protecting society by trying to maintain a strict social order is every fear-based institution’s main concern, instead encouraging and empowering each individual member of society works better for everyone.
  • Empowering to those they serve. Fear-based institutions cause more problems than they solve, and those new problems must then be solved as well, so our present institutions are self-perpetuating. By contrast, all our institutions should hold as a primary goal their own obsolescence in the lives of their newly revitalized and empowered constituents.
  • Careful to do no harm. Far from producing all the terrible unintended harms that we get from fear-based institutions, every one of our institutions should tread lightly, always seeking out and working promptly to correct any unintended consequences.

A love-based institution is full of feedback loops. It insists on being accountable. It treats every human being, no matter how currently debased, as capable of fundamental goodness and unlimited spiritual growth.

But there is one thing we really will have to kill if we ever hope to make much love-based progress. What it is may surprise you, and perhaps seeing the harm that it causes will surprise you more. During the long pull of humankind through millennia during which we lived steeped in fears and we had no way to access the truths that would have helped us to address our fears, we relied on our faith. Humankind’s touching ability to believe in what we could not see was the only respite we ever had from the fears that otherwise would have overwhelmed us. But as our new era of certainty dawns, it turns out that our ability to believe without evidence, and our eagerness to put skepticism aside, will have to be vanquished. We’ll address this next week.

If you hear the song I sing, You will understand.
You hold the key to love and fear All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both. It’s there at your command.
              – Chet Powers (1937-1994) from “Get Together” by The Youngbloods

 

Green energy photo credit: krandolph <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/57529570@N00/131951309″>Misty mint swirl</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
HDR Sunset photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo – 68 Million Views <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/49465812848″>Adirondack Mountains – Whiteface Mountain – Lake Placid – New York – HDR Sunset</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Sun through trees photo credit: franzisko hauser <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/125814940@N06/40403236753″>the search of the secrets from the light :-)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Rushing water photo credit: Schneidersphotography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/124918242@N04/48019581701″>Ditz Waterfall</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Dutch stream photo credit: HereIsTom <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/47035764@N03/47765348622″>Heather garden, Driebergen-Rijsenburg, Netherlands – 1464</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Sedona spice photo credit: nixter <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/12097621@N00/49137449748″>Sedona Spice</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Light tunnel photo credit: enneafive <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75612671@N03/45488678501″>Wonderland Tunnel</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Are People by Nature Fear-Based or Love-Based?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“What is man that You should remember him,
or the son of man that You should care for him?
You have made him a little lower than the angels,
and have crowned him with glory and honor.”
                                     – The Apostle Paul (Heb 2:6-7)

We enter our earth-lives as beautiful people, loving and kind and generous. Research scientists have just confirmed what every mother of an infant knows: babies are spiritually gifted people, just the sort of people we hope to one day become. I have reared three babies of my own and have been close to three infant grandchildren, so I have a bit of expertise! And I can tell you that right from birth, every infant is a unique individual and each of the six babies I have mothered began life as an amazingly spiritual being. They were all from the moment when they first saw light demonstrably loving, empathetic, and generous. Some were more sensitive than others, crankier or more contented, and easier or harder to please; but still, from their first interactions with others, those love-based spiritual characteristics were there. And doesn’t that make sense? They had come directly from a love-based world where these beautiful traits were universal!

But it isn’t long before life on earth starts to sour these little ambassadors of love. By the age of two, experts confidently tell us that all children are selfish and bratty, and they say that three-year-olds are worse. So if we start our lives as spiritual beings, why is it that almost immediately we spiritually devolve to the point where most of us will then spend the rest of our lives just trying to become as spiritual developed as we were at birth? In my view, this is the key question to be answered if we ever hope to re-invent our fear-based institutions and begin to build a perfectly love-based world.

Simply put, our fear-based institutions are the product of the flawed and hurting people that ignorant parents and mentors tragically make of those innately spiritual infants. All of humanity is trapped in this horrendous chicken-and-egg cycle! Damaged people create institutions that universally assume we are all damaged people who must be strictly controlled by fear and by other negative stimuli or human societies will sink into brutality.

It is in this that our longstanding reliance on science and religions as our sources of truth is revealed to be the dead-end cage that it is. Since science and religions are belief-systems that are hampered by their respective dogmas in their efforts to understand anything, together they now blithely  assure us that human nature is inherently evil. By their lights, we can never live together in reasonable peace unless we are constrained. This is true of science of course, where it is assumed that we are nothing more than animals who can stand upright. So negative human tendencies such as Machiavellianism, psychopathy, sadism, and narcissism (they call it “the Dark Tetrad”) are all traceable to their mimics in animal species and announced to be innate to our animal natures. And we know by now in abundance that Christianity considers humankind to be originally created in God’s image but rendered permanently evil because Adam, who was the first human being, chose long ago to disobey God.

Science remains so ignorant of what human beings actually are that nearly all child-development experts assume that we come into the world as organized clusters of cells with no history. This is, of course, demonstrably false! Indeed, having closely known my own children and those three grandchildren ever since they were born, I can tell you that each was a fully-formed and entirely unique individual from birth who has changed very little over all these years. But even as recently as this past December, a well-meant article for parents opined that a child’s “true personality” doesn’t emerge until their “tween years.” Before then, what we have is just “temperament.” As someone who has closely studied for their entire lives six adults or near-adults who all were born with precisely the same complex personalities they still have today, I read this garbage from “experts” and my jaw drops. No one who ever has actually studied even a few human children from birth until adulthood could say that they were blank slates through childhood whose personalities were not fixed before the age of ten!

Until our two deeply trusted but utterly misguided sources of truth will open their minds and objectively examine just who and what human beings really are, you and I are left to do that for ourselves. And in fact, the truth about human nature is wonderful! Based upon the bits of light that modern science is able to shed, plus all that afterlife researchers have learned and my own frank observations, I can assure you that:

  • Every newborn infant is a being who has lived one or more previous lifetimes. The evidence that we reincarnate repeatedly is so abundant now, and so variously sourced, that it can no longer be seriously challenged.
  • Every newborn has planned a lifetime for which it will need a specific set of characteristics. Talents, appearance, native intelligence, temperament, handicaps, and so much else will come in part from the genetic makeup of the parents and in part from what each child’s guides will add so all children can better follow their personalized life-plans.
  • Coming into a new human life is traumatic. Just transiting the birth canal is painful and frightening, and then the shock of light and sound makes most babies scream and can leave them irritable for weeks thereafter. We are told, too, by the not-really-dead that many babies are grumpy for a while to find themselves back in a material body. They volunteered to come back, true, but they had forgotten what a depressing come-down life on early really is!
  • For the first five or six years of our lives, each of us is in “download mode.” We are uncritically taking in what our observations tell us is true about our status and rank, our personal characteristics, our environment, and the rules governing our lives. What we learn during those first years of life becomes hard-wired into our minds for this lifetime. It will govern all our future thinking about ourselves and the world unless some big event or insight can dislodge it.

Keeping in mind these basic facts that govern the first years of each human life makes it easier for us to better understand the dear little bundles doctors put into our arms. When I think back on the six babies I have mothered – and my own children are in their forties now – I can see that from their earliest moments they were precisely the same people they still are today. Knowing that they were eternal beings who were beginning only the latest of their many lives on earth, I can make sense of the vagaries of each of their childhoods, and a lot of their early choices can be seen in retrospect as having been essential to developing the lives that they and their spirit guides had planned.

What does bother me, though, is the fact that until quite recently I did not understand that throughout their preschool years my children were taking as unquestioned truth everything that they heard or saw. I desperately wish I had known that at the time! Had I known then what I know now, none of the six infants I was privileged to be a part of parenting would have spent even a moment of those formative preschool years in the presence of an adult who wasn’t careful about what was being said and done around them.

As it is, of course, our clueless culture is full of fear-based adults who themselves were damaged in their own preschool years and now are damaging the next generation. Today, little tots are being arrested. They are being encouraged to imagine that their birth-gender is wrong, and often for the flimsiest of reasons, even though just six-tenths of one percent of the adult population is actually transgender; and they are being deluged with extreme adult concepts when they are so young that it is impossible to gauge what lessons they are learning that they then will be certain are true for the rest of their lives.

If we want to replace the cruel institutions that keep the consciousness vibrations of this world so debased, our first task must be to stop turning every love-based child being born on earth into a miserably fear-based adult! We now know for certain that:

  • Human nature is in its essence love-based, and its impulse is to become even more loving as each life-plan unfolds; so
  • Once we stop damaging our children, we should readily be able to free them and trust them to live empowered and altogether love-based lives.

The only way for humankind to grow beyond its perceived need for fear-based institutions is for us to stop teaching our little children to submit to and be controlled by fear! We must break this awful chicken-and-egg cycle of fear-based controls that only further harm us, and the only way that cycle can be broken is by helping parents to better understand their children. But how can we battle both science and religions and bring the truth at last to all the world?

“When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I thought as a child, I reasoned as a child;
when I became a man, I gave up childish things.
For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face;
now I know in part, but then I will know fully, just as I also have been fully known.”
                                                                   – The Apostle Paul (1 Cor 13:10-12)

 

Growing girl photo credit: Spitzgogo_CHEN (Nokia 6230i) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75607732@N00/306730797″>一眠大一吋 “Inch by Inch”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Twins with baby photo credit: quinn.anya <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/53326337@N00/44777591195″>Eliza and brothers</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Happy baby photo credit: malone545 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8167329@N06/17342475786″>Hi, Everyone!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Fear-Based vs. Love-Based Institutions

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

“Some men see things as they are, and ask why.
I dream of things that never were, and ask why not.”
                                       – Robert F. Kennedy (1925-1968)

The most powerful force depressing the consciousness vibrations of all of humankind is the fact that every human institution is fear-based. We have seen that this is true of religions, which use fear and guilt to keep the faithful in their pews; and in fact, it is true of everything we do. Humankind as a whole is not sufficiently developed spiritually even to know what a love-based institution might be like! So let’s look now at some of the differences between fear-based and love-based institutions, and then let’s consider the most destructive fear-based American institution of all so we can re-imagine how it might be replaced with a more successful version that is based in love. Fear-based institutions are:

  • Top-down. Every such institution has a governing body that makes and enforces the rules. That body generally lacks supervision, so it wields a lot of independent authority.
  • Tailored to serve the needs of their constituents and the larger society as the governing body perceives those needs to be. Over time, the decisions made by leaders of fear-based institutions tend to be more and more influenced by outside and often self-interested actors.
  • Allowed to wield substantial power to enforce consequences for their constituents’ infractions. The consequences that a given institution’s leadership has the power to impose might be as trivial as the loss of some privilege, or as major as the loss of one’s life.
  • Careless about whatever negative consequences they might create. I don’t know of any human institution of any size that doesn’t create substantial problems. Many of them create far worse problems on a much broader scale than the ones they have been entrusted to solve.

The most heinous institution in the United States gives us a good example upon which to experiment. We are hearing talk now about prison reform, but for us to undertake mere prison reform would be like applying an Ace bandage to a compound leg fracture! Our entire criminal justice system is so deeply fear-based, so pointlessly cruel, so destructive to American society, and so lacking in any redemptive qualities that we have no choice but to tear it down altogether and entirely rethink it. The Catch-22 in this, of course, is that until many more Americans are thinking from love and no longer from fear, most people still will sadly see the worst aspects of our criminal justice system as not really so bad, and probably necessary.

Whole books could be written about the many things that are wrong with our criminal justice system, so I will give you here just some of the lowlights. Hold onto your breakfast:

  • The US is barely 5% of the world’s population, but we hold 25% of the world’s prison population. Read that again! Even including places like China and North Korea, one in four of those incarcerated in the world is imprisoned in the United States.
  • A staggering 97 percent of all federal inmates and 95 percent of all state felony inmates were sentenced and imprisoned without a trial. Almost everyone now imprisoned in the United States was terrified into “pleading guilty to a lesser charge.” My research suggests that most of these people are not properly charged, or are wrongly sentenced, and a significant number of them have committed no actual crime. Some were just in the wrong place at the wrong time.
  • More than six million Americans are currently in prison or on probation. To think of this differently, the current US prison population is larger than the populations of 15 states; and to feed, clothe, house, and provide healthcare for a group this size is an industry approaching $200 billion in annual costs.
  • More than half of current inmates do not pose a special danger to society. One in five is incarcerated for a nonviolent drug offense, and those who are imprisoned for violent crimes are no more than forty percent overall. Perhaps surprisingly, statistics indicate that some of those who committed the most violent crimes now pose no elevated threat. For example, rapists and murderers are among the folks who are least likely to re-offend.
  • Conditions in prisons are deliberately dehumanizing. Prisoners are treated like immoral criminals without rights, just as you will be treated if you run afoul of some aggressive prosecutor. You may be denied family visits and allowed little contact with the outside world; you will be limited in what you can read or watch on TV, and how you might use a computer; and all of this will happen at the whims of your keepers. If your mother dies while you are in prison, you won’t be going to her funeral. If you are moved to a prison far away from those you love, that will be tough luck for them and for you.
  • Punishment does not end when you leave prison. Former inmates are often permanent second-class citizens, without the right to vote or to access public benefits. More than ten million Americans collectively owe over $50 billion in fines and fees associated with their arrest, conviction, and incarceration that many will never find a way to pay. Even very wealthy ex-felons can have access to their assets limited for years after they have entirely paid their debt to society. Indeed, those who are incarcerated for more than six or seven years will often become so conditioned to prison that they can no longer lead productive outside lives.
  • And what of the children? More than half of America’s prison inmates have minor children. More than a million fathers and 220,000 mothers have left almost three million children without one or both of their parents. One in nine black children has an incarcerated parent today, and a father’s incarceration has serious implications for children and their ability to succeed in school due to associated patterns of aggression and delinquency.
  • Our poisonous criminal justice system is the single biggest reason for the ongoing disparities between black and white Americans. It is tragically not an overstatement to say that ever since the Civil War, in many ways this nation has been criminalizing the very condition of being black and male. For example, in 1970 blacks were twice as likely to be arrested for drug crimes.  By 1990, it was four times. Today, it’s about three times as likely. It is easy to assume that this is because blacks use and sell drugs at proportionately higher rates, but data consistently shows that this is not the case. The incarceration rate for blacks is seven times the rate for whites. In twelve states, more than half the prison population is black. One in 87 working-age white men is in prison, vs. one in twelve working-age African American men. And the loss of the presence of so many fathers has created a “school-to-prison pipeline” for young black men, so there are prisons now in which grandfather, father, and son share a cellblock.

As far back as 1972, thoughtful judges were decrying our criminal justice mess. For example, an opinion of the US District Court for the Western District of Wisconsin (340 F. Supp. 544 [W.D. Wis. 1972], April 6, 1972) said, “With respect to the intrinsic importance of the challenges, I am persuaded that the institution of prison probably must end. In many respects it is as intolerable within the United States as was the institution of slavery, equally brutalizing to all involved, equally toxic to the social system, equally subversive of the brotherhood of man, even more costly by some standards, and probably less rational.”

If we were to take the entire criminal justice system down to base and rebuild it as a love-based institution, how would it differ from our present train wreck? A love-based institution is:

  • Bottom-up. The needs of those the institution serves come even before any public needs. In the case of a rethought criminal justice system, concentrating on turning convicts into more successful members of society would be this institution’s main goal.
  • Responsive to society’s overall needs. The fact that nearly all convicts will return to life on the street means that prisons must avoid disrupting prisoners’ lives any more than is absolutely necessary.
  • Empowering to those they serve. The fact that so many of those who run our prisons are petty tyrants who beat prisoners down emotionally would be anathema to a love-based institution.
  • Careful to do no harm. A love-based institution treads lightly, always seeking out and working promptly to correct any unintended consequences.

Building a love-based criminal justice system is going to take considerable research and effort, but these will likely be its main characteristics:

  • Nonviolent offenders will pay their debts to society while remaining in their homes. Felons will each follow their own individualized programs of education, work, fines and reparations, counseling, and community service, with always the background threat of incarceration to ensure their ongoing cooperation. Instead of sitting in prison, these people can be parenting their children, maintaining their relationships, and responsibly supporting themselves and their families as they continue to build productive long-term careers.
  • Any prison sentence of more than two years’ duration will require a jury trial. With prisons now limited to holding only violent offenders, prosecutors will be further limited to cases they believe can be proven. And due to the costs and time delays of trial, the only people tried will be those who have committed serious violent crimes. For lesser crimes, plea-bargaining for sentences of two years or less can remain in place.
  • There will be a mechanism to promptly restore full civil rights to nonviolent offenders, including banking and firearms privileges and the right to vote. And after a nonviolent offender has maintained a clean record for five years after having left the system, all his criminal records will be sealed. No longer will a plea-bargained prison sentence impair any nonviolent offender’s ability to go back to living a normal life.

Having examined some of the differences between fear-based and love-based ways to handle the same set of complex social problems, it is time for us to consider how we might best begin to rebuild all our core institutions from a base of love and not of fear. It is essential that we do this soon! For so long as we continue to subject ourselves to the tyranny of powerful fear-based institutions, we will be severely impairing everyone’s ability to move beyond fear as humanity’s primary motivating force. It may well be that until we have replaced not just our fear-based religions, but also all our other fear-based institutions, we will remain forever stuck in the mire of negativity that pervades every human culture now. We have got to start somewhere!

“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?”
– Rabbi Hillel the Elder (c.110 BCE-10 CE)

 

Penitentiary photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo – New Format <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/48512361822″>Rawlins Wyoming – Wyoming State Penitentiary – Historic Prison</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Prison cell photo credit: Sean_Marshall <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7119320@N05/49303110637″>Kingston Penitentary</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Penitentiary interior photo credit: Sean_Marshall <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7119320@N05/49303110042″>Kingston Penitentary</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Black man photo credit: Benjamin Disinger <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/92014410@N06/16336104359″>Marco Martinez</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Young family photo credit: Anirudh Koul <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/84856173@N00/3801955554″>Mommy, Daddy & the Budding Baby</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Life Without Sin – Part Three

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We have by now well established the fact that the religion that bears the name of Jesus does not follow the teachings of Jesus. Everything Christians are taught to believe was introduced in the process of religion-building that began two centuries after the Lord’s death. And all those dogmas are fear-based! The overall Christian message is that we are unworthy of anything good, not even because of something we did but because our first ancestor disappointed God. Add to Adam’s sin the fact that we have made a lot of our own mistakes, and our cause is hopeless! A righteous God never could forgive the utter wretches that we are, so the perfect Son of a perfect Godhead – not descended from Adam, and Himself sinless – had to be born of a sinless human as the perfect sacrifice so a judgmental God could forgive us for our human failings. We should note that two thousand years ago they were sacrificing animals to the Jewish God, and the animals they sacrificed had to be perfect. So the whole Christian dogma of substitutionary atonement made literal, absolute sense back then! But we can see now that it has nothing to do with what Jesus spent three years teaching us. More to the point, we can see that the notion that a loving God could want to see His Own Son murdered is ridiculous on its face.

Jesus told us He came to free us from fear so we could better learn how to love, and to grow past fear we were going to need to learn to relate to God directly. Since the notion that God might hold anything we do against us is purely human-made, Jesus had to remove from our minds the very notion that an act can be sinful! Once we are free from religious dogmas and free from the thought that anything we might do could be against some God-made rule, we are left with the Lord’s gentle exhortation that we leave fear behind and concentrate on love. As He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

In the bad old days when religions told us that God had given us holy laws that we could burn in hell for disobeying, we had an easy way to distinguish Right from Wrong! But in this new world there is no divine law at all beyond the Lord’s encouragement that we learn to feel more perfect love for the Godhead, and that we learn to feel for everyone around us the same love and care that we feel for ourselves.

How can we begin to get our minds around better understanding Right and Wrong in this brand-new and much gentler-seeming world? Morality has moved from applying laws that we are made to believe come directly from God toward trying to ever better understand and then apply the following steps in each daily instance of moral choice:

  • What is really going on here? The question is no longer what I see in the moment and how some divine law might apply. Now I’ve got to lovingly seek to understand the truth of every situation from the separate viewpoint of each human being.
  • What are the actual and potential results to come from each of the actions I might take? In particular, how are each of my actions likely to affect all the others around me, both all the people I might know and every stranger who might be affected, emotionally as well as physically and financially? And what is the most loving way to balance the needs of all these separate people, knowing that in helping someone I might need to harm someone else?
  • Are there outside-the-box things that I might do that could create a more peaceful and love-based outcome? Religious laws are mostly in the negative: don’t lie, don’t steal, don’t kill. But if there are no religious laws, and if our great aspiration now is to make the world and everyone in it much more loving and more deeply loved, then we are encouraged to explore a new and more love-based set of positive actions. What might we do that can help all the people involved feel better about themselves and those around them? How might we perhaps help to nudge all of society a bit closer to a more love-based future?

Let’s look now at the difference this kind of thinking can make in three core moral areas. As a practical matter, in these three areas the thou-shalt-not laws that were long ago decreed by a dogmatic human-like God never have fit very well. We can see how killing to save others might be necessary, and there are so many different ways to categorize property crimes in daily life that it is hard to know where to begin! As for the emotion-laden and highly complex area of sexual behavior, there are so many ways that what we do in private can profoundly affect the lives of others. I should point out, too, that I am one observer! In all three areas, my own life-experiences will deeply affect how I see Right and Wrong, so I hope that others who have had different experiences will weigh in below with their own points of view.

SEXUAL BEHAVIOR

  • Divine Law. In the Old Testament world, enforcing gender roles seemed essential to maintaining social order. But the human-made God of the Old Testament doesn’t just say, “You shall not commit adultery” (Ex 20:14). No, He then goes on to say of a girl who is not a virgin on her wedding night, “then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death because she has committed an act of folly in Israel by playing the harlot in her father’s house” (Deut: 20-21). And “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death” (Lev 20:13). When you read the Old Testament, you get the sense that the Jews of three thousand years ago were probably not very different in their sexual behavior from the people of today, but the God they worshiped made sins often punished by death out of almost anything they did sexually that happened outside a legally sanctioned marriage between a man and a woman. Er… except for polygamy and concubinage. God still loved and blessed King Solomon, even though he had 700 wives and 300 concubines.
  • Love-Based Morality. In the love-based world first envisioned by Jesus in the Gospels, there are no more sin-based laws, so having sex outside legal lines is never automatically wrong. But sexual decisions made from love are very different from the modern sort of sexual morality that we summed up in the nineteen-sixties as just, “if it feels good, do it.” Arguably, a strictly love-based morality requires of us a whole new attitude toward sex that is more rigorous by far than are either the Old Testament laws or our modern sexual freedom. Our core problem in approaching a love-based sexual morality is that no sex act is truly private. If you masturbate, you might be rejecting intimacy with your partner who dearly loves you. If you have sexual contact outside your marriage, you are betraying your spouse and endangering the stable home that your children have a right to expect. If you ever have intercourse, you risk harming the new being that act might be creating, and the kinds of harm that new person might suffer must all be taken into account! Are you in a stable marriage? If not, then you risk bringing a child into a single-parent home, with all the disadvantages that sort of family life entails. And a love-based morality would of course decree that abortion is almost never an option!

KILLING SOMEONE

  • Divine Law. The Old Testament God says, “You shall not murder” (Ex 20:13), and “If a man takes the life of any human being, he shall surely be put to death” (Lev 24:17). Modern secular law generally agrees that the killing of another human being without cause is reason enough to put the killer to death, so in both cases just the act is a capital crime.
  • Love-Based Morality. But what if we feel required to kill to prevent the harming of a child? What if our own life is threatened? What if our homeland has been invaded? You and I can name a dozen conditions that make killing another human being forgivable. As with the decision to have sex, in the love-based and fear-free morality that Jesus introduced to us there is no longer any divine law against killing another human being. But the law of love requires a balancing of the needs of all the other people affected, so the love-based process of deciding whether to kill is more rigorous than a law-based decision ever could be.

STEALING

  • Divine Law. The Old Testament God says in black-and-white terms, “You shall not steal” (Ex 20:15), and “If a man steals an ox or a sheep and slaughters it or sells it, he shall pay five oxen for the ox and four sheep for the sheep” (EX 22:1). How easy a sin-based morality makes it seem!
  • Love-Based Morality. Appropriating another person’s property is a less damaging sin than is murdering him, and therefore it is subject to less severe religious and secular penalties. But when there truly are no rules and we are thinking only from love, these decisions become more complex. What about stealing a delivery van so you can hurry someone to the emergency room, or taking food from a vendor for a starving child? When we are judging all our actions only from the viewpoint of love, we are in an entirely different world.

How does a love-based morality coincide with the Lord’s command that we forgive? Jesus says, “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” (LK 6:37). On the other hand, the Old Testament God told Moses that He was, “The Lord, the Lord God, compassionate and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in lovingkindness and truth; who keeps lovingkindness for thousands, who forgives iniquity, transgression and sin; yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished, visiting the iniquity of fathers on the children and on the grandchildren to the third and fourth generations” (Ex 34:6-8). Wow. Is it any wonder that the genuine Godhead felt the need to be re-introduced to us when eventually the time was right?

Next week we will look at how love-based thinking complicates the sin-based morality that still prevails in our civic life. In fact, our religion-based tendency to think in terms of sin and not of love has created some of our worst and most intractable modern social problems….

 

The child’s bath photo credit: mark6mauno <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/98147195@N00/11124183974″>”The Child’s Bath” by Mary Cassatt</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Family hands photo credit: docoverachiever <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/90692748@N04/46076212842″>Grandma and Grandson</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Asian grandma photo credit: FotoGrazio <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/94075184@N00/23902215673”>Generations of Love</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Boy with mom’s belly photo credit: ClauReyesPhotography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/130736614@N03/24602209539″>Promoted to Big Brother!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Four women photo credit: Lua Pramos <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/65274361@N08/22505965360″>358/365</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Life Without Sin – Part Two

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Rules are meant to give us a structure within which a great many people can live together in reasonable peace and safety. We understand that fact in the civic sense, and we know that until humankind has managed to do a lot more spiritual development there will be a need for civic authorities and their rules. But religious rules are another matter! Religions are just human-made efforts to make some sense of the greater reality and alleviate our fears of the unknown, and we know now based on abundant evidence that no religion gets reality right. None of them gets God right, either. All of that is not surprising, since every significant religion has been co-opted by human authorities and turned into what is primarily a method for better controlling the people. In our leaders’ efforts to control us all, fear-based rules are essential! And when those rules were first said to emanate from and carry the enforcement of a powerful god, the human-made concept of “sin” was born.

Last week we took a quick look at the history of religions and at the Gospel words of Jesus in an effort to understand how the genuine Godhead views the whole idea of sin. We saw that the Godhead does indeed have a point of view! We learned that:

  • From earliest prehistory, God has been sending emissaries who each brought the divine revelation of some version of the love-based Golden Rule, around which their clueless listeners then generally built another fear-based religion; and
  • Two thousand years ago Jesus came to the Jews from the highest aspect of the Godhead to free us from the need for religions by teaching us how to relate to God directly.

The genuine Godhead has never given us any rule beyond the exhortation that we love God and love one another. As Jesus put it, “‘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).

During most of human history, people likely saw no harm in the fact that the gods they worshiped were scary and demanding. But we know better now! We understand how essential it is that all of us rid ourselves of every kind of fear-based thinking, since we come to earth primarily to raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. Therefore anything that introduces into our lives additional fear in any form works directly against the divinely-ordained primary purpose of our lives on earth.

So if we intend to follow the Jesus of the Gospels, we must abandon every religious rule and even the very notion of sin. We also must begin to know and to follow the genuine God as Jesus introduced God to us in the Gospels! He told us the following things about the Godhead, and about His own essential role:

  • “The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing His work” (JN 14:10). This is an extremely important point! We know now that Jesus came from the highest aspect of the Godhead. What He said was the Word of God as nothing else ever said or written by anyone can be called the Word of God!
  • “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and in truth” (JN 4:24). The notion of a trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit – was established late in the third century C.E. It did not come from Jesus! According to Him, God is only Spirit, so the Trinitarian Christian god that was depicted by Michelangelo on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel as an old guy with a beard is human-made.
  • “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). The genuine Godhead invites us to seek, to inquire, and to probe ever deeper. God wants us to always be learning and growing! So the god who imposes dogmas on us – unsupported old beliefs that we must not question, and that we must believe entirely on faith – also is a false and fear-based god.
  • “Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light.” (MT 11:29-30) Unlike all those scary human-made gods, the genuine Godhead is gentle and humble. There never is any reason to fear God!
  • 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). God does not need nor want mass worship. From the perspective of the genuine Godhead, the important one in your relationship with God is not God. It’s you.
  • “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). God rejects our religious traditions altogether. God insists that we give up the man-made rules and dogmas that underlie all our religions, and urges us instead to seek to ever better know and love the genuine God.
  • “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves.You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit (MT 7:15-17). This is a very important point! Organized religions by their very nature tend to become increasingly distorted. Their dogmas become more and more fear-based, and the result is more damage inflicted on the faithful. We need only look at the widespread child abuse by Catholic priests, the judgment and rejection of people based on Old Testament sexual rules, and the splintering of Christianity into thousands of versions to see that the religion is by now producing an overabundance of thistles.  
  • “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” (JN 5:22-23). So God never judges us? Really? Then the god who is said to have demanded that Jesus die for our sins is another false god. Without a concept of sin and without the judgment of God, there was no need for Jesus to die for our sins; and to make that explicit, before His death Jesus pre-emptively threw the much-later Christian doctrine of penal substitutionary atonement out the window!
  • “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 12:47). So Jesus doesn’t judge us either! But what did Jesus come to save us from? Certainly not from God’s judgment, since He has already told us God does not judge us. When we take all His Gospel words together, it is clear that what Jesus came to save us from was all the false and fear-based religious doctrines that had been coming between us and the genuine God.
  • “Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:48). Here is the Lord’s summary definition of the Godhead, which we are now given to understand is a Collective of perfected beings so advanced spiritually that they are… Perfect.

For what is likely to be the first time in your life, behold now the genuine God as God is revealed to you by the words of Jesus! I read these ten points over again and smile. God is indeed a loving and doting Parent, just as Jesus told us God is! All those fear-based rules whose violations clergymen insisted are “sins” so they can badger and shame us with them are for the Genuine God like a treasured infant’s spilling of a little milk on the carpet. Don’t believe any theologian’s ideas about God! Jesus knew the truth. He told us the truth, because He is the truth. And as He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

The only Godhead is infinitely powerful, infinitely loving, eternally perfect Spirit. The dead say that God never appears in human form. God never judges us. God’s only law is the law of love that Jesus reveals to us in the Gospels. This understanding of God is not new. It was given to us by Jesus when He walked the earth, so it is centuries older than Christianity itself.

This vision of God that comes straight from Jesus is the only acceptable understanding of God for any professed Christian to hold. The fact that nearly all who call themselves Christians accept lots of fear-based human ideas about God is a shame that one day more enlightened generations will puzzle over. Christians call the whole Bible the Inspired Word of God, when only limited parts of just four Biblical Books can claim that distinction!

For us to live as genuine followers of Jesus in the world being created by the genuine God will require that we pretty radically change the way that we relate to God. For example, we now know that:

  • We have no truly private space. When I first understood that our minds are part of the Mind of God, I kind of shrugged and imagined opening the top of my head and inviting God inside. Now I assume that my every thought is being shared directly with God. And wow, have I cleaned up my act!
  • There are no God-made laws or commandments. Even what Jesus called the “commandments” that we love God and also love others as we love ourselves are not commandments in the usual sense. Jesus used the term just in responding to a questioner who had used it. We are here to learn to love ever more completely, and love is something that not even God can command. God urges us toward love, but God demands nothing of us!
  • God does not want us to hold any compulsory Christian beliefs. Everything that Christians are told to believe that is not outlined in the ten points Jesus gave us above is just a human-made dogma. And even where those ten points are concerned, God wants us to question everything!
  • There is no such thing as sin. Jesus made a point of breaking religious laws – He plucked grain and performing healings on the Sabbath – but most of our decisions are so complex that it is hard to find a moral compass for some of them. For example, here is an amazing woman who broke every religious law there is in her effort to fight the Nazis. We’ll talk about this sort of dilemma next week.
  • Fear is indeed our only enemy. And the more fear-based a being is, the weaker it is, while the more love-based a being is, the more powerful it is. So we know now for sure that Our Daddy can beat every other daddy on the playground. We are perfectly safe and forever loved in Everlasting Arms. When I tell you on Seek Reality each week that you are the most beloved being in the universe, just see yourself tenderly held in those Arms and know an absolute freedom from fear that is new in all the history of humankind.

How are we to live in a world with no fear-based religions remaining, and with no gods but the genuine God that Jesus came to introduce to us? Let’s begin to talk about that next week….

 

Isaiah new things photo credit: Sapphire Dream Photography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/87199074@N05/8103388720″>Isaiah 43:18-19a</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Isaiah time photo credit: Sapphire Dream Photography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/87199074@N05/8135464892″>Isaiah 44:7</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Fruit of the spirit photo credit: Scripture As Art <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/126581270@N08/16313154151″>Fruit of the Spirit</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Psalm Lord loves photo credit: Sapphire Dream Photography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/87199074@N05/8134901984″>Psalm 33:5</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
First commandment photo credit: Scripture As Art <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/126581270@N08/15286560239″>Mark 12:30</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Love neighbor photo credit: Scripture As Art <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/126581270@N08/15450363276″>Mark 12:31</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lord is refuge photo credit: Lisa Hall-Wilson <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/83246984@N07/8663049059″>Psalm 9:9</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Righteousness photo credit: Scripture As Art <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/126581270@N08/15456786056″>Matthew 5:6</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Life Without Sin – Part One

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

When Jesus replaced all religious laws with God’s Law of Love, He abolished the notion of rules-based sin and created a whole new world in which right and wrong are based entirely on whether an act is loving or unloving. It is hard for us to get our minds around the magnitude of this change! And the consequences of it are such that it is going to take two weeks for us to start a conversation that is likely to continue beyond the rest of our lives. What we call divine laws are human-made. They have little to do with the genuine God. And doing away with them is the spiritual equivalent of being a sixteen-year-old at last entrusted with the car-keys. Humankind is growing up spiritually! And without those arbitrary laws that always have come between us and the Godhead, we can accept all the glorious opportunities and responsibilities that come with growing up. With those words from Jesus two thousand years ago, humankind was being ushered into the start of spiritual adulthood! That it has taken us two thousand years to accept God’s challenge that we at last grow up takes nothing from the sweetness of this moment. Today we will look at how we got to this place. Then next week we will start to consider how we might begin to accept God’s challenge.

From distant prehistoric times, humankind has dwelt in fear of a gigantic and highly adversarial Unknown. The result has been a lot of man-made superstitions and desperate beliefs in human-made gods that could let us put a name to our fears and give us a focus for rituals that might help us start to feel less helpless. Over time, what began as local gods and rituals were aggregated under regional gods, until eventually monotheism began to take root. One all-powerful god was easier to deal with than all those despotic demi-gods! The ancient Jewish tribes were among the first people to solidify their worship in one all-powerful god, so it makes sense that when the Godhead chose to elevate our understanding all over the world, it was to the Jews that Jesus came as God’s emissary.

There is no religion that really knows and can reveal to us the genuine Godhead. That fact is not a surprise to you. What may be something of a surprise will be learning that Jesus was not the first, nor is He the last divine being sent by God to start to spiritually elevate humankind! We know about Moses and the Buddha, and students of religion know that there have been many other prophets who brought their wisdom to primitive people, many of whom then soon built their own human-made religions around those bits of received divine wisdom. By now there are some 4,300 separate religions, the biggest of which have been broken into thousands of additional sects over time, so today Christianity alone boasts some 40,000 variations. Nearly all of our more than four thousand core religions were developed in isolation over eons, but in fact virtually every human religion is built around just one simple precept. If that precept was not given to us as many separate revelations over eons of time from the emissaries of a single Godhead, then how is it possible that more than four thousand religions have this one core teaching in common? Rabbi Hillel was a great Jewish sage who died in old age when Jesus was a teenager. He put that one ancient divine message this way: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.”

All religions are built around the Golden Rule! And when every religion is built upon the simple divine revelation that we should do to others what we want others to do to us, then how is it possible that no modern religion makes the Golden Rule its primary teaching? Where do all those other religious dogmas come from? And beyond that, how can we explain the fact that all significant religions share the same five traits?

All modern religions of any size share the following characteristics:

  • They include one or more gods or godlike beings in human form. Often it is the emissary from the Godhead who brought to local people the Golden Rule who is then depicted as either the god or a leading servant of the god. The pictures that illustrate this week’s post are all examples of these gods and holy beings that were created in human form by people bent on building their own religions.
  • They require that their adherents believe things for which there is no proof. Every religion has a set of dogmas that its followers are required to take on faith. The god is powerful; the god dwells in a mountain, or it requires certain feast and fasting days; the god wants the sacrifice of each firstborn child, or the god died and was revived, and so on.
  • They demand adherence to a set of laws that they claim are of divine provenance. Every modern religion includes a set of laws that were purportedly handed down by its god. The Ten Commandments listed in the Christian Old Testament are a set of supposedly divine laws that have been in place for adherents of the Abrahamic religions with only modest variations for at least the past three thousand years.
  • They make big promises. The notion that we can survive our deaths if we strictly observe a religion’s dogmas is perhaps the most common such promise, but there are others. Human-made gods take care of their own, provided that their devotees remain forever those gods’ obedient and powerless servants.
  • They are based in fear and guilt. Christianity is a great example! Jesus came to us from God with a love-based and fear-free set of teachings. But no one takes a religion seriously unless it can instill in us guilt and fear, so in order to form their new religion, Christianity’s founders added Original Sin, a fiery hell, and the Lord’s crucifixion for our sins to save us from the judgment of a wrathful god. Christianity is fear and guilt on steroids.

It is striking that all modern religions share all (or nearly all) of the above five traits! There must be reasons why this is true, and indeed there are some excellent reasons. All these traits directly address central human needs or characteristics. Briefly:

  • Free will is a core element of the human condition. The spiritual growth that we all enter our lives on earth to seek requires that we expose ourselves to negativity so we can choose against it. The fact that free will is an essential part of being human means that we must also be able to choose not to listen to God’s emissaries; and if we choose against God, then neither God nor God’s minions will attempt to override us. They will just, with endless patience and over and over again, share with us divine wisdom that is suited to our stage of spiritual development. Which is why so many divine emissaries have been needed!
  • Every person on earth is vibrating at a relatively low level. We have talked endlessly about the fact that consciousness is all that objectively exists, and that we come to earth to grow spiritually; and until we reach the upper part of what we call the afterlife levels, we are unable to raise our consciousness vibrations unless we are exposed to the sort of deep negativity that we can find on earth.
  • Human beings strive to organize information and minimize unknowns. We have always organized our understandings as best we could, and we have made educated guesses at the rest. Every god that human beings ever have believed in and worshiped has been a product of these educated guesses.
  • Voluntary human associations are unstable. People are stubbornly independent! The only human associations that are even remotely stable are those – like governments – which instill in us a fear of disobeying their leaders. No religion that doesn’t instill fear in its followers ever lasts for very long.
  • We are born with an eager craving to reunite with the Godhead. There is indeed one genuine God! Our minds are all inextricably part of that one infinitely powerful and infinitely creative force which continuously manifests this universe, so it is little wonder that an eventual reunion with God is a human need that we crave even more than we crave food and drink. The fact that no religion is capable of delivering reunion with the true Godhead because all of them are based in false doctrines is not the fault of the many divine messengers who over the eons have tried to enlighten us.

So now it is not much of a stretch for us to draw the following conclusions:

  • Every divine emissary in human history has come to us from the same Godhead.
  • Nearly all of them have given us some version of the same message.
  • There is therefore just one human religion that has nearly infinite cultural variations.
  • There being only one Godhead and one culturally varied religion, when Jesus came to replace the old notions of sin with God’s perfect Law of Love, He did that for every devotee of every religion upon the face of the earth.

Jesus came from the Source to lead all of humankind to the young-adult stage of our spiritual development. He came to hand us the keys to our lives! We are no longer to be forced by fear of divine retribution to obey a set of laws, as grade-school children are required to obey rules until they grow enough to be able to accept responsibility for their own actions.

To be frank, we don’t obey religious laws anyway. Read  the Ten Commandments, for example. We see them as just suggestions, don’t we? All of us would kill to protect those we love, we honor our parents to the extent they are honorable, few of us adequately mark the Sabbath, and there is no human being who breathes who has never felt the pangs of jealousy. The Ten Commandments are just suggestions! And some of them are trivial ones. But we are told the Ten Commandments are laws from God, so their very existence instills in us both guilt and a smug self-satisfaction. Guilt if we violate maybe three or four commandments, but a “good enough” passing-grade satisfaction if we can minimally observe the other six or seven!

We must leave those old divine laws behind if we are ever to learn about divine love. Human-made rules and God’s infinite love are utterly incompatible. But with all rules gone, we find ourselves beginning to expand in powerful ways. We start to glimpse glorious new beginnings. It is only when we remove the human-made laws that long have come between us and God that we can truly meet and begin to know and love the genuine Godhead.

 

Dead Jesus statue photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 46 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/44105688010″>Colorful Pieta</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Egyptian gods photo credit: ER’s Eyes – Thanks for the 20 million views! <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/41111966@N04/45573493902″>The Old Gods, Alabaster Store, West Bank, Luxor, Egypt.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Buddha photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/49325039632″>Buddha image at the Pavilion of the Enlightened in Muang Boran (Ancient City) in Samut Phrakan, Thailand</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Thai gods photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/49284244036″>Sculpture of Phra Sukra in the Garden of the Gods in Muang Boran in Samut Phrakan, Thailand</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Hindu gods photo credit: jay galvin <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/36957368@N00/48538681597″>Ganesha and Lakshmi – Hindu</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Neptune at sunset photo credit: virtualwayfarer <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/32368927@N02/31010151725″>Neptune at Sunset</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cambodian gods photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/44258795074″>Statues of Gods lining the causeway entering the ancient city of Angkor Thom near Siem Reap, Cambodia</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Greek gods at war photo credit: torbakhopper <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/32029534@N00/24445037928″>gods in color @ the legion of honor, scott richard</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Empowering the Greatest Commandment

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Christianity is not based in the teachings of Jesus, and in fact much of modern Christianity is antithetical to the teachings of Jesus. It will therefore be impossible for us to tinker around the edge of Christianity, soften it here and firm it up there, perhaps remove some later accretions, and thereby transform it into the spiritual movement Jesus came to earth to begin. If we really intend to follow Jesus, our only option is to rescue the Lord and His Word from the false religion that has prevented His teachings from uplifting the world, and let that religion just fade away.

The way Christianity treats the Son of God like nothing more than a prop is appalling. When the Catholic church has had continuous custody of the Gospels for two thousand years, when the first Biblical translation into English dates back to the sixteenth century, and when to date the Bible has been translated into 698 different languages, how is it possible that literally no prominent modern Christian denomination gives the Lord’s teachings as they are set forth in the canonical Gospels anything more than lip-service?

We have talked here repeatedly about the differences between the Gospels and Christianity. We have demonstrated Christianity’s troubling history, shown how individual Christian teachings are bogus, and also spent time carefully reading the Gospels in modern English as we strive to ever better understand the genuine meaning and message of Jesus. But it occurs to me now that in giving you a constant fire hose of information, I really am not serving you well. I realized during the Christmas season that what you need in order for you to see how hopeless it is for us to try to fix modern-day Christianity is the clarity of pinning down the anti-Jesus teaching that is Christianity’s core message.

Jesus tells us in the Gospels that in coming to us two thousand years ago He had at least five goals in mind:

  • He Came to Abolish Our Need for Religions
  • He Came to Teach Us to be Seekers
  • He Came to Teach Us How to Relate to God on Our Own
  • He Came to Teach us How to Grow Spiritually
  • He Came to Bring the Kingdom of God on Earth

And Jesus had a sixth purpose, too, which seems more subtle to readers of the Gospels because as they are translated into modern English this core purpose is never bluntly stated. But this purpose is central to all the others! Unless we include it, we make our actually following the teachings of Jesus much more difficult:

* Jesus Came to Give Us a New Definition of Right and Wrong

To put it plainly, Jesus came to abolish the very notion of “sin.” The dictionary definition of sin is “an act of transgression against divine law,” which makes the word culturally malleable, doesn’t it? What is against divine law in one culture might be divinely mandated in another. But in fact, Jesus intended to do away with all divinely mandated rules. He outmoded the concept of sin altogether! And I think now that the fact that Christianity is based in the notion that we are all sinful is the central reason why the religion is so irredeemably flawed.

Christianity is based in the Old Testament; in the teachings of Paul; in the needs of the early Roman church-builders; and in the random tweaks of lesser church leaders. And in nearly all of the more than forty thousand versions of Christianity now extant, the notion that Jesus came to die for our sins is central! I spent fifty years of my life first as an ardent Protestant, then after my marriage as an ardent Catholic. Christianity was even my college major, so I do indeed know the religion. And this beautiful Christmas carol that once upon a time I loved is Christianity at its core:

I wonder as I wander out under the sky
How Jesus my Saviour did come for to die
For poor ornry people like you and like I.
I wonder as I wander out under the sky.

“I Wonder as I Wander” was written in the 1930s, based on fragments of an Appalachian folk song. These words express the guilt and shame that all of us are meant to feel because we are so sinful that a sinless Jesus had to suffer the horrible death we all deserve.

But Jesus emphatically did not “come for to die”! If that had been His purpose, He would never have needed to speak a word, and in fact His spending those three-plus years teaching would have delayed and detracted from His holy purpose. We have no right to impose our own interpretations on the Lord’s work, nor to take him at anything less than His Word! And He plainly tells us that He came to us as the kind of disrupter who will pluck grain on the Sabbath (MT 12:1-5), will dine with undesirables (MT 9:9-15), will refuse to punish sinners (JN 8:3-11), and will physically attack people for going about their lawful business (JN 2:13-16). In fact, He came to transform everything! He had to do it cleverly, since in His day speaking against the prevailing religion was a capital crime; and when you realize that, you read the Gospels with a fresh sense of admiration. Sometimes you and I have to read between His careful lines a bit, but when we do that His meaning is plain. Often, He waited until He could answer somebody’s apt question so the Temple guards who were always listening wouldn’t hear Him introducing something radical just on His own initiative. Then when He got the right question, He hit it out of the park!

One day someone asked Jesus what was the greatest commandment, and He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Those Ten Commandments are religious laws. They are proscriptions against sins, so if His purpose is to do away with the concept of sin He will have to do away with all those commandments. Now, let’s watch Him do it! When He was asked what was the greatest Commandment, instead of naming any of the Ten, Jesus gave his listeners God’s new Law of Love. He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (MT 22:37-39). Since love is not even mentioned in the Ten Commandments, this answer was far more radical than it seems to us now! He was giving us two new commandments and placing them above the Ten Commandments that God had given to Moses long before. He could have stopped right there, and the fact that He didn’t stop there should be a topic for sermons and homilies in every church on earth. His next words were, “On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:40). “The Law and the Prophets” was what the Jews of His day called our Old Testament. The whole concept of sin is grounded in religious laws, and in summing up the Old Testament this way, Jesus was discarding every Jewish law and replacing them all with God’s Law of Love. He was abolishing sin, by definition! And He confirmed that His abandonment of sin-based religious laws was deliberate when He also said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (MT 5:17). He was indeed fulfilling all prophesy, and thereby beginning our whole new relationship with God. He was introducing God’s reign on earth as only perfect eternal love!

We know now that all that exists is consciousness, and that it exists in a range of vibrations from fear at the lowest to love at the highest. So we can understand now why it was so important to Jesus that He do away with fear-based religious laws when He brought us God’s new Law of Love, since if the notion of sin remains as a burden on humanity then our learning to love and thereby raising the consciousness vibration of this planet becomes a great deal harder. He had to abolish the notion that any act can be sinful on its face. From the day that Jesus first spoke those words, we must not consider any act to be arbitrarily divinely proscribed! From then on, the only question is whether you are doing whatever you are doing for some selfish personal reason, or whether you do it purely and entirely out of love.

It is important to add that God didn’t change! What Jesus was doing was just removing from the religion of the world’s first true monotheists all the fear-based human corruptions that had allowed for easier control of the people. Love hadn’t been much emphasized before, although we find it throughout the Law and the Prophets; and when Jesus removes the human-caused fear, then that love shines even where it is not called love. God didn’t change by a single jot. It was people’s understanding of God that Jesus came to change.

For example, Micah of Moresheth was an early Hebrew prophet, a contemporary of the great Isaiah. He spoke in particular against religiosity and the notion that God wants our sacrifices, and a full eight centuries before the birth of Jesus Micah previewed the Lord’s whole Gospel message. 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)

What God asked of us three thousand years ago is just what God still asks today! For a long time I felt an urgency about separating Jesus from Christianity, fretting that as the religion declines we might mistakenly throw out the Baby with the bathwater. But with every day that you and I study and proclaim the Lord’s Gospel teachings, we further lessen that risk. Jesus still calls us to follow Him, and every day more and more of us are choosing to leave Christianity behind so we can follow the Lord. And as we do that, He tells us we are making Him glad! He says, “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)

Learning to live without a concept of sin is a much bigger challenge than it might seem. If we truly mean to follow Jesus, then we must enter a whole new world! Let’s begin to explore that world next week….

 

Stained glass Adam & Eve photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/42657206832″>Blame Game</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Stained glass Annunciation photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/47411429472″>Detroit Annunciation</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Stained glass spiral photo credit: Nine is the Magic Number <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/90434877@N00/27066001550″>Detail</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Moses photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/6013972010″>Moses and the Law</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Wrecked church organ photo credit: Thomas James Caldwell <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/81643710@N00/31736017368″>King of Instruments</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Lord enthroned photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/2438544154″>Lord enthroned…</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Life is Consciousness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The worst thing about the mainstream scientific gatekeepers’ insistence that all scientific inquiry must be based in materialism is the fact that since even matter is not solid, such a dogma makes it impossible for scientists to seek real answers to our most important questions. These central questions will vary depending on the viewpoint of the one asking them, but for most of us they seem to come down to three, in ascending order of sophistication:

  • Who and what are we? The only answer from a materialist-science perspective is that we are slabs of meat, but just the fact that we have the capacity to ask the question makes that answer insufficient. Our defining characteristic is our conscious awareness, and unless we can open-mindedly study that, we really have no reliable way to learn very much about ourselves. So this question remains scientifically wide open.
  • How is it that we and this universe exist? Scientists have been hard at work seeking a matter-based answer to this question, and the Collective has created an answer for them to find that is generally called the Big Bang. But since that answer is matter-based, it begs the question of what came before it. Nothing rooted in matter and time can ever be an ultimate answer, so this question also must be seen as still open.
  • How did life begin? Akin to the question of how reality exists is the question of how life exists. What caused those first living cells to arise from some primordial soup? Traditional scientists doing what is called Origin of Life research have generated ideas about how life might have begun, but so far they have made little progress. And now materialist scientists have some aggressive rivals in this field! By far the best Origin of Life research is being done by more open-minded scientists who are focusing on what is called intelligent design, and they are pretty well demonstrating that life could not have arisen spontaneously.

It has of late become obvious that the vaunted scientific method is inadequate if we ever hope to come to thoroughly understand anything. It was established in simpler days now more than a century into the past, and a lot has changed since then! For example:

  • Materialism is passé. To keep scientific research free from a religious taint, the university departments and the journal editors long have insisted that it must be based in materialism. This crippling restriction remains in place long after physicists have come to understand that even matter itself is not solid. And in this highly secular age, there is no longer any risk of religious interference, so materialism is only a sorry relic that gravely hampers scientific progress while it no longer serves any useful purpose.
  • The old forms of scientific research are too limiting. Peer-reviewed studies and replicable experiments are the core of traditional mainstream science, and both vaunted protocols are now being seen to be inadequate and deeply flawed.
  • Mathematics-based conclusions can be flat wrong. Because some aspects of reality can be studied mathematically, scientists now rely on math a lot more than they should. As a result, some primary scientific principles likely are based in faulty math-based assumptions.
  • The standard breakdown among scientific fields is clumsy and archaic. Organizing the study of all that exists into fields and sub-fields might once have made sense, but now we are coming to see that all of reality is deeply interconnected. Studying it from fragmented points of view risks our missing the deepest connections and thereby obscuring the greater picture.

Materialist scientists’ inability to even begin to understand consciousness is a core indicator of just how inadequate the scientific method really is. Scientists are reduced to trying to figure out how consciousness might arise in the brain, which we have joked is the equivalent of their studying an old tube radio to find the source of Frank Sinatra’s voice. Researchers not constrained by the scientific method long ago determined that Max Planck was right, that consciousness is a form of energy and it has to predate matter. Therefore it cannot be created or destroyed! And since it cannot be the product of matter, it cannot originate in our brains. No matter how much more time and money scientists waste in searching for a source of consciousness in the brain, their failure is already assured.

Once we have determined the primacy of consciousness and its fundamental energy-like nature, we then can go on to investigate the three main questions that were asked above. Enlightened researchers are doing that, and we know now, or we strongly surmise, that these are good preliminary answers to humankind’s three core questions:

  • Who and what are we? Our minds are deeply interconnected aspects of the one Mind that manifests this universe. Our minds are indestructible and eternal, so we never began and we never will end.
  • How is it that we and this universe exist? The one universal Mind of which each of our minds is an integral part continuously manifests all that we think of as real. Creation wasn’t “once and done,” but rather it happens continuously. So the past is as malleable as is the future. In reality, there is only Now.
  • How did life begin? Just as the universe is an aspect of consciousness and it exists outside of time, so also life is an aspect of consciousness. It also exists outside of time. Each instant of reality’s existence is Now, and in that Now life had no beginning and life can have no end.

I have hesitated to discuss the Origin of Life question, not because we don’t know what the answer is but because the implications of that answer are boggling. We are coming to suspect that both awareness and life are inherent attributes of consciousness itself. And since consciousness is the base creative force, it may be that not only is everything conscious, but also everything may be alive. Please follow this through with me!

  • We may not understand consciousness, but we do know what it is. No matter how mainstream scientists insist that our minds must come from and die with our brains, it is obvious to each of us that conscious awareness is quite a bit more than just an evolutionary afterthought.  And we experience consciousness itself as being alive! If I were to tell you that life is in fact a key attribute of consciousness, I doubt that would surprise you at all.
  • Consciousness is the base creative force that continuously manifests all that exists. I have linked above to some of the earlier posts where we have examined the evidence for this proposition from so many different angles that it has come to seem self-evident.
  • So everything that exists is an aspect of the very consciousness that you and I experience as living awareness. Every rock, every star, every grain of sand is created by and composed of what we experience as living consciousness.

Does this mean that everything is alive and aware? I don’t think so. I am coming to surmise that the key universal attributes of life and awareness exist in all things as core aspects of the consciousness that manifests them, but each attribute is there in an active gradation from what we might call highly alive and aware right down to oblivious and inert. Further thoughts:

  • Animals are alive and aware. That they are alive is self-evident, and anyone who ever has been close to a companion animal has come to suspect the animal is more mentally sophisticated than scientists will allow. Look into the eyes of your dog or cat and have a conversation. My horse, Beau, was one of the finest people I have ever known.
  • Plants are alive, and they may be aware. We know that plants are alive, and apparently they are also aware in a way that simply differs from our own awareness. The Secret Life of Plants came out in 1973. I read it then, and forever after I have winced whenever I had to cut a raw fruit or vegetable. And we know now that trees don’t only communicate with one another, but they care for and  support one another, even across species. It is hard not to conclude from the evidence that trees even actively love one another.
  • Minerals may be to some extent alive and/or aware. Early in my afterlife research I read somewhere about a planet where we might choose to incarnate, and there the life was silica-based. You would incarnate as an aware rock, and everything would seem normal to you but to those whose post-death touring included visiting that planet it would all seem to be inert because the life there moved so-o-o slo-o-oly. When I once mentioned this factoid to a scientist, he said, “Interesting. Silica is an element, like carbon, that could be a basis for life.”
  • Whole planets may be alive and/or aware. There is building evidence that our planet on a macro-level operates something like a living thing.

An afterlife researcher trained as a lawyer has no business trying to conduct scientific research! But you can see from just what has been said above that until mainstream scientists can escape their straightjacket of arbitrary dogmas and ideas, all of us are going to have to pitch in and try to do the work that they won’t do. As the great polymath Nikola Tesla said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”

 

Hands photo credit: verchmarco <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/160866001@N07/48674769562″>Big man’s hand and little hand newborn (Flip 2019)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
New family photo credit: photo_grafitti <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/157274368@N08/36919251432″>KAT, ABEL III & ABEL IIII</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Sand play photo credit: Denish C <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/46886232@N07/48428055272″>Joy! (IMG_1124b)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Four months photo credit: whateyesee13 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/71309382@N00/47002060484″>Happy boy</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Asian baby photo credit: Saran Chamling <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7318474@N08/3160331460″>omi</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Happy children photo credit: www.librolasemilla.com <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/156582083@N07/49119270933″>7 Secrets from the Divorce Whisperer by Marta J. Papa, J.D.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Gold, Frankincense, and Myrrh

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

For to us a child is born, to us a son is given; and the government will be upon his shoulder, and his name is called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace” (Isaiah 9:6).

Six or seven years ago I started to loathe Christmas. When I was a child it was a magical time, with all the cousins on their best behavior and my father and uncle in the same room together for an entire day without much bickering. Like you, I revel in memories that I took for granted at the time, including my grandmother baking pies and making dinner in a black-iron range that her sons would tend as she cooked. A wood-fired kitchen stove in the fifties! Other children’s grannies were cooking by then on electric stoves in pink or turquoise, but never since those days has there been a more perfect turkey or a better apple pie. And then, of course, I reared my own children and we made our own Christmas memories; and when I tell my grandchildren now about their parents’ childhood Christmases, all of it feels as ancient to me as does my grandmother’s wood-fired range. But so the generations turn!

My sudden aversion to all things Christmas astonished me at first, when for so many years the day had made me happy. A lot of glitter for a few weeks of time, the hectic pressure to buy and spend, the cards, the foods, and the decorating of an evergreen that would spend our Christmas season dying in the living room. One seemingly random year was the final year when I did it all and enjoyed it; but then as the following December approached, I realized I simply couldn’t do it again.

For awhile I thought my Christmas revulsion was the product of my mother’s recent death, or perhaps it was a reaction to the fact that our grandchildren were outgrowing the toy orgies that had so delighted us. It might even have sprung from the sense of futility I long had felt about the fact that you no sooner got that tree set up than it was time to strip its corpse. Even shopping had begun to seem pointless, since our growing grandchildren were happier now if we just gave them money. For years I felt alone in my dread of Christmas, but I have lately come to suspect that this feeling is becoming almost mainstream.

If you are starry-eyed about being deep in the wonders of the Christmas season, then please accept from me a loving hug and a cheery “Merry Christmas!” But if much of the heart and purpose seems to have left your Christmases, too, then let us reason together about why this has happened so we can think about what might come next.

Why are so many Americans of late beginning to dread the Christmas season? I can see two main reasons:

  • As the Christian religion declines, its signal celebration comes to feel less meaningful. When I was small, the Catholic children went to midnight Mass on Christmas Eve while the Protestants went to their candlelight service, and it was with this grounding that all of us went to bed feeling cleansed and holy and with minds well primed to be joyous as we rose to open our gifts the next morning. Christmas was about the Greatest Gift, and it was magical! But as Christianity fades, we are left with a hollowed-out orgy of obligatory foods and gifts that feels like just a sad attempt to recapture a little of what we have lost.
  • Christmas has become part of a universal winter celebration called “The Holidays.” It is no longer especially linked to Christianity or to the Jesus of the Gospels, so now what really is the point of it?

Without an uplifting spiritual core, an old-style Christmas is too much effort. It seems to have become over the past few decades little more than a food-and-merchandise binge that leads to a crashing emotional letdown. So for the past six years I have not done Christmas. No decorations. No carols. No tree, and only gifts that could fit in envelopes. My husband and I still cooked the feast, but we served it at my daughter’s house so we even avoided any Christmas mess! I had thought I was well over Christmas, but I have just begun to realize that these past few years may have been a cleansing. I may be growing now toward something new.

My astonishing sense of Christmas uplift began only a week ago, with “fall on your knees” singing in my mind. “O Holy Night” had been my favorite carol, but of course I hadn’t heard it in years! So when it became my sudden earworm, I had to look up the actual words:

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;
Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.
A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;
Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born.
O night, O holy night, O night divine.

“O Holy Night” was composed in French in 1841 and translated into English in 1855. Just read those lyrics! Each time I read them I am freshly stunned by the momentousness of what we should be celebrating. Two thousand years ago God chose to be born as a human being so He could bring us eternal truths to uplift and transform humankind. Jesus tells us in the Gospels what He came to do. And while the Christian religion by and large ignores what the Lord says in the Gospels, “O Holy Night” puts His Gospel words front and center as the reason for the season:

O holy night, the stars are brightly shining,
It is the night of the dear Saviour’s birth;

Jesus is indeed our Saviour! But what this Christmas carol makes clear is that He didn’t come to save us from God’s wrath. What He came to save us from was hopeless ignorance. Read on…

Long lay the world in sin and error pining,
‘Till he appeared and the soul felt its worth.

His came to free us from erroneous religious nonsense, and from the very notion of sin. His teachings help us to grow away from fear and toward love, and thereby we begin to know our true worth!

A thrill of hope the weary world rejoices,
For yonder breaks a new and glorious morn;

“Yonder breaks a new and glorious morn!” A new beginning for humankind that is based in awareness of our own divinity is born for us at Christmas in the Son of the living God.

Fall on your knees, Oh hear the angel voices!
O night divine! O night when Christ was born.

For us to fall on our knees in wonder as God’s angels above us sing for joy is our only possible response to the heavenly import of that night. Humanity had been steeped for all its history in grievous notions of sin and shame and in the sad weariness of daily confronting our own ultimate worthlessness. And then God came to earth in the same way that all the rest of us come to earth, and He taught us that our minds are forever one with the infinite Mind of God.

All these musings over the past week have sent me back to read the Gospel story of the Lord’s birth, which is given to us in Matthew and Luke as the well-known tale of the shepherds to whom an angel revealed the birth of Jesus (LK 2:8-14), and the story of wise men who arrived in Jerusalem in search of the newborn “king of the Jews.” The star that announced the birth of that king “went ahead of them until it came and stopped over the place where the child was…  After they went into the house and saw the child with his mother Mary, they fell down and worshipped him. Then they opened their treasure sacks and offered him gifts of gold, frankincense, and myrrh” (MT 2:9-11).

In every modern Bible translation, the wise men are said to give the infant Jesus the same three gifts, and that fact soon started me wondering whether the gifts themselves might have some meaning. It turns out that both frankincense and myrrh are the dried sap or resin of specific trees, and both can be used in making incense and perfume. Both also have strong medicinal properties. So just as gold symbolizes wealth, so frankincense and myrrh symbolize beauty and healing. The gifts of the Magi are in celebration of the dawning awareness of God’s perfect love that was born to us in that holy child. Those gifts are the prosperity of spiritual unity and the healing sweetness of spiritual growth that will culminate in the eventual arrival of the kingdom of God on earth.

When we look again at the words of the Prophet Isaiah foretelling the birth of Jesus almost a millennium before the event, we find that the words that follow them are, “Of the growth of his government and peace there will be no end. He will rule over his kingdom, sitting on the throne of David, to establish it and to uphold it with justice and righteousness from this time onward and forevermore” (Isaiah 9:7).

It’s an ancient perspective on what Jesus called the arrival of the kingdom of God on earth, and as we abandon the false dogmas of Christianity and we begin to closely follow the Gospel teachings, we start to fulfill that ancient promise. Christmas was never about gifts and glitter! Instead, the source of all human joy is the fact that God was born on earth to teach us to choose love over fear so we could claim at last our divine birthright. We are only infinite, perfect love! And three thousand years after the Prophet Isaiah foretold God’s arrival on earth, we begin at last to understand what that means. To quote Paul, “When I was a child, I spoke like a child, thought like a child, and reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up my childish ways. Now we see only an indistinct image in a mirror, but then we will be face to face. Now what I know is incomplete, but then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known” (1 Cor 13:11-12).

As we ever more closely follow Jesus, and we ever more perfectly embody God’s love, we will begin to celebrate that holy night without a need to add glitter and gifts to make it feel more special. I am suspecting now that Christmas isn’t over. Instead, it seems to be just beginning.

 

Poinsettia heart photo credit: Bennilover <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75885098@N05/49213443636″>Poinsettia Heart</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Christmas gold photo credit: Bennilover <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75885098@N05/49210198733″>Silver and Gold</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tree with gifts photo credit: Bennilover <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75885098@N05/37868004735″>Happy December!</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Stained glass angel photo credit: Lawrence OP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/35409814@N00/48831005952″>Guardian Angel</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Blue jay and cardinals photo credit: COLORED PENCIL magazine <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/61446950@N06/23420261844″>January 2016 Art Challenge Photo “Birds of a Feather”</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
2020 Cookies photo credit: shixart1985 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/156445661@N02/49138856926″>2020 cookie Christmas decorations.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Evidential Mediumship

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

One question that is often asked is whether there are any good mental mediums. People ask the question in various ways, inquiring about honesty or native talent, but what they really want to know is whether we know of a medium who can clearly demonstrate to them that a loved one has survived. Having had test-readings with dozens of mediums and been disappointed almost every time, I have concluded that most professional mediums are honest, and many have considerable talent; but few develop their abilities to the point where it is impossible to deny that they are talking with our own dead loved ones. That certainty is what we crave! We don’t want, “Your grandmother is here. She says you should eat your vegetables.” Instead, what we hunger for is something like, “Your grandmother is here. She wonders if you remember the day when you let Grampa’s goat into her henhouse and it chased the chickens and upset them so much they didn’t lay for a week.” Now, you might remember that ancient day when you were only six, or you might not. But this message is specific and detailed, and it is the sort of intimate and trivial thing that no amount of research could find. So if it clicks with you, it will transform your life! Never again will you be able to believe that dear ol’ Granny is not alive somewhere.

A good evidential mediumship reading is the Biblical pearl of great price (MT 13:45-46). Every working medium knows it! So, why is it that so few mediums will deliver what everyone is desperate to hear? There seem to be a number of reasons:

  • Mental mediums are mind-reading with dead people. Pause for a moment and let that sink in! Since all human minds of both the living and the dead are part of the one eternal Mind that continuously manifests reality, it should be as easy to communicate by mind with the dead as it is with the living. But that doesn’t make it a walk in the park!
  • Mediums rely heavily on the help of their guides. Nearly all mediums’ guides have ceased to incarnate, so they must be at least somewhat advanced; but still, they might not know as much as you and I would wish they knew about how to help our loved ones think about and then produce the deeply personal and very specific bits of evidence that we all crave to hear.
  • People who are spiritually sensitive can be easily attacked by negative entities. Good mediums are at special risk, so most will practice rituals. Some might burn sage, recite mantras or incantations, and surround themselves and the person being read with “a white light” or “a bubble of protection.” But rituals and chants are not enough, when what is needed is an adamant refusal to have any contact with dark entities. I know of a talented medium who began to see negative entities around her, and she seemed to think of them the way you might think of wild animals you had managed to tame. The next thing I heard was that her personality had been dramatically transformed overnight: now she was sharp, enraged, irrational, and impervious to anyone’s reason. And since these fear-based demons partially supplanted the work of her love-based guides, her mediumship abilities declined.
  • Maintaining mediumistic skills in top form requires dedication. Being a genuine medium is more physically and emotionally draining than most of us realize! The best mediums have to be obsessive about everything, from what they eat and how they exercise through how they maintain themselves spiritually, how they keep negative beings away, and when and how often they feel able to do readings. Some are so stressed by the pressure to perform for individual clients that they drift toward doing mostly group readings.
  • Even very good mediums will have “off” days. This is the opposite of an exact science! What a medium should say if she isn’t getting much information is something like, “The spirits aren’t cooperating. My guides and I sometimes have a bad day. Would you like me to refund your fee, or shall we just reschedule?” But mediums also need to eat, so we seldom hear of one of them giving a refund when a reading has not gone well. Some will even try to convince us that what we are hearing is evidential, and the fact that it isn’t clicking with us is our own fault. One medium who offered me a free reading in hopes that I would recommend her to others described some people and events of which I had no memory. When I told her I didn’t have a brother who died in Vietnam (nor did I have any brothers at all), she told me hotly it was someone I thought of as a brother. Maybe it was a cousin. “Keep listening to the recording of the reading and it will all come back.”
  • Arranging for key words and phrases with the dying won’t work. I don’t know of a single instance where a dead person remembered the desired key phrase and delivered it through a medium. One early researcher is recorded as having brought up the fact there was something he was supposed to remember, but now he couldn’t retrieve it. The leading expert on early-twentieth-century mediumship, the venerable Michael Tymn, gives us a good explanation for this problem that I will quote below, but we should note that other kinds of spiritual testing also routinely come up empty. Some operating rooms have signs that can be read only from ceiling-height in order to test whether people who claim to have left their bodies actually have done so; and to my knowledge, that has never worked, either. Spirits flat refuse to be tested! You can almost see a gang of them sitting around some celestial bar drinking nectar and sharing a laugh about all these silly earthlings who keep trying to catch them out.
  • The problem might be you. Twenty years ago I spent thousands of dollars having readings with well-recommended mediums. All those readings were disappointing, and the most famous and expensive medium I tested was awful! It has taken me most of the intervening two decades to realize that for someone as skeptical about mediums as I am to have a reading or two every week over months of time is a guaranteed way to get nothing. The medium who did best was the one who read me first, perhaps primarily because a lot of my dead loved ones were happy to show up; but after the first few months, it was only my mother-in-law and brother-in-law, both recently dead, who loyally continued to answer the call. Don’t make my mistake! To hire a medium while assuming she will be a dud is a sure way to make your most pessimistic views into self-fulfilling prophesies.

I enjoy reading Michael Tymn’s blog posts, and I urge you to read them too! Michael is the greatest living expert on the heyday of physical mediumship, now more than a century into the past, and the author of some terrific books, including his essential The Afterlife Revealed: What Happens After We Die. Two other enjoyable must-reads from Michael Tymn are Resurrecting Leonora Piper: How Science Discovered the Afterlife, and Dead Men Talking: Afterlife Communication from World War I. He recently quoted what Sir William Barrett (who coined the term “deathbed visions”) told his wife through a medium about one big reason why the dead have so much difficulty in communicating through mediums.

Sir William told his wife that he had needed to learn how to slow down his vibration in order to communicate. He said, “Sometimes I lose my memory of things from coming here (he means closer to the earth’s vibration). I know in my own state, but not here. In dreams you do not know everything, you only get parts in a dream. A sitting is similar; when I go back to the spirit world after a sitting like this I know I have not got everything through that I wanted to say. That is due to my mind separating again.”

Sir William told his wife a century ago something that now is commonly known. When we are in an earth-body, our subconscious mind is separated from our conscious mind. As you and I know from abundant evidence, when we transition back home, our two minds come together again and make one complete mind that knows and remembers everything. So apparently Sir William is telling his wife that when we lower our mind’s vibration and bring ourselves back into the physical sphere so we can communicate, our conscious and subconscious minds will again naturally separate just as they separate when we first enter an earth-body. So we immediately forget a great deal, and we can’t recall it again until we leave the earth’s influence and the two parts of our minds rejoin. (This is fascinating!)

When Lady Barrett asked Sir William to elaborate further, his interesting explanation was that we have a fourth-dimensional self that cannot make itself exactly match our third-dimensional self. He said, “It’s like measuring a third dimension by its square feet instead of by its cubic feet, and there is no doubt about it I have left something of myself outside which rejoins me directly I put myself into the condition in which I readjust myself.” He told her at a later sitting that when he was in his own sphere he would remember a name, but when he rejoined her through a medium it would slip his mind. “The easiest things to lay hold of are what we may call ideas. A detached word, a proper name, has no link with a train of thought except in a detached sense; that is far more difficult than any other feat of memory or association of ideas. If you go to a medium that is new to us, I can make myself known by giving you through that medium an impression of my character and personality, my work on earth, and so forth. Those can all be suggested by thought impressions, ideas; but if I want to say, ‘I am Will,’ I find that is much more difficult than giving you a long, comprehensive study of my personality.”

The dead are used to communicating with one another by thought, so apparently ideas are easier for them to share than are specific words! But fortunately, a good evidential medium doesn’t need many words to give you the certainty that those you have loved in life have survived. Five years ago, a medium described a scene to me in which two important things occurred:

  • My mother pointed at her eyebrow. The medium said, “Why is she pointing to her eyebrow? Oh. She says she doesn’t have to paint them on anymore.” My mother had virtually no eyebrow hairs, which fact was a private bane to her that she covered up by painting big eyebrows onto her face every day. Her assuring me that she didn’t need to do that now was my mother’s loving confirmation that after I had spent my whole early life chatting with her while I watched her go through her morning ritual, she knew that this particular bit would be highly evidential for me. It was the most significant post-death communication from a loved one I have ever received.
  • My grandmother displayed an oyster shell with both hands. I had no idea what that was about! She was a simple farm wife; I was sure she had never even seen an oyster. When I said she couldn’t possibly be holding an oyster shell, the medium said, “But that’s what it is. And she insists it’s important! Maybe it will come to you later?” And so it did. Within a few days it occurred to me that my mother’s maiden name was “Ostergaard.” As Sir William tells us above, specific names are hard for beings in spirit to convey! And how else could my mother’s mother have given me some approximation of that name?

Two brilliantly evidential details had been coaxed from my loved ones by that medium’s guides. Few words were needed, and both communications involved such odd and obscure facts that it is hard to see how any medium could have independently discovered them. If I had not already known that human life is eternal, these two ideal bits of evidential mediumship would have sealed the deal for me forevermore!

 

Oysters with pearls photo credit: Max Garçia <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/62474890@N04/18739862869″>Oysters with pearl</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Pearls photo credit: elluckyphoto <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/65186576@N07/23501502621″>Artificial pearls</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Operating room photo credit: H.KoPP <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/39715972@N00/398025084″>Butchers workbench</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Oyster shell photo credit: Upupa4me <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/40650891@N02/8672972177″>white ~ 22 oyster shell</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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