Author: Roberta Grimes

Whither Christians Now?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Christ, the royal Master, Leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, See his banners go!

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
At the sign of triumph Satan’s host doth flee;
On, then, Christian soldiers, On to victory.

Hell’s foundations quiver At the shout of praise;
Brothers, lift your voices, Loud your anthems raise.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

Last week we considered the entire history of Christianity to date, trying to summarize two thousand complex and too often bloody and venal years in a few quick paragraphs. Of course, my own problems with Christianity began when I was eight years old, and I was awakened at what I think was four in the morning by a brilliant flash of light and then the comforting voice of my spirit guide. Because of that light and that voice, I began so young to disdain kiddie Sunday School, and instead I was glad to attend grownup church. I began to read the Bible repeatedly from cover to cover when I was eleven, and my college major had to be early Christian history. I was eager back then to learn so much more! And my college advisor, Miss Corwin, took me to a much deeper personal understanding and love for Jesus than I ever had found even in gownup church, together with a resentment of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s role that I have never in my life managed to get over.

While it was my childhood experience of light that first transformed me into an eager Christian, it was my college major that much later soured me on the Roman Christianity that has long been the world’s most prominent religion. Now I look at Christians that I respect, and especially the smartest ones, the ones that I know love and honor Jesus, and sometimes I want to say to them, “Oh my very dear one, how can you possibly believe all that Christianity as a religion still insists that you must believe? My darling, where in this is your mind?” But I never actually do say that to anyone.  

The core Roman Christian teaching is that Jesus was born pure and sinless so He could then assume all of humankind’s sins, and He could suffer and die for all of us as our pure sacrifice to God. And you know that makes no sense at all. Just think about it! That whole idea is insulting to God, and it is humiliating to Jesus. Please consider what it says about both of them. God gentlly insists that you and I must learn to forgive whatever happens to us in order for us to grow spiritually. And yet God is not willing to forgive us for anything unless God first gets to watch God’s own Son being tortured and murdered? Does that make sense? And Jesus taught us for three and a half years the greatest wisdom of all the ages, but when it comes right down to it, Jesus’s greatest and most sacred role is not to teach us anything, but rather it is just to be our blood-sacrifice to God for our sins? He is a sacrificial lamb, dumb and mute, and nothing more? When we truly love and respect God, and when we also truly love and respect Jesus, each in their own pure and perfect light, we can see that none of this makes sense. Obviously, it makes no spiritual sense! But even beyond that, it makes no literal, factual, objective sense when we actively apply to it our God-given minds. It is frankly and on every level a fundamentally stupid idea.

It was wonderful Miss Corwin very long ago who first pointed all of this out to me. I can remember that seminal afternoon in her study to this day, her somewhat disorderly books and papers, and how angry at some long-dead Roman Emperor named Constantine she still was, that he had fabricated this nonsensical dogma that made fools of both God and man, and then he had formed his own version of Christianity around his dumb idea. To me, at barely nineteen, she looked to be maybe old enough to herself have known that ancient Roman Emperor personally. And yet, she probably was not even as old then as I am now.

It is said that if you love hot dogs, then you never should watch hot dogs being made. And the same can surely be said of Christianity! I began college as an ardently devout Christian who was planning to become a minister. But by the time I graduated from college, my Christian feelings were deeply nuanced. I still kept my daily Bible-reading habit; and in fact, I kept that up into my early fifties. I still loved Jesus, and even more deeply, just as Miss Corwin very deeply loved Jesus; but then a few years later I met the love of my life. Edward was and remains an ardent Catholic, so that ended my ambitions toward entering the Protestant clergy! And after I had watched Christianity being made at the First Council of Nicaea, I had kind of lost my taste for Constantine’s brand of Christianity, anyway.

My Thomas is the lead author of these weekly offerings for you, and he wants me to point out whenever I mention First Nicaea in any way derisively that it did accomplish two very good things:

  • The First Nicaean Councilors assembled the first Christian Bible. Before First Nicaea, there was not one definitive place where what we now call the Old Testament, the Gospel teachings of Jesus, and the letters of Paul could be found preserved together in good and consistent form. Those Councilors sought out the best versions of all those scriptures, they prayed together, and they claimed to be divinely inspired.
  • In assembling their Bible, The First Nicaean Councilors respected Jesus. As they worked, those Councilors messed far less with the teachings of Jesus in the four canonical Gospels than they actually might have messed with them, collecting and including only the teachings that Jesus Himself was impressing on their minds that He wanted them to use, and putting their few wrong additions just at the backs of the four canonical Gospels, so anything they could not resist adding, such as Jesus’s call to Peter, would be easy for us to spot and remove.

My much-beloved Thomas reminds us that the First Nicaean Councilors could so easily have filled their Bible with Jesus spouting lots of invented nonsense taken from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s ideas! And you and I would be none the wiser.  Nowhere do we find Jesus saying, “I go to the cross now to die for your sins!” or anything like that sort of nonsense. Thomas tells me that he and Jesus were indeed actually present at the First Council of Nicaea, gently influencing the Councilors’ minds at key moments, and keeping pure the Christian Bible that resulted from their efforts. As a result, the Bible that Roman Christianity uses now is one that Jesus’s followers still will be able to use, even after Constantine’s faulty religion eventually fades.

And speaking of the long decline of Roman Christianity, which is something that we have been expecting, it may be a bit longer in coming than we have been imagining would be the case.  A recent Pew poll suggests that, in the United States at least, the decline of Roman Christianity has slowed, and it may now even have effectively been halted. The Pew Research Center calls itself a nonpartisan American think tank based in Washington, D.C. which provides information on social issues, public opinion, and demographic trends shaping the United States and the world. It recently surveyed more than thirty-five thousand American adults across all fifty states, making this one of the most comprehensive religious studies ever conducted. The results of this most recent survey are striking:

  • 62% of American adults still identify as Christians. This includes 40% who are Protestants and 19% who are Catholics.
  • The religiously unaffiliated group has held steady at 28%. This includes those who identify as atheist, agnostic, or “nothing in particular,” and it is nearly unchanged from multiple previous surveys.
  • 7% of respondents identified with a non-Christian faith. Their list of these other religions includes faiths such as Judaism, Islam, and Hinduism.
  • The percentage of Christians has remained stable over the past five years. Pew points out that this marks the first time in decades that the decline has stalled.

Christianity experienced a steep decline percentage-wise in the United States in the late 20th and early 21st Centuries. In 1990, roughly 90% of Americans still identified as Christians, which seems to be an astonishing statistic when you learn that by 2007, that percentage had already dropped to 78%. The last major Pew religious survey prior to the one just conducted was in 2014, and it recorded Christians at 65%. Pew calls it “not insignificant” that the steepest declines took place during the eight Obama years.

Some observers note that there seems to be a correlation between the decline of religious feeling and political leftism. For example, as was noted above, the steepest decline in Christian religious feeling in the United States in recent years seems to have happened during Barack Obama’s leftist presidency. And over several years beginning in 2020, more traditionally leftist Canada to America’s north devoted some three hundred and twenty million dollars to finding any evidence at all that nineteenth-century Christian schools for indigenous children there had buried many of those children in unmarked graves, which project inspired quite a lot of anti-Christian Canadian hatred.  When little to no evidence for such a travesty could be found, after a few years the project was abandoned, but not without the waste of so many millions of dollars and the vandalizing or the outright burning down of fifty-five Canadian churches.

It feels comforting to find that the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians seems to be perhaps no longer declining! If this percentage eventually stabilizes at something like fifty percent of Americans who are still willing to hold to Roman Christianity with its deep flaws in dogma in order to keep their relationship with Jesus, and also their relationship with our culture’s old-time religion, well then, perhaps we might gently re-mold Roman Christianity into something more loving and less fear-based. Edward tells me that some old Catholic traditions, like confession, simply don’t seem to happen anymore. However, even gentling the old religion now would still leave some forty percent of formerly Christian Americans without a real spiritual home. And what we still don’t know for sure is what Jesus wants to do now for those who have fallen away from Roman Christianity but still want a relationship with Him.

Pew tells us that ninety percent of Americans were professed Christians thirty-five years ago, and that percentage has declined by one-third now. So it is worth asking what those thirty percent of Americans who already have abandoned the Christian religion are doing today for their spiritual sustenance. Jesus has lately suggested to Thomas and me that for those who have left Roman Christianity, He intends to begin His original Way once again. “The Way” was Jesus’s movement that thrived during the three centuries following His death and resurrection, and it quickly grew to millions of people before Constantine destroyed it. Jesus and Thomas have channeled through me two books that Jesus tells us His new Way will use, and He has asked us to begin a website called teachingsbyjesus.com that will not become fully operational until He tells us how He wants us to complete it. And so, my dear ones, here we are. We have framed our blog post this week with the swashbuckling words of a hymn that I recall so well from my childhood spent attending and loving grownup church. I smile to find that there still is life and a possible way forward for the old-time religion that I once loved, and Thomas and I are talking now about writing for next week a post about what it might take to save it. And meanwhile, in the timeless, glorious reality where Jesus now plans His eternal Way’s next stage, we are watching Jesus, and wondering, and waiting for His next stage to begin.

Like a mighty army Moves the Church of God;
Brothers, we are treading Where the Saints have trod.
We are not divided; All one body we:
One in hope and doctrine, One in charity.

Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
Onward, then, ye people; Join our happy throng.
Blend with ours your voices In the triumph song:

Glory, laud, and honor Unto Christ, the King.
This through countless ages Men and angels sing.
Onward, Christian soldiers! Marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus Going on before.
– Sabine Baring-Gould (1834–1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

A Bit of History

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

To dream the impossible dream. To fight the unbeatable foe.
To bear with unbearable sorrow. To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the un-rightable wrong. To love, pure and chaste from afar.
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star.

 This is my quest! To follow that star!
No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.
To fight for the right without question or pause.
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause!
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One God!” (Deut 5; Deut 6:4) This is the most important Law of Moses, and first given to him by God on Mount Sinai thirty-three hundred years ago, after Moses had brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. And then Jesus, some thirteen hundred years later but still two thousand years before this morning, when He was asked what was the greatest Commandment, He boiled the entire Law of Israel, including all Ten Commandments, down to just these two: “‘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).

As we have said often here, Jesus came to teach us how to forgive and to love so we can raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently that we will never again need to incarnate on earth. And His teachings work so beautifully to do precisely that! So, why then did the Lord’s effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth not succeed the first time around? Actually, it was going very well for at least the first four hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus’s earliest followers buried at least six million of their dead in tunnels beneath the city of Rome, the last of which burials date to the early fifth century C.E. And in all the art in the Catacombs tombs, there is not a single cross to be found! Instead, the symbols are all peaceful ones, like the fish, the dove, the vine, and especially the Good Shepherd who carries on His shoulders not a sheep, but a goat. What amazing evidence of the fact that the earliest Christians knew that Jesus had come to uplift all of humankind spiritually, including even the very least worthy among us! This gradual and gentle spreading of His Gospel truths seems to have been just what Jesus intended to have happen. After all, He said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Well, okay then. But over the past two thousand years, a few untoward things have transpired between God and humankind. For one thing, in about 312 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine believed that he had seen a cross of light emblazoned with the Latin words “in hoc signo vinces,” which means, “by this sign you shall conquer”. And at once, he went from being a persecutor of the followers of Jesus to becoming the father of his preferred version of the Christian religion.

Of course, Constantine the Great’s Christianity, which still is the world’s dominant religion, is nothing like Jesus’s original gentle spiritual movement. Jesus knew that because every human mind is part of one eternal Mind, it would not take much more than this single population, using Jesus’s teachings to raise their personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, to begin to elevate the spiritual vibrations of everyone then living on earth. The transformation of the minds of His followers would begin the transformations of all human minds! As Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13:33). So we have every reason to think that for those first few centuries, the advent of the kingdom of God on earth was unfolding just as Jesus and as the divine Collectives of the Godhead had intended that it should unfold; and quite rapidly, too. But then the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye on the Lord’s beautiful Way, and he had his brutal way with her.

The first thing that Constantine did was to select one version of Christian thought, and set out to destroy every other version. He chose for himself the most fear-based version of all, the one that claimed that Jesus’s crucifixion had been required by God as a sacrifice for our sins. There were more than three dozen “heresies” brutally stamped out or driven into the wilderness by the early Roman church under Constantine before he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE that formalized Constantine’s new religion. Those rejected “heresies” had been strains of thought among pre-Roman-Councils followers of Jesus. They had peacefully coexisted as alternative ways to follow Jesus, because the Lord’s original Way had not been a religion at all! It had required only that people follow Jesus’s teachings and learn to ever more perfectly love and forgive; and as Jesus had said, “He who is not against us is for us” (MK 9:40).

The Roman Emperor Constantine’s deeply fear-based notion that Jesus had died for our sins had been just one of many ideas in a widely varied spiritual movement. It had been harmless, until Constantine had used his First Council of Nicaea in 325 to begin to impose one Christian religion with its human-made and fear-based dogmas upon the world. A gentle and gradual movement that was spreading nothing but forgiveness and love would have been useless to an emperor. But a fear-based religion that carried the dogmatic threat of hellfire for anyone who disobeyed him? Now, that was something that he really could use! Six more church councils followed that First Council of Nicaea in 325, all called or presided over by emperors and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. So a fear-based religion that bore the name of Jesus but otherwise had almost nothing to do with Him was imposed upon the world by force at a cost of what is conservatively estimated to have been twenty-five million mostly awful deaths.

We are surprised to study this history now, and to reflect on the fact that God allowed all of it to happen in quite this way. All of it, from the transformation of Jesus’s peaceful and beautiful Way that seems to have been working so wonderfully for hundreds of years into Constantine’s barbaric and dogmatic religion, and then the inquisitions and the crusades. Thomas whispers to me now that, ah, but Constantine created the Bible that has safely preserved the words of Jesus. And Constantine began those seventeen hundred years that were dominated by fear and negativity for people to push against, into which we can forever after down through the timeless ages choose to incarnate for priceless spiritual learning and growth.

Our earliest evidence that a new effort has begun to bring the kingdom of God on earth dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when we began to receive much easier and more abundant afterlife communications. This effort to thin the veil and better enlighten us might have seemed to the Godhead to be necessary in order to begin the process of at last taking down both Constantine’s fear-based Christianity, and also the equally false notion of atheistic scientism, in preparation for the war-filled and spiritual-stress-filled twentieth century that was soon to dawn. No one knows for sure why we were suddenly being shown so much more of what was really going on behind the curtain!

But among God’s earliest targets in this modern-day effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth were physicists. As we neared the turn of the twentieth century, clockwork materialism remained in place as a dogma in a reality that is in no respect solid, to the point where Nobel Laureate in physics Albert Michelson said in 1894, “It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” Even the great Max Planck, another Nobel Laureate and the eventual father of quantum mechanics, said in 1924, “When I began my physical studies [in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly… he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science… Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but… theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.”

To shake up this scientific materialist complacency completely, the Godhead did two things at once. It initiated a new age of much better communication between the living and the not actually dead. And It also channeled in to the minds of Dr. Planck and a few other physicists the wonderfully disruptive theory of quantum mechanics. What strikes me most profoundly is the way God has been acting even in what we know now was a clear divine emergency, with an extraordinary respect for human free will and dignity! Everyone who comes to earth with a commission from the Godhead does so voluntarily, and it is through these willing minions that nearly all God’s work on earth is done. God works in the world with all the love, patience, and respect of a host of perfected Beings who once inhabited bodies themselves. What a sublimely beautiful process!

When the scientific community was forced to react simultaneously to the twin challenges of quantum physics and very good evidence that the dead do in fact survive, it chose to deal with the first challenge and ignore the second. This stonewalling by the scientific gatekeepers of any evidence at all that the universe is not matter-based has gone on now for more than a century. Apparently it is going to end only when God decides it must end. There is a lot that we still don’t understand. But for the first part of the twentieth century, the Godhead seems to have watched Its work unfold while avoiding further interference in the affairs of humankind… That is, until we used nuclear bombs in warfare in August of 1945. This was apparently what God had been working to prevent, and its suddenly happening anyway seems to have been a wake-up call that might have been unique in human history. Insofar as we who study this can tell, four initiatives were then begun at once:

  • The decision was made that we will never again be allowed to use nuclear arms in warfare. If you wonder why it hasn’t happened in the more than three-quarters of a century since Nagasaki, despite the fact that nuclear armaments have proliferated and human crankiness abounds, be assured that we have been told that God is preventing its happening. There are anecdotes about missile tests in which an unexplained missile would turn up out of nowhere and shoot down the missile being tested. But my hunch is that God is working mostly at the level of many human minds.
  • A renewed effort was begun to demonstrate to the world what actually is going on. The floodgates of broader information began to open in the fifties, and then in the seventies they opened much wider! Most of what afterlife experts are telling you now is an accumulation of many bits of information that have been permitted to us by the Godhead. If it had not been God’s perfect will that we figure all these things out now, we would still be as clueless as people have been clueless throughout all of human history.
  • Many more minions began to parachute in. There is no time where the Godhead is, so the first of this new wave of minions were born in the thirties and forties. And we continue to be born today, these people who have promised to assist in the work of raising this planet’s consciousness vibration and bringing the kingdom of God on earth. I may be typical. I am my primary guide’s comrade through seventeen lifetimes, and I had promised him that I would come in and do some specific things that would help him to put a finis to his spiritual work done as Thomas Jefferson. That effort was still in the planning stage when this call came, and we answered it! We made a life-plan for me that included efforts to complete his prior work, and we overlaid it with this plan to help the Godhead that now consumes my life.
  • A decision was made to freshly introduce the Gospel teachings of Jesus to the world. Of course, for this to happen requires that the fear-based Christianity created by Constantine the Great must either die away or be transformed, and we see this ongoing now on both fronts at the level of billions of human minds. Our task is just to nurture the love of Jesus and His Gospel teachings, carefully saving the baby as God discards the bathwater.

The Lord’s Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness and raising our personal vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth are needed now, more than they ever have been needed before! Those of us who have closely studied the Gospel teachings and are working now in the Lord’s harvest field are delighted to report that it all truly is happening now, and all around us. This Impossible Dream of universal human forgiveness and love as Jesus taught it, such that it really will be possible for God’s kingdom to begin to overspread the earth, is all awakening now.

And beyond that, as we who have spent our lives studying the glorious afterlife evidence can tell you, is the certain fact that all that really exists is consciousness. Or as our dear friend Craig Hogan would put it, all that exists is mind and experiences.  Now we wonder ever more deeply about something even more. As we have studied both the teachings of Jesus and the illusory reality in which we live these lives, we come to ever better understand that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact all that exists. There is no such thing as solid matter. And the afterlife evidence, plus bits of things that Jesus said when He was here, including His much more advanced teachings in A Course in Miracles, all lead us to begin to wonder whether perhaps this all might be a pure illusion? Is it possible that Jesus insisted that we love our neighbor as ourself because He knew that our neighbor is ourself?

It is a surprising, and even an amazing question. To which one day we each will learn the answer!

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

Overcoming!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We shall overcome, We shall overcome,
We shall overcome, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.

 We shall be alright, We shall be alright,
We shall be alright, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.

We shall live in peace, We shall live in peace,
We shall live in peace, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.
– Joan Baez, from “We Shall Overcome” (1963)

I have said elsewhere in these musings something that feels hard for me to believe now, but it remains true nonetheless. I lived the first eighteen years of my life in these United States of America without ever seeing in the flesh a single person of any race other than my own. Not even on a stage somewhere, or inside a Chinese restaurant. I grew up in a small town in central Massachusetts, and, needless to say, we didn’t get around much. But perhaps all of that was just as well. My parents never had an occasion to say anything racist in my presence. So the fact that some folks who appeared on TV had different skin tones and castes to their faces was to me as a child utterly unremarkable.

Once, when I was eight or ten, I mentioned to my mother as I was lying on my tummy on the carpet, watching TV with her, that, wow, Nat King Cole looked exactly like our family dentist! Had she ever noticed that? The resemblance was amazing. She sputtered, “But he’s black!” Oh. Well, sure, except for that. It is remembering such moments that makes me know that if you rear children without instilling racism in them, they grow up to see skin shade and racial details as no more important than eye color or hair color. Even to this day, I don’t think that I see race in the same way that most people do.

And so it was that I first fell in love in college. And I fell hard! He was tall, dark, gorgeous, intellectual, soft-spoken, and so much my destiny that I even had dreamed of exactly him, including how he would look, just a few nights before I met him at an inter-college mixer (he was Columbia; I was Smith). I met him at the start of my sophomore year, and by Thanksgiving I was eager for my parents to meet him because I was so sure that he was The One. I was certain that they would love him, too! He rented a car, as I recall, or his parents did it for him, and we drove the hour and a half or so down the Mass Pike to my family’s home. I had told them how in love I was, and what a star he was at Columbia; I had told them everything wonderful about him except for the fact that his parents were Chinese immigrants. I hadn’t been hiding that fact from them. It just seemed to be so unimportant.

My mother covered her shock when she saw him better than my father did. Even to this day, the fact that my beloved’s race mattered so much to them feels amazing. My goodness, why would anyone even notice another person’s race, and never mind caring about it? We got through that one Thanksgiving together, and then my beloved and I talked the issue through. He was my deeply beloved, and I cherished him for the next two years, even though we subtly agreed that we would not again inflict our relationship on my parents. Instead, on weekends we often would visit his parents’ townhouse in Queens, New York, where I came to love his adorable parents and I learned to use chop sticks like a native; and we went to a Chinatown dim sum restaurant as a happy tradition on Sunday mornings. He loved Manhattan, and I began to love the city, too, as I  saw it through his eyes. He graduated the year before I did; and even then, Columbia was showing the radical leftist tendencies that the school has today. We had never much talked about politics, but soon after he graduated, one day he amazed me by asking me to come with him to California “to join the Revolution”. I think he knew before he brought it up that his idea was going to be a bridge too far for straight-laced, Christian little me. And besides, I still had one more year of college to go before I graduated. So, sadly, we parted – over politics, mainly – and we went on to live our different lives. Otherwise, I am pretty sure that eventually I would have married him.

The other great love of my life before I met my eventual husband was someone that I never met. There were two big historical events that crammed the evening news each night during my high school and college years, neither of which made sense to me, and both of which were very far removed from my life. One was the fighting in Indochina which soon became the Vietnam War; and the other was what to me was the nonsensical racial troubles in the American south. Nonsensical to me! But also, far away. I could watch the marching and all that anger, and be just puzzled by it. But then, ah, there was one voice that soon stood out from all the rest. Do you remember his completely magnificent voice? His conversational voice made him sound like a Rhodes Scholar. His speeches, and the look on his face as he gave them, were absolutely magnificent. I listened to him, and I read what he said, and then what he wrote, and for the first time I began to really understand what the racial struggle in the American south was about. Dr.Martin Luther King, Jr. made it all start to seem absolutely clear and plain, and then he even made it begin to feel very personal to me.

He was such a small man! Oh my goodness, you would see him in a group of young and tough black men who were around him to protect him, and he looked so unremarkable. But wow, as soon as he opened his mouth, freedom would ring! Here is just a sample of Dr. King’s public message:

He was quoting Thomas Jefferson when he said in July of 1965, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by God, Creator, with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’ This is a dream. It’s a great dream! The first saying we notice in this dream is an amazing universalism. It doesn’t say, ‘some men’; it says ‘all men.’ It doesn’t say ‘all white men’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes black men. It does not say ‘all Gentiles’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes Jews. It doesn’t say ‘all Protestants’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes Catholics. It doesn’t even say ‘all theists and believers’; it says ‘all men,’ which includes humanists and agnostics. Never before in the history of the world has a sociopolitical document expressed in such profound, eloquent and unequivocal language the dignity and the worth of human personality. The American dream reminds us—and we should think about it anew on this Independence Day—that every man is an heir of the legacy of dignity and worth.”

“Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives to remind them that the lie of their inferiority is accepted as truth in the society dominating them.”

“I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear. “

“I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal’ … I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”

“We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.”

“Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.”

“I refuse to accept the view that mankind is so tragically bound to the starless midnight of racism and war that the bright daybreak of peace and brotherhood can never become a reality… I believe that unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.”

“If physical death is the price that I must pay to free my white brothers and sisters from a permanent death of the spirit, then nothing can be more redemptive.”

“I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go to the mountain. And I’ve looked over, and I’ve seen the Promised Land! I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.”

I first heard this beautiful, sainted man speak, and I fell in love with him. Omigod, did I fall in love, and thereafter I hung on his every word! The moral midgets who fought him in the American south were trying to destroy this nation’s Founding Fathers and everything they had stood for and built; and then this one small, beautiful man stood up against them. He stood tall and strong against them all! The modern American Founding Father that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. has proven to be was the greatest American of the Twentieth Century. And now, as a new American national administration takes shape, we can see so many of Dr. King’s young inheritors of every race and shade, all free at last now, thanks to Dr. King, of even the smallest taint of racism or sexism, so many of them finding positions of leadership in the country that Dr. King loved so much, and that he fought and then he died to save. He always deeply believed that this nation was someday going to find a way to reform, and to redeem itself.

So I look around in amazement and delight, and I see that Dr. King’s vision already is alive and coming true right now! I live in what was once a Confederate and slave-holding state. It is one-third black, one-third Hispanic, and one-third white, if you want to talk about races, but nobody here ever talks about races. We Texans all live happily together with a lot of immigrants from India as well, and legal immigrants from South America and from other countries all over the world. Oh my dear beloved Martin, here we all are right now, already living in your Promised Land! We are all your grateful inheritors! Look at us, please, my very dear one, and know that you have already won! Witness your great dream coming true!

My dear friends, we hardly had noticed it, but Dr. King’s big dream is coming true now, in Texas and in the whole former Confederacy. And as the future years and then the centuries pass, the miracle that is this whole free nation, wisely designed and founded by a Generation of Giants and then largely saved two centuries later by that one extraordinary, visionary man, will continue to thrive for all the lovers of freedom and justice who are their grateful beneficiaries. May all Americans, in the long course of time, always prove themselves to be ever more worthy of these great Americans’ wonderful gift!

We are not afraid (oh Lord), We are not afraid (oh Lord)
We are not afraid, today.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe,
We shall overcome, someday.

 We shall overcome (oh Lord), We shall overcome (oh Lord)
We shall overcome, someday.
Oh, deep in my heart, I know that I do believe
We shall overcome, someday.
– Joan Baez, from “We Shall Overcome” (1963)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Your Internal Life

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Precious Lord, take my hand,
Lead me on, let me stand,
I am tired, I am weak, I am worn;
Through the storm, through the night,
Lead me on to the light:

Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.

When my way grows drear,
Precious Lord, linger near,
When my life is almost gone,
Hear my cry, hear my call,
Hold my hand lest I fall:

Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home.
– Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” (1938)

When our very dearly beloved Jesus was born from the Godhead two thousand years ago, He was born among ignorant primitives. And that was for Him the entire point! He came here to teach people what our life on earth was meant to be for, because during long previous ages of time, everyone had endlessly turned on the wheel, as Gautama Buddha later would put it, being born into life after life on earth and making almost no spiritual progress each time because we never had any idea why we even were being born at all. Was there ever a point to any of this? Jesus chose to come to people for whom life was only ever an endless drudge. He was determined now to give to each of us the love of God, the purpose of personal growth, and the eventual joy of endless paradise.

For the Being who would become Jesus, achieving His own spiritual perfection by simply living on earth had been an easy task. Jesus loved people as easily and as naturally as He breathed! For Jesus, each individual person always was so inconceivably precious, so lovely, so downright adorable that even as a child in His last pre-Jesus lifetime, He would spend His days tending and doting on everyone. My Thomas had been his older brother in that last lifetime that Jesus lived on earth as a pre-ascended being, and while my dear spirit guide’s memory of it all is vague now because he has lived so many other lifetimes since then, he does remember his own exasperation at his need to always protect his younger brother. That boy never would fight, not even to save himself! To the warrior-general that Thomas had been in that lifetime, having a kid brother like Jesus had been craziness-making! When Thomas and I have talked about this, and he has tried to describe the way Jesus had seemed to see other people, what he has come up with is the idea of a world full of cute but helpless puppies. Imagine seeing the whole world as if every person in it is wonderfully adorable and also desperately needs your care.

Even now, in fact, Jesus seems to see each person who visits Him in just this way. When Thomas was taking me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane during the summer of 2022, the Lord would always appear to be so delighted to see me, with his powerful personal energy always tamped down to just a sizzly buzz. If Jesus doesn’t remember to reduce His personal energy that way, it is so overwhelmingly powerful at this point that it is difficult for us to be near Him; it feels to you and me like a painful battering. But Jesus is aware of that, so He politely keeps it in check for us. At this point, He is vibrating even higher than the Godhead level, but His overwhelming love for people compels Him to spend His eternity on the third level of the astral plane, which for nearly all of us is the entry level to the afterlife. There He mostly sits beside a river that is full of multicolored, iridescent fish, and with a herd of tame deer nearby. And He greets small groups of people who are newly transitioned, who want very much to meet Jesus at last.

They come in small, polite groups of maybe fifteen or twenty, and they line up to be greeted by Him. Since I  would spend perhaps a couple of hours with Jesus each time Thomas took me to visit with Him, I became used to watching Jesus briefly transform into what we called church-Jesus, with lighter skin, longer and paler hair and blue eyes. Then He would stand and go and welcome each person in line with a few words, a smile, and a blessing. If a woman who had died in childbirth was carrying her baby, He would take the newborn into His arms and kiss it and bless it, too. There is no sense of time passing there, but to me all of this seemed to happen something like every fifteen minutes or so, around the clock! While meanwhile, Jesus also would be talking in His mind with those who always are praying to Him. Thomas tells me that Jesus can smoothly do all of that while He also is keeping a conversation going with us. But How can He possibly love people this much? How can He be so entirely selfless?

That really is the right word to describe Him. Jesus is selfless. All the rest of us seem to have our little “I’m important!”egos, at least to some extent; but Jesus really does have no ego at all. Instead,  all that matters to Him is you. Whenever I arrived to visit Him there under that many-colored sky, He usually would be sitting on His riverbank, communing with His fish. He would look up at me and smile like the sun rising because wow, here she is back again. As I sat down on His riverbank beside Him, He would say, “Little One! My Little One, tell Me about your day! What did you write today?” I always tried to tell Him something specific from my day because He seemed to be so strangely avid to know more about my life, and then He would bring up some details from my last visit and ask about them, and want to know how this or that legal client’s situation had turned out. He then asked me about other of my legal clients, since He knew them by name, as we fed His many-colored fish with grain that just would appear in our hands. But if I tried to ask Him rather shyly about His own day, Jesus? Who has visited You lately? How was that? He always would deflect my questions and ask me again about me. Once I thought to ask Him if any famous people from the earth had died today. He simply looked at me quizzically and asked me another question about my own life, and I realized later that He knows so little about what is happening on the earth from our perspective that He would have no idea about who might be famous among us now.

All the lovely memories that I still hold of having spent personal time with Jesus during that summer give me some sense of what it must have been like to be one of His earthly followers. The Biblical Gospels tell us that He was very charismatic during His lifetime on earth, and wow, I really have felt that same charismatic tug, just sitting and quietly talking with Him! As He began His career as an itinerant preacher, simply teaching and answering questions wherever groups of people would gather, Jesus soon had hundreds, and then thousands of people that followed Him wherever He went. The common people would hang on His every word.

Some scholars who have closely analyzed the words of the Old Testament, and also the way that Jesus taught, now suspect that they know what may have been happening for many of those first followers of Jesus. We know from their writings that human beings even as late as Jesus’s time really didn’t have much in the way of internal lives, and certainly not in the vivid and complex way that we do. Think about it. Their old heroic ballads were stark and plain and were primarily about people simply doing or being commanded by God not to do certain things. Even the psalms were minimalist in their messages. Indeed, even for King David there was action in the outer world that he clearly could describe, but there was relatively little going on in his mind when you compare it with our rich internal lives. This may have been why, before the advent of Jesus, not only did we not know why we were here, but even had we been told that we were here to grow spiritually, we would have given one another puzzled looks and scratched our heads. What was that all about?? The teachings of Jesus, on the other hand, were all about discovering and then richly building our inner lives! Jesus’s teachings were about emotions, and primarily about love and forgiveness.  

Consider this remarkable exchange that Jesus had with a lawyer of the Pharisees: 34 But when the Pharisees heard that Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, they gathered themselves together. 35 One of them, a lawyer, asked Him a question. Testing Him, he said, 36 “Teacher, which is the great commandment in the Law?” 37 And Jesus said to him, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ 38 This is the great and foremost commandment. 39 The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ 40 On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:34-40). And wow, Jesus gave them what was an extraordinary answer! “The Law and the Prophets” was what Jesus’s listeners, those ancient Jews, called what we now would call the entire Old Testament. It was the Ten Commandments, the Psalms, and the Proverbs. It was everything. He was telling them that you can now boil the entire Law and the Prophets, all those scrolls put together, down to just two Commandments from God: Love God, and Love Your Fellow Man.

Jesus had just turned all those many old, external, formal Laws into just two Laws which are entirely spiritual, and therefore they are entirely internal! Jesus was talking to old-minded, entirely externally-minded clergymen, so they really had nothing to say to Him in response. Look at what comes right after this key exchange just above: 41 Now while the Pharisees were gathered together, Jesus turned it about and asked them a question. He said: 42 “What do you think about the Christ, whose son is He?” They said to Jesus, “The son of David.” 43 Jesus said to them, “So then how does David in the Spirit call Him ‘Lord,’ saying,

44 ‘The Lord said to my Lord,
“Sit at My right hand,
Until I put Your enemies beneath Your feet”’?

45 If David then calls Him ‘Lord,’ how is He his son?” 46 No one was able to answer Him a word, nor did anyone dare from that day on to ask Jesus another question (MT 22:41-46).

Do you see what has happened here? People who still lack an internal life of the spirit have no way even to conceptualize what Jesus just has asked them. They therefore cannot formulate an answer. You or I could answer Him, though, could we not? We understand that there is an afterlife where David in Spirit now dwells. And we know that David in Spirit is gladly able to assist his Son by putting his Son’s enemies beneath his Son’s feet.

And so it was that Jesus came to us from out of the Godhead to live that lifetime on earth so He could open us all to the greater life of the Spirit, which is internal. It is of the mind, and built on Jesus’s teachings about love and forgiveness. He gave us then the concrete certainty that we are in truth fully spiritual beings. We are not at all the material beings that we can see in a mirror, only dimly. As Jesus said to the Good Thief who was crucified beside Him, so He also says to us, now and forevermore: For so long as you tend to your own life of the Spirit, you will steadily grow in love, and “Truly I say to you, you shall be with Me in Paradise” (LK 23:43). 

When the darkness appears
And the night draws near,
And the day is past and gone,
At the river, I stand,
Guide my feet, hold my hand:

Take my hand, precious Lord,
Lead me home
– Thomas Andrew Dorsey (1899-1993), from “Precious Lord, Take My Hand” (1938)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

All Reality is Consciousness

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

… He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea.
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights every star that makes the darkness bright.
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night.
He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive”
– Richard Mullan & Jack Richards, from “He” (1969)

What you and I experience as conscious awareness is in fact all that exists. In all things and in every aspect of reality, consciousness is everything. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. Or, as my darling Thomas so well put it to me, long before I could have understood who that tall stranger in the long blue robe who spoke to me and taught me in the empty lot beside my childhood home actually was: everything there is or there ever can be is part of a thought in the mind of God. Thomas taught me that there never has been and there never can be anything else.

The fact that consciousness is all there is was first discovered by the earliest quantum physicists around the turn of the twentieth century. And it was a major reason why mainstream science so resolutely drove itself off the rails into materialist atheism at about the same time, in what the scientific community imagined was its own defense. I first discovered this crisis of science just in passing, as I was browsing in used-book stores, reading popular-science magazines, and discovering so much wonderful turn-of-the-twentieth-century afterlife evidence. It is easy to see why Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, must have panicked the whole field of Newtonian physics when he began to go public with his discoveries! If you have not yet done it, you ought to read the ultimate quantum-physics-for-dummies book, Quantum Enigma by Bruce Rosenblum and Fred Kuttner. Quantum physics makes sense, and their book will help you to understand why it is so easy and sensible for consciousness to be all that exists. But our great friend Max Planck really did a number on Newtonian physicists when in 1931 he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” 

Wow, that was pretty definitive, was it not? By then, the mainstream scientific gatekeepers understood that what they truly were protecting their precious against was the possibility that some scientist might inadvertently claim to have found the God of the Christians and the Jews. So they clamped down on enforcing their materialist/atheist dogma ever more strictly as the twentieth century wore on.

And, sure enough, Max Planck at last did indeed come to understand the ever deeper implications of what he had found. In 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.” Bingo! God had at last been found. So then, how far does this penetration of consciousness go? What about animals? Are they conscious as well? Of course they are. Even the birds at the feeder outside my window will look in through the glass and cock their heads at me with what clearly is awareness. That has to be true of animals and birds, when it is true even of plants!

The most transformational book that I ever have read is The Secret Life of Plants by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird. I first read that amazing book in 1973, its year of first publication, and I didn’t realize until years later the way that book had helped to form a basis for my fifty years of afterlife research. And it primed me to accept the evidence that what we experience as human conscious awareness truly is universal among all living things! The fact that such a seminal masterwork which is so fundamental to our understanding of life has been so steadfastly ignored by mainstream scientists because it doesn’t fit their predetermined materialist/atheist narrative was my first clue that the mainstream scientific emperor is sadly altogether naked. And that scientific emperor appears now likely to remain resolutely naked, not only for the rest of your life and mine, but perhaps naked even for our children’s and our grandchildren’s lifetimes as well.

The Tompkins and Bird book’s fundamental insight is that plants are conscious, they mentally communicate with one another, and they also mentally communicate with us. And what an amazing revelation that is! Consider only the work of Cleve Backster, who in the nineteen-sixties was one of America’s leading experts on lie detectors. One morning in 1966, Mr. Backster decided on a whim to use his office plant as an experimental subject. He attached a galvanometer to one of its leaves. And, what do you know? He found that the plant in his office was reacting very much as a person would react as it sat there contentedly in its pot having its transient and amazingly human-like thoughts. Backster soon found that the most extreme reactions in his plant were produced when he decided to burn one of its leaves. Its frantic reaction was less if Backster only imagined burning the leaf, without actually intending to do the plant harm. His plant would react, too, if other living things in the room were mentally threatened with harm. And Backster and other researchers later demonstrated that these strong reactions are present even in living fragments of plants. My goodness, plants can read the minds of their own particular keepers even from a distance of miles away! There is so much more to Backster’s work that mainstream science still ignores. These amazing discoveries are now nearly sixty years old, and they are all by themselves sufficient reason for you to pick up and read one of the most amazing and most unjustly ignored books in human history.  

Here is an astonishing video that gives you some sense of just how sensitive and mutually cooperative, and even how oddly aware and almost human-like plants actually are as they work and live together in their wild communities, right there in our own backyards. Please do take the time to watch this video, since I cannot do it justice. I only can tell you that after you have watched it, you will forever after see each patch of forest as a thriving community of sentient individuals in communication with one another, sharing their resources and caring for their young. You will never look at any plant of any size in the same way again.

I spend my days working on my laptop computer in a big bow window as part of a mutually supportive community that consists mostly of houseplants, both large and small. Of course, this way of life is healthy for all of us. Plants exhale oxygen and they breathe in carbon dioxide, while people do the reverse; and it has lately been shown that plants also help to improve indoor air quality in tightly-constructed modern homes. And surprisingly, these plants in my mixed person-plant community actually miss me when I am gone! I practice business law in Massachusetts, and I travel to see my clients for a week at a time several times a year. I leave my plants well-watered; but still, no one comes into my office for that week, so, depend on it: some of the smaller plants will drop a leaf or two whenever I am away. Is that loneliness? Or is it worry? Should I ask my human family to come in here every so often and talk to the plants while I am gone?

Oh yes, what we experience as consciousness is the base creative force (there are five great Hillfaith videos at the link).  Consciousness is all that objectively exists, which means that it should not really surprise us to find that every living thing is in some way conscious. And in fact, that may also be true of even what we consider to be some non-living things. If Consciousness is the base creative force and all that exists, then perhaps even things like rocks might also be in some way conscious, too? One of the things that we generally do when we first return to our eternal home is to go sightseeing, and often on random distant planets. After all, there is neither time nor distance in our eternal home, so we can easily travel to very far away places. I recall long ago reading an account by someone who had been enjoying doing his post-death touring, and he talked about having visited a planet where the life was not carbon-based, but instead it was silica–based. That entire planet teemed with life! But you didn’t realize at first that anything on the planet that he was visiting was alive, because it all moved so ve-e-e-ry sl-o-o-wly. And, you know, come to think of it now, the rocks all around us on planet earth are moving ve-e-e-ery sloo-o-owly too-o-o….

When we fully understand that Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay, and truly nothing else exists, it does not surprise us at all to learn that life is a core attribute of consciousness. It is difficult to fully understand everything that this most fundamental sentence of all Apex sentences in this post actually means, although, wow, we are coming to realize more and more completely some of what it means. Even the bit that we can see is boggling!

I have been an eager science hobbyist for most of my life. So I can tell you with confidence that all through the latter part of the twentieth century and the early part of the twenty-first, traditional scientists have been sure that they were just about to figure out how life began. The theory on which most bets have been placed has long been that lightning must have hit just the right random mix of chemicals in some primordial pool, and Presto! We had life. So they would try to replicate this or that mix of chemicals and then zap it in their laboratories. But the problem with solving this most difficult of all scientific problems was figuring out how that spark of life, even if it might have begun this way, could have maintained itself for long enough to have randomly evolved over time a self-sustaining living cell with all that cell’s necessary components. Those popular-science magazine articles of late are less common and not nearly so hopeful.

My dear ones, those materialist/atheist scientists’ primary problem lies in the fact that they long ago turned what should have been an open field of unrestricted inquiry into just one more closed-minded, dogma-driven religion. And what good is that to anyone? They still even today are forcing working scientists to spend effort trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, where of course no such thing ever will be found. Scientists remain stuck with their foolish “fundamental materialist dogma,” even a hundred and twenty years after a few panicked gatekeepers first adopted it as a stopgap measure to try to protect quantum physicists from finding the religionists’ God. So even more than a century later they still are forced to come up with endless arbitrary nonsense. Like, for example, a “Big Bang” of something from nothing as their explanation for the origin of reality, even though of course any reasonably intelligent twelve-year-old child can simply ask, “So, what came before that?” And the scientists are undone. That child’s question is one that no scientist can honestly answer. Scientists are going to have to give up their artificial materialist/atheist dogma eventually, whether it’s now or another thousand years from now! And from now until they eventually do give it up, every bit of the science that they claim to be doing in the interim will be severely tainted by the fact that their dogma always insists that they get “One free miracle; then we’ll explain the rest.” This is true of the Big Bang, and of most other areas of inquiry as well. Frustrated materialist scientists still are forced to defend the nonsensical proposition that all of reality is just an ephemeral nothing.  

Consciousness is all that exists. And since consciousness is both timeless and eternal, and life is a fundamental property of consciousness, once mainstream science as a discipline stops adhering to its silliness of materialist/atheism, and it frees all scientific researchers to at last do open-minded scientific research, then in very short order the answers to every question that they even now still have to fudge will be honestly found. In non-time and non-space, all reality lies in the simple underlying certainty that consciousness truly is all! 

… He can grant a wish or make a dream come true.
He can paint the clouds and turn to gray the blue.
He alone is there to find a rainbow’s end.
He alone can see what lies beyond the bend.
He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold!
He knows every lie that you and I have told!
Though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Richard Mullan & Jack Richards, from “He” (1969)

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Being Conscious

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Whether I’m right, or whether I’m wrong,
Whether I find a place in this world or never belong,
I gotta be me, I’ve gotta be me,
What else can I be but what I am?

I want to live, not merely survive.
And I won’t give up this dream of life that keeps me alive!
I gotta be me, I gotta be me,
The dream that I see makes me what I am!

That far-away prize, a world of success,
Is waiting for me if I heed the call.
I won’t settle down, won’t settle for less,
As long as there’s a chance that I can have it all!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

Working scientists of every stripe simply cannot get over their frustrated wonder at the plain fact that you are aware that you are reading and making sense of these words. I kid you not. This fact clearly bothers them very much. They still cannot explain how it happens, so they call this central fact of our lives “the hard problem”. And in truth, it is a very hard problem for them! But that is true only because more than a century ago, the scientific gatekeepers, the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, unfortunately began to require that the only trustworthy scientific proofs for anything that they ever will accept must be material in nature. They created what they then called the fundamental scientific dogma that all of reality must be matter-based. But it turns out that not even what our senses perceive as material is actually solid in any meaningful sense. Matter is composed of atoms, and atoms are by their nature almost entirely empty space because even the subatomic particles of which atoms are composed are just whirling specks of energy.  So scientists have given themselves an unnecessary problem which they never will be able to solve.

What’s more, since consciousness is not composed of atoms, as any matter-based form of energy would be composed of atoms, working scientists have long been certain that your conscious awareness must be a mere emission generated by your material brain. So for the better part of the last century, scientists have sought a source of human consciousness inside the human brain, only always and forever to come up empty. Of course, they will never find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, because for matter to generate consciousness would be an impossibility for reasons that scientists cannot understand because they have no scientifically acceptable way even to study what consciousness is. This just-published interview with one of the leading scientific researchers in this field yet again makes that simple fact quite clear. But instead of accepting the fact that, well, of course the brain doesn’t generate consciousness, some neuroscientists have lately decided that, okay, so then your conscious awareness must be  an emission generated by some combination of reactions inside your material brain plus the sensory and emotional reactions of other aspects of your material body as well. Put all of that together, and somehow, Presto! Awareness arises in your whole material body and brain put together. Omigod, what utter and complete nonsense! The scientific community has so narrowly circumscribed its acceptable description of the reality in which we live our earth-lives that much of what is very important is going to remain forever beyond its grasp.

I have spent the past fifty years researching the afterlife. Unlike a working scientist, I have put no limits on what I could study or how I would allow myself to study it; but still, my biggest handicap in doing this research has been the simple fact that I am by nature highly skeptical. In trying to figure out whether an afterlife exists, I was only seeking to make some kind of sense of my childhood experience of light. Even a decade or two after that event, my experience of light still felt as real and immediate as if it had happened only last night, so I had a pressing need to better understand where that light and the voice might have come from. Where else could it have come from, I thought, other than from where the dead are now… that is, if the dead might be still alive somewhere?

Luckily, it turns out that there is a truly amazing amount of consistent evidence that human life is eternal. And figuring out not only that in fact we all do indeed easily survive our deaths, but also that we can learn what happens to us after our deaths, and where and how it all happens, even down to what happens during the many long centuries after each of our deaths on this earth, is actually easy for any disciplined researcher who is willing to devote sufficient time and effort to doing the research. This has been for me by far the most compelling and enjoyable lifelong avocation that you can imagine! You may be surprised to discover that real evidence for the afterlife does not include near-death experiences, which are just spontaneous out-of-body experiences that may include travel into the gigantic astral plane; but NDEs never include visits to the actual afterlife. NDEs are therefore useless as evidence for anything except for the fact that we easily can travel out-of-body. As indeed we can! All of us travel out-of-body during our deep-sleep phase, and we generally do that almost every night.

A few other careful researchers have shared my same wonderful hobby over roughly the same few decades, and we have reached about the same glorious conclusions, which fact has been so greatly reassuring! Two of these peer afterlife researchers who deserve special mention are, of course, Dr. R. Craig Hogan, who does such a wonderful job with seekreality.com, our shared website which at this point is the best and most thorough source of information on death and the afterlife that exists anywhere; and also Australians Victor and Wendy Zammit, whose website, victorzammit.com, is also full of wonderful information. The Zammits’ weekly afterlife newsletter is truly a must-read!

All right, so now my Thomas wants me to tell you some of what – besides him – long ago convinced me that human life truly is eternal. I began to do this research in the early seventies, when I was first living in Boston and browsing used and new bookstores every weekend. Just anywhere that I could find books about death and the afterlife. I consulted mediums, too, finding that a few were good but most were awful, and little by little I came to see that I was putting together a picture of a strictly evidence-based afterlife reality that was consistent and that began to feel real. Here are a few of my high points:

  • Old books about the great early-twentieth-century deep-trance mediums. For example, Gladys Osborne Leonard, who was my favorite, worked with a bossy spirit guide named Feda, as I recall. These grand old mediums had developed their incredible gifts before the development of electric lights, and they could go into a deep trance and turn their bodies over completely to their spirit guides, who then would chattily entertain newly-dead folks who could converse easily and in detail with their relatives in the room. Each book about one of these mediums would contain dozens of vivid conversations between the living and the newly-dead. And all those hundreds of different adventures in all those books about the work of all those mediums were happening in precisely the same wonderful, gigantic place. They all talked about the same process, the same physics, the same clothing, the same surroundings, and all the same minuscule bits of information across the whole gigantic afterlife. The details, both great and small, were all the same.
  • Deathbed Accounts. Experiences of the dying who are not heavily drugged as their death approaches are amazingly consistent, and they seem always to include the comforting assistance of dead loved ones who have come to take them home. These accounts go back as far as the early nineteenth century, when Thomas Jefferson transitioned on the morning of July 4, 1826, and then he appeared to John Adams on that same afternoon to invite him to come and join him in the afterlife. Dead people who appear to the dying this way will usually appear in the upper corners of the room, looking young again and healthy; and once they appear, the dying person will typically stop talking to the living, but will talk only to the new arrival. The dying will even see dead people who, as in Jefferson’s case, have only just died, so the dying person could not possibly know that the deathbed visitor is dead. John Adams’s last words heard by the living were, “Thomas Jefferson still survives!” Those words were no doubt exclaimed by him as a smiling young Jefferson appeared to him in an upper corner of the room.
  • My adventures with mediums. What we want when we consult a medium is a bit of absolutely spot-on evidence that the person that medium is talking with is our own transitioned loved one! And to be sadly frank, nearly all of the mediums that I ever have consulted have given me information that was much too general. “Your Mom is here. She says she’s very proud of you!” Yeah, well, great, but I need something that is a lot more specific than that. The best communication I ever have received from my mother came through a medium not long after my mother’s death. The medium said, “This is your mother. But why does she keep pointing to her eyebrows? Oh. She says she doesn’t need to paint them on anymore.” Bingo! My mother was always embarrassed that her eyebrows were so sparse, and she would paint on these big, black eyebrows. That was the one key thing that she could have said that she would have known would have given me definitive proof of her survival. But this medium could not possibly have known that.
  • Books by extensive astral-travelers. Here I confess that I found some accounts that were so weird they were likely fiction, but I also have read some books by people who have learned to go out-of-body at will, and they could enter the gigantic non-afterlife parts of the astral plane, which is most of the astral plane, and tell us their wonderful travel tales. The more of this literature you read, the more you can see how it paints a picture of a gigantic, largely still unexplored new reality.
  •  My own astral experiences. I cannot go out of body at will, so it wasn’t until April of 2022 that my Thomas first took me to the astral plane and let me remember the experience, because Jesus wanted to talk with me. Now, just to be clear about this, all of us go out of body on most nights during the period of deep sleep that generally comes first each night, but we simply don’t remember doing it. We might chat with our spirit guides and our dead loved ones, but generally we don’t leave our bedroom, or perhaps our immediate neighborhood. Sometimes some of us might astral-travel with the help of our guides, since the astral realms are more or less where we are but just at a higher vibration. Easy to find, if you know how to get there; and easy to get back to your body, since you can follow your silver cord. In any event, I have recently been there, and I know how vastly familiar it is going to feel to you when you yourself go home. The astral plane truly is our eternal home! And once you have visited the astral plane with awareness of the event, you will understand without question that, of course silly bunny, human life is eternal! And these few minutes that we spend on earth for each brief lifetime here are the dimmest shadow of what it feels like to be alive in the astral plane.
  • The Gospels. I have studied the Gospels extensively, even majoring in early Christian history in College, and I am familiar with the rest of the Bible as well. And yet it is only relatively recently that I have come to see how closely Jesus’s Gospel words align with what we learn from the afterlife evidence. It is clear that Jesus was familiar with, and His Gospels reinforce, the details of our eternal home.

As we afterlife researchers have done all this research, of necessity we have also made some side-discoveries. Most notably, in the process of researching death and the afterlife, we have come gradually to understand that what human beings experience as consciousness is the grounding of all reality. Everything that actually exists is composed of and made by consciousness. There really is nothing else. Think of that old cartoon of two swimming fish, where one says to the other, “How’s the water today?” and the other says, “What’s water?” That is us, really. Consciousness is the water in which we swim. And that is true for clueless, oblivious  scientists as well. They cannot study consciousness because consciousness is both the water and the swimmer. They cannot tell the dancer from the dance.

When I was in kindergarten, they taught each student to recite our home address. I recall that back then sometimes after school I would play alone in the empty lot beside my house, and an extremely tall, kind man who wore a long robe was sometimes waiting to talk with me there. He taught me to add to my home address, “the earth, the solar system, the universe, and the Mind of God.” And actually, he was precisely right! All of reality, including the whole of every level of the astral realities, all of it is within the Mind of God, so therefore all of it is One Consciousness. And nothing else but that One Consciousness exists.

Of course, if you think for a moment, you will realize who that long-ago kindly tall man in the woods next door who taught me so much must have been….

 

I’ll go it alone. That’s how it must be.
I can’t be right for somebody else
If I’m not right for me. I gotta be free, I’ve gotta be free!
Daring to try, to do it or die, I’ve gotta be me!
– Walter Marks, from “I’ve Gotta be Me” (1968)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Ours to Do

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

For the beauty of the earth, for the glory of the skies,
for the love which from our birth over and around us lies;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For the beauty of each hour of the day and of the night,
hill and vale, and tree and flower, sun and moon, and stars of light;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.

For the joy of ear and eye, for the heart’s and mind’s delight,
for the mystic harmony, linking sense to sound and sight;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For the joy of human love, brother, sister, parent, child,
friends on earth and friends above, for all gentle thoughts and mild;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

When we read Thomas’s answer given last week to our sweet friend Lynnette‘s wonderful question about who Jesus really is, we soon see that answer as what it is in fact. Once it satisfactorily answers Lynnette’s question, it then goes on, and it becomes in fact a gigantic challenge to each of us, does it not? It is Jesus saying to you and to me, “Oh beloved child of God, I achieved the seventh level of reality naturally, not even knowing what I was doing. And from there, I looked back at the earth, and I saw so many people struggling on earth through lifetime after lifetime because they had no idea how to do for themselves what I had so easily done for Myself.” So, from the heart of our Lord Jesus’s pure, holy love for humankind, He begged of the Godhead the gift for us of that one more lifetime for Himself that He wanted to live here only for us. He wanted to come back to earth, my dear ones, just as our Teacher! For all of us living on earth at that time, our life was still what Gautama Buddha had called just an endless “turning on the wheel.” We would come back over and over again, for pointless lifetime after pointless lifetime, never knowing why we kept coming back, so for lifetime after lifetime we made almost no spiritual progress.  So our beloved Elder Brother took upon Himself all the struggles and pains of that additional lifetime that He lived as Jesus, and all and only for His great love for each of us!

Even Jesus’s death on the cross as He was exiting that additional lifetime as Jesus was by His Own choosing, and it was done for us. His original plan that had been made for that lifetime had included His simply slipping away when His earthly teaching work had been completed, and being subsumed once again up into the astral plane. But Jesus had been unsuccessful in persuading the people that He was trying to teach that their lives would be eternal. Because, of course, they all thought they knew better. The custom of the day was to lay out the bodies of the newly-dead in caves to decay down to just their bones; and then when there were only bones left, those bones would be collected into bone-boxes, called ossuaries, which would be labeled with the decedent’s name and stored away. So don’t tell us that we don’t die, Lord Jesus! We love you, sir, but we know better than that! We have watched all those bodies decay down to their bones!  

So Jesus changed His life-plan while He was living here on earth. He decided that instead of just walking away, He would die a very public death on a cross, so everyone would know that He had become stone-cold, flat-out absolutely as dead as a doornail. Then He would reanimate that dead body while it lay there in the cave where it had been laid out to rot away (see e.g. MT 28), so Jesus could reoccupy his own rotting corpse a couple of days later and walk it out of that cave under His own power. “Ta-da! See? I am not dead after all!” Of course, that body was not actually alive again, was it? Not at all. It was already rotting! He used it for just a day or two to prove His point that He Himself was alive! Then He cast His material body aside and used an astral body for the forty days or so before He bodily ascended.

I have written elsewhere about the Shroud of Turin and the Sudarium (face-cloth) of Oviedo, in Spain. The modern evidence that these relics are genuine is abundant, and at this point I consider that evidence to be irrefutable. Here is some of what has persuaded me:

  • Both relics date to the time of Jesus. The linen of which they are made can be carbon-dated to His lifetime, it is of a weave then in common use, and it still carries pollen from plants that would have been blooming in a first-century Jerusalem springtime.
  • The blood on both relics is male and of type AB. Surprisingly, only about two percent of modern people share Jesus’s blood type.
  • The marks on both relics mirror Jesus’s injuries. The distribution of dried blood on both cloths and some twenty other points of similarity make it statistically certain that they covered the same man, that He was Jewish and He died on the eve of the Sabbath, and that He had suffered the same wounds that the Gospels report that Jesus suffered.
  • The Shroud carries an image which is a photographic negative of a man. That image  appears as smudges on the cloth itself, and the reason for this was not apparent until 1898, when the Shroud was first photographed; whereupon, the clear image of a crucified man appeared on its negative plate. Those smudges had been documented to exist on the Shroud of Turin for almost two millennia before anyone could have known what a photographic negative even was! Moreover, it is a 3-D negative. Mathematical analysis of it presents a perfect three-dimensional image of that crucified Man.
  • No one knows how the image on the Shroud was made. It appears as a scorch on just one side of each individual fiber, and it does not penetrate the fibers at all. Analysis shows that it is not a pigment, nor is it anything else man-made. The best explanation we are given is that it was caused by an immensely powerful “electrical charge in the form of radiation.” And that burst of radiation from the body of the victim is said to have happened well after the blood had dried. So… a couple of days later.
  • Something amazing to consider. Experts who have examined those scorches and are able to do the calculations now tell us that what would have been required to produce them would have been a tremendous burst of energy from the body after its death that was roughly equivalent to or greater than all the electricity now being produced on earth put together, in a single discharge. This energy would have come not from the physical body, of course, but from Jesus’s astral body, returned after two days to reanimate His corpse.

We can see from closely reading the Gospels that Jesus’s reanimated physical body was not made actually alive again. Two days after it had died on the cross, its blood had coagulated and its flesh was decaying. The Gospels suggest that those who had known Jesus did not readily recognize Him when He appeared wearing his own rotting body. Jesus Himself considered His body to be so fragile that He warned Mary Magdalene not to touch it (see JN 20:16). But Jesus could briefly re-inhabit and re-animate that body to the extent that it could again walk and talk, and that was enough for Him to prove His point: He could demonstrate that He had survived His crucifixion, and therefore we also will survive our own deaths. He also was able to manage to guard and preserve those two pieces of cloth for two thousand years thereafter, with enough evidence on them that He can prove to us now that He did indeed live and teach as Jesus, having been born in Bethlehem from out of the Godhead. Jesus’s story and His teachings as they are preserved for us in the Biblical Gospels are absolutely real, and He can indeed prove the truth of all of it now!

So, there you have the genuine miracle of our eternally risen Jesus. Two thousand years ago God came to earth as a human being, and He lived among us for thirty-three years. Then by His Own choice and as a gift to us all He allowed Himself to be tortured, crucified, murdered, wrapped in a Shroud which still exists as His gift of proof for us to this day, and His body was laid in a tomb. Two days after that He re-animated His dead physical body with an extraordinary burst of energy from His eternally living astral body, and that energy was at least equivalent to all the electricity now being produced on this earth being generated in one amazing blast! He then showed Himself to His disciples to prove to them, and to us, and to all of humankind that human life is indeed eternal, and that none of us ever is going to die.

And my very dear ones, all of this is Jesus’s great gift to each one of us! This much is His gift! All of it was His alone to do, because that was what He was able to do, and only He could have done it for us. it was what, clearly, you and I could never have discovered for ourselves. He did everything that He could do for us, and He gave us all of Himself gladly and in full measure. What Jesus could not do, however, was to force us to understand everything that He was actually teaching, to learn the deeper meanings of all of His words. To put together all the great and glorious truths that could help us to rally and to learn and to actually grow spiritually! No, learning all of what Jesus taught us, and using it to at last grow away from fear and hatred and forever toward ever more perfect love, clearly all of that is still necessary for each of us to do individually. That part still is yours and mine to do. 

Jesus has very well lit the way ahead for us all. He taught us that what we were here to do was to raise our personal vibrations away from fear and hatred and as close as possible to love and joy! Or, as Jesus was fond of putting it, to make the earth more like the kingdom of God. He uses the term “kingdom of God” fourteen times in Mark and thirty-one times in Luke, where He specifically says, “The kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:21). So, how can we more easily make that be true right now, and how can we follow the teachings of Jesus closely enough to raise our own vibrations sufficiently to make this our own last necessary earth-lifetime? These two big steps are crucial:

  • We must remove all negativity from our lives. This is not optional, nor is it a “do your best” sort of step, but if you are serious about raising your spiritual vibration, you must from this day forward eliminate every form of even somewhat fear-based or rage-based entertainment, every lazy habit of negative thought or action, and every bit of me-vs.-you or us-vs.-them warlike feeling from your life forevermore. Some adversarial feeling seems harmless to us, especially the political and the sports-type variations, and a lot of that even can feel enjoyable. But it does negative things to our minds emotionally, so all of it has to go! To harbor any of this emotional negativity at all is like carrying a leaden weight around your neck that makes it impossible for you ever to rise.
  • Forevermore, we can think only loving thoughts and undertake only loving actions! Working toward our personal spiritual perfection is not a part-time effort. And it is emphatically not for sissies! Jesus says to us, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you” (MT 5:43-44). And that is that. For the rest of your life. The beautiful instrument that you truly are must play only one high, pure note of love! The love that Jesus requires of us now is not just the pretty sort of “love God and love your fellow man” that we enjoy reading about in Gospel passages like this: “‘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). No, the true love of God that Jesus talks about is like sunlight and rain: God gives it equally to us all. And so we also must in God’s image impartially forgive and equally love all people, no matter what they may do to us, and for the same reason that Jesus gives for forgiving those who were even in that moment driving the spikes through His flesh at His crucifixion. He said, “Father, forgive them for they do not know what they are doing” (LK 23:34).

So Jesus came to earth two thousand years ago to give us the greatest set of spiritual lessons that ever has been given to humankind. He could teach us how to perfectly forgive and love, but what He could not do was to personally force-feed to us how best to apply what He had taught us to our own daily lives in ways that would most efficiently and rapidly elevate our own spiritual vibrations! That part of this process is ours to discover. And then it remains for each of us to do Jesus’s work in our own lives in order to make of this our last necessary earth-lifetime.

 

For Thy church, that evermore lifteth holy hands above,
offering up on every shore her pure sacrifice of love;
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
For Thyself, best Gift Divine, to the world so freely given,
for that great, great love of Thine, peace on earth, and joy in heaven:
Lord of all, to thee we raise this our hymn of grateful praise.
– Folliott S. Pierpoint (1835-1917), from “For the Beauty of the Earth” (1864)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

 

 

Who Is He?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I am weak but Thou art strong.
Jesus, keep me from all wrong!
I’ll be satisfied just as long
As I walk, let me walk close to Thee. 

Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be! 

Thro’ this world of toil and snares
If I falter, Lord, who cares?
Who with me my burden shares?
None but Thee, dear Lord, none but Thee!
– Kenneth Morris (1917-1989) “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (1940)

I have been getting a certain specific question only very recently. I cannot recall ever receiving it before perhaps the year 2022, and it surprised me at first, three years ago, when someone rather shyly asked it. But then a year later, someone else asked almost the same question in a different form. Then last year, I had a similar question asked of me actually several times; and  now, here it is again! Actually, it is an excellent question, a deep and very important question, and this time it was especially well and very thoughtfully asked. So, I gave her the best answer that I could manage in the few minutes that I ever have to devote to each emailed question. Only to find then to my horror that, as sometimes happens, my communicator had given the system a wrong address, so my earnest answer written to her had bounced off into the nether to nowhere. Thomas then suggested that it was time to make her very good question the subject of our weekly blog post. Great idea! So, okay. First, my dear ones, her question was this:

Hi Roberta, I was hoping you could help me with a question that has bothered me for my entire life. I was raised Christian in the episcopal church and I’ve had multiple experiences with loved ones that have passed on. But I have a problem with Jesus. Not that I don’t believe in him, because I do, but it’s so hard for me to say he’s the only son of God when I feel we are all sons and daughters of God. Or that he died for our sins so we can have ever lasting life. I feel he’s more of a wise brother than a savior. I feel he was a very evolved soul that tried to lead us in the right direction here on earth. Am I way off base? I feel like I’m committing blasphemy every time I say that I don’t believe he’s the only son of God. Thank you in advance for any clarification you can give me.

As our questioner points out, we all are equally sons and daughters of the living God. We all are bountifully loved by God, we all are made in God’s spiritual image, and there is nothing that any of us can do to remove ourselves from the infinitely powerful and eternal love of God. There is no need even to cite Biblical quotations yet again that will once more ground us all in those eternal basic facts as they are expressed in the Old Testament, and then as they are further confirmed by Jesus. They are true beyond question! We are all God’s children. So, where then does Jesus fit in?

Our questioner further asks us about that vexing core Roman Christian doctrine specifically, the one that tells us that Jesus died to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. Since all of us are alike the infinitely beloved sons and daughters of God, then she has trouble believing that Jesus died for our sins, or that He ever needed to do that. What kind of a petty, unloving, and judgmental God would demand such a thing of that God’s own beloved children? And she is right, of course. An infinitely loving God of all would never require a human blood-sacrifice! That whole notion that Jesus died for our sins was nothing more than a barbaric third-century pagan idea that the Roman Emperor Constantine incorporated into his newly-invented version of Christianity, which was not even remotely built around what Jesus actually had taught while He was on earth. Jesus did say that He came to save us, but He first made it emphatically clear that God never judges us by saying, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son” (JN 5:22). So Jesus told us that the Roman Christian dogma was flat wrong! And He at the same time made it clear in the Gospels that what He, Jesus, had come to save us from was spiritual ignorance. Otherwise, why did He even bother to teach us so earnestly about love and forgiveness for three and a half years? If the Roman Christian religion had been centered around the message of Jesus, and not instead built around purely fear-based, third-century pagan Roman ideas, that religion would be very different today! But that was not what our correspondent primarily asked me. Instead, if we might paraphrase her question, she wonders how, if at all, Jesus might differ from the rest of us, all of whom are alike God’s own children?

Ah, here now is a genuine story to be told. Our much-beloved Jesus told me the basics of His personal story on the night of April 6, 2022, when Thomas took me to meet with Jesus on His riverbank on the third level of the astral plane. Jesus then wanted Thomas and me to begin to prepare a website for Him, And that, very gradually, we have been fleshing out, although Jesus seems to feel no special urgency about our completing it. Apparently, His casualness is because He is still waiting out the gradual weakening and the eventual death of the Emperor Constantine’s dogma-based and fear-based version of Christianity. It is hard for people to grasp the fact that the Roman Christian religion that has been so prominent for the past seventeen hundred years, and that still is in fact the world’s leading religion, is not much based in the actual teachings of Jesus. Realizing that still horrifies me. But, so the truth ever presents itself to us, my dear ones!

When Jesus first told His story to me on that night in early April of 2022, I found it to be difficult to fully piece together. But my Thomas had been there with Jesus for much of that story as it unfolded, so he has helped me to puzzle it out. Clearly, the One telling me His story on that night really was Jesus. When you are even somewhat used to nighttime astral travel while your body sleeps, as I have lately become used to it, since Thomas has been dragging me along on some nights of late and allowing me to remember parts of it, you soon become used to feeling for and recognizing people by the unique patterns of low and high notes of their personal energies. And Jesus is, wow, uniquely just one extremely high energetic note so strong that unless He tones it down by a lot, you cannot even get close to Him. His energy can feel like an unbearable battering. But on that night, He toned down His energy for me, as He also tones it down for all the newly-transitioned people who visit Him in small groups. Whenever I have visited Jesus, He has repeatedly needed to transform Himself from the way He usually looks in the astral plane, with light-brown eyes, olive skin, and dark-brown, curly hair, into what He and Thomas rather dryly refer to as “church-Jesus”. Just look at any of these illustrations, and you will know what they mean by that term!

So whenever Thomas took me to meet with Jesus in the spring and summer of 2022, Jesus would have repeatedly to stand as we were talking and transform Himself into church-Jesus. The shift in His appearance would be instantaneous. Then He would step away and greet more new arrivals, who would look to be feeling overwhelmed by the experience of actually meeting Jesus! They would genuflect, try to kneel, or maybe make the sign of the cross, while Jesus would try to keep them on their feet and murmur to each of them words of welcome and blessing. If there were babies or young children among them, He would kneel down perhaps, take them into His arms and kiss them and bless them. And He does this for newly-arrived people perhaps every hour or two in earth-terms, all day and all night!

But between-times, whenever I was there, Jesus would be darker-skinned and brown-eyed Mediterranean Jesus with dark all-over curly hair, and He would be softly talking with me as we sat on His riverbank and fed His fish from the grain that just appeared in our hands. Jesus is vibrating so high now that He is vibrating even higher than the seventh level, the Godhead level of our reality; and yet He chooses to remain on Level Three, which is the entry level to the afterlife. Nearly all of us can maintain ourselves at that level easily, and for people coming from the earth-level and traveling astrally, the light seems dimmer there on Level Three than it normally seems to be here in the daytime. Think of the earth-level around sunset, especially since the sky is every color but blue and the vegetation is every color but green. And on that level you are in vibration far below the primary source of astral light, which is the Godhead level. You get used to it, though. Jesus has a slight conversational accent, since English is not His first language; but He speaks English easily. Communication in the astral is generally by mind, and no language is needed if you converse that way, but for newbies from the earth, doing that doesn’t feel comfortable; and Thomas tells me that actually Jesus speaks many earth-languages conversationally pretty well. When Jesus and Thomas are together, though, they often speak some odd and unguessable language. Thomas tells me that what they speak together is their last language from when they shared a lifetime on earth, and they continue to speak it now and then, just to stay in practice. Which makes sense, because there would be no one else who still speaks it now. He tells me the language doesn’t have a name.

Oh my goodness, that last language they spoke together on earth would have been spoken here maybe six thousand years ago! The story of Jesus’s last earth-lifetime began quit simply as He told it to me on the night of April 6, 2022. He told me then that there was a time when He was the middle in age of three princes of a walled city, and they went outside the walls with an armed escort to deliver tribute from their father. He didn’t tell me when this had been. Thomas and I more or less figured it all out afterward. In Jesus’s final normal lifetime on earth so long ago, my Thomas had been His older brother and the city’s general; and the Apostle John had been their youngest brother. The three had been the only sons of the king’s first wife, and while Thomas was grown by then, the younger two were teenagers. Thomas has lived many lives since this one, so his memory of it is hazy, even though, as with the language, he and Jesus have tried to dredge back as much as they can. In any event, their train of wagons carrying tribute was ambushed on its way and plundered, and the three princes were murdered. I gather that then their walled city also was breached, all those six or so thousand years ago. And their parents and other siblings also were murdered, and everything they knew in that lifetime was destroyed.                

So far, our questioner is correct about Jesus. He began as just another child of God, just as all of us are equally beloved children of God. But here, perhaps six thousand years ago, is where Jesus’s story diverges from yours and mine.

When the Beings who would eventually become Thomas, Jesus, and the Apostle John, together with all others who had been massacred with them arrived together in the afterlife, it was then determined that Jesus had achieved all grace. Thomas tells me that in what little he recalls of that last lifetime together, his brother who later became Jesus had been extraordinarily kind and loving, to the point where He would not defend Himself. Thomas’s own barely recalled last memory of that lifetime was that He had died trying to protect his younger brother from a barbarian horde. So it was no wonder that Jesus had then been admitted to Level Seven, to the Godhead level, as a newly Perfected Being. Each of the others in His family, of course, had achieved a much lesser spiritual status.

And this struck Jesus as outrageously unfair! So long ago, what you and I now know about the reasons why we come to earth, the need to raise our spiritual vibrations away from fear and hatred and toward perfect love, and our eventual individual spiritual growth to the point where we each will join the Godhead Collective: none of that process and eventual goal was at all known or even imagined on earth. Jesus had achieved it only randomly and naturally. But nevertheless, He was now expected to meekly join the Godhead Collective? Not on your life was He about to do that! Not when no one could tell Him what was going on, and why His siblings of that lifetime could not also join Him there. He remained in contact with Thomas, the elder brother to whom he was very close, and who had achieved, Thomas thinks, just Level Four or Five. While Thomas strove mightily to just stay in place, and to be there for Jesus whenever Jesus managed to reach out to him, all down through the millennia Thomas had repeatedly to take lifetimes and to come up with stories for the Elders as to why He was trying not to advance. While meanwhile, on the seventh level, Jesus continued to raise a fuss and apparently something like all heck was breaking loose.

Thomas and I don’t know many of the details of what was now happening on the Godhead level during what may have been as much as four thousand earth-years. Jesus tells us that He flat would not yield. He kept asking questions, and gradually He pieced together what had happened to Him, and then what the eternal plan of spiritual growth seemed to be for all of humankind. So then He began to petition the Godhead to allow Him to be born for one more time on earth, so He could teach people more concretely how to achieve what He had achieved naturally. The first response from the Godhead was that people on earth already had the guidance of the Prophets. Surely that was enough! And the thought that Jesus might be born from out of the Godhead level at terrible personal risk to Himself when He was already a Perfected Being was at first unthinkable to the Godhead Collective. But, again, out of His pure love for all of humankind, Jesus remained implacable. And you and I know the rest of this story. My answer to our questioner would be that Jesus is indeed originally one of us. But He is also irrevocably different from us now, in that He is uniquely the Son of God, born again directly from out of the Godhead to teach us how to achieve our own spiritual perfection in this lifetime, just as He once long ago achieved spiritual  perfection for Himself.

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more.
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To thy kingdom’s shore, dear Lord, to thy shore.
– Kenneth Morris (1917-1989) “Just a Closer Walk with Thee” (1940)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

Childhood Transitions

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The little toy dog is covered with dust,
But sturdy and staunch he stands;
The little toy soldier is red with rust,
And his musket molds in his hands.
Time was when the little toy dog was new
And the soldier was passing fair;
And that was the time when our Little Boy Blue
Kissed them and put them there.

“Now, don’t you go till I come,” he said,
“And don’t you make any noise!”
So, toddling off to his trundle-bed,
He dreamed of the pretty toys;
And as he was dreaming, an angel song
Awakened our Little Boy Blue —
Oh! the years are many, the years are long,
But the little toy friends are true!
Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)

My mother knew many old poems by heart. She especially liked “Little Boy Blue,” and she would recite it cheerily as she went about her day. Somehow, it didn’t tug at her heartstrings the way without fail it still does to mine. Even today, I cannot get through all three verses of it without tears in my eyes. Back in the nineteenth century, before the invention of antibiotics and the wonder of protective vaccines, it was not at all unusual for a family’s two or even three young children to all catch diphtheria or typhoid fever or some other now readily preventable illness, and for all of them to be called by an angel on a single night. Indeed, the wisdom was that you should not become too fond of a young child until after it had hit the age of five.

Even as late as Little Boy Blue’s day, memorial photography was a common thing. Most personal photography in the late eighteen-hundreds still happened formally in a studio, so when children and young people died unexpectedly, they often then would be photographed for the first time and in a lifelike pose. Or a whole family would then be photographed, but with one child looking stiffly propped-up. I have a book of nineteenth-century memorial photographs, and it includes some examples of two or even three small children in the same family who had died together of a single illness. They would generally be laid out to be photographed in plain-crafted oblong boxes leaning against a wall, from youngest to oldest. The youngest might be a nine-month-old in a long white christening dress which spills out of the casket onto the floor. Next might be a little boy perhaps two years old, nattily dressed in knickers and with his hands folded, our Little Boy Blue. And the third, larger box might contain a girl of barely four whose hair has been fussily teased into banana curls. Again, she is posed to greet eternity with her hands folded, as if she were an adult. I look at such pictures with sympathetic horror. There was a long-ago night on which this young family had three children, and they were fighting mightily to keep at least one of them alive! But by the next morning, their children all had succumbed to a terrible childhood illness that is just some preventable nothing today.

My comfort is knowing that for most of a century now, sudden childhood deaths have ceased to be the parental nightmare that they once were. In fact, for a  long time it has been a rare thing for a child that survives its birth to then die in childhood of anything except for cancer or an accident. Yet we who study death and the afterlife still can study deaths that happen out of order for the fact that they nevertheless very often turn out to be deaths that were planned before birth, and they clearly were designed to serve useful purposes in their families’ lives. Not every gift is fun to receive!

This phenomenon of childhood deaths as planned family gifts is a tough one for many people to accept. Nevertheless, we are told now that deaths which happen in childhood are a crucial fact of some lives that were well planned before birth; and when sub-adults die, their early deaths were always planned, without exception. My Thomas feels so strongly about this that he now insists to me that every death by any cause that happens before the early twenties is a planned exit by someone who didn’t need to live that additional lifetime, but who chose to be born one extra time and then die very young for the family’s spiritual benefit. Please recall the fact that we come to earth to learn how to better raise our spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward love so we can better grow spiritually. And then consider some of the many kinds of spiritual growth and depth and overall progress that can be gained by those who love and then lose a child.

Consider, too, these important additional factors:

  • Entering Adulthood. Even as late as the mid-twentieth-century, the near-universal acts of marrying and then bringing infants into the world were closely and irrevocably tied. That combined act of marrying and having a first child was seen as the true and essential marker of attaining adulthood, and it was seen to include tremendous emotional stretching and risk. To marry was to accept and to live that risk, with all its attendant complexities and responsibilities. This is a main reason why sex outside of marriage always has been strictly forbidden. It is hard for those younger than perhaps seventy years old now even to imagine this, but the ancient and long-continuing rigid set of family-related customs, further sanctioned and blessed by the Christian religion, is why those few late-Sixties years wrought such utter havoc on Western culture. In only three or four perfectly disastrous years, we went from a comfortable and consistent family-based culture that was at least two millennia old to one which sanctioned free sex outside marriage and the easy use of recreational drugs, and this new culture actually disfavored and even disdained our ever getting married in the time-honored way. Wow, talk about sowing chaos! Many of those in the first Vietnam-War-damaged, drug-addled, free-love Sixties generation never really got over their sudden loss of all constraints. And Western culture as a whole is still struggling to recover from the aftereffects of that awful youthquake today.
  • Turning to God. The unexpected loss of a child is among the worst tragedies that ever can befall us. Many of those who have suffered the sudden and unexpected death of a baby or a young child will tell you that there is no pain as deep as what they have endured, and in the wake of that death they will often look for spiritual solace wherever they can find it. Often, it is when they are in this bereft situation that many people will seek a deeper relationship with God. Whether they return to church attendance, or they seek a spiritual advisor, or their spiritual awakening comes in a more subtle way, for many people, the loss of a baby or a young child will be the cause of a spiritual awakening for them, and the start of a deeper spiritual awareness. The loss of a child can also damage human relationships, true, and it can break up marriages; but sometimes, the deepening of spiritual awareness can lead to greater and more rapid spiritual growth.
  • Enlightening Miracles. These extra births and early deaths can sometimes be amazingly revealing of what planning must be going on behind the curtain! Twenty years ago, I counseled a couple who were learning after many years of trying to have children that the wife was medically confirmed to be infertile. It was now proven to be medically impossible for her ever to naturally conceive a child, so they decided to try the then-new solution of in vitro fertilization; and, wonder of wonders, she was able to carry and deliver fraternal twin boys. But then, to everyone’s horror, when those dearly loved children were toddlers, one of them managed to get through a fence, and after just a moment he was found floating face-down in a pool. The bereaved couple tried IVF again, and they were blessed with two baby girls. So their beautiful family of one boy and two girls was considered to be complete. But then two years later, this young woman who had been medically proven to be incapable of ever conceiving a child now conceived on her own, and she gave birth to a healthy baby boy. The husband and father was, with me, fascinated by this series of happenings. You and I also can think about the pre-birth planning that must have occurred! And we always have been sure that the naturally-conceived boy is of course his own lost brother, Alex, now safely returned to the family.

Each newborn child is, of course, an eternal being. Having by now met three newborns and watched them grow to middle age, I can testify that this is true without question. I can recall looking into the face of each of my newborn children and being amazed to see not a blank stare back, flat and brand-new today. But instead, each was clearly a different eternal being from the moment of birth, surprised to find itself in a whole new place. Each was registering all the emotions upon greeting this new world and its mother that would be appropriate for the unique human being in my arms that I would later come to know so well. My older daughter was looking around, curious, quite interested in the world but not particularly in me (she has Asperger’s syndrome). My middle child, also a girl, does not have Asperger’s, and she was glancing around, but mostly locking eyes with me, seeming to be glad to see me, and cuddling. My son, another Asperger’s child, at first was regarding everything that he saw in this astonishing new world, including me, with a sensible wariness. And that, my dear friends, pretty well sums up the three bright and beautiful offspring who remain at the center of my life today.

Every child who is born into our lives and then dies  early as a sub-adult is, just as we are, a powerful, eternal being. Each child who transitions early from our lives never leaves us randomly; but instead, each such departure is lovingly and carefully planned before that child’s birth to be a constructive gift for all who will know and love that child. And, knowing this to be true, we can especially honor our children who have gone on ahead of us by not blaming God, and not blaming any human agent for the temporary loss of our child. Instead, it is important that we forgive universally and for everything, and that we forgive ourselves and our child most of all! That we will be joyously together again in the afterlife is a certainty, promised to us by God and by Jesus. And, oh my dear ones, how very great will be that day!

Aye, faithful to Little Boy Blue they stand,
Each in the same old place —
Awaiting the touch of a little hand,
And the smile of a little face;
And they wonder, as waiting these long years through
In the dust of that little chair,
What has become of our Little Boy Blue
Since he kissed them and put them there.
Eugene Field (1850-1895), from “Little Boy Blue” (1888)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

No Fear

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The road is long, with many a winding turn
That leads us to who knows where, who knows where.
But I’m strong, strong enough to carry him.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother.

 So on we go. His welfare is of my concern.
No burden is he to bear. We’ll get there.
For I know he would not encumber me.
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother,

 If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’s heart isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another. It’s a long, long road
From which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?
Bob Russell, Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

The first three-quarters of the twentieth century was a time of constant, irrational fear of wars for most Americans, and for many other people on earth as well. There was the First World War, which ran from mid-1914 through most of 1918. And then the Second World War, which followed it from September of 1939 to September of 1945. And that one ended with two nuclear explosions, which told us that forever more after that, nothing ever was going to be the same again. And the Korean War, which went from mid-1950 to mid-1953. And then finally there was the Vietnam War, which struggled on from November 1 0f 1955 right on through April 30 of 1975, believe it or not. And since the United States had exploded those two nuclear bombs in Japan to definitively end the Second World War, it was readily assumed by just about everyone during much of  what was left of the twentieth century that atomic warfare had well and truly begun. So it really was only just a matter of time before atomic weapons would be used in war again.

 I came along just after the duck-and-cover phase of school management, when everyone was supposed to dive under their desks in the event of another nuclear war. But still, when I was in school, we were taught that nuclear war was inevitable, and we simply had to learn to live with that fact. I can remember coming home from school one day so upset that I told my mother that, really, what was the point of anything, when human life was now so precarious? I will remember forever after what she said to me in response. I must have been no older than first or second grade, because I was looking a long way up at her face as she said to me, “We cannot live in fear.” Just those five words. And with those words, my mother changed my entire outlook! No, we cannot live in fear. My mother was perfectly right!

My mother and I talked a good deal about this, off and on throughout my growing-up. She was a firmly devout Christian, a leader in her Congregational Church, and she was an absolute rock of certain devotion to God. As I grew, and as I simply followed the tranquil certainty of her lead in trusting God, I came to realize that there is a path forward in finding that certainty in God’s patient love. In addition, those of us who were working in the study of afterlife evidence soon came across the fact that elevated Beings had been so horrified by Hiroshima and Nagasaki that they had vowed right then never to allow another nuclear weapon to be used in warfare. We later learned that apparently this directive actually had come from the Godhead directly. And you will note that, sure enough, despite the fact that nine countries presently have nuclear weapons, including the United States, Russia, France, China, the United Kingdom, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea, some of which are not, shall we say, especially friendly. Still, in the eighty years since the Second World War ended, no nuclear weapon has ever again been used in anger.

I no longer think that we can assume that any of this can be attributed to chance. During the past eighty years, there have been too many very-near-miss situations. Including at least one American missile test which was foiled when an unknown missile came from out of nowhere and shot it down. And then there was the well-documented situation of Stanislav Yevgrafovich Petrov (7 September 1939 – 19 May 2017), better known as “The man who saved the world.”

Petrov was a lieutenant colonel in the Soviet Air Defense Forces. He was on duty at the Serpukhov-15 bunker on September 26, 1983, when there was suddenly an alarm loudly sounding that indicated that a massive number of American missiles was right now incoming on Russia. Oh my God! Petrov should at once have notified his superiors, and there should have been a massive retaliatory nuclear strike launched against the United States right now, at once, while such a strike still was possible. But from somewhere came the thought that this must be a false alarm. And so, against all rationality and all common sense, Petrov waited. And he waited. And he waited some more, with his heart quite literally in his throat because if he was wrong about this, there would go his country and all that he loved in a bout of rampant nuclear destruction. But Petrov was not wrong. No American missiles ever came.

Again and again in the modern world, People who were working for God have, often unwittingly, done their great work for good, and often with no recognition at all.  Stanislav Petrov does deserve a statue for his heroic act somewhere in the United States, and perhaps in the Capitol itself? It would be lovely if all the courageous stories of unsung people like him could be told to our children. When the stories that we tell our children about people in other countries are not stories of petty hatreds, but when they are instead stories about people like Stanislav Petrov, people who love foreign strangers enough to say, No, I don’t believe they would send missiles at us. I don’t fear them. I love them. I trust them. And I will give them a chance to live.

And that love of good people for strangers is something that we must never take for granted! But what about the malevolence of a blind, uncaring universe? This linked article in the popular science magazine New Scientist is entitled, “The universe could vanish at any moment – why hasn’t it?” and like all such articles in all such magazines, it goes into a learned and complicated dither about just how extremely precarious everything is, and how it all eventually is going to end; but still why, nevertheless, you and I probably are going to be okay just for the moment. Or maybe for longer.  But consider for a moment that since the very recent-seeming year 2000, just shy of a quarter of a century has already passed. Only one more year will do it! We tend to think of a century as such a long time, but it is nothing, really. And I didn’t give that sobering fact much thought until I sat down just now to write this blog post. My, my. What then is a human being’s life, when it is planned to take so little time as one century?

All these musings came about because I have been very ill this week, and certainly in no condition to write. On Thursday, I told Thomas that we still needed a blog post topic for this weekend, like it or not. And as he tends to do when it is already Thursday, he gave me just one word. He gave me Fear as a topic. Oh my goodness, fear is the strongest negative word, and to boot, he said that the idea had come from Jesus. Jesus is quite bothered by the fact that so many people who are going home now are so fearful! And He feels that is more and more because the earth overall is so fearful, and so deeply negative. He thinks that what is needed for us is a more focused personal forgiveness practice which will make our eventual going-home process easier for us, and much more joyous. After all, this past quarter of a century since the twenty-first century began was a quarter of your own life! And how have you used it? What have you learned? What would you like to do with the next quarter of your life?

And above all, my darling ones, Jesus suggests to us now that we truly never need to fear anything. Just remember again that God has decided that there will never be another atomic bomb exploded in a war; and according to God’s decision, so it ever has been, for the past eighty years. Whenever I have thought of something like, “OMG! All our enemies have nuclear bombs!” or, “Scientists say the whole universe could vanish at any moment! We’re doomed!” I always at once think, “Nah.” Because I know that God always has my back. And God has your back, too! God loves each of us more than any of us can possibly imagine .No matter what ever happens, my dear ones, you and I are always safe in Everlasting Arms.

 

If I’m laden at all, I’m laden with sadness
That everyone’ heart isn’t filled with the gladness
Of love for one another. It’s a long, long road
From which there is no return.
While we’re on the way to there, why not share?

 And the load Doesn’t weigh me down at all
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother. He’s my brother!
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!
He ain’t heavy, he’s my brother!
=Bob Russell, Bobby Scott, from “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother” (1969)

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)

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