Author: Roberta Grimes

God and Creation

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It is amazing that deep in the twenty-first century we still don’t have good answers to humankind’s three most important questions. The scientific community has pontificated, and various religions have opined, but none of what any of them says feels right. Here is the sorry state of play, at a time when we really need to know!

  • What is God? Scientists beg the question by assuming no God, but the Judeo-Christian concept of a Big Guy on a Throne is no better. How can one God with human failings like anger and a reluctance to forgive have created this active universe full of an estimated one billion trillion stars, not to mention all the details of our planet with its seven billion people living complex lives? Those of us who study the greater reality have come to understand that the only thing that objectively exists is consciousness, and we assume that God is the love-based top, but how can creation really come from something so vague and vapory? No matter whose version of God we choose, if we are being honest we must admit that all of them are cartoonish and frankly inadequate to the task of being the omnipotent Creator God, and also the God Who hears every prayer.
  • Why does the universe exist? Or as the late physicist Stephen Hawking put it, “What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe? … Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?” Physicists have no idea, but again, our religions are no better. Some say the universe was created as a place of misery to be overcome, or perhaps as a place where God can choose a few people to save and send the rest to hell. Others point to the notion that a lonely God might have needed worshipers. If a genuine God exists Who created this amazing universe, then it seems to be an insult to God for us to assume that God created it for a trivial, a selfish, or a barbarically manipulative reason.  
  • How did the universe begin? And what maintains it? Scientists have discovered the Big Bang, by means of which they propose that the entire universe began 13.8 billion years ago by expanding from something the size of a pencil dot to its present great size and complexity. But they cannot meaningfully speculate about how and why the Big Bang occurred, nor can they say how it has managed to avoid either collapsing upon itself or blowing apart in all the intervening eons. They simply beg every question again by telling us that the fact that the universe exists and is stable means that its beginning and subsequent stability were within whatever might have been the range of possibilities. And we have to admit that the Christian creation notions are plain ridiculous! The basic Bible version tells us that something like six thousand years ago this universe was created in less than a week. Every creation theory is so unsatisfying that there might as well be no theories at all.

I set out half a century ago to understand my childhood experiences of light. I knew they had been real! So I spent my life studying the afterlife and the greater reality that includes this whole universe, and after decades I put it all together. At last it really did make sense! But I completed that work ten years ago, and still there was a big something missing. I understood it, but it didn’t feel real. I can see now that what I actually have spent my whole life searching for was satisfying answers to these three questions. And I further realize that it has been my residual Christian squeamishness that has put me through a further decade of floundering. It was only when we sat at the Lord’s feet and really listened to Him that I was able to trust Him enough to put together three daring evidence-based answers which, surprisingly, work pretty well together! My primary guide considers these answers to be sufficient to begin our better understanding, and he asks that I now share them with you. This is not an end to our seeking, but it does give us a sounder beginning.

What Is God?

I have been seeing references to the possibility that God is plural since I was a child. The old Hebrew word for God is the plural “Elohim.” There are hints at God’s plurality in the Old Testament, too; for example, “Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness’” (Gen 1:26). When I was deep in reading old channeled materials as I began my serious afterlife studies, I found that all the advanced beings who spoke with authority to us through channels made it clear that they were speaking for collectives of hundreds or thousands of advanced beings. My guide, Thomas, has let me know that he is working with a collective, too. Mikey Morgan, living at the Sixth Level, insists that God is “the unity of pure love.” Advanced beings tell us that Jesus “came from the highest aspect of the Godhead.” And the teachings of Jesus are all about erasing the separations between people! It is clear that the farther we advance spiritually, the more we are drawn to work closely together, and it seems that working in collectives is pretty much the way all advanced beings roll. So now Thomas has flat-out told me that I must get over my Christian qualms and accept the fact that the Creator God at the Source Level of the greater reality is a Collective of Perfected Beings.

Why Does the Universe Exist?

The only sensible explanation for the existence of the universe that I ever have found is based in A Course in Miracles. I don’t have a searchable ACIM, but the explanation goes something like this: “Into the mind of the Son of God came a tiny, mad idea at which the Son of God forgot to laugh.” That idea was the possibility of separation, and Mind is so infinitely powerful and creative that immediately that separation happened! At once, of course, God ended it. But inside that infinitely powerful and creative separated bit, Mind already had manifested time and space and minutely divided minds. According to this explanation, what we are living in now is that long-ago mistakenly separated bit of Mind, and what is still going on within created time is the rescue mission that eons ago ended that very brief separation. Beyond time, we already are back in God, and we have been back in God for eons. What we are doing now within this artificial time is simply remembering what we are, and as we do that we become aware of being the perfect beings in the Godhead that we are eternally.

How Did the Universe Begin? And What Maintains It?

We talked last week about the fact that what we think of as the past is just a part of Now. So it may not surprise you to know that the secret to understanding how the universe is created, and how it is so well maintained, is that God continuously manifests this universe in each micro-instant. Each present manifestation includes all of history, so it is simple for God to change the past. And God does that! This universe has been expanded, with galaxies and complexities continuously added, and then even a Big Bang was added too with all its related history, to ensure that we never will find an edge. The Collective has included enjoyable ways for us to study this increasingly complex history by, for example, creating a backstory for life on earth that is complete with fossilized bones and other bits of evidence. They even have gone to the amazing trouble of making matter mathematics-based. There is no other reason for the history and details of this material universe to be based in the human science of mathematics than to give us a way to study what is in fact an entirely Mind-created reality! Of course, there are glitches to be seen, such as the odd way that evolution stops and starts and the fact that nearly all modern species arrive in history together with modern man in a very recent geological instant. And scientists, still clueless about all of this, continue to trouble the Collective by trying to find ever more of Their little glitches!

This notion is not as mind-bending as it seems. Nothing much really changes from micro-instant to micro-instant, just as when Lego toy films are created not much will change from frame to frame. And some gradual changes can be automated. Occasionally we even might catch these changes in our history as they are happening! For example, many years ago I read an account by an astronomer who had trained a high-powered telescope on a section of sky where there was literally nothing. He left it there, and a year later he looked through that telescope again, and what do you know? That formerly-empty section of sky now held billions of galaxies!

So, how did this universe actually begin? We who were divided aspects of the Godhead caught in this micro-instant of separation found ourselves in an illusion of a time-bound reality that those of us who were vibrating highest were able to shape into a means for our rescue. With creation happening freshly in each micro-instant, there didn’t need to be much created at first, just matter and energy, time and space, and maybe a solar system with a minimal planet. Then as those of us who thought we were caught in this illusion of separation were better able to notice things, of course it was easy for the ever-increasing Collective of Perfected Beings Who were being developed in that tiny universe to make it ever more complicated, larger and with a more complex history. The billions of years of past universe expansion that now comes with each micro-instant of creation is in reality not old at all, but rather it is continuously new. All that really exists is Mind! And in fact, with gratitude to my brilliant software-engineer daughter, here is hot-off-the-press evidence that even working physicists may be coming to see that no objective reality exists beyond our own minds.

God as Collective is active in our lives by means of our beloved spirit guides. The Collective’s minions are as close to us as our own thoughts! And they work so smoothly with the Divine Collective that for the first time we can see that, yes, God truly does hear all our prayers.

It will occur to you that God as Collective may not be the Ultimate God. After all, Who was the God Who ended that micro-instant of mistaken separation? My guess is that your suspicion is right, and there is an even much greater God beckoning for us to achieve the perfection of the Godhead that we know, and then to continue on toward ever more glorious Everlasting Arms. But there is little point to our wondering about that just yet. For now, our task is to grow spiritually so we can escape this mistaken separation which actually ended long ago. Surely it is long past time for us to be learning and devoutly living a more spiritually productive kind of love….   

 

Eagle Nebula photo credit: Abel de Burgos <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/28608040@N07/39683390343″>Eagle nebula or M16</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Supernova photo credit: Martin_Heigan <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/97303475@N00/46576962622″>Simeis 147 Supernova Remnant</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Heart & Soul Nebula photo credit: José Jiménez – Astromet <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/21144055@N04/46357800544″>IC1805 and IC1848 – The Heart and Soul Nebulae</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Tar Pits photo credit: Animal People Forum <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/84236606@N02/46361498164″>Sabertooth and mammoth, depicted in mural at La Brea Tar Pits and Museum</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Butterfly photo credit: Thank you, my friends, Adam! <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/101289507@N04/33141032878″>An Exlporer</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Timeless

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Scientists never make anything like the public fuss that they ought to be making about the fact that they cannot understand time at all. Apparently there is no scientific reason why time should run in one direction, why it should be constant and measurable, or even why it should exist; so pretty much the best they have been able to come up with is more scientific-sounding versions of the famous and perhaps apocryphal quote that is generally attributed to Albert Einstein: “The only reason for time is so that everything doesn’t happen at once.” Physicists have concluded that the passage of time is probably an illusion, so in desperation they have of late turned to philosophers and other non-physicists to try to gain some further insights. They even talk about wishing they could do away with time altogether. Some physicists are eager to find a way for time to have existed before the Big Bang, but apparently for most of their theories to be right, that pre-universe time must have run in reverse.

Mainstream physicists’ core problem remains what it long has been. They assume that this universe is solid and stable; that it began 13.8 billion years ago in a physical event that we call the Big Bang; and that it continues to chug along as an independent machine. The fact is that time is just one of many fudge-factors that the Collective which is the only God makes use of as It creates this physical universe. The great Rupert Sheldrake very enjoyable discusses a few of these adjustments that are continuously being made in his famously banned Ted talk. It turns out that objective time as we think we are familiar with it does not really exist at all.

I first wrote about time five years ago, when I was freshly fascinated by past-life regression therapy and how it meant that in a more enlightened age we might be able to heal the world’s past. Two years later I addressed an emphatically non-particle-physics version of what matter-bound physicists call spacetime. I am surprised to see how well those blog posts still hold up! Let’s just bring them forward now to help us better understand creation and the nature of the material universe that we believe is all around us.

Scholars of the greater reality of which this material universe is a part have come to understand that the following things are probably or certainly true:

  • Time is not objectively linear. The implications of this likelihood are manifold and confusing! For example, such ostensibly time-related concepts as cause and effect may not be happening as we perceive them to be happening.
  • Matter and energy, time and space are holographic. So each unit (how ever you might measure that unit) contains all the information of every other unit. After more than a quarter of a century, Michael Talbot’s extraordinary The Holographic Universe  continues to look better and better!
  • Matter and energy, time and space are mind-created. Universal Mind is their foundation, and each of our minds is an undivided part of that universal Mind. This suggests that Mind may also be a hologram, and our superconscious minds likely are more powerful than we can imagine.
  • All our lifetimes are happening simultaneously, and they influence one another. Something like reincarnation does happen, but it happens outside of time. Early in my research I encountered the suggestion by a discarnate that we might consider ourselves to be like a bucket out of which each lifetime is dipped and back into which each lifetime is poured. A corollary of this simple understanding is that as each of us makes or avoids making spiritual progress in this lifetime, we affect for good or ill all our other lives, both past and future. The effectiveness of regression and progression therapy as a means of curing our present-life mental and physical ailments suggests this to be true.
  • All past and future events are happening simultaneously, and they influence one another. It was this mind-bending concept that so fascinated me five years ago, when I first wrote about time.
  • Experiencing time is optional for those that we used to think were dead. They can live on earth-time in order to more easily interact with loved ones still in bodies, or they might instead disengage from time altogether and spend earth-eons in bliss. They can opt into and out of versions of time as you might on earth choose your daily clothing.

Wonderfully, some scientists are beginning to talk about time in a way that is consistent with what the not-really-dead have been telling us is true. Bernardo Kastrup is a European computer engineer who has worked at some of the world’s leading research laboratories, including the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN). His upcoming book is The Idea of the World: A Multi-Disciplinary Argument for the Mental Nature of Reality. Not having read it, I cannot vouch for his book, but it does look to be an important step toward obliterating the entire notion that time is objectively real and linear! To give you a flavor of it, Dr. Kastrup wrote a blog post for Scientific American in which he said in part:

“There can only be experiential flow if there is experience in the past, present and future. But where is the past? Is it anywhere out there? Can you point at it? Clearly not. What makes you conceive of the idea of the past is the fact that you have memories. But these memories can only be referenced insofar as they are experienced now, as memories. There has never been a single point in your entire life in which the past has been anything other than memories experienced in the present.

“The same applies to the future: where is it? Can you point at it and say ‘there is the future’? Clearly not. Our conception of the future arises from expectations or imaginings experienced now, always now, as expectations or imaginings. There has never been a single point in your life in which the future has been anything other than expectations or imaginings experienced in the present…

“Let’s make an analogy with space. Suppose that you suddenly find yourself sitting on the side of a long, straight desert road. Looking ahead, you see mountains in the distance. Looking behind, you see a dry valley. The mountains and the valley provide references that allow you to locate yourself in space. But the mountains, the valley, your sitting on the roadside, all exist simultaneously in the present snapshot of your conscious life…

“You see, whether time flows forward, or doesn’t flow at all, or moves back and forth, our resulting subjective experience would be identical in all cases: we would always find ourselves in an experiential snapshot extending smoothly backwards in memory and forwards in expectation, just like the desert road…

“The ostensible experience of temporal flow is thus an illusion. All we ever actually experience is the present snapshot, which entails a timescape of memories and imaginings analogous to the landscape of valley and mountains. Everything else is a story.”

Brilliant. Dr. Kastrup’s book will be out on April 1st, and it looks as if he will be ripping the bandage off the scientific wound that is the false notion of objective linear time. In doing so, he brings us one step closer to what we now understand from those who are not dead after all is the actual nature of this material reality. There is one explanation of time that makes it possible for everything that Dr. Kastrup and I have said here to be true, and it fits with what we have come to understand with the assistance of a host of elevated beings about the nature of God, the nature of reality, and why this universe even exists. It all comes together and begins to make sense, even to these minimal minds that are all that you and I can access while we are still in physical bodies! Better understanding the illusory nature of time is the key to our finally making sense of how this universe came into being. Next week let’s take a peek behind God’s curtain….

Watch in hand photo credit: Stiller Beobachter <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/56091199@N03/5249841186″>old timer</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Kingdom of God on Earth (Part IV)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The kingdom of God was the Lord’s obsession. He uses the term more than fifty times through all four Gospels, and He refers to “the kingdom of heaven” almost thirty times in the Gospel of Matthew. Since the terms seem to mean the same thing to Jesus, this is likely another translation glitch so to avoid confusion I will use “the kingdom of God” even in those Matthew quotations. While modern-day adherents of the fear-based Christianity that was shaped in those first-millennium councils continue to obsess about sin and the bogus idea that Jesus died to save us, we who seek to follow the Way of the Lord can read the Gospels more as they were spoken. And we soon realize that most of what Jesus said was instructions about raising our personal consciousness vibrations. We can see now that helping us all to attain the kingdom of God was the reason for the Lord’s whole ministry.

What Jesus called the kingdom of God is what we moderns call the Sixth Level, which is the aspect of non-material reality that is just below the Godhead. And giving us a spiritual gym where we can more efficiently raise our personal vibrations enough to attain that Sixth Level is apparently the whole reason why this universe exists! When Jesus says, “you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:48), He means that literally. He says, “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes (clergymen) and Pharisees (religious big-shots), you will not enter the kingdom of God (MT 5:20). “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of God, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21). “Truly I say to you, among those born of women there has not arisen anyone greater than John the Baptist! Yet the one who is least in the kingdom of God is greater than he” (MT 11:11).

The kingdom of God is the highest consciousness vibration where elevated beings still are striving to raise their vibrations enough to join the Collective that is the true God.

This is a simple matter of consciousness physics! If you allow yourself to feel fear, anger, hatred, or any other ishy emotion, you lower your personal consciousness vibrations; but if you can avoid every negative emotion and make achieving more perfect love your focus, you will raise your personal consciousness vibrations. There are other emotional effects attendant on this process, but they don’t seem to need to be addressed until after the heavy-lifting effort of leaving all negativity behind has been mastered. So for you and me, our task is simple. From this moment and forevermore, we will always and in every instance, no matter how difficult it may be, altogether reject every negative emotion and practice ever more perfect love!

Contrary to what modern Christians believe, none of the teachings of Jesus on love and forgiveness can be seen as aspirational. Instead, they are the basis of the Way of the Lord, the core of what Jesus came to do, and the only thing about the Christian Bible that is worth the cost of its ink and paper. Methods for learning how to love and forgive that have been given to us by Jesus and by other sages down all the generations are everything on earth that matters! Without those teachings, nearly all of us will mindlessly reincarnate for a thousand more frustrating and mostly pointless lifetimes, turning on the wheel and making little progress. But if we will use those teachings well, we can begin today to get pretty close to achieving the kingdom of God in this lifetime!

When I began my afterlife studies, most researchers thought that exalted Sixth Level was not even material. Back then we called it the Causal Level, the place where what was in the rest of the afterlife levels was created; and we also called it the Mental Level, from which ascended beings would materialize to teach those living in the middle levels. It is only recently that we have learned that the Sixth Level is not only material, but it is also amazingly beautiful! And it is full of wonderful universities where those who have mastered perfect love are preparing to ascend to the Seventh Level and become part of the Collective which is the true God.

We don’t know much about what these ascended beings are learning, but we have hints. I recall reading decades ago an account by a woman who claimed to have attained this exalted level, and she told her family that she was learning how to create a living flower. She also said she was part of a group that was experimenting with creating new kinds of living animals, and she thought that was fun but she found it difficult. Mikey Morgan won’t say much about what He is learning in his Sixth Level studies, but he does say those studies involve the more advanced use of energies. To be frank, I never saw much point to any of these exalted classes until I came to see that God is a Collective of Perfected Beings! If we are preparing to become part of the creative force that continuously manifests this universe, then we had better learn the trade!

Once Jesus had taught us how we can attain the kingdom of God in the afterlife reality, He introduced a radical new idea. He said that in strictly following His teachings, we can bring the kingdom of God on earth! He said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; transform your mind and believe in the gospel” (MK 1:15). And He said, “But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God” (LK 9:27). And “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 in your midst” (or “is within you”) (LK 17:20-21).

He told us that spreading the kingdom of God over all the earth would be a gradual process. He said, “The kingdom of God is like a mustard seed, which a man took and sowed in his field; and this is smaller than all other seeds, but when it is full grown, it is larger than the garden plants and becomes a tree, so that the birds of the air come and nest in its branches” (MT 13:31-32). And He said, “To what shall I compare the kingdom of God? It is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (LK 13:20-21).

We now understand, as the Lord’s first listeners never could have understood, why a few people raising their consciousness vibrations would be sufficient to begin to raise the personal vibrations of everyone else on earth. The only thing that exists is an infinitely powerful energy-like potentiality that you and I experience in a dim way as consciousness. Every human mind is inextricably part of that base consciousness which at its highest level continuously manifests this universe, so the more of us who raise our spiritual vibrations, the higher the vibrations of all the minds now vibrating below the Godhead will become. Again, this is simple consciousness physics! Each one of us who commits to achieving the highest vibration we can manage on earth can bring us all just a little bit closer to the moment when everyone on earth is vibrating high enough for wars, anger, suffering, fear, hatred, and every other manner of human evil to be banished forevermore.

What are these Sixth Level beings like personally? When the Lord’s disciples tried to keep little children from approaching Him, He said the like of, “Permit the children to come to Me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child will not enter it at all” (LK 18:16-17). I have by now met a few spiritually advanced people, and I can tell you that even in old age they are surprisingly childlike. Mikey Morgan, too, retains that childlike simplicity and light, even as he perfectly answers the most profound questions. People in bodies who are sufficiently spiritually developed to approach the Sixth Level are invariably warm, mild, very loving, not interested in money or possessions, and closely focused on helping others. They don’t get angry. When they are attacked, they withdraw rather than defending themselves. They seem not to bear ill will against anyone, not even those who set out to harm them!

Even if a substantial number of people were to begin today the process of raising their personal consciousness vibrations, for us to begin to see an appreciable difference in the world would take awhile. The Lord was right about that! So for us to begin right now is urgent. We are told by those not in bodies that all the negative choices made by people on earth over the past few centuries, and especially the brutal negativity of the two great twentieth-century wars, have together so debased the consciousness energy of this planet that it cannot recover unless humankind will soon make some dramatic changes. My own guide, Thomas, has told me that we have another couple of centuries left before the earth will be a bleak and barren wasteland of cruelty and wars, poverty and starvation, and even the added hopelessness of an inability to reproduce without laboratory procedures that few will be able to afford. What horrifies me is that even now we begin to see these disasters unfolding! Human sperm counts are dropping sharply. Political infighting is rampant worldwide, and in too many places innocent people are pawns in their leaders’ power struggles. Thomas assures me that we can turn this around! But when we are talking about raising the consciousness vibrations of seven billion people, even a century or two is not much time.

In order for us to begin to envision that more perfect world of the kingdom of God on earth, there are three more areas where we will need to improve our understand of the greater reality. My own understanding is still developing, but I am being told that now is the time for me to tell you what I know, what I suspect, and how all of this impacts our spiritual growth. So over the next three weeks we will dip more deeply into Time, God and Creation, and Forgiveness and Love. Meanwhile, I hope you will be doing your own deep thinking! Please either tell us in the comments below, or perhaps email me through this website and share with me how you envision that much better future when we will at last be living in the kingdom of God on earth. Let us start to reason together about the most important issue that ever has confronted or ever will confront humankind. This unsuspecting world is ours to save!

 

Jesus face photo credit: giveawayboy <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/49503096783@N01/32282233497″>New canvas print</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
University photo credit: Onasill ~ Bill Badzo – 61 Million Views – Thank Yo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7156765@N05/46058113855″>Crouse College ~ Syracuse University ~ Syracuse NY</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Kingdom of God On Earth (Part III)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The destruction of the Lord’s first effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth was complete. The early Roman Church stamped out every form of Christian thought that did not conform to its fear-based dogmas, and it almost destroyed even the memory of those first three hundred precious years when Jesus had been a vibrant force for love whose teachings were devoutly followed.

Even the Lord’s words were directly edited by the First Council of Nicaea. The Council removed every reference they could find to reincarnation, reportedly because our believing we have just one lifetime was likely to make us try harder. They also added references to church-building, sheep-and-goats judgment, and end-times nonsense that are so different from the Lord’s genuine teachings that we can pluck them out easily.

What may be worse is that the dogmas laid down at Nicaea gave rise to errors that are now embedded in the Gospel words themselves. The earliest translations of the Gospels from Greek into Latin happened later in the fourth century, and they followed upon Nicaea’s ideas. For example, Jesus is frequently quoted as saying versions of “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; repent and believe in the gospel” (MK 1:15). But that is not what Jesus said! The Greek word for what He actually said was metanoeite, which means “transform your mind.” But the prelates who first translated that word from Greek into Latin were so steeped in Nicaea’s fear-based dogmas that they chose instead to use the word paenitentia, which means “repent” or “do penance.”

It is difficult to sufficiently grasp all the damage that  was done by this one change. Jesus had come to help us transform our minds, and had abolished the very notion of sin, but over the past seventeen hundred years the belief that He had told us to “repent” became such a fundamental tenet of Christian thought that even modern translations that are done from the original Greek use the flatly erroneous word “repent.” And this is true, even though it contradicts everything that Jesus actually said! Let’s look at three of the Lord’s core teachings that are starkly incompatible with the notion that Jesus sees us as guilty of anything for which we would need to “repent.”

Jesus Tells Us We Must Always Forgive, and We Must Never Judge

When Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And if we  are broadly forgiven, then repentance is unnecessary. He said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned (LK 6:37). He told us straight-out that even God does not judge us. He said, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). And neither does Jesus judge us. He said, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him” (JN 12:47). He spoke so strongly against every kind of judgment that it is horrifying to see how completely the early Roman Church made the false belief that God judges us its entire fear-based focus.

Jesus Tells Us We Must Love Even those Who Seem Unworthy of Love

He said, “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).“‘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). If we are made to feel so guilty that we need to “repent,” we cannot possibly love these unrepentant others as Jesus tells us we must love them.

The Lord’s Focus is On Teaching Us How to Transform Our Minds

Our need to bring the kingdom of God on earth requires that we now forget about sin and focus on transformation! So He came to share with us simple methods for adopting at our very core a kind of dynamic peacefulness that is possible only with the elevation of our personal consciousness vibrations. He said, “But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two” (MT 5:39-41). “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, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous.  For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48). Nothing short of transforming our minds can even begin to make us perfect!

The Christian Church created by Constantine the Great is anathema to everything Jesus came to do. But I don’t mean by that to say that Jesus failed. Since objective time does not exist and our incarnations are not linear, I have come to think that the intervening seventeen hundred years or so are meant by the Collective that is the only God to be a period when we can choose to incarnate in order to experience the severe negativity of domination by a fear-based Christianity. Now, however, the very free will that is essential to our being able to grow spiritually has allowed too many of us to choose fear and anger over love, so the consciousness vibration of this planet has sunk to what we are told by those not in bodies is a level from which it cannot recover without divine intervention. And therefore, late in the nineteenth century the Lord began His modern push to bring the kingdom of God on earth. We spoke last week about the start of that effort. Here, as Paul Harvey used to say, is the rest of the story.

No one who is in a body knows all of what is going on. There are a great many people now who are claiming that Jesus is in contact with them, and a number who have channeled books that they believe came from Jesus. I am not allowed by my guides to communicate with these people or to read their books, but I hear from many Seek Reality listeners who tell me about this or that writer or YouTuber whose work in this field is just like mine. I love hearing that! As Jesus said to His disciples, “The harvest is plentiful, but the workers are few. Therefore beseech the Lord of the harvest to send out more workers into His harvest field” (MT 9:37-38).

Those who have not been in bodies for centuries lose their ability to communicate easily with the living, so it is understandable that the Lord’s first apparent attempt to reintroduce His Gospel teachings missed the mark. He led the team that channeled A Course in Miracles in the late Sixties, and while ACIM is indeed those same Gospel teachings, they come there in a form so advanced that it is hard to do much learning unless you commit to meeting with a study group!

So reportedly the team around Jesus decided in the 1980s to channel exactly the Gospel words but with Nicaea’s additions removed. I am told that they set out to find for this task what they called “a pure vessel,” someone who had never been a channel. And here is where, amazingly, your old friend Roberta enters the picture. I knew none of this at the time! I have told My Thomas by Roberta Grimesyou too often that I learned in February of 2015 that my primary spirit guide was once Thomas Jefferson, and I am apparently a friend of his over lifetimes who agreed to enter this body now so I could finish a few of the things that he didn’t manage to finish as Jefferson. One of those tasks was the writing of his thoughts on the teachings of Jesus, so Thomas had been preparing me to write his own take on the Gospel teachings. And of course I was not a known channel, so he offered me up to be used by the Lord. Apparently I filled the bill. But they needed to know that I could channel, so my friend who in his Jefferson lifetime had been so private that he never wrote a memoir, and he even burned all his wife’s letters and papers, then used me to channel his memoirs of his ten-year marriage that spanned the Revolutionary War period. My Thomas is the most beautiful thing that I will ever write. And the research and writing of it were so easy that I thought I was a genius! Sadly, though, I am not. Thomas is. My every subsequent effort to write anything that my precious friend has not supervised has been nothing but a rookie mess.

Apparently my having channeled My Thomas convinced the beings around Jesus to choose me, and according to Thomas they spent the next twenty-five years preparing me to channel the Lord. I was clueless! And of course when they felt the time had arrived for Jesus to channel His restatement of the Gospels, Thomas didn’t tell me more than that he wanted me to write a book about Jesus. And I flat-out refused. Who was I to be doing that? So then he nudged me to contact a medium, and four years ago this month he used her to break into my waking life. He told me who he was, and he convinced me that I had to write his Jefferson-era book about Jesus. He did not, however, tell me this book was going to be written by the Lord Himself!

Thomas began by channeling the first three chapters of Liberating Jesus. Then, late one afternoon the medium through whom he had first contacted me emailed to say that Thomas had just seized her briefly in a Walmart parking lot and said, “Please forgive the speed at which we are dictating, as your soul-ular self is working directly for the Master now, without benefit of the filters which would slow the transmission. And I hasten to add, you must please of course speak clearly should your physical suffer exhaustion.” I thought nothing of that until I woke up abruptly at two the next morning and rushed to my computer, and over two weeks an entirely different entity channeled the rest of that book. I tell the tale of how it was written in Appendix V of Liberating Jesus, so I won’t rehash it here. Suffice it to say that there has never been the remotest doubt in my mind that the Being who wrote that book is Jesus.

With the Collective’s many minions now deep in working to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet, we are assured by beings at the upper levels that the Lord’s work is unfolding according to plan. Jesus told us it will happen subtly, so don’t expect the kingdom of God to arrival on earth with trumpets blaring! Indeed, I suspect that it is going to be apparent to us just in retrospect. So, what would it be like for you and me to live in God’s kingdom here on earth? Let’s begin now to think about that….

Broken angel photo credit: JFB119 <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/77461661@N04/46512163062″>D-MFA-52</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
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The Kingdom of God on Earth (Part II)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We are told by those that we used to think were dead that for more than a century there has been a major effort underway, being orchestrated at the highest levels of reality, to raise the consciousness vibration of this planet away from fear and anger and toward ever more perfect love. This goal should seem familiar to you. Those at the highest levels of reality – the Collective that is the only God – have recently re-initiated what is essentially the same effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth that Jesus first began 2000 years ago.

But why did the Lord’s effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth not succeed the first time around? Actually, it seems to have been going well for at least the first three hundred years. For example, the earliest Christians buried millions of their dead in tunnels beneath the city of Rome, the latest 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 peaceful ones: 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 us all, and even the least worthy among us! This gradual and gentle spreading of His Gospel truths may have been just what the Lord intended. 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” (or “is in your midst”) (LK 17:20-21).

Jesus knew that because every human mind is part of one eternal Mind, it would not take much more than this single population working 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 transformation of all human minds! As He 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 three centuries the advent of the kingdom of God on earth was unfolding precisely as Jesus and the divine Collective of which He is a part had intended that it should unfold. But then the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye on the Lord’s Christianity, and he had his brutal way with her. No less violent term seems adequate!

There were more than three dozen “heresies” stamped out by the early Roman church that had been strains of thought among pre-Councils Christians. Those different ideas had survived in peace because the Lord’s Way was emphatically not a religion! It required only that people learn to ever more perfectly love and forgive; and as Jesus said, “He who is not against us is for us” (MK 9:40). The fear-based notion that Jesus died for our sins was just one of many ideas in a widely varied movement, and it was harmless until Constantine the Great used his Council of Nicaea in 325 to begin to impose one fear-based Christian religion 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 threat of hell for any who disobeyed? That was something he could use! Six more church councils followed that First Council of Nicaea, all called or presided over by emperors and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. So a false and fear-based religion was imposed upon the world by force at a cost of what is conservatively estimated to have been twenty-five million mostly awful deaths.

Our earliest evidence that a new effort had begun to bring the kingdom of God on earth dates to the late nineteenth century, when abruptly we began to receive much easier and more frequent afterlife communications. This step might have seemed necessary in order to begin to take down both fear-based Christianity and the equally false notion of atheistic scientism, and perhaps also to make it easier for people to understand why we need to choose love over fear; but no one knows for certain why we were suddenly being shown so much more of what was behind the curtain. And we don’t know why it took God so long to reject that false version of Christianity, although perhaps Constantine’s fear-based religion had turned out to be useful. It made this planet a tougher spiritual gym where more rapid growth was possible, especially for those who were nearing the end of their need to incarnate. Then from God’s perspective outside of time, perhaps it seemed by the 1840s that we had been given sufficient generations to ensure there would be incarnation-ready bodies for anyone who wanted to experience such an extreme degree of clueless negativity. The Collective that is God didn’t intervene until It felt the need to intervene so It could head off humankind’s greatest folly.

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 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 father of quantum mechanics himself, 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, the Collective did two things at once. It initiated a new age of much better communication between the living and the not really 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 that God-as-Collective has been acting even in a clear 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 the work of the Collective is done. God works in the world with all the love and patience of a host of perfected Beings Who once inhabited bodies Themselves. What a sublimely beautiful process this is!

But of course, when the scientific community was forced to react simultaneously to the twin challenges of quantum physics and very good evidence that the dead in fact survive, it chose to deal with the first while altogether ignoring the second. This stonewalling by the scientific gatekeepers of any evidence that the universe is not matter-based and random 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… 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 seems to have been a wake-up call that might have been unique in human history. Insofar as we can tell, four initiatives were 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 three-quarters of a century since Nagasaki, despite the fact that nuclear armaments have proliferated and human crankiness abounds, you should know 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 this work is happening 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 sixties, and late in the seventies they opened wide! 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 through all of human history.
  • Many more minions began to parachute in. There is no time where the Collective 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. Apparently I am my primary guide’s comrade through many lifetimes, and I had promised him that I would come in and do some specific things that would help him put a true finis to his lifetime as Thomas Jefferson. That effort was still in the planning stage when the call came, and we answered it! We made a life-plan for me that included efforts to complete his work, and we overlaid it with this plan to help the Godhead that now consumes my life. I had to come in at a certain time and in a place that we could use, so I was conceived out of wedlock by a couple who had no soul-group connection to me and I was born just one year after the Nagasaki bomb was dropped. I ended up a female, which might have been just whichever fetus we could get because Thomas still seems to be a bit squeamish about my gender!
  • The 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 of Constantine the Great’s dreams must at last be euthanized, and we see this actually ongoing now at the level of billions of human minds. Our task is just to nurture the love of Jesus and His Gospel teachings, 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! And those of us who have closely studied the Gospel teachings are delighted to report that the way things are getting a lot worse now was actually predicted by the Lord. He told us the advent of the kingdom of God on earth would be a time of great tribulation. So, how can we make it from here to there… ?

Jesus Lives photo credit: Thomas Hawk <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035555243@N01/5640576674″>Jesus Lives at Graceland</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
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The Kingdom of God on Earth (Part I)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Some who have been reading this series have told me they were eager to see how I was going to describe the advent of the kingdom of God on earth. And I was eager to see that too! I was game. I boldly set fingers to keyboard, but then I realized there were a few more things that you and I should talk about first. As Jesus tells us in the Gospels, if we hope to bring the kingdom of God on earth we must first get rid of all fear-based religious ideas, and we probably will need to escape every religions-based notion altogether. For certain, we will need to replace that judgmental and cranky human-made God with the perfectly loving Spirit that Jesus reveals to us in the Gospels. If you haven’t read those three previous blog posts, please do that before you read this one so we can explore some further truths together!

As I have sought a deeper understanding of the Lord’s Gospel message, I have developed a habit of checking the work of various Biblical scholars; so this week I looked at how Christian scholars have interpreted the Lord’s Gospel words about the kingdom of God. To be frank, what I have seen confounds me. Surely someone in two thousand years must have considered the Lord’s Gospel words to be important in and of themselves? Yet every interpretation of the Lord’s teachings I can find that talks about His bringing the kingdom of God on earth has been built on and mixed with Christian religious ideas. No one ever seems to have tried to hear those words as the earliest followers of Jesus heard His words. No one has sought to understand what was in the Lord’s mind as He was speaking them.

The only way what all these Christian scholars are doing could make any sense would be if God and Jesus had planned out the details of modern Christianity even before Jesus came to earth. But that would be inconsistent with a lot of what the Lord says in the Gospels! And if He came to start a new religion, why did He never through four whole Gospels come out and plainly tell us that? Instead, He spoke against religions! And there was no recognizable Christian religion for hundreds of years after His death. Furthermore, we never can forget the fact that the multitudes who are not actually dead now tell us in the strongest terms that every Christian dogma is plain nonsense. They insist that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being. (That fact is so well established by now that perhaps it is time for us to engrave those words on a coffin-lid and finally inter the old Roman Emperors’ human-made and sadly fear-based Christianity?)

So indeed it may be, dear wonderful friends, that you and I are breaking new ground. Amazingly, we are among the first people in two thousand years of history to seek to sit at the feet of the Lord and hear His Gospel words without a beliefs-based overlay.       

How did Jesus Himself believe that the kingdom of God on earth would look? As Jesus was just beginning to teach, “He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. And the book of the prophet Isaiah was handed to Him. And He opened the book and found the place where it was written, ‘The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me, because He anointed me to preach good news to the poor. He has sent Me to proclaim release to the captives, and recovery of sight to the blind, to set free those who are oppressed, to proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.’ And He closed the book, gave it back to the attendant and sat down; and the eyes of all in the synagogue were fixed on Him. And He said to them, ‘Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing’” (LK 4:15-21).

This Gospel passage is astounding! Here Jesus lays out right at its start what He sees as His public mission, and to do it He uses words that had been written eight hundred years before. Words that clearly He had chosen to read before He ever entered that synagogue. Nowhere does He talk about our sinfulness, or mention that He was planning to sacrifice Himself in order to redeem us. No, we can have no doubt that He was focused from the start of His ministry on bringing the kingdom of God on earth!

So, what can you and I tease out of these words that we hear this unknown young man speak as we sit in that synagogue long ago? He is quoting scripture, so we realize He might not have meant every one of those words, although I suspect that He did mean them all. Let’s look more closely at what His words might have meant to Him as He was saying them:

  • Jesus considers His earthly mission to be the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. Whether this was literally true – whether Isaiah in fact had Jesus in mind – matters less than does the Lord’s wish that His work be seen to be the next prophesied step in the advancement of the Jews’ spiritual history, and perhaps also of the spiritual history being planned by the Godhead for all the world.
  • He intends to aim His teachings at the poor, the downtrodden, and the oppressed. (Different words are used in the various translations.) Here is a recurring theme throughout the Gospels: Jesus repeatedly reminds us that the one who is least on earth will be the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven, and He urges us to help the less fortunate.
  • He intends to end wars and strife. When Jesus talks about proclaiming “release to the captives,” He is talking about releasing people being held in captivity against their will, but not criminals in general. That comes later. In His day, raids by enemies could lead to enslavement far from home, and a “release of captives” likely would accompany the advent of long-term peace and stability among the nations.
  • He intends to facilitate physical healing by the power of our minds. Healing the sick, the lame, and the blind is a constant theme of the Lord’s ministry, but what is less often noted is the fact that He keeps stressing to those He heals that it is their own minds that have effected their healing!
  • He intends to end earthly judgment and punishment. It follows from the fact that Jesus replaced the Old Testament rules with God’s Law of Love that He meant to end the concept of sin.  No longer is a given act to be seen as violating any law, but rather now it is the motive of the actor that matters. You can break every law, and if you do it all with no motive beyond the pure love of God and of your neighbor, then you are sinless. So Jesus has come to set free everyone who has been oppressed by all those human-made laws. He means to open every prison door!
  • He plans to unite all of humankind. His invocation of “the favorable year of the Lord” is generally seen to be a reference to the Biblical Year of Jubilee, when Israelite slaves are freed, debts are forgiven, and we all celebrate together. Above all, Jubilee means the shedding of as much as we can of all the various ways that life on earth erects barriers between people.    

So Jesus began His work by proclaiming that His mission was to transform humankind. He intended to create a world in which all these wonderful outcomes would unfold together! This is the result that Jesus expected His teachings to produce: this is how He foresaw the kingdom of God developing as it overspread the earth. He told us we should pray for it, and in that same prayer He revealed that the kingdom of God would be God’s will done perfectly on earth. He said that we are to pray, “Your kingdom come. Your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven” (MT 6:10). And again He said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21). He thereby further emphasized the fact that it is only our obeying God’s will that can bring the kingdom of God on earth. And what is God’s will that we are to obey? He lays it out repeatedly, through all four Gospels! This may be the best example:  

“But I say to you, do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also. If anyone wants to sue you and take your shirt, let him have your coat also. Whoever forces you to go one mile, go with him two. Give to him who asks of you, and do not turn away from him who wants to borrow from you. 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, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:39-48).  

It is clear from what He says in the Gospels that Jesus expects the almost immediate advent of the kingdom of God on earth. “Now after John (the Baptist) had been taken into custody, Jesus came into Galilee, preaching the gospel of God, and saying, ‘The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; change your mind and believe in the gospel’” (MK 1:14-15). Of course, theologians dispute the fact that Jesus meant that literally. They try to retro-engineer Christianity back into the Gospels, even though the formal religion began long centuries after Jesus died. And there can be no doubt that Jesus Himself intended to begin the process of bringing the kingdom of God on earth right now. He said, “The Law and the Prophets were proclaimed until John; since that time the gospel of the kingdom of God has been preached, and everyone is forcing his way into it” (LK 16:16). He said, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand; change your mind and believe in the gospel” (MK 1:15). He even said, “But I say to you truthfully, there are some of those standing here who will not taste death until they see the kingdom of God” (LK 9:27).

Jesus came to us directly from the Godhead with the mission of bringing the kingdom of God on earth in the decades after His death, and He gave to His mission everything He had! So why did it all go so wrong? We’ll talk about that next week.

 

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The Genuine God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The question of whether there is an Uncaused Cause is settled. Not even the most closed-minded scientist disputes the fact that the universe exists, so clearly something must have caused it! But scientists refuse to take seriously what seems to be the next big question. When pressed to identify the Uncaused Cause that brought forth the universe out of nothing, their answers more or less boil down to “Nobody knows and shut up.” Or as the great Rupert Sheldrake sums up the attitude of scientists toward the Uncaused Cause, “Give us one free miracle and we’ll explain the rest.”

But something brought the universe into being! And for the first time in human history, we are close to discovering what that Something is.

Human beings always have believed in a force that was greater than ourselves. In association with some of the earliest stone tools are works of art created by people who were living on the edge of survival. What else but a mix of fear and awe could have inspired so many primitive people to expend the vast time and energy that must have been needed to make this art? Then, perhaps twelve thousand years ago an amazing temple was built at Gobekli Tepe, in what is now Turkey. For me, the most extraordinary thing about Gobekli Tepe is the fact that stone-age people built this amazing place, and then one day they buried it. Our relationship with our gods has always been tempestuous!

Modern afterlife research has demonstrated that each of us is densely connected with Spirit. Each person has the constant help of beings who are not now in bodies, and we can assume that this spiritual aspect of the human experience goes back to our beginnings. As the Jesuit priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said, “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” Surely this spiritual connection must be why we always have had the sense that there must be an unseen force! Our impulse toward God may be the central fact of the whole human experience.

Every modern version of God is as human-made and bogus as was all that art created by stone-age primitives. None of our present Gods can factually address our deepest questions, so our yearning to know the real God remains. I have often talked about God here  as I have tried to better tease out from the afterlife evidence what more we can learn about the Uncaused Cause that is the genuine God. Today let’s try to deepen our understanding just a little more.

 A Bit About the Greater Reality

It is impossible for us to understand God unless we have some sense of the reality in which God operates. The greater reality is not only stranger than what we have been imagining, but it is stranger than we can imagine! I can give you in this limited space only what I hope will be sufficient highlights to provide a frame in which we can deepen our search for the genuine God.

The greater reality is everything that researchers have been able to determine exists, but apparently it is not all that exists. It may be twenty or more times the size of this material universe, although both time and space do not exist as constant factors in most of reality so we are talking only relative sizes. The greater reality is composed of what we experience to a limited extent as human consciousness, and in fact what we are calling consciousness turns out to be the base creative force that manifests all that exists. So what we experience as consciousness is the substance and source of the greater reality. Consciousness is the Uncaused Cause! Researchers are coming to accept this fact. Many of us now capitalize the word Consciousness, or we shorten it and refer to the Uncaused Cause with words like Source or Mind.

The consciousness which is all that exists is a kind of energy. Like other forms of energy, it vibrates. Its vibratory rate ranges from the lowest and weakest, which is fear, to the highest and most powerful, which is perfect love. So what we experience in a limited way as emotion is the essences of that base creative force! God is the highest vibration of a consciousness that includes us all; and since there is no objective time, you and I are eternal by definition.

Getting rid of that cranky Christian God has been such a relief for me that it has taken me years to realize why even this better understanding of God still feels so unsatisfying. God is perfect eternal love! We live in God forevermore! But Consciousness-as-God still somehow feels as inert and impersonal as a plush puppy. And knowing that Consciousness is the base creative force allows us to explain how the universe is created, but it doesn’t tell us why.

A Bit of What We Know About Creation

 The Creator is the created. Consciousness is all that is or was or ever will be. This material universe is a subset of consciousness, which means that consciousness creates time and space so it cannot be affected by either. I have been working for years to try to ferret out the implications of a greater reality in which objective time does not exist! For our dead friends time is optional, and learning how they view time has confirmed our supposition that in reality time does not exist at all. The implications of this fact are boggling. If anything now exists, it always exists. The past might change as easily as the future. So creation didn’t happen “long ago,” but instead creation is happening in each micro-instant. The great physicist Max Planck said, “We have no right to assume that any physical laws exist, or if they have existed up to now, that they will continue to exist in a similar manner in the future.” Yet again, he is exactly right.

Researchers have found bits of evidence that creation is a continuous process, and once scientists take an interest I am sure they will find many more. For one example, we are told that the universe’s stability depends on a number of forces remaining constant, and scientists assume that therefore these constants must be forever constant. But Rupert Sheldrake, a meticulous researcher, has discovered that some of these so-called constants are in fact adjusting minutely. So the universe exists and is stable because consciousness manifests it in each micro-instant. What we see as the material universe is in the nature of a thought.

Something the Bible and the Dead Suggest About the Genuine God

Everything the Bible says about God refers to the human-made religious God, but we notice a few hints here and there that the genuine God might be a collective. For example:

“Then God said, ‘Let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness’” (Gen 1:26).

“Then I heard the voice of the Lord saying, ‘Whom shall I send? And who will go for us?’ And I said, ‘Here am I. Send me!’” (Isaiah 6:6)

This would mean nothing, except for the fact that we know that advanced beings work in collectives. One of their number will speak for them, but that spokesman never acts alone; instead, he represents thousands of beings who have become so spiritually advanced that they can think and act as one. Even my primary guide, Thomas, when he met with me through a medium so he could badger me into writing Liberating Jesus, made it plain that he was working with beings who included Mary Magdalene and Mother Mary. So I find it arresting to find Jesus saying things like, “The words that I say to you I do not speak on My own initiative, but the Father abiding in Me does His works” (JN 14:10). So Jesus plainly told us that He was a spokesman? He often referred to God as “the Father,” perhaps to soften his primitive listeners’ fear of their religion’s cranky God; and of course, He never could have told them He was representing a collective because they could not then have conceived of the kind of God that I will suggest to you now. Jesus tells us repeatedly that “God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24). But “God is spirit” is like “God is consciousness,” is it not? It feels vague and impersonal. And we know that God is neither….

Suspecting That God is Us

Mikey Morgan is a sixth-level being who last lived on earth in the 1600s. He took a brief additional lifetime that ended in 2007 so he could speak to us in modern terms with the assistance of his mother, Carol, who has never studied any of this. It took me years to accept that Mikey is genuine. But I have seen him rapidly answer hundreds of questions much better than I could have done, and he never makes a mistake. At this point, he is almost the only person I still trust to help me answer the biggest questions. When I asked Mikey for his definition of God for his book, Flying High in Spirit, and he said, “God is the unity of pure love and all that exists,” that planted a seed in my mind. He and I had not discussed God in the intervening three years, but I asked him the question again this week. Here is what he said, word for word: “God is the Unity of Absolute Pure Love which is Infinite. The Collective or Source of all that exists.”

Very early in my research I began to encounter statements from upper-level collectives that told us the seventh level is the Source level, where God is. Eventually there was a belief among researchers that entering the seventh level would be optional, and it would mean personal extinction and merger with the Source. We even called it “the second death.” When that notion began to freak me out – why try to advance, if it would mean my extinction? – my primary guide said to me, “You will never lose awareness. You will have God’s awareness.” Thanks to other communicators and to beautiful Mikey, we now know that what Thomas said is true: the awareness you are experiencing now is eternal. We also know from Mikey and others that the Source level is by no means the top of what you and I can aspire to achieve. Mikey tells me our spiritual growth is “infinite.” Consider my mind to be officially boggled!

I am now convinced that the genuine God is a collective.

I have asked Thomas to take this notion away, but instead he has reinforced it. And since this idea first occurred to me, I have found so much evidence for it that I have been slapping my head repeatedly. For just one example, we have been told by some of those not in bodies that Jesus is “from the highest aspect of the Godhead.” What else could that mean?

My dear friends, the Uncaused Cause, the Source of everything, and the only eternal God is an infinitely powerful collective of people who have achieved the highest spiritual vibration. I will have more to say soon. For now, this seems to be enough!

 

Candles photo credit: Adam Tomkó <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/31857315@N04/5274561890″>Karácsonyi hangulat – Christmas spirit</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Universe photo credit: pic fix <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/14497446@N02/32000076417″>Look and you will see</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Castle photo credit: Ulster Architectural Heritage Society <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75077138@N08/6883939738″>P4 – Necarne Castle, Irvinestown – 15-1-03</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Faithless

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

No sooner had I shared with you my insight that the Gospel words suggest the Lord meant to abolish the notion of sin than I realized there was another thing He seems to have meant to consign to history. This one is a harder call, so I wondered if I should mention it now; but I have come to see as I have written this for you that perhaps this further stumbling-block is even worse than fear-based sin as a barrier to our spiritual growth!

Jesus meant to raise in us a dissatisfaction with religious faith, and to teach us instead to seek and find a more solid spiritual certainty. What else can He have meant when He said, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8)?

My difficulty in trusting the evidence that Jesus spoke against religious faith seems mostly to have stemmed from the fact that He used the word “faith” or “faithful” so often, and in three different ways:

  • He used the term as a synonym for loyal and steadfast service. For example, He quoted a master as saying, “Well done, good and faithful slave. You were faithful with a few things, I will put you in charge of many things; enter into the joy of your master” (MT 25:21). And He said, “He who is faithful in a very little thing is faithful also in much; and he who is unrighteous in a very little thing is unrighteous also in much” (LK 16:10).
  • He used the same term to praise a belief in Him that allowed Him to draw additional power from the minds of the sick as He was healing them. For example, “Seeing their faith, He said, ‘Friend, your sins are forgiven you’” (LK 5:20). “Then He touched their eyes, saying, “It shall be done to you according to your faith” (MT 9:29). “And He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has made you well; go in peace” (LK 8:48).
  • He used the word to rebuke His disciples whenever they doubted Him. For example, when a storm threatened to capsize their boat and alarmed His disciples, He said to the sea, “Hush, be still.” We are told that the wind died down and He then said to His disciples, “Why are you afraid? Do you still have no faith?” Then they said to one another, “Who then is this, that even the wind and the sea obey Him?” (MK 4:39-41)

In none of these cases does the word “faith” refer to believing in any religion. Arguably, in the second and third instances He is talking about belief in the powers of our minds being essential to our being able to use those powers, which was a concept His listeners could not have understood, but it does make sense to us today. Realizing the yawning gap in understanding that existed between Jesus as an ascended being and the primitives He was teaching gives you a lot of sympathy for Him! It makes you all the more admire His determination to overcome their ignorance and educate them to the point where they might bring the kingdom of God on earth even in that ancient, more primitive day.

Only once in all four Gospels is Jesus quoted as saying, “Have faith in God,” and even that sole example is another reference to our need to believe in the powers of our own minds. “Peter said to Him, ‘Rabbi, look, the fig tree which You cursed has withered.’ And Jesus answered saying to them, ‘Have faith in God. Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, “Be taken up and cast into the sea,” and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him’” (MK 11:21-23). Surely Jesus is not saying that if we have sufficient religious faith then God will at our command perform the parlor trick of moving a mountain? Of course not! We know now that He is talking instead about the vast creative powers of our minds, those same powers that He often says He is using to assist Him in healing those who approach him, hoping to be healed.

Nowhere in the Gospels do we see Jesus using the word “faith” in a religious sense! On the contrary, Jesus sees religions beliefs as stumbling–blocks between us and God, and He rails against them as obstacles to our obeying God’s command that we learn to love perfectly. He says, “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9). And “Why do you transgress the commandment of God for the sake of your tradition?… You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:3-9). The fact that practicing any religion so often produces people that you would rather not be around was something He saw as a tremendous strike against religions as a whole. He said, “Beware of the false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Grapes are not gathered from thorn bushes nor figs from thistles, are they? So every good tree bears good fruit, but the bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

That was the Lord’s opinion of religious faith, as painful as it might be to read! Jesus told us two thousand years ago that it was time for us to move past mere belief in man-made religious dogmas, and to put into practice His own teachings so we could begin to live God’s perfect truth. He said, “If you hold to my teaching, you are really my disciples. Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free” (JN 8:31-32).

So it does seem likely that yet another thing that Jesus came to do was to eliminate religious faith. The question then becomes, why did He think giving up our faith would be a necessary prelude to the dawning of the kingdom of God on earth? Here are some thoughts:

  • Beliefs that are not based in facts are superstitions. We hear the word “superstition” negatively, but its dictionary definition boils down to “an irrational belief.” And we hear the word “faith” positively, but it means “a belief in something for which there is no proof.” The words are synonyms! And no matter how Christians might celebrate their faith, the plain fact is that every Christian belief is based in teachings many hundreds of years old that come from the non-Gospel parts of the Bible and the fear-based notions of ancient primitives. From now on you might want to replace the word “faith” whenever you see, hear, or even think it with its synonym, the word “superstition.” Jesus wants you to know the truth! He has given you the right to demand God’s truth, and He urges you to settle for nothing less.
  • All beliefs not supported by facts are of equal value. If all we need is religious faith, then how can we find and know the genuine God? What about Moloch, the Canaanite god that demanded infant sacrifice? If unsupported faith is a good thing, then how is having faith in Moloch any less worthy than is having faith in an invisible god that demands the sacrifice of its own son before it can forgive us for Adam’s sin?
  • Having faith makes it much harder for us to come to know the true God. Since having faith assumes that no evidence is needed, we can – and we do – imagine many of the characteristics of our personal deity. Having faith alone means that we have created an idol in our minds, rather than following the Lord’s direction that we seek the perfect truth.
  • Having faith cannot banish our fears. I was there once, so I know that faith is thin gruel in the middle of the night. You think there is a God. You want to believe! But how can you really know? And worse, without any certain characteristics of the genuine God to guide your thoughts, you cannot help worrying that your imaginary God might be angry and judgmental and might condemn you to hell forever after all. If you don’t come to know the genuine God, it is easy for you to fear the worst!

So to summarize our discussions of the past few weeks, Jesus tells us in the Gospels that He came to abolish religions, teach us to relate to God on our own, teach us to be seekers and teach us how to grow spiritually, and also teach us to abolish fear-based notions including sin and even religious faith, all so we will be able soon to bring the kingdom of God on earth. It feels astonishing to read this list! Yet the evidence of what Jesus came to do is stated in the Gospels in plain words that make sense and come together well even after two translations over two thousand years. The fact that Christianity has largely ignored those Gospel words has only delayed the moment when we can at last empower the Lord to speak to a people who love Him enough to hear and respect what He is saying! Without religious dogmas in the way, we can come to know the true Jesus. And through Him we can come to know at last the genuine, eternal God.

Knowing what we have been learning from the Lord, you and I can much better see that the forty-thousand-odd versions of modern Christianity must be anathema to the Jesus of the Gospels! Knowing that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being, and knowing how important our following His Gospel teachings is to the genuine Lord, we can see that every living Christian faces what might be for some a hard choice. We can cling to a set of fear-based dogmas that have nothing to do with the risen Lord, or we can instead become among the first true followers of Jesus and His Way. And in truly following Him at last, we can help Him save the world!  Or to put it even more plainly:

Jesus came to abolish religions, teach us to relate directly to God, and give us the tools to raise our personal consciousness vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth.

Jesus was determined to remove from our lives every source of spiritual fear so our personal vibrations could naturally rise to the point where the love-based perfection of the highest afterlife levels could overspread the earth. And as I write, I realize there is one more thing that Jesus came to do….

 

Adam & Eve photo credit: www.ilkkajukarainen.fi <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/130333033@N08/41963999232″>6Q3A8287</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Isaiah photo credit: Andrew-M-Whitman <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/23967095@N00/28816066756″>Victoria & Albert Museum, London</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Sinless

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I had mostly drafted my promised ideas about the dawning of the kingdom of God on earth when I realized that before I posted them I ought to share with you one more thing that Jesus came to do for all of humankind. He came to abolish the concept of sin and transform our notion of right and wrong! I blush to admit that this added mission has only lately occurred to me, when clearly it was not an afterthought. In fact, I am beginning to see that killing the whole fear-based notion of sin is the core of what Jesus came to do. It really changes everything!

Jesus talks about sin throughout the Gospels, which is probably why I missed what He was saying. He cleverly misled the Temple guards, and He just as cleverly misled me! For Jesus to speak against the prevailing religion would have been a capital crime, so He could not flat-out tell the world that He had come to abolish all religions, toss out the entire Old Testament, and end the very notion of sin. All of this was His earthly mission, but He couldn’t say that plainly! We have been talking of late about how He was able to get most of His message through by using some devices that we must keep in mind if we hope to understand His message. By accepting those tricks and digging deeper, we have learned from the Gospels that Jesus came to help us relate to God on our own so we can better raise our spiritual vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, and thereby bring the kingdom of God on earth.

He accomplished much of this with a single stroke! When He was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead He said,“‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment.  The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). The Law and the Prophets was of course what the Jews of His day called our Old Testament. And He confirmed that His abandonment of religious laws was consistent with the divine plan when He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish but to fulfill” (MT 5:17).

The concept of sin is grounded in religious laws. In throwing away the Old Testament, Jesus discarded every Jewish law, so by definition He abolished sin! But was this what He intended to do? If He had been able to speak to us plainly, would He have said, “Take heart, you who labor and are heavy-laden, for I have come to abolish sin, and with it every reason you might have to fear”? I think the answer to this question is yes! Let’s see why.

Jesus Broke Religious Laws Repeatedly

To the open-minded Gospel student, the many times that He pushed what were then inviolate laws and gave us cagey reasons for doing so look like a campaign to discredit those laws. Here are some examples:

“At that time Jesus went through the grainfields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat.  But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, “I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath.’

“Departing from there, He went into their synagogue. And a man was there whose hand was withered. And they questioned Jesus, asking, ‘Is it lawful to heal on the Sabbath?’—so that they might accuse Him. And He said to them, ‘What man is there among you who has a sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will he not take hold of it and lift it out? How much more valuable then is a man than a sheep! So then, it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath.’ Then He said to the man, ‘Stretch out your hand!’ He stretched it out, and it was restored to normal, like the other” (MT 12:1-13).

“And they brought to Him a paralytic lying on a bed. Seeing their faith, Jesus said to the paralytic, ‘Take courage, son; your sins are forgiven.’ And some of the scribes said to themselves, ‘This fellow blasphemes.’ And Jesus knowing their thoughts said, ‘Why are you thinking evil in your hearts?  Which is easier, to say, “Your sins are forgiven,” or to say, “Get up, and walk”? But so that you may know that the Son of Man has authority on earth to forgive sins’—then He said to the paralytic, ‘Get up, pick up your bed and go home’” (MT 9:2-6).

Jesus Made a Point of Loving and Caring for Sinners

The strictly religious folk of His day acted pretty much the way Christians do now: they shamed and shunned anyone they judged to be sinful. Jesus, on the other hand, especially loved even the most unlovable! For example, we read, “And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him” (MT 2:15). He even told us why He especially loved sinners. He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (MK 2:17).

“Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.’ So He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!”  In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’” (LK 15:1-10).

“The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, ‘Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act.  Now in the Law Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?’  They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on sin no more’” (JN 8:3-11).

Jesus Came to Give Us New Definitions For What is Right or Wrong

The more you read the Lord’s Gospel words with the thought that perhaps He abolished sin, the more you realize that was indeed precisely what He did! Jesus had replaced the Law and the Prophets with God’s law of love, and in doing that He was announcing that we were ready to move above a stark and puerile thou-shall-not morality and begin to live by a standard that is based entirely in love. Whatever we might do is no longer important, but instead all that matters is what is in our hearts! If we have raised our spiritual vibration sufficiently that our every thought, our every impulse is based in nothing but love, then everything we do from out of that love is good and moral by definition. This is a much stricter standard than any old-style law could be! It requires that we make no decision without first weighing it on the scales of love that are ever more perfectly manifest in our hearts. It may be that only when we achieve this level of spiritual development can we begin to bring the kingdom of God on earth. We’ll talk about that next week.

Micah of Moresheth was an early Hebrew prophet, a contemporary of the great Isaiah. He has not been much considered, perhaps because He spoke for mercy and against religiosity. You might say he was three thousand years ahead of His time! He long ago foresaw a day when we would serve a gentler, more loving God that did not inspire our quivering fear or demand our sacrifices, and certainly one that did not demand that we sacrifice God’s beloved Son. From a time eight centuries before the birth of Jesus, Micah speaks to us. And His words sing!

“With what shall I come to the Lord and bow myself before the God on high? Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings, with yearling calves? Does the Lord take delight in thousands of rams, in ten thousand rivers of oil? Shall I present my firstborn for my rebellious acts, the fruit of my body for the sin of my soul? He has told you, O man, what is good; and what does the Lord require of you but to do justice, to love kindness, and to walk humbly with your God?” (Micah 6:6-8)

 

Praying photo credit: Pamela P. Stroud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138014685@N08/43088689381″>How Peter Came to Know Jesus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Seaside photo credit: Pamela P. Stroud <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/138014685@N08/41277066900″>How Peter Came to Know Jesus</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Prophet photo credit: L’art au présent <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/144232185@N03/35794148312″>RUBENS (d’Après BUONARROTI Michelangelo) – Le Prophète Zacharie, Chapelle Sixtine (drawing, dessin, disegno-Louvre INV20229) – Detail 59</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>

The Kingdom of God

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Recently we sat at the feet of the Lord and listened as He taught His flock. Among other things, freshly listening to Him made us realize that He was bent on achieving the almost immediate arrival of the kingdom of God on earth. He expected His spiritual revolution to start small and then grow rapidly, and to be substantially completed within the lifetimes of some of those who heard Him speak. This astonishing insight seized the imaginations of some of our readers here, and it prompted them to ask a question that also has been on my mind.

What would the modern world be like if the kingdom of God arrived on earth today? Let’s talk about that. This week we’ll discuss in more detail the kingdom of God that Jesus meant to begin here. Then next week we will all catch hands and step together into the possible world of our beloved Lord’s dearest imaginings!

In studying the words of Jesus, we have one big advantage over traditional Christians. We have the detailed and consistent testimony of people that we used to think were dead. For reasons I prefer to think are innocent, Christian leaders have long insisted that communicating with the dead was evil, and that all our dead communicators were actually demons in league with the devil. In fact, these warnings are patent nonsense. The Bible holds a number of accounts of ancient people speaking with those not in bodies! And for moderns who need Biblical permission, 1 John 4:1 assumes that we all talk with spirits. It says just, “Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God.” Every reputable medium of whom I am aware does exactly that. And we are being given now by those not in bodies extensive new ways to communicate across dimensions, including real progress with electronic communication that we are told will result in a telephone! In the face of this great effort being conducted at the highest levels to establish better communication, for Christians to continue to try to prevent our loving dialogue with higher levels is a literal rejection of the will of God. So we test the spirits, then we eagerly welcome what the dead have to say about the meaning of the Gospel words of Jesus.

I should mention for readers new to this space that one thing we know for certain is that Jesus did not come to die for our sins. The dead tell us that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being, which should not surprise us when Jesus Himself tells us that God does not judge anyone (see JN 5:22). The fact that God does not judge us has been plain in the Bible for two thousand years, but Christians have altogether ignored it! The whole doctrine of substitutionary atonement – the notion that Jesus came to die for our sins – was human-made in a primitive day when animals were being sacrificed in temples. It was a way for those who had been devastated by the unexpected death of their Messiah to make sense of that death in first-century terms, and to turn it into something that to them seemed positive. In our more enlightened age we are able to see the whole idea as a frank barbarity, an insult to God and a humiliation of Jesus, so we are relieved to learn it is bogus! And our knowing Jesus didn’t come to die for our sins now frees us to look to His Gospel words for a different reason still big enough to explain the amazing fact that God came to earth in the body of Jesus.

When we sat and listened at the feet of the Lord, we heard Him tell us He had come to abolish fear-based religions and teach us to relate to God in love so we could bring the kingdom of God on earth. And if attempting to bring God’s kingdom on earth was so important two thousand years ago, then surely in this more enlightened age you and I ought to give it a second try!

What is the Kingdom of God?

Translators called it the kingdom of Heaven in the Book of Matthew, where Jesus mentions it more than thirty times. He refers to it fourteen times in Mark, and more than thirty times in Luke. No one reading the Gospels can have any doubt that God’s Kingdom is the Lord’s obsession! We know now that everyone on earth arrives in the self-same afterlife, so what then might be this more selective place that Jesus urges us to try to reach? The kingdom of God is the joyously blissful upper levels of the afterlife that can be attained only by people who are spiritually very far advanced. As Jesus said, “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven will enter” (MT 7:21).

What we experience as human consciousness is the only thing that objectively exists. Every human mind is part of that consciousness, and we spoke last week about the fact  that consciousness exists in a range of vibrations, from fear at the lowest to love at the highest. When we talk about our need to grow spiritually, what we really are talking about is our need to raise our personal consciousness vibrations away from the fear-based end and toward the love-based end of the spectrum. Jesus makes it clear in the Gospels how we can raise our own vibrations: He tells is that we must learn to love perfectly and learn to forgive completely. Christians take the Lord’s words as aspirational – just things we should try so we can make God happy – but no one who actually reads the Gospels can see His words as less than divine commands:

“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, so that you may be sons of your Father who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48).

Peter asked him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23).

Jesus tells us we are always either growing or shrinking spiritually, and we are coming to see He is precisely right. Consciousness cannot remain static! He says, “For to everyone who has, more shall be given, and he will have an abundance; but from the one who does not have, even what he does have shall be taken away. And throw out the worthless slave into the outer darkness; in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 25:29-30).

What Is It Like In the Kingdom of God?

Here our willingness to listen to and learn from those that we used to think were dead is a great asset! There is a nearly infinite gradation of consciousness vibrations in the afterlife, but for convenience we on earth group these vibrations into seven general levels. What Jesus called “the outer darkness” is the lowest afterlife level. Virtually everyone enters at Level Three, and we are told that reincarnation on earth in order to achieve more rapid spiritual growth is no longer necessary once we reach the upper part of Level Five. The highest level below the Source, Level Six, is what Jesus refers to as the kingdom of God. Few who have attained that exalted level ever have communicated with us on earth; and in fact, for most of my research career Level Six was assumed to be non-material. Mikey Morgan is a being who achieved Level Six after having last lived on earth in the 1600s, and he wonderfully took a brief additional earth-life that ended in 2007 so he could better understand modern people and thereby know how he might best teach us. Mikey’s book, Flying High in Spirit, is again in print, and it is one of the reasons why we now realize that the Sixth Level is gloriously material! The Sixth Level is full of spectacular flowers and amazing universities. Those who live there often teach in the lower afterlife levels, and a few – like our beloved Mikey Morgan – have made it their personal mission to teach people who are still in bodies.

Why Should We Want to Bring the Kingdom of God on Earth?

A lot of what we hear Jesus say when we sit at the Lord’s feet and closely listen feels like gentle urging toward freeing our minds from fear so we can vibrate toward more perfect love. For example He says, “Do not be worried about your life, as to what you will eat or what you will drink; nor for your body, as to what you will put on. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing? Look at the birds of the air, that they do not sow, nor reap nor gather into barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not worth much more than they?

“And who of you by being worried can add a single hour to his life? And why are you worried about clothing? Observe how the lilies of the field grow; they do not toil nor do they spin, yet I say to you that not even Solomon in all his glory clothed himself like one of these. But if God so clothes the grass of the field, which is alive today and tomorrow is thrown into the furnace, will He not much more clothe you? You of little faith! Do not worry then, saying, ‘What will we eat?’ or ‘What will we drink?’ or ‘What will we wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be added to you” (MT 6:25-33).

So what Jesus came to earth to do was to teach us how we can make this anger- and hatred- and fear-filled planet into a love-filled mimic of the highest heavens. Even if you are a traditional Christian who believes Jesus came to die for your sins, don’t you agree that if He considered bringing the kingdom of God on earth to be important enough that He spent three years teaching us how to make it happen, then perhaps after two thousand years of misery we ought to give His ideas a second try?

What would our world be like if we followed the Lord’s directions now? Let’s talk about that next week….

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