Author: Roberta Grimes

Let There Be Life

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We have talked here about the fact that materialist mainstream scientists still continue to look for a source of consciousness inside the brain. Not content to wait for proof-of-concept, scientists even are racing now to develop a level of artificial intelligence that they believe can give rise to consciousness: they are building machines that can “repair themselves” and even can “eat, grow, and evolve.” These researchers are generally careful to say that their machines are not conscious now, but over it all there is an unspoken hope that if machines become sufficiently competent then actual consciousness might arise. They think about how we are going to know that some machine is “conscious”; and since their fundamental premise is so flawed because consciousness is not generated by the brain, they keep stumbling across issues and barriers that simply do not exist in life. They study anger in dreams with the astonishing belief that “(t)he research may ultimately help experts understand the neural foundation of the emotional content involved in nightmares,” even though of course emotion is a property of consciousness rather than an artifact of brain activity so what they are studying is merely the effects of emotions on the brain. Nor can they even begin to fathom such questions as what the mind experiences during the death process, or a genuine explanation for the beautiful phenomenon called Acquired Savant Syndrome.

Bernardo Kastrup is a young Dutch scientist who grasps the primary role of consciousness, and reading his work does give me hope that the willfully self-enforced Luddite cluelessness of modern mainstream science may not be forever; but meanwhile, you and I are left to do the work of studying consciousness that rightly belongs to career research scientists.  Creator

And there is another scientific pursuit that is fully as hopeless as trying to find a source of consciousness inside the brain. A great deal of time and money is being devoted now to searching for the origin of life in some version of a primordial soup. The term given to the whole broad area of trying to understand how life arose on earth is called Origin of Life research, and it has become a kind of demented sister to the ongoing search for a source of consciousness in the brain. While consciousness researchers do the rough equivalent of taking a radio apart to search for the source of Frank Sinatra’s voice, Origin of Life researchers are back-engineering living organisms to try to discover how inert chemicals once were combined in such a magical way that life was sparked into being. This insanity has been going on for decades, and it is so well funded that even largely unrelated scientific pursuits can be made more viable if their missions include an Origin of Life component. Repeated supposed breakthroughs have been announced, countless conferences have been held, and many learned articles have been published, all of which have amounted to nothing.

The problem is that research scientists have set themselves an impossible task. Not only must life be sparked into being, but it requires a cellular and chemical infrastructure to sustain it; and this means that life’s basic structures would almost certainly have to predate whatever first caused life to spark. Then for life to progress beyond single cells would require the development of DNA and so many other essential details that the odds against chance for randomly emergent life to then randomly create you and me turn out to be unfathomably long.

I am coming to believe that the fatal flaw that eventually will bring down materialist science may turn out to be the fact that the origin of life requires pre-emergence design.

Mainstream scientists are so wrong-headed and fundamentally clueless about all of this that they are easy targets for Christian scientists arguing for intelligent design; and while these Christian scientists have their own biases, their work can be helpful to those of us who simply want to know what is true. The current state of play in Origin of Life research was brilliantly set out by two scientists at the 2019 Dallas Science and Faith Conference held in January of this year. I am giving you two lectures from that conference; I hope you will watch at least the first one:

* James M. Tour is a synthetic organic chemist who is the T. T. and W. F. Chao Professor of Chemistry at Rice University in Houston, Texas. He talked about The Mystery of the Origin of Life. 

* Jay W. Richards is an Assistant Research Professor at The Catholic University of America, and a Senior Fellow at the Discovery Institute. He spoke about The Privileged Planet.

Yet again you and I are caught in the war between mainstream science and mainstream Christianity, learning what we can from each of them but always aware of the dogmas and biases that make them both fundamentally wrong. So we learn what we can from these Christian scientists, and we add it to our larger set of understandings. Now, if you and I were asked to hazard a guess at how life began on earth, what might we say?

  • Consciousness is the base creative force, and it is all that independently exists. Everyone who reads these words is living the core underlying fact that consciousness is inherently and vitally alive! It begins to seem reasonable to suggest that what we experience as life may even be a fundamental property of consciousness-based matter itself.
  • Creation is not once-and-done, but rather it is continuous. So the physical and chemical structures necessary to sustain the first living cells could appear and be animated all in the same micro-instant of ongoing creation. As is true of evolution’s punctuated equilibrium and so many other things that have changed in earth’s history without leaving a record of precisely how that happened, God need not show us every step!
  • The building blocks necessary for increasing life’s complexity could similarly be installed in primitive living cells. DNA, organelles, the differentiation of cell types, and all the rest: God works it out and smoothly installs it, perhaps even simultaneously with that first spark of life. And if scientists discover any of this, it just will demonstrate to them the notion that life could have arisen randomly because that will seem to them to have been how it happened.

So the Origin of Life is easy for you and me to explain in a way that fits our developing understanding of how reality works. Consciousness is the base creative force, and creation happens freshly in each micro-instant. Indeed, the fact that this is probably the only way that life could have arisen gives us further evidence that our theory about how creation happens is right.

Mainstream scientists never will be able to explain the origin of life until they abandon their certainty that consciousness is merely an artifact of the brain. Making life arise from some chemical soup, and cell structure and DNA and all the rest then somehow naturally arise as well, will seem to them to be possible because it exists that way in the fossil record. But their making it happen in the laboratory will forever be as elusive to them as will be the creation of intelligent robots that are able to develop consciousness.

Reality is all of a piece! If you insist on having one part of it your way, you guarantee that you never will understand the rest.

Mainstream science maintains its insistence that matter is primary and consciousness is generated by the brain as a bulwark against its ever finding the Christian God. Even in the twenty-first century, the organized scientific community still sees itself as courageous crusaders against old Christian superstitions; and oddly, the fact that materialist science and mainstream Christianity both are based in erroneous assumptions seems never to occur to anyone. But things are turning now, almost imperceptibly. Even the most zealous scientist would tell you that inevitably all dogmas fall away and the light of objective truth must dawn!

 

Chemistry of Life photo credit: DalinYebo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/93406034@N04/32673641837″>Shell to quit US lobby over climate policies</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Shells photo credit: marcoverch <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/149561324@N03/38708357851″>Sammlung von unterschiedlichen Muscheln vor weißem Hintergrund</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

He Lives!

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

We know for certain now that Jesus is real! He came from the highest aspect of the Godhead, and He entered a body two millennia ago with a set of goals that included teaching us how to lift ourselves spiritually so together we can transform the world.

All the forty thousand religious variants that profess to follow Jesus largely ignore what He said, and the core Christian teaching that Jesus died to redeem us from God’s judgment has no basis in fact. We have on occasion felt the need here to defend the Lord against fear-based religious notions, but on this day when we celebrate the fact that He literally, physically rose from the dead we join hands in love and simply listen to Him. His teachings are not the basis for a religion, but rather they are a way of life. And they can be put into practice equally well by people who are devoutly religious and people who have no religion at all. Every clergyman of every religion can use these teachings to aid his own flock’s spiritual growth! As Jesus said, “Therefore every clergyman who has become a disciple of the kingdom of God is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old” (MT 13:52).

The fact that we have available to us so much of what Jesus said is a miracle. His words were passed down orally for a couple of generations, and then they were translated into Greek and Latin before later being translated from those languages into English. The words of Jesus were in the custody of the Catholic Church from the fourth century on, and in the course of all those years the Church added anachronistic bits that we ought to pluck out. Still, the Lord’s genuine truth survives! We have recently quoted here the Lord’s teachings on love, forgiveness, and the advent of the kingdom of God on earth, so we won’t include them again today. Here, simply organized by topic, is a further sampling of the Gospel wisdom of Jesus.

ALWAYS BE A SEEKER

“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).

FOLLOW MY TEACHING

“Why do you call me ‘Lord, Lord,’ and do not do what I say?” (LK 6:46).

“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).

“Come to Me, all who are weary and heavy-laden, and I will give you rest. Take My yoke upon you and learn from Me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For My yoke is easy and My burden is light” (MT 11:28-30).

“The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work” (JN 14:10).

“Therefore everyone who hears these words of Mine and acts on them may be compared to a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and yet it did not fall, for it had been founded on the rock. Everyone who hears these words of Mine and does not act on them, will be like a foolish man who built his house on the sand. The rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and slammed against that house; and it fell—and great was its fall” (MT 7:24-27).

“You are the light of the world. … Let your light shine before men in such a way that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father who is in heaven” (MT 5:14-16).

BE HUMBLE

“Why do you look at the speck that is in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log that is in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Brother, let me take out the speck that is in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log that is in your own eye? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take out the speck that is in your brother’s eye” (LK 6:41-42).

“The greatest among you shall be your servant. Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted” (MT 23:11-12).

“Whoever receives this child in My name receives Me, and whoever receives Me receives Him who sent Me; for the one who is least among all of you, this is the one who is great” (LK 9:48).

THERE IS NO DIVINE JUDGMENT

 “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).

“If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47).

“Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned” (LK 6:37-38).

BEWARE OF RELIGIOUS IDEAS

“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… A good tree cannot produce bad fruit, nor can a bad tree produce good fruit...  So then, you will know them by their fruits” (MT 7:15-20).

“Beware of the clergymen who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places… who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40).

“But woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you shut off the kingdom of God from people; for you do not enter in yourselves, nor do you allow those who are entering to go in” (MT 23:13).

“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).

“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).

DO NOT PACKAGE MY TEACHING WITH RELIGIOUS IDEAS

“But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results.  Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17).

“Therefore every clergyman who has become a disciple of the kingdom of God is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old” (MT 13:52).

DEVELOP A DIRECT PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD

“So when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret… when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:2-6).

GOD WILL CARE FOR YOU

“For this reason I say to you, 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… 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 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).

LOVE YOUR ENEMIES

“You have heard that it was said, ‘Eye for eye, and tooth for tooth. 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 5:38-41).

“But to you who are listening I say: Love your enemies, do good to those who hate you, bless those who curse you, pray for those who mistreat you … If you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who are good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do that.  And if you lend to those from whom you expect repayment, what credit is that to you? Even sinners lend to sinners, expecting to be repaid in full. 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 6:27-36).

SPIRITUAL GROWTH IS THE ONLY WEALTH

“Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys, and where thieves do not break in or steal; for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (MT 6:19-21).

“For nothing is hidden that will not become evident, nor anything secret that will not be known and come to light. So take care how you listen; for whoever has, to him more shall be given; and whoever does not have, even what he thinks he has shall be taken away from him” (LK 8:17-18).

MY COMMISSION TO YOU

“I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and that your joy may be complete. My command is this: Love each other as I have loved you. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one’s life for one’s friends. You are my friends if you do what I command. I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends, for everything that I learned from my Father I have made known to you. You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit—fruit that will last—and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.  This is my command: Love each other” (JN 15:11-17).

On this Easter morning, you and I are gathered at the feet of the risen Lord. We hear Him freshly, and we listen to Him! His teachings by themselves are whole and complete. They come to us through Him from the Godhead, and we live in the wonder of that awareness. We resolve now to put His teachings first, above religious notions, the Law and the Prophets, the Letters of Paul, and every fear. Jesus is our universal Teacher and the emissary of the genuine God. No matter what religion we follow, and even if we have no religion at all, from now on we will follow Him.

Easter Eggs photo credit: M.P.N.texan <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8113246@N02/39095607394″>99¢ Easter 2018</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Hugging photo credit: Sterling College <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/7973252@N08/43074652381″>Commencement2018_0817</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Now He Rises

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The most amazing discovery of my life is the fact that Jesus is a genuine Being Who came to us as God on earth. Having faith without evidence to back it up is useless! Who cares what you or I might believe? But we can prove now based on the testimony of people that we used to think were dead that Jesus the Christ actually walked the earth two millennia ago knowing things about God, reality, death, the afterlife, and the meaning and purpose of human life that He could not have known if He had not been an emissary from the Godhead. Some years ago this truth hit me hard, with a joy so deep I cannot even express it! The Lord isn’t just a religious figure, but rather He is an elevated Being Who came to earth with an essential purpose. So then I was determined to know that purpose, and if possible to help the Lord fulfill it; and my first shock was the realization that the religion that bears the Lord’s name has very little to do with Him. Far from coming to earth just to die for our sins, Jesus spent three years sharing with us a set of teachings that we now can demonstrate came through Him directly from God, unprecedented in their elegance and simplicity, and entirely sufficient all by themselves to bring the kingdom of God on earth.

For most of the first millennium after the Lord’s death, His manner of passing was so little remarked that amid the plentiful uses of symbols like the anchor, the fish, the vine, and the dove, the use of the cross as a Christian symbol is nowhere to be found. But today that Christian cross is everywhere! The cross that depicts the Lord’s manner of death has become the symbol of Christianity because between the fourth and eighth centuries a series of Roman councils invented a new religion based in fear which replaced the gentle movement based in love that Jesus had so well begun. If I am wrong about this, I am going to a hell that the dead insist does not exist; but if what the evidence tells us is true, then it is time at last to move beyond that old false and fear-based Christianity.

I have given you a graphic photograph of the Lord dying, nailed to a cross, so you can better appreciate the ghastliness of all those sanitized Christian crosses! Suspended above the altar in my husband’s brand-new church is the archetypical Catholic cross that bears a life-sized, full-color Jesus. The few dribbles of blood are decorous, true, and the face of the Lord is beatific, but no one is allowed to enter that magnificent modern church without being made to feel sinful and unworthy because Jesus had to die a ghastly death in order for God to forgive us. In the New England Protestant church of my childhood the sanctuary cross was of bare wood, but it was nonetheless large and prominent. Never for a moment are Christians allowed to forget the manner of the Lord’s death, nor can we escape the Christian notion that it was entirely our fault! As the great mid-century stand-up comedian Lenny Bruce once said, “If Jesus had been killed twenty years ago, Catholic school children would be wearing little electric chairs around their necks instead of crosses.”

What follows are the actual words of a twenty-first-century Christian preacher. This dear man believes with all his heart that he is devoting his life to Jesus, but is there anything in what he says that seems to be related to the Lord’s Gospel words? He says, “Many people can’t see how a loving God would let people spend eternity in hell. The problem is that we are all born in sin because of the Garden of Eden! God tells us there is only one way to cleanse ourselves of sin, and that is the plan that our loving God gave us. He sent His only Son to die for the sins of all humanity. Jesus was born of a virgin so He was without sin, and then He lived His life without sin, so when He died on the cross he could pay with His blood for the sins of all mankind. That is why it is only faith in Jesus Christ that can wipe away our sins so we can spend eternity with a holy God. Those who never accept Christ will die still in sin, so they cannot be reconciled with God. This is God’s loving plan to save us.”

Please re-read those words. Is there anything about the Gospel teachings of Jesus on love, forgiveness, and bringing the kingdom of God on earth that seems to you to comport at all with what this earnest preacher says?

Even for those who don’t realize that it has nothing to do with the teachings of Jesus, Christian theology is plain off-putting. And many prominent thinkers have pointed out the fact that it makes no sense! Eighteenth-century French philosopher the Marquis de Sade said, “To judge from the notions expounded by theologians, one must conclude that God created most men simply with a view to crowding hell.” And no less an intellectual light than Albert Einstein wisely noted that, “I cannot imagine a God who rewards and punishes the objects of his creation and is but a reflection of human frailty.” It is no surprise that in the United States, which has the world’s largest Christian population, the most prominent religious persuasion has of late become “no religion at all.”

We owe a tremendous debt to those who preserved the Lord’s words for two thousand years! Thanks to the Apostle Paul, the Roman Emperors, and all the nameless worthies who played their part in advancing a religion not based in Jesus that still venerated the name of Jesus, you and I have the amazing chance to read an approximation of what Jesus said. We never will know what might have been forgotten in the couple of generations before the Gospels were written down, nor what those Roman councils might have removed; but, wonderfully, enough remains for us to reconstruct what the Lord came to do so we can advance His true work today. It was inevitable that a religion based in random fear-based human notions eventually would lose its appeal, but what is wonderful is the fact that despite a broad-based disenchantment with Christianity, in survey after survey Jesus Himself still shines!  His favorable rating in the United States remains as high as ninety percent.

Jesus did not come to die for our sins. He tells us in plain Gospel words that neither He nor God judges anyone, and those that we used to think were dead tell us that the death of Jesus on the cross has never made an afterlife difference for a single human being. Furthermore, that whole false theology of substitutionary atonement is insulting to God and humiliating to Jesus! When we read His Gospel words, we find Him clearly telling us why He came. Other objectives He might have had have been lost, but for now these five are a coherent plan:

* He Came to Abolish Religions. We tend to think of religions, spirituality, and God as a kind of package, but religious beliefs are archaic nonsense that distances us from the genuine God.

* He Came to Teach Us to Relate to God directly. We can demonstrate that God is real! So at last you and I can speak to God on our own, and God will lovingly listen.

* He Came to Teach Us to be Seekers. Far from wanting us to stick with old religious beliefs, Jesus urged us to remain forever open to new divine revelations!

* He Came to Teach us How to Grow Spiritually. The teachings of Jesus on forgiveness and love are the easiest and most effective method for achieving rapid spiritual growth ever found.

* He Came to Save the World. Humankind now risks prompt extinction on a desolated planet, but the teachings of Jesus have the power instead to bring the kingdom of God on earth.

Yes, the Easter miracle really did happen. We are told by upper-level beings that for Jesus to suffer a public death and then rise from the dead had not been part of His plan. But He had found it so difficult to convince His followers that despite the fact that our bodies decay our spiritual lives really are eternal that He decided to demonstrate for them and for us the fact that death is an illusion. It doesn’t matter, of course, when He decided to do it, but we are assured that is why He did it. The fact that Jesus’s ghastly death and His re-animation of His dead body were all done to demonstrate that life goes on altogether transforms the Easter Week events from humiliating proof of our unworthiness into a glorious demonstration of God’s perfect love.    

So at last Jesus rises! It is happening now! Amazingly, Jesus the Anointed One, the Christ, the Son of the Living God now rises from the false religion that has blessedly preserved His teachings, and He speaks to us freshly in 2019 as clearly as He spoke to us long ago. And just as the Lord’s first listeners were called to leave their fishing nets and follow Him, so you and I are being called now to put aside all our lesser struggles and begin to share the Lord’s Way with the world. Of course, since His Way is not a religion, it won’t matter whether we are Christians, Jews, atheists, or any religion at all: we can forget about religions and join hands worldwide as we share God’s perfect love. This is such a joyous time to be alive!

Rather than the fear- and guilt-based gloss that Holy Week has always carried, eased just a bit on Easter morning by the comfort of lilies and chocolate eggs, you and I have no reason any more to feel anything but gratitude that Jesus chose to die as He did to demonstrate that eternal life is our birthright, no matter what our religion might be. What Jesus is demonstrating for us all is that God loves us perfectly, no matter what! And living in the certainty of God’s perfect love, all of us can join hands at last and learn to love everyone else on earth.

I will be traveling during this coming week, so I have invited a beloved Guest to share with us His thoughts on Easter morning. I hope you will welcome Him with all your heart!

Jesus Dying on the Cross photo credit: babasteve <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64749744@N00/33900721811″>GOOD FRIDAY</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Crucifix as Art photo credit: afagen <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/51035749109@N01/45880826781″>Crivelli’s Crucifixion</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Junked Crosses photo credit: patrina_io <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/52467002@N00/2866543588″>desktop per biateddi</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a

Living in the Kingdom of God on Earth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

It is so hard to convey to you what living in the kingdom of God on earth will be like that we have spent a  few preparatory months in  sharing background information. There has been so much that you needed to know in order for what we say here to make sense that if you haven’t yet read all the linked posts, it might be good for you to do that now. Yes, all of humankind can arrive together at that glorious day when we will be united in love at close to the highest level of consciousness, and empowered to live in the kingdom of God whose process of arrival on earth the Lord first initiated two millennia ago.

We know now that all of this is true:

  • The only thing that objectively exists is the base creative force that we experience in a limited way as human consciousness.
  • Consciousness exists in a range of vibrations, from the lowest (fear and rage) to the highest (perfect love).
  • All human minds are inextricably part of that base creative Consciousness, so if even a few of us substantially raise or lower our personal consciousness vibrations, we will be minutely raising or lowering the vibrations of everyone else on earth.
  • The process of bringing the kingdom of God on earth therefore consists in raising the vibrations of as few as ten percent of the living population of this planet, which will powerfully raise the collective vibrations of everyone else on the face of the earth.

Last week we described the characteristics of those who already have achieved a substantial elevation of their consciousness vibrations. Such people are:

  • Happy. Whenever you meet anyone whose core happiness setting seems unusually high, you are dealing with someone who is more advanced spiritually.
  • Peaceful. They never seem to process events as threats to themselves, but rather they do what they can to address them with love; then they withdraw and allow the will of Spirit to prevail.
  • Humble. They have no interest in personal attention, beyond considering how they might use whatever attention might come their way in the loving service of others.
  • Very slow to anger. People who are vibrating higher cannot be near people who are angry. When attacked, they won’t fight back; but rather, they love and bless and withdraw.
  • Not interested in wealth. People who are more developed spiritually prefer to live simply. If they have more, they want to devote their own surplus to helping others.
  • Loving and supportive. Spiritually advanced people tend to think well of everyone, and even of those who want to do them harm.

Now here is one more important fact. Not only is it true that all human beings are part of a single Consciousness, but every one of us at the core of our being realizes this essential truth! So raising our personal consciousness vibrations consists most of all in jettisoning all the negativity that now weighs us down, and remembering who and what we are. Even with the consciousness of all humanity vibrating now in such deep fear that upper-level beings who are not in bodies warn that our survival as a species is at risk, you still can see that human impulse toward unity and universal love. Let’s mention here what may be its most tragic distortion.

The yearning to live in compassionate collectives seems modern to us now, but it may be as old as our species. Wikipedia defines socialism as “a range of economic and social systems characterized by social ownership of the means of production and workers’ self-management.” And Jordan Peterson, the Canadian clinical psychologist who wrote 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, says that we are “emotionally drawn to the ideals of socialism because it draws its fundamental motivational source from a kind of primary compassion” that is innate in all of us. He says that therefore the appeal of collectivist living “never will go away.” He is precisely right!

The earliest Christians carried out the first broadly known experiment in socialism. Their way of life arose in the afterglow of the Resurrection, and it preceded what they thought would be the prompt advent of the kingdom of God on earth. We are told that “all those who had believed were together and had all things in common; and they began selling their property and possessions and were sharing them with all, as anyone might have need” (Acts 2:44-45).

But every modern effort ever made to form collectivist governments has failed to the point where it has had to be replaced, or else it has led to agony. North Korea and Venezuela are only the most recent examples of socialism’s failures. Even Israel’s noble Kibbutz movement sadly petered out. The failure of every effort ever made to create a benevolent mode of collectivism might prompt us just to shrug and accept the explanations generally given for these failures, which tend to revolve around economic inefficiencies and misplaced incentives. But no one really has a bedrock reason why socialism always fails. All the reasons given are just the sorts of things that would topple any system that never had been solid in the first place. There has to be a basic reason why no variant of socialism works, and we find it in reference to that first hopeful Christian collectivist experiment. We learn from its firsthand reporters that “the congregation of those who believed were of one heart and soul” (Acts 4:32). This experiment sadly failed as well, but only after Roman persecution and the tardiness of the kingdom of God’s arrival on earth sowed disillusionment in the flock.

The core reason why socialism fails is that human minds are not sufficiently developed spiritually for us to live in the selfless love and harmony that collectivism requires. I am not advocating for socialism! But the hunger behind its persistent appeal is an idealistic yearning for a fairer and more love-based society. As Dr. Peterson says, that primal hunger for spiritual union will never go away. And the only way to create a society that is based in love and kindness will be for us to so transform the universal human mind that all humanity will be, like those earliest Christians, beautifully “of one heart and soul.”

For the first time in human history, we have the power to effect such a transformation. And once the kingdom of God on earth arrives, perhaps even socialism might work! It seems likely, too, that the republican form of government established by the Constitution of the United States will at last operate in the free and egalitarian way that our Founders first envisioned it to work, once all Americans are more selfless and loving.

Please read again that list of the characteristics of people who are spiritually advanced. Then let’s think about some of today’s most pressing problems as all of us will be thinking once we live in the kingdom of God on earth.

Political Strife. With all Americans now thinking from love, every candidate in every party is campaigning on which of them can best work with people who hold opposing views. The most successful politicians are those who are most expert at taking solutions that were first suggested by their opponents and expanding upon them, perfecting them and helping them better appeal to all Americans. Then they implement these consensus solutions with such loving sensitivity that before long political parties have withered as the Founders had hoped they soon would wither. At last, universal comity prevails.

Economic Inequality. The gap between rich and poor in the world has become intolerable to the wealthiest among us. They have succeeded in building their own wealth. Now they want everyone to have that same chance! Many of them are inspired to devote the bulk of their private fortunes to the financial empowerment of everyone on earth, both to lend muscle to new ideas for the betterment of humankind and to create many more millionaires and billionaires. So they have formed a massive charity that works with business startups all over the world, both lending the initial funds and providing a program of education and expert advice that spurs an explosion of economic growth and greater economic equality worldwide.

Racial Inequality. Scientists have lately proven what we all know in our hearts is true: there is just one human race. And as Americans better understand what perpetuates our artificial differences based on skin color, we all come together to end those differences once and for all. From educational enrichment that starts at birth through reforms that end housing and economic inequities, the devastating after-effects of Jim Crow and the War on Poverty’s destruction of the black family are being ended with the sensitivity and love that have been missing all along.

Criminal Justice. The United States holds less than five percent of the world’s population, but 25% of the world’s incarcerated felons. A more awakened nation sees this situation as intolerable, so America’s criminal justice system is being taken down and altogether rebuilt. Now the emphasis is on in-community service, reparations, education, and counseling for all but violent offenders; and rather than the old corrupt system in which 97% of federal felons were coerced into pleading guilty, by law now every prison sentence of more than two years’ duration requires a jury trial criminal conviction.

Illegal Immigration. The United States gains strict control of its borders as it establishes a fast-track system in which a million visas each year are offered to properly-vetted immigrants from Mexico and from Central America. This nation also works with these source countries to help them build upon the economic and social model that Colombia now provides, and stem the need their citizens have been feeling to come north in search of better lives.

International Discord. There is no more international discord! With all the people of the world thinking more from love, and with fear and anger withering, the first-world nations are working in harmony to bring their level of freedom and prosperity to all the rest of humankind.

Best of all, this is just the beginning of what is going to be our much better world!

 

Muslim Woman photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/40556918970″>Tigray Woman</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
African Man photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/46627260371″>Hamar Warrior (in explore)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Asian Girl photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/46065785382″>Naxi Girl (in explore)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Caucasian Girl photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/38113134044″>Girl in Sana’a</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
African Baby photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/26221640677″>Konso Girl</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Indian Little Girl photo credit: Nithi clicks <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/47850033@N08/28897413027″>Portrait of a beautiful Indian little girl</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Girl in Yemen photo credit: Rod Waddington <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/64607715@N05/25685449944″>Girl in Sana’a, Yemen (explore)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
American Circle photo credit: moodboardphotography <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/67835627@N05/7301106896″>10080031</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Bringing the Kingdom of God on Earth

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

All the stresses and angers that now separate people, best exemplified in our rage-filled politics but extending into every cranny of our lives, are signs of human history gone dangerously wrong. It is hard for people whose lifespan on earth will extend for only eight or nine decades, and people who furthermore believe that modernity is a synonym for progress, to grasp the fact that our species is rushing headlong down a blind, dark alley. We are entranced with technological progress which enhances our lives, and with medical progress which lengthens our lives, while never once really grasping the fact that we are decorating an empty vessel. None of the scientific bounty of the past two centuries has made us one whit happier. Indeed, we are ever more plagued by depression and hopelessness on a worldwide scale. And this does not end well! We are being told now by beings not in bodies and living at the highest levels of reality that unless we can very rapidly change the course of human history, within just another two hundred years humanity will be reduced to a dying remnant battling on a ruined planet.

You and I are in the midst of an emergency without precedent! So we have spent the past seven months here taking weekly bites at this crisis and exploring the fact that our options for addressing it are limited. If you have come late to this series, please read at least the posts linked here, since otherwise you may think I am being unnecessarily alarmist! Among our worst problems is the fact that not only are our main sources of information – mainstream science and mainstream religions – entirely devoid of potential solutions, but they actually contribute to perpetuating everything that has gone so wrong. Now here is the solution in a nutshell.

Nobel Laureate Max Planck, the father of quantum mechanics, told us that consciousness is the source of reality. He said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And as was noted a couple of weeks ago in MIT Technology Review, a surprising recent experiment bears him out! What you and I experience in a limited way as human consciousness is the base creative force that continuously manifests this universe. Consciousness at its highest vibration is the Godhead, so it deserves a capital “C.” Here is some of what we know about Consciousness:

  • Consciousness is in the nature of a form of energy, and it vibrates according to what we experience as emotions. It is important that we understand how powerfully creative our emotions are! When we think hatred- or fear-based thoughts, we are creating negativity in our environment as surely as if we took a flamethrower to a standing forest.
  • At its lowest vibration, Consciousness is fear and every other negative emotion, while at its highest vibration Consciousness is perfect love. The more we strive to turn away from negative emotions and ever more perfecty love and forgive, the higher our personal vibrations will rise.
  • The lower its vibration, the weaker Consciousness is; while at its highest vibration the creative power of Consciousness is infinite. So your having nasty thoughts is going to be considerably less powerful than will be your sharing of pure love and light!
  • Every human mind is part of one Consciousness, not discretely but indivisibly. So for any of us to raise or lower our personal vibratory rate will minutely affect the personal vibratory rate of every other person on earth.

When taken together, these four points suggest something that experimental evidence supports: just a few people thinking in loving concert can powerfully affect events. British researcher Lynne McTaggart is one of the world’s leading experts in the field of using the power of minds joined together in love to, for example, bring down the crime rate in targeted cities or foster love between Jews and Muslims in the Middle East. Her experiments are described in her wonderful book, The Power of Eight: Harnessing the Miraculous Energies of a Small Group to Heal Others, Your Life, and the World. The great results that she describes are so astounding that they make you want to organize the entire world into groups right now and target every problem with loving mind-energy!

For each of us to raise our personal consciousness vibrations away from negativity and toward ever more perfect love is our first order of business. And it turns out that the teachings of Jesus are the simplest and most effective method for doing that. There can be no clearer proof that Jesus is a genuine historical figure who came from the highest aspect of the Godhead than the fact that two thousand years ago He gave us the only certain answer to the problems that you and I face today!

As Jesus well knew, and as we said last week, raising our individual spiritual vibrations is a matter of simple Consciousness physics. No need to learn to meditate or do yoga; no need to take classes or go to church, and no need even to worry about sin or to practice penance. This is not a matter of earning God’s approval, but instead it is as much a matter of simple physics as are the effects of gravity or the temperature at which water boils. The Gospel teachings of Jesus work efficiently to raise your own spiritual setting, and in fact they are the easiest and most effective method for achieving rapid spiritual growth ever devised. Those teachings may not take you all the way, but they can take you pretty far! If you will carefully follow the five-step process based in the Gospels that was posted last week, you can achieve real spiritual growth within months, and be stabilized at a much higher spiritual level in a single year.

I have received a surprising number of emails from readers since posting that five-step process, nearly all of whom were trying to find a way around their need to forgive everything. They said things like, “I can forgive but I can’t forget.” “He isn’t sorry, so how can I forgive him?” or “I have put it behind me. Why isn’t that enough?” All of which tells me that I was not sufficiently straightforward last week. As A Course in Miracles tells us, there is no order of magnitude to the miracle of forgiveness. Everything can be forgiven! Simply make and release those forgiveness balls all day, every day, until your lazy mind gets over the urgency that you yourself have instilled in it about panicking at every perceived wrong. And it soon will give up. I can promise you that! Your ne’er-do-well brother-in-law or the monster who murdered someone you love doesn’t care whether you forgive him or not, but your learning to forgive without reservation is the greatest gift that you can give to yourself!

The characteristics of people who are vibrating at a much higher rate are easy to spot. Without exception, these people are:

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

Or to quote Jesus, “Do not worry … but seek first His kingdom and His righteousness” (MT 6:25-33). “Do not resist an evil person; but whoever slaps you on your right cheek, turn the other to him also” (MT 5:39). Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled; and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted” (MT 23:12). “Store up for yourselves treasures in heaven… for where your treasure is, there your heart will be also” (MT 6:19-21). “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return… Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). And “Be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:48). Apparently the Lord wasn’t giving us behavioral suggestions when He said those words, but rather He was describing for us the way spiritually advanced people naturally are!

Jesus told us that if you will sufficiently raise your personal spiritual vibration in this lifetime, you will at your death be able to enter the highest vibratory level beneath the Godhead, which Jesus called the kingdom of God. But that is not the primary reason why you and I must make this effort now! Please read again the fourth property of Consciousness given above. Every human mind is part of one Consciousness, not discretely but indivisibly. So for any of us to raise or lower our personal vibratory rate will minutely affect the personal vibratory rate of every other person on earth. And for as few as perhaps ten percent of the world’s population to raise their spiritual vibratory rates will raise the spiritual vibrations of all of humankind enough to begin to bring the kingdom of God on earth. All those others don’t even need to know why they are feeling less angry now, why their first impulse is to want to help others, or why they are happier than they ever have been and they want all the world to be happy, too. The work of raising our personal spiritual vibrations is a matter of consciousness physics, and so also will be our work of raising the consciousness vibrations of all the people in the world.

As we have been saying, you and I know enough now that we really can begin to transform ourselves, and then we can reach out and help others who also want to transform themselves. And as we do that, all of us together will without any further effort be starting the process of utterly transforming every other person on the face of the earth. Now is when it begins! And those in Spirit assure us that if we each will only do our part, it won’t even take us very long. Let us look now at what it will be like when we are living at last in that much better world….

 

Military photo credit: calafellvalo <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/33818912@N00/9017701601″>Baldellou (151)</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Medieval Jesus photo credit: MichaelHDJ <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/75912214@N08/6777478576″>Jesus Christ</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
photo credit: symphony of love <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/85608594@N00/42321412244″>Master Cheng Yen To forgive others is, in fact, being kind to ourselves</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>

Forgiveness and Love

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Amazingly, this is the first decade in all of human history when we know for certain why the universe exists and why you and I are in these bodies. No mogul or king, no prophet through even the end of the twentieth century could have known what you and I know now. Had some of them known the truth, of course, human history could have been much better; but apparently that was all part of the plan. We come to earth to experience negativity so we can push against it and thereby grow spiritually, and Lord knows our history has been rife with negativity! In a reality without time, there are millennia now when people can incarnate into ignorance and pain in an effort to attain greater spiritual growth. And wonderfully, we are being told that at this point the plan is for us to learn how to elevate our personal vibrations to the point where we can raise the consciousness vibrations of this entire planet. We really can do that! Growing spiritually to the point where you and I need never come to earth again turns out to be an easy process.  

Another thing that no one knew before the twenty-first century is the fact that Jesus is historically real, but His mission was entirely different from what Christianity has been telling us it was.  And when we put together what Jesus taught with our fresh information about the nature of reality, we find that they fit together as well as if they had been one divine revelation. What I will share with you now is the easiest and most effective way to raise your personal consciousness vibration, to bring the kingdom of God on earth, to achieve greater personal happiness while here, and to make this your last earth-incarnation. It works so well that you can feel a substantial improvement within months, and you can achieve most of your spiritual development in as little as one year’s time! I have written an entire book on this topic, but for this series on the kingdom of God I will give you just a quick summary.

Understanding Our Task

What we are talking about is nothing less than transforming ourselves from the inside out. The way we think, the way we act, and every reflex that we ever have had: almost nothing can remain the same. The transformation required of most of us to materially raise our spiritual vibrations is so profound and complete that we must begin to think of the teachings of Jesus as mandatory! And He knew very well what He was asking of us. 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). Those Gospel teachings are the easiest and the happiest process for raising our personal spiritual vibrations ever devised! I will give you this process as discreet steps, but while the steps should begin in order, it isn’t necessary for you to finish one before you start on the next. In fact, the first step is likely to be an ongoing process for the rest of our lives.

1) Learn all that you can about the afterlife and the greater reality.

The more you learn about what actually is going on, the easier it will be for you to inhabit the fact that your life is eternal. And really knowing that changes everything! Instead of the old “life sucks, then you die” way of viewing the world that has tended to be humankind’s default setting, you will start to see your life as ongoing forever and fundamentally joyous. You will stop focusing on meaningless temporal pleasures and begin to live in an eternal and essentially non-material frame.

2) Begin an active gratitude practice.

As is true of learning about the afterlife, developing a strong gratitude practice helps to soften your mind spiritually and better prepares it for transformation. I urge you to begin right now to keep a gratitude journal. For at least the next three months, spend ten minutes of every day writing down one new thing that you are grateful for, and why. For the first month or so this is pretty easy! But eventually you will be looking for reasons to be grateful even for mosquitoes and train wrecks.

3) Understand and master your ego.

Your ego emphatically is not you! It is a fear-based gremlin whose only purpose is to make you frantic to protect your body and to protect your ego itself, and you will shed your ego when your body dies. So inevitably your ego is going to die, and it makes you frantic about that, too. I think the ego likely is useful in childhood, but as an adult you don’t need it at all! And your ego will fight your spiritual development, probably because once you grow sufficiently it is going to shrivel and fade. For example, my own ego terrified me with worries that growing spiritually was going to lead to my final oblivion. Doing A Course in Miracles with a study group through the extinction of the ego might be the best way to squash it, but simply understanding what the ego is and refusing to give it mind-space also can work. Every fear that you ever experience is ego-based. So every fear is groundless! You are forever God’s best-beloved child, and once you have internalized that fact you will laugh at your ego’s petty fears.

4) Learn and practice prevenient forgiveness.

There is a big reason why Jesus emphasized forgiveness! Until you can forgive everything completely, you cannot love in the universal way that really raises your consciousness vibration. He said, “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” (MT 5:39-40). “Love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return… Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36). “You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48). So we are meant to forgive everything, no matter what, as if it never had happened at all! In fact, the whole secret to substantially raising your spiritual vibration is learning how to forgive right now every bad thing that ever will happen in your life.

While we are in bodies, we can access only a limited part of our eternal minds, and these earth-minds have three characteristics that especially fit them for rapid learning. Our earth-minds are lazy. They seek and take the easiest course. They quickly adapt. So if we rearrange whatever used to be their easiest course, they will take the new route without hesitation. And they operate largely by habit. Just as they learn how to operate our bodies or use a phone and then perform automatically, so they learn what is a threat to us. And when they are triggered by any threat, they summon the ego’s fears and rev us up to do battle, even if that stimulus is only socks on the floor, being cut off in traffic, a pissy attitude from a twelve-year-old, or a dear friend’s unjustified behavior.

Who teaches our earth-minds what is a threat? Why, we do, of course! So it is up to us to change their programming. Forgiving things after they have set off our defenses always will be a battle, but we can re-program our minds to stop perceiving stimuli as threats by spending a few months forgiving everything. Just, whenever anything happens or is about to happen that you know will set you off, quickly gather it up with sweeps of your arms and form it into a nice, tight ball. Include all the people, too! Then with both hands push that ball away as you say aloud, “I love you, I bless you, I forgive, and I release.” Do this two or three times for each threat at first, until your irritation goes away. Until your mind accepts the fact that you will no longer react to its nonsense. You are the one who taught your mind to be irritated by your mother-in-law, so it is your job to kill that programming.

And yes, once you have transformed your mind you will find that everything is equally forgiven.There was a woman whose son had been murdered, and once his killer was convicted she began to visit this young man in prison. When eventually he was released, she gave him a home and helped him to make a new start. Only when I had transformed my own mind did what she had done for her son’s murderer seem to me to be the easy and obvious response.

5) Understand and practice universal love.

A Course in Miracles tells us that “special loves” are as counterproductive spiritually as are “special hates.” As Jesus says, even tax collectors love their own families! The kind of love that matters spiritually doesn’t single out a few people as our beloveds, but rather it reveals to us that even the worst dregs of humanity are completely beloved and sacred in God’s eyes. Every human being must become equally our own beloved!

Looking For Signs of Spiritual Growth in Yourself

I first put this all together a decade ago. So I have been your guinea pig, and I was an excellent test subject! It is hard for me to remember now the way I was back then, but if I think about it I can make myself blush. Times when I was cranky with my husband and children, and even prickly with my poor mother who refused to believe I knew what I was talking about so she fought her dying to the end. Competitive driving. Snapping at store clerks. Playing into the petty squabbles of friends. I wasn’t worse than your average American, but for sure I was no better! But then in the summer of 2011 I set out to apply what I had been learning.

I first noticed a change in myself about six weeks into my new forgiveness practice. Something happened that should have set me off, but I felt no irritation at all; I told friends at the time that it was as if there had been levers on the outside that people used to fiddle with and make me crazy, but they had been disconnected now. When people fiddled with them, I felt just softness and peace. Then soon after that, I began to notice that everyone around me was a lovely person! Even strangers on the street. I loved everyone! It turns out that once you get rid of all that ego-based ballast by forgiving everything, your spiritual vibration begins to rise on its own. And this change in me has been amazingly self-reinforcing. Over the past two years I have been subjected to tremendous deliberately-inflicted stress, but I have had no trouble forgiving and loving all the perpetrators. It has been seven years since I last had to form a forgiveness ball. Dear beautiful friends, this works! And nothing else works so easily.

Seeing things coming together now and knowing we are watching God in action is a source of such absolute wonderment that to deeply think about it puts you into bliss! It is said that when the Buddha achieved enlightenment, what he said was, “I am awake.” And now you and I have been given the power to awaken just as he awakened. The power to live all that Jesus envisioned. The power to transcend and then transform the world! The hour is late, but it is not too late. Next week we will begin to envision what it actually will be like to bring forth the Lord’s long-promised kingdom of God on earth….

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>
Bible and cross photo credit: verchmarco <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/160866001@N07/44559979080″>Geöffnete, alte Bibel mit verfärbten Seiten und kunstvollem, silbernem Kreuz als Buchzeichen</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>

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