Author: Roberta Grimes

The Hard Problem

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Spring was never waiting for us, dear.
It ran one step ahead as we followed in the dance,
Between the parted pages, and were pressed in love’s hot, fevered iron,
Like a striped pair of pants.
MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark, all the sweet, green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain.
I don’t think that I can take it, ‘cause it took so long to bake it,
And I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no!

I recall the yellow cotton dress foaming like a wave
On the ground around your knees.
The birds, like tender babies in your hands,
And the old men playing checkers by the trees.
MacArthur’s Park is melting in the dark.
All the sweet, green icing flowing down.
Someone left my cake out in the rain.
I don’t think that I can take it ‘cause it took so long to bake it
And I’ll never have that recipe again. Oh no!
– Jimmy Webb, from “MacArthur Park” (1968)

What is most astonishing about the efforts of scientists in the field of consciousness research is the way these scientists never bother to study or try to fully define it. Their first step in studying consciousness should have been to do the research and seek a good preliminary understanding of what consciousness even is. And when you google the word “consciousness,” you don’t get much, which is testimony to the fact that mainstream scientists have never much bothered to take what should have been the essential first steps toward understanding their elusive quarry. Even Wikipedia defines “consciousness” simply as “awareness.” And this, in a day when every reasonably well-informed person who is reading these words has long since learned that consciousness appears in our lives in other ways than merely our individual awareness! For example:

  • Everything death-related is consciousness-based. Whether it be reports of ghosts and apparitions, or the many thousands of consistent and verifiable communications that Westerners have been receiving for more than a century and a half from those that we used to think were dead, the afterlife is by now undeniable. And it is all consciousness! But scientists simply do not want to know about it.
  • Near-Death Experiences and Out-Of-Body Experiences all are also consciousness-based. The fact that each individual’s consciousness can exist and operate readily apart from its related material body, and can have experiences, and can then return to that body and report on those experiences in detail, is by now an undeniable fact. That people blind from birth, and even those born without eyes, can see and can report on what they are seeing during NDEs and OBEs, is another undeniable fact. But, again, scientists do not want to know about it. And when they are asked about NDEs, they will stick their fingers into their ears, scrunch their eyes up tight, and hum loudly.
  • Our spiritual growth is consciousness-based as well. The more thoroughly people seek to understand the meaning and purpose of human life, the more that meaning and purpose seems to be revealed to be precisely what Jesus told us that it was two thousand years ago. It is simply to love more perfectly, and to forgive more completely. Nothing more, but nothing less. Which means that for each of us to raise our personal consciousness vibration away from the lower vibrations and toward the higher, more love-based vibrations is the very essence of our spiritual fulfillment. But, again, scientists have no interest at all in this tremendous swath of our universal human experience.

For mainstream scientists to have been adamantly materialist thirty years ago, or perhaps even as recently as twenty years ago, would have been understandable, and probably forgivable. But for mainstream scientists’ prevailing degree of willful ignorance about something so basic and so important to persist even now, when so much good information is so widely available on the internet and in well-researched and footnoted books and publications, is frankly inexcusable. Indeed, it is looking more likely to more open-minded researchers that consciousness is going to turn out to be not some minor product of the human brain at all. But in fact, it is pretty clear now that consciousness is going to prove instead to be crucially important. It seems that consciousness may indeed prove in the end to be the ground of being of all reality. Which means that materialist scientists may very well have things completely backward! Our meat-brains do not after all produce consciousness, but instead it is likely that they merely receive consciousness.

Scientists of the traditional materialist sort who study consciousness are making two core assumptions. They assume that:

  • Consciousness is only human-brain-based awareness. And moreover, they assume that consciousness can never be found in any other form. They know for certain that you and I are aware. And they assume that our awareness must be brain-based. So when they study consciousness, scientists assume that it actually makes sense to reason outward from ourselves. But we who are not materialist scientists understand that these scientists all must therefore be living in a pre-1976 world, prior to the publication of Raymond Moody’s Life After Life. It is a world in which no one ever has heard the term “near-death experience,” and no NDE or OBE ever has yet been reported.
  • Therefore, these materialist scientists reason, consciousness must somehow originate inside the structures of the human brain. There is no other possibility. The human brain is indeed vastly complex, but after the better part of a century of scientists having fruitlessly assumed that those complex brain structures somehow have to give rise to consciousness, it still never has seemed to dawn on any traditional research scientist that they might want to consider looking beyond the brain itself.

So it is no wonder that scientists have taken to calling their search for the source of consciousness inside the human brain “the Hard Problem.” I maintain that even if we were indeed still pre-1976, it still would make no sense at all to be proceeding to try to understand consciousness based upon the above two assumptions! It still would be important in any event for us first to try to better understand what consciousness actually is. 

My favorite definition of consciousness was given to me by Thomas, my spirit guide. He tells me that “Consciousness is an infinitely powerful and infinitely creative energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware.” So in other words, consciousness is the ground-of-all-being, and Consciousness at its highest vibration is God, which is perfect love. Scientists won’t be using this definition for a while, but they might begin to use some part of it. And someday all of us will use it. Mark my Thomas’s words.

In what other area of scientific research does reasoning outward from some random starting assumption like “consciousness must be brain-related, so, what the heck, let’s just look there” make sense to anyone? When consciousness is independently and objectively studied, it is found to have so many other and widely varied aspects beyond simple awareness that it would be found to be flat impossible for consciousness to originate inside the human brain! And yet, these blinkered materialist scientists are undaunted.

Stolidly, and apparently with little doubt in their minds that eventually they are bound to succeed, they still  look for that spark of consciousness to appear, magically generated somehow from the meat inside each human skull. Oh, they have come to understand by now that solving the Hard Problem is not going to be easy! But since these scientists have careers to pursue, and children still to educate, while there are sources of funds to pay their salaries, these materialist scientists will soldier on. They enter each new year with optimism, and they follow every new idea, no matter how crazy it might seem, with so much hope! Only to find that, over and over again, each new idea is yet another blind alley.

More genuinely hopeful, though, is the fact that there are some independent organizations that explore consciousness more intelligently, the most prominent of which is the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS). IONS was founded by astronaut Edgar Mitchell after he had a spiritual epiphany as he was returning from the moon. For half a century, IONS has been a leader in spurring interest in and seeking funding for research into genuine consciousness studies. Perhaps wisely, what IONS tries to do is to stay only a half-step ahead of the strictly materialist scientists, which is a tricky dance to do at best. And it is a dance that requires more patience by far than I possess.

For example, I notice that IONS is co-sponsoring with The Division of Perceptual Studies, the University of Virginia, and The Alef Trust a conference called Beyond the Brain. Apparently a group called the Scientific and Medical Network has been putting on this conference since 1995, and its specific, stated purpose is to explore consciousness, and specifically to address whether and how consciousness might extend beyond the physical brain. The conference’s promotional materials note that “speakers at the cutting edges of their fields (will offer) a deeper understanding of how consciousness research is expanding the horizons of science.” This conference bills itself as “The world’s premier conference series exploring new research on whether and how consciousness and mind extend beyond the physical brain and body. This year’s event covers children who remember previous lives, energy medicine and healing, spiritual awakening in scientists and academics, neuroscience and spirituality, terminal lucidity, DMT and consciousness, and the more general issues of nonlocal consciousness and the consciousness-brain relationship.” This is nowhere near the genuine cutting edge, of course, but when it is compared with what the materialist scientists are doing, it breaks the sound barrier.

This year’s online event takes place from Friday, 3 November to Sunday, 5 November. And reportedly, “Speakers are all at the cutting edges of their fields and will be discussing innovative research that probes the nature of consciousness. You will gain a vital overview and a deeper understanding of how consciousness research is expanding the horizons of science. This mind-stretching conference is not to be missed, so we greatly look forward to your participation!” Apparently it is all online. If you are interested, go to Beyondthebrain.org to learn more.

IONS is a fine organization, founded as it was by astronaut Edgar Mitchell and run for many years by the estimable Dean Radin. But nevertheless, it is difficult to be hopeful that it can do very much to change the meaningless direction of materialist science. The traditional scientific community is a closed system, and I flat cannot imagine that it is going to listen to anyone outside of it any time soon. Modern mainstream scientists do not in fact live in a pre-1976 world. In their everyday lives they live in 2023, and they are well aware of near-death experiences and all their manifold implications, and yet these blinkered fools still persist in taking the money and wasting yet many more decades in what amounts to a meaningless charade. The real question is, when what they are doing is at this point so obviously pointless, why do they nevertheless persist in doing it?

While science continues to wallow in self-imposed ignorance, you and I no longer need to continue to wait to begin to understand the truth. There are by now some brilliant researchers who have mostly figured out consciousness, and they are happy to share with us what they know! Here is a lovely series of videos by our treasured friend, Dr. R. Craig Hogan, which demonstrate (a) that the mind is not inside the brain; (b) that the brain is actually unnecessary; and (c) that in fact there is nothing but mind and experiences. As Jesus has been telling us all along, the truth indeed does make us free!

There will be another song for me, for I will sing it.
There will be another dream for me. Someone will bring it.
I will drink the wine while it is warm,
And never let you catch me looking at the sun.
And after all the loves of my life, after all the loves of my life,
You’ll still be the one.

I will take my life into my hands, and I will use it.
I will win the worship in their eyes, and I will lose it.
I will have the things that I desire,
And let my passion flow like rivers through the sky,
And after all the loves of my life, Oh, after all the loves of my life,
I’ll be thinking of you. And wondering why…
– Jimmy Webb, from “MacArthur Park” (1968)

We Create Our Own Suffering

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What kind of fool am I, who never fell in love?
It seems that I’m the only one that I have been thinking of.
What kind of mind is this? An empty shell,
A lonely cell in which an empty heart must dwell.
What kind of clown am I? What do I know of life?
Why can’t I cast away this mask of clay
And live my life?  Why can’t I fall in love,
Like any other man? And maybe then I’ll know
What kind of fool I am!
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021) from “What kind of fool am I?” (1962)

For the past ten years I have been writing a weekly blog post, and also putting out a weekly podcast. My first blog entry was posted on November 21, 2013, while my first podcast went live in mid-June of that same year. And while this blog would skip as much as two or three weeks in the beginning if I had a lot going on, that podcast seems only once to have done reruns on a holiday weekend. For the most part, their audiences are different people. In fact, some who are reading this post may be surprised to learn that your blogger friend also does that podcast every week! The audience for Seek Reality with Roberta Grimes is larger than is our blog audience, since we send out just under five thousand weekly emails that carry each new blog post, while our podcast audience is in the hundreds of thousands. But still, I put considerably more effort into blogging for you than I put into delivering those weekly podcast episodes.

These blog posts take more time to write because each of them is a much-fussed-over think-piece. And I continue to practice law part-time as well. My law practice remains a central joy of my life! I have thought about retiring from the practice of law, but I am still having too much fun with my day-job, since some of my client businesses and their associated families have been a beloved part of my life for decades. I don’t practice courtroom law, so my practice leaves me lots of time for researching and thinking about aspects of the greater reality that I then can have the rare joy of discussing with my Thomas, and even sometimes with Master Jesus; and then eventually I will need to write about what the two or three of us have talked about, to enable us to pull it all together. And you, my precious blog friends, are graciously willing in the end to read and comment on whatever we write. My podcasts, on the other hand, are arranged just around outreach and teaching. They are meant to be times when I can do what Thomas tells me is what the rest of my life is primarily meant to be about, which is helping to share the truth about Jesus, and the truth about death and the afterlife. Although on occasion I have said some radical things on-air, at which times I have generally been my own guest. But mostly, I will interview authors, or I repeat my listeners’ favorite guests at regular intervals to talk about important educational topics that feature the afterlife and the greater reality.   

So it may not really be as surprising as it feels to me that this is the first time in more than a decade that my podcast seems to have something important to offer to my weekly blog post. But just this past week, I interviewed someone whose book gives us a great new way to approach and to use the Gospel teachings of Jesus. And I love his book! It’s called, If I Die Before I Wake – The Five-Step Roadmap to Enlightenment, Prosperity, and Your Life’s Purpose. And since Jonathan England is giving his book away for free at findyourpurposebook.com, I see no reason not to recommend it to you. With all the many hundreds of authors that I have interviewed on Seek Reality in the past ten years, his is only the second book that I have recommended to the world without reservation, because it gives you a different and worthwhile approach to using the Gospel teachings of Jesus. The first such book that I recommended was TJ Woodward’s Conscious Being, just a few years back. TJ Woodward is a wonderful spiritual counselor to those who struggle with addictions, and while I thought that TJ’s book was perfect in particular for people to whom the very notion of Christianity was likely to bring on a literal case of hives, Jonathan’s book contains marvelous insights into why Jesus’s teachings are so effective at raising our consciousness vibrations. Jonathan’s Seek Reality interview will be posted at webtalkradio.net for the week of October 10th, both in audio and in video. If you are curious, you might listen to it there.   

 It is seldom, if ever, that I learn anything new from my podcast guests. That is not why I do these weekly podcasts. And Jonathan England bills himself as someone who is going to help you learn how to earn your first million dollars, so I thought, Well, okay. I know the type. At this point, new potential guests are pitched to me by agents as often as twice a week, and a lot of those potential guests are in that mold. I generally turn them down, but Jonathan England was pitching himself, and he came from a fresh perspective on the teachings of Jesus, so I thought, Okay, I’ll play your silly game, and I penciled him in. But then I read his book! What Jonathan England was offering was a kind of post-Christianity, twenty-first-century approach to the teachings of Jesus that seemed to interest my two much-beloved Collaborators as much as it interested me. I know that it works. There are five separate steps to it, and I have personally lived all five of them in my own pursuit of spiritual growth. I think that for a modern seeker to begin with the Gospel teachings of Jesus as they are taught in The Fun of Growing Forever, and then perhaps to add Jonathan England’s five steps as they are taught in If I Die Before I Wake, has to take you at least to the top of level four, and probably into afterlife level five. How can that not happen? Because the primary thing that I have learned from Jonathan’s book, the elegantly simple thing that has been in front of my face for my entire life but it is so simple that I never before have seen it, is this: WE ARE ALREADY PERFECT. Of course we are! We come from God. How can we not be perfect?

Or to put it another way: We create our own unnecessary suffering. And since we create our own suffering, the great news is that you and I really are in control! Each of us is born as God’s Own best-beloved Child. We look upon the perfect face of Jesus, and we are looking in a mirror! But we forget that fact, once we are born on earth. All the epic struggles and pains of this place, the horrors and stresses and the battles that each of us fights every day of our lives is a roomful of mirrors of our own imagination that reflect to us our own desperate and despairing face. The sources of human suffering are manifold! Most of our suffering is fear-based, and it has myriad causes. For example, here are some of the sources of our own entirely self-created fears:

  • A reluctance to trust God sufficiently for us to love and forgive without reservation. Jesus would tell us that most of our earthly problems come from our pure lack of ability to trust God enough for us to love and forgive all people. Now, please read that underlined sentence again. How shameful is that? Each person on earth is God’s Own best-beloved Child! So, who are we to refuse to love and forgive them all? We believe that we are alone in the world, but we are never alone! What with God, our spirit guides, and our own loved ones not now in physical bodies, every one of us is a walking crowd.
  • Failure to make a sincere effort to raise our personal consciousness vibrations. There is no hell, and nor did Jesus ever teach about hell, but rather the lowest level of consciousness is what Jesus called the Outer Darkness, where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth. And if we are unable to forgive, we might end up there, simply because we have allowed our consciousness vibratory rate to sink so low. Not a pleasant place to be, but not hell at all, and a place from which eventually we all will be rescued.
  • Accepting fear-based and unloving religious ideas as real. Much of what religions teach is based in fear, to the point where it is not an overstatement to say that you should be careful about which teachings you follow from any religion. And that especially includes even innocent-seeming teachings like the Christian Apostles’ Creed, which seems to be just a bland statement of faith, but which can nevertheless be fairly easily turned into something divisive and unloving. It has spawned another version of the LGBTQ sort that has proven to be quite divisive. I don’t know the answer here. All I know is that if the Apostles’ Creed is being used to spawn other creeds which are divisive, then we stop reciting the Apostles’ Creed and all its spinoffs altogether. And if you find attending church to be at all negative or stressful, then simply stop going to church. The one time that Jesus talks about going to Synagogue on the Sabbath day, people try to throw Him off a cliff (LK 4:14-30)! Instead, simply turn to reading the Gospels on your own. Here is an article which suggests that the Gospel of Matthew is all that you ever will need to read and follow for your personal spiritual well-being. Or you might just graduate to teachingsbyjesus.com. Avoid all fears for the spiritual poison that they are!
  • Allowing fear-based governmental manipulation of our minds. We have no choice about living in human societies at the federal, state, and local levels, but we do have the right to choose whether or not and the extent to which we will allow our societies at all levels to affect our daily lives and our personal peace. When I stopped watching television two decades ago, it was primarily to get away from the minute-by-minute stress of all that political news! It is essential that we inform ourselves and that we vote, but we can do those things while avoiding all the fear-based drama that comes with TV political news. As Jesus tells us, we are to render to Caesar what is Caesar’s, and to God what is God’s (MT 22:21).

The more we can free ourselves from all these completely unnecessary sources of fear and stress, the more we will begin to set right our entire lives! And perhaps the most joyous thing of all about this so deeply joyous time of my own life is how completely all the parts of it are coming together.  I feel so deeply at peace about it all, and so absolutely free from fear, so very far beyond joyous and clearly as if I am somehow the most fortunate person alive. Because it really didn’t have to be turning out this way at all!

 The truth about reality more and more is feeling for me something like just before dawn on the morning when I was six years old, and I got up on my very best-ever Christmas Day of my life. We are so close now to the point where scientists are going to have to give up on materialism for the complete crock that it actually is, even though (laughably) the older ones still are clinging to straws. And meanwhile, we are finding ever more beautiful evidence of the known events of the factual life of a Jesus who really is fully God and fully Man, and who is, by the way and incredibly, my own deeply cherished personal Friend! We are learning with ever more flat-out certainty that not only is each of our lives eternal, but each of us is inextricably part of God; and as such, each of us is ALREADY PERFECT! Simply reach out and claim the truth of who you already are, my dear one! Thank You, dear God! Ours is the very first generation on earth that is no longer ignorant of anything! There is no longer anything that has been forgotten, but instead there is only perfection beneath this ultimately bountiful Christmas Tree of your own blessed and complete eternal life!

 

 What kind of mind is this? An empty shell! A lonely cell in which
An empty heart must dwell. What kind of lips are these?
That lied with every kiss. That whispered empty words of love
That left me alone like this. Why can’t I fall in love?
Like any other man? And maybe then I’ll know what kind of fool I am!
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “What kind of fool am I? (1962)

Was Jesus a Slave?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

My sweet Lord, my Lord, my Lord,
I really want to see you! Really want to be with you!
Really want to see you, Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord,
My sweet Lord! My Lord, my Lord!

 I really want to know you! Really want to go with you!
Really want to show you Lord, that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)

Really want to see you! Really want to see you! Really want to see you, Lord!
Really want to see you Lord, but it takes so long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!) Hm, my Lord (Hallelujah!) My, my, my Lord (Hallelujah!)

 I really want to know you (Hallelujah!) Really want to go with you (Hallelujah!)
Really want to show you Lord that it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)

As I have researched the life and teachings of Jesus, there were things that never made sense to me. But I was so engrossed in ever more deeply studying Jesus’s Gospel words, in blogging and podcasting and answering questions, that for a long time I ignored the things about the life of Jesus that didn’t seem right. Or I accepted the explanations we were getting from scholars, even though I thought those explanations were unsatisfying. There were a number of such puzzles in Jesus’s life, but the two things that most bothered me, and the ways in which most scholars have addressed them, were these:

  • Jesus’s lack of a wife. It is clear to anyone who reads the Gospels that Jesus was reared as a well-educated and religiously observant Jew. And in His day, properly brought-up Jewish males were married in their teens, but we can find no evidence that Jesus ever took a wife. Why was that? Some scholars assume that He did have a wife, that perhaps Mary Magdalen was His wife, and even that He likely had children, who were then spirited away to France or somewhere, either with or without their mother, and that some or all of the members of Jesus’s nuclear family survived His crucifixion. Some scholars even assume that Jesus joined His family in exile after His resurrection. But there is no evidence for any of this.
  • The “Lost Years.” It would have been assumed that Jesus would begin His teaching mission as a young adult, but the Biblical Gospels tell us that He did not begin to teach in Galilee until the age of thirty. That silent period of young adulthood that lasted for almost a decade is what is commonly referred to as “the Lost Years,” and naturally scholars have wanted to fill those years with some sort of useful activity. The most common ideas put forth have to do with His traveling to India or Nepal, perhaps. He might have networked with Buddhist and Hindu teachers, further learning and perfecting what He later taught. All of which I reject as nonsense! Jesus had things to learn on earth before His teaching phase began, but what He had to learn was only about humankind, so He could better understand and therefore better teach the people around Him. Jesus was born on earth from the Godhead as already a spiritually perfected Being.

As I came to better know Jesus last summer while we worked on material for His website, I tried to develop the courage to ask Him to address some of these questions about His personal life. After all, I had been charged with creating His website, and everyone is avid to know more about Jesus on a personal level. We were discussing His positions on doctrine, and He was  comfortable about doing that. And in the process, He was tearing down Constantine’s Christianity without reservation. But Jesus was reluctant to answer questions about His personal life. I had long wondered about John, for example, who was “the disciple that Jesus loved,” and who had leaned back against Jesus’s chest at a banquet to ask Him a question, and had taken other personal liberties with the Lord. When you pair that information with the fact that Jesus never married, you might naturally wonder about their sexual preferences…? But when that thought even barely entered my mind, I got an “if looks could kill” look from Jesus, and He stood up and walked away. Jesus has never looked at me that way either before or since, and I have never thought of asking Him even one more personal question. (And then I remembered that of course John was Jesus’s younger brother from His last pre-Jesus lifetime, the one in which Thomas was Jesus’s older brother, which should adequately explain why John was the disciple that Jesus loved.)

Jesus simply will not address the details of His personal life with me. Nor, I think, will He address them with anyone else. Jesus is private by nature, but more to the point, He considers His personal life to be unimportant. It is only His teachings that matter to Him. And when I ask Him questions in general, He usually won’t say a definitive “Yes.” The most that He will do is to give me a positive vibe. He will, however, say a definitive “No.” And sometimes – as you saw – His “NO” is emphatic! But soon after that if-looks-could-kill moment, I found an article somewhere that suggested that Jesus had been born into slavery. And when I asked Him in my mind whether this could be true, He gave me the comfortable sense that I might profitably investigate that question. Which is as close to a “Yes” as I ever will get from Him.

An open-minded researcher has to admit that the evidence that Jesus was born into slavery is strong. When the idea is first suggested to you, though, everything within you is repulsed by it! At least, that was how I felt. I thought there had to be some mistake. Jesus? If you want to dismiss the whole notion out of hand, all I ask is that you read the rest of this post with an open mind. And with the understanding that Jesus Himself gave me permission to investigate this question. I did the research, and I went from being a repulsed skeptic to becoming someone who is not only personally convinced, but who thinks that we have discovered some interesting new information about the Man Himself. Let’s look together at the evidence: 

  • Slavery was common in that time and place. But slavery in the area where Jesus lived two thousand years ago was a milder condition than is our image of chattel slavery in the pre-Civil-War American South. And for many of those held in bondage then, it was not a permanent condition. People often sold themselves or their children into servitude for a period of time in order to pay back a debt, or even because they could not otherwise afford food and shelter. The Greek word translated as “servant” generally did mean what we would call a bondsman, or an actual slave, but sometimes it meant just a person hired to do some task; and these people were often bound for a time and not for life. There were, moreover, strict Biblical rules about how “slaves” were to be treated (see, e.g., Exod 21.2-6; Lev 25.10, 38-41; and Deut 23.15,16).
  • Jesus’s mother, Mary, identifies herself to the Archangel Gabriel as a slave. She uses the female version of a Greek word which is translated as “slave” whenever it is used for a male (see LK 1:38). And if Mary is a slave, then her child will be born into her same legal status. In which case, insofar as I can determine, Jesus’s status as a slave at birth would have been for life. But when Jesus was four, the Roman Emperor Augustus decreed that those born into slavery as Jesus would have been born into slavery were now to be freed at the age of thirty. And if Jesus was a slave until He was thirty, then that very well explains both why Jesus was not married in His teens, and why He did not begin His teaching ministry until He reached the age of thirty, since He would have been Joseph’s bondsman working as a carpenter during all those “Lost Years.” And while Joseph may not have married Mary, he received and heeded Gabriel’s announcement, and he seems in all respects to have thought of Jesus as his beloved oldest son, protecting Him from the slaughter of the innocents when it happened and educating Him well in preparation for His free adulthood. We really have no complaint to make against Jesus’s nominal father.
  • A mere stable is considered to be sufficient shelter for a woman who is about to give birth. We fondly think that the “no room in the inn” story of Jesus’s birth is charming, but in fact it is a sign of Mary’s low status, especially in view of her late stage of pregnancy. Would a free woman of respectable rank have been shuffled off to give birth in a barn?
  • Joseph seems never to have married Mary. Jesus from the cross asks His disciple, John, to look after His mother (see JN 19:27), so we know that Jesus is not certain that Joseph will care for his mother after His own death. As indeed apparently Joseph does not care for her, according to a close reading of the Gospel of Luke, since Mary soon moves into John’s household.
  • Jesus was oddly despised by His childhood neighbors for speaking with authority at the start of His ministry. After Jesus was baptized by John the Baptist, He returned to Galilee. And then comes an astonishing scene that never made sense to me before, in which He speaks in His home synagogue and announces that He is the fulfillment of Hebrew prophesy. And his home-folks promptly try to throw Him off a cliff. Here it is:

14 And Jesus returned to Galilee in the power of the Spirit, and news about Him spread through all the surrounding region. 15 And He began teaching in their synagogues and was praised by all.

16 And He came to Nazareth, where He had been brought up; and as was His custom, He entered the synagogue on the Sabbath, and stood up to read. 17 And the scroll of Isaiah the prophet was handed to Him. And He unrolled the scroll and found the place where it was written:

18 “The Spirit of the Lord is upon Me,
Because He anointed Me to bring good news to the poor.
He has sent Me to proclaim release to captives,
And recovery of sight to the blind,
To set free those who are oppressed,
19 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

20 And He rolled up the scroll, gave it back to the attendant, and sat down; and the eyes of all the people in the synagogue were intently directed at Him. 21 Now He began to say to them, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing.” 22 And all the people were speaking well of Him, and admiring the gracious words which were coming from His lips; and yet they were saying, “Is this not Joseph’s son?” 23 And He said to them, “No doubt you will quote this proverb to Me: ‘Physician, heal yourself! All the miracles that we heard were done in Capernaum, do here in your hometown as well.’” 24 But He said, “Truly I say to you, no prophet is welcome in his hometown. 25 But I say to you in truth, there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah, when the sky was shut up for three years and six months, when a severe famine came over all the land; 26 and yet Elijah was sent to none of them, but only to Zarephath, in the land of Sidon, to a woman who was a widow. 27 And there were many with leprosy in Israel in the time of Elisha the prophet; and none of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.” 28 And all the people in the synagogue were filled with rage as they heard these things; 29 and they got up and drove Him out of the city, and brought Him to the crest of the hill on which their city had been built, so that they could throw Him down from the cliff. 30 But He passed through their midst and went on His way (LK 4:14-30). A presumptuous local boy who had grown up as a slave among them and only just been emancipated might inspire such rage, but surely nothing less!

We all plan our lives on earth before we are born, and that was especially true of Jesus. The Jesus that we know would have planned an earth-life as the poorest of the poor, and in that time and place, that may well have meant that Jesus deliberately chose to be born of a slave mother, and to live as a slave Himself during most of His human life. My Thomas tells us that Jesus was born as God on earth so God could “look through His eyes,” as Thomas puts it, and observe and come to very much better understand humanity. And how much better could God come to understand people when viewing us from the perspective of the least of these (see MT 25:44-46), by spending the first thirty years of Jesus’s life viewing us from the perspective of an actual slave?

That perspective of “the least of these” would have additionally suited Jesus’s purpose as He fine-tuned His teachings in preparation for His active teaching phase. And God could easily have influenced Caesar Augustus’s mind to decree an emancipation at the age of thirty for those born into slavery in plenty of time for Jesus to begin His planned teaching phase when He was thirty. That coincidence of ages seems simply too neat for it actually to have been a coincidence.

 So I have come to accept the probability that Jesus did indeed begin and live most of His life as a slave, and He did so by strategic choice, to better serve God’s need to more perfectly understand people. But I think it was also done by personal choice. I slapped my forehead when I realized that! The Jesus that I have lately come to much better know, the Jesus who loves each individual person to the point of obsession, and who as recently as just last week could not stand to see that a member of this community was sad without rushing off to give her a hug, could not have borne the thought of planning a lifetime to be lived among so many slaves unless He was going to be a slave Himself. Jesus has just lived the past seventeen hundred years doing nothing but loving hundreds of millions of Christianity’s victims back into mental and spiritual health, even though He had no part in causing any of their pain!

 I get it now. I do. Late last spring, soon after I first personally met Jesus, when I was still trying to get my mind around all the details of knowing Him, I was asking my Thomas a lot of questions. Why did Jesus do this or that, or was this or that really true about Jesus? And the sense I got was that Thomas wasn’t always thrilled about these things either, but I just had to accept what Jesus did, and who He was. And I now realize that Jesus would have had to teach as a free Man. But until the public phase of His life began, He would have wanted to have the same status as the poorest people around Him. He would likely have wanted to be a slave, since He lived where so many people were slaves. And if I had asked my Thomas why that would have been so, since I would certainly never have wanted to be a slave, his answer would have been the same answer that I always got when I asked my Thomas these questions. He would have said simply, “That is why He is Jesus, and you and I are not.”

The Personal Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love thee with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.
– Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806-1861), from “How Do I Love Thee?” (1850)

Someone has recently asked me if I could channel Jesus, or if I knew of someone who could channel Jesus. I told her No, on both counts. And in an effort to temper her expectations, I added that Jesus is very busy, and we cannot cause Jesus to appear at our command just to chat. She emailed me back rather huffily that she would try to remember that Jesus did not have time for her. At once I sent her another email, saying that was not my point at all! But there are billions of Christians on earth, and there is just one of Him, and I don’t know how either God or Jesus can be receptive to all the prayers that they receive; but somehow they do manage to hear and to answer each individual prayer. I didn’t think that she would presume to ask if I could channel God, would she? And Jesus is no different!

Although perhaps that is not really true at all. Jesus is fully God and fully Man, and He is determined to maintain that human aspect of Himself, even though now He can continue to maintain His humanity only with tremendous effort. I have talked here about how Jesus has remained on the entrance level of the astral plane so He can welcome every returning Christian who wants to meet Him personally, and He and Thomas spend a lot of time together, even physically play-fighting as loving brothers will, all so Jesus can maintain Himself in human balance. So Jesus really is unique. Although He is vibrating now even above the Godhead level, His love for humankind is such that He puts tremendous effort into maintaining Himself as fully one of us. And His maintaining that gritty human touch does require a surprising amount  of effort!

Before last year, I guess I thought of Jesus pretty much as most people do, more or less as just another public figure. And you and I feel as if we own public figures, don’t we? That is the brutal price of fame: when you are famous enough, you give up your privacy. Before last year, Jesus was generic Jesus to me as well, so I would have expected, just as that woman who emailed me expects, that I could pray to Jesus and expect to get His personal attention. If someone were channeling Jesus, I would assume that as a cradle Christian I had the right to get in line and talk directly with Jesus as well. There is now an artificial intelligence Jesus chatbot app available, which frankly seems to me to be an abomination; but before last year, I think I would have seen a Jesus chatbot as just fine, and perhaps even inevitable. Technically Jesus is a deceased public figure who possesses no legal personhood, so He sadly lacks the standing even to sue in court to protect His good name.  

 But having personally met Jesus last year has made such a monumental difference for me that now I wish that everyone could also personally meet Him! Jesus is a complete and well-rounded, living and breathing Person. I have read articles about Jesus since the night when I first met Him, each talking about some little facet of Jesus based on Biblical evidence and various assumptions, but none of the authors has ever had the great good fortune of actually meeting Jesus, and therefore nothing that I ever have read has conveyed the fact that my treasured Friend is a whole living Person who has His own unique personality. And remarkably, the impression that He makes is not what you might think. Jesus is difficult to describe because He seems when you meet Him to be so young, and yet He has such obvious deep gravitas. He looks to be in his early thirties, and He is only maybe five feet nine or ten inches tall. You can feel people’s personal energies in the astral, and Jesus’s energy is like no one else’s, powerful and yet absolutely smooth, with no low notes at all. I think the reason Jesus seems so powerful and at the same time so mild is that He has no ego, as we think of an ego. No sense of putting Himself forward or wanting your attention, although of course there is no need for that because His personal energy makes it clear Who He is. Jesus focuses great attention on you, and He doesn’t expect you to focus attention on Him, which is not how people customarily act; but it is charming to have Him so delightfully interested in you! He looks deeply into your eyes when He talks to you. Indeed, talking with Jesus is such a different experience that it flustered me on the night when I first met Him. I recall that at one point I became so overcome that I blurted to Him, “Have you any idea what a big deal you are?” Then I was embarrassed about having said something so stupid. But He seemed not to have heard it.  Or perhaps He was just perplexed about why I had said it.

I think the best way to describe Jesus’s manner is to say that He makes me think of a self-made, very prosperous young man. I have worked with some very successful businessmen in my legal career, which has been spent advising the owners of closely-held businesses. And all the most successful business owners that I ever have met have been pretty much the way that Jesus is now. They were friendly, kindly, respectful, entirely focused on their visitor, and at the same time efficient and no-nonsense because their time was so valuable. Jesus is all of that. As I have said in other posts, my Thomas spends time with Jesus on most nights as part of his effort to help Jesus maintain His human balance, and since as my spirit guide Thomas also is supposed to keep watch over me, he generally takes me along, but with amnesia for the event. Last summer, however, He and Jesus were allowing me to remember some events from the nights that I spent with them because we were thinking through developing seekreality.com and teachingsbyjesus.com, the two websites that Jesus wanted me to create, so Jesus liked having me nearby where He could give me His thoughts on the websites. And what an extraordinary summer it was! I never remember dreams. And anyway, these experiences were not dreams. I would wake up on a couple of mornings each week with an awareness of having been with Jesus and Thomas by the river, and the actual memory would fill in over the next hour or so. In earth-time, no visit was very long. And some memories seemed to have missed the mark in terms of timing, in that I think I was remembering what had happened just before or just after Jesus had spoken to me and I would have His words separately. But they were real and amazing memories of having spent time with Jesus and Thomas in the astral plane.

One thing I have come to understand is that the Jesus I love so dearly has grown spiritually even a great deal more since He lived on earth two thousand years ago. The historical Jesus whose life’s work is described in the Canonical Gospels was and remains abundantly real. The evidence that Jesus was born from the Godhead as a perfected Being, powerfully and miraculously divine, and that He lived, died, and was resurrected in the first century CE is beyond question.  But my Thomas tells me that most of the extraordinary spiritual growth that is so evident in Jesus now is the result of His having spent the past seventeen hundred years patiently loving and healing the hundreds of millions of people who were damaged by Constantine’s Christianity as the Roman Emperor and his successors established and built their religion beginning in about the year 313 CE. During all that time, Jesus’s healing gardens in the afterlife were full of brutally damaged victims of the Inquisitions and the Crusades, and even victims of the fear-based lies about God and about reality that the Romans built into their version of Christianity so they could use the religion as a means of human control. All the centuries of boundless, selfless love that Jesus has put into healing those hundreds of millions of people since He was resurrected have made Jesus even immensely more spiritually powerful than He was when He lived on earth as Jesus, or so my Thomas tells me now. And Thomas knew our Friend on earth during His earth-lifetime as Jesus, so he is able to describe the differences this further growth has made in Him.   

One thing that I have long wanted to know from Thomas was how Jesus could possibly be hearing and answering the prayers of billions of people at once. And my Thomas, always a man of few words, used always to tell me just that Jesus did it the same way that God did it. Which of course told me nothing at all. So finally, and very recently, Thomas told me that when Jesus seemed to be sitting and gazing out at the river perhaps, or otherwise He seemed to be deep in thought, He was actually deep inside His mind and involved with all the people who needed Him. And I was suddenly aware that, of course, Jesus did that sort of brief withdrawal almost constantly, all the time, and in little bits of time. For example, if Jesus was having a conversation, He often would blank briefly, looking away, and then come back again. Thomas tells me that at this point, Jesus’s mind has become what is probably a close mimic of God’s mind. And yes, Jesus can hear our individual prayers, so no worries about that. I still don’t really get it. A billion is a lot of people! But earth-time is not astral-time, so things in the astral might be altered or compressed in some way. And whatever is going on seems to be working for Jesus. And therefore it works for us.

But I do so much love my precious Friend! I don’t think I ever understood the meaning of the word “charismatic” until I met Jesus in person, and now I think it is no wonder that He had crowds following Him all over Galilee. You just want to be near Him. You want to hear His voice, and it doesn’t much matter what He is saying. I think it is all because Jesus makes you feel so personally loved. So individually precious to Him. That seems to have been a theme throughout the Gospels, too, that Jesus called to fishermen to leave their nets and follow Him, and instantly they made that life-changing decision. Or He otherwise gave His attention to someone, and He got an instant positive reaction. And wow, I certainly know how that feels! When Jesus looks at you, the love in His eyes and in His face overwhelms you completely. And His is a personal, individual sort of love: it belongs to you alone, which may perhaps have been what bothered the clergymen of His day, who did not take it well. He was calling them to a standard so far above their own in terms of love and service to humankind. And since one of Jesus’s purposes in coming to earth was to abolish religions and teach people to relate to God directly, you can see why Jesus as a Teacher might have grated on them!  

Jesus calls me “Little One.” He is avid to hear about my day, and He listens closely and asks me questions as if the trivialities of my life matter more to Him than they do to me. You have never had a truer Friend than Jesus, or a better Teacher, or a more doting Parent. Since meeting Him, I have become a nicer person than I was before, kinder and a lot more patient with others. I have thought more than once that if only there were some way that we could clone Jesus so everyone could have his or her own personal Friend, the world would be at once a more perfect place. But when I first said that, both Jesus and Thomas said that we each do have that perfect Friend in the Gospels, and now further simplified in teachingsbyjesus.com. You will be amazed to know how much Jesus cares about the personal lives of each of those who love Him. It is not just me! So read the Gospels, and read His website. Speak to Jesus in your heart. You can tell Him about your day, just as I do! If you have questions, email them to me and I will try to answer them. Think of that Browning sonnet as Jesus speaking to you personally, and recite the sonnet to Jesus in return. Feel free to love Jesus with everything that is in you now, and for Him and for yourself do the very best that you can with your spiritual growth in this lifetime. Live His teachings every day. You know that when it is time for you to go home, He will be waiting to greet you as the eternally treasured personal friend of His that now and forever you truly are.

Adding Things Up

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Praise the Lord, my soul. Lord my God, you are very great!
You are clothed with splendor and majesty.
The Lord wraps himself in light as with a garment;
He stretches out the heavens like a tent and lays the beams of his upper chambers on their waters.
He makes the clouds his chariot and rides on the wings of the wind.
He makes winds his messengers, flames of fire his servants.
He set the earth on its foundations; it can never be moved.
You covered it with the watery depths as with a garment; the waters stood above the mountains.
But at your rebuke the waters fled, at the sound of your thunder they took to flight;
They flowed over the mountains, they went down into the valleys, to the place you assigned for them.
You set a boundary they cannot cross; never again will they cover the earth.
He makes springs pour water into the ravines; it flows between the mountains.
They give water to all the beasts of the field; the wild donkeys quench their thirst.
The birds of the sky nest by the waters; they sing among the branches.
He waters the mountains from his upper chambers; the land is satisfied by the fruit of his work.
He makes grass grow for the cattle, and plants for people to cultivate—
bringing forth food from the earth: wine that gladdens human hearts,
oil to make their faces shine, and bread that sustains their hearts.
The trees of the Lord are well watered, the cedars of Lebanon that he planted.
There the birds make their nests; the stork has its home in the junipers.
The high mountains belong to the wild goats; the crags are a refuge for the hyrax.
– (Psalm 104 1-18)

 

One evening eighteen years ago, before I gave up on television, my husband called me to our bedroom to check out the start of a PBS special. And a young astrophysicist said something that profoundly seized my mind. I remember that moment so vividly! This is the only thing that I can recall from 2005, other than fleeing Hurricane Katrina up the west coast of Florida and actually then ending up moving to Texas. It must have been early on a late-summer evening, from the way the light was falling in the room. Edward had called to me to come and check out what he was about to watch, so he was sitting comfortably against the headboard but I was perched just on the foot of our bed because I was ready to reject what was on offer and head right back to my office. A PBS special was beginning. They were running some beautiful pre-roll of the universe, and a young-sounding astrophysicist was about to speak. What he said was, “For some reason, mathematics can be used to study the universe.” I swear! He said, “For some reason.” And I was thunderstruck.

I have wondered during the intervening years whether I would have been as affected if he had not begun with that odd question. Remove his “for some reason,” and you have just a plain declarative sentence. But add it, and the listener’s own mind immediately wonders what that reason might be. I moved from perching on the end of the bed to sitting against the headboard myself. I watched that whole PBS special, although I cannot now recall the first thing about it. But those first three words the presenter had said were a revelation to me. Think about it! What reason could there be why we can use mathematics to study the universe? I for one was sure that I knew the reason, which was why I found that astrophysicist’s question to be so flat-out astounding. It felt like materialist science’s long-awaited concession that God has to be behind it! Because I had known since I was in high school that math is a human-invented science. So that young astrophysicist had just informed us that the universe also must be invented. And if humans didn’t invent it, then who did?

There are math-people and there are non-math people, and I am emphatically a non-math person. By the time I was in the second semester of Algebra II in high school, I had decided that this would be my final math course unless someone could convince me that I might need to use higher forms of math later on. And more and more I was coming to suspect that no higher math was likely to be useful in the legal career that I was planning, so one day I stayed after class and asked my Algebra II teacher whether math was a discovered or an invented science. That seemed to be a crucial question! But my teacher gave me an impatient look, as if I might be trying to trick her, and she told me that math was an invented science. I thought, “Aha! Well, forget that!” And I never took another math course. (Actually, I have more recently learned that my question was not as foolish as that teacher seemed to think it was.)

So there I was in 2005, all those many years later, hearing a bright young scientist wondering why math can be used to study the universe. And if math is invented, then so indeed must the entire universe be invented as well, which seemed to me, even eighteen years ago, to be a pretty good proof of the existence of God. And then I came across another excellent Hillfaith video which makes that point better than I ever could. In fact, math is everywhere in science, to the point where it almost feels safe to say that math is the language of science, every bit as much as math is the language of God. Math is the way in which God built reality, and certainly God could not have used math to build reality if God were not the ultimate mathematician. Coming to see God that way as an afterlife researcher, eventually I came to regret my rash decision not to take calculus in high school. I should at least have tried to understand what higher mathematical concepts were about! Yes, the sight of mathematical equations on a chalkboard still gives me hives and a headache combined. But if math really was God’s language, then for years I wished that I had at least tried to learn it.

But is math in fact God’s language? For a long time, I was sure that it was. And as I thought about it, I could envision God with what must have been multiple heavenly chalkboards, first working out the language that was going to become higher mathematics, and then using that language to work out reality. And you can imagine the God that I must have had in mind back then, with such a long beard that He would have had to repeatedly throw it over His shoulder to keep it out of His way. He had to invent mathematics first, and God could have done that easily. With chalkboards and not whiteboards. This was long before whiteboards! Big chalkboards, as befitted a gigantic God. I never imagined any of this concretely, but had I imagined it, this is what I would have had in mind.

And then, at about the time that I was giving up on television, I was coming to understand that my old vision of God was altogether wrong. Ditch the beard. Ditch the notion that God  would need something ponderous like mathematics with which to create reality. By the turn of this century, most afterlife researchers were coming to realize that Max Planck’s insights of a century before had been right, and consciousness is primary. Indeed, consciousness is all that exists, and reality is fundamentally non-physical. The more deeply we moved into the study of consciousness as primary and pre-existing, the more obvious it seemed to all of us that no other understanding of reality is possible. The more we studied what the dead were telling us, and especially the more we listened to what non-physical beings and our own spirit guides were telling us, the more the words of the first quantum physicists made sense. We are swimming in nothing but Consciousness!

Dr. Planck said, “There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent Mind. This Mind is the matrix of all matter.” Physicist Sir James Jeans simply said, “The universe begins to look more like a great thought than a great machine.”

Well, of course! God had no need to dream up mathematics in order to create reality! God is in fact the highest aspect of Consciousness, the very essence of pure Mind, and God could simply think all of reality into existence and maintain it in existence micro-instant by micro-instant, simply by Mind alone. Sir James Jeans was right. And maintaining the universe simply as a thought would be so much easier for God by far than what is actually happening, which is this kind of show-your-work situation where all of reality is constructed according to mathematical principles, so it can therefore be studied by us mathematically. Which fact brings us back to that young astrophysicist’s question of eighteen years ago.

If God never needed to use mathematics as God’s own tool by which to create and maintain this universe, then why can mathematics be used to study the universe? Why is the reality that God thought up deliberately created and refined in such a way that it obeys mathematical laws? Ah. That is the real question! And I invite your proposed answer in the Comments section. As for me, I can think of only one answer. I think that God wants us to have the ability to think it all through with our own earth-limited minds, and to seek and then to find the Creator behind it all. God made reality not as something random and without meaning, but as a set of puzzles that you and I have the ability to solve. Mathematics. Higher mathematics. And then the universe, in all its manifold complexities. All of this could have been thought up and maintained by a less loving God in each micro-instant as an entirely random thought, and much more easily for God. But that has never been God’s plan!

Our frame-verse was first sung at least three thousand years ago. Most weeks’ frame verses are just related to the post in some way, and are meant to entertain you; but this verse is an integral part of this post’s message. A thousand years before the birth of Jesus on earth, people were already making sense of God’s wisdom in arranging reality so they could live supported and sustained by it, and also so they could seek, find, and to at least some extent begin to comprehend and find God’s love in it. And if you will read Psalm 104 while seeing its message as God’s earliest call to people as it was being received and understood, and as it was then being first sung back to God in love and joy, it can bring tears to your eyes.

The best evidence for the existence of God is the fact that you are alive and you are comprehending these words.

As a further case in point, we have been discussing the Origin of Life debate between materialist scientists and scientific free-thinkers. On that front, things are heating up! And since we have been following that debate in recent weeks, I think it might be fun to follow James Tour’s new challenge to materialist scientists. He is giving ten materialist research scientists sixty days to come up with just one of five definitive proofs that materialism has a meaningful approach to understanding the origin of life. And the materialists themselves are even invited to be their own judge! My goodness, how rigged in the materialists’ favor could Dr. Tour’s quite honorable new contest possibly be? I am confident that nevertheless there is no way that the materialist scientists can win Dr. Tour’s new contest. I have done considerable research into the origin-of-life problem, and even if a spark of life can be ignited in some random way – lightning is the most likely method – for life to be sustained even briefly would be such a complex process that for life ever to have arisen randomly and then been randomly sustained and developed to the point of turning into the complex life forms that we see all around us, and that indeed we are ourselves, is close to inconceivable. But it is going to be fun to watch these chosen materialist scientists try to win Dr. Tour’s bet. If, indeed, they even will be willing to try! Let’s hope that of the ten that he has challenged, at least a few will be as honorable as he is, and will try to provide even one of the many more than five elements that would be necessary to sustain and develop life past that first unlikely spark. I’ll keep you posted!

 

He made the moon to mark the seasons, and the sun knows when to go down.
You bring darkness, it becomes night, and all the beasts of the forest prowl.
The lions roar for their prey and seek their food from God.
The sun rises, and they steal away; they return and lie down in their dens.
Then people go out to their work, to their labor until evening.
How many are your works, Lord! In wisdom you made them all;the earth is full of your creatures.
There is the sea, vast and spacious,teeming with creatures beyond number—
living things both large and small.
There the ships go to and fro, and Leviathan, which you formed to frolic there.
All creatures look to you to give them their food at the proper time.
When you give it to them, they gather it up; when you open your hand, they are satisfied with good things.
When you hide your face, they are terrified;
when you take away their breath, they die and return to the dust.
When you send your Spirit, they are created, and you renew the face of the ground.
May the glory of the Lord endure forever;may the Lord rejoice in his works—
he who looks at the earth, and it trembles, who touches the mountains, and they smoke.
I will sing to the Lord all my life; I will sing praise to my God as long as I live.
May my meditation be pleasing to him, as I rejoice in the Lord.
But may sinners vanish from the earth and the wicked be no more.
Praise the Lord, my soul. Hallelujah! – (Psalm 104 19-35)

Semi-Conscious

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

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

The most inexplicable fact about the mainstream scientific community’s blind adherence to its “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” is how utterly worthless that tattered old dogma actually is. Indeed, restricting scientists with any dogma whatsoever as they go about their work of attempting to better understand the reality that we inhabit can be of no value to those scientists and their work whatsoever. Wow, talk about tilting at windmills! No dogma can provide any useful information, or guardrails, or shortcuts, or even cautionary tales. Dogmas give scientists nothing that can be of value to their work, even on a minimal level. So why do modern research scientists seeking to understand consciousness still continue to allow themselves to be burdened by materialism, when it has been clear for more than a century to anyone with even a minimally open mind that whatever consciousness is, it has to be studied without any preconditions at all? And certainly, it makes no sense whatsoever to limit its study to just the human brain! So, why is that still happening? I have kind of an awful theory about that. But before I mention my theory, let’s first check in on the current state of the ongoing search for a source of consciousness inside the human brain.

Back in 1998, premier neuroscientist Christof Koch had wagered prominent philosopher of mind David Chalmers a case of fine wine that within the next 25 years, a specific “signature of consciousness” would be found in the brain. Well, those twenty-five years were up this summer, and philosopher of mind David Chalmers handily won their bet. (When you click on the link, just scroll down and enjoy the video. And no, despite appearances, Dr. Chalmers has not of late become a homeless person.) And, gentleman of his word that he is, Dr. Koch has conceded that he has lost their 25-year-old bet, and in front of a packed theater he recently delivered to Dr. Chalmers six bottles of fine wine. He then doubled down on his failure and reactivated their bet, insisting that by twenty-five years from now, in the summer of 2048, when Dr. Koch will be a sprightly 92 years old, some scientist somewhere will indeed have figured out how the human brain generates consciousness. And Dr. Koch will then gladly claim that future, younger scientist’s victory as his own!

But why is figuring out and better understanding consciousness so very hard for scientists, anyway? Well, for one thing, when they seek to define consciousness, they seem always to do it with reference to the human brain. And they continue to do this, even as we approach the fiftieth anniversary of Dr. Raymond Moody’s groundbreaking book, Life After Life, where Dr. Moody defined the term near-death experience. Since 1976, when that book first came out, there have been so many books and videos produced about near-death experiences, out-of-body experiences, remote viewing, and verifiable afterlife communications, all various proofs of the simple fact that human consciousness easily exists apart from the human brain. So at this point, to read about the feeble and primitive state of scientists’ understanding of consciousness can make you feel like tearing your hair out. Mainstream Western culture is full of all kinds of evidence of the simple fact that consciousness is a lot more complicated than just something that seems to arise and exist only inside our material heads. So for credentialed scientists to be still as willfully ignorant as so many of them insist on remaining, they have to be covering their eyes, sticking their fingers in their ears, dancing from foot to foot, and singing “La La La La!” continuously and loudly, all day and night!

Believe it or not, the following amazing piece of retrograde nonsense was copied from a recent article in a reputable popular science magazine: “The orthodox scientific view today is that consciousness is a property of physical matter, an idea we might call physicalism or materialism. But this is by no means a universally held view, and even within physicalism there is little agreement about how consciousness emerges from, or otherwise relates to, physical stuff.”  Wow. If you haven’t believed me when I have been telling you that the gatekeepers’ “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism” is still being enforced, perhaps you will believe me now!

In fact, the scientific gatekeepers’ bent toward materialism is still being so rigorously enforced that there is as yet no universal scientific consensus about what consciousness even is. Wikipedia tells us that “Consciousness, at its simplest, is awareness of internal and external existence.” And “today, it often includes any kind of cognition, experience, feeling, or perception. It may be awareness, awareness of awareness, or self-awareness, either continuously changing or not. The disparate range of research, notions and speculations raises a curiosity about whether the right questions are being asked.”

That last sentence, not italicized in the original, seems to me to be the most crucial point! It seems obvious by now that in fact scientists are not asking the right questions, and moreover they are making what amount to nonsensical assumptions when they discuss and attempt to investigate consciousness. The first and foremost question to be asked and answered as soon as possible is whether the human brain produces consciousness, or whether the brain instead receives consciousness, much as a radio receives a transmitted signal. Given all the very good evidence produced in the past fifty years that an individual human being’s consciousness can function apart from its associated brain, this is an absolutely key question that must be asked by the scientific community, and investigated insofar as that is possible, before very much more research money is spent! And yet, insofar as I can tell, nowhere in the mainstream scientific community has this question ever been asked by anyone.

The fact that mainstream science is putting its time, money, energy, and effort into doing research that is all based on the assumption that the human brain produces consciousness is a triumph of  hopeless hope in a failed dogma over basic common sense. Let’s look at just four randomly-chosen current articles in popular science magazines about research projects in the area of consciousness:

*·   The Mind-Body Connection. Here, in an article dated in May of this year, some  scientist argues that the reason why we haven’t found the source of our conscious experiences in our brains alone is that our hearts and guts must also play a role. He is insisting now that generating who we are must be a whole-body project. Yes! That’s the ticket!

*·   Consciousness Must be an Emergent Phenomenon. Just as in physics, for example, some materials exhibit superconductivity in volume, where large numbers of electrons together can move without resistance in ways that one electron or a few cannot, and yet it isn’t always clear why; so some neuroscientists now believe that consciousness seems to emerge from some collective behavior of many neurons working together.  More nonsense.

·*   Consciousness is Either More or Less Than Sentience. In a confusing article published in November of 2022, a psychologist argues that the phenomenon of children born with hydranencephaly, which is a condition where the brain’s cerebral hemispheres are mostly absent and replaced by sacs filled with cerebrospinal fluid while these children can nevertheless still function, may imply that consciousness is lodged in the brain stem. Or maybe not.

*  Wakefulness Can be Traced to Specific Clusters of Nerve Cells in the Brain. In what is a relatively modest article published in August of 2023, researchers at Harvard Medical School have mapped how 18 clusters of neurons that were previously found to underlie wakefulness in the brains of mice, rats, and cats also connect to each other in deep regions of the human brain.

I chose these articles at random. They were just the four that were recommended below one of the articles that I was copying about Dr. Koch’s and Dr. Chalmers’s 25-year-old bet, and I copied them as well, with the thought that they might be useful later. The fact that they seem so pathetic when we set them out and look at them together was not my deliberate plan! But the fact is that consciousness research at this point is just this modest and just this aimless. Scientists being funded to do consciousness research have got to assume that consciousness arises in the brain somehow, and that it is a product of matter, although they have no idea how that might happen. They do, however, have families to feed, and their only safe option in doing consciousness research at this point is to limit themselves to studying the matter of the brain. As I quoted above from a recent popular science magazine article, “The orthodox scientific view today is that consciousness is a property of physical matter, an idea we might call physicalism or materialism.” So if you are a working research scientist doing consciousness research, you have no option under current rules but to come up with some probably pointless and dead-end idea like one of the four cited above. Your job in fact is just to find some materialist way to run out your entire career-clock.

And my suspicion is that it is mainly for the sake of four generations of research scientists since the early twentieth century whose careers have been sacrificed on the altar of materialism that the scientific gatekeepers are so reluctant to make any changes now. And I get that. It is hard to admit that they and their predecessors were wrong for so long, and they guided so many scientists so far astray! But how can they possibly justify their continuing to hold fast to materialism, when it has been proven at this point to be such an obvious dead-end? How many more scientific careers are they going to pointlessly waste?

Christof Koch might as well buy his next case of fine wine now and expect to turn it over in 2048, because he is again going to lose his bet. We afterlife researchers will wait for mainstream scientists to open-mindedly do the research before we proclaim this definitively, but we think now that the evidence is pretty strong that Max Planck was right. Consciousness is primary, and it pre-exists matter. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay, and in fact we are confident now that nothing else but consciousness exists. And for so long as the scientific gatekeepers continue to treat science, which should be an open-minded search for the truth, as nothing more than an insiders’ battle that they have long been waging with religionist insiders, then all of humankind will continue to be the ultimate losers here. But once the scientific gatekeepers free research scientists to think, and to question, and to learn, and to grow, then at last our future as an intelligent and fully productive species can begin!

And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest,
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
And the world will be better for this: that one man, scorned and covered with scars,
Still strove with his last ounce of courage to reach the unreachable stars!
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

Let There Be Life

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Dear one, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every little rose bud is covered with dew.
The thrush on high his sleepy mate is calling,
And my heart is calling you.
– Eugene Lockhart (1891-1957), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise”) (1919)

To watch the mainstream scientific community continue to pretend to do the impossible would be funny, if it were not so sad. And there are so many things that traditional science has proven that it can do well. Come on out and take a bow, traditional scientific folks! From all the wonders of modern medicine and the chemical discoveries that we take for granted, to the extraordinary technical inventions that we use every day, like my husband’s flat screens and our laptop computers and our iPhones and all the wonders of the Internet, and even the rockets and telescopes that are letting us begin to explore the depths of the sky. Modern science makes possible a lifestyle and a level of knowledge about this material reality in the twenty-first century that would have been unthinkable even just a few decades ago.

 But there are two things in particular that modern science is still completely flummoxed by. It finds these two areas impossible to understand, and for reasons which are sadly self-imposed, so rather than removing its own blinders, the scientific community now blusters and lies about them. These two off-limits topics are, simply put: 

*·   Consciousness. Scientists know that we ourselves are conscious, and that animals are conscious too, but they cannot figure out what consciousness even is so they certainly cannot understand how or why we are conscious. Might scientists possibly discover a source of consciousness inside the human brain? Might some human-created artificially intelligent robots somehow manage to become conscious? Scientists still sadly do not have a clue.

*·   Life. Where does life come from? The only scientific theory ever seriously proposed has been some variation of the idea that lightning must have long ago hit just the right mix of odd chemicals in a primordial soup, and presto. Good luck to them on making that idea work!

In fact, mainstream science’s ongoing ignorance about these two areas is deliberate. And for all we know, there may be other fields as well where modern scientists have also willfully blinded themselves, but these are two where I have some expertise, thanks to the wonderful work now being done by afterlife researchers and by creationist scholars. So let’s use these two as examples. The scientific community’s willful ignorance about consciousness and about the origin of life is based in both cases on a religion-like determination to require that reality must conform to a rigidly-enforced dogma that is fully as arbitrary as any straight religious dogma ever could be. And it is based in an underlying worry that goes back for twenty-five hundred years, as far as the great debates between Plato and Aristotle.

 I am going to explain science’s core problem just as simply as I can, and my one request is that you not be drinking coffee as you read this. Because when you fully understand what the scientific gatekeepers’ problem is, you are bound to spit your coffee and make a mess. Simply put, the great quantum physicist Max Planck discovered in the early part of the twentieth century that consciousness is apparently primary, and it seems to pre-exist matter. This was a notion which seemed to the scientific gatekeepers, which are the university science departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, to stray too close to Dr. Planck’s having perhaps found the religious God. So they quickly established and began to enforce materialism as their “fundamental scientific dogma.” And this, even despite the fact that all matter is made up almost entirely of nothing but empty space! And as a result, science has been stuck in place quite literally for the past hundred years, and counting. There. Now aren’t you glad that you put your coffee down before you read that?

 Here is some of what Dr. Planck said to inspire such a panicky circling of the scientific wagons:

In 1931 Max Planck 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.” 

Then in 1944 he said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear-headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”

In point of fact, Dr. Planck had indeed discovered the primacy of consciousness. We afterlife researchers have done considerable research that feeds into what Dr. Planck first understood, and we have come to realize that in fact all that actually exists is what you and I experience as consciousness. Everything else that we perceive to be real actually springs from consciousness. Indeed, consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay.

 In recent decades, too, creationist scientists have found better funding. They have begun to do more sophisticated work, so they are beginning to give traditional materialist scientists a run for their money. For example, considering in particular our two areas of controversy mentioned above, here are ways in which creationist scientists have carried the battle to the materialists’ turf: 

*·   Consciousness. After a twenty-five-year-long bet, the philosopher of mind was declared the winner over the traditional materialist scientist where the source of consciousness was concerned (and no, David Chalmers is not now a homeless person). There is indeed no “consciousness spot” in the human brain. Because of course the human brain receives, and it does not produce consciousness.

*·   Life. Materialist scientists have been  caught committing what amounts to fraud repeatedly and on an epic scale as they have tried to convince the world that, sure enough, they have come up with some sort of materialist way to generate life. This  is the second of two diatribe refutations by the brilliant creationist scientist James Tour, and he does a pretty good, if exasperated-sounding job of explaining just how impossible the whole materialist position on the origin of life really is. Personally, I am pretty sure that life is simply a natural property of consciousness itself.

 When a scientific discipline adopts and enforces any dogma at all, that science is no longer a genuine open-minded search for the truth. In fact, it really is no longer a “science” at all that is remotely worthy of the name. If my saying that seems harsh, simply imagine a science which adopts a dogma that decrees that any publishable scientific conclusion must be water-based. Or imagine a science that decrees that in order for a scientific conclusion to be published in a peer-reviewed scientific journal, it would have to tie back in some way to experimental methods that first were introduced by Sir Isaac Newton. Do you see how silly any kind of scientific-dogma-restricted scientific exercise actually is? Neither of those dogmas is any sillier than the massively silly materialist dogma that is still being enforced by modern mainstream science, and has been in place there for the past century. Once you limit any scientific field with any sort of dogma at all, it ceases to be an actual science! Which is why the scientific gatekeepers no longer talk publicly about their “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism.” But after more than a hundred years, they still enforce that dogma, all the same.

So for more than a century, ever since Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics, there have been no more fundamental physics breakthroughs forthcoming. 

Mainstream scientists would especially love to establish a workable theory of everything. But in fact, general relativity and quantum mechanics cannot ever be unified for so long as mainstream science remains materialist. Indeed, burdened by materialism as they still are, working scientists have no way even to test their theories. The brilliant young physicist Bernardo Kastrup is working on a consciousness theory of everything, but of course his work will remain out of bounds for so long as mainstream science remains materialist. And thus it ever will be, for so long as what used to be a genuine science remains now nothing more than an in-group buddy-show defined and restricted by its materialist dogma.

 How essential is their materialist scientific dogma to modern mainstream scientists, anyway? Actually, it is not essential at all. Nor is it even useful. There is nothing about consciousness which is remotely reminiscent of the human-created gods of any religion, and consciousness is in fact the base underlying energy which creates and maintains this material-seeming reality, literally moment-by-moment. So for mainstream scientists to attempt to study the reality in which we live while not allowing the study of consciousness makes all their studies of anything real almost entirely useless and actually a complete waste of their time. For mainstream scientists to continue to treat consciousness as unimportant as they continue to study matter is something like attempting to understand wildfires without considering how wind-driven oxygen might perhaps play a role, simply because you cannot see that oxygen.

As Nikola Tesla famously said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.” In that, Tesla was even more right than he knew! And by placing the most potentially productive areas of scientific research quite literally out of bounds for modern scientific researchers simply because a century ago those scientific gatekeepers found consciousness and what Max Planck was saying about it to be a bit scary, we only further delay that inevitable and very much better scientific new day.  

Dear one, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every rose is covered with dew.
And while the world is waiting for the sunrise,
In my heart is calling you.
– Eugene Lockhart (1891-1957), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1919)

Christianity in Crisis

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

What’s it all about, Alfie?
Is it just for the moment we live?
What’s it all about when you sort it out, Alfie?
Are we meant to take more than we give?
Or are we meant to be kind?

 And if only fools are kind, Alfie,
Then I guess it is wise to be cruel.
And if life belongs only to the strong, Alfie,
What will you lend on an old golden rule?

As sure as I believe there’s a heaven above, Alfie,
I know there’s something much more.
Something even non-believers can believe in.
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)

Even as Christianity fades in popularity, some of the religion’s sterner denominations continue to condemn people to hell just for doctrinal reasons. There also are Christian denominations whose views of God, or views of roles for women, or thoughts on communion formalities, or rules about making amends for sins are seen by some believers to not hit the right doctrinal notes to make others happy, even within the same denominations, so as to cause sometimes bitter debates. So it is no wonder why at this point there are more than forty-two thousand different Christian denominations worldwide! If I were advising the churches, and even putting aside the fact that afterlife researchers have found that there is in fact no hell, I would advise all versions of Christianity that all this hell-condemning and policing of the minutia of people’s various beliefs amounts to a set of terrible marketing choices, for heaven’s sake!  As Jesus Himself said, “You have let go of the commands of God and are holding on to human traditions…You have a fine way of setting aside the commands of God in order to observe your own traditions!” (MK 7:8-9) It is time now for those who are still trying to preserve what little is left of that old-time religion to take the Lord’s point, and to stop all this fussing over divisive doctrinal nonsense. The marketing optics of it all are frankly god-awful!

One might even ask where the whole hell idea comes from, when the afterlife reality itself as we have come to know it pretty well through communications from the afterlife’s residents so notably lacks any mention of a hell. Even Jesus in the Gospels never mentions a hell beyond the gloomy fire-free outer darkness, which does in fact exist as the lowest afterlife level; but it is a place to which only we ourselves might temporarily condemn ourselves. Or Jesus mentions the Gehenna garbage dump outside Jerusalem, whose references don’t look very hellish either. A couple of what look like references to permanent divine condemnations in the Gospels are clearly later suspect additions that were added at the First Council of Nicaea in 325 CE. And, well, simply put, I just don’t get it! When fewer and fewer people are attending churches every year, why are those churches chasing ever more attendees away by instilling in them terror of a hell for which there is no evidence? And when fewer and fewer Americans are mustering any kind of belief in God with each year that passes, why make that problem any worse by insisting that only a God of a certain specific description can somehow win the right to reign on high?

There is no real cure for what ails Christianity now, other than a return all the way back to its true First Source. I have been reading a variety of Christian bloggers, looking for ideas about how we might begin to shape a viable post-all-schisms Christian movement, and over and over we see most modern Christian thinkers making the same key mistake. To their minds, “going all the way back” means reading just the early church fathers, all of whom lived and wrote after First Nicaea in 325 CE. By then, the pure thinking of Jesus Himself was not even a distant memory.

To his great credit, the modern Christian thinker who tries to hew closest to the Gospels’ true First Source is Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation.  Father Richard believes that when Christianity became the official religion of the Roman Empire, it lost the essence of the Gospels themselves as what he calls “good news for the poor.” And of course I agree with him, although I consider that Gospels good news to have been not just for the poor, but for all of us! I do get his point, though, and I want to give him the chance to make it to us here. Father Richard says:

“In the early Christian Scriptures, the message of Jesus seems to have been heard in great part by people on the bottom. We see clearly in Matthew, Mark, and Luke’s Gospels that people who are poor, in need of healing, or viewed as sinners tend to get the point. Those who are outside or at the edges of the system understand Jesus, while those who are inside or at the center are the ones who crucify him.

“We can date the turning point to the year 313 CE, when the Emperor Constantine established Christianity throughout the Holy Roman Empire. The Church thought that linking up with power was a good way to spread the gospel message. In truth, it became embarrassed by Jesus, the powerless one. Most churches do the same, in their own way. We feel more comfortable with power than we do with powerlessness. Who wants to be like Jesus? Who wants to be powerless? It just doesn’t look like a way of influence, access, or one that is going to make any difference.

“After 313, Scripture interpretations do a 180-degree turn. Take the issue of war: a hundred years before 313, it was unthinkable that a Christian would fight in the army. Jesus’s teaching on nonviolence is self-evident. As Mohandas Gandhi (1869–1948) observed, ‘I am convinced that [Christianity] has distorted the message of Jesus…. When it had the backing of a Roman emperor it became an imperialist faith as it remains to this day.’ Jesus taught nonviolence, lived nonviolently, and died nonviolently, but this goes right over our heads! We can’t see it because we’ve spent seventeen hundred years interpreting Scripture from the top. Reading Scripture from the bottom is the key to what liberation theology calls the preferential option for the poor. I just call it the bias from the bottom. Apart from conversion and until the ego is transformed, everybody wants to be at the top. Apart from grace, we don’t see anything valuable on the bottom.

“By the year 400 CE, the entire Roman army is Christian and we are killing the ‘pagans.’ After the Empire becomes Christian, there is a whole section of the Bible that we are structurally unable to read. We can’t read anything about nonviolence, powerlessness, or not being ‘winners.’ We can’t see what we can’t see. We can’t hear what we are not ready to hear. And if we are on the top, any critique of the top is un-hearable. This is where action and contemplation are linked together. In the contemplative journey, unless we see this necessary humiliation of the ego and defeat of the false self, we don’t undergo basic transformation.”

The gentle, kindly, and perfectly spiritual Man who is Jesus Himself was forced to watch the perversion of His pure Gospels message by the Roman Emperor Constantine beginning late in the third century. And Jesus understands people so well! He knew precisely what Constantine’s seizure of His burgeoning Jesus Movement was going to mean, and it breaks my heart to think of Him having to watch it happen. Simply put, love and forgiveness, kindness and peace, all those stellar virtues of the least of these, do not sell well among those who lust only for absolute power and control. Constantine cared not at all for the very teachings which were central to the love-based movement that Jesus had so well begun.

But what Jesus had taught was beautiful! He said, “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). And Jesus said, “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). When Peter asked Jesus, “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 Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).

Sadly, though, none of that was of any use to Constantine, who needed a fear-based way to control the masses as he conquered them. So as he built the Roman Christian religion that is our Christianity of today, Constantine suppressed and destroyed all the peaceful aspects of the Jesus Movement. He built the entirety of his new religion around what was a minor idea that had developed as an aspect of that Movement, an idea based in ancient Hebrew religious practice that proposed that Jesus had died as a pure sin-sacrifice to God. And Constantine thus built his whole religion around the notion of Jesus as the ultimate pure sin-sacrifice, which of course then imposed deep fear and penance upon us all. He did include Jesus’s Gospel teachings in the Christian Bible as He assembled it, but none of that was emphasized. Or even really taught. So all the fear- and guilt-based aspects of modern Christianity came from Constantine. None of that came from Jesus.

And since history is written by its winners, Christians down through all the generations have been taught and have lived our lives knowing things which never have been true. We were taught that Constantine was a hero! He had saved and protected and built the church, and done wonderful things for us and for Jesus as he spread Christianity throughout the world. I can recall how rudderless it felt to be a young Christian even in the nineteen-sixties, simultaneously reading the Bible over and over with an emphasis on the Gospels while I also attended Christian church services. Being taught to love and also to fear, not knowing which beliefs were right, and yet if you guessed wrong about what you believed, your soul might wind up in hell. Could that really be true? Oh my goodness, you never saw a more seriously devout religious seeker than I was as a teenager! But for someone who naively took Christianity as seriously as I took it then, the competing beliefs of Constantine’s fear-based religion and the earlier Jesus Movement still buried inside the Gospels simply never could be reconciled.

What fixed it all for me was the wonderful professor who was my college advisor. Miss Corwin was at the end of her long career, and growing bitter about the fact that her strongly negative view of Constantine’s role in Christian history, while factually correct, was going to remain a minority position. But she taught what was true, and she answered my questions, and while she wanted me to become a minister, I realize now in retrospect that she could see even then that I lacked the fire in the belly that entering the clergy would have required. But perhaps my doing what I am doing now is even more effective at spreading her point of view?

All I know is that the most famous Being Who ever lived came to us from the Godhead two thousand years ago to free us from all religions, and to give us the easiest method for achieving rapid spiritual growth ever devised. If we will follow Jesus’s simple teachings, we can achieve enough spiritual growth in one lifetime to make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. And Constantine has only delayed, but he has not ended the moment when The Way of Jesus can prevail. As my Thomas tells us, Constantine did perform one service for us all. Now everyone on earth knows the name of Jesus! So now we need only to help the world to better understand what Jesus taught, and the true Jesus Movement can at last begin.

I believe in love, Alfie.
Without true love we just exist, Alfie.
Until you find the love you’ve missed, you’re nothing, Alfie.
When you walk, let your heart lead the way,
And you’ll find love any day, Alfie, Alfie
– Burt Bacharach (1928-2023), from “Alfie” (1966)

Simply Jesus

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

I don’t know how to love Him. What to do, how to move Him.
I’ve been changed. Yes, really changed.
In these past few days, when I’ve seen myself I seem like someone else.

I don’t know how to take this. I don’t see why He moves me.
He’s a man, He’s just a man. And I’ve had so many men before.
In very many ways He’s just one more.

Should I bring Him down? Should I scream and shout?
Should I speak of love? Let my feelings out?
I never thought I’d come to this! What’s it all about?
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)

The most astonishing thing about my recent visits with Jesus was the way that He presented Himself as just a usual inhabitant of the astral plane. He looked and acted and spoke as a pleasant young man maybe five feet ten inches tall wearing a simple white astral robe that didn’t glow at all. He wore no signifiers of rank, no hat, and no belt beyond a braided cord. The only thing about Jesus that was at all remarkable was His extraordinary personal energy, which is how we recognize one another in the astral plane. As we elevate ourselves spiritually over many lifetimes, our personal energies become ever richer, ever stronger, and ever much more powerful, but still there are always high notes and low notes, so everyone’s personal energy is a unique signature. You feel that complex personal energy from people whenever you are near them, so in the afterlife and in the astral it is really by people’s personal energies and not visually that we recognize them. And Jesus’s personal energy is extraordinary. It is just one consistent very high note, with no low points at all. Think of someone singing a sustained operatic high note. People’s personal energies are perceptible on earth as well, but here they are subdued and masked by the way we look, so we only know that this or that person feels nice, or maybe not so nice to be around. But Jesus’s gorgeous personal energy is so overwhelming that unless He remembers to keep it toned down, those who are not also very elevated find it almost painful to be near Him.  

One of the things that surprised me when I was first doing afterlife research several decades ago was my gradual discovery that the afterlife is a very status-conscious place. Who would imagine such a thing? The only status is, of course, our relative level of spiritual growth as that is measured by how high we are vibrating and, therefore, the level of the afterlife or the astral plane that we can comfortably attain. Some of us can get to and hold Level Four comfortably, and a few can make it to the top of Level Five. A very few can achieve and hold the top of Level Six, which is the Teaching Level, the level just below the Source. But Jesus is actually vibrating much higher even than the Source Level, or what is also called the Godhead level. Thomas tells me that once, when he teased Jesus into doing it, Jesus traveled and took Thomas with Him into the unknown territory that is far above our reality’s Godhead Level, and with no energetic resistance felt at all. But they didn’t stay there very long. Jesus found it boring to be so high, with no people up there who needed His help.

But the point is that each of these levels of spiritual achievement grants to us the right to wear specific indicators of merit that are honestly worn and highly respected by everyone. You might proudly wear astral robes that glow in significant colors, plus ever-more-important-looking hats and belts, extra body height, and even a distinctively-colored cape once your spiritual rank is high enough. What extra insignias Jesus might be qualified to wear, you and I cannot even imagine! And yet there He sits on His humble riverbank on lowly Level Three wearing no signifiers of rank at all, just warmly greeting new Christian afterlife arrivals and very occasional earthly visitors, telling us His remarkable stories, and of course from time to time feeding His fish. So at first, I had some trouble believing who He even was.

 That next morning after our first long meeting on April 6th of last year, I said nervously to Thomas, “That really wasn’t the real Jesus, right?”

Thomas said, “You know exactly who He was.” My Thomas does not suffer fools.

And then of course Jesus did something that next morning to cheer me up that I have reported here. He and Thomas pulled off a sort of vaudeville act in the back seat of my car that had me stopped dead in the middle of a busy city street and doubled over with laughter. But even in the rank-conscious afterlife, Jesus needs to wear no signifier of His extraordinarily exalted rank. When you are vibrating even above the Godhead level, your personal energy is the only signifier you need.

I have learned so much more about Jesus in the past year! Just as the churches tell us, Jesus is fully God and fully Man, and we now understand how very true that is because He has shared with us His completely human history. And yet, since He is now vibrating at such an exalted level, the one aspect of His unique persona that requires maintenance – and a lot of maintenance! – is His humanity. In the natural course of things, Jesus would have either merged with an exalted aspect of the Godhead Collective five or six thousand years ago, or else He would have continued to raise His personal vibration even above our reality’s  Godhead level, until He lost touch with this universe’s reality altogether. That Jesus has continued to raise His consciousness vibration even without the usual earthly stressors has happened because he has devoted His past seventeen hundred earth-years to lovingly healing the horrendous damage among new afterlife arrivals that the Roman Emperor Constantine’s version of Christianity has done to so many hundreds of millions of people with its Inquisitions and Crusades and its appalling fear-based teachings, and most of that damage has been done in Jesus’s name. His doing such loving healing work has been a powerful driver of His further spiritual growth, so the Jesus that I first met last year is far more elevated spiritually than was the Jesus who long ago taught on earth.

And if that had been all that Jesus had done in the past two thousand years, He would by now be simply God. Period. We might be thinking of Him as seated at the right hand of the Father. And He would have lost touch altogether with earth-based humankind in any sort of personal way, as fully lost to us as a balloon would be lost that had long since slipped its earthly tether. He would have so immensely increased His consciousness vibration by lovingly healing those tens of millions of damaged people, and He would have become by this point long since no longer in touch with our reality at all, nor would He be in loving touch with anyone in it. But thanks to Jesus’s little band of friends, all of whom have been with Him for thousands of years, Jesus is still carefully being maintained in emphatic touch with His human side as well.

It is only lately that I have given much thought to Jesus’s friends and their ongoing role in His life. My Thomas, who is Jesus’s older brother from His final earth-lifetime lived six thousand earth-years ago, is the closest to Jesus of this little band. And since Thomas is my spirit guide, and therefore he is responsible also to me, apparently Thomas has been bringing me along  on many nights of this earthly life, whenever he has gone to meet with Jesus. I simply have had amnesia for the event. What was different about our visits to Jesus last summer was that Jesus liked the idea of having me remember those experiences, since at the time we were working on seekreality.com and on teachingsbyjesus.com. Jesus is not very knowledgeable about websites, but He wanted to talk about ideas with me. And I cannot recall ever seeing any of the other members of Jesus’s team when we were with Him, but gradually Thomas has answered my questions. Apparently there are about thirty beings in Jesus’s little group, nearly all of whom present in male astral bodies, and some of whom have lived earth-lifetimes with Jesus but none of whom ever was a famous saint or in any way very notable. My Thomas’s stint as Thomas Jefferson is the most famous past lifetime of their lot. But what they have in common is that all of them have sworn their loyalty to Jesus in preference to ever becoming perfected beings themselves. They will neither join an advanced Collective nor ever rise above our Godhead. Instead, they are pledged to work for love in service to Jesus for eternity.    

And together they help Jesus to maintain His humanity. Which, as I have glimpsed that process, turns out to be no easy thing. For night after night last summer, I accompanied Thomas to that astral riverbank with awareness for the experience, and I watched as my Thomas talked with his Brother, teased Him, tussled with Him, and treated Him as a regular human guy. As I watched, Jesus even once called Thomas some insulting name and then dodged away from him. I think the word that Jesus used meant “Butcher” in another language, since in a long-ago earth lifetime Thomas had once been a general. So then Thomas muttered “Brat!” and chased Jesus among His pet deer and caught Him, bigger and stronger as he is, and he actually play-beat Jesus up. I doubt that the others in Jesus’s loyal group ever take such liberties with the King of Kings, but in reality that is the kind of thing that Jesus really needs, that deeply regular human touch. He has not been on earth or interacted with people who are living in bodies for the past two thousand years, and He has no idea any longer about what that would even be like. Jesus has also asked me a few times to share with Him trivialities from my daily life, and He has listened to me as He always listens to people, as if I was for that moment the only person in existence and what I was saying was very important.He seems to want above all to be truly and deeply one of us.

What is really important for us to understand about Jesus, though, is how very far He has moved beyond religions. And especially how far He has moved beyond Constantine’s Christianity! If you go to teachingsbyjesus.com, and you see there how all of the Core Teachings together systematically destroy all the man-made dogmas of that entire religion, so only the genuine Gosprl teachings of Jesus remain, just know that those are Jesus’s Core Teachings. He has approved them all. Even today, the remnants of Roman Christianity try to hold on to fear-based, man-made dogmas that never have made any spiritual sense. And Jesus has never been any part of that religion, even in its heyday. Most importantly of all, Jesus wants nothing whatsoever to do with all the endless and pointless divisions in Christianity. Good grief! In 2010, when I wrote The Fun of Dying, there were more than ten thousand versions of Christianity, which at the time seemed shocking and shameful to me. How could there be so many little details of doctrine for Christians to argue and divide themselves over, when Jesus only ever taught forgiveness and love? Well, just thirteen years later there are now more than forty-two thousand different denominations of Christianity. We are bound to hit fifty thousand any day now, when the Methodists have just expelled two of their biggest churches from their organization solely for ordaining female ministers.  

And so it goes. Thomas and I continue to meet with Jesus nearly every night, and I accept the fact that while my present earth-lifetime continues, Thomas prefers that I have amnesia for those meetings. He considers them to be his private time with Jesus, and he knows that if I am allowed to remember them I will for certain blog about them. He does tell me, though, that lately I have been helping Jesus to improve His English, although to what end I don’t really know. What I do know is that whatever Jesus does now, it will not be based in man’s foolishly selfish and shortsighted doctrinal games.

Jesus really does want only to lovingly help us, to teach us, and He wants to do that on as intimate a basis with us as He can. Perhaps my most surprising memory from last year was my first stunned realization that the biggest rock star of all rock stars on earth has no ego at all. I mean, Jesus really has NO ego. He is the very definition of humility. And I had trouble at first getting my mind around that. How is it possible that the most famous person on earth is the most self-effacing soul that you can imagine? At one point on the night of last April 6th as I was listening to Him, to the mild and courteous way that He talks and the gently loving and endlessly kindly things that He says, I blurted to Jesus, “Do you have any idea what a big deal You are?” He looked at me as if He was having trouble comprehending what I had just said. Then He smiled the barest smile, thoughtfully, as if perhaps I was a very young soul and I didn’t really understand, so my comment didn’t need a response. Then He modestly looked away.

 Don’t you think it’s rather funny I should be in this position?
I’m the one who’s always been so calm, so cool, No lover’s fool,
Running every show. He scares me so.
I never thought I’d come to this! What’s it all about?
– Tim Rice & Andrew Lloyd Webber from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)

Resetting Our Lives

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

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

Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– From “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Traditional African-American Spiritual (19th Century)

“The unexamined life is not worth living.” It was Socrates who famously said those words some twenty-five hundred years ago, although just what his statement may have meant to Socrates himself feels less than certain to me. How much of an inner life did anyone have twenty-five hundred earth-years ago? Evidence suggests that most people who were alive when Socrates talked about the unexamined life had probably nary a thought that extended much beyond a concern about where their next meal was coming from. There is evidence that as late as Jesus’s day, most people still had little going on upstairs beyond the daily search for food and shelter and the superstitious need to avoid their own human-created gods’ wrath; and I have sometimes had the thought when reading Jesus’s Gospel words that He was saying things meant for people who seldom had much to think about beyond satisfying each day’s survival needs. When you read the Lord’s words, you can see Him patiently and gently helping His listeners to turn up the brilliance of their own inner lights so they each could begin a personal spiritual journey toward achieving an ever-richer inner life. Jesus was urging His followers to look inward in their prayer lives, too, saying, “When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:5-6).

And even today, so many of us take the possibilities inherent in our potentially rich inner lives so much for granted. But it is essential that we not do that! There are breadths and depths to be discovered in the more effective use of our deeply extensive minds that even most twenty-first-century people have not very much explored at all, so those possibilities remain buried under what by the time we reach midlife are entrenched habits of daily trivialities. And therefore, a great many of us continue to live what are essentially still Iron-Age-level lifestyles. We just have nicer homes and better food choices. I almost added that at least we have better entertainment choices now, but in the Iron Age their primary sources of entertainment were telling stories and waging wars. And now we have TV, politics, and video games. Not very much improvement there, either. I may be simplifying the extent of our modern spiritual deficit to some extent, but I wish I could say that I was entirely missing the mark. Sadly, I don’t think that I am. The percentage of modern people who deeply examine their lives and seek to use the full powers of their minds to enrich their spiritual growth is hardly greater today than it was when Socrates first made his exhortation.

We tend to think of beginning anew as something that we do each January. We make our New Year’s resolutions, and we start the new year with a hopeful  new life. But actually, a new start like what I am about to suggest is probably much better begun around this time of year. If it occurs to you that you want to work on making a better and more spiritual use of your mind, well, that is going to be a fairly substantial process, is it not? And if you begin to work on it now, then you might start to show some positive progress in the coming fall, and be building some solid new habits over the fall season that will help you to roar into 2024 with what is going to amount to a whole new life! So, let’s start to talk about it now, shall we? And then let’s see where we can go with it from here?

The first thing that I urge you to do is to begin to think of your mind as your forever home, and as a home that is far vaster and much more important and more infinitely complex than you ever heretofore have imagined it to be. Your mind is where you live and where you spend time with God. It is a profoundly sacred place. It also is a richly complex and very well-provided place, a world so dense with resources that you could spend all day of every day of the rest of your earthly life exploring what you might possibly do in and with and employing your mind as a place to explore and as a set of tools, and still you would not even begin to exhaust what it might be possible for you to do with your mind. It is a playground many times the size of this universe! And it also is a toolbox whose standard-issue tools will leave you slack-jawed with awe as you first begin to appreciate their possibilities. Every mind is all of this, and more, even in the limited version that each of us brings into this lifetime. But sadly, most people live their whole lives while for the most part altogether ignoring most of their vast, eternal minds’ possibilities.

Conveniently, your mind also is flexible in size, and nearly all of us live with our minds shrunk down to a cozy living room. Furthermore, each of us treats our mind as if it is our private home, a place that is off-limits to everyone else. And we live in our mind more or less the way we lived in our first studio apartment out of college, with paperback books of questionable propriety in cinder-block bookcases beside old sofas with food stains and cigarette burn-holes that we cover up with afghan throws. The shades are always down because their pulls don’t work, and all of that is just as well, since the place is full of empty beer cans and old pizza boxes. We speak to our friends, to our boss, and even to God from there in our most articulate voice and with every word thoughtfully considered, and we assume that no one has any clue what a mess of awful ideas and shabby, inappropriate thoughts lurks behind our well-constructed nice-person façade. We head out from there to live our public life groomed to the nines, so everyone must assume that our deepest mind is as put-together as we always look and sound.

Each of us probably got our first job that way, walking out nicely groomed from a disastrous mental apartment. Some of us have later moved on and mostly cleaned up our mental act, but since I personally never undertook the kind of rigorous mental tidying that really is required to live a fully spiritual life until about twenty-five years ago,  I assume that there are others, too, who have been similarly lax. Most people have only lately come to understand the primacy of consciousness, and when you first gain that insight,  you look at the way you have been living in your mind for your entire life, and you begin to feel uneasy about it. You know that every mind is part of the one vast, eternal mind which includes all other minds, and includes God at its Apex. So, OMG, what does that mean? How deep does this consciousness-based dense mental togetherness actually go?

It turns out to go very deep indeed, I am afraid. I wrote a blog post on this topic almost five years ago now, and I cannot much improve on it so I urge you to go back and read that post again. Nearly all of us think of our minds as the ultimate private space, where we can think even the shabbiest and nastiest and most disgusting thoughts, and no one else can access them. But in point of fact, our minds are all part of one vast, eternal Mind, so it is far better simply to assume that your mind is a fully public space, and to clean up your act entirely and then open wide the top of your head and invite God to come inside.

I first did this twenty-five years ago, and I cannot begin to tell you how much doing it improves the quality of your entire life! It feels a bit naked in the beginning, to imagine that the top of your head really is wide open and to be inviting God to come in and hang out inside your mind with you. But if you are persistent, you soon get used to it. A few who had followed my recommendations the first time I posted that blog post told me then various things, like that they had imagined a special chair for God, although of course God is not physical. Or they had sensed God’s presence in their mind-room. I know what that feels like! And in fact, the more comfortable you become with the sense that the top of your head is always open and a “Welcome, God!” sign is always posted, the more often you will feel Spirit’s presence in your life. Many people have told me over the years that they want to do God’s work, and they have asked me how they can best get started. I credit everything, all the books I have been given to write in the past twenty-five years, all the work I have been led to do, all the contacts I have had with Jesus more recently, and His choice to use me in doing a part of His work, I credit all of it to my yielding my life to God back then as I describe it in that blog post.

So now, what about our friend Socrates? How can we turn a largely unexamined life so far into one that even Socrates himself would consider to be an examined life according to his own terms? Before you do anything about that, of course, I urge you strongly to clean up your living room, and from now on please keep it always as a place where you can comfortably meet and visit with God. Until you do that, all your efforts at elevating your personal consciousness vibration are going to be hampered by the negative detritus that inevitably clutters your mind as a result of your simply living day by day in this modern Western culture. And yes, I am fully aware that for many people this is a very big Ask! Television. Movies. News. Politics. Video games. Sports. Religions. Social Media. I am suggesting that you give up for the rest of this lifetime the entirety of modern Western culture as too negative and much too stressful. I did this twenty-five years ago, and I can personally testify that it is amazingly easy to opt out of all of it altogether!  I have since been told by those who have experimented that some mild doses of some of these cultural poisons can be retained without doing much spiritual harm. But I am skeptical. And I still suggest that you attempt a cold-turkey withdrawal from all of it for at least six months. Allow yourself to know how that freedom feels. Please give yourself at least that gift!

Then once you have cleaned up your mental living room, at least a few times each week simply find the time to sit quietly within it. Doing this was never possible when it was a mess of trash thoughts and negativity, but now you can comfortably invite God to join you inside the haven that is your mind. There are various ways that you can do this. You might play a bit of music first, to re-set your mood. Then begin this quiet time of half an hour with God by reading what I consider to be the most important words of the entire Old Testament. They were sung in the reign of King Jehoshaphat by a psalmist of no special note, but someone who clearly was channeling God. Jehoshaphat was born in the year 905 BCE. He was the Fourth King of Judah in the lineage of David. His psalmist sang, “Be still, and know that I am God. I will be exalted among the nations. I will be exalted in the earth” (Psalm 46:10). As people first began to develop an inner life, hundreds of years before Socrates was born, God here first began to reach out to humankind. “Be still, and know that I am God.” And as you go about your day, simply open your heart as you might think of it to that simple inner invitation from God, thinking, “Be still, and know that I am God.” Invite God’s response to your acceptance of God’s call. This sounds like meditation, but it doesn’t feel like meditation. It feels like a joyful yielding to God at God’s own first-ever call to humankind. As you sit quietly with God, if you do this consistently, you will feel your relationship with God ever deepening on God’s Own gentle, awesome terms.

You are ready then to make Jesus a part of your precious time spent with God. It was teaching us to open our minds and redirecting them toward more effective spiritual growth that formed the greater part of what Jesus came to teach. I have favorite Gospels passages that I read and sit with. Perhaps you have a red-letter Bible. Or since the Roman Emperor Constantine edited the Gospels in 325 CE to suit Constantine’s own fear-based religion-building purposes, you might be someone who worries  that we cannot trust every word of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John as being the Lord’s actual spoken Words. So then perhaps a more trustworthy way to use His Gospel teachings without running afoul of Constantine’s fear-based religiosity might be to go to teachingsbyjesus.com and go through Jesus’s Core Teachings, one by one. Perhaps read one each day, and then let it play in your mind as you use it to examine your own life.

Either way, simply invite Jesus to help you to relate His teachings to the way that you are living your personal life. Take in His thoughts in the presence of God as they are reflected back to you from your own heart, in the soft silence. “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). Remember that God is only perfect love, so if you ever feel even the slightest twinge of fear, then that is not from God. It is just a random remnant of Constantine’s religious nonsense, and you might ask Jesus to help you ease it out of your life.  You will find that as days and weeks pass, Spirit will help you to examine and to strengthen your understanding of your life in the sweetest and most love-filled way, as Spirit always works in our minds. Whatever your question might be, you will find that you and God already are finding and living the answer.

When my feeble life is o’er,
Time for me will be no more.
Guide me gently, safely o’er
To Thy kingdom’s shore, to Thy shore.

 Just a closer walk with Thee.
Grant it, Jesus, is my plea!
Daily walking close to Thee.
Let it be, dear Lord, let it be.
– From “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Traditional African-American Spiritual (19th Century)

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