I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses,
And the voice I hear falling on my ear
The Son of God discloses.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
– Charles A. Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

On the morning of April 9, 2009, and on ecstatic impulse, I gave the rest of my life to God. It seemed at the time to be only fair, after all that God had given to me. In retrospect, I have to say that, wow, when you do that, God takes you at your word! Within months after that first April 9^th, I was writing what became The Fun of Dying. Soon after that came The Fun of Staying in Touch and The Fun of Growing Forever. I met Craig Hogan, and soon he and I were giving afterlife conferences. Then Thomas came out to me through a medium. He insisted that I channel Liberating Jesus, which meant that unexpectedly for two weeks’ time I lived as Jesus’s fingers on my keyboard. So really, upon reflection I would have to say that when you give your life to God, you can look back after several years and realize that God does take your gift seriously.       

And God makes it all such a happy experience! I am so much loving my life that I am shocked to notice how old the calendar says that I have lately become. In only another decade or two, I will be what sounds to me like seventeen billion years old. And yet, after the heart surgery that I had last summer, I feel as if I am only maybe forty years old. Or, okay, I’ll admit to forty-two. I am delighted to be still practicing law for the family businesses that I adore, and I continue to podcast. I am writing this blog post in the middle of the night because I habitually split-sleep. I have plans now to share the truth with the world, and that will take another fifty years at least, which is where the age thing may be an issue. I have learned so much in my very long life about the afterlife, about God, about Jesus, and about the greater reality. And I feel charged now with sharing all this knowledge with as many people as I can!

I first personally met Jesus in the astral plane just twenty months ago, in April of 2022. I don’t know what it is about April for my dearly beloved Thomas and me! My childhood experience of light happened in April of 1954, and Thomas Jefferson’s earth-birthday is April 13^th. My guess is that the month of April might have even more significance for Thomas than it has for me. But in April of 2022, I thought that even his taking me to the astral plane to meet with Jesus was too amazing a story for me ever to feel entitled to share it, although of course that wasn’t true at all. NDE-ers talk about meeting Jesus in the astral plane all the time. And back then, it was just simply meeting Jesus that absolutely freaked me out. His personal energy feels like silk to be near but it is so immensely powerful, and He was talking to me as if we were friends just casually collaborating on a project, when I was so overwhelmed and starstruck to be suddenly meeting Omigod the real Jesus! Because, of course, what I didn’t know then was that I had been Thomas’s tagalong charge just casually meeting with Jesus and my spirit guide in the astral plane on most of the nights of my earthly life.

Primary spirit guides are never supposed to leave their charges alone for long. And yet Thomas also has another, and a very much greater duty. He is a part of Jesus’s inner circle, and his role for Jesus is what Thomas calls “balance.” He helps Jesus to maintain His connection to the human aspect of Himself, which seems to me mainly as I (rarely) observe it to involve a whole lot of kidding around in what Thomas tells me is a pidgin of several obscure and probably ancient languages, and sometimes actually play-fighting on the ground like foolish teenagers, which apparently nobody else in the universe feels able to do for the Son of the Living God. So when Thomas became my spirit guide, he started to take me along at night when he visits with Jesus while my body sleeps, and he simply gave me complete amnesia for all those out-of-body nights. And his problem was altogether solved. But I had no idea that any of that was ever going on! So to Jesus, I soon became just one more of His many familiars. Thomas tells me now that I have been part of Jesus’s circle of familiars anyway for the past two thousand years, although not nearly to his own extent. But that amazing April night twenty months ago was just dropped on me from out of nowhere with no warning at all.

They had decided to let me remember some of that night, and also many of the subsequent nights of that summer, because it was time for me to start to work with Jesus on the plans that He had been brewing for a website to house His genuine teachings and eventually to become a meeting place as He begins to come out to the world more generally. We all think of Jesus as a million miles above us! He Himself is God, for heaven’s sake. He is fully God and fully Man. You cannot feel His personal energy, so utterly devoid of any human low notes, and not understand that Jesus is God. You are speaking with God. He looks at you, and you see God in His eyes. But as I have begun to know Jesus, I have come to see that what Thomas keeps telling me also is true: Jesus has a gentle servant’s heart. And He has no ego at all! Nothing about Jesus is an affectation. When He asks you questions about your day, He actually is eager to learn about your day. It truly seems never to occur to Jesus that the fact that He operates spiritually even above the Godhead level makes Him any more important than the simple person who is operating barely on spiritual Level Three. Jesus is always sweet and gentle and deeply respectful of everyone. And I cannot tell you how charming that is!

It was on that April 6^th twenty months ago that Jesus first told me His genuine Christmas-and-Easter story. Now He wants us to tell it over again on all the Christmases and Easters to come, to gradually replace what He considers to be the Roman Emperor Constantine’s bogus version that prevails in Christianity today. So here it is again. Please read it, just as Jesus told it to me. We have put Jesus’s true story on teachingsbyjesus.com as well, but Jesus tells us that He never intends to make a major deal of it. He says that He understands that some people still find comfort in the old Christianity with all its fear-based stories, even as more and more people are becoming increasingly appalled by it all. Jesus tells us that in centuries to come, people are going to be relieved to hear the true Christmas-and-Easter story, that Jesus came into the world to teach people how they can easily become Perfected Beings so they can make this lifetime on the earth the last one that they ever will need to live here. It is Jesus’s wish for each of us that we will find and follow the spiritual pathway that leads us most directly to find God’s genuine peace in our own hearts.

And Jesus has made my Thomas know that He wants now to go back to teaching what He came two thousand years ago to teach to us. He wants to share His own original Way with those who no longer find Roman Christianity to be either sensible or satisfactory. The pure Way of Jesus still remains preserved in the four Biblical Gospels. The Nicaean Councilors did modify some of the Lord’s words, true enough, but mostly what they did was just to harvest a few random words that Jesus had said, and then they built the very different fear-based teachings that Constantine and other Roman Emperors had in mind on those single plucked-out sentences. Here is one especially awful example:

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. (JN 3:16)

Constantine’s Christianity uses this beautiful sentence to proclaim that God is so barbaric as to require the blood-sacrifice of God’s own Son to Godself, or else God never will forgive us for our sins.  

But when we look at the Gospel passage from which this sentence was taken (it is the first of the two underlined sentences in the Gospel passage below), we see that it is about something else altogether! Jesus is actually explaining here to His loyal follower, Nicodemus, that He came to fight what He has told you and me is His own particular bane, which is our vast spiritual ignorance, and the fact that as a result of our spiritual ignorance, too many people even to this day must be born on earth repeatedly, having to reincarnate (i.e. be “born from above”) over and over again. We come back to earth repeatedly, while making very little spiritual progress each time.

What Jesus came to free us from WAS NOT the judgment and punishment of a vengeful God! Remember, Jesus tells us in that same Gospel of John that God never judges us! Jesus actually says, “For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). Which gives the lie altogether to Constantine’s Big Lie about what Jesus meant when He said the words at JN 3:16, does it not? No, what Jesus was born to fight was not our sins at all, but it was instead our own awful spiritual ignorance!

Or else, why did Jesus even bother to teach us anything? Why didn’t He simply step up and die on the cross right away, and then rise from the dead and head back Home? And Jesus makes all of this perfectly clear in the rest of this passage from John, where He says almost wryly that if people won’t listen to Him as He tells them how they can grow spiritually and thereby save themselves from having to keep on reincarnating forever – if they won’t “come to the Light,” as He says to Nicodemus in the passage below – then there is nothing more that He can do to help them. They have judged themselves to be unworthy of advancing spiritually. Or as He plainly puts it below, “They have loved the darkness more than the Light” (JN 3:20). But those who instead have listened to and followed Jesus’s teachings will find when they come to their post-death life-review that they have grown so much spiritually that, as was also true of Him when He lived His last earth-lifetime prior to His first ascension six thousand years ago, they have been practicing the truth so they have come to the Light, just as He says to Nicodemus in the second underlined sentence below, to the point where their deeds literally have been “performed in God.” And remember as you are reading this that the kingdom of God is the upper part of the afterlife.  Omigod, how much more obvious can any of this possibly be?

Please read Jesus’s words in their Gospel context for yourself!

3¹Now there was a man of the Pharisees, named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews; ² this man came to Jesus at night and said to Him, “Rabbi, we know that You have come from God as a Teacher; for no one can do these signs that You do unless God is with him.” ³ Jesus responded and said to him, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born again (or born from above), he cannot see the kingdom of God.”

⁴ Nicodemus said to Him, “How can a person be born when he is old? He cannot enter his mother’s womb a second time and be born, can he?” ⁵ Jesus answered, “Truly, truly, I say to you, unless someone is born of water and the Spirit, he cannot enter the kingdom of God. ⁶ That which has been born of the flesh is flesh, and that which has been born of the Spirit is spirit. ⁷ Do not be amazed that I said to you, ‘You must be born again (or born from above).’ ⁸ The wind blows where it wishes, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know where it is coming from and where it is going; so is everyone who has been born of the Spirit.”

⁹ Nicodemus responded and said to Him, “How can these things be?” ¹⁰ Jesus answered and said to him, “You are the teacher of Israel, and yet you do not understand these things? ¹¹ Truly, truly, I say to you, we speak of what we know and testify of what we have seen, and you people do not accept our testimony. ¹² If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you heavenly things? ¹³ No one has ascended into heaven, except He who descended from heaven: the Son of Man. ¹⁴ And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, ¹⁵ so that everyone who believes Him will have eternal life in Him.

¹⁶ “For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. ¹⁷ For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that all the world might be saved through Him. ¹⁸ The one who believes in Him is not judged; the one who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God. ¹⁹ And this is the judgment, that the Light has come into the world, and people loved the darkness rather than the Light; for their deeds were evil. ²⁰ For everyone who does evil hates the Light, and does not come to the Light, so that his deeds will not be exposed. ²¹ But the one who practices the truth comes to the Light, so that his deeds will be revealed as having been performed in God” (JN 3:1-21).

Jesus was born to be our spiritual Teacher. He was born on earth two thousand years ago from out of the Godhead as a Divine Being, fully God and fully Man and literally God on earth, with a divine mission, which was His teaching mission, a life-plan chosen by Himself and blessed by God to teach all of us how to raise our spiritual vibrations to the point where this can be our last necessary earth-lifetime. And once His plan was completed, He chose to die a public death by crucifixion so He could then reanimate His dead body and literally rise from the dead in order to teach us that death is just an illusion. He then used that decaying body briefly before He discarded it and used an astral body for a month, after which He was bodily assumed into the astral plane, where He remains to this day. I am a skeptic by nature, so I have pretty thoroughly investigated all of this. And every bit of it is true!

I tested Jesus’s teachings on myself twelve years ago, and they worked within weeks to raise my spiritual vibration to an amazing degree. The effect was dramatic! And it has been permanent. Jesus has asked me now to begin to teach others to do what I have done for myself, so I am completing a course on how to teach a course. After having just once mentioned my plan here to do this, I received about fifty emails. Which was amazing! I had hoped to start with maybe ten people. But I am game, if you are. We will need first to learn what you will need to know and how much of it you will need to know in order for the Lord’s teachings to work their magic for you, just as they have done for me. The result is a literal transformation! And I am planning to guarantee that same transformation to every participant. We expect to begin Zoom classes in January, and to run this course for ten Wednesday evenings and then do support groups afterward. This is going to be fun! My transformation took just a few weeks, but my prior knowledge base was a factor. However, now that I understand how and why the teachings work, I am confident that our success rate can be one hundred percent. Most of the opt-in requests have come to our info@robertagrimes.com address, so to be sure that you receive an invitation, if your first email was to rgrimes@robertagrimes.com, please send a new email to the info address, and be sure to include your correct email address. Then, soon after Christmas, if you have expressed an interest, please watch your inbox!

He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing,
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing.

And He walks with me, and He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own;
And the joy we share as we tarry there,
None other has ever known.
– Charles A. Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

It seems we stood and talked like this before.
We looked at each other in the same way then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
The clothes you’re wearing are the clothes you wore.
The smile you are smiling you were smiling then,
But I can’t remember where or when.
Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

I still can recall, and vividly, that when I first entered college as a religion major was when I first encountered and grappled with some of the Very Biggest Problems.  Even in my freshman year, we were made to wrestle with these new, grownup questions and issues that sometimes kept me awake at night and staring in the dark. I was still at my core a trusting Christian child, and never before had any of this gigantic potential for existential angst ever even occurred to me. How did all this Something arise from nothing? And it was already fine-tuned for intelligent life to evolve from what had been primordial dust? And if even so much as a single pixel in this whole complex picture were to shift by a shade, or if anything ever were to change by a jot, then everything could collapse in upon itself without warning, or else it all might blow apart? It was this new possibility that rocked me at the time, this sudden new awareness of the precariousness of it all. So, was God still even out there?

I mean, think about it. The original creation had happened so long ago! Was the crucial job of being God and remaining in charge to make sure that the universe continued to function a long-term commitment for the genuine God? When you are a child, you don’t want to have to worry about making sure that God remains sufficiently interested in God’s Creation to stay on the job forevermore!

So I look back now, and I realize that those fifty years of doing afterlife research that began for me almost right out of college were a more complex matter on an emotional level than I ever really knew. I still tell the story of my experience of light at the age of eight, and I have traced my wanting to research the afterlife back to that extraordinary night. But I think now that it has been more than that.  I think I may have spent my early life chasing a core need to establish a certainty that God really is always going to be there, and God loves me enough to never leave me again.

All of which is a meandering preface to a straightforward statement. There can be no question that God Exists. You can know that for certain, because you exist. And the whole stable reality around you exists. Something cannot come from nothing! So for us to be sure that a Creator exists is simple common sense, all based in the commonsense certainty that Something cannot come from Nothing. Of course, the bearded caricature of a God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel does not exist. Nor does the cranky Jehovah boogeyman of the Old Testament exist, with all his brutal whims. God is not just a very big humanoid creature made in our own image!

For almost all of human history, though, that grotesque image of God was what we thought we were stuck with. And human leaders soon came to realize that they could imagine for that cartoonish version of God unlimited powers to reward and punish people to the extent of whatever the human mind can conceive, and their subjects would believe it all was possible for God. And so, enter the Roman Emperor Constantine and his Christian clergyman descendants. They could imagine even a loving God who will nevertheless burn your baby in hell alive and aware forever if you don’t get it baptized before it dies.

We came to understand definitively only toward the end of the last century that no such anthropomorphic Christian God exists. But what does exist is an Uncaused Cause without form, without size, and just as Jesus taught, with an immense energy of infinite power. And the True God will never leave us, because – again, just as Jesus taught – the True Creator God’s greatest power is Perfect Love. So the Genuine God does not need our worship. The Genuine God needs nothing from us. It was the bullying and petty old-style gods that we had created in our image as just big people, oversized in every way and even to their gigantic flaws, that were small enough to need our worship. The Genuine God delights in each of us the way a loving parent delights in the one most beloved infant child! Jesus tells us that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24).

But before we move on to talk about the True God that actually does exist, we should briefly mention the fact that the one belief about God that makes no sense is atheism. Think about it! Materialist scientists continue to hope to get around the pesky fact that the undeniable existence of this complex and longstanding and entirely stable reality gives us proof that a brilliant Creator MUST exist. Scientists try to defend their nonsensical atheism by putting their imagined creation-by-happenstance event extremely far back in time and making it happen really, extremely, gosh-darn quickly, and also very loudly. Materialist scientists even call their imagined first event the “Big Bang.” But of course, that doesn’t really help them, because no matter how far back it was and how quickly it happened, and no matter how loud was its bang, there still is going to be someone in the very back of the room who at some point is going to ask the obvious two questions. But, excuse me, sir, what caused that Bang? And what was there before the Bang happened? Materialist scientists of the atheist bent so deeply hate the fact that atheism is such a demonstrably flawed belief that they even talk about finding long-odds end-runs around the problems with it. Like, for example, the grasping-at-straws notion that maybe we are living in one gigantic simulation. A simulation wouldn’t need a definitive beginning, since it is never real at all!

And of course, right beside the problematic origins-of-the-universe question for atheists are the same continuation worries that plagued me in college. There are an amazing number of variables which must forever remain constant within tiny tolerances, or else this universe will either collapse in upon itself or blow apart; and yet they insist that those variables have all remained where they have to be for billions upon billions of years. Knowing that you and I are each the best-beloved Child of a God Who loves us infinitely, we are certain that God is real, so we can sleep each night without worries! God’s eye is on the sparrow – and on each of the cosmological constants – so we know that God is watching over each of us. But the truth is that the materialist scientists are very well aware by now that those “cosmological constants” which must remain the same are always nevertheless all minutely adjusting. Which fact very strongly implies that there has to be a Divine Cosmological Constants Adjuster out there somewhere, keeping this universe going.

Oh, but it implies nothing of the kind! Not to materialist scientists, it doesn’t. Those scientists just decided one fine day to give up on keeping track of all the essential cosmological constants as they keep on doing their minute-adjusting thing. The scientists have simply set each “constant” at one predetermined value and decided to assume that each of them never will change again, so even as the constants keep on minutely adjusting, now the scientists never will know about it. Rupert Sheldrake’s famously banned Tedx talk on this topic is laugh-out-loud funny because he plays it as a classic straight man. And if you have never seen this talk, please watch it now! I think Dr. Sheldrake may have missed his calling. He really should have been a comedian.

All right. So now, let’s talk about what the genuine High God actually is. Jesus told us, as we quoted Him saying above, that “God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and Truth” (JN 4:24). Notice that Jesus is not here insisting that we worship God in the old, fear-based way in which people used to worship God, with rote prayers and blind subjugation. No, since God is Spirit, if we choose to worship our Father who gives us life, which is entirely up to us, we are now to worship God where God is, and in Spirit and in Truth. When Jesus told us that God is Spirit, He was telling us what we now know to be true: God is the highest aspect of Consciousness.

Consciousness is all that exists, and each of us alike is also a part of that same Consciousness. Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay. Consciousness is a form of energy, and so it vibrates. At its lowest and slowest vibration, consciousness is fear and hatred, which we strive to escape. At its highest vibration it is the High God and perfect love. While people could not have known any of this two thousand years ago, they could at least have known that this new version of God that Jesus was calling Spirit is a departure from what they always had understood God to be, and this new way of praying to God was new as well. Jesus taught us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven (MT 6:8-10).

Yes, it felt like a departure to those who first heard these words, but it was love-based and not fear-based, so it also felt liberating to Jesus’s first followers, just as it feels liberating to us. God now is no longer a scary human-like Jehovah, but instead God is a loving Father whose very name is sacred, or Hallowed. And thanks to Jesus, we are now on the path toward joining God where God is, as we work toward elevating our own spiritual vibrations ever closer to becoming one with God in Spirit, and thereby bringing the kingdom of God on earth and ensuring that fear and hatred will be no more. As it is above, so it also will be below. How easily we now understand this prayer which first was prayed two thousand years ago. The very highest aspect of Consciousness is the High God, while all of us also are aspects of that same Consciousness; and as we grow spiritually, we are growing toward what will be the end of our need to ever again incarnate on earth. So once every human being has completed that same journey, God’s kingdom on earth will dawn at last. Every word that Jesus speaks to us is meant to introduce to us our own coming spiritual perfection.   

I should add that I have been amazed by how many people have said after I mentioned it last week that they want to take our proposed course in spiritual growth that begins in February. I have tried to keep track, although I am sure that I have missed some people’s emails, but apparently this course-on-giving-a-course that I am now taking includes a way for you to sign up if you like, so please be on the lookout for that. Yes, if you do this course as Jesus intended it based upon His teachings, and then if you will (easily) maintain your elevated vibration, this can be your last necessary trip here, and you will understand why that is true as the three-month teaching phase of the course progresses. I think we will be doing simultaneous courses in the U.S. and Australia, and perhaps also in Europe/Africa, but that will depend on the final number of signups in each time zone. All of that being said, let’s do this now for Jesus! He went through a lot to bring the Truth to us, and I am amazed now to tell you, the Truth really works!

Some things that happened for the first time
Seem to be happening again.
And so it seems that we have met before,
And laughed before, and loved before,
But who knows where or when?
– Lorenz Hart (1895-1943) & Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “Where or When” (1937)

Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be
For my unconquerable soul.

In the fell clutch of circumstance
I have not winced nor cried aloud.
Under the bludgeonings of chance
My head is bloody, but unbowed.

Beyond this place of wrath and tears
Looms but the Horror of the shade,
And yet the menace of the years
Finds and shall find me unafraid.

It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
– William Ernest Henley (1849-1903), “Invictus” (1875)

One of the oddest debates in materialist science is about whether or not human beings have free will. This debate is a longstanding one, and it can be maddening to those who are watching it, since most materialist scientists claim that human free will is a mere illusion. We last discussed this issue here two years ago, when I mentioned professional atheist Sam Harris’s book on this subject. I was sure when I first read his book that he would think the whole idea of no free will was ridiculous. After all, Harris himself is such an adamant free spirit! But amazingly, I found that he had bought into the lie, hook, line, and sinker. This controversy first acutely arose when a researcher named Benjamin Libet showed in the 1980s that muscular and nervous preparations to move a digit begin about 350 milliseconds before we make the conscious decision to move it, thereby proving to many materialist scientists that human beings have no free will. There are some scientists who are sure that Libet’s work proves no such thing; but theirs is a minority view. So scientists who still stubbornly believe in free will are now mostly relegated to the religionist side of the battle between science and religion that goes back as far as Plato and Aristotle.            

But of course, you and I well understand that our decision to move a digit is not made in the brain. Rather, it is made in our mind, and our mind is a part of the great universal Consciousness which underlies all of reality. Then our mind notifies our digit to move, and only then does our mind make our brain aware of what our decision has been, so that 350-millisecond gap is actually quite easy to explain. And thus, you will be relieved to learn, our better understanding of the nature of Consciousness and its primary role in reality has given you back your free-will right to decide what you are going to have for breakfast.

What is very important, too, is the fact that our deeper understanding of the primary role of Consciousness lets us better understand the teaching role of Jesus in our spiritual development. Please think about this! If we come to earth primarily so we can learn and grow spiritually, but then while we are here all our spiritual challenges are confronted by mere automatons of people who have no free-will ability to make decisions because all our decisions are being made for us, then how on earth can any of us ever learn and grow spiritually, even by an inch? It is in our very need to learn and grow spiritually that our need for an unfettered free will is most essential!

Most of our basic human learning is what we might call simple rote-learning. During that first learning, which happens in babyhood and childhood, we are primarily in download mode. No free will really is needed there. Actually, during those first nearly two decades we spend a lot of time just learning to become successfully functioning human beings, able to live and to navigate in this complex material world, and becoming fully adapted to it and emotionally invested in it. This is all so we will be comfortable in our surroundings, and not distracted by them as our adult spiritual challenges begin to occur.

When my Thomas first took me to meet Jesus in the astral plane eighteen months ago, and Jesus then told me His personal eternal-life story, I was frankly blown away by it. Jesus had begun His existence in ancient times as a normal human being whose one great talent was an extraordinary ability to love His fellow Man. Jesus had always been so naturally good at loving, and so driven by His deep personal need to love, that He had become a spiritually perfected being fully six thousand years ago, easy-peasy for Him, and welcome to the Godhead Collective! But of course, if you are so deeply driven by such a profound love for all of humankind, you are not about to happily join the Godhead and just let the rest of humankind flounder on in ignorance through countless more lifetimes to come.

When Jesus first realized that the whole point of human life was to learn how to ever better love and forgive, and to thereby raise our spiritual vibrations, He was distressed to realize that everyone else was not already very well aware of that fact! People were living lifetime after lifetime, and making very little spiritual progress with each lifetime because they had no idea about even why they were here. So rather than joining the Godhead Collective, Jesus spent the next four thousand years convincing God to allow Him to return to earth in order to teach all of us how to do what He had so easily done naturally. He wanted each of us to be able to raise our own consciousness vibrations sufficiently to quickly become perfected beings, just as He had done. (This whole story as He told it to me is now posted on teachingsbyjesus.com.) Jesus had no need to die for our sins. No, that later Christian dogma was just part of the Emperor Constantine’s religion-building process. It was Constantine’s separate deeply fear-based idea. So then Jesus was by His own choice born from the Godhead two thousand years ago to be our spiritual Teacher.

And Jesus is such an extraordinary Teacher! Oh my goodness, He is truly amazing. When I first realized about thirteen years ago that His role on earth was to be our Teacher, and I took Him seriously in that role, I said, Okay, Jesus, so please let me be your guinea pig. Let’s see if Your teachings really work as intended. And I discovered that, yes indeed, they do work beautifully. And they work within months! I ended up putting them in The Fun of Growing Forever. It would have been trickier for Jesus to teach what He wanted to teach us when He was on earth, because the first step really has to be to leave your fear-based religion behind, and back then no one would have understood a spiritual teacher who was not a clergyman. But what a joy it is to watch that beautiful young man throw off every religious and cultural inhibition, and simply teach us the love-based truth!

That is actually what the story of Jesus and the woman at the well is about. It comes at the start of His public ministry, and in His encounter with the woman at the well, Jesus broke three important Jewish customs. First, He spoke to a female stranger. Second, she was a Samaritan woman, a member of a group the Jews traditionally disdained. And third, He asked her to give Him a drink, which would have made Him ceremonially unclean just from using her drinking vessel. All of this shocked the woman at the well. But Jesus lived in unrestrained love, free from all laws and customs. And the boldness and confidence with which He did these things right at the start of His ministry is amazing!

This comes from Chapter Four of the Gospel of John: “³He left Judea and went away again to Galilee. ⁴ And He had to pass through Samaria. ⁵ So He came to a city of Samaria called Sychar, near the parcel of land that Jacob gave to his son Joseph; ⁶ and Jacob’s well was there. So Jesus, tired from His journey, was just sitting by the well. It was about the sixth hour.⁷ A woman of Samaria came to draw water. Jesus said to her, ‘Give Me a drink.’ ⁸ For His disciples had gone away to the city to buy food. ⁹ So the Samaritan woman said to Him, ‘How is it that You, though You are a Jew, are asking me for a drink, though I am a Samaritan woman?’ (For Jews do not associate with Samaritans.) ¹⁰ Jesus replied to her, ‘If you knew the gift of God, and who it is who is saying to you, “Give Me a drink,” you would have asked Him, and He would have given you living water.’ ¹¹ She said to Him, ‘Sir, You have no bucket and the well is deep; where then do You get this living water? ¹² You are not greater than our father Jacob, are You, who gave us the well and drank of it himself, and his sons and his cattle?’ ¹³ Jesus answered and said to her, ‘Everyone who drinks of this water will be thirsty again; ¹⁴ but whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.’”

“¹⁵ The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, give me this water so that I will not be thirsty, nor come all the way here to draw water.’ ¹⁶ He said to her, ‘Go, call your husband and come here.’ ¹⁷ The woman answered and said to Him, ‘I have no husband.’ Jesus said to her, ‘You have correctly said, “I have no husband”; ¹⁸ for you have had five husbands, and the one whom you now have is not your husband; this which you have said is true.’ ¹⁹ The woman said to Him, ‘Sir, I perceive that You are a prophet. ²⁰ Our fathers worshiped on this mountain, and yet you Jews say that in Jerusalem is the place where one must worship.’ ²¹ Jesus said to her, ‘Believe Me, woman, that a time is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. ²² You Samaritans worship what you do not know; we worship what we do know, because salvation is from the Jews. ²³ But a time is coming, and even now has arrived, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for such people the Father seeks to be His worshipers. ²⁴ God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth.’ ²⁵ The woman said to Him, ‘I know that Messiah is coming (He who is called Christ); when that One comes, He will declare all things to us.’ ²⁶ Jesus said to her, ‘I am He, the One speaking to you’” (JN 4:3-26).

This is in some ways the most extraordinary passage in all four Gospels. Especially coming, as it does, right at the start of Jesus’s ministry. Not only is Jesus breaking every social convention in speaking to a Samaritan woman and asking her for water. But here, for the first time in His earthly life as Jesus, He is proclaiming Himself to be the Messiah. And He is choosing to make that very important initial announcement… to a despised Samaritan woman. Jesus is telling us in no uncertain terms that He will not be inhibited by any human conventions whatsoever, but rather that love is His only law.

Before Jesus told me His life-story, He still seemed like Magic-Jesus to me, as He had been for my entire life. He probably at one time seemed that way to you as well. Perhaps He still does. The whole born in a manger, and then the angels came, the Son of God, and crucified, rose from the dead, and all of that: If ever anyone was a not-real, larger than life individual, it was Jesus. To have my spirit guide tell me that he himself had once been Thomas Jefferson had been stretching things pretty far to begin with; but I had gotten used to that. We even had written a book about Thomas Jefferson together. But then Thomas took me to meet with Jesus in the astral plane, which was so far off-the-charts unbelievable! And then came the story that Jesus told me, and I began to know the genuine person that He is, and that brought Him more down to earth and personal for me.

The thing about Jesus is that in person, Jesus is the humblest, really the least full of Himself Person that you can imagine. When you meet Him, He makes it all about you. Which is odd, because He has this overwhelmingly powerful and absolutely silken personal energy that shouts how important He actually is. And yet when He looks into your eyes, He does it as if in that moment, you are all that matters to Him. “But, but, He is God!” You might be protesting now. And the last thing you would expect of the Ultimate High God, Creator of the Universe, would be humility! I thought that at first as well. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that perhaps it would be rather like God to love each one of us deeply, as a mother loves her precious child. Think of it!  This whole universe is God’s creation. And God creates all of it to give us a place to grow spiritually. Wow. You had better believe that God truly and deeply loves each one of us!

There is something else, too, that is amazing about that moment between Jesus and the woman at the well. Jesus talks about giving her “living water,” and He says that “whoever drinks of the water that I will give him shall never be thirsty; but the water that I will give him will become in him a fountain of water springing up to eternal life.” And the water in the afterlife actually is alive! When I first read that Gospel passage, I realized that Jesus knew about the living water in the afterlife. He actually had been to the same afterlife that my research had been revealing to me! And then, soon after that, I discovered that the Shroud of Turin is genuine, and it can be used to confirm that Jesus actually did rise from the dead. What a heady time that was for me, when I first understood that all my research could be used to confirm that Jesus is genuine in every conceivable way!

And then, of course, Thomas decided that it was time for me actually to meet Jesus. My Thomas was so wise in the way that he handled this! By the time I met Jesus, Thomas had already resolved all my potential reservations. I knew that Jesus was a genuine historical figure who had, moreover, actually risen from the dead. At one time I had been, if you will pardon the expression, a modern doubting Thomas of sorts. I wanted so much to believe! But even despite my childhood experience of light, and my second such experience in young adulthood, I was – and I remain – a natural skeptic. So then I met Jesus, and thanks to Thomas’s already having addressed whatever reservations about Him I still might have had, just my finally seeing Jesus, and feeling His amazing personal energy, readily resolved whatever doubts remained. Jesus is, and for you and me He carefully maintains Himself eternally to be, fully God and fully Man. I try to understand what it must be to love people as Jesus loves people. I really do try. But there are not enough words of love and praise in all the languages of the earth to express how I now feel for my beloved Jesus.