Author: Roberta Grimes

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)

The Universe

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Words are flowing out like endless rain into a paper cup.
They slither wildly as they slip away across the universe.
Pools of sorrow, waves of joy are drifting through my opened mind,
Possessing and caressing me.
Jai guru deva, om.
Nothing’s gonna change my world!
Nothing’s gonna change my world!

Images of broken light which dance before me like a million eyes,
They call me on and on across the universe!
Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letterbox,
They tumble blindly as they make their way across the universe!
Jai guru deva, om.
Nothing’s gonna change my world!
Nothing’s gonna change my world!
– Paul McCartney & John Lennon (1940-1980) from “Across the Universe” (1970)

The wonderfully entertaining and delightfully eccentric billionaire who apparently lives just up the road from my family has now decided to figure out the universe. And, what the heck, if that idea amuses him, then there is no harm in his trying to do that. Although he seems to be going about it wrong, as the godfather of his electric car company would have been the first to let him know, had that noble genius not died so many years ago now.  Like so much of what deludes us by appearing to be solid, this whole universe is not solid at all. And as that astoundingly brilliant polymath after whom our local polymath named the world’s first really successful electric car company so wisely said a hundred years ago: “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.”

What Nikola Tesla was talking about when he made that remark about non-physical phenomena was consciousness. Tesla was born in 1856, and he died in 1943, so he lived through the end of what we might call the last dying gasps of the Age of Materialism, which technically ended in the first third of the twentieth century. That Age really did end in the 1930s or thereabouts, although mainstream science took little notice of its ending at the time. Nikola Tesla was well acquainted with the work of Max Planck and the other physicists who were then developing quantum theory, and who discovered that, confoundingly, what we each experience as consciousness is somehow at the base of all reality. Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of Quantum Mechanics. In 1931 he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” 

Max Planck went on to say in 1944, “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.”

So the first half of the twentieth century was a time of supreme scientific tumult. And while some of the aging physics greats, in particular Albert Einstein, were reluctant at first to accept the more profound implications of quantum mechanics, eventually even he accepted its conclusions. Toward the end of his life Einstein said, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.”  And Nikola Tesla understood that this was true, in spades! What we experience as consciousness does indeed underlie it all. But for the mainstream scientific gatekeepers, for the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals, recognizing consciousness as a primary force seems to be too much like finding (gasp!) a religious God. So for the past several decades, an intensive and well-funded research program has been underway to find a source for what we experience as consciousness inside the human brain. Oh, yes indeed. Scientists are wasting time, effort, and considerable sums of money (more than a billion dollars, and counting) as they treat consciousness as if it must be just an artifact produced inside each individual brain, from which it must somehow then emanate, and mingle like an evanescent vapor in the air. And that, my dear friends, is the literal definition of human folly and wasteful futility.

And we know that all of that is futile, because the human genome demonstrably does not even code for the human mind. When the results of The Human Genome Project were first announced in 2003, there had been found to be only something like twenty-three chromosome pairs in the entire human genome, where at least two hundred thousand pairs had been confidently expected, given the extent and complexity of the human mind. And all over the world, when these results were first announced you could hear a steady patter of little thuds as thousands of scientific jaws hit the floor. Because clearly, the human genome does not code for the human mind, which fact was big scientific news at the time! But twenty years later, it is all covered over in an obfuscating word-fluff. I defy you to find anywhere in the popular science news a single mention of what should be a fundamental point being made freshly for each new generation of science buffs to learn and to wonder about and to marvel over. So we will make that point clearly for you here:

The Human Genome Does Not Code for the Human Mind

Where consciousness is concerned, the human brain is little more than a transmitter and receiver which also does processing. It provides a way for each individual human mind to interact and work with its associated body. But rather than accepting this fact, the mainstream scientific community continues to ignore the abundant evidence that now exists that consciousness is independent of and easily acts apart from its individual human body, because what each of us experiences as human consciousness is indeed primary and universal. Dr. Planck was right, and all is well! Even despite the mainstream scientific community’s determination to maintain an oddly pre-twentieth-century ignorance about what actually is going on, there has been so much evidence now produced that consciousness is primary, and especially including the tens of thousands of well-documented near-death experiences (NDEs) which sometimes include verifiable distance observations, that this is one genie that never can be forced back inside its little bottle. But because this is something fundamental about reality that the university physics departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals still refuse to accept, it is likely to pose a problem for sincere and open-minded seekers who simply want to know what is objectively true. Like, for example, our wonderfully eccentric neighbor from a few miles up the road. His new website suggests that his primary purpose in undertaking this new planned investigation is simply that he wants to “understand reality.”

Which is such an admirable goal! Ten years ago, my Thomas chose “Seek Reality” as the title for our podcast as well, and that goal has turned out to be broad enough that even without funding, we have been able to figure out so many things. All our afterlife studies, and astral studies, and general reality studies have gone wonderfully well. And with all of that, we also have been able to learn quite a bit about consciousness. Here is a sampling of what we now know is certainly or very likely true:

* Consciousness is a form of energy, so it vibrates. We experience the vibrations of consciousness as emotion. At their lowest and slowest, these emotions are the ishiest vibrations, like fear, anger, and hatred, while at the highest vibrations are the purest and most wonderful emotions, the very highest of which is perfect love.

* Consciousness is also a human-inhabited spectrum, of which matter is the lowest and slowest. Above matter are the astral levels at higher and higher vibratory ranges, dozens of them, many as large and solid-seeming as this universe, and all of them accessible by mind at higher and higher vibrations as we raise our personal consciousness vibrations.

* Matter and all the aspects of conscious are almost entirely empty space. Because of the makeup of atoms, matter is  99.9999999% empty space, and all the many dozens of aspects of reality exist together happily in precisely the same place. You and I believe that we are on this material level of reality only because our minds are tuned to and are picking up this level of reality at the moment; but we can easily “astral travel,” and pick up a different reality in exactly the same place.

* Consciousness may be all of what exists. Our minds are consciousness, and the structure of reality is, as Max Planck put it, also consciousness, so it is impossible for us to get behind consciousness. And it may well be that nothing else but consciousness actually exists.

* Consciousness is the likely source of life. One ongoing puzzler in the scientific community has been the origin of life. And for a number of reasons, consciousness itself looks to be the most likely source of the elusive spark which produces life.  

* All the various energy levels of consciousness and their associated realities work together in un-guessable ways. This remains one of science’s great research frontiers! Consciousness is not distinctly striped in terms of its energy vibrations, but rather it is one continuous energy rainbow. And while nearly all the funding in this area is still committed to nonsense like trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, doing some of what would be genuinely useful research in this area is going to have to wait.

So in short, if anyone wants to truly understand reality, here is a gentle hint. Unless a research project’s mandate includes consciousness as a part of what you intend to study, then it won’t be more than a much too severely limited “garbage in means garbage out” sort of situation, I am sad to say. And adding Artificial Intelligence (AI) as a study tool isn’t going to be of much help, since Nikola Tesla and Max Planck themselves would tell you that unless consciousness is a part of your mandate, you have so severely limited what it is that you are studying that no comprehensive understanding of much of anything really is possible. To again quote the proud namesake of the world’s reigning brand of electric car: “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.”

Sounds of laughter shades of life are ringing
Through my open ears, inciting and inviting me.
Limitless undying love which shines around me like a million suns,
It calls me on and on across the universe!

Jai guru deva, om.
Nothing’s gonna change my world!
Nothing’s gonna change my world!
– Paul McCartney & John Lennon (1940-1980) from “Across the Universe” (1970)

 

Who Is Jesus #3

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)

Perhaps we have well enough answered our question over the past two weeks. And I think that indeed we may have answered it definitively. Who Really Is Jesus? The Being who would one day be born from out of the Godhead as Jesus was almost certainly the only human being ever naturally born on earth who loved each individual person to such an extreme and unrelenting extent that He very rapidly achieved the Godhead level of spiritual development for Himself. And it was so easy for Him! But Jesus’s love for humankind was such that He never could have been content with simply joining the Godhead Collective, merging His Being with the Source, and abandoning all the suffering souls that He had left behind on earth and in the astral plane. What, so Jesus was supposed to simply leave them all behind to suffer pointlessly and for ages to come? So then they would each be required to, individually and one by one and in countless earth-incarnations to come, eventually figure out and very gradually achieve what Jesus had achieved for Himself so easily? The very thought of each human being having to go through that was anathema to Jesus! He was warmly invited to join the Godhead Collective. Then when He kept insisting that He needed to take another lifetime on earth so He could teach the whole world how to do what He had just done, He was ordered to instead join the Godhead Collective! That was the natural next stage in His spiritual development. It was an honor that He should have been eager to claim!

And yet, Jesus could not bear to accept God’s gift, if doing that meant turning His back on all of suffering humankind. My Thomas was in mental communication with Jesus back then, and it seemed to him that the Godhead Council that was managing his Brother’s spiritual growth went from at first being flummoxed and impatient with Him, that He was refusing to color within the usual lines, to gradually developing a reluctant reverence for this odd new creature, this Ascended Being who was so deeply loving that He refused to join the Godhead until everyone else over all the earth had managed to achieve the same level of spiritual growth that He had achieved. After all, being loving was the whole point of human spiritual development, was it not? So Jesus was in fact just an overachiever, simply carrying His love for suffering humanity to its logical, extreme conclusion. And the Godhead Council, as troubled and apparently deeply hidebound by its own customs as it apparently was by then, was unable to fault Jesus for His eagerness to help these people to advance spiritually.

We afterlife experts know very little about the upper levels of Consciousness. Fifty or more years ago, we believed that our universe’s seventh level must be its top, but meanwhile some who had achieved that level and were able to grow spiritually yet even beyond the Godhead level were finding that what our dear Mikey Morgan now is confirming for us is in fact true. Human spiritual growth indeed has no top! At its ultimate highest top is what Jesus calls Spirit. The Father. The Ultimate High God. Although even the actual top is not its actual top. And in any event, The Ultimate High God, which is indeed not the top after all, still does nothing quickly. So an amazing four millennia very gradually passed while Jesus patiently tried to sell the Godhead of this material universe, and the Ultimate High God That reigns above All, on this idea that Jesus had that He needed to be born again somehow from out of the Whole of It All into something altogether new. And something wonderful!    

Jesus Himself did not really know how He had achieved so much spiritual growth so easily. It just had come completely naturally to Him. So a part of Jesus’s need now to sell the Godhead Collective on His earthly mission meant selling the Godhead on Jesus’s need, and also on the Godhead’s Own need to better understand humanity. As my Thomas much later would put it to me, when Jesus was born from out of the Godhead and He first walked on earth, the Godhead was able to “look through Jesus’s eyes,” and learn to better understand the Godhead’s Own creation. But still, it took Jesus close to four thousand earth-years to convince the Godhead to allow Him to take an unprecedented Incarnation from out of the Godhead, first to study humankind in order to figure out how people born on earth could learn to achieve the Godhead level of  spiritual development, just as He had done; and then to teach those techniques on earth. So then all human earthly suffering could finally and forever be no more.

And all of That was Jesus’s Quest. And Wow, it was no less than the greatest of all possible human Quests! Just think of what a nuisance Jesus must have seemed to the entire Godhead Collective, at least in the beginning, wanting as He did to achieve nothing less than the entire spiritual transformation of all of humankind right now. He was like David going against Goliath. But at least Goliath had been some sort of evil dude! No, Jesus was going against God here, for heaven’s sake. Which One of them was actually on the wrong side? Who knew?

(And I should tell you here, my dear ones, that last Saturday afternoon I broke my right shoulder . And I have been in such a cloud of pain and medication ever since that my family kept telling me to give up on writing this. But I knew that I had to keep on writing. I had to write you something!)

And this is how Jesus was born on earth.  That was a haphazard thing as well. His earthly parents were Joseph and Mary, The Archangel Gabriel announced His coming. And Jesus was so simply born!

Thomas was watching it all from a little respectful distance by mind, and wondering what his little Brother was even thinking. That kid, for He was just a child then, and He was already a Perfected Being. Such a sweet boy He was, but altogether so completely out of His depth, so at what level actually was He now? Was there any way to even comprehend that? He even chose to be born to a slave mother, for heaven’s sake, to a woman of the lowest caste. So then Jesus moved in and was born and made all of this work somehow, He actually did, and indeed we have His Gospels as proof of that. It all does make sense! Jesus’s mission, and His Quest.

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.

 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)

Who Is Jesus? (#2)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want.
He lets me lie down in green pastures.
He leads me beside the still waters. He restores my soul.
He guides me in the paths of righteousness for His name’s sake.
Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me.
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies.
You anointed my head with oil. My cup overflows.
Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life,
And I shall dwell the house of the Lord forever (Psalm 23:1-6).
– David, Third King of the United Kingdom of Israel (1040 BCE – 970 BCE)

Jesus’s most important Gospel encounter is the tale of His meeting with the woman at the well. It comes as His ministry begins, and it gives us everything that we need to know about Jesus and His mission on earth, if only we can fully understand what we are reading. Jesus is speaking not to a crowd of Jews in a synagogue or on a hill, as later on He often will do. And nor is He sparring with Temple leaders or with clergymen, as He will be doing later. In fact, in this early and very rare case, Jesus is not speaking with men at all. No, Jesus’s earliest and longest Gospel discourse is a private conversation that He initiates with a least member of a despised ethnic minority. And she is, oh my goodness, just a woman to boot! What follows is most of the fourth chapter of the Biblical Gospel of John:

So then, when the Lord knew that the Pharisees had heard that He was making and baptizing more disciples than John 2 (although Jesus Himself was not baptizing; rather, His disciples were), 3 He 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 noon. 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.”

27 And at this point His disciples came, and they were amazed that He had been speaking with a woman, yet no one said, “What are You seeking?” or, “Why are You speaking with her?” 28 So the woman left her waterpot and went into the city, and said to the people, 29 “Come, see a man who told me all the things that I have done; this is not the Christ, is He?” 30 They left the city and were coming to Him.

31 Meanwhile the disciples were urging Him, saying, “Rabbi, eat something.” 32 But He said to them, “I have food to eat that you do not know about.” 33 So the disciples were saying to one another, “No one brought Him anything to eat, did he?” 34 Jesus said to them, “My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to accomplish His work. 35 Do you not say, ‘There are still four months, and then comes the harvest’? Behold, I tell you, raise your eyes and observe the fields, that they are ripe for harvest. 36 Already the one who reaps is receiving wages and is gathering fruit for eternal life, so that the one who sows and the one who reaps may rejoice together. 37 For in this case the saying is true: ‘One sows and another reaps.’ 38 I sent you to reap that for which you have not labored; others have labored, and you have come into their labor.”

39 Now from that city many of the Samaritans believed in Him because of the word of the woman who testified, “He told me all the things that I have done.” 40 So when the Samaritans came to Jesus, they were asking Him to stay with them; and He stayed there two days. 41 Many more believed because of His Word; 42 and they were saying to the woman, “It is no longer because of what you said that we believe, for we have heard for ourselves and know that this One truly is the Savior of the world.”

43 And after the two days, He departed from there for Galilee. 44 For Jesus Himself testified that a prophet has no honor in his own country. 45 So when He came to Galilee, the Galileans received Him, only because they had seen all the things that He did in Jerusalem at the feast; for they themselves also went to the feast. (JN 4:1-45).

For those of us now free from the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based Christian dogmas, there is so much richness in this wonderful story! My affection for this tale from the Gospel of John is first rooted in my childhood, when at the age of eight I had an experience of light, and a voice from out of that light assured me that God is real and God will never leave me. After that night, I spent the rest of my childhood attending grownup church and communing with a beautiful stained-glass depiction of Jesus talking with the woman at the well as I listened to Reverend Turrell’s love-filled sermons.

And then came the moment, almost forty years later, when I realized that all my afterlife research and Bible-reading had clashed head-on, and I closed my Bible for the next two years. I could no longer be a Christian, because nothing about the religion was supported by the afterlife evidence. I knew by then that the afterlife is real. But I could not bear to give up on Jesus! So one rainy day, very gingerly, I sat down and read just the four Biblical Gospels. And in reading just the Gospels, I could find no place where the words of Jesus were inconsistent with what I knew to be true about the afterlife.

Then I came to the Fourth Chapter of John. You really can read all four Biblical Gospels in one long sitting! Jesus was speaking with the woman at the well, and I was starting to relax. Christianity’s dogmas about sin and hell and the sacrificial redemption of humankind by Jesus and all the other religious nonsense that Constantine crammed into his Roman Christianity at First Nicaea in the year 325 CE do not jibe at all with the afterlife evidence! But at least Jesus’s Gospel teachings can live with the afterlife evidence just fine. So then Jesus said to the woman at the well, “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” (JN 4:10). And I about fell off my chair! One of the big things about the afterlife is that the water there is alive. It looks like water but it feels like silk, it is dry to the touch and rich in energy, and you can walk into it fully clothed and come out of it dry and energized. And Jesus knew all about the living water in the afterlife. Please read Chapter 4 of John again, with Jesus’s true purpose in coming t0 earth as He described it to us on April 6, 2022, fresh in your mind. And you will realize that what Jesus actually is telling the woman at the well is that He is going to teach her how to get to where the living water actually is. He is going to teach her how to grow and perfect herself spiritually. That is what He has come to earth to do! And once she has done that, she will never be thirsty again because once she is a spiritually elevated being, she can just walk into that living water in the afterlife and be refreshed. Having heard what Jesus told us last April 6th, everything that He says to the woman at the well in Chapter 4 of the Biblical Gospel of John makes complete sense to us now!    

This story is a beautiful time capsule message for us from Jesus given at the start of His ministry. It feels like His wink given to us across time for each one of us, from long before what was eventually going to become a very far off-track and sure to eventually dead-end Roman Christian religion. It is as if Jesus is reassuring you and me from before any of the past seventeen hundred years even happens. He is gently saying to us now, “Please don’t worry, My dear ones. Because I have got this for you. All is well!” But what else is He actually saying to us here? What are all the signs and symbols for us in the Gospel of John, Chapter 4? Well, let’s just see:

  • Ethnicity, Gender, and Rules. The woman at the well is a member of a despised minority, and a lowly female, who even is living in sin to boot. For Jesus to be having any sort of private conversation with such a person is extremely inappropriate! Yet He is here deliberately, and right at the start of His ministry He is signaling to all of us and to the world at large His complete departure from every old religious and cultural rule, both to break all social boundaries and to establish a new eternal spiritual system that is purely based in love alone.
  • Equating His Teachings with Eternal Life-Giving Water. Many modern Christians equate Jesus’s reference here to “living water” with baptism, which is certainly not what Jesus Himself has in mind! Note especially that the point is made at the start of this passage that it is only His disciples, and not Jesus Himself, who is baptizing His new converts. No, Jesus is thinking only about what He has come to earth to do, which is to teach us all how to raise our spiritual vibrations and achieve our own spiritual perfection, just as He Himself has long since done. That life-giving water on Jesus’s mind is the energized living water of the spiritually elevated afterlife that His teachings will enable the woman at the well – and then all the rest of us – to achieve.
  • God is Universal Spirit. Jesus even tells the woman at the well that God is universal Spirit, and from now on people will no longer be worshiping their individual gods. No more worshiping of the Jewish Jehovah in Jerusalem, and whichever private god the Samaritans worship on their mountain, but now everyone will worship the one true God of all, which Jesus tells us is Spirit.
  • Jesus is the Messiah. Having been born from the Godhead, Jesus knew and taught that God is Spirit; but I have wondered whether He was really calling Himself the prophesied Christ so early in His teaching mission. Son of Man, certainly. But since the Gospels were much later edited at the First Council of Nicaea, can we know now for certain what Jesus precisely was saying here? Well, yes we can. He tells me now that He did know, even so early, that He had been sent as the promised Messiah. And He adds that the Old Testament title “Son of Man,” which He did claim from the start of His ministry, was a softer way of saying the same thing.
  • Food and the Harvest of Souls. Jesus here is instructing His disciples, whom He has only recently recruited, that their food and His is to do God’s will, and to reap a fruitful harvest of the people that God has sown and nurtured on earth, and to teach them the Truth, so that all may grow spiritually and achieve the glorious bounty of eternal life. Here, in JN 4:31-38, where Constantine’s religion-builders were apparently unable to find it and to pollute it with their awful fear-based ideas, Jesus tells us that His true original mission is to bring in the harvest that God has sown and nurtured on earth by teaching all of God’s people how to achieve the Godhead level of spiritual growth, just as Jesus Himself had long ago achieved it.

Jesus’s remark that a prophet has no honor in his own country (at JN 4:44) is something that He knows from a very recent experience. In the Gospel of Luke, Chapter 4:16-24, we see Jesus reading from the scroll of Isaiah on a Sabbath morning in the Synagogue in His hometown of Nazareth just before He begins this journey that is described in the Gospel of John, Chapter 4. The Gospel of Luke says that Jesus was feeling full of the Spirit as He stood up and read,

“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,
 To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord.”

Then Jesus handed back the scroll to the attendant as He said, “Today this Scripture has been fulfilled in your hearing” (LK 4:21). And in the increasingly tense back-and-forth that followed between Jesus and some of His erstwhile neighbors, they became so enraged at His seeming presumptuousness that they tried to throw Him off a nearby cliff.

But Jesus was very clear from the start of His ministry about precisely what His true mission was! There is nothing in what He says to the woman at the well of any fear-based dogmas, judgment by God or a fiery hell, nothing about His future crucifixion or sacrificial redemption, or any reason at all for any of us ever to worry or to feel afraid. In that whole rich and beautiful conversation by the well, none of the dogmas of the Christian religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine invented more than three hundred years later are anywhere to be found.

Before last April I had figured some of this out. But once Jesus then gave us His human backstory last April, and I re-read this tale from the Gospel of John freshly with what Jesus had told us then in mind, I realized to my wonderment that really nothing more ever needs to be said! The whole of Jesus’s true earthly mission before Constantine ever messed with it is beautifully encapsulated in verses 1-45 of the Fourth Chapter of John’s Gospel. Jesus revealed His entire earthly mission to the very least of these right at the start of His ministry when He told it all to that humble Samaritan woman at the well. And someone in my childhood church has just kindly sent me to share with you a photo of that stained-glass window. So now it heads this blog post….

“The Spirit of the Lord God is upon Me,
Because the Lord anointed Me
To bring good news to the humble;
He has sent Me to bind up the brokenhearted,
To proclaim release to captives
And freedom to prisoners;
To proclaim the favorable year of the Lord” (Isaiah 61:1-2).
– Jesus, reading in the Synagogue in Nazareth on the Sabbath (LK 4:18-19)

 

Who Is Jesus? (#1)

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

Jesus loves me, this I know,
For the Bible tells me so.
Little ones to Him belong.
They are weak, but He is strong.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– Anna B. Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
(Popular Children’s Hymn, first Composed as a Poem for a Dying Child)

Last summer I experienced the most extraordinary few months of my life. They may have been the most extraordinary few months of anyone’s life who was born later than maybe 25 CE. And it is first now that I am far enough from those months to think about them with any kind of perspective. I can imagine that all of that might be behind me at this point, although my Thomas, my spirit guide, still will not assure me that time is finally over. But eight months have passed since I last visited with Jesus in the astral plane, and I am beginning now to mentally process those personal experiences that I shared with Him. Or, what shall I even call those moments that I could not believe were actually happening, even as I lived them and I knew they were happening? Without this blog, I likely would not have written them down as I did. But Jesus wanted me to blog about them for you. I am only now really seeing that. His opening Himself again to the world as He was only then just beginning to do is a part of Jesus’s moving beyond His seventeen hundred earth-years spent in working to heal the hundreds of millions of people who were damaged by the Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity.

Where Jesus is now, He encounters few people who are presently occupying earthly bodies. So He is not used to contending with our temporary amnesia. And while I still find it impossible to believe that I had ever met Jesus before last April, Thomas tells me that I have known Him as a friend and colleague ever since Thomas and I died together in a Roman massacre of some of the Lord’s first post-Resurrection followers. So apparently ever since the first century CE, I have been a part of Jesus’s inner circle. Which means that naturally, when Thomas took me to meet with Jesus on April 6th of last year, the Lord knew on an intellectual level that I would have no memory of any of that. But almost at once, He slipped into an easy familiarity with me that confounded me at the time.    

In person, Jesus has an overwhelming presence. He presents in an astral body that is only about five feet eight or nine inches tall, and He looks pretty much like the picture that we have been showing to you here, but with all-over curly hair. His personal energy is silken but it is extraordinarily  powerful, like a mammoth engine idling, although He can tamp it down when He thinks about doing that. As I recall, He did lessen his energy that night. Before last April, I had glimpsed Jesus when I was astral traveling with Thomas and he pointed Him out to me. But before that night I had seen Jesus only incidentally and from a distance. So to be suddenly so close to Him, and to be the sole focus of His attention, made me feel unbearably shy. I couldn’t look at His face. How do you look upon the face of God?   

Then right away the next morning I was trying to deny to Thomas that any of that had happened. I was driving to my first client meeting when I said to Thomas somewhat shakily, “That wasn’t the real Jesus, of course. Right?”

Just to orient you, the third level of the astral plane, which includes the entrance to the afterlife, is where Jesus spends most of His eternal time so He can greet each returning Christian. It is lit by God’s love, as are all the astral levels; and the higher they are, the more brightly they are lit. But to those who are used to sunlight, the third level has a cozy, late-afternoon sort of feel to it. And the sky and the vegetation are all kinds of colors. We were driving around eastern Massachusetts during that week last April, and as I was driving early that next morning, what had happened the night before was gradually more and more coming back to me. Oh my god. Jesus had been telling me on the previous night what He had called “the real Christmas-and-Easter story,” going back for thousands of years before His birth as Jesus, and beginning with His last earth-lifetime. His last earth-lifetime? What? He had been the middle in age of three princes in what He had said had been “a small city of no consequence.” He had said that “the one you call Thomas” had been His older brother. “The one you call John” – who later became the Apostle John – had been His younger brother. All three princes had died very young in a massacre, and… Wait, what? Back then, Jesus had been just a normal human being? This had all been news to me!

So that was when I told my Thomas that the Jesus we had visited the night before had not been the real Jesus. He could not possibly have been the real Jesus! A Jesus who once had been a regular, normal, just some ordinary human guy? And perhaps I should also further enlighten you about Thomas, my spirit guide. Whenever I have seen him in an astral body, he has looked like a handsome young man maybe thirty years old, but his presence feels strong and venerable to me. He has a deep and boomy voice when he speaks audibly, which is almost never; and he often gets impatient with me when I act “girly” (as he calls it), since he is used to relating to me as two males together beyond this one lifetime. When I told him that the Jesus we had seen last night had not been the real Jesus, he at once snapped, “You know who He was!” in his boomy spoken voice. So, that settled that. And I realized then like a clout to the head that I was still on some deep level a Christian. I still needed to believe in Magic-Jesus, and in the God with the beard on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. So when Thomas insisted to me that what Jesus had said on the previous night had been true, then the last of my old blind Christian faith was shattered. So then, at the worst possible moment, I fell apart.

Although I practice law in my own way, I do wear a suit and I play it straight. My clients are sober business owners, they have worked with me for many years, they respect and trust and rely on me, and like Thomas they expect me to be reasonably serious and not foolishly girly and falling apart. And soon I was very upset as I drove, and ranting and raging at Thomas. “Who are we supposed to pray to, then? Is there even a God at all?” As I drove, I badgered him, feeling more and more distraught, while Thomas was saying nothing. I had tears on my cheeks, but I was trying not to cry because I had a whole day of seeing clients ahead of me.

In times of crisis, true friends try to help. Thomas is always behind my left shoulder, and soon I was aware that there was a second Presence, more toward the middle of the back seat. Omigod, it was Jesus! And then Thomas was audibly talking with Jesus. I drifted into silence as I tried to hear what they were saying. I found that they were discussing, using spoken words and for my entertainment, what they thought should be the name of Jesus’s future website. Jesus can speak American English, but with a slight, unguessable accent. Thomas has that portentous voice, but he was sounding less boomy at the moment. A glance in my rear-view mirror showed me that neither of them was there in a body, but they sounded as if they were right there. They almost sounded like a Vaudeville act. They sounded hysterically funny, to be frank. But I refused to be distracted and cheered up so easily.

I was wiping tears and fighting to stay grim. I said aloud, “You can’t use the word ‘Jesus’ in the website name. It has already been taken. In every possible combination.” And the plain injustice of that seemed to outrage the latent Jefferson in Thomas. It is, after all, Jesus’s personal name! I don’t recall precisely what he said aloud then. It was something about how I am a real lawyer, right? So, can’t we find a way to get Jesus legal standing so He can challenge in court the use by all those churches of Jesus’s own personal name? And then I just cracked up. There I was, stopped dead in the middle of a city street in Fall River, Massachusetts, doubled over with laughter in an apparently empty car. While morning rush-hour traffic honked and tried to squeeze by on both sides around me.

All of us astral travel at night while our bodies sleep, but with amnesia for the event. This generally happens during our body’s deepest sleep in the first part of the night, and ideally beginning well before midnight. What I didn’t know until these events of last April was that for my entire life, Thomas had been taking me along with him as if he were walking his dog, and meeting every night of my earthly life with Jesus in the astral plane while I would wait obliviously nearby. He was taking his spirit-guide duties seriously. He was supposed to be watching over me, but he had loyally stayed by Jesus for some six thousand years, ever since that last earth-lifetime that they had lived together as princely brothers. And so, every night he still visited and talked with and served as a supportive brother to Jesus, which is something that continues even now, although once again I have amnesia for these experiences. What was different about last summer, though, was that briefly Jesus wanted me to be aware and remember and report to you some of the details of their meetings. So you and I have had some privileged glimpses of the most amazing Brotherly friendship!

What is clear to me now, though, is that all our experiences with the Brothers were only ever Jesus’s idea, and never Thomas’s. My Thomas is a very private and highly dignified being, who in his Jefferson lifetime burned all his beloved wife’s letters and papers after her death. Like her, he was appalled by the institution of slavery that they had inherited, but her early death took the wind right out of his abolitionist sails. When she died at the age of only thirty-three, his entire focus was on protecting her private opinions from other people’s judgment.

Jesus, on the other hand, overwhelmingly and confoundingly loves people! Thomas has often remarked to me that his eternal Brother’s love for each individual human being is the whole of who Jesus is and who He always has been, for the past six thousand years. An obsessive love for each human being individually is Jesus’s sole salient characteristic. And unlike the rest of us, He has not had many incarnations. Jesus has not incarnated as a human being since that princeling lifetime long ago. When He then died in what Thomas guesses was His early twenties, He had already loved so perfectly and grown spiritually so much as a result that He was already a perfected Being, and He ascended directly to the Godhead level. And because He perfectly loved each individual human being who was still struggling to get by on earth, and for whom becoming perfected was not nearly so easy and so automatic as it had been for Him, He then spent the next four thousand earth-years petitioning the Godhead to allow Him to teach the rest of humankind how to achieve what He had achieved so easily. So then eventually Jesus was given the right to take an unprecedented incarnation from out of the Godhead in order to teach us all how to achieve the level of spiritual development that He had long ago achieved for Himself.

“For God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but will have eternal life” (JN 3:16). That passage from John is so completely misunderstood today! Instead of God, it was Jesus who had pleaded with the Godhead for millennia, and who at length had won the unprecedented right to be born on earth from out of the Godhead as the ultimate Teacher to show all of us how we, too, can attain our own spiritual perfection. And my Thomas so loved his brother that he had waited for Jesus in the astral, without himself progressing, for all of those four thousand years. 

What I never understood for that whole summer long, until eventually my Thomas explained it to me, was why he would sometimes unexpectedly call Jesus “Brat” and chase and bully Him, and even on occasion sort of beat Him up. Thomas performs the one essential service for Jesus that at this point no one else can do. Thomas calls it “balance.” The churches say that Jesus is “fully God and fully Man,” and that He is! But Jesus can maintain His human status now only with considerable effort, and only because there still is one being in all the realities that in Jesus’s Own mind still “outranks” Him. My Thomas is Jesus’s older brother from that ancient lifetime, right? And Thomas seems to be the only being in all the realities with any human connection that Jesus still completely trusts. I had never really thought about this, but nearly every human being that Jesus ever has loved and trusted has left Him and has ascended. His Apostles and all the Saints. And so many clergymen have lied about Him and about His teachings, injecting fear into what Jesus teaches in order to monetarily enrich themselves on earth. I think that if it were solely up to Jesus, He might like to have continued to blog with us, but my Thomas is a very private being and he is essential to Jesus’s maintaining His human balance. So when last fall Thomas wanted to stop including you and me in their meetings in the astral, at least for a while, Jesus assented to Thomas’s wish.

This brings up a thought from out of my childhood that feels especially insightful now. A wise old man long ago told me that, “My child, there are two kinds of people, and only two. One kind looks at you and says, ‘Here I am!’ The other kind looks at you and says, ‘There you are!’” And of course we all know people who, no matter what the topic at hand might be, can manage to turn that topic into themselves within two sentences. And then there is Jesus. Jesus loves you more than anyone else has ever loved you. Guaranteed. Jesus is the most extreme “There you are!” sort of Guy there ever was. He looks you in the eyes and wants to hear all about you and know you completely, and in that moment nothing else matters to Him. And this, even now, when His personal energy is even above the Godhead level. Jesus is literally God at this point. He is the ultimate megastar, the first or second most popular name on earth, but even now He only wants to talk about you, and never about Himself. The last time I saw Jesus was in the early fall. Thomas was off somewhere, and Jesus called to me, “Little One! Little One! Come here and tell me about your day.” And He switched on whatever it is that He can switch on to make me aware and able to remember this experience. I realized then that my astral body was wearing an astral robe and sitting on a little knoll about thirty feet away from where He was. I do that whenever I am there as just Thomas’s tagalong, I sit a distance away to give them privacy. So I stood and went and sat down beside Jesus. He was looking softly into my eyes and smiling at me. He didn’t take my hand, because the difference in our energies is such that unless He is careful to keep His energy tamped down, His touch can give me an uncomfortable buzz. I cannot remember now what I said about whatever day that had been, but it was just a bunch of stupid stuff. Still, Jesus listened closely, He asked me interested questions, He made wise remarks about the people, and He even chuckled. He is more interested in my life than I am interested in my life.   

So if it were up to Jesus, His website would be more about us than it is about Him. He has even experimented with having me do a question-and-answer thing, a channeling-Jesus sort of thing, so He might hold something like “Office Hours with Jesus” for the entire world of individual people on His website. And it actually worked, but it creeped me out. I am not a medium! Can you imagine if I told the world that now suddenly I can channel Jesus? So we are still playing with designs and ideas there. But as much as He might not be interested in Jesus, you and I are interested in Jesus! And this world is such an unbelievable mess, and apparently He is returning to it now. What is He going to do to try to help the world? What can He do, that might make any difference? Just Who really is Jesus today?

Jesus loves me! He will stay
Close beside me all the way.
He’s prepared a home for me,
And some day His face I’ll see.
Yes, Jesus loves me! Yes, Jesus loves me!
Yes, Jesus loves me! The Bible tells me so.
– Anna B. Warner (1827-1915), from “Jesus Loves Me” (1862)
(Popular Children’s Hymn, first Composed as a Poem for a Dying Child)

Which is Real?

Posted on by Roberta Grimes

He can turn the tides and calm the angry sea!
He alone decides who writes a symphony.
He lights every star that makes the darkness bright!
He keeps watch all through each long and lonely night.

 He still finds the time to hear a child’s first prayer.
Saint or sinner calls and always finds Him there.
And though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Jack Richards (1925-2011) & Richard Mullan from “He,” (1954)

I get afterlife questions constantly. A common one is, “What can we ever find to do in the afterlife? It must be so boring, with nothing to do.” When in fact, the complete opposite is true! There is a whole endless circus in the afterlife of time-travel and space-travel and toys and research and playtime, and spending endless non-time with loved ones and actually meeting and even talking with Jesus, and with Elvis, and also attending and yourself even performing in concerts and shows, and learning to play the piano with Mozart, and skating and swimming and boating and snowboarding and generally having such infinite fun that it is a very good thing that our afterlife bodies never need to sleep! And then after I finish gushing over a great long list of endless afterlife delights, and I remark that it’s a good thing indeed that objective time does not exist in the afterlife, because if it did, it might take you a thousand years at least just to exhaust all these and so many other wonderful afterlife delights, one of the questions that I sometimes will get from some diehard cynic or other is this: “Well then. So, which of these realities is real? Because they can’t both be real. Both here and there. So, which is it?” Which one is real?

Scientists believe that the universe is 13.7 billion years old, with an uncertainty factor of only 200 million years, either way. But, who knows? This universe could just as easily have been created as an initial tiny habitat for primitive humankind only two hundred thousand years ago, and made to grow gradually larger and more complicated and seemingly older only after the fact, as that became necessary, as we human beings became steadily ever more sophisticated, and therefore more curious, so we never would find an edge. In fact, ninety percent of all the animal species on earth appeared at about the same time that the first humans did, only 200,000 earth-years ago. There were thereafter at least two near-extinction events for humankind, one caused by a severely adverse climate event around 150,000 earth-years ago, during the Marine Isotope Stage 6 period, so named because it was a specific type of ice age, when not only did the polar caps and glaciers around the world expand, but all the deserts did as well, since the atmosphere had so much moisture sucked out of it by the ice. And the area of the world most affected by this extreme ice age and extreme dry period combined was southern Africa, where the entire world population of human beings then still lived. It has been estimated that at the anatomically modern human population’s lowest point, there were probably fewer than 1000 people alive on this entire planet.

The second human near-extinction event was only about 74,000 earth-years ago. It followed the super-eruption of a Sumatran volcano called Toba that ejected roughly ten thousand times more ash and gas into the atmosphere than did the Mount Saint Helens eruption in 1980, dimming the sun globally for at least five years, killing off most of the vegetation worldwide, and threatening all human life on earth. It has been estimated that again the earth’s whole anatomically modern human population, still confined to the southern part of Africa, was reduced to between 1000 and 5000 people.

But this second calamity was actually a fortuitous event. Toba’s eruption deposited sufficient ash along the eastern edge of northern Africa and the Nile valley that a green corridor was created all along that edge, where there only had ever been impassable desert. And over the next sixty-odd thousand earth-years, wave after wave of human travelers wandered out of Africa and began to populate the rest of the world. The glaciers of the most recent ice age still covered most of Europe, so it wasn’t until about ten thousand years ago that anatomically modern people finally made it into western Europe. But it was Toba’s last eruption that made humankind’s African exodus possible. And it was only then that sufficient anatomically modern people began to live in enough different places on earth that the odds began to favor our species’s long-term survival.

When we realize how amazingly brief our history as a species actually is – only two hundred thousand years! – and how recently human beings made it out of Africa, then the possibility of the world as a human habitat deliberately created for spiritual learning begins to make more sense. Materialist scientists love to talk in terms of our universe’s history as billions of years in length, and our human evolutionary history as five million years long, but we know enough now to realize that such numbers are actually meaningless to us. We understand that within Consciousness there is neither time nor distance, so the genuine God, as the extreme Alpha of Consciousness, could easily have created us in the Now of two hundred thousand earth-years ago, and simultaneously built for us a backstory of billions of years, and we would believe it all without question. In truth, we would be none the wiser.

I am sorry to break this news to you so bluntly, but in fact there are an amazing number of little “tells” which suggest that we are probably living in precisely that 200,000-year-old God-created universe, and believing in a simultaneously God-created backstory. I will never forget my first “OMG!” moment, which happened even long before I first realized that nothing else but Consciousness exists. It was almost forty years ago now, back when I still was reading everything I could get my hands on in the field of afterlife evidence, and also reading about scientific anomalies. I think this fellow called his book something about “God signs,” and it was full of various kinds of weird phenomena. For example:

  • Creating Stars. The forty-odd-year-old moment that first got my attention was a story of someone who had pointed his telescope at an area of the sky that was then entirely devoid of stars. He first made certain of that fact. It was entirely blank! Then he left his telescope in place, and one year later to the day he returned and looked through it again. And now that same place in the universe teemed with billions of galaxies. As I recall his explanation, this was then a well known, if creepy phenomenon among astronomers. And so many people were testing it for themselves that astronomers expected that soon there would be no place left in the visible cosmos that was not well-populated with galaxies.
  • Punctuated Equilibrium. Darwin’s original nineteenth-century theory of many gradual, constant, minute changes that happen continuously and constitute evolution looks so silly now as to beggar belief, because in fact that is not the way that evolution happens. Instead, once a species appears, it will go through long periods of stasis before a new, related species appears and then goes through another very long period of little or no change at all. This “punctuated equilibrium” is frankly what you would expect to see if God were creating all these creatures anew, modifying them, and just sticking them into place in series. It is no wonder that materialist scientists don’t spend a whole lot of time talking about the details of Darwinian evolution.
  • Rhinoceroses. There are a few strains of animals – and rhinoceroses are one of them – which simply appear in the fossil record, and don’t have any discernible ancestors which connect them back to a very primitive first ancestral creature. It is almost as if God just had an idea for a funny animal one day, and went with it. And when we realize that nearly all the modern species of animals appeared at the same time, 200,000 years ago, we cannot help but wonder whether with some of these more peculiar kinds of animals, the existence of both punctuated equilibrium and especially odd creatures like rhinoceroses that appear out of nowhere might be evidence that something like that might actually have happened. They all seem to be perhaps evidence of a hurried kind of “good enough” wish to fudge things on the part of the Divine.
  • The Big Bang. Scientists tell us that the universe began in a Big Bang a very long time ago. But of course, something cannot really have come from nothing, or that is the biggest “tell” of all! So the “Big Bang” doesn’t really explain anything, does it? You can then ask, “What was before that?” and then “What was before that?” an infinite number of times, no matter how long ago or how recently materialist scientists want to tell us that the creation of the universe first happened. Occasional efforts have been made to explain what existed before the Big Bang, including perhaps prior universes which might have ended in a Big Crunch before they expanded outward again. But the fact is that since matter is almost entirely empty space, this entire universe is as insubstantial as a thought, in any event.
  • Daily Miracles. Had I realized that I soon would be writing this post, I would have captured more of these, but you know what I mean. We come across unlikely-seeming happy stories in our news feeds and in our lives all the time! And on the world stage, from the hair’s-breadth survival of those first human beings through their early repeated near-extinction events, right through the had-to-happen success of the Normandy invasion in the Second World War, to the remarkable fact that in the nearly eighty years since Nagasaki was leveled, no country has been allowed to explode an atomic bomb of any size in anger, we all have witnessed so many miracles that by now we simply take them for granted. But we never should take any of them for granted. God is intensively and minutely active in this world right now, and from moment to moment.

All right. So, after I hope I have at least somewhat convinced you that the afterlife reality must be more substantial than this clearly shaky and artificial-seeming material reality quite obviously is, let’s cross over and take a look at that other side, which from here we call the afterlife. The reality that we live in now is scientifically proven to be 99.9999999% empty space, for heaven’s sake! And there are a lot of little tells which suggest that this reality may well have been thrown together to become our habitat only a mere two hundred thousand earth-years ago. Perhaps it began as one planet, or even as a single flat plain only very recently, and then it was built outward from there as the human creatures in this little playpen meant for spiritual education took to exploring it, so they never would find an edge. Surely the whole gigantic astral plane, with its multiple solid-seeming levels which include the afterlife as a tiny part must be a whole lot more substantial than this is!  

Well, actually, not so much. The afterlife exists in the same physical location that we do, so when we die, we simply tune our minds to a higher vibration, very much as you might tune your TV to a higher-numbered channel, and there we pick up a whole new solid-seeming reality precisely in the same place where we are now. Dying is just as easy as that. But what is really amazing and wonderful about the astral plane which is our eternal home is that when we are there, and especially for the more spiritually advanced of us, our minds are much more powerful than our minds are when we are on earth. Consider these examples, gleaned from abundant afterlife communications:

  • You can have whatever you miss from your life here just ended. Someone who has recently died might think of a book, a trinket of jewelry, a treasured vase from a former earth-home, or whatever else you might miss, and just turn around, and there it is. I think the reason for this facility is so we will get past caring about material things. But for whatever reason it happens, it is flat-out astonishing.
  • Building is by mind. It is possible to stick-build people’s post-death homes, but why bother? When people in the afterlife or in the astral plane want to build a house, they will draw the plans for it, and then they call by mind for sixth-level beings to come and think it into existence. And a few of them, perhaps three or four, will appear and gravely study the plans, and study the place where the building is going to be. And then they will put their minds together, literally, and the building will shimmer into and out of existence briefly before there it stands, brand-new and as solid as can be!
  • Travel is by mind. People in the astral plane can travel from here to the edge of the universe in a literal heartbeat of non-time, simply by thinking the wish to be there. We cannot go higher in vibration than the level of the astral to which our level of spiritual development has suited us, but we can readily go lower. And many people there are inveterate travelers, especially soon after they have first returned home.

So then, which reality is real. Is it here, or is it the afterlife and the astral? Or it might make better sense to ask, which reality is more real? I think we would have to rate the answer to that question to be a toss-up. The material-seeming reality that we inhabit now is just what amounts to the lowest vibrational level of the astral reality, and these realities are so closely connected that it is impossible to separate them. Both of them are composed of and governed by and existing within the same Consciousness which is all that exists, of which each of our minds is a part, and which at its highest vibration is God . They are in fact both part of the same reality, just in two different expressions to make for our more efficient earthly spieitual learning. And Jesus told us all of this, we realize now. But then, didn’t Jesus tell us everything? The problem was that so often we didn’t know enough to have a way to understand what He was telling us at the time. Long ago our sweet Brother said, “Do not be afraid, little flock, because your Father has chosen to give you the kingdom! Sell your possessions and give to the poor; make yourselves money belts that do not wear out, for yours is an inexhaustible treasure in heaven, where no thief comes near nor does a moth destroy” (LK 12:32-33).

He can touch a tree and turn the leaves to gold!
He knows every lie that you and I have told.
And though it makes Him sad to see the way we live,
He’ll always say, “I forgive.”
– Jack Richards (1925-2011) & Richard Mullan from “He,” (1954)

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