Posted by Roberta Grimes • December 03, 2022 • 28 Comments
Jesus
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?
– Andrew Lloyd-Webber & Timothy Miles Bindon Rice, from “I Don’t Know How to Love Him” (1971)
To read a debate about whether Jesus is God or man, and to see learned people insisting that He has to be only one or the other makes your eyes cross. To see our beloved Father Richard Rohr trying to imagine a future for Christianity, which I love him for attempting to do even though I think he knows the religion has no future makes me sad for him. I grew up in a church in which we were taught that Jesus on earth was “fully God and fully Man,” and that still makes sense to me even now that, amazingly, Jesus has spent the past two thousand years healing all the millions of people damaged by Christianity, and He has thereby grown even vastly more spiritually elevated than He was when He was Jesus on earth, and I have actually met Jesus. I know Him personally. In fact, I don’t know how else you would describe the amazing Being that Jesus has become! His extraordinarily silken and immensely powerful personal energy, and His selflessness and grace are confounding. He is literally God now. That is beyond doubt. And yet, two thousand years past His final incarnation Jesus chooses to present in the astral body of a Man who looks amazingly young and mild. He looks Mediterranean, less than six feet tall, with curly hair and olive skin. He is nearly always barely smiling, as if He has thought of some lovely secret. And when He looks at you, the love in His eyes is indescribable. Not even your own mother ever has loved you the way that Jesus loves you. Fully God and fully Man. My childhood minister, dear Steven Turrell of blessed memory, was so completely right! But Jesus at the same time is so self-effacing that if it were not for the Lord’s amazing personal energy, you wouldn’t even much notice Him now. And that seems to be what He prefers.
Achieving the Godhead level has been easy for Jesus. The Godhead level of our astral reality is at a very high consciousness vibration, and Thomas tells me that Jesus has even surpassed that at this point in His personal spiritual development. But He always has loved people so much, just naturally and confoundingly, in the same way that some of us especially love puppies. Every human being deeply touches His heart, while my Thomas says that He himself mainly sees people’s flaws. Thomas has come to think that perhaps Jesus sees people’s flaws as simply adorable, in the way that some folks might see a puppy’s clumsiness as cute, perhaps; but for whatever reason, Jesus has always been obsessed with loving people. So over thousands of years, my Thomas has watched the being who six thousand years ago was his own little brother continue to grow spiritually from there to become Jesus the Christ, the King of Kings, and elevated spiritually far above all the rest of humankind. For my whole life on earth Thomas has told me no part of this story. But now apparently Jesus wants it to be known, so now Thomas is answering my questions freely and letting me share his answers with you. This is all still new to me, and it feels illicit, but apparently we will be putting much of this information on Jesus’s website. (Good grief.)
This feels like a kind of Catch-22. And in a minute you will see why I call it that. My whole business career has been spent as an attorney and general advisor to closely-held and primarily family-owned businesses. So naturally I have been thinking about what I might advise Jesus to do in this situation, if He ever were to ask for my advice. Of course, I never would offer Him advice unsolicited. But it seems to me that He could do a lower-key and positive version of a Second Coming thing. Why not? He has sufficient power over matter to demonstrate that He is in fact Jesus the Risen Christ, and not just some imposter; and perhaps He could be based at the Vatican for His temporal protection. He might then teach the world from there. He doesn’t have to have just some nobody like me create a website so He can gradually share His teachings with the world. He doesn’t have to start all over again from the beginning!
So Thomas very briefly indulged my fantasy. Sixth-level beings are very tall and thin when they appear on earth, and they glow. Well, Jesus could create a church-Jesus astral body maybe ten feet tall and glowing. Thomas reminded me that Mikey Morgan once appeared at one of our nightly meetings in an astral body of a snowboarding kid, and he randomly kept switching into a ball of light and then back into a kid again. I said, “Great! Jesus can do that, too!” Thomas tried last Halloween to get Jesus to touch a pumpkin on earth and blow it up just for the fun of it, which suggestion had horrified Jesus. Thomas told me now that blowing up something at the Vatican by touching it with one finger would be a way for Jesus to convince the Pope that He really is Jesus. I said, “Yup! Good plan.” And I also thought that Jesus could materialize something for the Pope, because I bet that He could do that, too. Something holy-looking. Something in gold, perhaps? The Pope would love that!
So then Thomas gave me a frank look. He said, “You really don’t know Jesus at all, do you?”
“What?”
“Ten-foot-tall church-Jesus? Something in gold? The Vatican?”
He has to be safe…”
“Putting Jesus in the Vatican would be like putting matter together with anti-matter,” Thomas said, and he actually chuckled to himself. I hate it when he gets smug like that. It means he sees a gotcha in this for me somewhere.
“I do know Jesus! Stop toying with me!”
He said, “My confused little friend, our Brother Jesus is not a Christian. He died on earth three hundred years before the religion was even born, and Christianity teaches nothing that Jesus taught. And He certainly isn’t a Christian now. Not after He has had to love back into health so many hundreds of millions of damaged people! Damaged by the religion! What makes you think He would go anywhere near the Vatican? What makes you think He wants to look like church-Jesus for the Pope? He does it for Christians as they are coming home because He loves them and it makes them happy. But, for the Pope?”
He was right, of course. What was I thinking?
“I know you would love to find a way to get out of creating His website because you feel so unworthy of doing it. And of course you are not worthy! There is no one on earth who is worthy now of doing anything for Jesus. But, He cannot do it. And I cannot do it. I have been preparing you for your whole life to do this for Him. You worry that whatever you do will disappoint Him. But it will not disappoint Him. It will delight Him.” Then Thomas added – and here is what I see as the Catch-22 of this situation. “He wants you to see Him as just a man. I think He even tries to see Himself that way. Our Brother has the power to move on the hearts of all the world if He chooses to do that. He could transform the world in a heartbeat of time. But He wants to begin His ministry again from the beginning, and build it from there moving heart by heart, and erasing the false religion in the process. And who are we to tell Him that is the wrong thing to do?”
My God. If Jesus chose to do it, He could end every problem on earth in an instant. Just transform every heart, and then maybe touch The Empire State Building and blow it up to further make His point. Then He might say, “Any questions? Didn’t think so. Now open your Gospels and there are your lessons. Start learning.”
I sighed. I knew what this was going to mean. “So, no Second Coming. And I’ll have to take another lifetime. Maybe two.”
Thomas also sighed. He said, “We both will.”
This is the whole thing about being Jesus. I have been thinking about it ever since Thomas and I had this conversation. Jesus really is God! He has the power to fix everything on earth in an instant, if He chooses to do that. But if He does choose to do that, then He destroys the value of the earth as a spiritual school, so therefore He never can do that. What He can do is what He first set out to do two thousand years ago. He can again establish His movement to recalibrate humankind toward positive spiritual growth. He first came to earth to study us and figure out how we can best grow spiritually.
And His teachings based on what He learned back then still work amazingly well! I know how well they work, because a dozen years ago I personally tried them, and I was internally transformed within weeks. And that transformation has been permanent. It forms a bright line in my life: I cannot even remember now what I was like before. So if Jesus wanted to do it, He could at once produce a similar transformation in every person on earth! But, then what? Bringing the kingdom of God on earth will be a slow process when we do it in His planned and deliberate way, and intentionally so, since once it is completed, the earth will then become useless as a spiritual school. Except for the fact that, of course, in a reality without time there will then be eons laid down into which people can continue to incarnate for their personal spiritual growth. Jesus had of course thought this all through long before.
But the thing that really astonishes me as I read again the debate linked at the start of this article is that both of the worthies taking part in it seem to be clueless about the primary role of consciousness. That really does confound me, because in fact the primacy of consciousness is central to everything! Since all that exists is consciousness, and since you and I are inextricably part of the one Consciousness that continuously manifests reality, in fact, each one of us is fully God and fully man! Just think it through. Of course, you know that insight is profoundly right, and Jesus is the eternally-living proof. People so desperately want Jesus to be Magic-Man! The Son of God! And NOT precisely one of us. Because then that lets us off the hook, don’t you see? But Jesus’s life story is of a normal man who simply has always loved people more than most of us love people. So over the centuries, and then over the millennia, Jesus has simply loved people so much that He has raised His personal spiritual vibration even above the entire Godhead’s spiritual vibration. So now Jesus is the exemplar for us all. What He has done, so can we do, too!
And Jesus did not only die for us. Dying for us once? That would have been so easy! No, for the past six thousand years, Jesus the eternally living Christ, our sweet and perfectly beloved Brother has been living for us, healing hundreds of millions of damaged Christians and rearing all those aborted children. And now, it is His full intention to teach every last eternal one of us to achieve the same spiritual level that He Himself has achieved. It doesn’t matter to Him a fig how we might see Him. He loves each one of us infinitely, and until the very end of non-time. He sees Himself forever as our Teacher. And that little seventeen-hundred-year interruption in our spiritual lessons that was Christianity has been to Him little more than just a single summer’s day gone by.
Dearest Roberta,
Having heard that millions of souls wish to have their next incarnation on earth because Earth is such a difficult school that they could work off much Karma there. So I wonder, how does our Brother Jesus relate to these souls? Or does every solar system have an equivalent to Jesus?
Yours,
Cookie
Oh my dear beloved Cookie, and so the rumor goes! They say that the earth is the toughest school in this entire universe. When you stroll into that Star Wars Cantina, and you elbow your way toward the bar, and you say, “I’m from Earth,” they all will politely step aside. At least, that is what they say. And as to where our dear Brother Jesus ranks in all of this, it is my understanding that Jesus ranks above all the Beings in all the realities that exist, save only the ultimate High God. And my Thomas confirms that for me, although he is fastidious enough to add that no one really knows very much about what goes on above the Godhead level of any reality. The seventh level of each reality is its Godhead level which creates that reality, and above that is a great unknown… and far above all of it is the ultimate High God of all.
Roberta I’m confused Your opened with Mother Teresa
Do Good Anyway You talked about your mom You
talked about NoHell but if you can’t forgive yourself
you go down to a place that sure sou
nds like Hell-awful And it’s my fault for everything
It’s bleak Roberta
Jesus is man or God very plausible
It hurts
Icome down the chute and comense to hurt myself
and others Bummer
Hi Erica,
We are suppose to screw up. That is how we learn.
I took art classes in High School and College. Part of the class was putting our work up in front of everyone so it could be critiqued. The thought of that was uncomfortable.
After a few times it became no big deal. The feedback helped many of us to become better artists.
We are sometimes too afraid of making mistakes when we should be making more of them.
I think you will do great and shouldn’t worry about that place you mentioned. We will always be there for you.
Dear Thomas, thank you so much for helping our precious friend, Erica. I guess it has been so very long since I ever have imagined any negative thought – I always feel so continuously bathed in love, so completely and overwhelmingly immersed in love that it is difficult for me even to imagine fear at this point. But you are there for her, my dear. Thank you!
Oh my dear Erica, it isn’t bleak at all!! Simply learn how to forgive yourself, my dear, and self-forgiveness really is so easy!!
Thomas is hilarious. I couldn’t stop laughing at the thought of Jesus blowing up pumpkins. Sounds like a great script for a new movie. Jesus Part Deux, the Reckoning.
I really like how Jesus looks at our flaws. Many if not most of our flaws are kind of funny if you think about it The things we worry about. The things we think matter. I can’t help but laugh at the times I thought I was so smart only to realize what an idiot I am. A recurring theme it seems.
If you and Thomas come back, I will be willing to make a trip back here just to listen to the conversation.
Thanks again for a great post Roberta. Appreciate you, Thomas and Jesus for all the help.
Oh my dear Thomas, you should have been there! That picture of the two boys taken from the back at the bottom of this post really sums up their relationship, with Jesus as the younger brother. Thomas and Jesus. They are very tight, and they both see Thomas’s role as what he calls “keeping balance” for Jesus. Keeping Him human. Everyone else treats Jesus as you would expect, as JESUS, as an object of worship, even though He refuses to look like church-Jesus. So at Halloween, Thomas took it into his head to tease Jesus about using His power to blow something up on earth, as a prank. Something big, at first. Or finally, at least just a pumpkin on somebody’s porch. What about on our porch? We had four pumpkins. Why not? And Jesus was horrified about demonstrating His power to blow things up! OMG, then what would Thomas want Him to do next? Jesus is the biggest pacifist there is! He had Thomas in stitches laughing at Him, trying to toughen Him up, and of course I wanted no part of any of it. But all of it – that boyish play – all of it is what Jesus wants. He wants to be treated as a normal brother. He doesn’t want to be worshiped.
Well dear Roberta,
Your post here asserts what I believe to be two foundation principles for all of existence:
1. “Since all that exists is consciousness, and since you and I are inextricably part of the one Consciousness that continuously manifests reality, in fact, each one of us is fully God and fully man! Just think it through. Of course, you know that insight is profoundly right, and Jesus is the eternally-living proof. ”
Because everything that exists must be made by God from God’s own being (the Consciousness that God is), each of us (and all else) is a part of God; while that seems implausible for out mortal body, our soul/spirit knows that directly when detached from the body. However, the level of spiritual development (the closeness to the perfection which is God’s personal being) is highly variable. I trust that your assessment of Jesus, as having attained a development close to God, is accurate.
2. ” Jesus really is God! He has the power to fix everything on Earth in an instant, if He chooses to do that. But if He does choose to do that, then He destroys the value of the Earth as a spiritual school, so therefore He never can do that. ”
Converting the material existence for life on Earth to resemble the bliss of Heaven would defeat the reason for having a material, mortal, life experience with all of its physical, mental, and emotional pains– because each pain provides the opportuty for spiritual growth. In our Heavenly abode, there is no pain, only the blissful experience of existing in the light and love from God. So, the material world was created to provide opportunities for spiritual growth.
There is another benefit to our interludes in the harsheness of the material world life. By existing only in the bliss of Heaven, we could never realize how wonderful that existence there is. By having our harsh mortal lives, we can then appreciate the bliss of Heaven and enjoy it, instead of taking it for granted.
I would add following point 2. that while Jesus and God could simply directly tell us tangibly in our mortal existence what is required at each and every trial, such direction would interfere with free will, and would deny the opportunity for true spiritual growth.
Consulting our God given conscience, and drawing inspiration from what Jesus told us, such as practicing the Golden Rule and having faith that our Creator loves us, provide the bases for living a productive life– and for justifying hope that the trials of mortal life are valuable despite their pain.
Hi Jack,
I’ve been thinking about this for some time. I understand why we come here and the reason for the pain/negativity we endure.
Where we can make great strides from experiencing this harsh world.
Could too much pain/negativity lead to hurting our spiritual growth?
Maybe less pain could lead to smaller but steady bursts of growth.
One where all of us are growing instead of some of us possibly going backwards and needing help when we return.
I can’t help but think Jesus would be enjoying his heavenly experience more if this was working the way we had hoped. Instead, he is helping many of us as we come back from this material world. So could this experience be too much in a short time?
Dear Thomas,
Kinda funny what you observed:
” Could too much pain/negativity lead to hurting our spiritual growth?
Maybe less pain could lead to smaller but steady bursts of growth. One where all of us are growing instead of some of us possibly going backwards and needing help when we return. ”
When I was the director of a large Army R&D organization, I had an assistant who was more like a brother than any subordinate.
Sometimes something would go wrong at work, or more importantly in the world at large. The killing fields of Cambodia. Rawandan genocide. Get reminded of the holocaust… And I would lament to him for God to hear, “I know that we need to see evil to realize that there is the Good, and that is our mission goal– but do we need torture, carnage, the slaughter of millions when just one or two injustices are sufficient for the contrast that makes the Good knowable? Why so much hurt?
Never heard an answer, but I guess that that’s the outcome for journeyman souls gifted with free will. And too, the pains of life are only a blip in our eternal Heavenly journey with God.
Oh my dear Thomas, how good it is of you to want Jesus to enjoy His afterlife as well! Actually, that thought never had occurred to me. What He really seems to want to do is serve people, now that you bring it up. When most of us get to the afterlife, it’s playtime! When He first was resurrected, He could have made a beeline for the upper levels. Instead, He stayed on the entry level and made ready to welcome His followers home. But then soon He was welcoming those the Romans were damaging so He set up His healing gardens. And then came the Inquisitions. And the Crusades. He simply thrives on being useful to people. Aborted children. Thomas told me that when they took a little tourist jaunt above the Godhead level, it was glorious but Jesus was immediately bored because there was no one there who needed Him.
Oh my dear friend Jack, I’m so glad this all feels right to you as well! It does so much astonish me that the religion sees the value to us of Jesus’s life to have ended with His resurrection. It seems to make of Him just an object of worship. Why has it never occurred to anyone in the religion even to wonder what He might have been doing since then, nor to wonder what further lessons we might have to learn from Him?
Oh Thomas Belknap,
Thank you so much! This is Erica.
I was going to leave Roberta a note that I was going to take break. I thought I sounded crazy but when you said you
would be there for me and only saw the good in me,
I wanted to thank you.
Oh my dear Erica, of course everyone sees the good in you! Please stop being so hard on yourself, my sweet friend!
You don’t sound crazy Erica and we will miss you if you do decide to take a break.
I can’t help but laugh at the way some people look at me when I tell them about some of the things we discuss.
It’s fascinating to me how powerful our thoughts really are. They can change our realities. I’m finding changing the way I think is like learning a new skill. It takes me repetition and time. All of the sudden that change happens and you’re not even aware of it.
Oh yes, my dear Thomas, especially for those of us coming out of Christianity – or indeed coming out of any religion – changing our thoughts is very much like learning to play the piano or to ski, for example. It feels impossible in the beginning, but then it kind of catches on, it starts to work, and then it actually does work. It was so hard for me in the beginning! I was so in love with Christianity that the only thing that could break that for me really was falling more in love with Jesus, and then finding a need to defend Him from the religion. The whole thing has been pretty traumatic in my case!
Dear Thomas,
Kinda funny what you observed:
” Could too much pain/negativity lead to hurting our spiritual growth?
Maybe less pain could lead to smaller but steady bursts of growth. One where all of us are growing instead of some of us possibly going backwards and needing help when we return. ”
When I was the director of a large Army R&D organization, I had an assistant who was more like a brother than any subordinate.
Sometimes something would go wrong at work, or more importantly in the world at large. The killing fields of Cambodia. Rawandan genocide. Get reminded of the holocaust… And I would lament to him for God to hear, “I know that we need to see evil to realize that there is the Good, and that is our mission goal– but do we need torture, carnage, the slaughter of millions when just one or two injustices are sufficient for the contrast that makes the Good knowable? Why so much hurt?
Never heard an answer, but I guess that that’s the outcome for journeyman souls gifted with free will. And too, the pains of life are only a blip in our eternal Heavenly journey with God.
Oh my dear Jack, I do agree with you! I could take just one little bit of horror, thank you very much, as contrast enough. I don’t think that we need any more horror than that!
Thank you again Thomas.
l am staying
You talked about the power of thoughts.
Yesterday I was filled with burst of joy.
I was in HEB pouring it out.
No one minded and some who
recognized my joy gladly took some
home with them.
I’m beginning to notice what persons need.
This morning I emailed my sister,
leaving all this out, She says Roberta stuff
no.She’s says she is afraid of this. stuff.
I respect her
The power of thoughts—it’s a responsibility.
Oh my dear Erica, how can your sister be afraid of happiness and light? Now, that really does perplex me!
Dearest Roberta,
I loved this blog, as I loved last weeks blog.
Inspiring & clarifying stuff, my dear. If last week raised the topic of fear, this week provides its antidote: Love.
Jesus loves each of us more than our own mothers? Woah! This is an amazingly wonderful kind of love. And knowing that the reality behind the abject mire of the human world is Love Consciousness, means this truth is awe inspiring and security giving. Jesus really is God, as you say; all we need to do is trust in Jesus, in God, and we will be alright in the end. There – right there – is the end of fear.
In addition, I gather incarnation into this earth-school gives us strong, lasting, growth lessons. However I don’t see this as, say, appreciating love where we would otherwise have taken it for granted. No. I tend to see the result of earth incarnation as feeling the DEPTH of what we already know in our celestial home. For instance, having experienced love amid desperation and adversity on earth, gives our love extra depth and dimension, as it were. Without incarnation our grasp of love could be compared to a square, having length and breadth. Hence know a square as having area. After earth life we might discover that love has become a cube having length, breadth and height. Thence we have understood volume for the first time. Things ‘fill out’. They become more real by spending time on earth.
Roberta, It must be a tremendous feeling to see one’s own growth after returning from an earth life; finally we can understand what all the terrestrial strife, stress and hardship was for. At last we will see what all the palaver was about!
🙏🏼❣️🌎
Oh my dear Efrem, you make a good point! Better understanding love really is a fascinating thing to watch as an observer! Since Thomas has very recently allowed me to even know about his relationship with Jesus, which really is stunning to me – to be frank, I have had trouble actually believing in it – I have begun to see it as a kind of case study in love. What love is, perhaps, and how it can best be maintained. Jesus is God. He IS love. He loves people so much, and all He gets is worship from all the people around Him – and yet He wants to remain human, so it is my Thomas alone who is willing to keep Him in balance. All summer (your winter) I have watched Thomas doing that. He has teased Jesus, bullied and belittled Him, tried to get Him to use His power to blow things up on earth, roughhoused with Him, and showed Him abundant love but not the least worship. Exactly what Jesus wants from Thomas. Fascinating.
Roberta, this is beyond fascinating to me:
It is as if Thomas is setting a kind of template for the rest of us; laying down the tracks of love, for humans to see Jesus as both human and Divine. Now completely relatable, Our Jesus is much, much closer and not in need of stiff or stylized religion-based worship.
We humans may have a ‘love reset’. There is no longer a need to adhere to formal, fear based religious conditionings. 🌅🎉❣️
My dear Efrem, what is astonishing to me is that all of this has always been there, right in the Gospel teachings! Jesus taught us as a fully modern man, and then Paul came along and the Romans built their religion on His letters. It truly was Paulianity, indeed.
Dear Roberta,
It was a revelation to read in your post that Jesus CONTINUES to grow spiritually. That is an amazing and also comforting thought; for myself, it illustrates there is no end goal to spiritual growth. One practice that has helped me to step out of my judgmental, analytical mind and to connect to the “consciousness” that I am, is through the teachings of Eckhart Tolle. Simply put, live as much of your daily life free of the incessant “talk in the head”. By silencing the thinking mind while doing your daily activities, you connect with a spacious dimension inside or, as Eckhart states, “the Kingdom of Heaven within you”. Incorporating presence throughout my busy day has allowed me to glimpse what Jesus meant when he said he has “overcome the world”. Only when I quieted my mind did I readily see in myself the judgmental human mind that always “thinks” it accurately perceives. I’ve discovered in myself how this is an illusion and thus can overlook what I used to perceive as intolerable people: “They know not what they do”. Are you familiar with Eckhart Tolle’s teachings?
Thank you for your wonderful post. I love reading your first hand accounts of meeting Jesus.
Joanna
Yes, my dear Joanne, I have read Eckhart Tolle, but long ago. And I must confess that meeting Jesus personally last spring really upended many things for me – I have had to start over again in a lot of my understandings, almost from the beginning. As you say, discovering that He has been living and growing for the past two thousand years certainly was a revelation! And now He chooses to look like a young Mediterranean lad? My spirit guide actually is Jesus’s older brother from a long-ago lifetime, and they still live that relationship? Although they haven’t allowed me to remember most of our meetings, I have met with them fairly often during this past summer – or rather, I should say that Jesus has informally joined my meetings with my spirit guide, mostly so as I create His website I will better understand who He is. And that is probably a good precaution. I was so overawed by Him at first, but in truth Jesus is the sweetest and the gentlest, the most unassuming person that you can imagine. His personal energy is very strong, but He could not possibly be nicer!
I have mixed feelings about Earth’s reputation for being
so rough. I wish we didn’t need to suffer so much…I
think Earth is so beautiful, I love the birds and trees and
animals and”amber waves of grain.” Everything was supplied for us. It hurts to have it depleted so much.
Why did anyone get the idea that killing the bison, the Native Americans, and cut down the Buffalo grass.
Free Will is a mixed bag.When the Silver Cord is severed, poof, free will is no more— on the wings of a snow while
dove…Why Celine Dion? I see no merit in suffering. I hate it.
ASchool? Look! It’s so perfect, well was We hurt the Earth.
That is a huge sin.
My duty is toget all the J.esus in me as I can. 2t2
Next HEB!