Roberta Grimes

We Create Our Own Suffering

Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 23, 2023 • 23 Comments
Book News, Jesus, Understanding Reality

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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