Posted by Roberta Grimes • May 25, 2019 • 42 Comments
Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
There are more than forty thousand versions of Christianity worldwide. Many are the size of a single building, but a few are gigantic: the Catholic Church has 1.2 billion members, and the United Methodist Church alone has more than twelve million members worldwide. Most of the differences among denominations are minor, but they are enough to convince many devout Christians that hell yawns before many other devout Christians. And this awful fracturing continues apace! A decade ago there were about ten thousand versions of Christianity. Who can guess how many more there will be in another ten years’ time?
This endless splitting-apart of Christians over doctrinal disagreements has a long history. Among the earliest followers of the Lord’s Way, differences of opinion about even core details were peacefully allowed, so long as the Lord’s teachings were followed. But then came the Council of Nicaea in 325, and six more councils over half a millennium, all of which codified the Lord’s Way into just one set of acceptable beliefs. This newly unified Christian religion then abolished all of what it considered to be heretical ideas, and often in horrific ways.
The most recent major rift in what Christians still call the Body of Christ occurred early in 2019. The United Methodist Church is the largest mainline protestant denomination in the United States, and it has fallen into bitter disunion over the issue of homosexuality. At a meeting meant to heal the rift, those who wanted to allow the ordination of homosexual clergy and the legalization of homosexual marriage were voted down, so now a split seems inevitable. It was delegates from developing countries who killed the idea of accepting homosexuals. Jerry Kulah, the head of the 
UMC Africa Initiative, was delighted to say, “I’m happy to go back to old ladies and old men in villages who received the Bible from missionaries and let them know that the Bible hasn’t changed.”
“The Bible hasn’t changed.” Once again, the Old Testament was used to beat down the Lord’s central message that God’s Law is love. To this day, devotion to the Old Testament is allowed to further split the Body of Christ, even though Jesus Himself freed us to throw the Old Testament out the window! When asked what was the greatest commandment, Jesus said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).
So Jesus told us two thousand years ago that He was giving us God’s new revelation that every rule and law in the entire Old Testament must be seen as subservient to God’s Law of Love! Yet Christians still allow this endless splintering, even though as Jesus prepared His followers for His crucifixion He prayed that we would remain forever united in perfect love. He said to God, “The glory which You have given Me I have given to them, that they may be one, just as We are one” (JN 17:22). To His disciples He said, “I give you a new commandment, that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another. By this everyone will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another” (JN 13:34-35). One wonders whether these essential words of Jesus ever have been read by any leader of the now forever disunited United Methodist Church!
The primary reason for this ongoing splintering of Christianity is the fact that some denominations persist in claiming that the whole Christian Bible as it was first assembled almost two thousand years ago is still and must forever remain God’s Inspired Inerrant Word. As a result, Christians will insist to you that their religion must forever condemn homosexuality because the Old Testament says, “If there is a man who lies with a male as those who lie with a woman, both of them have committed a detestable act; they shall surely be put to death” (Lev 20:13). But the Old Testament is full of such outmoded nonsense! And in fact, even the most Bible-obsessed Christians feel free now to ignore many of the worst Old Testament laws. For example, if a girl is taken to wife and found to be not a virgin, “then they shall bring out the girl to the doorway of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her to death” (Deut 22: 21). And if a son is rebellious, “then his father and mother shall seize him, and bring him out to the elders of his city at the gateway of his hometown. They shall say to the elders of his city, ‘This son of ours is stubborn and rebellious, he will not obey us, he is a glutton and a drunkard.’ Then all the men of his city shall stone him to death” (Deut 21:19-21). When you ask Bible-believing Christians why they aren’t stoning their rebellious sons and their daughters found to be not virgin, they will tell you those laws no longer apply. So why then is the law against homosexuality still so strictly enforced? The only difference that I can see is that stoning people to death has for quite a while been a violation of civil laws, while until very recently the shunning of homosexuals was an accepted social norm. And if that is what makes the distinction, Christians, then Jesus is saying to you now, “You hypocrites! Rightly did Isaiah prophesy of you: ‘This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far away from me. But in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines the precepts of men’” (MT 15:7-9).
I don’t know how much clearer Jesus could have made His core revelation from God that religious laws are no longer inviolate. Repeatedly He broke the Sabbath laws, insisting that love is more important. “Have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath
the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here. But if you had known what this means, ‘I desire compassion, and not a sacrifice,’ you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath” (MT 12:5-8). And Jesus despised religious traditions! “Neglecting the commandment of God, you hold to the tradition of men… You are experts at setting aside the commandment of God in order to keep your tradition” (MK 7:8-9).
At the root of this ongoing Christian fracturing is Bible-believing Christians’ refusal to confront one core question.
DOES GOD HAVE THE RIGHT TO GIVE US NEW REVELATION?
For those who insist that God gave us His final word two thousand years ago, it is past time to face this issue frankly. Is there, or is there not a still-living and all-powerful God? And just how clearly must God speak before Christians will listen and obey? Jesus tells us plainly in the Gospels that He came to replace the Old Testament laws with God’s new Law of Love. But then of course the old religious culture still remained strong in people’s minds, so after the Lord’s crucifixion God reinforced His new Law of Love by channeling through the Apostle Paul this extraordinary message that puts God’s Word as plainly as it ever could have been said!
“If I speak in the tongues of men or of angels, but do not have love, I am only a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal. If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing. If I give all I possess to the poor and give over my body to hardship that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
“Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when completeness comes, what is in part disappears. When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known.
“And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love (1Cor 13).
If you doubt this passage was divinely channeled, just look at what comes before it and after it! All churchy blather, then a quick transition: “All are not prophets, are they? All are not teachers, are they? All are not workers of miracles, are they? All do not have gifts of healings, do they? All do not speak with tongues, do they? All do not interpret, do they? But earnestly desire the greater gifts. And I show you a still more excellent way” (1Cor 12:29-31). Then after the miracle of 1Cor 13, Paul goes right back to talking about the same tongues-and-prophesy gibberish that God’s channeled message has just decried: “Pursue love, yet desire earnestly spiritual gifts, but especially that you may prophesy. For one who speaks in a tongue does not speak to men but to God; for no one understands, but in his spirit he speaks mysteries. But one who prophesies speaks to men for edification and exhortation and consolation” (1Cor 14:1-4).
God’s direct Word was shoehorned into human ignorance here, without question!
A God Who cannot give us new revelations as we grow beyond speaking, thinking, and reasoning as spiritual children is not a God worthy of our worship. And the genuine God Who is all that exists revealed to us two thousand years ago through the ministry of Jesus Christ the fundamental truth that love is all! When we needed to have that truth reinforced, God channeled it again through the Apostle Paul.
“He who has ears to hear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches” 
(Rev 2:7, 2:11, 2:17, 2:29, 3:6, 3:13, 3:22). If Christians will not unite in obedience to God’s revealed Law of Love, then Christianity will continue to die this dismal death of forty thousand cuts. Then soon, at last, those who follow Jesus will come together and begin to share God’s Law of Love with all the world!
One has to wonder if the God in the old testament is the same one that is spoken about in the new testament. How can stoning people to death be justified by anyone, let alone a supposedly higher deity? The old testament makes God look like a psychopath, so where did all that come from? All that Jesus says in the new testament boils down to love being the answer to everything. If that is true (and I’m sure it must be), then the old testament couldn’t have been divinely inspired. So who wrote it? We will likely never know.
Thanks Roberta for your insights as I have held these same views but my Christian friends insist we must still hold the old testsment values even though I know Jesus brought a new way of life with love. I have felt conflicted & even guilty because of this and now I know I can be confident living truly what Jesus taught & not have to bow down to old Jewish men’s laws.
It’s a common thing to hear people ltalk about how He was a radical, but they don’t always put two and two together . He was executed for His “radical” views against organized religion, not the Roman empire.
Dear Amanda, you can indeed live confidently in the Lord’s pure truth! The Christian Bible is full of internal contradictions and frank barbarisms. It cannot possibly all be the work of a loving, consistent, or even a sane and rational God! And yet it contains the preserved words of Jesus, Who is an aspect of God and Who brings us the divine truth directly from the Godhead. That we have the Lord’s words still preserved after two translations and two thousand years is a literal miracle! Although of course, the Gospels are not perfect representations of what Jesus said. Those seven church councils in the first thousand years altered them, adding things and subtracting things; but wonderfully, it is possible to ferret out and discard the additions. And what remains is enough to give us the easiest and most effective set of instructions for how to achieve rapid spiritual growth ever devised!
Your Christian friends will come to the point where they, too, will begin to seek the genuine Jesus, dear Amanda. And it is then that your knowledge and your own growth can be of immeasurable help to them!
Dear Lola, one way to see the Christian Bible is as man’s search for God, with just those four books of the Gospels as God’s search for man. It’s obvious to anyone reading both the Old Testament and the New that the God throughout the Bible – everywhere but in the Gospels – is human-made. That God is made in man’s image, with human failings writ large! A God MORE jealous, MORE petty, MORE vengeful even than a human leader is likely to be? What on earth kind of sense does that kind of God make?
What most strikes people who have sought and found the genuine God Who is all that exists is the emphatic fact that God is not in the human image. The genuine God has no human failings! And that genuine God is beckoning to us now, in the Gospels, to shed our own human failings, too, and to become what in fact we already are: perfect aspects of the perfect Godhead. In that love-pure perfection, at last, we are truly One.
As to who wrote the Old Testament, of course it was fallible human beings who were not venal. They were simply seekers. And the Old Testament God was a vast improvement over the other gods of the day! At least the Jews were monotheists. They were perhaps the world’s first true monotheists, at a time when others were worshiping what from our perspective looks to have been whole passels of cranky demons of various descriptions.
Humankind advances. It is time now for us to open-mindedly seek the genuine God.
In many ways these are not God’s new revelations but a new go at the message of Jesus as a teacher.
As people come to really know what He taught, we will be empowered as we truly spirituality are! Toda, at least in my religious traditions, it is as if His whole life on earth was just biding His time until he could “die for us,” as a sacrifice. The emphasis is on the belief that we are unworthy, and only Jesus as Savior saves us from ourselves. Oddly, Christians seem to like this self image.
With the truth of His actual teachings, we will be set free of such a self image.
Dear Mike, I also am struck by the utter lack of interest that Christians seem to have in Jesus as our ultimate Teacher. People around Him called Him Teacher. They followed Him for three-plus years and raptly listened as He spoke. And yet none of that means anything much to Christians!
I think the reason why those in the religion are so taken with the notion that He died for our sins is that it is so EASY. We all know that we are less than perfect, even if we don’t totally buy the notion that Adam’s sin is what lies at the root of our human failings.. But that doesn’t even matter, does it? Whatever it is that makes us unclean and impure and less than worthy, just by claiming the Lord’s death as our own sacrifice, we can fix it all! Wow, is that EASY!
By contrast, actually following the Lord’s teachings looks hard. Many of those who followed him thought it looked too hard, and to this day it looks a heck of a lot harder than just claiming that Get Out of Hell Free Card that the Christian religion offers us.
The problem, of course, is that the whole premise of sin (which is another thing that Jesus arguably abolished) is entirely beside the point. It isn’t sin that we need to fight, but rather it is a deficit of love! And even more to the point than fighting that illusory dichotomy is the fact that we now know why choosing love over fear is so important. We understand the role of Consciousness, and the need to raise the vibration of this planet, and so much else that Jesus could not have explained to His followers because they lacked the ability to make sense of even the little that He did say. So it might well be said that He was speaking not to them, but to us. And we get it, Lord. We understand. And joyously, we now obey!
This is the God I want to believe in! The God that loves all! Love is all that matters. But it’s so easy to feel beaten down by those who use God to hammer those of us in the GLBTQ community.
I wonder if it will ever stop, particularly for those of us who don’t conform to the two-binary gender system.
Oh, my dear Valerie, God loves us all perfectly, exactly as we are. In fact, the surviving words of Jesus suggest something that Christians surely must see, since I saw it when I first began to read the Bible from cover-to-cover in my early teens: Jesus Himself may have been gay.
I saw and puzzled over these passages when I was so young that I didn’t even know what homosexuality was (or even what sexuality was, for that matter). They confused me at the time, but I didn’t much think about it until later. At twelve or fourteen I just thought, “Oh. Jesus especially loved another man.” For example:
There was reclining on Jesus’ bosom one of His disciples, whom Jesus loved (JN 13:23).
When Jesus then saw His mother, and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, “Woman, behold, your son!” (JN 19:26)
Therefore that disciple whom Jesus loved said to Peter, “It is the Lord” (JN 21:7).
Peter, turning around, saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; the one who also had leaned back on His bosom at the supper and said, “Lord, who is the one who betrays You?” (JN 21:20)
There are examples in the other Gospels, too. John was the disciple Jesus especially loved, and everyone knew it. He reclined beside the Lord at table and casually leaned back against His chest to ask Him a question. And none of this was shameful or anything that needed to be hidden; it was simply a casual fact.
Now, here is why it puzzled me for years and then decades, and it still seems important to me today:
1) Jesus loved everyone! So how was it that everyone marked out this one young man as the disciple that He loved? There must have been something special and important to Jesus about their relationship, don’t you think?
2) Catholics, especially, insist that Jesus never married. But every observant Jew would have married in his teens! So for Jesus to have so defined the religious tradition of the day as not to marry at all must mean that emphatically He was an open homosexual. The religious folks cannot have it both ways!
Personally, I have come to think that Jesus must have married, and He probably had children. But still… there He is, this man who teaches and lives the very embodiment of perfect love for everyone in all the world, with that one particular disciple that He “loved.”
Today, this is what I think:
1) He may well have been homosexual or bisexual.
2) It doesn’t matter to Him or to God, either way. So it cannot be allowed to matter to us.
3) It is evident that the modern English translations of the Gospels were presided over by God’s minions, for reasons that I won’t reiterate here. So they included this ambiguity for us to puzzle over now! I think it’s possible that they want us to wonder. And then they want us to realize that it doesn’t matter to God, so it must not be allowed to matter to us.
Please feel safe with Jesus, dear Valerie. He loves you perfectly, just as you are!!
Centuries of dusty accumulated dogma have only served to add to this fracturing of Christianity and the anger, distrust, divisiveness – even wars- that go along with It. I think that is why I have always been interested in learning about the earliest followers of the Way. That may be part of my mission in this life. My guide was part of that church hierarchy as a medieval French Cistercian monk, a “milito” or “soldier for Christ.” He seems to want to help correct some of those errors now. He has told me there is a “new understanding” coming. I hope he is right. I think it may relate to the 1 Corinthians 13 passage. I was just reviewing my dream and meditation journal from 9 years ago when I was working on some of this same spirit guide stuff. I had done a dream incubation asking about God’s Love. In the resulting dream I was looking at an antique book entitled “Corinty” that dealt with putting ones heart and soul into what one does. Considering I had never heard of this passage until Roberta brought it up, this is quite an amazing similarity. I’m guessing my guide was behind that dream. He doesn’t want to give his actual name right now, but be introduced as Marion, a French name relating to his devotion to the Virgin Mary in that life. As a little aside, he appeared in another dream from that period as a guy in a white “hoodie” which made no sense to me then – too funny.
Dear Scott, I love watching your relationship with Marion develop and grow! This is something that you may well be called to teach, this meditating and targeted dreaming and keeping a journal of communications as a way to deepen your waking relationship with your primary guide. I don’t have the patience to do it – as my beloved Thomas well knows! – but it allows you and your guide to develop an ever-deepening relationship on all levels.
There seem to be quite a few clergymen of all generations guiding many of us now. For example, I was told by a medium when I was writing The Fun of Dying that five transitioned clergymen were working on it with me. Back then, this whole concept of targeted spirit guidance was news to me! But I know now, of course, that we attract helpers for a season or a reason, although five is a lot.
She told me that one of them was very advanced spiritually and had not incarnated for a very long time; and of the four who had lived more recently, one was famous. When I heard the name, I blurted, “Why would he work with me?” And she said, “He wants to set the record straight. They all do.” Then a year later, when I wanted to stop touring for the book, four of the five (including the famous one, but probably not the upper-level one) appeared to me in a communication dream. They were in spirit robes, young and beautiful and dancing and singing a show tune for me (knowing that I am a big fan of show tunes). It went, “You’ve got a wonderful story to tell. Life goes on forever – And there is no hell! – so go out there and share that beautiful story!” Wow. So I sighed and went back to speaking and touring for close to a further decade.
Dearest Roberta,
The first part of your blog reminds me of an anecdotal near death experience (NDE) that I saw once on Youtube.
This younger man had died for a while, due to a road accident. After he was revived in hospital, he told of meeting Jesus, while his body lay lifeless after the crash:
He saw Jesus approach him, filled with bright light. The guy saw himself containing a dim light within. As Jesus greeted him with love and acceptance, He told this man to ask the question within him. The astonished guy asked ‘My Lord, is it alright to be homosexual?’ (This man was gay and had struggled with his sexuality for years.)
Jesus laughed and said, ‘That’s not the right question.’ Then He
embraced the guy, filling him with glorious light. The feeling of Love was a flood this time; overwhelming, utterly complete and perfect.
When the man woke up he never forgot what had happened. As time went on, he knew that he had not asked the right question. The real question, and the answer to this question, was love.
The next part of your blog states the core of all things: Love unbounded.
Roberta, you quote what Jesus said: “Just as I have loved you, you also should love one another.” (JN13:34.)
He said this to his disciples and to each one of us, really. It is the most amazing thing, simple in its delivery but infinitely deep and unfathomable in actuality.
How can I possibly love people as He loves loves them? Jesus loves at a level beyond my conscious mind; beyond my understanding and space and time. In what way can I possibly hope to ………..?
I am feeling that this one commandment alone, surpasses all the Law and the Prophets (the good parts), all Judaism as it is practiced. It is beyond all perceived Christianity as it is understood on earth.
I could focus on this (and my love of the Source) and leave aside all other things. It would still take all my life for the ‘edgings’ of such love to dawn on me.
I’m feeling that this is an invitation from our Jesus to become one with Him; one with God. To do this and end ego separation, is the only way I can love others as Jesus does. It’s about the awakening to Oneness. Indeed Jesus calls me to transform my mind.
I’d love to hear your thoughts on this incredible topic, Roberta.
Love and hugs, Efrem ❣️🌅🙏🏼
Oh dear Efrem, you have written a paean to love unbounded! And you are right: simply fathoming love to its limitless depths and heights could be the work of a lifetime. What Jesus has given us in the Gospels is a wonderful short-course for preparing our minds to take that journey, but it still is a journey. And a glorious one!
Where homosexuality is concerned, please see my answer to Valerie above. I am still amazed that no member of the homosexual community has yet thrown those Gospel passages back in the faces of Christians who condemn and ostracize them. I really think that very few people realize this issue even exists in the Gospels! When I brought it up in college, a half-century ago now, I was told that Jesus and John were what my grandchildren today would call besties. But, um, when you read about their relationship that sure isn’t the way it looks!
Spiritual growth equals love. They are equivalent. And we have in the hopper an upcoming blog post about how to do what you talk about here, Efrem: how to transform your mind sufficiently to be loving at the level that Jesus loves.
Meanwhile, though, someone I don’t know at all has just asked out of the blue an emailed question that I saw yesterday, but I am not sure how to answer it. “If I want to devote my life to making it to the sixth level in one lifetime, how can I do that?” What a terrific question! And theoretically it is possible, but I feel inadequate to the task of adequately answering that question. Oh, where to begin??
Christianity and contemporary Western “thought” does not deal well with spiritual evolution toward the upper levels. Some early Christian mystics did, but their writings aren’t widely known.
Supposedly the Buddha did what your questioner is asking about, but Buddhist philosophy that I have so far come across doesn’t really confirm how many lifetimes he actually had. The Dalai Lama is said to be on his 14th lifetime. He also says he hasn’t decided if he will reincarnate for a fifthteenth, but that there IS a sutra that prays to remain here to serve as long as “sentient beings” remain. So it may be more aspirational to remain at a lower spiritual level if it served the higher purpose better!
Dear Mike, Thomas tells me that a perfect and ardent adherence to the teachings of Jesus on love and forgiveness in the environment of one stressful lifetime on earth is all it will take. I have trouble really saying that, though. How can it be so easy?
This just hit me: it’s simple because it enables us to FOCUS on this particular experience we perceive as incarnation. As we discussed previously, there is so much about the greater reality and our higher selves we cannot grasp, that trying to come close to understanding it or ourselves on The higher level is overwhelming! Focusing on Jesus teaching empowers us to set all of those beyond-our-comprehension questions aside and live a spiritually rewarding life!
… And because it’s safe (it’s Jesus, after all, so even Christians are safe doing it); it’s not woo-woo New Age (ditto); and it’s simple to do while just living your life. I can see why Thomas says that following the teachings of Jesus as they are given in The Fun of Growing Forever is the easiest way to get started on the right spiritual track. And I can report from experience that those teachings are amazingly self-reinforcing: you tend to continue to grow. But, sixth level??
I had a similar dream once, and I remember just a portion of it so clearly. Interestingly, no words were spoke. But I woke up in this beautiful place, I remember some classical columns and I was sitting by a lake. I can’t explain it fully, as it was very white and lots of stone, but one would expect it to feel somewhat cold, but it was warm. I felt others around me, but they were not fully in human form, more like many have describe as spiritual vibrations. Then I felt the vibrations become excited and a brighter light appeared and I knew instantly it was Jesus, and the light made its way to me to me and no words were spoken, and as the light came close I was filled with pure acceptance and love. No need to explain, I was just loved. At the time, I thought it was just my imagination, as I often have vivid dreams which are nonsense really. But, now I remember that dream and how incredible that moment felt.
Roberta: I really believe that Thomas was correct when he said love and forgiveness was the real answer to all of this, but I don’t agree with you about it being an easy solution. It is EXTREMELY hard to love everyone and forgive them, as some people can literally wreck our lives for their own selfish reasons. It takes a lot of work to think in a different way, but it may be easier to absorb all this once we are “dead” for a while. It is not always pleasant to live on this planet. making it harder to love and forgive while we are here.
I would not be surprised if Jesus was gay. I don’t think he thought that was any big deal. It is human beings who got hung up on someone’s sexuality being so important, resulting in the terrible oppression those people had to face through the years. Perhaps that is why the man in Efrem’s account related that in his dream, Jesus laughed and told him it wasn’t the right question to ask.
Oh dear Lola, anything can be an easy solution if there is a right and simple way to accomplish it, even if that right and simple way is not commonly known. And it is a fact that the teachings of Jesus, if properly applied, can begin the work of spiritual transformation in anyone who sincerely follows them, and can produce considerable positive effects in only months! Yes, even though the world contains some horrible people who do horrible things. As A Course in Miracles says, there is no degree of difficulty in forgiveness. You can forgive anything. Once you know how!
So it isn’t learning to love and forgive perfectly that is the hard part… and it isn’t even building on that initial transformation that concerns me. Indeed, you can! As Jesus says, His yoke is easy and His burden is light. But what I wonder about is what else we need to accomplish to raise our vibrations sufficiently to attain the sixth level? I have some thoughts, but it is going to take a much larger experimental sample to find out for certain how this all works!
And meanwhile… who knows?
Dearest Roberta,
That is an amazing question about how to attain the Sixth Level in one lifetime. Heck! What a thought !
Incidentally, the bloke that had his NDE meeting with Jesus (as I somewhat starkly relayed above) was saying that there was no obstacle to Jesus and to love. I thought that he understood it in his soul mind and was healed at the same time when Jesus came to him.
My feeling is that the Sixth level is bestowed. It’s given as much (if not more) than attained. It’s the ‘union’ that is at the heart of Kabbalah (Heb: ‘Yehida’) and also Hindu mysticism (Sanskrit: ‘Yoga’). It’s the transcendence that we trust in; dive into, if you will..
What an amazing blog we are in right now. (This feels ‘bestowed’ on me. Especially by the way I was lead to it, to you.) I love this subject and my fellow posters here.
This growing is shown in the Way. As I’ve already experienced growth happening I know that there are things to do. Prevenient forgiveness is the salient thing here. But does one have to pass through the furnace in this world to get to Sixth Level in one life??
Does it take sore trials? Some Gandhian level of life dedication?
I can’t help wondering about this, Roberta…
Perhaps it is the melding of our minds collectively, here and in the Afterlife, that floats us to the bright heights of Sixth Level, but that suggests more than one lifetime. But in ONE life? Heck, I’d love to know about that.
I hope my earnest inquiry isn’t trying to preempt your next blog too much. Hugs❣️ Efrem
Oh dear Efrem, it would be wonderful if the sixth level could be a reward for working hard at very difficult spiritual lessons on earth and really, really trying! But consciousness is in the nature of an energy, and it seems to obey its own laws which are in the nature of the laws of physics. Its vibration is based in the fear-love polarity, so the more we love perfectly and completely, the higher our consciousness vibration will rise. Apparently spiritual growth – at our stage, at least – is, to somewhat misuse the word because I don’t know what other word fits, a largely mechanical process.
When Jesus said we had to become like little children to enter the kingdom of God, and if we don’t become like little children we can’t enter it at all, He wasn’t saying we need to sit around playing with rattles and gurgling nonsense. No, what He was saying was that as our spiritual vibration rises as high as the level just below the Godhead, we naturally become softer, meeker, sweeter, and surprisingly childlike in our ways. Descriptions of sixth-level beings in bodies are rare, but every such description that I have seen was of a very impressive, tall and glowing being, with a gender but kind of androgynous, and uniformly gentle and sweet. They have something to say or do, and they accomplish that, but without waving arms, shouting, threatening, ordering, or doing really anything that an embodied person in authority might do. Their manner is – yes – childlike.
My job is to understand and accept what I’m shown, and then to make it simple. From the beginning of my doing this work, I have been given to understand pretty emphatically that I am teaching spiritual kindergarten, which is what is essential right now, and which must be simple! It does begin to look to me, though, that perhaps the whole process can be simple. Perhaps the teachings of Jesus when perfectly applied can take us most of the way. But I’m not sure. And Thomas won’t say either yes or no, but he is receptive to the idea.
Thank you, dearest Roberta, your answer to my entry about Sixth level in one lifetime was wonderful.
Looking at consciousness as having the nature of energy and the fear-love polarity, physics based mechanics puts all this in a nutshell. At least for our spiritual kindergarten level.
I loved the understanding of becoming like little children; of Sixth Level beings as tall and glowing and yet sweet and gentle. Heck!
You clarify much.
And I do know that NDEs are astral and person specific experiences. Since NDErs are told that they can’t go further, beyond a certain point, or else they must die on earth. If they wish to renter their bodies and terrestrial lives, they must not go forward. So the true Afterlife is not seen by these NDE experiencers.
You see the NDE anecdote that I related above resonated for me, as I have faced this issue most of my life.
E 🙏🏼🌅❣️
Efrem: Your account of the NDE that this experiencer had has really stuck with me. I have read hundreds of NDE experiences, and this stands out in a way that is hard to explain. I have no personal interest in whether anybody is gay or not, any more than if they liked to play football versus golf, but if this person really was talking to Jesus, then his question seemed totally irrelevant to him. This suggests that our life here may not be as critically judged as many people think and that we are meant to experience a little bit of everything for reasons I obviously can’t explain. However, like you, I wonder what it all really means.,
Dear Roberta. Maybe I’m just a typical Boston puritanical prude 😁, but I have trouble seeing Jesus, as someone who appears to have been embodying something along the lines of 6th level love, had much interest in sexual love of any stripe, or in marrying and having kids. Didn’t he say that people don’t marry in heaven? Also, I think you’ve mentioned that on higher levels people don’t really do sex, but rather a kind of energetic blending that produces an ecstasy way beyond anything sex can. That sounds just like the incident Efrem described, where Jesus chuckles and perhaps gives the man a demonstration of that blending. Maybe Jesus’s “besty” was someone reaching a high enough vibration that he was starting to sense that. I could be way out on the tip of a limb here, but maybe that was why he was leaning into Jesus so much. He may have gotten one of those demonstrations, or was working on getting to where he could.
Oh dear Scott, remember that Jesus was in a physical body! And physical bodies have a sex drive. Clearly He would have married, since in His day observant Jews married very young; and His young body had the same sex drive as any other 18-year-old boy’s body would have. Of course He had sex. Of course He had children. You know that I am from the puritanical Boston area too, and it took me awhile to become comfortable with all of this; but I did. And so will you. OMG, my fiction-writing team does sex scenes and swearing without hesitation! That shocked me at first. Now I just shrug.
Yes, there is no marriage in heaven, and our bodies there have no sex drive. Mikey Morgan died at 20, and he tells us clearly that he knows what a sex drive is and his body there doesn’t have one. He reminds us, too, that what he calls “a hug” is ten thousand times better there anyway, and of course he is talking about the body-melding that people do there for physical pleasure instead of sex. People are still people, after all.
(Interestingly to me, my fiction team is using this melding as something that is possible on earth once our minds are sufficiently developed. I was surprised by this at first, but now I think it’s just pretty clever of them.)
There really is nothing wrong with physical sex, nothing unclean or evil about it. We are meant to enjoy these bodies! And anyone who has had sex with a loving partner knows that it can be a profound emotional experience. The Old Testament sexual laws are human laws, and built around human needs to protect lineages and ownership and such. They are not God’s law.
It is all about why and how you do whatever it is that you do! If we are meant to know anything at all, it is that you can do literally anything if your motive is nothing but the purest love.
Dear Lola, Jesus tells us throughout the Gospels that the Old Testament rules no long apply (if they ever did), and the ways in which the Old Testament God would have judged us do not matter at all to the genuine Godhead. Indeed, He says that God does not judge us at all! We judge ourselves, and our only criterion is love.
And dear Lola and everyone, please understand that NDEs are wonderful, extraordinary experiences, but they happen in the astral and they have nothing to do with actual death. I interviewed the father of NDEs, Raymond Moody, last fall, and he told me this was emphatically true; he said, “That’s why I called them NEAR-death experiences!” So you can’t take anything that happens in an NDE as a message from God, or as evidence of what happens in the afterlife (NDEs happen in the general astral instead).
However, that being said, Jesus appears in NDEs surprisingly often, just as He appears in the actual afterlife. God appears in NDEs too, though, when actually the dead tell us that God never appears in a body.
So… what do we make of all this? We are told by those that we used to think were dead that our own guides or beings helping our guides will on occasion take on the appearance of Jesus or of God if we, in particular, need to have the experience of one or the other. Sometimes it is easy to tell this is a mimic; for example, there is a strain of Jesus-sightings where He is blond and always laughing. These happy-Jesus appearances are generally in children’s NDEs, and I think they are clearly experiences with Jesus-mimics. Since Efrem reported the story above, though, I’ve puzzled over it, and I’m still not sure. This looks like the sort of thing that Jesus might have done. Still, it doesn’t matter, does it? We are all one being, and love is all that matters!
This is true, Roberta, because in the Seth books channeled by Jane Roberts years ago, “Seth” himself said that he often took the persona of Jesus or some other religious figure in order to make the “dead” person more comfortable. This is a concept that in Jane Roberts’ day was totally unheard of. Seth also mentioned that we are our own judges
Of course! Jesus is most common, but they come in all flavors. The Virgin, the Buddha, Confucius, Mohammed, various saints, and really anyone who would seem like a comforting religious figure to people coming back from a hard life on earth.
I have made an honest attempt to read the Bible, but gave up in frustration because I couldn’t understand what the passages were trying to say. Then you attend church and hear an interpretation that fails to make it any clearer. I attended six different denominations which turned out to be a really bad idea. So I walked away to find my own answers.
We are losing so many lives to suicide and addiction. Did they also walk away from their churches? How many would still be with us if (all) religions taught love over sin?
Oh yes, dear Amanda! You are perfectly right. People are hungry to be fed spiritually – just as hungry as they are for physical food – but so few are able to relate to religions! You will be glad to know that everyone can relate to Jesus. His word is truth, it is only love, it makes sense, and it fits perfectly with what we have been learning from so many of the people that we used to think were dead. If you want to ask me questions, don’t hesitate to email me through info@robertagrimes.com. Meanwhile, I’m sending you a hug. You are going to love knowing Jesus – I promise!
Hi Lola,
Thank you for your kind thoughts and feelings about someone being gay. It seems that the above described NDE resonated with you and I both. ❣️
For me it is because people who are gay, especially seekers, can doubt themselves because of their sexuality. They are conditioned through various religions to believe that being actively gay is the ‘deal breaker’ where God is concerned. IE: That God doesn’t ‘save’ you if you are gay.
The thinking is that although God is loving, he draws the line at gayness. People are prone to accept this belief because they feel that, although this seems too harsh, God cannot be understood by the human mind. He moves in mysterious ways. And this rejection of gay and lesbian people might be ‘right’ in the Divine sense, even though it doesn’t seems so to (some of) us.
Though I reject this religious exclusion idea now, it troubled me for decades. This idea produces damaging results.
The result? A gay seeker can withdraw and stop seeking God. Or a deep sense of conditioned guilt can lower their vibration and geld (excuse the reference) their verve, confidence and dynamism. Hence they hang onto God but suffer deep, prolonged emotional pain while doing so.
My own doctor, an Associate Professor, says that lesbians, gays and women generally, are more prone to depression because they are considered to be less than normal and less than equal by traditional society. Certainly I have experienced depression by this kind of overt and covert put down.
Hence I’m encouraged by Roberta’s take on homosexuality and your kind approach too. (I’m floored by Roberta’s idea that Jesus may have been gay or bisexual. I never thought of that.)
Concerning my gayness I have to live by the maxim:
‘Those who matter don’t mind,
And those who mind don’t matter.’
And it strikes me that of all the questions this NDE guy asks Jesus, when he gets one chance, happens to be: Is it okay to be gay?’ ….That speaks volumes to me!
Thanks for your sweet reply,
Love Efrem ❣️🙏🏼🌅
Dear Efrem, it is obvious that same-sex attraction is normal for some people, and the fact that there even is an issue about it is just an artifact of the barbaric Old Testament. It is terrible and profoundly un-Christian that Christians even give that old rule a thought! I am delighted to find our society moving on and beginning to accept, love, and celebrate us all just as we are ;-).
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Efrem: I think that the reason the NDE guy asked if it is okay to be a homosexual is because he was conditioned all his life to believe that he was in some way committing a “sin.” This led to unnecessary feelings of guilt etc. How fortunate he was to have had that experience. I’m happy for him and glad he shared it on Youtube
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Roberta,
I so appreciate the time you spend on follow-up remarks, it really makes your posts so meaningful. As always, you say something in such a way that resonates for me. This week you said, “the God throughout the Bible – everywhere but in the Gospels – is human-made. That God is made in man’s image, with human failings writ large! “. That is huge, we hear as children in church that man was made in God’s image, but the reality is very likely the exact opposite – Man made God in man’s image. I have also struggled with the thought of Jesus as the son of God, I think that too was a metaphor to help understand the importance of Jesus, as lineage was so important to the Ancient Jews. And the Virgin birth, well like so many things, it really doesn’t matter. It probably wasn’t a Virgin birth, nor did it need to be. And also when I hear Jesus sits in heaven on the right side of God – that seems so autocratic, like the Supreme Court. I can’t imagine a spiritual being “needing” to sit anywhere for any reason. Thanks as always for sharing. I love learning about love in the purest form, and the fact that we can separate Jesus from religion is so important to me. No need to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak. Which, many who can’t accept the teachings of Christian church do, because it doesn’t make any sense to them.
Dear Tim, these are wonderful insights! And I think you are right about all of them. What gets me is that in this culture, if you don’t believe in the Christian God – and emphatically, I do not – then you are an “atheist,” even though the genuine God is a great deal more wonderful! I wrote a post about that last fall. What the dead tell us is that Jesus “comes from the highest aspect of the Godhead,” which I think means that He is part of the Collective. He repeatedly reincarnated and perfected, but He managed to do it very early in human history. Indeed, His journey is our own. And no, there are no thrones in heaven! Jesus is reported to be everywhere in the afterlife, constantly working and serving, and while I believe most of these sightings are caretaker beings and our own guides, I think that those which have Him sitting beneath a tree and teaching are indeed the genuine Jesus. You are right, dear Tim, that we’ve got to save Jesus from the decline and death of Christianity. And that is what each of us is helping to do, right now!
Dear Roberta. Along these lines of man made vs God made, something keeps prompting me to ask, what are your thoughts about angel’s or the angelic realm?
Dear Scott, this is a great question! I have been wanting to interview an angels expert on Seek Reality, mostly so I can read the expert’s book and learn more about angels myself! But the fact is that every angel expert I have found is not a rigorous facts-based scholar, but is instead a New Age sort. Which is fine, but for me I’ve got to see how angels fit into the facts-based pattern that experts are developing, and I don’t want to add to that pattern anything that doesn’t fit. But I’ll tell you what I think I know.
From all the bits that I have gathered, I think that angels are a separate category of being that serves the Godhead. They aren’t people, they never have been in human bodies, but they are intelligent and loving. We are “a little lower than the angels,” as the Bible puts it.
Angels apparently serve as guardians of each human body, to prevent harm from coming to it so it can remain alive long enough to fulfill its life-plan. There are many stories in the literature of a being doing this or that miraculous thing that saved a life, and that being was probably that body’s guardian angel Apparently each of us has our own – it comes with your primary guide, like a package – but I’m not sure about that. The great Archangels apparently do exist, and we think they also protect and preserve humankind. I am eager to learn more once I get home!
Guardian angels are at once a mystery and familiar to those of us raised and schooled by Catholic nuns. Of course we don’t need anyone to point out that the English word “angel” derives from other linguistic roots that mean “messenger” or even more straightforwardly, “message.” A message from God would indeed be not just a thing to take note of but an conscious entity. If we take this to heart, angels are “created” each “time” God needs to impart understanding. The most famous angel in this regard is Gabriel.
The archangels envisioned by some as a sort of army of God would not, of course, be a violent army, but they might operate as a super message that God urgently needs to impart. All of this is pretty fascinating stuff although, as you point out Roberta, angels are so romanticized and not very clearly documented that is is not really practical to know at this point what sort of phenomenon they represent. I’ve decided to stick to my spirit guide, who is mysterious enough!
All we really know is that angels are beings of connsciousness – as everything is made of consciousness – but they have never been in bodies. We are told that they are of a “purer” class in some way, and like us there are some who are more powerful. Coming to know what angels are all about is one of the many things that I am eager to do whenever I finally get to go home!