Posted by Roberta Grimes • September 11, 2021 • 29 Comments
Afterlife Research, Jesus, The Teachings of Jesus
And He will raise you up on eagle’s wings,
Bear you on the breath of dawn,
Make you to shine like the sun,
And hold you in the palm of His Hand.
– Michael Crawford, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1998)
I answer many emails from Seek Reality listeners, and someone recently asked what may well be a universal question. He wrote, “There is a question that bugs me. Perhaps you can answer? Why did Jesus come once and to such an ancient age? Why hasn’t he come to our age or earlier to proclaim his message to us? It’s weird he would come once and done, and not try again. I hope I’m not being silly in asking this.”
This isn’t a silly question at all! But it’s one with a fairly complex answer. In fact, there may be two good answers: there is what I have long thought must be the best answer, and there also is what we are just now coming to see may be an amazing added refinement of that best answer. None of us can speak for Jesus, but He has given us enough of His thinking that we can have a good inkling of His possible reasons for not appearing on earth today.
First, let’s lay out an answer based on what we have come to know about Jesus and his earthly mission. Jesus appeared in a simpler, more credulous age, and He spoke to people who could not possibly have understood the full import of His coming and His message. Understandably, they packaged His words in completely unrelated religious ideas. And there He has remained for two thousand years, while the religion spread and Jesus grew in stature, to the point where today – when He is most needed! – He is consistently named as one of the two or three most influential and beloved figures worldwide. He has been quietly waiting, biding His time, until now, when He can shed the wrapper of a dying religion and reveal Himself as what He always has been: He is God on earth, and our ultimate Teacher. And unlike every other religious figure, He has taken care to give us abundant evidence so we can prove to ourselves that He is indeed real:
So now the stage is finally set for one of the most beloved figures in the modern world to quietly reveal Himself to us, now shorn of any religious wrapper! Think about this for a moment. Jesus came to teach us how to raise our consciousness vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love. His teachings are what the world needs now! And if He were to come back now in the flesh – perhaps riding on a horse, as in the Book of Revelation – His second coming in a body would be (a) highly controversial, disruptive, and confusing; and (b) REALLY SCARY. One reason we can be certain that the events of the Book of Revelation never will happen is that they would promptly undo whatever good the teachings of Jesus ever have done by scaring everyone on earth half to death. So instead, Jesus has been quietly setting the stage for us, and apparently now the true Revelation is actually just about to happen! It will be a quiet Revelation, gradually spreading, of Who Jesus really is and what He actually came to do. And it will come to a worldwide audience that is already primed to love and trust Him.
So Jesus actually has come back!
In fact, now we know that He never has left.
As a refinement, let’s now consider how what we have been learning about time and creation might tweak this answer and make it feel even more wonderful.
But first, we ought to remind ourselves that nothing is as it seems to be. Matter is nothing but empty space thinly filled with bits of whirling energy that create for our eyes and fingertips the illusion that things are solid and real. And time and space are apparently illusory. They are mere artifacts of the matter and energy that surrounds us. Time, especially, can trip us up as we try to understand what is going on! Time is highly germane to the question that we are trying to answer here; but in fact, it doesn’t exist except in this material universe. And this entire universe is just a part of what we now realize is a much greater reality which is composed entirely of and by consciousness. This fact has profound implications that we are only now beginning to see.
The inescapable primacy of consciousness means that the scientific community is at a dead-end. Its ongoing insistence that reality must be material is looking increasingly absurd. True, materialism-based science has given us some wonderful materialism-based advances that have vastly improved our standard of living on earth over recent centuries; but at the same time, scientists have taken immaterial matter so seriously that they have come up with some highly creative – but ultimately meaningless – theories as they tried to use matter alone to somehow figure out what actually is going on.
Materialist scientists will never be able to answer any of the biggest questions. In particular, what we are learning now about how creation actually works is frankly beyond their reach. Although there have been a few scientific thinkers who have realized there was something going on that was much more enormous than anything any materialist scientist can touch, and they have had sufficient status to be unafraid to say that frankly. For example:
In 1931 Max Planck said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness. Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.”
The great polymath Nikola Tesla, who later lent his name to Elon Musk’s luxury line of electric cars, also very insightfully said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”
And Albert Einstein, the all-time-greatest materialist scientist of them all, actually said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.”
But even today, the scientific community continues to double-down on its materialist dogma. By now, anyone who has spent much time with popular-science magazines can see that scientists are on such a wrong track in their search for a source of consciousness in the brain and for the origin of life in some primordial soup that the long run of materialist scientific successes seems to be meeting an ignominious end.
But open-minded seekers who are not burdened by materialism can shed further light on why it isn’t necessary for Jesus to come back in the flesh. The lack of time in most of reality means that all that exists is NOW. And without time, creation cannot be just one-and-done a long time ago, but instead everything – including all the past – is being eternally re-created in each micro-instant. So it is entirely possible that Jesus has carefully designed His entire history on earth quite recently. We would be none the wiser! All of the two thousand years of preparation for Jesus to come to us today and be instantly both known and believed is all part of a perfectly constructed version of a past which is a part of Now. And the more we consider it, the more we see that the best way for Him to come to us today with such gigantic truths that can uplift all of humankind while avoiding the worldwide fear and trauma that his sudden reappearance might well cause is precisely the quiet and gentle reveal that is now in progress. If it had been planned right down to the tiniest detail, it is hard to see how what is happening now could be in any way more perfect!
We probably cannot with these limited earth-minds ever really figure it all out. But one thing we know, with every breath we take! Each of us is the infinitely precious treasure of the genuine Godhead. It is impossible for us ever to grasp how deeply and completely we are loved.
You need not fear the terror of the night,
Nor the arrow that flies by day,
Under his wings your refuge.
His faithfulness your shield.
– Michael Crawford, from “On Eagle’s Wings” (1998)
Dear Roberta, You mentioned a truth that I an positioned to reinforce, ” …but instead everything – including all the past – is being eternally re-created in each micro-instant.” Without going into personal details, some 20 years ago I was upset to the breaking point. I looked out upon the beautiful snow covered Grand Tetons and vexed why things had to change. In my utter anguish, the unvoiced voice said, “If there were not ongoing change, then the world would be frozen dead.”
Many years later, I learned from reports of those who have left their body and returned (matters not if from trauma, deep meditation, lucid dreaming, spontaneously, or drugs, as all report that time no longer ran, but past, present and future were all present together); this idea is known in philosophy as block time, and Einstein was an advocate (by my theoretical reconstruction, we can visualize time not running, yet existing, by conceptualizing a time line of infinite length in which “now” is any arbitrary location between the “past” and the “future”). But that creates a conundrum. i.e., change is ongoing, but time does not run. The solution is that what exists to be known is, just as you wrote here, by an existence that is recreated instantaneously for eternity in the universal mind, in what I term the Universal Field of Consciousness.
Thus, everything exists in an eternal now, but a now that is alive with change. Materialism is incapable in general of dealing with this paradox, but materialism is, as you observed, unable to accept that consciousness is the foundation of existence, not the tiny eaches of energy erroneously perceived as a hard substance. Here too, Einstein had shown that energy and material were of the same sort in his equation of E = m C squared.
Materialists are stubborn in their ignorance. I have been able to demonstrate in a published paper ( https://jcer.com/index.php/jcj/article/view/934 ) that what is known as quantum entanglement, what Einstein derisively termed “spooky action at a distance,” is a fiction; in private communication, two Nobel laureates agree with my conclusion, but the physics community at large refuses to accept that quantum mechanics was defined by a mistaken Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, despite the evidence of multiple published experiments that contradict that “principle.”
Oh my dear Jack, you have been well ahead of me! Thomas has kept bringing time up, trying to open my mind, while I have always felt that the lack of objective time wasn’t a big thing. But in fact, it is gigantic! In the end, and thanks to Thomas’s insistence, I have come to realize that without objective time, the very idea of a past may well become nonsensical. And therefore the fact that the artificial time that runs on earth emphasizes the notion of a past probably means what Thomas actually tells me it means: a continuous creation, in the nature of a filmstrip running. Now it finally makes sense!
I owe that particular insight to the great Dutch polymath Bernardo Kastrup. Although he isn’t where we are on some things – he can’t yet be sure about an afterlife – he really is living far ahead of all of us!
Roberta, Thanks for your continual mentioning about what “time is”. I don’t understand the total concept yet but know that with your ongoing imput, I will eventually get it. Dave
My dear Dave, I don’t think there is anyone now living in a body who really understands the time issue! The fact that time and space are both aspects of matter and both only exist in this material universe has been known for decades, and is irrefutable. But we are confident that the astral plane is many times the relative size of this material universe. We are certain that this material universe which is billions of years old is within a reality that is being freshly created in each micro-instant. I have had a lot of trouble really grasping any of it!
The only way that I can sinple-mindedly grasp size at all is to say that all of reality is in the nature of a thought. The first time I got it, I intensively imagined a mile-wide grassy valley and mounting a horse and galloping forever across that valley. You’ve got to imagine it pretty intensively! Then when I finally got to the other side and found a little village there, I stopped and thought, “Where is that valley? Oh. It’s inside a thought.” And I got it.
For time, you’ve got to get your mind around the fact that all that you ever can experience is NOW. (The wonderful Bernardo Kastrup helped me finally get this.) No past. No future. All that ever exists is NOW. And NOW. And so on. So it’s a filmstrip! You think that filmstrip is always running and moving smoothly, but in fact is is a bunch of frozen NOW moments. Once I got that, I began to see how there can be no objective time.
I still can’t live in no-space and no-time as the not-really-dead do, happily. But I can imagine living in it, so I can begin to explore the implications, which are manifold!
Wow, these are great explanations, especially getting on that horse and riding across the valley and the other example of the filmstrip. Now I have some excellent examples to reference back to when I need it. THANKS!!!
Roberta, your timing of this article is impeccable. I might add; change one thoughts change your world..
Skip
Oh my dear Skip, exactly right! Actually, though, the timing was Thomas’s. When I started to try to respond to that email from a listener – how do you condense this answer? – Thomas said at once, “Blog post!”
I have always thought of myself as an afterlife expert, helping to enlighten the world; but the world’s real expert on death and the afterlife and how everything works is Craig Hogan. I’m eager to work with him, but I can’t compete! More and more, I am coming to see that what Thomas is aiming us at is for us to help to re-introduce Jesus to the modern world. And that is, frankly, so much bigger than teaching the afterlife truths that my mind quails. Let’s see where he takes us….
Dear David, the thread to which you responded ran out just above, but I wanted to respond to what you said.
Yes, those images helped me a lot at first – the filmstrip, and riding that galloping white horse – but still, it’s important to get beyond that. And I’m trying! In fact, the entire universe is nothing but a thought – as Albert Einstein said, it’s “an illusion, albeit a very persistent one” – so the only reason why we think it has size is that our minds are so invested in the illusion. We believe in it, and our belief itself is what reinforces the illusion and makes it continue. I think this is what Jesus meant when He said that if we have a mustard seed’s worth of “faith” we can move a mountain: if we stop reinforcing the illusion with our minds but instead believe we can conquer it, then we can!
And the nature of time also begs us to go deeper. We believe in a past that is as immaterial as a thought. The only thing that actually exists is NOW. The “past” is in fact as indefinite as the future, as unreal, as much a product of our imagination – again, it is a thought. Time and space are both nothing but thought. And we can escape them if we have that mustard-seed-sized bit of conviction that we can escape them.
I think I might be actually beginning to get it! But only beginning. I am going to be so fascinated to actually see it all whenever I get to go home!
Dearest Roberta,
For many years I had held to the theory that Jesus chose a time to appear in the flesh that coincided with the Pax Romana, a time when the Roman Empire was both stable and prosperous with a good network of roads. These characteristics would make it ideal for broadcasting the Gospel. Perhaps this was also a consideration made by Jesus.
Cookie.
Dear Cookie, you may well be right. We have discovered accounts of the crucifixion of Jesus at the time when it actually happened in far-flung parts of the Roman Empire, which helps to confirm that He actually lived, and that is pretty wonderful! It is hard to know now whether He expected His teachings to spread then, or whether He was deliberately planting a seed then that we could validate only now, with a rich flourishing of His teachings to come only in this century. I wish so much that we had more of an insight on what He was thinking!
I sing the song “On Eagles’ Wings” often in Church: Weddings, funerals,
so inspirational!
Oh yes, my dear Celia! Inspirational and beautiful, and so heart-swellingly, perfectly true! I love it too. Wonderful!
“More and more, I am coming to see that what Thomas is aiming us at is for us to help re-introduce Jesus to the modern world. And that is, frankly, so much bigger than teaching the afterlife truths that my mind quails.”
Dearest Roberta, your comment above reminds me of walking over a steep hill to learn what is behind it and discovering the vast Pacific Ocean.
Or maybe, just maybe, I somehow find myself watching a white horse galloping furiously over an endless sea of grass forever. If this is a continuous film strip running in a loop, with each frame of a white horse moving on green that flits by the projector’s light-eye, it is indeed endless.
In the physical world the projector would break down no doubt, as everything does breakdown in this world, from political promises to relationships to cheap vacuum cleaners. Or perhaps the film would overheat and the image would burn and melt away, never to be seen again.
Only as an ongoing thought, in the realm of consciousness, would the bright horse sail over the endless grass forever. So each thought-frame could be said to be one little whole, a microcosm, while the endless thought-film itself is one vast whole, the macrocosm. It could be like each of us together makes up the whole of this endless picture; being really an indivisible part of it and eternal at the same time. All inside that continuous thought of God.
And our beloved Jesus shows us the Way to shake of the drowsy dream and awake to our eternal self. The Self that has no beginning and has no end. And as you say, Roberta, amid all this we are perfectly loved. His perfect love will do this for – and with – us.
I guess the job of re-introducing Jesus to the modern world is a very big thing! Somehow though, I am comforted to know that it is all taking place within the mind of God. 🌅❣️🐴
Oh my dear Efrem, this feels like such a seminal time! Jesus talked about what it would be like when the kingdom of God actually began to arrive on earth – He said it would be disruptive. He even called it “the Tribulation.” Still, I always thought it would happen gradually, as each individual raised his or her vibration a little, and then a little more, because our minds are part of one Mind so each person’s growth feeds everyone else’s growth. But I realize now that the process can’t be tranquil, since it disrupts literally everything we have ever known and it challenges us. So He was right about that, too.
When we step back far enough, we see that the iron hold that all the belief-systems (science especially included) have had on us is slipping away. The religions are all dying, as their dogmas that made sense a thousand years ago are showing themselves to modern people to be frankly unbelievable; and science, which is prevented by its materialist dogma from ever answering the two biggest questions (the nature of consciousness and the origin of life) is reduced to figuring out just boring trivialities. All our old gods are dying and losing their hold on our minds and on our behavior. No wonder everything seems to be falling apart!
Dearest Roberta, you have such an elegant way of expressing the really big, worldwide picture in such a clear and accessible way. Thomas and your good self really take such care to make sure that we can understand what is actually happening.
It does feel like the Tribulation is unfolding, doesn’t it? Every long held ‘pillar’ that supports the roof of our civilization is dissolving right before our eyes. Yet the roof doesn’t quite fall down – instead, it is thinning and parts of it are opening up to let the light in. These growing skylights let what really lies beneath become visible for the first time. So the darkened ‘great hall’ of our civilization is growing brighter and clearer.
I guess we human beings, who need stability to thrive, may feel frightened at what may happen. (There is that fear of not surviving again. Flux makes us nervous.) But I’m feeling curious to see what transpires; what God has in store. Thankfully, I’m able to feel the surging hope of truly positive change that is in the air. I simply refuse to spend my life in fear!
Even a big dictatorship in the East, that I do not choose to name, shows consistent evidence of the populace stirring and quietly, carefully disobeying the regime. It seems people there desire the freedoms we have in the democratic world.
For example there is a new phenomenon of ‘laying flat’ that has recently been spreading across that authoritarian country. It is spread by word-of-mouth chains (that are highly organized in dictatorships) and by snapshots on social media. People living under this heavy regime know that if a movement has no central organization and if it doesn’t give the government a visible-level threat, said movement can appear and disappear repeatedly and get away with building quite a bit of dissent.
So, when ‘laying flat’ people have been circulating pictures of themselves laying in bed during the day, laying on benches, stretching out on work breaks, even draping themselves over walls and rocks. The idea behind it is clear to everyone: laying down is the only thing you can do in this country, without being taken away by the police and quite possibly never being seen again. Otherwise, you can be arrested for just about anything. IE: At least ‘they’ can’t get you for laying down for a short time.
The world is moving towards something new. I’m glad I’m still here Roberta, to witness what is happening and to undergo transformation myself. Maybe I could help others along the Way too. 🙏🏼❣️🌅
Oh my dear Efrem, I love your paragraph on the Tribulation! Beautifully said and exactly right. It is hard for people living through big historical moments to get much perspective on them, but everyone can see that there is something on the wind!
And the Chinese “laying flat” movement (happy to name the country, tee-hee) fascinates me, too. And more and more it is the highly educated young in their twenties and thirties – the people they can least afford to lose – who are moving out of big cities, taking menial jobs, maybe marrying locals, and just not bothering. When the game is rigged, why be fool enough to still play it?
We see this happening in the US, too, and I’ll bet it’s happening in Australia, but it might take different forms. Here, white heterosexual males have been made the biggest scapegoats by the wokies, so fewer and fewer of our brightest young men are even going to college. My wonderful and very bright second grandson should be starting college now, but instead he has begun a career in video editing that makes him very happy; while meanwhile, his Irish-twin sister (11 months apart) started college in what should have been her junior year in high school (special local program). She is planning on a traditional career, probably as a lawyer. I think their story is typical of what is happening here now.
Yes Roberta, why bother playing the game if it is rigged?!
As you know, we have the curse of wokism here in Australia too.
We are quite a multicultural country and we were going well without wokism. Then the wokies, who are a smaller but louder group, started endlessly broadcasting their creed: Not only are multicultural minorities good, now they are far better than the Anglo-Celtic majority. Women are great but men are potential or actual abusers. Intersectional women, gays, aboriginals and ethnic-religious minorities are very special, cherished and praiseworthy. Whereas everyday guys are now seen as sexist, racist, ignorant and discriminatory.
Aussies are still down-to-earth, practical, good hearted folk so most of them don’t accept this stuff. However wokies have infiltrated the media and they get more air time than their fewer numbers would suggest. Typically, they are proving to be angry, divisive and quite judgmental. They sow discord among us. And it is white, straight men that are the focus of their boundless ire.
Roberta, I’ve had young guys tell me that they don’t know how to approach women anymore. They don’t know where they stand nowadays. (Granted, I’m in the inner city of Sydney so there are more wokies here than in the suburbs or country towns. So there is that.) But guys don’t know if the girls they approach at a public bar, party or club will glare at them and call their effrontery sexual abuse. They are concerned that in such a changed social climate they can be falsely accused of any sexually related crime. And I’m talking about decent, fair minded, hard working men here.
This is very sad my dear. Since all people really want at core is to be accepted and loved as they are. It is so much easier to accept people just as you find them, regardless of differences. 😉🌅❣️
It’s exactly the same way here, Efrem. It’s been that way for quite a while and borders on paranoia
Sorry to hear that Lola.
We tend to pick up trends a little after the US and some other Western nations. But what starts at the top end of the world, always comes down under soon enough.
It’s doubly a pity because wokism stokes strife and discord among people at the outset. Then the dramatic acrimony of woke derision, causes a reaction against woke accusations and stops active problem solving from happening. There is no unity of purpose in such an adversarial socio-political climate.
😣🙏🏼❣️
My dear beautiful Efrem, it is sad indeed! Wokism is extraordinarily divisive, but that is in fact the entire point of it. It’s meant to be a way to divide us negatively, by race and gender and in any other way they can, so they can destroy the beautiful unity that has been the greatest strength of Western culture, both in the US and in Australia and other modern western countries. I’m glad the Aussies won’t fall for it! The actual point of wokism is to destroy our countries’ unity, and set ourselves at one another’s throats to such an extent that those who are behind all this (the Chinese first among them) will be able to take over our countries from within and make them collectivist. It isn’t hard to see the actor, the purpose, and the goal. And it won’t be hard to stop it if we simply will refuse to be divided!!
Quote from above: “We probably cannot with these limited earth-minds ever really figure it all out.”
Hi Roberta, hi everybody! There is an important and interesting twist at the conclusion of this musing on what it means that Jesus is always with us—and that is the somewhat baffling power of mystery. As my son has said, it is more informative to admit there are things we just don’t know (I am paraphrasing him).
Or, as my beloved guide has said, “You don’t know. You can’t know. And if you knew, you wouldn’t know.”
As Roberta points out, to understand that Divine Love is driving all of this may be the best understanding of all.
Hah! I love Arrow’s insight, my dear Mike! I have the sense from Thomas, too, that even though they are now in their greater minds and trying with a lot more mind-power, they don’t consider themselves to really be able to make sense of it all.
And there are hints, visible even from here if we look, that there is so much more going on and it is all so enticing! To share just one example:
Mikey Morgan says that we continue to grow and to move higher, forevermore. That statement from him confirms what I have long seen bits of evidence of, which is the suspicion that our Godhead – which is a Collective of Perfected Us – has a hierarchy above it of unimaginable power and glory. Who or What is the ultimate God? And is there one??
And ACIM says that we already are there… wherever the ultimate “there” is. Wow. The greatest and the most exciting and wondrous mystery tale of all turns out to be the one that you and are now living!!
I don’t think it’s possible to know certain things from our limited perspective here. I don’t think there are words in our vocabulary to explain such a thing. I think that is why there are many similarities between the physical and non physical world – at least up to a certain level of development – it would be impossible for us to understand anything beyond that until we have progressed to a much higher level, and simply impossible to explain while we are still in a physical environment.
Of course you’re right, my dear. And even more than you may know! The many and profound differences between living on earth and living in the astral plane and the afterlife – which actually comprise most of the reality of which we are aware – are so unbridgeable, in fact, that it goes both ways. My Thomas keeps reminding me that the reason why he needs to work through me is that, even in his greater mind and even when he lived on earth not so very long ago, he doesn’t trust in his memories of what it was like here enough for him to do anything here directly. I find that stunning, but he has a very good sense of when he knows enough to be able to direct our work, and when he can give me just parameters and then he has to step back and trust my instincts. Astonishing.
I can add to that. Arrow recruited me and some others to be on her “team” project to accomplish her own Cosmic assignment. We are their agents as much as they are our guides. Fancy that!♐️🦉
Not really too astonishing I think he chose you because you are a good writer. When you think about it, he would need someone like that to convey his thoughts in writing. Otherwise, he would be helpless in bridging the gap between “here” and “there”
Dear Lola, I think it’s more a chicken-and-egg thing with us. Thomas made me into a good writer. I have a separate writing team of three that is headed by an entity named Marvina, and they began in the seventies to semi-channel to me a series of novels that now includes six, with a seventh just written, and the series spans almost 500 years. They tell me there is one more now to come, which will begin in 2024. They tell me I am being given these novels because working on them relaxes me, but they have taught me to write so well! I couldn’t do what I do now without the tutelage of Marvina and her team, and the books they have been working on through me for more than 40 years.
With Thomas, too, there is an added factor. He and I have lived 17 lifetimes together, always as two males, and the project we are working on now has been a centerpiece for both of us. He got to the point of graduating from needing to incarnate before I did, so he is the guide and I am the active one now, but he tells me it could as easily have been the other way around.
I don’t know how many teams of guide and guided are longstanding friendships over many lifetimes, but I have come to suspect it might be rather common. It certainly makes for an easier and stronger but more relaxed relationship, when you can trust and rely on one another to this extent!
I have reason to believe my guide and I go “way back” but I don’t know exactly what that means in the midst of an infinite experience.
Heh – I know how you feel! This is such an intense relationship – between guide and guided – that it seems more and more likely to me that our guides are mostly close eternal friends. Even if we don’t have a daytime personal relationship, and our guide just works internally and we talk only while the guided member of the team goes out of body at night. The mutual trust and understanding required to do this relationship well is so much enhanced by a deep sense of closeness and long history!