When Jesus replaced all religious laws with God’s Law of Love, He abolished the notion of rules-based sin and created a whole new world in which right and wrong are based entirely on whether an act is loving or unloving. It is hard for us to get our minds around the magnitude of this change! And the consequences of it are such that it is going to take two weeks for us to start a conversation that is likely to continue beyond the rest of our lives. What we call divine laws are human-made. They have little to do with the genuine God. And doing away with them is the spiritual equivalent of being a sixteen-year-old at last entrusted with the car-keys. Humankind is growing up spiritually! And without those arbitrary laws that always have come between us and the Godhead, we can accept all the glorious opportunities and responsibilities that come with growing up. With those words from Jesus two thousand years ago, humankind was being ushered into the start of spiritual adulthood! That it has taken us two thousand years to accept God’s challenge that we at last grow up takes nothing from the sweetness of this moment. Today we will look at how we got to this place. Then next week we will start to consider how we might begin to accept God’s challenge.
From distant prehistoric times, humankind has dwelt in fear of a gigantic and highly adversarial Unknown. The result has been a lot of man-made superstitions and desperate beliefs in human-made gods that could let us put a name to our fears and give us a focus for rituals that might help us start to feel less helpless. Over time, what began as local gods and rituals were aggregated under regional gods, until eventually monotheism began to take root. One all-powerful god was easier to deal with than all those despotic demi-gods! The ancient Jewish tribes were among the first people to solidify their worship in one all-powerful god, so it makes sense that when the Godhead chose to elevate our understanding all over the world, it was to the Jews that Jesus came as God’s emissary.
There is no religion that really knows and can reveal to us the genuine Godhead. That fact is not a surprise to you. What may be something of a surprise will be learning that Jesus was not the first, nor is He the last divine being sent by God to start to spiritually elevate humankind! We know about Moses and the Buddha, and students of religion know that there have been many other prophets who brought their wisdom to primitive people, many of whom then soon built their own human-made religions around those bits of received divine wisdom. By now there are some 4,300 separate religions, the biggest of which have been broken into thousands of additional sects over time, so today Christianity alone boasts some 40,000 variations. Nearly all of our more than four thousand core religions were developed in isolation over eons, but in fact virtually every human religion is built around just one simple precept. If that precept was not given to us as many separate revelations over eons of time from the emissaries of a single Godhead, then how is it possible that more than four thousand religions have this one core teaching in common? Rabbi Hillel was a great Jewish sage who died in old age when Jesus was a teenager. He put that one ancient divine message this way: “That which is hateful to you, do not do to your fellow. That is the whole Torah; the rest is the explanation.”
All religions are built around the Golden Rule! And when every religion is built upon the simple divine revelation that we should do to others what we want others to do to us, then how is it possible that no modern religion makes the Golden Rule its primary teaching? Where do all those other religious dogmas come from? And beyond that, how can we explain the fact that all significant religions share the same five traits?
All modern religions of any size share the following characteristics:
They include one or more gods or godlike beings in human form. Often it is the emissary from the Godhead who brought to local people the Golden Rule who is then depicted as either the god or a leading servant of the god. The pictures that illustrate this week’s post are all examples of these gods and holy beings that were created in human form by people bent on building their own religions.
They require that their adherents believe things for which there is no proof. Every religion has a set of dogmas that its followers are required to take on faith. The god is powerful; the god dwells in a mountain, or it requires certain feast and fasting days; the god wants the sacrifice of each firstborn child, or the god died and was revived, and so on.
They demand adherence to a set of laws that they claim are of divine provenance. Every modern religion includes a set of laws that were purportedly handed down by its god. The Ten Commandments listed in the Christian Old Testament are a set of supposedly divine laws that have been in place for adherents of the Abrahamic religions with only modest variations for at least the past three thousand years.
They make big promises. The notion that we can survive our deaths if we strictly observe a religion’s dogmas is perhaps the most common such promise, but there are others. Human-made gods take care of their own, provided that their devotees remain forever those gods’ obedient and powerless servants.
They are based in fear and guilt. Christianity is a great example! Jesus came to us from God with a love-based and fear-free set of teachings. But no one takes a religion seriously unless it can instill in us guilt and fear, so in order to form their new religion, Christianity’s founders added Original Sin, a fiery hell, and the Lord’s crucifixion for our sins to save us from the judgment of a wrathful god. Christianity is fear and guilt on steroids.
It is striking that all modern religions share all (or nearly all) of the above five traits! There must be reasons why this is true, and indeed there are some excellent reasons. All these traits directly address central human needs or characteristics. Briefly:
Free will is a core element of the human condition. The spiritual growth that we all enter our lives on earth to seek requires that we expose ourselves to negativity so we can choose against it. The fact that free will is an essential part of being human means that we must also be able to choose not to listen to God’s emissaries; and if we choose against God, then neither God nor God’s minions will attempt to override us. They will just, with endless patience and over and over again, share with us divine wisdom that is suited to our stage of spiritual development. Which is why so many divine emissaries have been needed!
Every person on earth is vibrating at a relatively low level. We have talked endlessly about the fact that consciousness is all that objectively exists, and that we come to earth to growspiritually; and until we reach the upper part of what we call the afterlife levels, we are unable to raise our consciousness vibrations unless we are exposed to the sort of deep negativity that we can find on earth.
Human beings strive to organize information and minimize unknowns. We have always organized our understandings as best we could, and we have made educated guesses at the rest. Every god that human beings ever have believed in and worshiped has been a product of these educated guesses.
Voluntary human associations are unstable. People are stubbornly independent! The only human associations that are even remotely stable are those – like governments – which instill in us a fear of disobeying their leaders. No religion that doesn’t instill fear in its followers ever lasts for very long.
We are born with an eager craving to reunite with the Godhead. There is indeed one genuine God! Our minds are all inextricably part of that one infinitely powerful and infinitely creative force which continuously manifests this universe, so it is little wonder that an eventual reunion with God is a human need that we crave even more than we crave food and drink. The fact that no religion is capable of delivering reunion with the true Godhead because all of them are based in false doctrines is not the fault of the many divine messengers who over the eons have tried to enlighten us.
So now it is not much of a stretch for us to draw the following conclusions:
Every divine emissary in human history has come to us from the same Godhead.
Nearly all of them have given us some version of the same message.
There is therefore just one human religion that has nearly infinite cultural variations.
There being only one Godhead and one culturally varied religion, when Jesus came to replace the old notions of sin with God’s perfect Law of Love, He did that for every devotee of every religion upon the face of the earth.
Jesus came from the Source to lead all of humankind to the young-adult stage of our spiritual development. He came to hand us the keys to our lives! We are no longer to be forced by fear of divine retribution to obey a set of laws, as grade-school children are required to obey rules until they grow enough to be able to accept responsibility for their own actions.
To be frank, we don’t obey religious laws anyway. Read the Ten Commandments, for example. We see them as just suggestions, don’t we? All of us would kill to protect those we love, we honor our parents to the extent they are honorable, few of us adequately mark the Sabbath, and there is no human being who breathes who has never felt the pangs of jealousy. The Ten Commandments are just suggestions! And some of them are trivial ones. But we are told the Ten Commandments are laws from God, so their very existence instills in us both guilt and a smug self-satisfaction. Guilt if we violate maybe three or four commandments, but a “good enough” passing-grade satisfaction if we can minimally observe the other six or seven!
We must leave those old divine laws behind if we are ever to learn about divine love. Human-made rules and God’s infinite love are utterly incompatible. But with all rules gone, we find ourselves beginning to expand in powerful ways. We start to glimpse glorious new beginnings. It is only when we remove the human-made laws that long have come between us and God that we can truly meet and begin to know and love the genuine Godhead.
Dead Jesus statue photo credit: Stanley Zimny (Thank You for 46 Million views) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/82256086@N00/44105688010″>Colorful Pieta</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Egyptian gods photo credit: ER’s Eyes – Thanks for the 20 million views! <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/41111966@N04/45573493902″>The Old Gods, Alabaster Store, West Bank, Luxor, Egypt.</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Buddha photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/49325039632″>Buddha image at the Pavilion of the Enlightened in Muang Boran (Ancient City) in Samut Phrakan, Thailand</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Thai gods photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/49284244036″>Sculpture of Phra Sukra in the Garden of the Gods in Muang Boran in Samut Phrakan, Thailand</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Hindu gods photo credit: jay galvin <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/36957368@N00/48538681597″>Ganesha and Lakshmi – Hindu</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Neptune at sunset photo credit: virtualwayfarer <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/32368927@N02/31010151725″>Neptune at Sunset</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Cambodian gods photo credit: UweBKK (α 77 on ) <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/8136604@N05/44258795074″>Statues of Gods lining the causeway entering the ancient city of Angkor Thom near Siem Reap, Cambodia</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Greek gods at war photo credit: torbakhopper <a href=”http://www.flickr.com/photos/32029534@N00/24445037928″>gods in color @ the legion of honor, scott richard</a> via <a href=”http://photopin.com”>photopin</a> <a href=”https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/2.0/”>(license)</a>
Dear Roberta, I love this! It’s especially important to note that there is a series of incarnate visits by highly evolved beings to continually teach us the same thing: love everyone, everywhere; forgive everything, every time; live always by the principle that we are one in the same, because we are. They keep coming back to tell us that. They do not give up on us. Why would we give up on ourselves? Thank you for this.
Dear Mike, thank you for your lovely words! Part of my effort to get my mind around this topic was an attempt to better understand whether Jesus is indeed unique, or whether He came as one of many emissaries; and according to Thomas, Jesus is unique both in His message and in His place in the heavenly pantheon. He came from the highest aspect of the Godhead Collective, and His role was to do what I have set forth here: to free people from all religious rules so they can at last enter a closer and truly love-based relationship with the Godhead. The divine patience almost defies imagination! He told us all of this plainly 2000 years ago, but He has brought us along in our understanding so gradually, so tenderly. It is impossible for us to really understand how very deeply we are loved.
Yes. I didn’t realize that Jesus is so important, such a uniquely elevated being, until Thomas came out to me and then started talking about Him. That was when I began to capitalize the Lord’s pronouns ;-).
Great question, Thomas! Love is the highest consciousness vibration, and what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force that continuously manifests the reality that we experience in each micro-instant. So, yes indeed, love is the law of the universe, the highest vibration, and the greatest power of all! I think that nothing could manifest in its absence.
Creation by its nature wants to build up, change, grow and evolve forever to discover. To us, as a part of this creative activity, this of course feels like eternal support, encouragement…in short, LOVE! There can be no other divine relationship than that which feels like love.
Yes, dear Mike, true and profound. I think part of our challenge is the fact that what we familiarly call “love” is kind of an afterthought emotion in modern cultural life, and not very powerful at all. You can fall in and out of it easily; you just kind of have warm feelings and call that love. But in fact, the kind of love that Jesus teaches is the most powerful force there is! And it is inherent in all of us; we just have to activate and live it. But to call it “love” seems like too measly a word, somehow….
I like to reference the Greek words for love, of which there are four. The love that Jesus speaks of is called “agape”. No strings attached, forgiving, unconditional love, love that is greater than all others. Agape is the love we strive for.
Dear Roberta
Thank you, as always, for a thoughtful and thought-provoking post.
I re-read a pamphlet by Emmet Fox the other day on The Lord’s Prayer and it echoes your comments on the love, simplicity and uniqueness of the teachings of Jesus and the propensity of mankind to take these teachings and twist them into something else.
Forgive me for quoting directly from Fox’s writing but he makes the following point about Jesus’ teaching of The Lord’s Prayer:
“The Great Prayer is a compact formula for the development of the soul. It [was designed by Jesus] with the utmost care for the specific purpose; so that those who use it regularly, with understanding, will experience a real change of soul…
[Jesus] designed his Prayer in such a way that it would pass safely through the ages without being tampered with. He arranged it with consummate skill, so that it could not be twisted or distorted, or adapted to any man-made system; so that, in fact, it would carry the whole Christ Message within it, and yet not have anything on the surface to attract the attention of the restless, managing type of person.”
“The Great Prayer” – I love it! Yes, this is a nicely stated summary of what makes The Lord’s Prayer unique and important. I traveled far from it, actually, in my youth, before I realized within the last decade or so that it is in fact the perfect prayer. Now I pray it as an introduction to whatever are my current gratitude affirmations, every evening. And I feel fed!
My wife (especially so) and I have become very disheartened with religions. They all say “You must believe our way and obey our rules to get to heaven. That’s the only way!” We are both in our 60’s, so we’ve seen a lot of B. S..
I have been reading (and listening) to your book(s) on the Afterlife and have followed your reading suggestions and read more. I have found it difficult to talk to my wife about religion. I’m not sure how or what she is thinking! However, I have started to share with her some details of the Afterlife that I have learned and pondered. I have also shared your insights about how Jesus “changed the rules” with his two Commandments about love. My wife hasn’t commented a lot, but she has expressed how the info on the Afterlife and the move towards Love is everything, “makes sense.” Thank you for your years of Afterlife research and sharing. Thank you for your insights about the teachings of God and Jesus.
I have tried to love “my fellow man” more and pray for Divine Love. I can’t do much for others due to health issues, but I can pray for others when I hear of their needs for God’s comforting and compassion.
Dear David, thank you for this beautiful, thoughtful comment! When I first read it, I thought, “Now I know why I was born and why I have worked so hard at this: I am making a real difference for this good man.” I so much love it when that realization freshly dawns! Yes, what you are doing is just what you should be doing, dear one, and please don’t discount the wonderful work that you have done just to get to this place! If I ever can answer a question for you or for your wife, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m here!
One thing I always appreciated about The Lord’s Prayer is its gentle approach to the common concept of sin. It makes reference to trespasses as if one inadvertently walked on another’s property. At the same time it ackowledges that we are not perfect in our current state.
Thomas, some versions say “debts” which of course takes your point one step further. We once discussed the Aramaic-language version. That’s reconstituted by scholars and not the original, but the Aramaic version refers to detaching our faults, which goes further still.
True, dear Thomas, and a great observation! The Lord’s Prayer is yet more evidence that Jesus came to teach us that we are not “sinners” deserving of God’s judgment, but rather we are God’s beloved children and one another’s brothers and sisters. It’s a literal transformation!
Thanks Roberta. This is very thought provoking. From what I’ve gathered, God’s infinite love is more than our little human brains can fully comprehend or experience. In light of that, moving from arbitrary rules for baby humanity, to a more adult path or “Way” of love is huge, and exciting to contemplate. How do you picture that rolling out in practice, considering that we only have limited, finite knowledge and understanding, in a negativity filled world?
The best I can imagine so far is to always strive for an outcome that is for the highest good of all, since we are all one in God at the most basic level. This would still involve lots of tough choices for our soul learning. Of course, since our knowledge is finite and imperfect, there would be plenty of unanticipated negative consequences, but it seem to me that if everyone (ideally at least) operated constantly on that principle of the highest good, it would be a steadily self-correcting mechanism, and things would never get too far out of whack, with perfect love and forgiveness being the everpresent underlying goal.
Dear Scott, thank you for thinking about this so carefully! We are working on this problem now, and as we get into it I can see that it is a lot more complex than I had at first realized. For one thing, it will likely require a worldwide awakening at some level in order for us to be able to live functionally in the kind of rules-free reality that we all would prefer. What we are trying to do now is just to better find what might be the halfway point from here to there!
Thanks Roberta. It occurs to me that learning to be inspired by spirit and our guides, who see a much bigger picture, could be a real key in the whole process. My guides have given me the concept of “The Holy Spirit will come to you.” I found this a bit confusing, since the Holy Spirit has always been the most mysterious and nebulous third of the so-called Trinity, and is never discussed much. It may make more sense in light of this conversation. It comes up from time to time in the gospels in situations that are analogous. Do you (or anyone else reading) have any thoughts or insights as to what the Holy Spirit is?
Scott, the Holy Spirit is a way for us to talk about and envision God’s transformative nature within our own, in action. The Holy Spirit is our own best self, in action.
Dear Scott and Mike, what Christians call the Holy Spirit is actually God, according to the Gospel words themselves. Jesus said, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24). But of course first-century Jews were sure that God was a physical being, and that Jesus was the Son, so since Trinities were in vogue for religions at the time (e.g. the Egyptian trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus), the Council of Nicaea created its own Trinity for Christianity. There is no separate Holy Spirit, but rather the highest aspect of reality is the Collective Godhead, which is Spirit.
Thanks Mike and Roberta. This makes sense. Maybe my guides were making a point similar to one of the points you made last week, Roberta, that Jesus wanted us to learn to relate directly God, or Spirit with a capital S. That certainly gives extra meaning to the word, “inspired.” Maybe the Holy Spirit also, in the minds of the first Christians, related to an energetic manifestation of God, similar to what Eastern traditions have referred to as chi or prana. When the Romans co-opted Christianity, it would make sense that they tried to make it more like a goddess in one of those trinities. Isis worship was very popular in the empire in those days.
This is interesting, Roberta. It seems that since God was thought of as a separate being, they decided that Jesus must be his “son.” Also there were people back then who believed (and still do) that God manifested himself on earth as Jesus. This makes sense since they insisted that God was a separate entity. I’m also thinking that Jesus couldn’t explain the real truth about all this due to the probability of the Council of Nicea not accepting his explanation, and the repercussions would likely be enormous. Do you think that’s why the concept of the Trinity was so confusing? I would think that they would frown on the idea that we are all one with God, as it might have been considered blasphemy back then.
Brilliant blog post!!! Sincere thanks, as always, my dear friend, Roberta!
Thank you dearest Roberta for elucidating the big picture. You put it so beautifully and succinctly. I see that the essence of different human religions are one. Also, if you read across the different religions you can really see universal truth emerge from amid all that diversity. It’s amazing really.
I like to look at God as ‘Ruach HaKodesh’. That is the Holy Spirit in Hebrew. Also as ‘Wakhantanka’. As you know, this is the Great Spirit of the Lakota people et al; of the Native Americans of the Great Plains. That’s my way of seeing God as the union of Love and all that exists because Spirit infuses everything.
When I meditate/pray on the Spirit, including Jesus the Godhead, I always put the essence of myself in it too. (I was nudged to do this.) It feels as though the one who prays, the prayer and the One prayed to are one. It’s made a real difference inside, as I no longer feel separate from Spirit. As part of the whole, I can no longer see myself as inadequate, faulty or insipid. I just bundle myself into the Divine and focus on that.
…Just sayin’. 😉
❣️🙏🏼🕊
Yes, dear Efrem! The one who prays, the prayer, and the One prayed to are one. This is universally true!! And I love the notion of bundling yourself in with the Divine ;-). Love it!
So it seems like the concept of a Trinity is not so complex after all. In the case of Jesus you have the Father Godhead, the person Jesus capable of great things since he is filled with the spirit of God and the Holy Spirit being the connecting force between the two entities, somewhat like electricity.
Dear Tom, in fact the notion of a Trinity is a purely human invention. There is one God, and God is Spirit, as Jesus tells us in the Gospels. Jesus came to us from the very highest aspect of the Godhead, so in reality there is no distinction between Jesus and the God of which He is a part. God is One, and God is all. This is a primary topic of my post for Sunday, so please stay tuned … 😉
Thanks, Tom, for your wonderful explanation of the Trinity. I always wondered just what that was and how it worked, but your explanation makes perfect sense.
… except that the Trinity was created out of whole cloth three centuries after the death of Jesus. It is a purely religious fiction, and it is important now that we look to the Gospels more closely so we can at last really understand what is going on!
Oh my gosh. I didn’t know it was created so long after the death of Jesus. This means that he likely never even mentioned it. All this time I thought there was some deep hidden meaning to it. Thanks so much for mentioning this.
No, dear Lola, He never did mention it. In fact, no such thing as the Trinity the way the religion has portrayed it has ever existed! To be frank, trinities in religions were relatively common at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, and I have thought since college that the worthies gathered there were looking for selling points for their new religion. Someone must have said, “Hey! We’ve got kind of a trinity, too! Let’s use that!” And thus was another dogma born….
Yeah I agree. They used it to lure people into their new religion. You might have had the same thing happen as I did due to your attendance at Catholic schools, but when I was a kid, the nuns all acted like the Trinity was some kind of divine law that was introduced by Jesus, and all that time, it was made up to attract followers – especially if it was a “fad” back then to have a sort of trinity. I can now see why that concept was so confusing, especially to children.
Oh my yes, dear Lola. I was a Protestant as a child, but later I was a Catholic Lector who had three children in parochial school, and even then I was reading the Bible from cover to cover and having trouble with a lot of the religion! But I loved my husband, and I wasn’t yet feeling called. I wince to think about it now!
Hi Roberta, This has been fascinating. Since they started it, I thought I should ask my “team” what they were getting at by Holy Spirit, and more specifically, what it would have meant to the earliest followers of Jesus, leaving aside all this later Trinity stuff. For what it is worth, take it or leave it, this is what I got. At the human level, it meant the aureole or circle of energy that develops at the top of the head as we cleanse our energy and raise our vibrations, like the halo. On the larger scale it is God’s creative force or essence, that which brings manifestation into being. (It seems lo me this corresponds,
as you have described, to the highest vibratory level, or Infinite Love. This may be like what the Jewish mystical tradition would come to call Shekinah or Tantra calls Shakti. These tend to be assigned a feminine aspect, probably arbitrarily, since God doesn’t really have gender, which could have helped lead to the later conflation with pagan trinities.) I very much look forward to your part two next week. Thanks for all you do. 🙂
While the trinity concept is a human invention, it does represent an attempt to explain in human terms truths beyond our human level of existence. Like many other religious “truths” it is often portrayed as a “mystery” to entice the unwary. The concept of mystery implies something that cannot be fully understood and should be approached with awe and wonder. It seems organized religions prefer we do not understand the true meaning behind such truths or “mysteries” as this diminishes our need for their services.
This is a good point. Introducing a “mystery” to any religion is enticing to most human beings. It also promotes fear, which is the basis for most religions, as one would naturally fear something unexplainable, thus keeping people “in line” and more dependent on whatever religion they practice.
Dear Roberta, There is a lot about “vibrations” in this blog and I do think I get the concept that a low (or slow?) vibration corresponds to fear whereas a high (fast?) vibration corresponds to love. What I don’t get is what is actually vibrating. I realize that it probably does matter; that the takeaway is to strive for higher vibrations through meditation and other means, but I just have some curiosity about this topic. I’d just like to know.
Hi Cookie! Actually, everything vibrates to some extent – even matter; but energy vibrates especially, and consciousness is an energy-like potentiality. Yes, a low vibratory rate is slow while a higher rate is faster. And actually, you can feel the difference! When you are fearful or very angry, you feel weaker, more helpless, even logy. Low-vibration emotions are ishy to experience. When you are living in love, however, you feel lighter, happy, revved-up, even joyous! It’s that lifted sense of an elevated vibratory rate that we all should be going for, seeking to experience it all the time; and as we do, we begin to feel addicted to it, so more and more we practice maintaining that set point. This is why learning prevenient forgiveness is so important, since being angry will knock your vibratory rate right down. It’s pretty easy, really!
You can find Roberta’s radio show and podcast posted freshly each Monday on Webtalkradio.net. If there is any guest you would like her to interview, or anything you hope she will talk about, please send your suggestions via the Contact block!
When Jesus replaced all religious laws with God’s Law of Love, He abolished the notion of rules-based sin and created a whole new world in which right and wrong are based entirely on whether an act is loving or unloving. It is hard for us to get our minds around the magnitude of this change! And the consequences of it are such that it is going to take two weeks for us to start a conversation that is likely to continue beyond the rest of our lives. What we call divine laws are human-made. They have little to do with the genuine God. And doing away with them is the spiritual equivalent of being a sixteen-year-old at last entrusted with the car-keys. Humankind is growing up spiritually! And without those arbitrary laws that always have come between us and the Godhead, we can accept all the glorious opportunities and responsibilities that come with growing up. With those words from Jesus two thousand years ago, humankind was being ushered into the start of spiritual adulthood! That it has taken us two thousand years to accept God’s challenge that we at last grow up takes nothing from the sweetness of this moment. Today we will look at how we got to this place. Then next week we will start to consider how we might begin to accept God’s challenge.
Over time, what began as local gods and rituals were aggregated under regional gods, until eventually monotheism began to take root. One all-powerful god was easier to deal with than all those despotic demi-gods! The ancient Jewish tribes were among the first people to solidify their worship in one all-powerful god, so it makes sense that when the Godhead chose to elevate our understanding all over the world, it was to the Jews that Jesus came as God’s emissary.
All religions are built around the Golden Rule! And when every religion is built upon the simple divine revelation that we should do to others what we want others to do to us, then how is it possible that no modern religion makes the Golden Rule its primary teaching? Where do all those other religious dogmas come from? And beyond that, how can we explain the fact that all significant religions share the same five traits?
handed down by its god. The Ten Commandments listed in the Christian Old Testament are a set of supposedly divine laws that have been in place for adherents of the Abrahamic religions with only modest variations for at least the past three thousand years.
It is striking that all modern religions share all (or nearly all) of the above five traits! There must be reasons why this is true, and indeed there are some excellent reasons. All these traits directly address central human needs or characteristics. Briefly:
those – like governments – which instill in us a fear of disobeying their leaders. No religion that doesn’t instill fear in its followers ever lasts for very long.
Jesus came from the Source to lead all of humankind to the young-adult stage of our spiritual development. He came to hand us the keys to our lives! We are no longer to be forced by fear of divine retribution to obey a set of laws, as grade-school children are required to obey rules until they grow enough to be able to accept responsibility for their own actions.
observe the other six or seven!
Dear Roberta, I love this! It’s especially important to note that there is a series of incarnate visits by highly evolved beings to continually teach us the same thing: love everyone, everywhere; forgive everything, every time; live always by the principle that we are one in the same, because we are. They keep coming back to tell us that. They do not give up on us. Why would we give up on ourselves? Thank you for this.
PS- I really like the photos of the many cultural artifacts of how humans envision “god” around the world! Very interesting.
And I enjoyed looking for those statues of gods as well! I remembered them so fondly from college, and fortunately Photopin had some great ones 😉
Dear Mike, thank you for your lovely words! Part of my effort to get my mind around this topic was an attempt to better understand whether Jesus is indeed unique, or whether He came as one of many emissaries; and according to Thomas, Jesus is unique both in His message and in His place in the heavenly pantheon. He came from the highest aspect of the Godhead Collective, and His role was to do what I have set forth here: to free people from all religious rules so they can at last enter a closer and truly love-based relationship with the Godhead. The divine patience almost defies imagination! He told us all of this plainly 2000 years ago, but He has brought us along in our understanding so gradually, so tenderly. It is impossible for us to really understand how very deeply we are loved.
We know He is known as “the Master” in the higher levels, and no wonder!
Yes. I didn’t realize that Jesus is so important, such a uniquely elevated being, until Thomas came out to me and then started talking about Him. That was when I began to capitalize the Lord’s pronouns ;-).
Is it reasonable to conclude that love is the law of the universe which might well cease to exist as we know it in the absence of such love?
Great question, Thomas! Love is the highest consciousness vibration, and what we experience as human consciousness is the base creative force that continuously manifests the reality that we experience in each micro-instant. So, yes indeed, love is the law of the universe, the highest vibration, and the greatest power of all! I think that nothing could manifest in its absence.
Creation by its nature wants to build up, change, grow and evolve forever to discover. To us, as a part of this creative activity, this of course feels like eternal support, encouragement…in short, LOVE! There can be no other divine relationship than that which feels like love.
Yes, dear Mike, true and profound. I think part of our challenge is the fact that what we familiarly call “love” is kind of an afterthought emotion in modern cultural life, and not very powerful at all. You can fall in and out of it easily; you just kind of have warm feelings and call that love. But in fact, the kind of love that Jesus teaches is the most powerful force there is! And it is inherent in all of us; we just have to activate and live it. But to call it “love” seems like too measly a word, somehow….
Hi Roberta,
I like to reference the Greek words for love, of which there are four. The love that Jesus speaks of is called “agape”. No strings attached, forgiving, unconditional love, love that is greater than all others. Agape is the love we strive for.
Dear Roberta
Thank you, as always, for a thoughtful and thought-provoking post.
I re-read a pamphlet by Emmet Fox the other day on The Lord’s Prayer and it echoes your comments on the love, simplicity and uniqueness of the teachings of Jesus and the propensity of mankind to take these teachings and twist them into something else.
Forgive me for quoting directly from Fox’s writing but he makes the following point about Jesus’ teaching of The Lord’s Prayer:
“The Great Prayer is a compact formula for the development of the soul. It [was designed by Jesus] with the utmost care for the specific purpose; so that those who use it regularly, with understanding, will experience a real change of soul…
[Jesus] designed his Prayer in such a way that it would pass safely through the ages without being tampered with. He arranged it with consummate skill, so that it could not be twisted or distorted, or adapted to any man-made system; so that, in fact, it would carry the whole Christ Message within it, and yet not have anything on the surface to attract the attention of the restless, managing type of person.”
Wonderfully stated, don’t you think?
Love and blessings always,
Kristian
“The Great Prayer” – I love it! Yes, this is a nicely stated summary of what makes The Lord’s Prayer unique and important. I traveled far from it, actually, in my youth, before I realized within the last decade or so that it is in fact the perfect prayer. Now I pray it as an introduction to whatever are my current gratitude affirmations, every evening. And I feel fed!
Dear Roberta,
My wife (especially so) and I have become very disheartened with religions. They all say “You must believe our way and obey our rules to get to heaven. That’s the only way!” We are both in our 60’s, so we’ve seen a lot of B. S..
I have been reading (and listening) to your book(s) on the Afterlife and have followed your reading suggestions and read more. I have found it difficult to talk to my wife about religion. I’m not sure how or what she is thinking! However, I have started to share with her some details of the Afterlife that I have learned and pondered. I have also shared your insights about how Jesus “changed the rules” with his two Commandments about love. My wife hasn’t commented a lot, but she has expressed how the info on the Afterlife and the move towards Love is everything, “makes sense.” Thank you for your years of Afterlife research and sharing. Thank you for your insights about the teachings of God and Jesus.
I have tried to love “my fellow man” more and pray for Divine Love. I can’t do much for others due to health issues, but I can pray for others when I hear of their needs for God’s comforting and compassion.
Thank you again,
Love, David
Dear David, thank you for this beautiful, thoughtful comment! When I first read it, I thought, “Now I know why I was born and why I have worked so hard at this: I am making a real difference for this good man.” I so much love it when that realization freshly dawns! Yes, what you are doing is just what you should be doing, dear one, and please don’t discount the wonderful work that you have done just to get to this place! If I ever can answer a question for you or for your wife, please don’t hesitate to reach out. I’m here!
One thing I always appreciated about The Lord’s Prayer is its gentle approach to the common concept of sin. It makes reference to trespasses as if one inadvertently walked on another’s property. At the same time it ackowledges that we are not perfect in our current state.
Thomas, some versions say “debts” which of course takes your point one step further. We once discussed the Aramaic-language version. That’s reconstituted by scholars and not the original, but the Aramaic version refers to detaching our faults, which goes further still.
True, dear Thomas, and a great observation! The Lord’s Prayer is yet more evidence that Jesus came to teach us that we are not “sinners” deserving of God’s judgment, but rather we are God’s beloved children and one another’s brothers and sisters. It’s a literal transformation!
Thanks Roberta. This is very thought provoking. From what I’ve gathered, God’s infinite love is more than our little human brains can fully comprehend or experience. In light of that, moving from arbitrary rules for baby humanity, to a more adult path or “Way” of love is huge, and exciting to contemplate. How do you picture that rolling out in practice, considering that we only have limited, finite knowledge and understanding, in a negativity filled world?
The best I can imagine so far is to always strive for an outcome that is for the highest good of all, since we are all one in God at the most basic level. This would still involve lots of tough choices for our soul learning. Of course, since our knowledge is finite and imperfect, there would be plenty of unanticipated negative consequences, but it seem to me that if everyone (ideally at least) operated constantly on that principle of the highest good, it would be a steadily self-correcting mechanism, and things would never get too far out of whack, with perfect love and forgiveness being the everpresent underlying goal.
Dear Scott, thank you for thinking about this so carefully! We are working on this problem now, and as we get into it I can see that it is a lot more complex than I had at first realized. For one thing, it will likely require a worldwide awakening at some level in order for us to be able to live functionally in the kind of rules-free reality that we all would prefer. What we are trying to do now is just to better find what might be the halfway point from here to there!
Thanks Roberta. It occurs to me that learning to be inspired by spirit and our guides, who see a much bigger picture, could be a real key in the whole process. My guides have given me the concept of “The Holy Spirit will come to you.” I found this a bit confusing, since the Holy Spirit has always been the most mysterious and nebulous third of the so-called Trinity, and is never discussed much. It may make more sense in light of this conversation. It comes up from time to time in the gospels in situations that are analogous. Do you (or anyone else reading) have any thoughts or insights as to what the Holy Spirit is?
Scott, the Holy Spirit is a way for us to talk about and envision God’s transformative nature within our own, in action. The Holy Spirit is our own best self, in action.
Dear Scott and Mike, what Christians call the Holy Spirit is actually God, according to the Gospel words themselves. Jesus said, “God is spirit, and those who worship him must worship in spirit and truth” (JN 4:24). But of course first-century Jews were sure that God was a physical being, and that Jesus was the Son, so since Trinities were in vogue for religions at the time (e.g. the Egyptian trinity of Osiris, Isis, and Horus), the Council of Nicaea created its own Trinity for Christianity. There is no separate Holy Spirit, but rather the highest aspect of reality is the Collective Godhead, which is Spirit.
Thanks Mike and Roberta. This makes sense. Maybe my guides were making a point similar to one of the points you made last week, Roberta, that Jesus wanted us to learn to relate directly God, or Spirit with a capital S. That certainly gives extra meaning to the word, “inspired.” Maybe the Holy Spirit also, in the minds of the first Christians, related to an energetic manifestation of God, similar to what Eastern traditions have referred to as chi or prana. When the Romans co-opted Christianity, it would make sense that they tried to make it more like a goddess in one of those trinities. Isis worship was very popular in the empire in those days.
This is interesting, Roberta. It seems that since God was thought of as a separate being, they decided that Jesus must be his “son.” Also there were people back then who believed (and still do) that God manifested himself on earth as Jesus. This makes sense since they insisted that God was a separate entity. I’m also thinking that Jesus couldn’t explain the real truth about all this due to the probability of the Council of Nicea not accepting his explanation, and the repercussions would likely be enormous. Do you think that’s why the concept of the Trinity was so confusing? I would think that they would frown on the idea that we are all one with God, as it might have been considered blasphemy back then.
Brilliant blog post!!! Sincere thanks, as always, my dear friend, Roberta!
Oh my dear Deanna, thank you! You always make me smile ;-).
Thank you dearest Roberta for elucidating the big picture. You put it so beautifully and succinctly. I see that the essence of different human religions are one. Also, if you read across the different religions you can really see universal truth emerge from amid all that diversity. It’s amazing really.
I like to look at God as ‘Ruach HaKodesh’. That is the Holy Spirit in Hebrew. Also as ‘Wakhantanka’. As you know, this is the Great Spirit of the Lakota people et al; of the Native Americans of the Great Plains. That’s my way of seeing God as the union of Love and all that exists because Spirit infuses everything.
When I meditate/pray on the Spirit, including Jesus the Godhead, I always put the essence of myself in it too. (I was nudged to do this.) It feels as though the one who prays, the prayer and the One prayed to are one. It’s made a real difference inside, as I no longer feel separate from Spirit. As part of the whole, I can no longer see myself as inadequate, faulty or insipid. I just bundle myself into the Divine and focus on that.
…Just sayin’. 😉
❣️🙏🏼🕊
Yes, dear Efrem! The one who prays, the prayer, and the One prayed to are one. This is universally true!! And I love the notion of bundling yourself in with the Divine ;-). Love it!
So it seems like the concept of a Trinity is not so complex after all. In the case of Jesus you have the Father Godhead, the person Jesus capable of great things since he is filled with the spirit of God and the Holy Spirit being the connecting force between the two entities, somewhat like electricity.
Dear Tom, in fact the notion of a Trinity is a purely human invention. There is one God, and God is Spirit, as Jesus tells us in the Gospels. Jesus came to us from the very highest aspect of the Godhead, so in reality there is no distinction between Jesus and the God of which He is a part. God is One, and God is all. This is a primary topic of my post for Sunday, so please stay tuned … 😉
Thanks, Tom, for your wonderful explanation of the Trinity. I always wondered just what that was and how it worked, but your explanation makes perfect sense.
… except that the Trinity was created out of whole cloth three centuries after the death of Jesus. It is a purely religious fiction, and it is important now that we look to the Gospels more closely so we can at last really understand what is going on!
Oh my gosh. I didn’t know it was created so long after the death of Jesus. This means that he likely never even mentioned it. All this time I thought there was some deep hidden meaning to it. Thanks so much for mentioning this.
No, dear Lola, He never did mention it. In fact, no such thing as the Trinity the way the religion has portrayed it has ever existed! To be frank, trinities in religions were relatively common at the time of the Council of Nicaea in 325, and I have thought since college that the worthies gathered there were looking for selling points for their new religion. Someone must have said, “Hey! We’ve got kind of a trinity, too! Let’s use that!” And thus was another dogma born….
Yeah I agree. They used it to lure people into their new religion. You might have had the same thing happen as I did due to your attendance at Catholic schools, but when I was a kid, the nuns all acted like the Trinity was some kind of divine law that was introduced by Jesus, and all that time, it was made up to attract followers – especially if it was a “fad” back then to have a sort of trinity. I can now see why that concept was so confusing, especially to children.
Oh my yes, dear Lola. I was a Protestant as a child, but later I was a Catholic Lector who had three children in parochial school, and even then I was reading the Bible from cover to cover and having trouble with a lot of the religion! But I loved my husband, and I wasn’t yet feeling called. I wince to think about it now!
Hi Roberta, This has been fascinating. Since they started it, I thought I should ask my “team” what they were getting at by Holy Spirit, and more specifically, what it would have meant to the earliest followers of Jesus, leaving aside all this later Trinity stuff. For what it is worth, take it or leave it, this is what I got. At the human level, it meant the aureole or circle of energy that develops at the top of the head as we cleanse our energy and raise our vibrations, like the halo. On the larger scale it is God’s creative force or essence, that which brings manifestation into being. (It seems lo me this corresponds,
as you have described, to the highest vibratory level, or Infinite Love. This may be like what the Jewish mystical tradition would come to call Shekinah or Tantra calls Shakti. These tend to be assigned a feminine aspect, probably arbitrarily, since God doesn’t really have gender, which could have helped lead to the later conflation with pagan trinities.) I very much look forward to your part two next week. Thanks for all you do. 🙂
Heh – dear Scott, I’m looking forward to Part Two as well 😉
While the trinity concept is a human invention, it does represent an attempt to explain in human terms truths beyond our human level of existence. Like many other religious “truths” it is often portrayed as a “mystery” to entice the unwary. The concept of mystery implies something that cannot be fully understood and should be approached with awe and wonder. It seems organized religions prefer we do not understand the true meaning behind such truths or “mysteries” as this diminishes our need for their services.
This is a good point. Introducing a “mystery” to any religion is enticing to most human beings. It also promotes fear, which is the basis for most religions, as one would naturally fear something unexplainable, thus keeping people “in line” and more dependent on whatever religion they practice.
Yep. Mystery and fear, which is the exact opposite of what clergymen should be giving out. They should be freely dispensing love and truth!
Dear Roberta, There is a lot about “vibrations” in this blog and I do think I get the concept that a low (or slow?) vibration corresponds to fear whereas a high (fast?) vibration corresponds to love. What I don’t get is what is actually vibrating. I realize that it probably does matter; that the takeaway is to strive for higher vibrations through meditation and other means, but I just have some curiosity about this topic. I’d just like to know.
Cookie
Hi Cookie! Actually, everything vibrates to some extent – even matter; but energy vibrates especially, and consciousness is an energy-like potentiality. Yes, a low vibratory rate is slow while a higher rate is faster. And actually, you can feel the difference! When you are fearful or very angry, you feel weaker, more helpless, even logy. Low-vibration emotions are ishy to experience. When you are living in love, however, you feel lighter, happy, revved-up, even joyous! It’s that lifted sense of an elevated vibratory rate that we all should be going for, seeking to experience it all the time; and as we do, we begin to feel addicted to it, so more and more we practice maintaining that set point. This is why learning prevenient forgiveness is so important, since being angry will knock your vibratory rate right down. It’s pretty easy, really!