Posted by Roberta Grimes • April 10, 2021 • 58 Comments
Jesus, The Source
Love’s redeeming work is done, Alleluia!
Fought the fight, the battle won, Alleluia!
Death in vain forbids him rise, Alleluia!
Christ has opened paradise, Alleluia!
Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)
All the gods that we ever have worshiped have been human–made. This is true even of the Christian God, who is based on the ancient Hebrew Yahweh. We have imagined the modern versions of our gods to be less cruel and a lot less scary, but still their ancient shape remains. And now I am wondering why. Humanity has long since split the atom, journeyed to the moon, even begun to cure cancer; but still we envision the same static God for whom the first Christian martyrs died. We haven’t even progressed to the much more loving God-just-as-Spirit that Jesus introduced! Despite the tweaks of the Protestant Reformation, we still adhere to basically the same Christianity that ruled by superstitious terror, carried out the barbaric Crusades, and tortured and burned many infidels alive.
But why should it still have to be this way, when at last we know that there actually is a genuine Creator God unlike any god that any religion has imagined? Being reminded last week of the staggering eternal importance of the Easter events that we never could have fully appreciated until after the twenty-first century began has made me think that it might be time for us to reconsider everything. Two thousand years ago the Godhead directly intervened in human history in a way that was designed to be fully obvious to us only two thousand years later. It was a genuine divine revelation! But then, as with every other religion, Christianity was created and soon frozen in time. Its dogmas have changed little in a thousand years. If God was watching our subsequent progress and later judged that the time was right for another major revelation, then unfortunately God would have been out of luck because the religion based in the incomparable divine events that were the life and teachings of Jesus has been sealed by its people for all time. If the Godhead has something more to say, how will any of us ever hear it? Isn’t it time for us to start to try to better understand what the living God actually wants?
Albert Einstein was a gigantic intellect, but at heart he was a relatable guy. One day in 1925 as he shared a walk with a young student he said to her, “I want to know how God created this world. I’m not interested in this or that phenomenon, in the spectrum of this or that element. I want to know His thoughts. The rest are just details.” How perfectly wise he was! And now you and I want to know God’s thoughts about the Godhead’s eternal plan for humankind. We aren’t interested in physics, which turns out to be a mere detail of this limited illusion that seems to be solid but in fact is not. Nothing physical is objectively real, since all that actually exists is Mind; and the laws and details of human physics seem more and more to be just the Godhead’s inventions to keep us amused and distracted. And of course that raises yet another question! There have been increasing hints that the Godhead is a Collective of Perfected Beings that is continuously creating the universe freshly in each instant of artificial time, and is steadily making our past more complex in what seems to be an effort to stay ahead of our attempts to figure things out. But why is that? What on earth is going on?
A quick perusal of our archive here reveals that we have asked variations of these biggest of all human questions many times, but always just in limited ways. It seems that we had to tackle this process in pieces and build toward even knowing how to ask the biggest questions. And beings who are no longer in bodies have lately been telling us that the limited aspects of our vast, eternal minds that we bring into these material bodies are meant just for efficient spiritual learning. They say that we cannot possibly expect to use such puny earth-minds to address the very biggest things!
That may be true. But we are not deterred. Jesus invites us to
ask our questions, not suggesting that we limit them by size; and already our trusting Him to give us answers has yielded some amazing insights! He says, “Ask, and it will be given to you; seek, and you will find; knock, and it will be opened to you. For everyone who asks receives, and he who seeks finds, and to him who knocks it will be opened” (MT 7:7-8). So now we ask Him to help us find some answers to the biggest questions of all, while knowing that we won’t fully understand whatever answers we might find. We trust that over time our perceptions will grow. And finally, when at last we get to go home, we are assured that we will know it all! Here is one way that we might frame our primary question:
How is the Godhead involved in human affairs?
This always has been humanity’s core question, even though we seldom have posed it as a question. Religions have assumed all kinds of things, from gods that deal minutely with every one of our individual wishes and needs to gods that hold us on the edge of disaster and require that we placate them by throwing our firstborn infants into their belly of fire. The Christian version of God is both gods at once, since we confidently pray for things like no rain for some event on Thursday while we also know that because of Adam’s sin we might wind up burning in hell forever. And I cannot recall even once in all my years of being a practicing Christian being told that we should, in complete love and trust, pray only and always for what God wants!
No, that is not quite true. In the greatest prayer ever imagined, the prayer that God in Human Form taught us to pray, we do say “Thy will be done.” But have we ever seen any Christian take those words seriously enough to stop asking God for anything else?
Last week we talked about the life of Jesus. We know now that there was a time when the highest aspect of the Godhead lived a whole life as a human being in an effort to understand us on our own terms. And we are told that Jesus did that so He could then teach us how we could better grow spiritually. Knowing what we know now, it is not an overreach for us to see the life of Jesus on earth as a hinge of human history, since it was the first moment when we could have ceased our endless religious floundering and begun a real relationship with the genuine Godhead.
But, why then? And why just once? And also, here is an astounding question: Why was evidence given to us way back then in all the details of the Shroud of Turin that we would be unable to see as key evidence for an additional two thousand years?
Since it is reasonable to assume there may be a divine plan, how does that singular gigantic event two thousand years ago fit with whatever came before it, and also fit with whatever divine events may have come after it? It seems to be extremely important that we seek now to know as much as we can! We have talked here about human religious history, but always just from our human perspective. Even when we thought we saw God taking some role, we clueless human beings have applied that role to whatever particular religious tradition we personally most favored. This is why Christians love the new evidence provided by the Shroud of Turin! They don’t yet see it as the reproof to all of Christian history that it might well be.
These musings are not sacrilegious. They are instead the height of loving respect for the only genuine Godhead! As humankind still continues to worship human-made gods in the very same ways that our human-made religions already were prescribing to us many centuries ago, we tell ourselves that we are honoring the genuine God. In fact, we are doing nothing of the kind. Instead, we are smugly telling God that we already know what God wants from us!
That fact is indisputably true. No clergyman can deny it! Many years ago, as I was converting to Catholicism and trying to do my best at it, I asked my priest a great many of the same questions that we have been asking here. And soon his answer was automatic. No matter what I asked him, he would simply say, “That is what we believe. You’re going to have to accept it.” Which is precisely the same thing that all our religions are saying now to the genuine Godhead! Every religious person is always telling God that we already know what God wants. And maybe we do, since after all Christians believe that God ‘inspired” all the councilors at the First Council of Nicaea. And perhaps all the other Christian councils, too. Maybe God has been whispering in human ears every one of the times that anyone on earth has assumed that any event at all has actually been a new divine revelation, from the Buddha’s moment of murmuring “I am awake” some five hundred years before the Lord was born to the amazing discovery of messages on “golden plates” in New York State in 1830. And we could name fifty other such “divine revelations,” just off the top of our heads! Convincing people we have received the Divine Word of God and then starting or revising some religion or other has long been a productive and highly satisfying role in life for a great many people.
But in trying to contain God in all these tens of thousands of human-made religious variations, we have been closing our minds and hearts to the love and guidance of the genuine Godhead. So we ought to begin to ask the question that we should have been asking all along:
How has God been relating to us?
I realize now that I was first prompted by Thomas to begin working toward asking these questions a couple of years ago, when I stopped blogging just when I got around to it and began to do it religiously (sorry!) each week. And just as I didn’t know where that was heading, so I have no idea where this is heading now.
But I do know that it is long past time for us to seek to know the genuine Godhead. Unless we at least attempt to understand what has been going on from God’s perspective, we will remain stuck forever in these human-made religions that will let us pursue a relationship with God only from our own perspective. And what kind of a one-sided love is that?
As Moses is quoted as having put it to the Israelites before they entered their Promised Land 3250 years ago, “The eternal God is a refuge, and underneath are the everlasting arms” (Deut 33:27). If there ever has been a time in the past three thousand years when all of humankind together desperately needed the comfort and safety of the genuine Godhead’s everlasting arms, it is now….
Lives again our glorious King, Alleluia!
Where, O death, is now thy sting? Alleluia!
Once he died our souls to save, Alleluia!
Where’s thy victory, boasting grave? Alleluia!
Charles Wesley (1707-1788), from “Christ the Lord Is Risen Today” (1739)
Thanks so much Roberta. This week’s blog is like a Godsend for me! It really gets to the nub of what’s been bothering me lately. How does a modern version of The Way avoid just becomming another fly in amber? More and more, what obsesses me is what I think you’re getting at here, the question of how to align my will with God’s will, that Will being something which I obviously can’t comprehend or encompass in my small human brain. The question arises in my mind as, “How may I be guided, in each moment, by the Christ?” Is that even possible? I hope so. It seems to me that living that way, learning to constantly flow with it like the river of Christ Consciousness, or the flow of the quantum field, or whatever it is, (This is the sort of imagery my guides have been giving, but I still don’t really know what they’re getting at) is the only way to keep the Way fresh and evergreen, relevant and pefectly tailored to each participant as an aspect, or arising, of that greater Mind. I really look forward to what ideas you and Thomas will have along these lines in the future.
Dear Scott, you understand the problem exactly! Even very hopeful attempts in just the past century to build a real relationship with Spirit – Spiritualism, the Unity movement – have ended up not evergreen and growing, but sadly frozen in time and now paralyzed in the receding past. But, why?
I think that “fly in amber” problem comes from the fact that people always have treated every perceived contact from God as an extraordinary isolated event to be preserved and treasured for its own sake. Not as the opening to a new conversation, and not even as evidence that God is real so there is a lot more to come from God, but as some sort of miracle that likely won’t happen again. It is such a profound lack of trust that God can hold up God’s end of whatever deal God is attempting to make with us!
But why is that? I think it likely is because we are so afraid that maybe God actually isn’t real. We are preserving our own hopes that were uplifted by whatever evidence was the original fly by closing off the possibility that any adverse evidence ever will turn up. I don’t know for certain. I only know that the whole phenomenon of religion-creation is something gigantic that human beings always have done wrong in our relationship with the genuine, eternal God! We can’t control that relationship, so therefore as a species we never really let it get started. Instead, we frame whatever contact we once had with God and hang it on the wall and use it to comfort ourselves. Very strange and sad. And not a phenomenon to be disregarded, since until we figure out how to avoid it, then even the Lord’s Way is going to be just one more dead fly!
We are mostly abandoned by God and higher entities in this dimension.
Oh my, God does not abandon His creations. It’s as Lola said, it only appears that way. If you accept that Heaven is a domain of bliss, and we come from there and then return after life here, then what is the purpose of this Earth life? Surely not to replicate existence in Heaven.
So life here is by design a stressed opportunity for spiritual growth and for appreciating eternal life in Heaven.
Dear Jack, of course you are right. This week I am trying to ask a different question, though, and perhaps not phrasing it very well. What I’m trying to understand is how God sees this relationship. And I’m trying to divine that in the only way that we can, which is by respectful observation. Perhaps it’s something like studying some exotic animal. Put a tiger in a cage so we can easily study it, and we just see it pacing and lying around. We can’t study a tiger on our own terms! But if we observe a tiger in the wild for a year, trying always to respect it enough to keep entirely out of its way, we will come to understand that tiger a whole lot better!
It is one of my present theories that our relationship with God has never become a real relationship because we never have respected God enough to do anything except to put God in the cage of whatever has been our preferred religion. But what if we instead respect God enough to really try to study God “in the wild”?
Hello.
Would you mind elaborating on your statement? I haven’t seen you on here before, and I only appear on here sometimes, but Hello!🙂 One thing Roberta Grimes does is try to respond to every post on here, and she has written about channeling at least one book, Liberating Jesus, so her experience is different from your statement. What is your experience?
Jason, Roberta has graciously permitted me frequently to post here–check it out by actually reviewing past blogs. Thank you for asking about my basis for posting. This link on the International Near Death Studies information website provides a good summary of my background and research findings ( https://www.near-death.com/science/articles/nde-of-space-time-and-consciousness.html )
Hello.
Thank you for replying, but I was directing my statement towards Ali. But, thank you for giving me the link to your paper, I will check it out.
Dear Jason, this is why I begin my comments with the name of the person to whom I am responding. I generally don’t get to respond right away, and when a number of people share their thoughts close in time these threads can become pretty confusing!
My dear Jack, you are the truly gracious one! Thank you for so often sharing your thoughts with us here!
Dear Jason, I think it is hard sometimes for people – like you, I think, and like me – who have built a relationship with Spirit to really imagine life without that. We are so fortunate! But I hear often from people like Ali, who simply don’t hear the music so for them the dance never really begins. And I sympathize so much! Before people learn how to respond to those first isolated-seeming overtures from Spirit, sadly that dance never really begins.
Dear Ali, I know it seems that God isn’t around much, or even at all! While we are in bodies, we trust our eyes and ears and largely ignore what is invisible and inaudible, so where our contacts with Spirit are concerned we are effectively blind and deaf. But the question is, what actually is going on? Not what can we see and hear, since that is looking at the relationship from our own perspective. And as you point out, from our perspective and on our terms, the relationship we have with God really doesn’t look like much. But from God’s perspective, what really has been going on? Do we have ways to figure that out?
I think so. We’ll see….
It probably appears that way because we can’t hear them or see them, and most people never talk to them. Once we acknowledge them or ask for their help, that situation often changes. We need to focus our thoughts on them and away from physical reality in order for this to happen.
(To Roberta Grimes) This was a reply to Ali’s post on April 11, 2021 at 2:03 pm.
(To Lola Hoovler) Hello. I wrote this because I saw you starting to do what you did last week. The way you are responding is not so much responding to Ali as starting your own post, which after a while became a little confusing. I will respond to him myself, so you can see the difference.
Dear Jason, it really is confusing, the way these threads run, isn’t it? Sorry about that. And I’m not sure how to get around it, but I commend those who post here for the way you have so often found your ways to do that!
Precisely! Dear Lola, you have nailed what I also think the problem is. If we want to understand God, we are going to need to try to study reality from God’s perspective. Not sure how to do that, but we’ll give it a go!
I didn’t mean to be confusing – I just didn’t want Ali to feel he was abandoned.
Dear Lola, it’s not you – it’s the thread-structure issue. I felt the same way, and wanted to reach out when I first saw his comment; but I had a meeting for a good part of the afternoon. Thank you for wanting to make him feel welcome!
Hi Roberta,
Excellent questions. Answers often suggest God wants us to attain spiritual maturity: “Just love the person you are with” (in the words of Howard Storm),” or “Love one another as I have loved you (in the words of Jesus)” or Teach only love, for that is what you are (A Course in Miracles).” It may be what God is asking is that we begin with ourselves.
-Chuck
It kind of sounds like love is the key to just about all of this
Yes, dear Lola. Love is the key. But theoretically we have been trying to follow that simple rule for two thousand years, and look where it has got us! Another dead-end religion 🙁
True. but I think it was because religious leaders made God fear based, thus taking love out of the equation., making God a separate entity and perceiving him to be angry over our slightest imperfections.
Dear Chuck, I think what we are supposed to do is this: for the first time in history, we should let God lead the dance. Not presume, and not get in God’s way. I think that’s where this is going, but I have no idea how to do that!
(It’s a good thing nobody expects me to actually write these weekly posts on my own :-)!)
Roberta, I agree that it is very difficult for us because of cultural conditioning and other factors to get out of God’s way, as you put it. We are conditioned to use this experience we perceive as incarnation as our reference point. It is important to begin to understand that this is not God’s reference point, but ours own and is fundamentally based on assumptions. 🙂
Right on. Mike, and very well said. It is almost all based on assumptions and is the reason for the many human traits projected onto God.
Dear Mike, I think this is an important point. While we are awake, we have awareness only of this basically illusory reality and these very temporary earth-lives, so we consider this place and this time and this little brief life of ours to be far more important than any of it actually is. And not just to God, but even to us! Every night we get out of our bodies while they sleep and sit around with friends and guides, hangin’ out, and we realize all over again how little these particular lives actually matter. But then we get back into our bodies, wake up, and become emotionally invested in these particular lives all over again!
Hello again.
Roberta, could you write of one of your experiences, where you went out of your body while you slept and sat around with your friends and guides? I have only been able to have a lucid dream a few times, but hope to do more in the future. Astral travel seems a bit easier, seems more like creative visualization, where, for example, you count down to be relaxed, go down stairs and open a door, step into the woods by a stream or on a mountain peak, where the person you will speak with is waiting with tea. Then, once done, up the stairs, count back up, and open the eyes. What has been your experience?
Roberta Responds
Dear Jason, this thread ended here, but you deserve an answer.
There are people who could much better answer your question than I can! Like most folks – there are only rare exceptions – I am not actively aware during nightly travels in the astral and meetings with my spirit guides. My memories of such meetings always come later, when I am awake, and only in response to my question or because my primary guide wants to make some point.
For example, after Thomas first came out to me as having been Jefferson, I was obsessed with knowing whether TJ had been the father of Sally Hemings’s children. I had done the research. I thought the father had been his brother Randolph, but I needed to know for sure! My guide is not Jefferson now and he thought it was none of my business, but when I wouldn’t leave it alone he eventually answered the question by letting me wake up one morning with a retained memory of sitting across from him in the paneled conference room where we generally meet and hearing him say, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings because she was my property so she could not have consented.” Another time he wanted me to know that someone very important had met with us, so while I was driving somewhere on a random afternoon he spontaneously put into my mind the vivid memory of having sat across from Jesus in that room and listening to Him speaking, and every other seat was taken (It’s a long oval – maybe 20 seats?). This was right before Liberating Jesus was published, and apparently that meeting was a big deal. I nearly drove off the road.
The easiest way for anyone to have such memories is to develop a dialog with your primary guide and be persistent about it. My own guide much prefers to work internally, and that works for us so well that I no longer ask for or expect any such memories!
Dearest Roberta and everyone,
I definitely sparked up when Lola said that love is the key to just about all of this. I’ve heard it said that : ‘Whatever the question Love is the answer.’
However, here we are attempting to consider reality from God’s perspective. This is a more intimate view that needs specifics, I feel. Certainly I’m most interested to understand more about it, and I know it does have something to do with the essential nature of love.
Wonderful topic, Roberta! Thank you!
I’m keen to learn more. 🙏🏼🌅❣️
Heh – I’m keen to learn a lot more as well, my dear Efrem!
I’ve been thinking a lot about this ever since Saturday, when Thomas took my week of floundering attempts to write something in response to his rather obscure suggestions and shaped the post that you see above. And my first thought, really, is one of amazement. I’ll bet that every founder of every new religion and each one of the forty thousand-odd versions of Christianity has thought they were asking God to lead, and they only were responding to what they thought were God’s ideas! There seem to be traps within traps in this, the more I think about it. I’m sure we aren’t going to do something definitive or amazing the first time around, but at least we are going to try to persist in leaving it all in God’s hands, and not ever think that we are doing anything on our own!
Hi Efrem: I think once God became fear based and got mixed up with the various religions who perceived him in various ways, it became almost impossible to see the real picture. For all we know, God may not want anything at all from us and just wants us to have experiences. It is us who declare these experiences good or bad, depending on our culture. However, I agree with you that the essential nature of love plays a big role in it all. Many mystics have been saying that for years, and I used to think it sounded childish and fanciful, but there is something about the nature of unconditional love(beyond my understanding) that is a key component here
Lola, You wrote, ” For all we know, God may not want anything at all from us and just wants us to have experiences. ” Based on my study of over 5000 NDE reports, and most specifically from the attitude of God’s acceptance of whatever we do in life (all the bad with some good) during life reviews– that is my own conclusion as well. But a bit more needs to be added. Given that we are made by God from what God is (addressing only our spiritual being), we are a part of God. All of us share our experience with God, and when in our spiritual form freed from the material body, we also have access to all that is experienced by all.
I totally agree with you, Dr Hiller.
Hey Lola 👋
I do agree that we are thinking we are doing what God wants (‘God’s work’) but we see this through the clouded filter of ego and religious/cultural/place & time conditioning. I also have heard that the Divine sees, feels and in some way even ‘learns’ from our lifetime experiences. In a way I see the exuberance of Creation seeing creation, while creation looks back at Creation. 😉
As Mike J-R expressed in his own way above, I see the tree producing the seed; the entire tree is found in a single seed. Of course, seeds then become entire trees themselves – reflections of the parent tree and thence part of ‘treeness’. Perhaps the purpose of life is to become a part of the Whole of God.
And I have a feeling there is more to uncover… 🙏🏼🕊❣️
That’s a very good thought, Efrem. If you look at a seed next to a majestic beautiful tree, there is no resemblance whatsoever but both are one and the same. It would be like comparing our puny minds to the “whole of God” as you put it, and that very well could be a large part of the purpose of life.
Hi Roberta, hi everybody! Yesterday I thought I had a brilliant comment, but upon waking up and reading what’s been said here, I don’t think I do, actually, have anything to add that hasn’t already been brought up. The original post is called Part 1. I look forward to Part 2 and, in the meantime, others’ insightful commentary.
I will however put here a riddle I have been turning over in my mind: imagine the parable of the mustard seed from the point of view of the mature tree. Who is the seed? Who are the birds of the air? For that matter, who is the tree?
Dear Mike, you raise a lovely point! What we are proposing to do is no less a departure than would be required for someone to answer your riddle. We always have treated God as something like a natural resource, and ourselves as the active, moving party entitled to establish the relationship on our own terms. But from what we now know of the genuine Godhead, this relationship is entirely different from what we always have imagined! It is extremely intimate, so intimate that there isn’t even skin between us! And God is emphatically the moving party. Always. How could it be otherwise?
Hi Roberta,
I like that phrase, treating God “as something like a natural resource.” Most certainly, this mindset is problematic to our understanding true existence.
Thank you, Mike! But don’t you think that phrase is accurate? It just came to me as I was writing the above response to you, and then when I saw it on the screen I said, “Thank you, Thomas – great insight!”
The more I think about all of this, the more incredibly presumptuous I think all of us have been, and for such a long time! We always have demanded so much from God, but we never stop and wonder what God might want.
The phrasing is indeed accurate — and I have a feeling this insight will continue to be important for Part 2!
Hi Roberta: Your post ( and others) is so thought provoking and gives me hope to understand myself and the Spirit, and how to truly love. I have found a concept that my mind can accept, but my tiny brain is struggling to improve my daily actions and way of life. I understand that most humans are guided by assumptions taught from our beginnings. I am working on loving and caring for all others, and having forgiveness for those that I have disdain for.
Roberta I feel so simple and imperfect. I still get mad at other drivers, I hate our present political climate, and I keep a weapon at my home for protection from evil people. I feel that I have not attained the right level of spiritual maturity. I can say that I have learned a lot about praying to the creator. Thank you many other authors on your recommended list for your writing and teachings! ( sorry about all the I’s in my post)
Oh my dear David, please don’t be so hard on yourself! I think everyone here would agree that our first step in raising our personal consciousness vibrations is developing insights about the ways that we can see ourselves and admit that we are falling short! And that is where you are now. Congratulations! Now all of us are working together to learn to let go of more and more of the negativity that weighs us down, and learning to accept and feel steadily ever more worthy of ever more perfect divine love. You are on your way, dear David!
David, Consider that you own a material body that was created to live in a material world full of danger and potentially offering pleasurable rewards. The body survives and prospers by navigating on its instincts. Our mind, you conscience, has an ongoing conflict with the motives and behavior of our body. Our stressful lives provide the opportunity to overcome the body’s amoral and immoral motives, and from that conflict to grow spiritually.
Dear Jack, thank you for encouraging our friend David. Lovely summary! We can be much too hard on ourselves, when we entered these lives from such a perfectly beautiful and loving place with such high expectations but then we are back here again and these lives on earth are so much harder than we had remembered or imagined when we were back home! What is needed is a simple self-study way for people to learn the basics at their own pace, and we are working on that. It’s harder to get it right than you would imagine!
Hi Roberta. I resonate with your reference above to traps within traps. I’ve gotten imagery like that recently, like walking through a dark forest, watching for multiple trip wires and booby traps. I’ve come across plenty of references in the spiritual literature where even gurus fall prey to the ego or the temptations of psychic powers. The spiritual path can be tricky, mainly I think because, as you say, we tend to impose our own limited concepts and desires instead of “let go and let God.” In the past, this problem was generally handled through highly personalized master/disciple transmission or carefully managed systems of initiation into mystery schools. Those who really had the eyes to see or the ears to hear tended to stay sub rosa or behind the scenes. It rarely seems to go well when they try to scale it up to the general popuation. At least we get very very basic concepts of morality and social order, but are they enough for this increasingly complex and dangerous world? Correct me if I am wrong, but I get the impression that this is the age old question you are grappling with – how to successfully scale up this underground stream of the Way that has been quietly flowing along in one form or another for centuries and millennia before humanity runs out of time.
My dear Scott, you are so wise! Yes, everything that you say above is right. Every successful leader in history, whether spiritual or secular, has been seduced in the end by his own success; and every well-meant movement based in wisdom that hasn’t eventually been turned into a fly in amber has been corrupted and destroyed from within. Every time! Even the great American experiment that has worked so well for almost 250 years and easily should always have worked is falling apart now in spectacular fashion, done in for selfish reasons by the very people whose key roles in the process are meant to preserve it.
And I can see no easy way to break this chain. Not when it seems to be as natural to every movement as eventual senescence and death! So I am studying it now. When we have enough examples, we should be able to plug every hole and ward off every potential calamity.
At least, that’s the theory….
I feel the same way, David, but it is very hard to just suddenly have forgiveness and unconditional love while living in the physical world, but I think you deserve a lot of credit for trying, as most people don’t even bother to do that.
Yes, my dear Lola, this is so true! The problem seems to be that no matter how well-intentioned we are, life always eventually gets in the way. We know it will happen, so we’ve got to find ways to be on guard and to support one another through the rough spots that we know will always be there!
Wow, so much this week to reflect upon. I sometimes pull away from Christianity because I have so many tangled and misleading ideas that were planted in my head as a child. But through Roberta’s blog I can circle back, absorb many truths, and continue my own spiritual journey. (Thank you Roberta.) It’s not that I don’t totally love Christ and his teachings, I just find myself freed by not trying to relate only to one source of truth. And, as we grow and accept that we are part of the Godhead, we really have Jesus nearby without even calling on his name. And not only Jesus, but our spirit guides and other spiritual beings as well. David mentions fear, and what I feel is great sadness for our current society. So much misinformation and misunderstanding, and some days it seems to grow worse ! As Roberta mentioned, we have accomplished so much as a culture, how do we make such little progress on simple spiritual truths. Love and forgiveness are the keys to overcoming fear and uncertainty. And it is a two-way street, often we look to the oppressor to reach out with love and desire to change, but equally important, the oppressed need to also have genuine forgiveness and love for the oppressor.
Oh my dear Timothy, you may not realize that you are part of an army of millions! Many of the people I hear from daily have the same points to make, although most make them less eloquently: they love Jesus but have outgrown Christianity’s simplistic and fear-based many-centuries-old dogmas, so they are frustrated and seeking.
When so many people feel this way, we know that the Godhead is providing answers; but we also know they won’t land on our heads. It is up to us to work with Spirit and find them!
Until recently, almost all Christians associated Jesus with Christianity, and the suggestion that they were separate was unthinkable. I knew of some who even thought Jesus started Christianity/ They point to the phrase “Upon this rock I will build my church.” In a way, you can’t blame them – I wonder what he actually meant when he said that (if he actually did say it). In any event, no book as old as the bible could survive so many translations without errors and misunderstandings, yet most Christians do not take this into consideration.
Dear Lola, you make such a wonderful point! No, Jesus didn’t start Christianity. Instead, He spoke AGAINST religions and He especially cautioned us NOT to put the “new wine” of His teachings in the “old wine skin” of Judaism… which, of course, is exactly what Paul and the other founders of Christianity did.
The specific Gospel quotation you mention is the most obviously later-added passage of all. Of course Jesus never said it! Let’s look at how we can be so certain. The quotation is:
“I also say to you that you are Peter, and upon this rock I will build My church; and the gates of Hades will not overpower it. I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven; and whatever you bind on earth shall have been bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth shall have been loosed in heaven” (MT 16:18-19). Note that:
1) “Peter” for “rock” is a pun in Greek. Jesus spoke Aramaic, as did His followers. So we know that this was put together after the Lord’s death.
2) Nowhere else in all four Gospels does Jesus use the word “church,” which came along much after His death. No one who actually reads the canonical Gospels can take from them that He was trying to build any kind of religion, never mind one that had “churches”!
3) The notion of “Hades” is also Greek, and foreign to Jesus. He spoke of the outer darkness where there is wailing and gnashing of teeth, which actually exists; and not of hell, which does not exist.
4)”Heaven” doesn’t have “keys.” Quite the contrary! And He certainly knew that.
5) These were Iron Age primitives. Jesus was in fact God, outside of time! He knew this was just God’s first outreach and there was an eternity of spiritual growth to come that would lead to “the kingdom of God on earth,” which was the theme of all His teaching. No way on earth would He have given power over this process to any clueless human being, to “bound” or “loose” anything in eternity!
No, this is one of the passages that was added by the Council of Nicaea in 325. And you can take that to the bank!!
That certainly seems to be the case, I think it was added in by the church builders at a much later date. He certainly didn’t mean for any middle man (i.e. a priest) to listen to our sins (confession) and order us to beg for forgiveness, which was what Catholicism taught.
To me, perhaps the biggest giveaway that He didn’t say it is the fact that it is EXACTLY what the much later church-builders would have wished He had said!
I totally agree/ Jesus never wanted to be worshipped. That is a human trait that we projected onto him. Like all the great people in history i.e. Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Oskar Schindler, Mother Teresa, Harriet Tubman etc., Jesus didn’t have an ego, and I think anything in the bible that insinuates he did is a fabrication and is a downright lie.
It is important to take in the reality of what is happening to our awareness. I hope people can read this blog entry—and Part 2 when it comes out —without feeling we are betraying God. Read more than once.
When Jesus used the Aramaic concept of Father in His day and culture He was radically altering the human relationship to God. As I have said many times, I am no scholar, but even the most benign Jewish concepts of God, outside of certain mystical circles, portrayed God in authoritarian descriptions.
Jesus makes God family!
And then He goes a step beyond and makes that family Spirit.
Dear Mike, thank you for this! I tend to assume that everyone who reads here is more or less on the same page, and you remind me that is not true at all. Two things that we always must keep in mind whenever we read the Gospels:
1) When Jesus was on earth, for Him to speak against the prevailing religion would have been a capital crime; and
2) He was not the founder of Christianity, which came along much after His death. The Council of Nicaea in 325 and the eight other first-millennium Christian councils felt free to both remove things from the Gospels that Jesus had said and add things that He didn’t say, especially details about later Christian doctrine and church-building. None of that came from Jesus!
So, yes, Jesus did what He could to advance our simplistic and fairly negative view of God, but He couldn’t come right out and say anything! Instead, He leaves it to us to carry forward His mission to spread God’s love and peace to all the world.
At one time, the Vatican was the wealthiest organization in the entire world. This did not come about because they taught the actual words of Jesus – it was because of the many additions and subtractions that were made to the gospel to generate fear of not being worthy. So they made it a “mortal sin” to miss mass on Sunday (less money if you didn’t attend). I think I’m probably the only one here that ever attended a Catholic school until my mother finally “woke up” and removed me from that horror, It actually amounted to child abuse.
Also, if Jesus was sent here by a higher power, why at a time when he couldn’t say what he really wanted to due to the watchers that were constantly stalking him? Surely a higher power (i.e. God) would have known it would lead to the many religious wars, the inquisition etc. I don’t understand the logic in this
Dear Lola, Jesus actually is Himself that “higher power.” And I have come to think that the fact that He had to speak obscurely to tell us truths that would become clear only thousands of years later may have been a lot of the point! For a long time I thought the way you seem to be thinking, that Christianity itself was the Lord’s message going horribly astray, Inquisition and so on; but then Thomas came out and set me straight in one exasperated lecture. He told me the Godhead does not make mistakes! This is not real life, there is no such thing as time, and I won’t really get it until I go home, but stop seeing those two thousand earth-years as anything but exactly what was supposed to happen! (My wonderful Thomas can be pretty cutting when he wants to be. And the fact that his many-lives buddy with whom he generally works so easily is at the moment a ditzy female seems at times to exasperate him.)
Our logic is not remotely like the Godhead’s logic. and our awareness is like an ant’s awareness when compared to the Godhead’s awareness and understanding. Thomas assures me that we will understand it all one day, but until then we should not for a moment suspect that anything about the life and work of Jesus (or anything else that God does, for that matter) is not divinely perfect!