Roberta Grimes

A Bit of History

Posted by Roberta Grimes • March 01, 2025 • 2 Comments
Afterlife Research, Human Nature, Quantum Physics, The Source, Understanding Reality

To dream the impossible dream. To fight the unbeatable foe.
To bear with unbearable sorrow. To run where the brave dare not go.
To right the un-rightable wrong. To love, pure and chaste from afar.
To try when your arms are too weary to reach the unreachable star.

 This is my quest! To follow that star!
No matter how hopeless. No matter how far.
To fight for the right without question or pause.
To be willing to march into hell for a heavenly cause!
And I know if I’ll only be true to this glorious quest
That my heart will lie peaceful and calm when I’m laid to my rest.
– Mitch Leigh (1928-2014) & Joe Darion (1917-2001), from “Man of La Mancha” (1965)

“Hear, O Israel! The Lord is our God, the Lord is One God!” (Deut 5; Deut 6:4) This is the most important Law of Moses, and first given to him by God on Mount Sinai thirty-three hundred years ago, after Moses had brought the Israelites out of slavery in Egypt. And then Jesus, some thirteen hundred years later but still two thousand years before this morning, when He was asked what was the greatest Commandment, He boiled the entire Law of Israel, including all Ten Commandments, down to just these two: “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40).

As we have said often here, Jesus came to teach us how to forgive and to love so we can raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently that we will never again need to incarnate on earth. And His teachings work so beautifully to do precisely that! So, why then did the Lord’s effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth not succeed the first time around? Actually, it was going very well for at least the first four hundred years after Jesus’s crucifixion and resurrection. Jesus’s earliest followers buried at least six million of their dead in tunnels beneath the city of Rome, the last of which burials date to the early fifth century C.E. And in all the art in the Catacombs tombs, there is not a single cross to be found! Instead, the symbols are all peaceful ones, like the fish, the dove, the vine, and especially the Good Shepherd who carries on His shoulders not a sheep, but a goat. What amazing evidence of the fact that the earliest Christians knew that Jesus had come to uplift all of humankind spiritually, including even the very least worthy among us! This gradual and gentle spreading of His Gospel truths seems to have been just what Jesus intended to have happen. After all, He said, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs to be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-21).

Well, okay then. But over the past two thousand years, a few untoward things have transpired between God and humankind. For one thing, in about 312 CE, the Roman Emperor Constantine believed that he had seen a cross of light emblazoned with the Latin words “in hoc signo vinces,” which means, “by this sign you shall conquer”. And at once, he went from being a persecutor of the followers of Jesus to becoming the father of his preferred version of the Christian religion.

Of course, Constantine the Great’s Christianity, which still is the world’s dominant religion, is nothing like Jesus’s original gentle spiritual movement. Jesus knew that because every human mind is part of one eternal Mind, it would not take much more than this single population, using Jesus’s teachings to raise their personal vibrations away from fear and toward more perfect love, to begin to elevate the spiritual vibrations of everyone then living on earth. The transformation of the minds of His followers would begin the transformations of all human minds! As Jesus said, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13:33). So we have every reason to think that for those first few centuries, the advent of the kingdom of God on earth was unfolding just as Jesus and as the divine Collectives of the Godhead had intended that it should unfold; and quite rapidly, too. But then the Roman Emperor Constantine cast his eye on the Lord’s beautiful Way, and he had his brutal way with her.

The first thing that Constantine did was to select one version of Christian thought, and set out to destroy every other version. He chose for himself the most fear-based version of all, the one that claimed that Jesus’s crucifixion had been required by God as a sacrifice for our sins. There were more than three dozen “heresies” brutally stamped out or driven into the wilderness by the early Roman church under Constantine before he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE that formalized Constantine’s new religion. Those rejected “heresies” had been strains of thought among pre-Roman-Councils followers of Jesus. They had peacefully coexisted as alternative ways to follow Jesus, because the Lord’s original Way had not been a religion at all! It had required only that people follow Jesus’s teachings and learn to ever more perfectly love and forgive; and as Jesus had said, “He who is not against us is for us” (MK 9:40).

The Roman Emperor Constantine’s deeply fear-based notion that Jesus had died for our sins had been just one of many ideas in a widely varied spiritual movement. It had been harmless, until Constantine had used his First Council of Nicaea in 325 to begin to impose one Christian religion with its human-made and fear-based dogmas upon the world. A gentle and gradual movement that was spreading nothing but forgiveness and love would have been useless to an emperor. But a fear-based religion that carried the dogmatic threat of hellfire for anyone who disobeyed him? Now, that was something that he really could use! Six more church councils followed that First Council of Nicaea in 325, all called or presided over by emperors and ending with the Second Council of Nicaea in 787. So a fear-based religion that bore the name of Jesus but otherwise had almost nothing to do with Him was imposed upon the world by force at a cost of what is conservatively estimated to have been twenty-five million mostly awful deaths.

We are surprised to study this history now, and to reflect on the fact that God allowed all of it to happen in quite this way. All of it, from the transformation of Jesus’s peaceful and beautiful Way that seems to have been working so wonderfully for hundreds of years into Constantine’s barbaric and dogmatic religion, and then the inquisitions and the crusades. Thomas whispers to me now that, ah, but Constantine created the Bible that has safely preserved the words of Jesus. And Constantine began those seventeen hundred years that were dominated by fear and negativity for people to push against, into which we can forever after down through the timeless ages choose to incarnate for priceless spiritual learning and growth.

Our earliest evidence that a new effort has begun to bring the kingdom of God on earth dates to the mid-nineteenth century, when we began to receive much easier and more abundant afterlife communications. This effort to thin the veil and better enlighten us might have seemed to the Godhead to be necessary in order to begin the process of at last taking down both Constantine’s fear-based Christianity, and also the equally false notion of atheistic scientism, in preparation for the war-filled and spiritual-stress-filled twentieth century that was soon to dawn. No one knows for sure why we were suddenly being shown so much more of what was really going on behind the curtain!

But among God’s earliest targets in this modern-day effort to bring the kingdom of God on earth were physicists. As we neared the turn of the twentieth century, clockwork materialism remained in place as a dogma in a reality that is in no respect solid, to the point where Nobel Laureate in physics Albert Michelson said in 1894, “It seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established and that further advances are to be sought chiefly in the rigorous application of these principles to all the phenomena which come under our notice.” Even the great Max Planck, another Nobel Laureate and the eventual father of quantum mechanics, said in 1924, “When I began my physical studies [in 1874] and sought advice from my venerable teacher Philipp von Jolly… he portrayed to me physics as a highly developed, almost fully matured science… Possibly in one or another nook there would perhaps be a dust particle or a small bubble to be examined and classified, but… theoretical physics approached visibly that degree of perfection which, for example, geometry has had already for centuries.”

To shake up this scientific materialist complacency completely, the Godhead did two things at once. It initiated a new age of much better communication between the living and the not actually dead. And It also channeled in to the minds of Dr. Planck and a few other physicists the wonderfully disruptive theory of quantum mechanics. What strikes me most profoundly is the way God has been acting even in what we know now was a clear divine emergency, with an extraordinary respect for human free will and dignity! Everyone who comes to earth with a commission from the Godhead does so voluntarily, and it is through these willing minions that nearly all God’s work on earth is done. God works in the world with all the love, patience, and respect of a host of perfected Beings who once inhabited bodies themselves. What a sublimely beautiful process!

When the scientific community was forced to react simultaneously to the twin challenges of quantum physics and very good evidence that the dead do in fact survive, it chose to deal with the first challenge and ignore the second. This stonewalling by the scientific gatekeepers of any evidence at all that the universe is not matter-based has gone on now for more than a century. Apparently it is going to end only when God decides it must end. There is a lot that we still don’t understand. But for the first part of the twentieth century, the Godhead seems to have watched Its work unfold while avoiding further interference in the affairs of humankind… That is, until we used nuclear bombs in warfare in August of 1945. This was apparently what God had been working to prevent, and its suddenly happening anyway seems to have been a wake-up call that might have been unique in human history. Insofar as we who study this can tell, four initiatives were then begun at once:

• The decision was made that we will never again be allowed to use nuclear arms in warfare. If you wonder why it hasn’t happened in the more than three-quarters of a century since Nagasaki, despite the fact that nuclear armaments have proliferated and human crankiness abounds, be assured that we have been told that God is preventing its happening. There are anecdotes about missile tests in which an unexplained missile would turn up out of nowhere and shoot down the missile being tested. But my hunch is that God is working mostly at the level of many human minds.
• A renewed effort was begun to demonstrate to the world what actually is going on. The floodgates of broader information began to open in the fifties, and then in the seventies they opened much wider! Most of what afterlife experts are telling you now is an accumulation of many bits of information that have been permitted to us by the Godhead. If it had not been God’s perfect will that we figure all these things out now, we would still be as clueless as people have been clueless throughout all of human history.
• Many more minions began to parachute in. There is no time where the Godhead is, so the first of this new wave of minions were born in the thirties and forties. And we continue to be born today, these people who have promised to assist in the work of raising this planet’s consciousness vibration and bringing the kingdom of God on earth. I may be typical. I am my primary guide’s comrade through seventeen lifetimes, and I had promised him that I would come in and do some specific things that would help him to put a finis to his spiritual work done as Thomas Jefferson. That effort was still in the planning stage when this call came, and we answered it! We made a life-plan for me that included efforts to complete his prior work, and we overlaid it with this plan to help the Godhead that now consumes my life.
• A decision was made to freshly introduce the Gospel teachings of Jesus to the world. Of course, for this to happen requires that the fear-based Christianity created by Constantine the Great must either die away or be transformed, and we see this ongoing now on both fronts at the level of billions of human minds. Our task is just to nurture the love of Jesus and His Gospel teachings, carefully saving the baby as God discards the bathwater.

The Lord’s Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness and raising our personal vibrations sufficiently to bring the kingdom of God on earth are needed now, more than they ever have been needed before! Those of us who have closely studied the Gospel teachings and are working now in the Lord’s harvest field are delighted to report that it all truly is happening now, and all around us. This Impossible Dream of universal human forgiveness and love as Jesus taught it, such that it really will be possible for God’s kingdom to begin to overspread the earth, is all awakening now.

And beyond that, as we who have spent our lives studying the glorious afterlife evidence can tell you, is the certain fact that all that really exists is consciousness. Or as our dear friend Craig Hogan would put it, all that exists is mind and experiences.  Now we wonder ever more deeply about something even more. As we have studied both the teachings of Jesus and the illusory reality in which we live these lives, we come to ever better understand that what we experience as human consciousness is in fact all that exists. There is no such thing as solid matter. And the afterlife evidence, plus bits of things that Jesus said when He was here, including His much more advanced teachings in A Course in Miracles, all lead us to begin to wonder whether perhaps this all might be a pure illusion? Is it possible that Jesus insisted that we love our neighbor as ourself because He knew that our neighbor is ourself?

It is a surprising, and even an amazing question. To which one day we each will learn the answer!

 

 

(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)