Roberta Grimes's Blog
September 6, 2025
Your Mind
The Lord is my shepherd,
I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures;
He leads me beside quiet waters.
3 He restores my soul;
He guides me in the paths of righteousness
For His name’s sake.
4 Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,
I fear no evil, for You are with me;
Your rod and Your staff, they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me in the presence of my enemies;
You have anointed my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– King David (1040-962 BCE), from Biblical Psalm 23 (about 1000 BCE)
My dear one, you really own nothing that you think is yours except for your eternal mind. Everything else that you might think belongs to you, how ever solid it might seem to you now, is just a part of this very brief and actually altogether unreal reality that we all think we see around us now, which is more like a vast, collective human illusion. The whole of what we consider to be reality, including the bodies that we seem to inhabit, really is nothing but empty space. And this planet that we briefly visit, the way we might visit a local gym, is just a useful workout place where we can exercise spiritually, so we can ever more perfectly empower our vast, eternal minds. And why does reading this surprise you? It surprises you only because in order for you to get the greatest benefit from your brief but useful time on this planet, it is important that you take this life seriously, so you come into this experience with complete amnesia about what actually is going on, and why you even are here at all. A newborn baby has no idea! And neither do you and I. That way, we all will take this life seriously, as if we had been born into something that is real, even though it is more like just a flimsy stage set. We take on the problems of our earth-lives that each new day brings, not remembering that we, and those closest to us in this lifetime, actually planned these vexatious issues into our lives as mind-challenges, as opportunities for achieving greater spiritual growth while we are here.
Yet at the same time, come to think about it, far too many people don’t take their lives on earth anywhere nearly seriously enough! These precious earth-lives are our minds’ great opportunities for achieving sufficient elevation away from rage and hatred, and toward ever more perfect love, so we can hopefully stop having to keep incarnating on earth altogether. That glorious mind-elevation that we all so eagerly seek can in reality only happen here on earth. And then, we get to take it home when our earthly bodies die, and we get to use it in our eternal lives forevermore. Growing spiritually is the reason why we come to earth; and yet, because we come here with complete amnesia about the reason why we have come here in the first place, people will heedlessly cheat and abuse one another. Our brothers and sisters even will carelessly kill one another!
When I was invited to visit Jesus in the astral plane in April of 2022, I was allowed to retain a memory of those events so I could remember that He had told me His story. He told me then His actual reason for having chosen to be born from out of the Godhead as a Perfected Being, He said that His reason had been to teach people what is actually going on, that human life is eternal; and He wanted to teach people how to achieve enough mind-elevation to be able to make this incarnation, the one that you are living now, your last necessary incarnation on earth. Before Jesus was born, He watched from the Seventh astral level as people were born over and over again on earth, but because most of them never knew why they were here, they were making almost no progress at all! He told me He simply could not stand to watch people incarnate over and over again, learning almost nothing each time! That precise mind-training in forgiveness and love which would help people to learn to make rapid spiritual progress on earth was, very specifically, what The Way was that Jesus taught, and that He then sent His Disciples out to teach after His Resurrection; it was designed to solve this problem, once and for all. And for three hundred years, His Way was highly successful, spreading to millions of followers all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. However, Constantine’s fear-based Christianity supplanted Jesus’s Way. And sadly, it is its near-opposite!
So, yes, Christianity does not much follow Jesus. But it is a religion. Religions can make their own rules. What is really astonishing is the fact that mainstream scientists also make their own rules, while at the same time they also claim to be open-mindedly studying the objective truth. So, scientists are flat-out lying to us! In the early part of the twentieth century, Max Plank and his merry band of quantum physicists basically freaked out the traditional physicists when they announced that consciousness underlies everything. As our dear, amazed Max said in 1931, so this was almost a century ago now, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” And he was right, of course. Consciousness does underlie it all. But the scientific gatekeepers, the university departments and the peer-reviewed journals, were not at all ready to go there, because there smacked too much of finding God; so around 1910, they informally but pretty firmly instituted what we might call the scientific dogma of materialism. They fixed their problem: no creator was now needed! They thereby turned science into the religion of atheism, and that is what science has been, ever since. Oh, there are some things that scientists still can do well. But there also are things they are compelled by their materialism dogma to do which are fundamentally crazy. At the moment, they are spending a billion dollars trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain, which is the precise equivalent of seeking to find your nightly newsman inside a television set.
Your mind really is the only thing that you can call your own. So it is time for you now to concentrate on taking very much better care of it! Just quickly, let’s understand what your mind is, and where you actually are in the great scheme of reality. First, let’s acknowledge that our dear brother Max Planck was right! Consciousness is in fact all that exists, and everything else that we might think is real is an artifact of that Consciousness. And of course, since we now realize that Consciousness is all that exists, we now treat the whole topic of Consciousness with a lot more respect! For example, from now on we will capitalize the word. How might we define the Consciousness that is all there is? We should note here that mainstream scientists cannot yet even define Consciousness at all. But with considerable help from my Thomas, what is given below is the best definition of Consciousness that I have been able to manage; he tells me that it will turn out to be right.
Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality without size or form, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, infinitely powerful and creative and also highly emotional, and therefore almost certainly self-aware. Its emotional range exists from what we feel as fear, anger and hatred at its lowest, slowest, and weakest vibrations, and perfect love at its highest, most rapid, and most powerful vibrations.
As Max Planck and his contemporaries discovered more than a century ago, there is no way to “get behind” Consciousness. Or to put it more accurately, you cannot “get outside” consciousness; because in fact, there is nothing whatsoever beyond Consciousness, in any direction. So, okay then. Let’s pause here for a moment and think about this. As we are coming now to better understand reality, and how reality actually works, your eternal mind is not “created” at all; but rather, your mind is of the very stuff of the Creator, and inextricably part of the Creative Mind. There is no clear separation whatsoever between your mind and the minds of all other people, and there is no separation between your mind and the Great Creative Mind. All is One Mind! We know, too, that our pets, and in fact we know that all animals possess eternal minds as well, and that animals that we have loved will be waiting for us in the astral afterlife, and will greet us there when we transition home. In fact, as the wonderful and astonishing galvanometer expert Cleve Backster proved extensively as far back as the nineteen-sixties, living plants also are conscious in their way, and they are easily able to read our minds, so there is no separation even between individual plants’ minds, or between their minds and our minds, either. So, of course, all this mind-stuff must be eternal, by its very nature! And all these minds are One Mind. Every living creature, including presumably every living fish and insect and even every living microbe, and for certain of course every living plant, is, with us, inextricably part of the one great, vast, and eternal Consciousness, which, thanks to Max Planck and the other earliest quantum physicists, we know is all that exists.
Yet of all this great, teeming mass of life that is, to at least some minimal extent, living in conscious awareness on this planet, it is only people who are sufficiently sophisticated minds that we are inspired to attempt to further elevate our minds spiritually within the Consciousness which is all that exists. I believe that we can say this with confidence. In my whole half-century of doing extensive afterlife research, I have seen no evidence, and not even a hint, that any other form of life also ever seems to be attempting to elevate themselves at all toward more perfect love! Yet when we are in the beautiful astral plane levels of Consciousness, which is where our minds spend most of our eternity, we come to crave greater and ever greater elevation of our minds. We then choose to be born yet again on the earth plane, with amnesia for why we are here but with a plan for growing spiritually.
So, here your mind is now on earth, once again. And most of us have lived many lifetimes on earth, each of which has brought only minimal spiritual growth, because your mind’s spiritual-growth needs are intense. And they are very precise! Many people live hundreds of lifetimes on earth, just “turning on the wheel”, as the Buddhists say, and as Jesus observed with considerable frustration, but making only minimal progress each time. Good grief, Thomas tells me that I have lived seventeen earth-lifetimes just with him, alone! Your mind’s past experience likely has been about the same; and yet, if you and I had lived our previous lives with more care and precision, perhaps we could have made any of those other lives the last one that really was necessary for us to spend here. Now, if you are to have any hope at all of making this your last necessary lifetime on this earth, you will need to raise your mind’s spiritual vibration considerably! These are the most important things that you really must do, this time around:
My Thomas has recently informed me that I have managed to raise my mind’s vibration enough that now this can be my last necessary earth-lifetime. What this means is that I have achieved the upper part of what afterlife researchers call Level Five of the seven aggregate astral levels. Those at this level are far enough now from all negativity that we can continue to grow spiritually by teaching in the astral plane, by serving in the healing gardens and in the children’s villages, and by acting as spirit guides for people who are taking lives on earth. This is an important and exciting achievement! Wow. This is spiritual nosebleed level. I could feel that a lot was happening in my mind of late, and soon I will write more about it for you. I was becoming a lot more peaceful. Nothing ever was bothering me anymore. I am always so happy now! And I mean, always, all the time, no matter what is going on around me. Happy for no reason! But, OMG, my much-beloved friends, if I can do it, then I promise you that you can do it, too! Simply follow the perfect instructions that were given to us by our so very deeply treasured Wayshower and Best Friend. Jesus gave to you and me the surest recipe for very rapid spiritual growth there can be! And wow, it really works so well!! Now, very soon it will be up to us to put our minds to teaching the whole world to follow His lead, because soon we can demonstrate what the end will be. He came to bring peace to all the world, and now we can see how it will come….
because You have anointed my head with oil;
My cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life,
And I will dwell in the house of the Lord forever.
– King David (1040-962 BCE), from Biblical Psalm 23 (about 1000 BCE)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Your Mind appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
August 30, 2025
Is Jesus a Christian? (#2)
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
Early in the morning our song shall rise to thee.
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity!
Holy, holy, holy! all the saints adore thee,
Casting down their golden crowns around the glassy sea.
Cherubim and seraphim, falling down before thee,
Who was and is and evermore shall be.
Holy, Holy, Holy! though the darkness hide thee,
Though the eye of sinful man thy glory may not see,
Only thou art holy; there is none beside thee,
Perfect in pow’r, in love, and purity.
– Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)
Christianity bears Jesus’s name, although nearly all of what modern Christianity teaches is not even remotely what Jesus teaches in the Gospels. So, you would think that at some point, more Christians might start to wonder what Jesus’s opinion is of the religion that they practice. Is He pleased with it? Is He disappointed in it? Or is He even, at this point, disgusted by it?
Okay, so since nowadays we can communicate with people that we know are dead, why has it never occurred to anyone that we should be able to communicate even better with Someone that we know has risen from the dead? I have been reluctant to proclaim the Shroud of Turin to be Jesus’s actual burial cloth, miraculously preserved for two thousand years. But the experts who continue to study the Shroud are by now making an overwhelming case for it. There really is no other explanation for all the Shroud’s amazing details! Not only is it the genuine article, it is indeed the cloth that received and wrapped Jesus’s body when it was removed from the cross; but also, the Shroud of Turin and the marks on it prove that Jesus came to us as a literal Divine Being. For one small example, some of those marks are a photographic negative, and they have been there since long before anyone then living on earth could have known what a photographic negative even was! And the scorch on the Shroud that was made when Jesus reanimated His dead body would have required more concentrated power for it to be made in a single burst than anything that we can produce all at once worldwide, even today. And all the horrific details of the torture that Jesus willingly put Himself through are right there on the Shroud of Turin. Just reading about the way they used those nails turns your stomach. And all, so He could die a very public death and then resurrect Himself very publicly, and thereby prove to us at last that we live eternally. No other explanation for all the details of the Shroud of Turin, and the marks that it carries, than that Jesus came to us as God on earth is even possible.
So, we do have definitive proof that at least Jesus’s body was briefly actually dead, and that He then reanimated it. And incidentally, He is the only person ever known to have done that, because those who have near-death experiences (NDEs), no matter how vivid their experiences might seem to them, never actually die and then come back to life. Death for everyone else but Jesus always is a one-way trip! But the fact that Jesus in fact rose from the dead is vividly documented in the Gospels (see e.g. JN 19:40-20:18). So then, should we not even more be seeking to speak with the still-living Jesus, who is alive right this minute on the third level of the astral plane, and He still greets every new afterlife arrival who asks to meet Him and receive His blessing? Why aren’t Christians asking Him directly through good mental mediums how He feels about this religion, which is the largest on earth; and although it follows Jesus almost not at all, it still somehow claims Him for its leader? Since Christianity teaches very different doctrines than what Jesus ever taught in life, do we now not owe Him at least the courtesy of asking Him straight-out whether He ever personally adopted the religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine created and formalized at the First Council of Nicaea that was held in the year 325 AD, since that was three centuries after Jesus’s death and resurrection, and it had so little to do with what Jesus taught when He was on earth? Or, does Jesus just consider Himself to be still a Jew? Or, perhaps, has He spiritually moved far beyond any human religious belief and practice whatsoever?
I never have presumed to ask Jesus any of these questions, but now I know what His answers would be. And not only that, but I know that Jesus wants Thomas and me to tell you now how He feels about the Christian religion, whether or not you even care what Jesus thinks. Actually, I had been thinking now that maybe we might not talk about it in this week’s post, after all. Thomas wanted to finally say it this week. We wrote last week’s post, intending to talk this week about Jesus’s opinions; but now, I have been thinking about maybe just dodging it all. I don’t want to talk about it. I still love my gentle childhood version of Christianity! The one that my sweet Reverend Turrell taught and lived. The one that we sang. We sang today’s frame-verse very often! And there are a good two billion practicing Christians on earth who still love the gentle version of Christianity, the one they still imagine that Jesus heads, just as I do. I didn’t really want to say it today, after all. However, I was driving on Wednesday, running some minor errands, when I heard Jesus’s unmistakable voice in my mind. He said, very strongly and clearly, “Say it now.”
Oops! Okay, Sir. Yes Sir! Yes. I’ll do it. Jesus’s voice is unmistakable. And you don’t say No to Him!
So, for the past couple of days, I have been thinking about the best way to go about doing this. Thomas has been helping me a lot! It is his view that the core of what is so wrong with all forty-eight-thousand-odd versions of Christianity is the religion’s insistence that Jesus’s death on the cross was a sin-sacrifice. In the nature of Judaism’s ancient sin-sacrifices of animals.
But, what does Jesus say about sin? Jesus destroyed most of those old religious ideas about sin in one stroke! When Jesus was asked what was the greatest commandment, He didn’t name any of the Ten Commandments. Instead, He said, “‘You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind.’ This is the great and foremost commandment. The second is like it, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ On these two commandments depend the whole Law and the Prophets” (MT 22:37-40). And He confirmed that His abandonment of religious laws was consistent with the divine plan, when He said, “Do not think that I came to abolish the Law or the Prophets; I did not come to abolish, but to fulfill” (MT 5:17). So, Jesus told us that spiritually, we didn’t need those old religious laws about sin anymore. We were now rising above them all.
The concept of sin is grounded in religious laws, and of course all religions are human-made. So, in shrinking the Law and the Prophets down to just two commandments about love, and thereby discarding nearly every Jewish law, was Jesus abolishing the whole ancient concept of sin? I think the answer to this question is yes! To the open-minded Gospel student, the many times that Jesus pushed aside what were then inviolate religious laws, and He gave us cagey reasons for His doing so, look like a campaign to discredit those laws without running afoul of the always-listening Temple guards. Here are some examples:
“At that time Jesus went through the grain fields on the Sabbath, and His disciples became hungry and began to pick the heads of grain and eat them. But when the Pharisees saw this, they said to Him, ‘Look, Your disciples do what is not lawful to do on a Sabbath.’ But He said to them, ‘Have you not read what David did when he became hungry, he and his companions, how he entered the house of God, and they ate the consecrated bread, which was not lawful for him to eat nor for those with him, but for the priests alone? Or have you not read in the Law, that on the Sabbath the priests in the temple break the Sabbath and are innocent? But I say to you that something greater than the temple is here! But if you had known what this means, “I desire compassion, and not sacrifice,” you would not have condemned the innocent. For the Son of Man is Lord of the Sabbath’” (MT 12:7-9). And the strictly religious folk of His day acted pretty much the way some Christians do now: they shamed and shunned anyone they judged to be sinful. Jesus, on the other hand, especially loved even the most unlovable! For example, we read, “And it happened that He was reclining at the table in his house, and many tax collectors and sinners were dining with Jesus and His disciples; for there were many of them, and they were following Him” (MT 2:15). He even told us why He especially loved sinners. He said, “It is not those who are healthy who need a physician, but those who are sick; I did not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (MK 2:17).
“Now all the tax collectors and the sinners were coming near Him to listen to Him. Both the Pharisees and the scribes began to grumble, saying, ‘This man receives sinners and eats with them.” So He told them this parable, saying, ‘What man among you, if he has a hundred sheep and has lost one of them, does not leave the ninety-nine in the open pasture and go after the one which is lost until he finds it? When he has found it, he lays it on his shoulders, rejoicing. And when he comes home, he calls together his friends and his neighbors, saying to them, “Rejoice with me, for I have found my sheep which was lost!” I tell you that in the same way, there will be more joy in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who need no repentance. Or what woman, if she has ten silver coins and loses one coin, does not light a lamp and sweep the house and search carefully until she finds it? When she has found it, she calls together her friends and neighbors, saying, “Rejoice with me, for I have found the coin which I had lost!” In the same way, I tell you, there is joy in the presence of the angels of God over one sinner who repents’” (LK 15:1-10).
The more you read the Lord’s Gospel words with the guess that perhaps He was abolishing the very concept of sin, the more you realize that was precisely what He was doing! Jesus had replaced the Law and the Prophets with God’s new law of love; and in doing that, He was announcing that we were ready to move beyond a primitive and puerile thou-shalt-not morality, so then we could begin to live by a standard that is based entirely in love. Whatever we might do is no longer so important, but instead all that matters is what is in our hearts. If we have raised our spiritual vibration sufficiently that our every thought, our every impulse is based in nothing but love, then everything that we do from out of that love is good and moral, by definition. And when you think about it, you realize that in fact, this is a much stricter standard than any old-style, sin-based law ever could be. This law requires that we make no decision without first weighing it on the scales of love that are becoming ever more perfectly manifest in our hearts.
It is from this more profound base of understanding where there is only love that we come to understand why we also cannot so easily judge the woman who has committed adultery. This is from JN 8: “But Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. Early in the morning He came again into the temple, and all the people were coming to Him; and He sat down and began to teach them. The scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman caught in adultery, and having set her in the center of the court, they said to Him, “Teacher, this woman has been caught in adultery, in the very act. Now in the Law, Moses commanded us to stone such women; what then do You say?” They were saying this, testing Him, so that they might have grounds for accusing Him. But Jesus stooped down, and with His finger wrote on the ground. But when they persisted in asking Him, He straightened up, and said to them, ‘He who is without sin among you, let him be the first to throw a stone at her.’ Again, He stooped down and wrote on the ground. When they heard it, they began to go out one by one, beginning with the older ones, and He was left alone, and the woman, where she was, in the center of the court. Straightening up, Jesus said to her, ‘Woman, where are they? Did no one condemn you?’ She said, ‘No one, Lord.’ And Jesus said, ‘I do not condemn you, either. Go. From now on, sin no more’” (JN 8:1-11). This is so beautiful!
And yet, the religion that carries Jesus’s name is based in the false notion, which never came from Jesus, that we are all irremediable sinners, to the point where Jesus had to be born as a sinless sacrifice to take all our sins upon Himself. And then Jesus is purported to have died as a sacrifice to God for our sins, after the manner of all the animal sin-sacrifices made to God by the Jews in their Temples. And the Christian religion has, for most of its history, been extraordinarily barbaric, to the point where Jesus is displayed on crosses in gory detail in all the Catholic churches to this day. Wow, to be a Catholic Christian is to be torn and riven with guilt even from childhood, knowing that such a good Man as Jesus had to die like that because you are so sinful, and so just plain awful! The whole history of the Catholic Church displays a surprising level of brutality, too. If you have not yet read Helen Ellerbe’s horrifying book, which is entitled The Dark Side of Christian History, then you really ought to do that now. And know that Jesus has spent much of the time since He last died on earth and then rose and ascended, simply healing the hundreds of millions of victims of the worst of Christianity’s most horrifying acts of raw and sadistic cruelty.
Then, since around the early part of the twentieth century, Jesus has been communicating with some on earth who were especially able to receive His communications. Some of these messages that look especially real to me were received from Jesus via automatic writing through James E. Padgett, a Washington, D.C. Attorney, between the years 1914 and 1921, and were first published in 1940 in a book entitle Book of Truths. Now Jonathan Beecher, the head of White Crow Books, which is the pre-eminent publisher of such spiritual books, is republishing these teachings in a new book just out, entitled No One’s Dead – The Jesus Messages. I won’t be interviewing Jonathan on Seek Reality for a few more weeks, so I have only just begun to read his book; but one quotation from it already jumps out at me. Jesus says there, “I did not die for your sins; those are on you.”
The definitive answer to the question that begins this post is that, No, of course not. Jesus is not a Christian in Constantine’s mold! And nor is God, for that matter. Neither of them follows any religion, but rather every religion is strictly human-made. Jesus taught His followers a spiritual movement which He called The Way that was based upon and meant to more easily spread His Gospel teachings; and His Way soon had millions of followers, spreading rapidly in the first three centuries following His death and resurrection, all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away as Rome. Until Constantine’s armies destroyed most of it, and drove its remnants far into the desert. Let’s see now what happens next, as Constantine’s religion begins to fall of its own weight….
Holy, holy, holy! Lord God Almighty!
All thy works shall praise thy name, in earth, and sky, and sea;
Holy, holy, holy! merciful and mighty!
God in three Persons, blessed Trinity.
Reginald Heber (1783-1826), from “Holy, Holy, Holy” (1826)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Is Jesus a Christian? (#2) appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
August 23, 2025
Is Jesus a Christian? (#1)
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before!
Christ, the royal Master, leads against the foe;
Forward into battle, see His banner go.
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
At the sign of triumph. Satan’s host doth flee.
On then, Christian soldiers; on to victory!
Hell’s foundations quiver at the shout of praise.
Brothers, lift your voices! Loud your anthems raise!
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
Like a mighty army moves the church of God.
Brothers, we are treading where the saints have trod!
We are not divided, all one body, we!
One in hope and doctrine; one in charity.
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
– Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)
As soon as I began to more deeply understand the details of early Christian history, and that happened when I was a sophomore in college, my religious life began to fall apart. Had no one else ever noticed the fact that Christianity was just one gigantic crisis, and most of it really made no sense at all? My goodness, it was the Roman Emperor Constantine, and not Jesus after all, who actually had created the religion! And a lot of Christianity as we practice it even now, two thousand years after the Lord’s Ascension, was in fact directly contradicted by what Jesus actually had taught when He was here! Did no one actually read the Bible? I had been reading the Bible from cover to cover repeatedly since I was eleven years old, so I already had seen some very big discrepancies between the things that Jesus had said as they were reported to us right there in the Gospels, and the most fundamental things that Christians in their churches were being taught to believe. I still can recall how I felt that spring when I was only twenty years old, as each new difference in dogma separately landed on me, and again set me fretting. I would go out then sometimes to where the other girls might be, perhaps sitting and lying heedlessly on the new-cut grass, and I would try to explain to those who were my closest friends why this was all so upsetting to me.
But no one much cared. It was springtime in New England, it was the nineteen-sixties, and elsewhere, boys were being drafted and dying for nothing, while people were rioting in America’s cities. And we who were in college and far from what were really very much bigger problems were savoring the fact that we were the lucky ones. As the whole modern world fell apart around us, they thought my fretting about religious errors was just so much utterly irrelevant nonsense.
My much-beloved favorite professor seemed so old to me, when I was so young, that I recall her now as likely having been old enough to have personally attended the Emperor Constantine’s First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE. Miss Corwin was the only person I knew back then who cared as much about the drama and tragedy of Christianity’s big errors as I did. She instilled in me a mighty fury at the Roman Emperor Constantine in particular, almost as if she had known him personally! Vividly, and to this day I can recall her tiny office with its bookshelves to the ceiling, and the way she would patiently sit with me and listen and attempt to assist me as I wrestled through my first great Christian disillusionments. Oh, my problems did get worse over the years that followed, and especially since there never has been any attempt made by the Roman Christian church to answer anyone’s issues with it at all. Oh, what? You’ve found a problem or an inconsistency with this or that, or with some other Christian church teaching? Well pound sand, my little apostate friend. Say twelve Hail Marys or go to hell, because that is just the way it is.
I soon personally learned just how very badly Catholicism handled dissension, because I fell in love with a Catholic when I was in my mid-twenties, and the priest who taught me to become a Catholic so we could marry actually put it to me just that way. He briefly tried to teach me pleasantly, but when I began to ask him a few of those tough questions that Miss Corwin and I had wrestled with when I was in college, his pleasantness disappeared at once. He just said to me something like, “Look, either you accept the religion, or you marry someone else. I think you should probably marry someone else.” So, I just crossed my fingers behind my back, where only God could see them, and I thought God didn’t mind, since God already knew that I had all those self-same problems with Protestantism. I became a Catholic so I could marry my Edward. I can recall thinking at the time that eventually, my beloved was going to mellow out and we both could settle on Episcopalianism. But, boy, was I ever wrong about that!
It was only after I met Thomas as my spirit guide much later on, and then he persuaded me 
when I was in my early sixties to give the rest of my life to God, that he helped me to realize that there is Someone Else who might be even more bothered about all the conflicts in Roman Christianity than I am. And Thomas thinks it is time for all of us, and really it is long past time for every Christian now living on earth to give Jesus the courtesy of at least wondering what might be His point of view on all of this! My Thomas, my much-beloved spirit guide, is very close to Jesus. He has been close to the Being who became Jesus since they died together in their last shared earth-lifetime, which Thomas believes was lived in what is now Syria about six thousand years ago. Jesus then ascended to the Godhead level, but He remained in touch with the being who had been His older brother, my Thomas, and He asked him to wait while Jesus tried to understand what just had happened to Him. Then eventually, after maybe four thousand years, Jesus not only had figured everything out, but He had persuaded God to allow Him to incarnate from out of the Godhead in order to teach us all how to grow enough spiritually in one lifetime so we will never again need to return to earth. So Thomas’s brother incarnated from out of the Godhead as Jesus. My Thomas then incarnated again on earth as well, and he served Jesus in that lifetime, and forevermore.
Even now, I have been given to realize, Thomas’s primary role in his eternal life is to serve Jesus, and he has sworn never to further advance spiritually so he always will be able to do just that. The two of them remain extremely close. Thomas meets with Jesus nightly, and since he also is my spirit guide for this lifetime, so by the spirit guide protocols he cannot leave me alone while he astral travels to see Jesus, he has been dragging me along without memory of the event on every night of my earth-lifetime. Good grief. When Thomas took me to visit with Jesus in the summer of 2022 and allowed me to remember those meetings, and he did this what I reckon was eight or nine times while my body slept, I had some glimpses of just how close those two actually are.
My favorite astral memory from that summer is of the two of them sitting close together on Jesus’s riverbank under that many-colored, always-twilight sky and happily chatting in their long-lost last earth-language. They could more easily have talked by mind, but Thomas has told me that sometimes they just enjoy dredging that language up and seeing how much of it they can still remember. I was sitting where I usually sat in these moments, slightly above and maybe twenty feet behind them, on a little hill. Then Jesus glanced to make sure no group of Christians was approaching, He gathered Himself and got ready to stand, and He whispered something to Thomas that was an insult in that old language. Thomas later told me that what Jesus usually would call him was “Bloody General”. Something like that. Then Jesus would stand up and run, and Thomas would chase Him, the pet deer would scatter, and inevitably Thomas would catch Jesus, throw Him to the ground, and, yes, beat Him up. The one time I saw this happen, I was so horrified that I flew up into the air and hovered above them. I distinctly recall the sweet look of Jesus’s face as He calmly looked up at me from under Thomas’s bigger and bulkier body in mild surprise. Then Thomas quickly looked up, too, and the whole thing ended.
No one was supposed to have seen that! But they both had forgotten that I was in “awake” mode. They discussed it, and at my request they allowed me to remember and report what I had seen. Thomas later told me that this is the most important thing that He uniquely does for Jesus. His cherished Brother is a fully Divine Being, vibrating even higher than this universe’s Godhead level, so no other being ever would even presume to treat Jesus the way that Jesus wants Thomas to treat Him. Indeed, no one else likely could bear Jesus’s very strong personal vibration and get close enough to Him to do it, even if they were willing to try to assist Him in this unique way. But Jesus is eager to retain the last remnant of His human status, to somehow keep His human connection to us, to remain “Fully God and Fully Man”. And it is only Thomas’s regularly tussling with Him like the earthly kid-brother that in fact he once was that enables Jesus to retain the last remnant of His “fully man” status.
So, is Jesus bothered by the basic differences and disconnects between “The Way”, the movement that He began during His lifetime that was born from out of the godhead, His movement that was based upon His teachings alone; and Christianity, the very different human fear- and guilt-based religion that the Roman Emperor Constantine founded for his own purposes three centuries later?
There are now some 48,000 different Christian denominations worldwide, nearly all of which are less than two hundred years old. Worldwide Catholicism counts as a single denomination, while many others are as small as a single church building. The differences in doctrine among Christian denominations are often tiny. And the worst disagreements between Jesus’s original Way and the fear- and guilt-based Christianity that Constantine created, which we might say is typified by today’s frame-verse, are these three:
The eternal Jesus has in fact expressed some strong opinions about these core Christian beliefs to me personally, and He also has channeled essentially the same thoughts to others. His feelings about the Roman Christian dogmas do not surprise me at all, and I think that they won’t surprise you, either. What does surprise me a little, perhaps, is that He is choosing this time on earth above some others to make His own ideas so clearly known! We’ll finish this important conversation next week….
Onward then ye people, join our happy throng!
Blend with ours your voices in the triumph song.
Glory, laud and honor unto Christ the King!
This, thru countless ages, men and angels sing.
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
Crowns and thrones may perish, kingdoms rise and wane,
But the church of Jesus constant will remain.
Gates of hell can never ‘gainst the church prevail.
We have Christ’s own promise, and that cannot fail!
Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war,
With the cross of Jesus going on before.
– Rev. Sabine Baring-Gould (1834-1924), from “Onward, Christian Soldiers” (1871)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Is Jesus a Christian? (#1) appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
August 16, 2025
Love and Fear
Love is but a song we sing!
Fear’s the way we die.
You can make the mountains ring,
Or make the angels cry.
Though the bird is on the wing,
And you may not know why,
Come on people now, smile on your brother!
Everybody get together,
Try to love one another right now.
Some may come and some may go.
We will surely pass,
When the One that left us here
Returns for us at last.
We are but a moment’s sunlight,
Fading in the grass.
Come on people now, smile on your brother!
Everybody get together, try to love one another
Right now. Right now. Right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), from “Get Together” (1967)
There are times when my wish that I could be a Christian again will unexpectedly overwhelm me with yearning. I have a sister and a cousin who are about my age. We three have been close all our lives, and now we text together when something happens that seems to one of us to be worth sharing. So naturally, when I held my big deer breakfast last Sunday morning, I texted to Lee and Paula a few pictures taken out my office bow window. My daughter had stopped at a Buc-ee’s on her way back from a drive down to Houston on that previous afternoon, and she had bought a big bag of deer-corn with which to entertain our local population. For people who don’t live in Texas, I should add that a Buc-ee’s is a highway-side world too gigantic to be called just a pit-stop, and it sells a lot of eccentric things, including bags of deer-corn. (The fact that those camouflage-colored bags of deer corn have big bull’s-eyes printed on one side of them is something that we can politely ignore.) So, there were a dozen deer in our yard that morning, ranging from bucks wearing half-grown antlers in velvet down to this year’s spotted fawns. All of them were just outside my office bow window, cheerily munching on their Sunday breakfast maybe six feet away but oblivious to me!
I texted a few deer pictures to Lee and Paula, but I didn’t hear back from them for almost an hour. Their tardiness excuse was that they each had just come home from church. One lives in Colorado now, while the other is still in Massachusetts, and each has of course become a matriarch who dwells, as I do, immersed in the comings and goings of a grown daughter’s nearly-grown family. And, amazingly to me, they both find going to their local Protestant churches on Sundays to be a usual part of their love-filled lives. Now, though, I can too plainly see that horrifying religion for what it is: it’s a fear-based Roman trap that wears Jesus’s beautiful face as a mask while it uses its own dogmas to hold more than two billion people ensnared for life.
But what fills me with raw, inescapable yearning as I read their texts about having just attended their churches is, of course, the sweet New England church of my childhood, where I never heard a single fear-based word. I still receive that church’s weekly emails, to this day. But dear Reverend Turrell has long since transitioned, and that church itself is several days’ drive away from where I live now in Texas. And unlike my sister and my cousin, even though I have pledged my life to serving God, and now I know and I deeply love the genuine, still-living Jesus with everything that is in me, I find that I can no longer be a Christian. For a time, soon after we moved to Texas, I thought the Unity Church might be my answer, since it was down to just singing and studying A Course In Miracles and positive conversations about how to better live the teachings of Jesus. But more recently, Unity has begun to almost semi-deify its late-nineteenth-century founders, the Fillmores and some others, which is the very last thing that poor Charles and Myrtle ever would have wanted.
My problem is that I know far too much! I know that the religion that we call “Christianity” was begun in the year 312 C.E. by the Roman Emperor Constantine, after the Romans had spent the previous two centuries trying to destroy the whole Jesus Movement. Those first centuries of persecution had only served to make the Way of Jesus stronger, but then Constantine had suddenly made a shift and begun to follow Jesus himself, because he thought he had seen a vision of a cross in the clouds, and heard a voice that said, “By this sign you shall conquer.” Which hardly seems to be a great spiritual base on which to build a new religion!
What Jesus had given us was a set of spiritual teachings that He called “The Way”. His body had died on a cross at the end of His earthly life, true enough; but only so He could then miraculously raise it from the dead, and thereby prove to us all that our lives are eternal. Jesus’s Way was immediately powerful, and it grew steadily ever more powerful. It soon had millions of followers, all around the Mediterranean Sea and as far away from its roots as Rome. But then, three hundred years after Jesus’s Resurrection and His Ascension, along came this Roman crazyman Emperor who needed a great fear-based way to unify and energize his armies So he called the First Council of Nicaea in the year 325 CE, and he directed them to create the first Christian Bible, and the fear-based doctrines of the Christine religion that is still being followed worldwide to this day. Christianity is not Jesus’s Way at all; but rather, it is Constantine’s Way.
How do I know all of this with such soul-wrenching certainty? Because Jesus, our beautiful eternal Wayshower and Best Friend Jesus, who came to us truly as God on earth, has personally told me His genuine Eternal Life’s Story. One night in 2022, and with no warning at all that this was about to happen, my Thomas took me to the astral plane to meet with Jesus, and together they allowed me to remember the event. Seriously! I look back at this whole life that I am living now, at my Experience of Light when I was eight years old; and then at discovering that my spirit guide is not a usual sort of spirit guide, but rather he was Thomas Jefferson in his most recent lifetime but one, and he has been what you might call Jesus’s close sidekick for the past two thousand years. You cannot make this up, and I am private by nature, so for sure I never would have chosen any of this! When I first began to put it together, and I started saying, “But, why me?” Thomas would cheekily retort, “Why not you?”
This is my Thomas’s first time working as anyone’s spirit guide, and as I think you can see, he is not yet great at the job (Sorry, Thomas). Everyone who is born on earth has a primary spirit guide for that whole lifetime, and the point of Thomas’s spirit guide role is supposed to be to guide me in raising my base spiritual vibration. So, our relationship should be all about me! But apparently, Thomas and I are very old and close friends, and my usual gender is male, so he treats me with more familiarity, and with much less gentle respect than is usual in the basic spirit guide relationship. And although I have no memory of any of this while I am in this body, I gather now that I also am part of Jesus’s eternal inner circle. So, Thomas and I came into this lifetime that is supposed to be all about ME. But we planned my life mostly around continuing to serve Jesus, as we have been doing ever since the Lord’s Ascension, two thousand years ago. Which, Thomas is now pointing out to me, has been a very effective way for him to help me to further raise my personal spiritual vibration, has it not? So, perhaps he hasn’t done such a poor job at his spirit guide role, after all, wouldn’t you say? And, shouldn’t I be admitting to that, now? Or, so he keeps saying to me. And he is right, of course. Well, in any event, that was the reason why he and Jesus gave me so little explanation of what was going on, when, one night in 2022, Thomas simply took me to meet with Jesus on the Lord’s astral riverbank. And Jesus, without ceremony, simply set about telling me His eternal-life’s Story.
Over time, we are preparing teachingsbyjesus.com at Jesus’s direction, and we eventually will be promoting it for Him. Thomas and I are absolutely not driving this train! And I have no idea about the timing, but I have the vague sense that Jesus is waiting for certain unguessable things to happen on earth before we will be given the word to complete and begin to promote His website. So it may be even decades from now. There is no time where Jesus is. What He told me about Himself in April of 2022 is meant just to be posted on that website, but He said these things to me as we sat together on that astral riverbank, and we fed His fish with grain that simply appeared in our hands beneath that odd astral sky streaked with colors that never are seen on earth. So, I know His truth now, and I cannot un-know it. I had been gradually growing away from Christianity over many years, even as I still loved the religion, because I had been seeing ever more clearly how different it is from the teachings of Jesus, and how based in fear it is, and not based in love, and how it really does not closely follow Jesus’s teachings at all. But I had gone to sleep that night not realizing that now would be my breaking point.
Jesus has a distinctive voice. He speaks softly and gently, and He has a mild, unguessable accent. He told me that He wanted to tell me His story, because it was time for the world to know His story, and He wanted me to tell it on His website. Which I told Him that of course I would do. Jesus lived His last earth-lifetime with the being that I call Thomas very long ago. My Thomas and I have come to reckon that the last earth-lifetime that Jesus ever lived as a usual human being was about six thousand years ago, when He was the middle brother of three princes in a walled city somewhere in the Middle East. His older brother then is now my Thomas, and His younger brother became the Apostle John. Those three long-ago princes died in their late teens and early twenties when their city was conquered by barbarians, and Jesus then rose to become a perfected Being at the Godhead level. And when He saw how unjust this whole system was, that people had to incarnate repeatedly because no one realized what actually was going on, He seems to have spent some four thousand earth-years petitioning God to allow Him to be reborn from out of the Godhead – something never before done, and also never done since – so He could teach humankind how to use the challenges of their earth-lives to grow spiritually, so then they never would have to be reborn on earth again. Well, wow. So Jesus really was once one of us! There was His purpose clearly stated for us, too: He was born from out of the Godhead so He could teach us how to grow spiritually, and it really had happened, just this way!
As He was telling me His story, Jesus had often to leave me briefly, to stand and go to greet and bless groups of newly-dead Christians, and then return and sit down again on His riverbank and return to feeding His fish and telling me His story. He would know when those groups were approaching us, even from a distance and without turning to look for them. And of course, He could read my mind as well, so I didn’t have to ask my most pressing questions. After we had talked about His life story through His teaching phase on earth, He said, “Little One, you wonder about My death on the cross, but you know these answers before I give them to you. My plan had been to give My disciples their charge, and to begin their teaching walk with them. Then one day, I would just walk away and ascend. But the problem was that, no matter what I said, I never could convince the people there is no death! They had all those bone-boxes. They thought they knew better than I did.”
He said those last words as He was standing, yet again. The custom of that time was to lay out the bodies of the newly dead in caves to rot away until only their bones remained. Then their bones would be gathered and placed in bone-boxes, called ossuaries, which would be labeled with each decedent’s name and then put in permanent storage. So, no wonder no one believed Jesus when He told them they were going to live forever! As Jesus sat down again beside me this time, He was saying that He had decided that His only option was to die a public death, a crucifixion, and then to resurrect His body. He had been practicing by resurrecting dead small animals, and that was working, although He couldn’t keep them alive for long. But once He was inside His resurrected corpse, He thought that He could keep it going for long enough to prove His point to the crowds. However, the advanced Beings who were His guidance team for His lifetime as Jesus absolutely forbade His letting Himself be crucified. For Him to debase a divine being to that extent? They refused to even consider allowing it! But Jesus said to me – and I will never forget the look on His face when He said this – that He was going to do it, no matter what they said. Which was why, on the cross, He briefly cried out to God with worry that God was not releasing Him from His body soon enough for Him to escape having the soldiers break His legs at sundown, so His body would die before the Sabbath began; since of course, broken legs would have rendered that body unable to walk once He resurrected it.
We talked that night about what Jesus could read from my mind was my major concern, which was whether He had died as a sin-sacrifice. That dogma is Constantine’s core Christian teaching, and yet it makes no sense at all, for at least these two reasons:
Jesus tells us in the Gospels that neither He nor God ever judges anyone, so no sin-sacrifice ever was needed (See JN 5:22-23 and JN 12:47).If Jesus had died as a sin-sacrifice, then His rising from the dead would have made no sense, since the Temple sin-sacrifices always stayed dead; yet the explanation for Jesus”s rising that He gave to me, that He rose from the dead to prove to the crowds that our lives are eternal, makes perfect sense.So from the moment when I woke up that next morning, and forever after, I can no longer bear Christianity. I cannot be inside a church. That religion is fear-based Roman lies! No, Jesus did not die as a sin-sacrifice, and to make the Roman instrument of torture that killed His body His symbol now is horrifying! Jesus’s symbol should be light and joy, the beauty and certainty of God’s perfect love. That is what I think, but what I think doesn’t matter. What does our Wayshower and Best Friend think…?
If you hear the song I sing,
You will understand (listen!)
You hold the key to love and fear
All in your trembling hand.
Just one key unlocks them both.
It’s there at your command!
Come on people now, Smile on your brother.
Everybody get together, Try to love one another
Right now, Right now, Right now!
– Chet Powers (1937-1994), From “Get Together” (1967)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Love and Fear appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
August 9, 2025
Growing Spiritually
If I loved you,
Time and again, I would try to say
All I’d want you to know.
If I loved you,
Words wouldn’t come in an easy way.
‘Round in circles I’d go!
Longing to tell you,
But afraid and shy,
I’d let my golden chances
Pass me by.
Soon, you’d leave me.
Off you would go in the mist of day,
Never, never to know
How I loved you!
If I loved you….
– Richard Rodgers (1902-1979), from “If I Loved You” (1945)
There is just one reason why you were born. There is a main reason why people do what they do, why they are as they are, and why this world is as it is, in all its manifold and mysterious complexities. There is one reason why this universe exists, and why it ever has existed at all; and why, against such extremely long odds, you and I as individuals are alive here today. That reason, when viewed from every angle, is always in fact going to be the same reason. And it is, indeed, a very good reason… I will certainly cede to you that fact! But still, wouldn’t you expect to find more than one reason for every conceivable thing that exists, from the smallest microbes to the most distant stars, and even down to each hair on your own very precious and beautiful head? I have spent my life looking for additional reasons, or for something else that also might be going on here, when you really look hard for it. I have searched for some ancillary things that we might point to as also of significant importance in this reality. But, no one else seems to be proposing any other reason for anything to exist; and, you know, at this point, I have largely given up trying to find another reason. Every other proposed reason that I ever have seen is just ancillary to that one primary reason. When it all comes right down to it, at the base of our reality, the deeper we look, the more perfect this singularity of purpose seems to us to be, at least to each sincere and consistent seeker. So, if you might have reached any other conclusion about what actually is going on here, will you please speak up now? A lot of us are all ears!
The one conclusion about what actually is going on that seems to be what everyone on earth has reached is that this universe is designed to be our habitat for rich and rapid spiritual learning. That’s it! And apparently, that also is all. We won’t attempt right now to give a name to the Designer who set up this reality, beyond noting that we are living within what is apparently a grand and remarkable design which is centered upon that singular purpose of humankind’s rapid spiritual learning and growth. And a “Design” does indeed imply a “Designer”.
We should note as well that admitting that obvious fact does put us far ahead of the whole mainstream scientific community. All materialist scientists resolutely remain with eyes squinched shut and fingers in both ears, so they can continue to insist to us that the reality that we perceive to exist around us in fact has no purpose and no design about it, whatsoever. No purpose, so no Design. No Design, so no Designer! Mainstream materialist scientists still insist that the universe just somehow randomly appeared in a Bang! out of nothing one day, and for no reason whatsoever. From there, it randomly developed to its present stage. Somehow and amazingly, but always randomly, it simply rambled toward nowhere, developing always by sheer happenstance to become this remarkably orderly world, even including the complex wonder of you and me, all out of nothing and with no plan. But you and I long ago dismissed their ideas as just the product of their odd religion of atheistic materialism, because the universe is so obviously precisely designed, just as you and I are designed, with this clear purpose of our rapid spiritual development while we are on earth always somehow behind it all. Anyone who actually studies the evidence without the scientists’ atheistic religious bias can reach no other sensible conclusion.
When you begin your research with parameters predetermined, and with the end result already in mind, then you cannot claim to be doing real and objective science. To this day, scientists still are awkwardly certain that the brain must be the source of consciousness, despite all the evidence they have developed so far against this assumption, and although even to this day they still cannot begin to fathom how that might happen. And they also still assume that life first somehow sprang from lightning hitting some magical primordial goo, although to this day they cannot tell you how that might possibly have happened, either. .After more than a century of devotion to their religion of atheistic materialism, when it comes to explaining why and how matter arose, where consciousness comes from, and how life began, the materialist scientists’ efforts still are sadly going nowhere.
So, my dear ones, at this point we need not continue to wait even a moment longer for the scientific community to eventually get a clue, as it ever more pointlessly flounders on. Like the worshipers of Marduk in the ancient past who threw their firstborn infants into the fires burning in their idols’ bellies, materialist scientists still follow a belief-system that we can see by now is tragically wrongheaded. But meanwhile, we understand that the truth of this beautiful reality around us is in fact so simple! As our great hero, the pioneering quantum physicist Max Planck, discovered more than a century ago, what we experience as consciousness is in fact all that independently exists. Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality, so it vibrates as what we experience as human emotion. Love is at the highest and most powerful consciousness vibration; and fear, anger, and hatred are at the lowest, slowest, and weakest vibration. And since time does not exist in our true home, if you are conscious now, then you are conscious eternally. You are eternal by your very nature. And if what we are summarizing in this paragraph is not already clear to you, simply put the word “consciousness” into the search bar above and to the right, and you will find more than thirty posts that document my own developing awareness over the past few years of the overwhelming fact that Consciousness is all there is. Consciousness is the sculptor as well as the clay. You also will find in those posts some terrific linked articles and videos that helped me to at last achieve these ultimate insights. Please enjoy those prior posts about consciousness, until all of this at last makes sense to you.
So, now we know for certain that our lives are eternal! You and I dwell forever in more beauty and joy than we can possibly imagine with just these little stripped-down aspects of our minds that we are using during these brief earth-lifetimes. Oh, we often do astral-travel at night back home from here while our bodies sleep. And some of us are learning to remember those journeys, because the veil between realities really is thinning at this point. But still, the Luddite scientific community holds an oddly mesmerizing control over most people’s minds. It really is amazing! Think about it. Since the scientific gatekeepers first imposed their nonsensical dogma of atheistic materialism on the whole scientific community more than a century ago, there have been no more fundamental scientific discoveries. We still don’t know how or why the Big Bang happened, nor what might have come before it; we don’t know what consciousness is, nor where it comes from; nor even how life on earth began. The answers to even these most basic questions still, and seemingly forevermore, must now elude us. And far too many people still overly trust a scientific community which tells us that one day very soon, for no discernible reason, we each will forever blink out like a light. And so, scientists sadly cheat most people now living on earth of the chance to use this lifetime as they came here firmly intending to use it, as a place for wonderfully rapid spiritual growth!
Every person now living on earth, all eight billion or so of us, has chosen to be born on this planet because it provides us with an ideal environment in which to grow spiritually. Each of us carefully planned these earth-lives with the help of our eternal mentors and our spirit guides for these earth-lifetimes; and we had the help, too, of wonderful eternal friends who now play important roles in our lives. We briefly put aside most of our vast, eternal minds so our active earth-minds were stripped down for rapid learning, and we accepted amnesia about what was going on as we prepared to be born into the earth-lives that we are now living. This material universe, and this earth in particular, is considered to be the toughest, and the best place in all of reality in which to achieve very rapid spiritual growth!
I suppose part of the reason why this is true is that, once you are here, you have no idea why you are here. And now, I’m going to use my own life as a pretty good example. Apparently, I am not actually a spiritual low-life and utter dunce in my real life, but rather I have been working with Thomas and serving Jesus for many centuries; but you never would have known that from my own early earth-life this time around. I was embarrassingly selfish, conceited, and self-absorbed as a child, quite spiritually un-promising. OMG, it embarrasses me now to look back at the whole first half of my life as Roberta! But I did feel driven to do all that afterlife research, and to read the Bible daily, and especially the Gospels, over and over again repeatedly from the age of eleven; and gradually, a more spiritually aware being emerged in me. What seems to be the case is that we all come into these earth-lives as I did, just spiritually stupid and self-obsessed, and our guides direct us in our very early development. And I don’t care how old you are now, it is amazingly easy for you to use the teachings of Jesus to retrain yourself spiritually, and to raise your own consciousness vibration rapidly enough from wherever you are now that you can make this your last necessary earth-lifetime. Once you make spiritual growth your whole focus, it can take almost no time at all! Just a year or two perhaps, if you will put your whole mind to it.
So, let’s really do this now. It was Thomas who directed me in taking these steps, even before I actually had met him in 2015. I think he probably did it as an experiment with me, and it worked beautifully! Raising your vibration enough to make this your last necessary earth-lifetime turns out to be as easy as One, Two, Three…
One, Perfect an Attitude of Gratitude. This is so simple! Get a notebook, and write down one new thing each day that you are grateful for. Or perhaps two at first, if you are an over-achiever. Write down what you are grateful for, and briefly why you are grateful for it. Also form the habit of falling asleep counting your blessings every night. When you concentrate on it, Gratitude becomes a wonderfully positive, reflexive, and constant attitude.Two, Apply Prevenient Forgiveness to Everything. The “Miracle” in A Course in Miracles is forgiveness, and universal forgiveness is the essential precursor to universal love, so whenever anything or anyone bothers you at all, always forgive it right away! At once and automatically, gather everything that even remotely bothers you into a nice, tight ball, and then push it away from you slowly with both hands as you firmly say aloud, “I love you. I bless you. I forgive. And I release.” Do this even two or three times in succession if necessary, always going through the whole process of gathering whatever bothers you, including all the people, and forming the forgiveness ball and pushing it away while you say the mantra, until all your negative feelings about whatever it was are altogether gone.Three, Master Universal Love. You will discover that once your Attitude of Gratitude has become habitual, and your Prevenient Forgiveness habit has largely cleared up all the things in your life that ever used to bother you, then you are going to find yourself liking, and then even loving things, and especially people, that you never would even have noticed before. Perhaps there were things about some of your family members, work associates, neighbors, and friends that used to get on your nerves; but now, oddly, those things bother you less and less. Or there was a house you used to pass on your daily walk where they never properly mowed their lawn, and rather than feeling irked by their laziness, your first thought now is that perhaps you ought to organize a neighborhood fund for people who have trouble affording to pay for lawn mowing.
Mastering these steps in this order is important. You are altogether retraining your pared-down earth-mind! Your attitude of gratitude first captures your mind’s full attention, and it prepares your mind for more intensive learning. Then, your obsessive use of Prevenient Forgiveness, your retraining of your mind with those forgiveness balls, clears away what has been a lifetime of letting your mind run wild with petty selfishness. This is some truly heavy-duty stuff! I spent about six months monitoring my every thought, and stopping and punishing my mind with another forgiveness-balls session whenever I had even the slightest mean or petty notion. And this was back in 2011, so almost fifteen years ago now. And in all the years since, I have never again had the smallest unkind thought about anyone. I have never had to form another forgiveness ball since then. Not even once!
It was sometime in about 2015, soon after Thomas had first come out to me as my primary spirit guide, and soon after we had together written Liberating Jesus, that my dear Thomas announced to me from out of the blue one day that I had now achieved the upper fifth spiritual level. So therefore, this is my last necessary earth-lifetime. I had never asked him this question, but he knew that, wow, I would want to know this, when it happened! And, yes, I did want to know it. I really had mastered my mind and raised my vibration to this extent? I knew that I did feel very different. It had been a long time since I had had any sort of unkind thought at all. I recall that I stood up slowly from my desk when he said this, and I went outside, and I walked around for a bit, just taking it all in. That was more than ten years ago. By now, I am used to this idea. I think that I have grown even more. But my darling, my dear one, my precious friend, please think about this. If I have done it, Then anyone can do it! You can so easily do it, too!
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Growing Spiritually appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
August 2, 2025
Sin?
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord:
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored;
He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword:
His truth is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
I have seen Him in the watch-fires of a hundred circling camps,
They have builded Him an altar in the evening dews and damps;
I can read His righteous sentence by the dim and flaring lamps:
His day is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
I have read a fiery gospel writ in burnished rows of steel:
“As ye deal with my contemners, so with you my grace shall deal;
Let the Hero, born of woman, crush the serpent with his heel,
Since God is marching on.”
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)
On occasion, someone will reach out to me by email, and will ask what I know is an unbearable question for a parent even to contemplate. They will remind me that I keep insisting that there is no hell. But, if someone has done some really bad thing, something awful, what will happen to him? How will God judge him? And sometimes, what follows will be an awful story of someone whose young life has gone terribly wrong, someone’s child has committed a crime perhaps, has killed someone, has killed himself or herself, or has died by a fentanyl overdose; and so on and on. Or it might not even be a child who has been lost. It might be some other loved one who has grieved my correspondent in some terrible way.
To be frank, this is the most hideous aspect of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s Christianity. Under the highly judgmental version of the Christianity that we have been faithfully practicing since the year 325 C.E., every mistake that you and I make on earth, however petty that mistake might seem to us to be, is immediately labeled a terrible “sin” by the religion. And that mistake, that sin, is reportedly about to subject us to God’s terrible wrath. Isn’t that right? Well, or so the Christian religion insists to us. But I am able to reassure my correspondents that Jesus tells us that nothing of the kind is true!
What does Jesus say to us about God’s judgment? Let’s open our Bibles together now, and ask Jesus that very question. What we find there about sin in actual fact is that Jesus pushes back pretty hard on the notion of any sort of divine judgment. Jesus even goes so far as to tell us that, “Not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son, even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23). So then, is Jesus telling us that God does not ever actually judge us? So now, is Jesus actually our judge? Is that why Jesus went to the cross for us? Well, no, because Jesus now tells us in the Gospel of John that, “If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). Jesus came to save the world? You came to save the world from what, Jesus? Well, it is clear from everything that Jesus said during His earthly ministry, which was more than three years long, that what Jesus came to save us from was spiritual ignorance. And Jesus seems even to have gone so far as to tell us that there is no universal judgment. He says, “Do not judge so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).
This idea that, so long as we forgive, then we also will be forgiven is Jesus’s great and very consistent theme, throughout all four canonical Gospels. When Peter, His disciple, asked Him, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I must forgive him, up to even seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23). And Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you.They will pour into your lap a good measure – pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure it will be measured to you in return (LK 6:37-38). Huh? While Roman Christianity uses the word “sin” as a powerful noun, as a fixed crime that, once you have committed it, now it rigidly exists, so it requires either punishment or some form of atonement; for the Jesus of the Gospels, “sin” is just a trivial and always-flexible verb, so it is easily modified, and even easily forgiven altogether. He says to the woman who was caught in adultery, at whom no one in the crowd has felt sinless enough in front of Jesus to cast the first stone, “I do not condemn you either. Go. From now on, sin no more” (JN 8:11). Wow, look at that! Jesus sees her sin not as a serious and rigid noun, a crime punishable by death. But rather, it is a trifling and flexible verb, a mere piffle that He can entirely dismiss with a word.
My gradually becoming so completely dismissive of the rigid, sin-based teachings of the Catholic Church has been made easy by the simple fact that the afterlife evidence all has sided so completely with the gentle Gospel words of Jesus. There is, in point of fact, no afterlife evidence whatsoever that God ever judges us. None at all! No afterlife evidence for a fiery hell, and nor is there evidence for any place of punishment at all after death beyond “the Outer Darkness, in that place there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth” (MT 8:12) The afterlife evidence tells us that this outer darkness is the very lowest-vibration afterlife level, and it is cold, dark, smelly, and disgusting. Only we, ourselves can ever put ourselves there, and that can happen only if we are unable to forgive ourselves for something that we have done in our earth-lives.
On the much more positive side, the Canonical Gospel teachings of Jesus can be seen now to be perfectly true! God never judges us, and also neither does Jesus. No, our post-death judge is always ourselves. And we don’t call this process judgment, but rather we call it just a life-review, and it happens very soon after our deaths. Each of us, with the assistance and comfort of our spirit guides, and sometimes also with the assistance of others who have been important in our lifetimes, will meet together, and will view all the significant events of our lifetime that just has been completed. We might be seeing all the important events from beginning to end, or else from the end backward to the beginning. But either way, this time we will feel the emotions of that whole lifetime from the points of view of all the people that we have in any way affected, for good or for ill.
Many of those who have been through these life reviews will tell you that they can be pretty awful experiences! They say they never had remembered some of these life-events; and some of the very worst times, when they had most upset or pained people, were things that they had thought nothing of at the time. On the other hand, some of their most obvious screw-ups, they had apologized for and largely repaired during life, so those events weren’t very big deals in their life-reviews. But, the little girl you shamed in third grade? The boy whose great love you stole when he was twenty-two? The dry cleaner you denied a bank loan, so they went out of business and they couldn’t pay for their daughter’s cancer treatments? Learning complete forgiveness, and especially self-forgiveness while we are alive, really is essential! And not even so much so we can forgive others, but because eventually the day will come when we are going to face the deepest truths about ourselves. As Jesus so abundantly tells us! And on that day, even His “seventy times seven times” may not be enough times for us to need to forgive ourselves.
I have told you before in this space that eventually the impossible contrast between the way the Jesus of the Gospels sees sin, and the way the Roman Catholic Church sees sin, made my eyes cross! For Jesus, sins are only trivial mistakes made in the process of spiritual learning and growth, and always easily forgiven. While for the religion, each sin is a permanent burden that only the pure blood of Jesus on the cross can wash away. So eventually, and it was a number of years ago now, I asked Thomas point-blank who God really is. Is God the stern and fear-based God of the Catholic Church, or is God more the loving Father that Jesus taught us to know and to love in return? And does God see sin as a burden that only Jesus’s blood-sacrifice on the cross can remove?
So then, one morning as I was waking up, my Thomas showed me as a clear vision the living room of our first family home, way back when our three children were toddlers. In the early eighties, the carpet was pale blue, and the sofa was striped pale blue and white. The God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with His long, white beard was sitting on the sofa in that long-ago living room, looking like a Grampa and grinning at a toddler who looked like my blond and curly-haired son at about the age of one. The baby was giggling as he carried a cup of orange juice around the living room. Then, Whoopsie! The cup tipped, and all that orange juice spilled on the pale-blue carpet. The baby started to cry, but God laughed, and He leaned and picked up the baby, just as it toppled; and God cuddled the baby in His arms. That precious child will learn how to carry juice without spilling it, just as you and I will learn how to grow spiritually past our little sins and mistakes. Cod’s love is perfect! And each of us is God’s best-beloved child. All of our sins are nothing worse than spilling orange juice on the carpet. We can call God our own heavenly Father, and we always can trust our God to keep us from falling. Every time.
He has sounded forth the trumpet that shall never call retreat;
He is sifting out the hearts of men before His judgment-seat:
Oh, be swift, my soul, to answer Him! be jubilant, my feet!
Our God is marching on.
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
In the beauty of the lilies Christ was born across the sea,
With a glory in His bosom that transfigures you and me:
As He died to make men holy, let us die to make men free,
While God is marching on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
He is coming like the glory of the morning on the wave,
He is Wisdom to the mighty, He is Succour to the brave,
So the world shall be His footstool, and the soul of Time His slave,
Our God is marching on!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! Glory, glory, hallelujah!
Glory, glory, hallelujah! His truth is marching on.
– Julia Ward Howe (1819-1910), from “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Sin? appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
July 26, 2025
Gratitude
When I’m worried, and I can’t sleep,
I count my blessings instead of sheep,
And I fall asleep counting my blessings.
When my bankroll is getting small,
I think of when I had none at all,
And I fall asleep counting my blessings.
I think about a nursery, and I picture curly heads;
And one by one I count them, as they slumber in their beds.
If you’re worried, and you can’t sleep,
Just count your blessings instead of sheep,
And you’ll fall asleep counting your blessings!
– Irving Berlin (1888-1989), from “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep” (1954)
My dear ones, I am traveling this week, so I have much less time to devote to blogging than is normally the case. I had thought that, therefore, Thomas and I might talk about our long adventure together as a spirit guide and his charge, which is a tale that some of you have asked us to tell. And actually, I think it’s an enjoyable story. It’s also a story that we can tell quickly and easily, and without the need to pull in links. But, no. Thomas finds the notion of telling our story pretty boring, so he thinks it will bore you, too; and besides, he takes very seriously our charge from the Lord Jesus that we should be at all times teaching you and helping you to grow spiritually. Even these detours that we have lately been taking into talking about scientific matters, the design and functioning of the greater reality, and so on, are meant to assist and further your personal spiritual growth. So, Thomas decided that what he wanted us to talk about this week was the crucial spiritual function, and the great personal strength and growth that comes of ever better learning to feel and express GRATITUDE.
Well, okay then. Let’s give that topic a go. We are born into these lifetimes as spiritually raw beings. In our eternal lives, each one of us is already more advanced spiritually than we appear to be when we first arrive here to begin a new lifetime. We come into these lives with stripped-down versions of our minds – we might call what we have at birth “learner minds” – and we also are born with complete amnesia of who we are, and also of what really is going on. As our wonderful sixth-level friend, Mikey Morgan, describes the process, he says that we put most of our minds in a suitcase before we leave our eternal home, and we pick our whole minds back up again when our material bodies die on earth and we then return to our eternal home. Knowing this fact is crucial! Because you are a much more precious being than you, yourself can conceivably imagine. When I remind you of that fact toward the end of each weekly podcast, I am not just stroking you, my dear one; but rather, I am plainly telling you that you are an aspect of the divine. You have come here, to what Craig Hogan calls “earth school”, to grow spiritually ever closer to your eventual reunion with the divine, which would not be possible if you did not already possess an eternal divine spark. You carry it, my dear one! But it is possible for you to cause your own spark to dim, and even nearly to die, if you do not properly tend it. From our births, each of us is instinctively driven to use the challenges of each earth-life to gain more spiritual growth… or else those challenges might beat us down, spiritually weaken us, and even tempt us to do terrible things.
Of course, here is where knowing and trusting in Jesus is our ultimate gift! There are other spiritual teachers, but none who teaches the great truths so well as Jesus does, and this is why I spend so much effort on teaching what He taught. He came to earth to teach us what is an amazing path that can empower us to raise our personal spiritual vibrations sufficiently that we can make this our last necessary earth-lifetime. His is a simple and powerful Way of prevenient forgiveness and perfect love:
FORGIVENESS
When His disciple, Peter, asked Jesus, “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18:21-23).
And Jesus said, “Do not judge, and you will not be judged; and do not condemn, and you will not be condemned; pardon, and you will be pardoned. Give, and it will be given to you. They will pour into your lap a good measure—pressed down, shaken together, and running over. For by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you in return” (LK 6:37-38).
“For not even the Father judges anyone, but He has given all judgment to the Son, so that all will honor the Son, even as they honor the Father” (JN 5:22-23).
“If anyone hears My sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge him; for I did not come to judge the world, but to save the world” (JN 12:47). And it is very clear from everything that Jesus says in the Gospels that what He came to save the world from was spiritual ignorance.
Jesus sums up His teachings on forgiveness by saying, “Do not judge, so that you will not be judged. For in the way you judge, you will be judged; and by your standard of measure, it will be measured to you” (MT 7:1-2).
LOVE
Love is in everything that Jesus talked about! He was always saying things like, “But love your enemies, and do good, and lend, expecting nothing in return; and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for He Himself is kind to ungrateful and evil men. Be merciful, just as your Father is merciful” (LK 6:35-36).
And, “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.’ But I say to you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be sons of your Father, who is in heaven; for He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. For if you love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? If you greet only your brothers, what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? Therefore, you are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” (MT 5:43-48).
Jesus routinely said grace before meals, but otherwise the Gospels don’t tell us that He ever talked much about our need to feel or to express gratitude. I think that may have been mostly a factor of the rougher and simpler times in which He lived on earth, two thousand years ago. Back then, He seems to have been concentrating on teaching the two more basic spiritual steps of forgiveness and love. Or perhaps, those listening just focused on the showier virtues of love and forgiveness, and they didn’t think that whatever Jesus may have said about feeling and expressing gratitude was sufficiently important for them to remember it for the few decades that passed after Jesus spoke and before His words were first written down. But we have come to understand now that learning to feel and express deep gratitude is actually a foundational virtue; and once well learned, gratitude can make it easier for you to feel and express the more profound spiritual virtues of forgiveness and love that will enable you to truly make this your final necessary earth-lifetime.
So, how can we best learn to feel and express gratitude? I once had a client who was constantly worried about his business. No matter how well things were going right now, and in fact things usually went pretty well, his business always seemed to be shaky to him. He could tell you all the big problems that were bound to come up next year. My legal practice includes not just the standard documents preparation, conveyancing, and general legal advice; but also, miscellaneous advice of all kinds, based on my decades of experience working with hundreds of businesses. And one day, when I was meeting with this business owner and he was feeling especially mopey about just how bad things were bound to be next year, I asked him to find for me one good thing about his business. Only one. And when he couldn’t find even one thing that he was really enthusiastic about, I proposed a few. Well, for example, there had been seven percent year-over-year growth in his gross revenue since the previous year, as I recalled. He had a great core of longstanding loyal employees. He had bought his business real estate twelve years before, and by now it had just about doubled in value, with the likelihood of a lot more growth in value to come in that neighborhood.
Almost against his will, I saw his spirits lift. It was there, in his face. I said, “Charlie, look, here is what I suggest. Why don’t you, every day for the next three months, give thanks for one different thing about Townshend Heating & Plumbing. Just one. Get a notebook, write each new thing that you’re grateful for in the business, and the date. Then say it aloud. If you don’t want to thank God, then thank the Universe. Just please do this for me? I’ve already given you your first three! And I promise you, even just a month from now, the business will be doing even better.” Bless Charlie, he was skeptical, and he wouldn’t do it for more than a single month, but he did that much for me. And this was all more than three decades ago now. As I recall, doing this classic gratitude exercise, even for only a month, made for a permanent difference in Charlie’s spirits. He still wasn’t Mr. Optimism, but his moping was much reduced. Then recently, he sold his much larger business and its even more valuable business site for enough to give him a great retirement.
This gratitude exercise works just as well in your personal life. You can easily develop an Attitude of Gratitude, and use it to plow your spiritual field, as it were, and to build on it a solid foundation for a much richer and sweeter spiritual life that will transform your daily personal attitude about absolutely everything. Simply buy a little spiral notepad, and every morning for one whole year, first write the date, then write down one thing for which you are grateful, and briefly also write why you are grateful for it. Do this every day for a whole year. The reason to do it for a year is because you want to have to stretch yourself to being grateful for snakes and bread mold! Most people can find something positive to be grateful for, at least for the first couple of months; but eventually, you will be down to rainy days, police stops, and mosquitoes. No duplications!
What you will find is that your whole attitude toward everything, and especially toward other people and toward life in general will soften. When you have spent time every day thinking about and writing about why you are grateful for so many things, and eventually even little and peculiar things, and really solidifying your attitude of gratitude, you will find yourself becoming ever more patient with, and less angry at the whole world in general. Developing an attitude of gratitude softens and gentles you, it civilizes you profoundly, and it lifts your heart! And then, on this far better spiritual base, your real spiritual learning and growth can much better begin….
I think about a nursery, and I picture curly heads;
And one by one I count them, as they slumber in their beds.
If you’re worried, and you can’t sleep,
Just count your blessings instead of sheep,
And you’ll fall asleep counting your blessings!
– Irving Berlin (1888-1989), from “Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep” (1954)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Gratitude appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
July 19, 2025
Hello Sunshine!
Dear One, the world is waiting for the sunrise.
Every rose is covered with dew.
The thrush on high his sleepy mate is calling,
And my heart is calling you.
Dear Heart, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every little rosebud is heavy with dew!
And while the thrush his sleepy mate is calling,
In my heart is calling You!
Gene Lockhart (1891-1957) & Ernest Seitz (1892-1978), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1918)
There is a classic magazine cartoon that carries a deep meaning. Two fish are swimming along cheerily, with speech-bubbles over both their heads. One fish is saying to the other fish, “How does the water feel to you this morning?” The second fish says, “What’s water?” And we giggle. Of course! We get it! That second fish cannot perceive that the water even exists, because the fish has never experienced not-water. So, for that second fish, water is the only reality. And in fact, this is precisely the same problem that mainstream materialist scientists of all disciplines are still having with their experience of consciousness. It was the great quantum physicist Max Planck who first discovered the fact that consciousness is the base of our reality, which means that we cannot ever experience not-consciousness. That was what he meant when he said that we cannot “get behind” consciousness. In 1931, he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” What our dear friend Max was telling us was that you and I and everyone else on earth, especially including every scientist, all live our whole lives like the second fish in that classic fish-in-water cartoon. Since consciousness is the water in which we swim, consciousness is our whole reality, and we cannot imagine how it would feel to live in a reality that pre-exists and must somehow first generate consciousness.
And yet, as we demonstrated here last week, cutting-edge science in the year 2025 still is being forced by its foolish materialist dogma that is now more than a century old to search for a source of consciousness inside the human brain. Which is the loony near-equivalent of searching for the source of water, or even of air somewhere inside our human bodies. One pursuit makes as little sense as do the others. And why should consciousness come from only human brains, when it is so obvious that all mammals and even simpler animals also are conscious, and clearly they also are able to think? There is an excellent embedded video at this link that includes five of the current leading thinkers in the field of consciousness research, and it will help you to better sympathize with their long frustration with their wasted careers, all spent in pursuing a source of consciousness inside the human brain. They all know by now that clearly no source of consciousness there is ever going to be found.
Although that video is rather long, it’s a good summary of the current state of materialist play, and you might enjoy it, as I did. And you ought to know that poor Christof Koch, who was featured in the video, recently lost a case of fine wine in a 25-year failed bet over the issue of whether a source of consciousness in the brain might ever be found before some certain date. Although mainstream science does creep closer to the truth, by inches! The materialists’ current theory which comes closest to making sense is panpsychism, which guesses that consciousness must be a property that is inherent in matter. OMG. So close, but still no cigar. Nevertheless, panpsychism seems to be an idea that most traditional materialist scientists love to hate, very sad to say. And that is true, even though it is the materialist scientific theory that seems to come closest to making sense of all the evidence about consciousness that materialist scientists can accept.
The key consciousness evidence that these scientists are not allowed ever to notice, however, reveals a massive area of strongly evidence-based reality that fits closely with the reality that we inhabit. I have been studying what is called afterlife evidence for the past half-century, and I can affirm to you that, by now, we have received a tremendous body of excellent evidence about what is actually going on that has been delivered to us by people that we used to think were dead. This evidence is so amazingly detailed, and so completely consistent across types of evidence and methods of delivery, and even throughout more than a century on earth, that it is impossible for the complex story that it is telling us not to be true.
Furthermore, as we have added all this amazing afterlife evidence to what traditional scientists have developed, we have built an understanding of a much more detailed and completely amazing greater reality. It all fits together like one single gigantic puzzle! And it makes it pretty easy for us now to solve the four big problems posed last week that scientists apparently cannot solve at all. Namely: Dark Matter/Energy, Death, Life, and Consciousness. With afterlife researchers now allowed to add their insights, let’s you and I consider again those four mysteries, but now in reverse order because consciousness underlies them all. Once we can wrap our minds around consciousness, it will be much easier for us to better understand everything else:
It is unfortunate that you and I are still stuck with this matter-obsessed scientific community that seems to care more about trying to create and then somehow make us believe in matter-based falsehoods, much more than it cares about finding the genuine answers to all these great scientific puzzles. True enough, they might not always like all the right answers. But, whether they like the right answers or not, their day of looking for answers where those answers cannot possibly be is sooner or later going to end. Eventually, the truth always wins. And meanwhile, here is another wonderful discussion of what actually is going on. Let the great and delightful Rupert Sheldrake brighten your day!
Dear Heart, the world is waiting for the sunrise!
Every little rosebud is heavy with dew!
And while the thrush his sleepy mate is calling,
In my heart is calling You!
Gene Lockhart (1891-1957) & Ernest Seitz (1892-1978), from “The World is Waiting for the Sunrise” (1918)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Hello Sunshine! appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
July 12, 2025
Hello Darkness!
Hello, darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains
Within the sound of silence
In restless dreams, I walked alone
Narrow streets of cobblestone
‘Neath the halo of a street lamp
I turned my collar to the cold and damp
When my eyes were stabbed by the flash of a neon light
That split the night
And touched the sound of silence
And in the naked light, I saw
Ten thousand people, maybe more
People talking without speaking
People hearing without listening
People writing songs that voices never shared
And no one dared
Disturb the sound of silence
– Paul Simon, from “The Sound of Silence” (1964)
Oh my goodness, I just have watched seven of what are supposed to be absolutely cutting-edge videos on dark matter and dark energy, six of them brief, and the seventh a genuine Ted talk that is only three years old. (To see and hear what I just saw and heard, after clicking the word “videos” above, go to the far right and click the pink video link.) That final video of the seven is a genuine Ted talk, mind you! There is no small-x after it. Which means it is a talk that was delivered on a primary Ted stage, so it was given by someone who is prominent in her field, and almost certainly therefore this presenter is an acclaimed theoretical physicist. Tedx stages exist worldwide. Their quality is always respected, but their real value is guaranteed just by the worthies who invite their presenters to speak, and then they stand behind whatever their speakers have said. But a central Ted stage is another matter! In general, only very well-respected speakers are featured there, and what they say must be approved beforehand. So, fasten your seat belts, folks! With a Ted talk beginning, you know that you are about to hear what amounts to up-to-the-year-2022 Scientific Holy Writ on this speaker’s topic of interest. And the title of her big Ted talk is, OMG, “How to Solve the Dark Matter Mystery.” Wow, she claims to be able to solve this whole mystery, which has been eluding even the greatest minds for decades? And her claim must be pretty solid, if the main Ted stage allowed her to use such a sharply definitive title! Our big Ted speaker here surely has the twenty-minute answer to the whole dark-matter problem, solved and ready to be delivered!
And yet, what she says in that Ted talk is a complete embarrassment, not only to herself, but also to all of mainstream science. What is astonishing is not only that any prominent and up-to-the-minute-in-2022 theoretical physicist might have given such a stupid and embarrassing talk on a prominent Ted stage only three years ago, but also that the Ted people would have allowed her to give it there, and especially under such a presumptuous title. I gather from having watched her talk twice that theoretical physicists have whittled down their study of dark matter to the point where they are trying to figure out what kind of tiny and useless particle actually floats around in and makes up twenty-seven percent of the reality of which we know that all the non-dark matter and energy in existence combined makes up only five percent. Our speaker here goes on record as voting for “axions”, whatever that might be. Not that it much matters. Because of their appalling materialist dogma, modern scientists are trained to seriously believe that it is possible for 25% (or 27%, whatever) of reality to have just naturally evolved to consist of nothing but junk particles with no purpose other than to form matter-based galaxies inside that very much more important (to us) five percent into their shapes, and then to push them farther apart, even though there is nothing else in nature that has developed in that very odd way.
As we know, very early in the twentieth century, the advent of quantum mechanics so much alarmed the mainstream science gatekeepers, the university departments and the peer-reviewed scientific journals, that they mandated a new dogma for all of mainstream science. And they called their new dogma “the fundamental scientific dogma of materialism”. Yes, in fact they came right out and said it! They don’t presume to use this term now, but back a hundred and fifteen or more years ago, you actually could find those words in print. This whole situation is frankly astonishing. It is little short of incredible! When ordinary matter makes up barely five percent of what even mainstream scientists themselves know actually exists, these gatekeepers were literally setting out to insist that scientists could not study, and humankind would not be allowed to know anything about, fully ninety-five percent of what even the scientists themselves knew at the time, and still know now, actually does in fact exist! Of course, the result of this nonsensical scientific dogma over the past nearly century and a quarter has been unbounded chaos and confusion.
To govern all the scientific research being done in the many decades since the fundamental dogma of materialist atheism was adopted, close to 125 years ago now, certain core assumptions have been made and consistently enforced by the whole scientific community. These assumptions are silly and arbitrary, are generally by now demonstrably wrong, and have held back scientific research severely! To be frank, there are probably more of such nonsensical assumptions that I cannot recall at the moment off the top of my head, or that I don’t even know about; but dealing just with the ones of which I am aware is a hoot and a half, I can tell you that. How ridiculous! And they still exist, even in the twenty-first century, for heaven’s sake! Mainstream scientists are even to this day still required to assume without question that:
Dark Matter/Energy, Death, Life, and Consciousness. There you have it, my dear ones! Perhaps there are other big scientific topics that we might talk about as well, but for today, let’s settle on just these four huge ones. These are four fundamental areas of basic scientific research that materialist scientific gatekeepers have so severely burdened during the past century and a quarter with their completely arbitrary and utterly absurd materialist dogma that, even to this day, none of these areas can be freely scientifically investigated. So as a result, in the entire past century and a quarter, no progress has been made by any working materialist scientist in any of these fields. Not, at least, by any credentialed scientist who has any hope of pursuing a mainstream career! Even much worse, there are whole related areas to each of these primary fields that also cannot be investigated.Worst of all, if I am still writing, and you are still reading, a thousand years from now, if that materialist scientific dogma is still in place in the year 3025, we will find in that year that scientists will still have made no further discoveries at all for us to write and read about by then in these four areas than they have made so far, today
And yet, there were at least three twentieth-century mainstreams scientists who did in fact figure a lot of this out! They did it by ignoring those foolish and clueless scientific gatekeepers, and just by freely sharing information, and then by following it where it honestly led them. Those who have been following these weekly missives are going to know what I am about to say, but let’s summarize it again here:
Max Planck won the 1918 Nobel Prize in physics as the father of quantum mechanics. In 1931 he said, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” In 1944, Dr. Planck said, “As a man who has devoted his whole life to the most clear headed science, to the study of matter, I can tell you as a result of my research about atoms this much: There is no matter as such. All matter originates and exists only by virtue of a force which brings the particle of an atom to vibration and holds this most minute solar system of the atom together. We must assume behind this force the existence of a conscious and intelligent mind. This mind is the matrix of all matter.”Albert Einstein, who needs no introduction from us, was more reluctant than was Dr. Planck to follow all the implications of open-minded consciousness research. But nevertheless, he did at one point say, “Concerning matter, we have been all wrong. What we have called matter is energy, whose vibration has been so lowered as to be perceptible to the senses. There is no matter.” He also said, “Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.” And finally, he explained why mainstream science was even in his own later years such a mess. He said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”Nikola Tesla was a polymath so brilliant that Elon Musk chose to name his line of cars after him. And he, too, saw where the truth was heading. He said, “The day science begins to study non-physical phenomena, it will make more progress in one decade than in all the previous centuries of its existence.”This ridiculous situation would be laughable, if it were not so tragic! We are talking about the whole modern world, for heaven’s sake! And it has voluntarily handicapped itself this way for more than a century, just because a few scientists long ago were afraid that someone might inadvertently find God? Next week, we will look at our four key areas of forever hopeless twentieth-century materialist research. We will show how all four of them relate directly to consciousness, and also to one another; and therefore, why they never will be solved until we accept that fact. So we will apply the great Dr. Planck’s seminal consciousness insight to solving them. Once we stop treating mainstream science as the holy religion of atheism, and we return at last to allowing scientists to follow the truth fearlessly, wherever it leads, then suddenly everything in science becomes so easy!
And the sign flashed out its warning
In the words that it was forming
And the sign said, “The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls
And tenement halls
And whispered in the sound of silence”
– Paul Simon, from “The Sound of Silence” (1964)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Hello Darkness! appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
July 5, 2025
Getting There
Sing, sing a song.
Sing out loud, sing out strong!
Sing of good things, not bad.
Sing of happy, not sad.
Sing, sing a song.
Make it simple, to last your whole life long!
Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear.
Just sing, sing a song.
Sing, sing a song.
Let the world sing along!
Sing of love there could be.
Sing for you, and for me!
– Joe G. Raposo (1937-1989), from “Sing a Song” (1971)
My dear friends, I had planned to write this week and next about the amazing origin of life, and I had thought my Thomas was on board with our doing that. Of course, we still can write about the origin of life later on! But this weekend, Americans celebrate the 249th anniversary of the birth of our nation, and that day is especially important to my spirit guide, and to me as well. Because in a previous incarnation, my much-beloved Thomas was the venerable Thomas Jefferson himself, the primary author of the American Declaration of Independence. I should have thought of this sooner, but this morning, as the Fourth of July dawned, I asked my very dear spirit guide if this week he might want us to put aside what we were working on and instead write about this nation’s founding. Or else, you know, I suggested that we should write about whatever he might want us to write about? Did he have a different preference? And what he said that he wanted us to write about instead, surprisingly enough, is how each one of you, the people that he and I both love so much, can best advance spiritually to the end of your need to reincarnate, and do it in this single lifetime!
I might just remark in passing that I consider my writing relationship with Thomas to be a close and very enjoyable collaboration. But of course, it is not remotely an equal one. The simple truth is that I am the one of us who manages this body, while he is far and away both a great deal smarter than I am, and also very much the more gifted writer. In practical fact, between us he is mostly the writer while I am more like just his scribe. Thomas handles this situation between us pretty well, but on occasion I know that it irritates him, in part because there are strict rules of etiquette, let’s call them, that govern the interactions between spirit guides and the people they guide. Thomas’s spirit guide relationship with me is supposed to be mostly about working to raise my spiritual vibration, and not so much about giving him the fun of writing earthly blog posts. And in our case, we also are working together to serve Jesus. And Jesus wants us to be spreading His spiritual teachings together while I am on earth. So, I gather that Thomas and I have anyway a considerably more complex relationship than what is usual between spirit guides and those they are guiding.
I know from talking with friends that most of their spirit guides operate smoothly and just internally. Those being guided usually don’t hear their guides, while I do very often hear Thomas talking to me. And he cares about our writing together! So, on occasion, when we are working on something and I’m not listening to him as closely as he thinks I should be listening to him, but rather I am off on what he would consider to be “a writing tangent”, he will mutter something sulky about the fact that I “control the hands”. Direct quote! Which is how I know that sometimes he wishes he could just seize my hands and write it all much better by himself, for heaven’s sake.
While we are talking about this, and before we move on to tackle the main topic of this post, Thomas tells me now that he does want to point out to you the fact that he is not Thomas Jefferson. Not at all! This distinction is important to him, but it also gives us an interesting little lesson about the way that reincarnation works. Soon after Thomas first “came out” to me as having once been Jefferson, I asked him about the Sally Hemings story. I had researched it when I first researched and wrote My Thomas, some thirty-five years ago. That is my biography about the wonderful love story that was Thomas Jefferson’s ten-year marriage. And while I thought I knew the truth about the Sally Hemings story, I wanted Thomas to tell me the truth for certain. So my Thomas told me that I ought just to hear the truth from Jefferson directly, and he took me to meet with the venerable Founding Father in the astral plane one night while my body slept. What a fascinating experience that was! There were three of us together there in an eighteenth-century astral room, with my Thomas looking like a sixth-level being, and with Thomas Jefferson himself, OMG, in late-1700s garb. Wow, what an experience, to meet one of my very biggest heroes in person! But I was embarrassed, when it came down to it then, to come right out and bluntly ask him this very personal question. After some pleasantries, though, I did manage to ask it. I said something like, “I haven’t believed the rumors, sir, but I’m sorry, can you please just tell me for certain, were any of the Sally Hemings children your children?”
Thomas Jefferson has the most beautiful soft, southern voice. He said to me, “I could not have been intimate with Sally Hemings, because she was my property so she could not have consented.” Wow. Spoken like a true gentleman!
And what was especially interesting to me about that meeting as a reincarnation lesson was the fact that my Thomas and his earlier incarnation as Jefferson had very similar personal vibrations. As you know, we can distinctly feel people’s individual spiritual vibrations in the afterlife and in the astral plane, and each person’s individual vibration is so unique that we can use their personal vibration to recognize people. And when these two people were in the same room together, their vibrations felt almost identical to me, except that my spirit guide was vibrating at a distinctly higher, lighter, and more rapid rate than was Thomas Jefferson. Oh wow, this is all so fascinating!
But Jefferson’s answer to my question did not surprise me at all. Despite the fact that lazy Mr. Google and everyone else all assume that the Founding Father must have fathered the six Sally Hemings children who carried Jefferson DNA, the evidence is very strong that the true father of that group of Hemings children was instead Thomas Jefferson’s younger brother, Randolph Jefferson. I won’t spend more time here on this issue, but I researched it thoroughly when My Thomas was being republished, almost a decade ago now. I consider the evidence to be determinative that Thomas Jefferson was not the father of the Sally Hemings children, and my own dear Thomas concurs. He tells me that Sally Hemings herself is eager to set the record straight, once better communication between this reality and the one where she is now can be developed. But just for today, if you care about this issue, perhaps those old posts linked above will be helpful to you.
And my dear Thomas considers a very much more important task for us today to be the summarizing here once again of your main task and mine for this whole earth-lifetime! It does not matter a single fig what you personally might believe or not believe, what your religion is or whether you have no religion at all; how you feel about life, whether you love or hate your circumstances, or really anything at all about your life or mine on earth. Nothing matters but the universal certainty that all of us are here for just one reason!
This material reality is a school, or perhaps it’s a spiritual gym if you would prefer to use that term. We have talked about the details of our human task on earth quite a bit in these posts over the past year, but we might just summarize them here. Very briefly:
Consciousness is all that exists. In 95% of our greater reality, Consciousness is both the sculptor and the clay; and since Consciousness is an energy-like potentiality, it vibrates.In only this lowest-vibration, matter-based level of reality, a different, material form of physics exists. It is only in this material five percent or so of the whole greater reality that a material physics based on subatomic particles keeps our very powerful minds from messing with our surroundings, so we will therefore be required to take our earth-life lessons seriously.Consciousness is One. All of our minds are part of the same Consciousness as God, just vibrating lower, which is why mental communication, including communication with those who are not currently in material bodies, is so easy! The only reason why it is not extremely easy is that we tend to doubt it, so our own minds too often block it.The highest vibration of Consciousness is infinitely powerful; the lowest vibration is essentially powerless. God is, of course, that highest vibration, while at the lowest vibration of which we are aware are various demonish nasties, including Shadow Men and other dark beings that cannot much harm us without our cooperation, but they can lurk in the dark and frighten us and then feed on our fear.Consciousness at its highest and most rapid vibration is perfect love; while at its lowest and slowest vibration, Consciousness is fear, anger, hatred, all the ishy emotions. So the irony for scientists is that what we experience as human emotion is what actually governs all the greater reality. Go figure!The astral realities, which from here seem to make up most of the greater reality, apparently consist of many different solid-seeming realities, each of which is probably the size of this whole material universe. To the extent that “size” means anything, which is probably not very much. But the easiest way for us to envision all of this is to think of your own mind as a television set. Right now, your mind is tuned to the body that you presently occupy on this material level of reality, so you believe that this is where you are. When the material body that you are using becomes unusable, no problem at all! Eternal loved ones will come and attract your mind to follow them, and you will pick up a new, astral body on a channel in the third astral level, which is the afterlife reception area. It happens just that easily and just that automatically, if you will follow your loved ones who can show you the way!There are very many, and probably hundreds of vibrational “channels” that your mind can choose in the astral plane that exists right where we are now, but only at higher vibrations. For convenience, early afterlife researchers chose to group those channels into seven master levels, which all are above this material level in vibration: Level One (The Outer Darkness), Level Two (The Recovery Level), Level Three (The Arrival Level), Levels Three Through Five (The Summerland Levels), Level Six (The Causal Level), and Level Seven (The Source Level). Everyone transitioning home after a death on earth is able to achieve and hold Level Three, even if just barely. The afterlife earth-launch and re-entry reception area is there as well, on Level Three, and in fact many people who have extensive near-death experiences in the Level-Three astral plane will approach a place where they are told that they are coming near that afterlife area, so they must turn back! If they continue, their silver cord will break and they will die on earth and be unable to return to their earthly bodies. Death is always a one-way trip!
Each of us comes into each earth-lifetime with a plan to raise our spiritual vibration as much as we can in this lifetime! It is easy to go lower, but almost unbearably painful to go higher than whatever Consciousness vibratory level we have comfortably attained, and we all want to be able to move higher in the glorious astral levels. Things are so much more beautiful, more wonderful, more unimaginably interesting and glorious, the higher in vibration we are able to go! And in fact, your mind is literally formed for spiritual growth. Moving ever higher is your mind’s natural element! The primary enemy of your spiritual growth is your small-self, your ego, your childish gimme. I know. I was there once, too. But my Thomas set out to help me to grow spiritually as fast and as far as possible in this lifetime, and he tells me that I have now achieved the top of Level Five, which is everyone’s major earthly goal. So now he assures me that this is my last necessary earth-lifetime.
And you, too, can do it in one lifetime, if you put your mind to it! Wow if I can do it, then anyone can. Here is how:
Set your mind for complete happiness. Find the joy and reject the gloom, the anger, the pain in every smallest aspect of your daily life. Make some variation of this post’s simple Sesame Street frame song your own personal theme! And SING IT!Develop an attitude of gratitude. Become obsessive about earnestly feeling and expressing daily gratitude for even the tiniest bits of goodness in your daily life.Become an expert at prevenient forgiveness. I explain the process in my book, The Fun of Growing Forever. And once you learn prevenient forgiveness completely, and it becomes fully automatic for you, you never will be angry again!Love everyone! OMG, once you get to this point, love begins to be more and more just a natural part of who you are, my very dear ones, to your very core and no matter what else might be going on in your lives. The peace and love of God which passes all understanding simple becomes your entire being!I cannot begin to adequately express to you how much happier doing all of this makes you feel, my darlings, even as your lifetime on earth continues. You will gradually never again feel unhappy, angry, frustrated, or in any way negative. Your mood will just naturally keep on lifting! And you will start to love everyone you pass on the street! Even before your spirit guide ever breaks in and tells you that, “Hey kid, you really are acing this lifetime! And whether or not that ever happens. My dearly beloved, simply turn your face toward God, and really smile. This is how we all can make our last trip home, together!
Sing, sing a song.
Make it simple, to last your whole life long!
Don’t worry that it’s not good enough for anyone else to hear.
Just sing, sing a song!
– Joe G. Raposo (1937-1989), from “Sing a Song” (1971)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
The post Getting There appeared first on Roberta Grimes.
