With what shall I come to the Lord
And bow myself before the God on high?
Shall I come to Him with burnt offerings,
With yearling calves?
Does the Lord take pleasure in thousands of rams,
In ten thousand rivers of oil?
Shall I give Him my firstborn for my wrongdoings,
The fruit of my body for the sin of my soul?
He has told you, O mortal one, what is good.
And what does the Lord require of you
But to do just
ice, to love kindness,
And to walk humbly with your God?

– Micah of Moresheth (c.737 BCE – c.696 BCE), from the Old Testament Book of Micah 6-8

When I was in college, God died unexpectedly. It was big news at the time. But I was thoroughly distracted in the sixties, what with finishing college and moving to Manhattan and learning to program an IBM 360 computer the size of a house that had far less power than your current cellphone. And anyway, that God-is-dead thing turned out to be a false alarm. The God that died in the sixties could not have been the genuine God. Because amazingly, things just kept on running, which would not have been the case if the God Who had died had been the Source of all Creation.

Being in contact with your spirit guide who will fairy freely answer your questions feels a bit like being able to secretly cheat on your final exams. My Thomas doesn’t know everything, but he knows considerably more than I do. And over the years, he has wanted me to figure out most things on my own. But now that I have arrived at what seem to him to be some pretty good answers, he has been helping me more along the way.

And we know now for certain that all the ancient religions have been wrong about the genuine God. Thomas has patiently blogged with me as I have been learning more about the Divine, primarily because I have been having such a hard time accepting what I now see is true. All the religions have been made by man, so they have been tainted by man’s worst impulses. Thomas has had a lot of trouble helping me to see these truths. Let’s look at some of the key elements of religions that are human-made:

  • Dogmas are all those rules and statements that each religion lays down as true, and generally tells us are dictated from on high by that religion’s God.
  • Rituals are ceremonies performed according to a prescribed order, and again are dictated or strongly suggested by that religion’s God.
  • Traditions are customs or beliefs passed on from generation to generation, and – you guessed it – often are said to be divinely mandated.
  • Laws are mandates and requirements passed on from generation to generation, and … ditto.
  • Feasts are traditional meals prepared and consumed at certain times and in certain ways, and once again the details of these meals are often said to be divinely mandated.

Thomas and I don’t express opinions about modern religions other than Christianity. But from Jesus’s perspective, it is reasonable to say that every element of Christianity is ranked below the Law of Love. Jesus beautifully summed up that central and only law when 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 now look at our frame-verse for today! The Hebrew Prophet Micah is considered to be one of the Twelve Minor Prophets because he was a contemporary of the great Isaiah, and Isaiah always gets top billing. But Micah is my favorite prophet. You can read his frustration with the old formal human-designed ways of relating to God in every word! And isn’t “Do justice, love kindness, and walk humbly with your God” nothing but “Love God and love your neighbor,” but just said a bit differently? Aren’t Micah and Jesus preaching from the same book held in the Hand of the selfsame God?

Jesus seems pretty clearly to have decided either before He began His public ministry or very soon thereafter to do away with His followers’ attachments to religions altogether. This resolve would of course have been complicated by the fact that He was always under close observation by the Temple guards, and had they even suspected that He had such an idea in His mind, He could have been arrested and tried for what would have been seen as a capital thought-crime. And He would likely have ended His earthly ministry on a cross considerably before that eventually did happen.

He told us quite specifically not to blend His teachings into Judaism, which is exactly what was later done, even despite His specific direction not to do it. He said, “But no one puts a patch of unshrunk cloth on an old garment; for the patch pulls away from the garment, and a worse tear results.  Nor do people put new wine into old wineskins; otherwise the wineskins burst, and the wine pours out and the wineskins are ruined; but they put new wine into fresh wineskins, and both are preserved” (MT 9:16-17). “Therefore every scribe who has become a disciple of the kingdom of heaven is like a head of a household, who brings out of his treasure things new and old” (MT 13:52).

And Jesus famously had little use for clergymen!  The canonical Gospels are full of passages like these: Beware of the scribes who like to walk around in long robes, and like respectful greetings in the market places, and chief seats in the synagogues and places of honor at banquets, who devour widows’ houses, and for appearance’s sake offer long prayers; these will receive greater condemnation” (MK 12:38-40). And, “Woe to you religious lawyers! For you have taken away the key of knowledge; you yourselves did not enter, and you hindered those who were entering” (LK 11:52). He summed up His attitude toward clergymen and their religions pretty well when He said, “Rightly did Isaiah prophesy about you, ‘This people honors Me with their lips, But their heart is far away from Me. And in vain do they worship Me, Teaching as doctrines the commandments of men ” (MK 7:5-7). Jesus really had their number!

A strong case can be made that Jesus was not trying to build a new religion at all, but instead He wanted to abolish all religions, and to establish in their place individual ways for each of us to relate to God. How else are we to hear the following words?

“Beware of practicing your righteousness before men, to be noticed by them; otherwise you have no reward with your Father who is in heaven. So, when you give to the poor, do not sound a trumpet before you, as the hypocrites do in the synagogues and in the streets, so that they may be honored by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full. But when you give to the poor, do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving will be in secret; and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you.

“When you pray, you are not to be like the hypocrites; for they love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on the street corners so that they may be seen by men. Truly I say to you, they have their reward in full.  But you, when you pray, go into your inner room, close your door and pray to your Father who is in secret, and your Father who sees what is done in secret will reward you” (MT 6:1-6).


In fact, Jesus tells us in the Gospels that He and His disciples can rightfully and without any guilt break every Sabbath law (see generally MT 12:1-12). It may indeed be reasonable for us to say that Jesus told us two thousand years ago that for Himself and for His followers, He was abolishing the very concept of religions. Please look again at the five human-made traits of religions outlined above, of which the Way of Jesus was gloriously free for those first three hundred years! But then Constantine and his successor Roman emperors massacred in their millions the first free Christians who were following The Way of Jesus. And then the Romans built their fear-based religion as a means of mass control.  So when it is suggested that it might at last be time to separate God from religion, my immediate reaction has to be, “Heck yes!”  My goodness, Jesus would tell us it is long past time!

But just Who or What is God? God is Consciousness, within Whom we live and move and have our being. Consciousness creates reality in each micro-instant, and beyond Consciousness nothing else exists.  Credit for this discovery should long since have gone to Max Planck, who won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. But the mainstream scientific community is so terrified of inadvertently finding God that they have resolutely ignored Dr. Planck’s discovery, and instead of building on his breakthrough, they have effectively halted most meaningful investigative scientific progress in its tracks. For more than a century, they have pointlessly wasted billions of dollars trying to find a source of consciousness inside the human brain. Given the demonstrable primacy of Consciousness, and the abundant evidence that Consciousness easily exists apart from the brain and obviously survives the death of the brain, these ever more extreme and ridiculous scientific flounderings have become beyond-pitiful to contemplate. The more time and money scientists waste on this nonsense, the more infamy will attach to them when in fifty years, or in five hundred years, some bright young physicist wins the eventual and inevitable Nobel Prize in Physics for a Consciousness Theory of Everything. And then at last physics will return to being a productive scientific field.

But meanwhile, we who are not afraid of finding God are seeking an ever deeper understanding of Consciousness. And there are some important things to be said here!

First, of course, is a better delineation of the physics of the energy-like potentiality which is Consciousness. Love is the highest, strongest, and most powerful Consciousness vibration, while fear is the lowest and the weakest. Keep these central facts in mind. Franklin Roosevelt, with his “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself” wisdom, was quite the visionary scientific philosopher!

Second is the fact that Consciousness is continuous. There is no actual division between you and me. This fact is most obvious when we are in the astral plane, where we can read one another’s energy vibration from feet away. I found this to be most remarkable when I sat beside Jesus there in April with perhaps two feet of space between us, and I was allowed to remember that experience. I was enveloped in His amazingly silken personal energy.

Third is the fact that we enter this material universe in order to attempt to grow spiritually, and the reason why this works so well is simple. Our minds cannot easily mess with matter, as they can with the energies in our astral home. Combine that fact with willing amnesia, life-planning, and the help of a spirit guide. And you have a very useful spiritual school!

Fourth, as we go beyond what I have been able to learn on my own with Thomas’s guidance, he has told me that ours is not the only universe, but it is one of many realities. He will say no more about it now, but he admits that there is no way that we can puzzle out such information on our own. We will have the chance to learn more once we go home.

Fifth, my Thomas feels that the easiest way for us to envision God is to think of Consciousness as something like a pail, with this material reality and all of us who feel that we are separated from one another although we are not really separate at all currently living toward the bottom of it, and in reality there is no top. So materiality is at the lowest level of Consciousness of which we are aware.

Sixth, each of us while we are on earth has a spirit guide who is our spiritual conduit to the higher levels of reality. Your spirit guide is what amounts to God’s ear and hand and heart in your earthly life.

Seventh, as we advance spiritually, we can eventually become spirit guides ourselves. And with further advancement, we can become perfected beings and elect to join the Godhead Collective of many thousands of perfected beings which continuously manifests our reality. Or else we can choose to venture ever higher. There is no limit to our possible spiritual elevation.

And Eighth, Thomas tells me that, yes, above it all there is what he calls an ultimate High God. And that eternal God is happy to wait those foolish scientists out. Human scientists can dither and waste time and money for another thousand years if they like. In the end, they will find no better explanation for the existence of every reality than the Mind of God.