The long and winding road That leads to Your door
Will never disappear. I’ve seen that road before.
It always leads me here. Lead me to Your door!
The wild and windy night That the rain washed away
Has left a pool of tears, Crying for the day.
Why leave me standing here? Let me know the way!
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Paul McCartney, from “The Long and Winding Road” (1970)
For years I have read the blogs and newsletters of a dozen public clergymen and theologians. They range from the highly respectable and much-beloved Father Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico to an unfashionable and thoroughly by-the-Book, fire-and-brimstone fellow at the other end of the range. I respect and love them all for their sincere and wholehearted devotion to God, to Jesus, and to their fellow man. Even though I am no longer practicing Roman Christianity, all of those who love and serve Jesus are my cherished brothers and sisters in Christ.
This year is shaping up to be the most astonishing year of my entire life. Oh my goodness, I have actually met Jesus! You don’t consider such a thing to be even possible, although now Jesus really is my friend. He has a voice that I know, with a minimal accent. He has a beautiful face that I adore. He has that overwhelmingly powerful silken energy, and He has mannerisms that I fondly recognize. I think of Him smiling a little and turning away when I said something flattering to Him. Never do that. Jesus just wants to be accepted and loved as one of us.
And now I read those daily or weekly missives from my old-friend clergymen with some amazement. They write as if my new friend, Jesus, has been sitting on a shelf for the past two thousand years with a blank stare on His face, just gathering dust. Or they even confidently write as if He is a quaint relic of some earthly Middle Eastern past. Why has it not occurred to any of them even to speculate about what He might have been doing during all that time since He last went home? Each human life is eternal, and what with the Inquisitions and the Crusades and all the rest of Roman Christian history, might it not have been worth at least a speculative blog post about Jesus’s possible subsequent involvement in the world? And perhaps the Lord’s own resulting further personal spiritual growth?
And my clergyman friends still write from within the religion! This fact astonishes me sometimes, especially with the more sophisticated of them. Max Planck’s revolutionary discoveries about consciousness are now a century old, and even though the mainstream scientific gatekeepers still are stonewalling them, his ideas by now have permeated our culture. Father Rohr is a Franciscan priest, and He actually said during one of His more recent newsletter cycles that he had thought about making some radical changes, but he had decided to “stay defiantly,” or words to that effect. Sometimes, when I am reading what these beloved clergyfolks write, I feel as if I am reading missives from some distant land that is stuck in the past and holding my dear clergyfriends prisoner. While Christianity continues to decline worldwide, they all still fret about terms and timelines and apologetics, and they fuss about modern concepts like something called “harmonial religion.” And all that I ever see them say about Jesus the Man is centered around events two thousand years in the past. Even then, their observations often involve details that were peripheral to the Lord’s life and work.
But I am so far beyond all of that now! And wow, I have got to say it: so is Jesus, pretty clearly. I don’t know who first used the term “church-Jesus,” whether He said it or I did, but Jesus seems to be just about as done with church-Jesus as I am. And at this point, Thomas no longer can effectively impede my curiosity, so this week I have dared to ask more questions. What were Thomas and Jesus fighting about? Of course, they weren’t actually fighting-fighting. And with Jesus’s permission, Thomas has been telling me about some of their experiments as they have tried to understand why Jesus can’t seem to feel anger. They have determined that He must have disabled His ability to feel anger while He was helping all those victims of Christianity.
At least, that is their present theory. Here were all those suffering people! Anyone else seeing them arriving home in that condition and in their millions would have become enraged, but Jesus felt only love and compassion for the torturers as well as the victims. Not normal. But Jesus tells Thomas now that He probably thought that if He had let Himself feel anger at what He was seeing, He might not have been able effectively to help all those victims. Still, we know that Jesus was able to feel some righteous anger during His lifetime as Jesus (See e.g. MK 7:1-23 and MT 21:11-13). So He and Thomas then together looked back even further, at their last earth-lifetime together as brothers, just as all of us can look at the records of our prior lives once we are back in our greater minds.
So what I was allowed to witness last week that led to Thomas chasing Jesus and pinning Him in the grass was a bit of their effort to recapture their lives lived within that ancient family that Thomas now tells me actually happened about 6,300 years ago. Which goes to show you that sibling rivalries can be remarkably persistent! Thomas was the oldest son in a ruling family, but Jesus was their mother’s favorite. She was lobbying to get Thomas removed as their father’s successor and Jesus installed in his place, even though Thomas was a warrior and already a successful general, and Jesus had never been willing to fight. Their youngest brother, who later lived an earth-lifetime as the Apostle John, didn’t figure into this rivalry. And later of course it all became moot when their city was wiped out in a massacre, after which Jesus became an ascended being. But Thomas and Jesus were able to get pretty deep into their memories, including recalling and using again the epithets that they had hurled at one another as boys, which Thomas translated into English. So their using those memories to try to revive Jesus’s ability to feel some level of anger was the nighttime event that Thomas had allowed me to remember. And thus they have established the curious Freudian fact that all that Jesus has to do now is to say “Butcher-Boy” to Thomas, and it puts Thomas into an immediate rage.
Now of late, Thomas and I have been discussing what more he and Jesus have been learning about how the process of spiritual growth seems to work. This question has seized Thomas’s mind, and with his current occupational limitation he mostly has just me to share it with, so he has been pulling me away from my other work to debate the question at hand. And that question for him has come down to this: Knowing what we know now, can we say that Jesus has actually, literally become God, having once been actually, literally just a human being, and in fact what my Thomas has referred to a couple of times lovingly and probably mostly in jest as his own bratty little brother? Jesus has been part of our discussion too, but since we have been talking about Him and He seems to be devoid of ego, He won’t contribute a point of view. I just have sometimes been feeling His silken energy nearby. I think He is curious. And while there probably is no clear-cut answer to this question, Thomas and I agree that the answer seems to be yes. It is yes no matter which of two different angles we take.
First: Jesus was born on earth as Jesus two thousand years ago directly from out of the Godhead. He had earned that spiritual level even back then, and His service to God and to humankind as Jesus surely has earned Him a great deal more in terms of spiritual growth. The fact that He chose not to return to and meld with the Godhead after His Ascension does not reduce any of that; but if anything, it further enhances it.
Second: The unique life of selfless love, sacrifice, and service on lowly Level Three that Jesus has been living for the past two thousand years has led to extraordinary additional spiritual growth that my Thomas witnessed as it was happening, and that amazing additional growth is obvious to me just as a visitor. But it really is impossible to quantify, in part because Jesus seems to be unwilling to test it.
Jesus has inadvertently made of Himself an experiment in extreme love and service. I cannot imagine that it ever will be replicated. If someone loves and serves hundreds of millions of people intensely, unceasingly, and for two thousand years, and so selflessly that He doesn’t allow His own spiritual development to advance by levels as it usually happens naturally, but instead He does all of this without ever leaving the third level of the astral plane, then what happens? Then you get Jesus as He is today. I find it hard to describe Him for you. It seems to be first now that He even feels free enough of fixing the mess that the Romans made of Christianity to even know who He is, Himself. This experimenting with trying to help Him feel human emotions again beyond love and sevice that He and Thomas have been doing has been helpful to Him, I think. It has helped to loosened and relax His mind. But what they have mostly learned is that at this point, Jesus is a Being unique unto Himself.
My mother was very close to death at the age of eighty-eight. After she came out of her coma, she even told me that her parents had come for her, but she had refused to go with them. So then a few days later she had a visit from a classic sixth-level being who told her that she would be given a little more time on earth. My mother had no idea what that being had been! She called it just “the big tall man.” And on that crowded hospital floor, she was the only one who saw it. Classically, sixth-level beings who appear on earth are often eight or more feet tall, very thin, and vaguely male or female but androgynous. They wear what look like angel robes with fancy belts and hats, and they glow with either a silver or a golden radiance. Or they might prefer to be simply a ball of light that you recognize as an individual being by its energy signature.
Jesus has been to the sixth level, which we are told is indescribably beautiful. But Thomas tells me that Jesus finds it boring, as of course He would. There are no regular people there. I haven’t asked Thomas whether Jesus has traveled even higher than Level Seven, which is the Godhead level, but I believe that He could indeed travel higher, if He chose to do that. Thomas is as curious as I am about how much power Jesus actually has at this point; indeed, we speculate that He is more powerful now than the entire Godhead Collective put together. Remember that even back when He resurrected His crucified body as Jesus, it has been estimated based on studying the scorch on the Shroud of Turin that He used more power to do that than we would be able to produce, even today. But not only does Jesus have no interest in testing His present power, but the whole idea of His having any kind of power that you could measure actually seems to disgust Him. Oddly, He seems to have come to equate divine power with money in some way, the lust for which He sees as having harmed so many of His human friends.
Jesus lives entirely by His own lights. In all of the whole gigantic astral plane, achieving the top of the sixth level and becoming one of those ten-foot-tall beings in angelic robes and with the flashiest belt and hat, all of it radiant with the brightest possible gold and silver and showing what a spiritual big-shot we are is everybody’s ultimate goal. And then there is Jesus. By choice, He is barely six feet tall, with short, curly hair and a regular beard and He wears just a plain astral robe that doesn’t glow at all. The only signifier of Jesus’s spiritual status is The Big One. The one that no one can hide. It is His overwhelmingly powerful and perfectly silken personal energy. And He even tries to tone that down.
Jesus innocently defies every convention of human spiritual growth that we have learned, or even that we can imagine. Thomas tells me that as Jesus has begun to think beyond His two-thousand-year detour into His need to minimize the harm that was caused on earth by Roman Christianity, some of what seems to be an endless supply of friends always coming and going are advising Him now to simply leave our astral dimension altogether. And Thomas tells me that some of Jesus’s inner circle also are advising Him to take that advice and disappear. I have had no idea about this, but Thomas tells me that Jesus, together with the Buddha and Krishna and some other great Wisdom teachers I have never heard of who were developed on earth are greatly revered in other dimensions. And I have heard Jesus say something about preparing to teach in those other realms.
So on Friday I asked my Thomas what he thinks that Jesus is going to do now. “Do you think He really will go and teach somewhere else? I think I can do a website about His teachings all on my own based on the Gospels and Liberating Jesus, if He wants to leave something of Himself here.”
Thomas said, “You know Him. What do you think that He will do?”
“I know what He should do. After we’ve just given Him two thousand years of grief!”
“But what do you expect Him to do?’
I thought about the Jesus I know. His voice. His face. I said, “He loves people. I think what would make Him happiest is staying here with us. And God knows, no one needs His teachings now more than we do, right here!”
Thomas smiled. And to the extent that it is possible for someone who is actually internal to give you a hug, I think he gave me a hug.
Many times I’ve been alone, And many times I’ve cried.
Anyway, You’ll never know The many ways I’ve tried.
And still they lead me back To the long winding road.
You left me standing here A long, long time ago.
Don’t leave me waiting here. Lead me to Your door!
– John Lennon (1940-1980) & Paul McCartney, from “The Long and Winding Road” (1970)