My sweet Lord, My Lord.
I really want to see you.
Really want to be with you.
Really want to see you, Lord,
But it takes so long, my Lord.
My sweet Lord. My Lord, My Lord.
I really want to know you.
Really want to go with you.
Really want to show you, Lord.
But it won’t take long, my Lord (Hallelujah!)
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)
In the past nine months I have been given such an extraordinary gift. Religious people speak freely about “knowing Jesus.” But I never had remotely thought that I ever would, you know, actually get to know Jesus. Now, however, I am dumbfounded to say that on the sixth day of April last year I actually met Jesus the risen Christ face to face. It turns out that a lot of people meet Jesus in the astral plane soon after their deaths. He makes a point of that. Jesus loves humankind to such an extent that, rather than ascending as He long ago would have been expected to ascend in the natural order of things and merge with the Godhead Collective, He has instead maintained His separate existence on the entrance level of the astral plane. And there He welcomes home all the adherents of Roman Christianity who hope to be blessed by Him personally. There are more than two billion Christians still living on earth, so He is going to be at this task for a while.
All of us generally leave our bodies on most nights while our bodies sleep. For what might be as much as two or three hours, using energy bodies that are mimics of our earthly bodies and trailing energy cords that keep our material bodies alive, we slip our earthly shells for some spiritual recreation. On many nights we never leave our bedrooms, although sometimes with our spirit guides we will take night-trips that generally don’t go far in distance, but are mostly vertical lifts in vibration. It is up to our spirit guides whether we are going to remember these nightly trips, and the trip that Thomas and I took last April was in the nature of a business meeting so I was going to need to remember what was said. On that April night I had the sense of waking up sitting on an astral river bank between Thomas and Jesus, feeding neon-colored fish.
Our Companion looked nothing like church-Jesus, but I knew where we were and I knew who He was. Being there made me recall that of course I had been there before in that love-based atmosphere, surrounded by colors that don’t exist on earth. And the subtle smells of the place are something that I don’t think that you ever forget. We recognize people in the astral plane by their unique personal energies, and Jesus’s energy is extraordinary, unbearably powerful but sweetly silken and with no down-notes at all. Sitting there, though, He looked like just some folksy older guy. He was talking as this memory begins, and Thomas was sending Him the thought that I would be able to understand His thoughts, so He smoothly switched to the mental method of communication that is usual in the astral plane. Jesus clearly knew that I was alarmed, because what He was mentally telling me was that as I became more comfortable, He would revert to looking as He usually looks. Omigod, I couldn’t even look at His face! Thomas had given me no preparation, and that grandfather-look was no camouflage. I had visited the astral plane before with Thomas, and had seen Jesus there a couple of times from a distance, when Thomas had pointed Him out. But I never had imagined I would talk with Him. And be sitting beside him, less than two feet away!
That night began for me a series of shocks. And the fact that Jesus now chooses to look more the way He would have looked when He was a brown-skinned Mediterranean Jew two thousand years ago is the least of it. Meeting Him has also made me dredge up and confront from decades ago all the early Christian history that I learned when I was in college. If I had been Jesus, and had started a spiritual movement that had been as successful for more than three hundred years as His own movement was, and then my movement had been destroyed the way Constantine ruthlessly destroyed the Jesus Movement, I would have been infuriated. And they even stole and used His name! He managed to preserve the core of His teachings inside the Christian Bible, but the core teachings of the Christian religion itself have nothing to do with Jesus. How can He not be a literal cauldron of raging grievances by now? There can be no greater advertisement for the success of living Jesus’s teachings than the Man is Himself. He has patiently waited out Roman Christianity for seventeen hundred earth-years, and now He intends to begin to teach His genuine truths all over again from the beginning.
Learning about Thomas’s history with Jesus, and about my own history with Thomas, explains some things about my own life. All of us accept amnesia when we enter these earth-lifetimes, and after this body dies I will sort out the rest. And meanwhile, Thomas seems generally to take me along on his nightly visits to Jesus, but with amnesia for the experience, very much as you might take along your uncomprehending Labrador retriever. It is part of the spirit guides’ code that he must never leave me alone for long. Thomas, however, also takes very seriously a sacred pledge that he made long ago.
As we have previously said here, Thomas’s role for Jesus is “balance.” All that Jesus ever gets is worship, but Thomas has known Jesus for so long, and six thousand years ago he was Jesus’s older brother in the Lord’s last human lifetime, so Thomas is the only being left anywhere who still is able to give to Jesus what each of us gets from our own familiars: just basic human interaction. And I have come to understand that for a Being at Jesus’s elevated level of spiritual development, what Thomas does for Jesus each night is essential. Without someone willing to help Him keep in regular human practice, Jesus would rapidly lose the remaining human remnant that He still has left.
For most of my life, Thomas has cloaked my astral experiences in such deep amnesia that I have had no memory of them at all. And to be frank, for most of that time I knew so little about what is really going on that I would not have comprehended much of it anyway. But after I actually met Jesus in April – and I am told that happened at Jesus’s request – Thomas has experimented with letting me remember a few of our nightly excursions. Not many. And it has been fascinating and heartwarming to watch their interactions from a respectful distance. They communicate mostly in some other language, or in what I suspect might be a pidgin of languages, and both by thought and verbally, so I seldom have a clue about what they are saying. And for much of their time together they talk warmly, sitting close together on that riverbank or sometimes walking, both in long astral robes, often laughing and teasing one another, and deep in the kind of verbal dance that close friends easily do. And then occasionally, Thomas will beat Jesus up. Not actually, but Jesus will say some trigger-word that is meant to infuriate Thomas, and Thomas says a word that I have been told translates to “Brat!” And then he chases and catches Jesus, and astral bodies are indestructible anyway. But the first time I saw this happen, I was horrified.
My spirit guide beats up the King of Kings. And now I have seen everything. But as I think more deeply through all of this, and as we prepare for teachingsbyjesus.com to go live about the end of February on the schedule that Jesus has planned, I am seized by a vague but increasing worry. A blogger on Patheos.com recently expressed my worry, and seeing it in black and white made me delete his post from my feed, so now I cannot link it for you. What I remember is that He said that the universalists shouldn’t be so smug about their insistence that there is no hell, because “if everyone goes to heaven, then Jesus died for nothing so now who needs Jesus?” My worry more precisely is that no Christian sees Jesus as a brown-skinned Jewish Teacher. But that is who He is and who He always was, and that is the way that He wants to be seen now. What He wants to do is to go back, literally, two thousand years, to the shores and hillsides of Galilee, looking not the way that church-Jesus looks, but looking instead like Mediterranean Jesus. And He wants to send all of us out now as His disciples to share not the Roman Emperor Constantine’s fear-based religion that is rapidly failing worldwide, but sharing instead His own love-based Core Teachings that can at last and forevermore truly bring the kingdom of God on earth. But, could that happen? Who would listen? Is it even possible at this point?
My fear is that instead, people might see Jesus as only nothing more than Christianity’s trademark name and face. So as the religion dies, so also might they see Jesus as outmoded as well, just as they would lose interest in any other trademark of a company that had fallen out of favor. As the religion dies, will the good name of Jesus also and inevitably die with it?
In fact, the Lord Jesus Christ is the most charismatic Man that you can imagine. He is the most popular guy, the star of every class, the one that everyone gravitates to and votes for and listens to and loves. When He looks at you, He truly sees you and He loves every single thing about you, and you feel that so powerfully that nothing else matters. I cannot get enough of simply being with Jesus! Just listening to His voice. It doesn’t matter what He says. And Thomas is smiling now, to see me writing this. He shares none of my worries. But it will be just a website! No one who visits it will experience Jesus. If only there were a way for people to hang out with Him, you would have people there by the millions. But, just at a website? No chance.
I have come to think of Jesus’s two-thousand-year post-incarnation life as a grand-scale experiment in the farthest reaches of love. According to the laws of Consciousness, He should long since have ascended and merged with the Godhead Collective. But for His pure, ardent love for humankind He has remained as human as possible while His vibration and His personal power have grown ever more, and in this He is unique. While He remained on the entrance level of the astral plane and nursed back to spiritual health the hundreds of millions of people that Roman Christianity was damaging with its fear-based dogmas and its Inquisitions and its Crusades, and His vibration and His power grew ever more elevated, and while His erstwhile brother kept working to keep Him in balance, and also kept taking repeated lives on earth to try to protect His Biblical teachings, and neither of them knew when or where this would end, Jesus grew vastly more spiritually powerful. He may be individually even more powerful now than is the whole Godhead Collective that continuously manifests this universe, and I say this because Thomas tells me that they have briefly ventured together even above the Godhead level with no energetic resistance at all, which is astounding. And I should add, too, that my Thomas has done His part. When I was seeking quotations for The Fun of Loving Jesus, I found sufficient great quotations from Thomas Jefferson to make him that book’s keynote speaker. And through all of this, Jesus was developing into the sweet and gentle and almost childlike Being that He is today.
And so we look at Jesus now. When I try to step back far enough to really see Jesus, I have to say that even as He is literally God, at the same time when He is compared to the Man who died on that cross, He is amazingly more childlike. Two thousand years ago, Jesus’s disciples came to Him and said, “Who then is greatest in the kingdom of heaven?” And Jesus called a child to Himself and set him among them, and He said, “Truly I say to you, unless you change and become like children, you will not enter the kingdom of heaven” (MT 18:1-3). He was always saying some variation of that, and with it He hit the mark precisely. Rather than causing Him to grow in ego, as it could quite justifiably have done, spiritual power as overwhelming as His has only made Jesus ever milder. I cannot envision the Jesus of today ever calling clergymen sons of hell, as He did back when He was last on earth, or overturning the tables of money changers in the Temple. No, this Jesus has risen very far above that! In predicting His coming some seven hundred years before His birth, the prophet Isaiah said in part, “And the wolf will dwell with the lamb, And the leopard will lie down with the young goat, And the calf and the young lion and the fattened steer will be together; And a little boy will lead them” (Isaiah 11:6).
And I wonder now whether Isaiah may have been seeing for us all even today a far better future. To know Jesus is to know a divine love so powerful that it is the Alpha and Omega and the bright morning star. To know Jesus now, I realize that we may be seeing in our own future some of what Isaiah could see when He foretold the Lord’s divine birth. We will say more about this next week.
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)
My Lord (Hallelujah!)
My sweet Lord (Hallelujah!)
Really want to see you,
Really want to see you,
Really want to see you, Lord.
Really want to see you, Lord.
But it takes so long, my lord (Hallelujah!)
– George Harrison (1943-2001), from “My Sweet Lord” (1970)
p.s. Many thanks to those who are reviewing The Fun of Loving Jesus! I cannot believe what Amazon charges for such a skinny book. We are looking now into buying it in bulk from the printer, so we can give it away.