When the moon is in the seventh house,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars.
This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius,
Age of Aquarius, Aquarius! Aquarius!

Harmony and understanding,
Sympathy and trust abounding.
Golden living dreams of visions,
Mystic crystal revelation,
And the mind’s true liberation. Aquarius!! Aquarius!!
– Galt Macdermot (1928-2018), James Rado (1932-2022), from “The Age of Aquarius” (1967)

I remember that glorious time as if it were yesterday! There are a few decades that can be recognized right away as pivotal. In the United States, the 1770s and the 1860s were big decades, although not happily so, since they saw civil wars that pitted neighbor against neighbor and tore families apart. But to be young in the 1960s was such a glorious time that nobody who lived through the Sixties ever will quite get over it. Even though we are in our seventies now, just the thought of having been young back then can bring us a little secret smile. It was not only that we were able to get away with a whole lot more back then. But in the Sixties, being young had a lot more value than being young does now. It makes me sad for today’s young people to see how watered-down their big causes are, how awful their favorite music is, and in general how much less dramatic their coming-of-age is now than ours was back then. I mean, kids were marching in the streets in 1968 by the hundreds of thousands, burning bras and sticking flowers into rifle-barrels. I actually thought the whole world might be ending. Now, THAT was a youthquake!

  • We had the music! There is nothing now to compare with Sixties music. We had not only the British invasion, but even bigger than that, we had Doo-Wop and Motown. The black singing groups that came out of the Sixties developed a beautiful meld of church, Civil Rights, and war protest music that was lively, fresh, and gorgeously danceable.
  • We had Vietnam! A trivial and useless war for which they were drafting boys who then died for nothing gives you a genuine reason to march in the streets and make a gigantic fuss! Before the Federal government wised up to its mistake, they had a full-scale revolt of the young on their hands. They might on occasion talk about it, but they never again will bring back the draft, short of a genuine intergalactic invasion.
  • We had rebellion for rebellion’s sake! There is a line from a James Dean movie where someone asks him what he is rebelling against, and he says, “Waddaya got?” That line perfectly captures the mood of the Sixties. Coming right after the battened-down Fifties, when our mothers all were chained to stoves, the push for women’s liberation really caught on in the Sixties. Congress didn’t pass the Equal Rights Amendment until 1972, but the drive for its passage began in the Sixties. Personally, I am glad that it never was ratified. As I told male friends at the time, women are “not equal, but better.” And the sexes are different enough physically that having made that amendment part of the Constitution would have raised repeated future issues. But the point had been made.
  • We had Saint Martin! I grew up in a tiny town in central Massachusetts, and I never saw a single living person of any race but my own until I got to college. But the Civil Rights movement was my favorite TV show. I recall that once as a young child I pointed out to my mother that Nat King Cole looked exactly like our family doctor. My mother sputtered, “But he’s black!” Well, true. But other than that, they could have been twins. My mother wasn’t racist, but like me, before television she had not been much exposed to the outside world. And when I first met Dr. King on TV, it was love at first sound. I couldn’t get enough of the way he talked and the beautiful, magical things he said. That plain-spoken man, so young and so mild, made an epic TV hero. They were attacking his people with dogs and fire hoses, and still he spoke like Jesus. I vividly recall the morning when I learned that he had been assassinated. For real. They had killed Dr. King, and I was devastated! It was then that I personally met the ugly face of racism. We were college seniors, and the girl I was walking with to class had been my friend since freshman year. But she was from New Orleans, I was from Massachusetts, and when I told her in tears how appalled I was that Dr. King had been assassinated, she snapped at me, “He wasn’t assassinated! He was not a public figure!” I don’t believe that she ever spoke to me again.

It really isn’t easy to be young. As superannuated children, those who are young continue to see many things in only one dimension, while the world exists in not even three dimensions, but really in such a nuanced complexity that even now, at my age, I look at the world that my generation has made, and I am amazed by it. If you are not amazed by it, then you are not considering it deeply enough. What has made me think about this process of getting over being young has been a conversation with my beautiful granddaughter about her post-college career search last weekend, and also answering emails from some of our commenters about last week’s blog post. 

And I have spent this past week trying to digest the enormity of Jesus’s eternal life. 

When we were young, we thought that we understood love. We thought the decade of the 1960s was all about love! But Jesus has been living an intense and boggling seven-millennia-long love affair with all of humankind. And now I am being called upon to help the world to understand the Master’s beyond-epic kind of love?  

Almost four years ago, I began to write The Fun of Loving Jesus – Embracing the Christianity That Jesus Taught. This was a project that my Thomas clearly had decided upon, since it just started happening one day and it flowed right out of me. I thought at first this second book was unnecessary, since we already have Liberating Jesus. Then as it was being written, I began to see that, yes, it was useful. We completed it, and the cover was designed, but Thomas refused to let me publish it. I assumed that there was some revelation yet to come, so I simply put it aside. It was only after the whole seekreality.com website to teach about life after death was thought up, undertaken, and even completed, that my Thomas then proposed the idea of creating a website for Jesus as well. And the way that he did it made me think it had been a part of his plan all along.

So then he took me on that field trip to the astral plane to meet Jesus in person last April, specifically so Jesus could tell me His own version of the Christmas-and-Easter story. And, guess what? Jesus turns out to be a regular guy! Well, not precisely regular, but very long ago He was an incarnated being. That was Thomas’s missing piece. And since then, he and Jesus have made me feel comfortable with telling the story of Jesus’s life in a way that is so real and relatable, and at the same time so amazing that the mind quails. That Someone who began as a human being can always have loved His fellow man as much as Jesus loves His fellow man is simply impossible to imagine.

I am going to try to tell this story as simply as I can. It is not a simple story, because the Being Who is Jesus is so extraordinary in one salutary way. He loves people. I mean, He really loves people. I have met Him now. I know Him. It doesn’t surprise me that people slavishly followed Him all over Galilee, because Jesus is extremely charismatic. He makes you feel as if He loves you so much that you must be the most important person in the world. And apparently He always has been this way.

In about 6500 BC, in the area that we now refer to as Babylonia, a small walled city was overrun and its inhabitants were massacred. And the middle son of three princes of its royal family had attained all grace, so He was admitted to what we now call the seventh level of the afterlife, which is the Godhead level. The Being who would eventually become Jesus was upset to be separated from His brothers, but He was still in contact with them by mind. He asked them to wait in place while He figured out what was going on. His older brother, the future Thomas and now my spirit guide, waited. Their younger brother, who would one day be the Apostle John, waited briefly. But Thomas’s wait extended for 4500 years.  

Jesus refused to meld with the Godhead Collective, as all other seventh-level beings were melding. Instead, He asked a lot of questions, and He never got satisfactory answers. In that much younger reality, there was not even a folkloric explanation for what had happened to Him. But gradually He came to understand that there was some kind of contest being run in life, and He had won it. He had achieved spiritual perfection. But He refused to win a contest that seemed to be so unfair! So eventually He decided that He had to go back. He wanted to figure out how everyone on earth also could win this contest.

It seems to have taken Jesus almost 4500 earth-years to convince whatever Councils had to be convinced to allow Him to take an unprecedented extra earth-lifetime from out of the Godhead. This seems never otherwise to have been done, either before or since. He proposed it as a combination research and teaching mission: He intended first to study humankind while He was again on earth in a human body, so He could figure out how everyone could master the same level of spiritual development that had enabled Him to attain the seventh level; and then He would teach those steps to the world. Jesus told me that they thought He was crazy to want to do this (not His word choice). But over many centuries, and out of His pure obsessive love for humankind, He wore them down. They assembled for Him His personal Council for guidance. They insisted on sending the Archangel Gabriel to announce His birth to His expectant parents, and invisible archangels to protect Him on earth at all times, so when Jesus told His disciples that He could call up twelve legions of angels for His protection (MT 26:53), He was not bluffing. He wanted His two beloved brothers from His final earth-lifetime to serve as His companions in this lifetime as Jesus, and my faithful Thomas still was there waiting for Him in the astral plane; although apparently John had taken other lifetimes in the meantime. And so the three brothers were reunited, and together they planned that monumental divine lifetime. 

All of which means that Jesus was indeed born as the Son of God. He researched and then He gave us the easiest method for achieving rapid spiritual growth that ever has been devised. And when He could not convince iron-age primitives that they would easily survive their deaths, He deviated severely from the plan that He had agreed with His Council that He would follow, which had been to leave His body before its natural death. Instead, He ordered His archangels to allow Him to be arrested, and He endured  crucifixion and death so He could reanimate His dead body, rise from the dead, and prove to us that human life is eternal. But even with all that Jesus did for us in that single lifetime, what amazes me most is what He then did after His resurrection.

It is Jesus’s life of love over the most recent two thousand years – the life that the world doesn’t know about – that truly and completely boggles my mind. Yes, I understand why He did it. And my Thomas and I have talked about it more than we have talked about any other aspect of Jesus’s life. But still, I have not come up with a way to really wrap my mind around it.

Jesus has spent the past two thousand earth-years working with His much-expanded personal Council, doing nothing but nursing millions of victims of Roman Christianity back into mental and spiritual health. Many of these people died screaming in agony, burning at the stake or being broken on the wheel or on the rack, being tortured to death in Jesus’s name. Or they died in wars that were fought in His name, and all for a religion that had co-opted and was using His name, and that had murdered on crosses or in coliseums all the millions of His earliest followers. And that imposter religion was teaching now not the spiritual truths that Jesus had painstakingly discovered, but instead it was teaching only fear-based, human-made dogmas that amounted to lies. And Jesus has devoted Himself to all this deeply love-based healing over two thousand years without the slightest murmur of complaint to anyone.

Okay. Please read that paragraph again. I submit to you, my dear friends, that this is what real love is. This is love in action. We thought back in the Sixties that we were acting out of love, but my dear brothers and sisters, we never knew the meaning of the word! There was nothing that Jesus could have done as a discarnate Being about the fact that Rome had co-opted and corrupted His movement almost from the start. They had stolen even His name! Back then, He loved so much that He could spend literally every moment for the next two thousand years as just plain church-Jesus, constantly loving and comforting people who all had suffered so much at the hands of bastard Roman Christianity. The Roman Christian Church stole everything from Jesus. And He never has complained about that. His whole heart and soul has been devoted to repairing what has been done to all these people He loves.

So yes, I am going to give Jesus His website. And I will do with the rest of my life whatever my precious Friend asks me to do. I intend to plan more lifetimes to give to Him! But dear God, no matter how hard I try, I really cannot understand You, Jesus. And I am having a great deal of trouble finding a way to explain You to people. I cannot explain so much love to the world! I cannot begin to comprehend it myself, no matter how I try. But thank You for showing me how it feels to finally look upon the face of God.

 

When the moon is in the seventh house,
And Jupiter aligns with Mars,
Then peace will guide the planets,
And love will steer the stars!
This is the dawning of the age of Aquarius,
Age of Aquarius, Aquarius! Aquarius!
Aquarius!! Aquarius!!
– Galt Macdermot (1928-2018), James Rado (1932-2022), from “The Age of Aquarius” (1967)