Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by day” (1971)
On April 6th I met Jesus in person. And He turns out to be a profoundly complex but amazingly relatable and even actually human Being. He is human not as you and I are human, but He is human because two thousand years ago He studied the elevated Beings around Him who even back then were of lesser rank, the members of the Godhead Collective and the tall and glowing Beings of Light, and He realized that He was about to be subsumed into the most elevated Collective. And once that happened, He would lose His chance to stay in contact with humankind, so He made the decision to take His personal Collective and live separately on the entrance level of the astral plane. And for the next seventeen hundred earth-years He lovingly welcomed and comforted and healed each of the billions of victims of Roman Christianity and many more people besides, and He taught and served on Level Three and in the children’s villages. He never claimed any of the privileges that His ever more exalted rank was earning Him.
Although the night of April 6th has remained vivid in my mind, it has taken nearly three months for the strangeness of the Lord’s situation to dawn on me. And Jesus is such a remarkable Man! He is in some ways childlike, and as low-mileage as anyone on earth might be who at the age of thirty has lived an entirely solitary life in a forest. But at the same time He is deeply powerful, as if He were an immense engine idling. He is personally smooth, without rough edges, gentle and mild, at the pinnacle of power but nevertheless extraordinarily sweet and kind.
My Thomas never volunteers information, even if something is bothering me. One morning last weekend I blurted to him, “Why did you take me there? What was the point? Now I can’t get Him out of my mind!”
“So it is only now that you bring Him up?”
“Isn’t He lonely? He is all by Himself!”
“He is not lonely. He is never alone unless He wants to be alone.”
“Is John with Him?”
Thomas didn’t answer that question. He threw me a kind of “It’s complicated” thought.
“Doesn’t he visit Jesus?”
Here I got the clear thought that John likes Roman Christianity and nothing more will be said.
But none of this is my business! We each were thinking that same thought at once, which seemed to soften my precious friend. I have come to see that he is in a difficult place. He is sworn to be my spirit guide for this earth-lifetime, and he loves me as all of our spirit guides love us, but at the same time I am coming to see more deeply that he is the close intimate of God Himself. And as we both had that added thought, he seemed to soften further. I can see what an immense relief it is to him that he no longer must keep these two parts of his eternal life separate. And I gather that the separation is ending now only because Jesus wants it to end. Surprisingly, Thomas then said many things in rapid boluses of thought. And as I was trying to take them all in, to my further surprise he told me that it would be acceptable for me to share with you a lot of what he had just told me. I realized as I was hearing him in my mind that of course he was in contact by mind with Jesus as he was talking to me. And he probably is constantly in contact with Jesus. So all of this must be what Jesus wants us to hear. And as I had that thought, I felt the Lord’s affirmation.
Wow, the veil is really thinning now!
Thomas told me that Jesus made the choice when He returned from His lifetime on earth never to rejoin the Godhead Collective. This universe exists as a place for human beings to experience the spiritual stressors that will enable us to better grow spiritually. And The Way that Jesus developed for us to achieve that result required that He maintain His identity as Jesus, and also maintain His personal Collective so He could better lead His new movement. By then He had achieved a status which allowed Him to make these choices. But He still was to remain at the Godhead level. That was His earned status. That was the established order of things, and the Celestial Council was in ultimate control. However, when Jesus realized how rapidly His being at that level was putting Him completely out of touch with the earth, He chose to permanently occupy a lower place. And so, once again He was making waves.
Thomas has long since told me that the Being Who is Jesus, uniquely perhaps among all the beings who ever have been born on earth, loves people. I mean, He really loves people! So to be separated from where He could care for and nurture the followers of His precious Way was unbearable for Him, especially since already the nascent Roman Christian movement was beginning to deliver up its first victims as it assumed control on earth of the followers of the Lord’s Way. The Celestial Council soon found that it could not prevent Jesus from welcoming and comforting and healing those victims. And thus began the Lord’s seventeen-hundred-year ministry that is moving toward its end only now, as the Roman phase of Christianity apparently at last is nearing its end.
I don’t think that I fully understand what I am about to say, but Thomas wants me to try. God is infinitely powerful, infinitely creative, and perfectly loving Consciousness energy. The material universe consists of nothing else. Jesus told us as much when He told us that God is Spirit (JN 4:24). More precisely, God is Consciousness at its highest vibration. The Apostle Paul told us that it is within God that we live and move and have our being (Acts 17:28). And loving others, exercising love constantly, is how we all grow spiritually, so as Jesus loved all those billions of damaged Christians into spiritual health over seventeen centuries, He became perhaps more personally powerful even than the entire Godhead Collective combined. It was a byproduct of the way He was ministering, and it was something that Thomas tells me now that he noticed more than Jesus did as Thomas was coming and going, taking repeated lifetimes on earth to do what he could to try to guard Jesus’s teachings as they had carefully preserved them within the Roman Christian Bible. He was with Jesus almost constantly between lifetimes as he watched with Him the development of Roman Christianity, and then its course through all those centuries.
Thomas has repeatedly told me, and he emphasized yet again to me last weekend, that none of Roman Christian theology has anything to do with Jesus. And it has little to do with God! But Thomas tells me that he never has heard the slightest complaint about any of this from Jesus, nor the least bit of resentment of the religion that was named for Him. And my Thomas has seen nothing from Jesus but perfect love for the billions of Christians who have returned home revering Him, although their religion has nothing to do with the Lord’s Own Way.
Jesus’s original Collective is vastly augmented now by a battery of Christian saints and clergy, and all those lay Christians who have returned home as His devoted followers. In the astral plane, Jesus now heads a gigantic spiritual family. So as we talked last weekend, I wondered to Thomas about what role he might still play for Jesus. He is just an earthly brother from the Lord’s final ordinary lifetime that I calculate must have ended maybe seven thousand earth-years ago, even before the Lord’s ascension to the Godhead level. So in practical terms, what might Thomas be to Jesus now? At that, my Thomas smiled. Even though I cannot see him more than vaguely in my mind, I can feel his emotion when he smiles. And he almost never smiles. He said thoughtfully, “He tells me that I am the only one who still outranks Him. I am His older brother, right?” Thomas even chuckled a bit, as if to himself.
I thought about that. Then I said, “He cannot be serious!”
“He is perfectly serious. He loves people with His whole heart, but all He ever gets is worship. The only one who can love Him as a human man seems to be me. So I am His pearl of great price.”
It was most of another day before I said to Thomas, “He really said that?”
“He says it all the time.” Then Thomas added, “He uses that term in the Bible (MT 13:46). And that is also why He loves those fish. And the deer. They don’t know that He is the King of Kings!”
I know what you are thinking now. Jesus can hear us talking about Him. So we shouldn’t talk about Him! We can talk easily in front of my family because our conversations are by mind. But when Jesus can hear us talking about Him, isn’t that embarrassing?
It was. But when I first had that thought, Thomas said, “You wonder why Jesus allows you to share what we are saying. My child, He is not a human man who has a need to hide His thoughts. His thoughts are your gift! Jesus loves everyone, but He trusts almost no one in a human body because He knows their hearts. He sees how His name is used by clergymen to build their earthly wealth. It is the hardest thing for Jesus to trust anyone in a human body because money is the great human obsession (MT 6:24). When I took you to meet with Him in April, it was by His invitation. He would like you to become more comfortable with Him. But He believes that He can trust you.”
Wow. It may be my Thomas’s new pride in me, which I can feel, even more than the amazement of the Lord’s expression of trust that really makes me smile.
Day by day, Day by day,
Oh, Dear Lord, three things I pray.
To see thee more clearly,
Love thee more dearly,
Follow thee more nearly,
Day by day.
– John-Michael Tebelak (1949-1985) & Stephen Schwartz, from “Day by day” (1971)