(I come to the garden alone,
While the dew is still on the roses.
And the voice I hear, falling on my ear,
The Son of God discloses.
And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own.
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– C Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)

Today we all make our hopeful plans for a new year that is just beginning. A bright new calendar! Three hundred and sixty-five empty squares just waiting to be filled. And thinking about those empty squares when I have spent months studying the teachings of Jesus makes me know what Jesus would tell us is the most important thing that each of us should be planning to do with all that brand-new time. Jesus says, “Do not worry about your life, saying, ‘What are we to eat?’ or ‘What are we to drink?’ or ‘What are we to wear for clothing?’ For the Gentiles eagerly seek all these things; for your heavenly Father knows that you need all these things. But seek first His kingdom and His righteousness, and all these things will be provided to you” (MT 6:31-33). And it is time to take Jesus at His word. Before you fill in too many squares with lunch dates and shopping, with work trips and meetings and impromptu vacations and various courses, it is time to make some positive room in your life for the most important part of your life. It is time to make room in your life for God.

There was a time when we considered our Sunday mornings to be God’s time. Remember? And even if you are still attending church, that isn’t really giving much time to God in any meaningful way, since sitting in a pew and listening to a sermon, perhaps singing, and perhaps taking communion doesn’t amount to having much personal contact with the living God. It takes more than that, both in terms of time and in terms of spiritual involvement. Jesus often spent all night in prayer, and I am beginning to learn how to do some of that; and what I am coming to see is that our most productive time with God is spent not in worship or in talking, but rather in silently listening. God knows so much more than we do! So we ought to let God be The One Who Talks.  

My greatest revelation from all my time spent in developing the content for teachingsbyjesus.com is the amazing discovery that Jesus so perfectly understands Consciousness. No, He really does! This young Man barely thirty years old knew two thousand years ago some complex scientific things that still puzzle modern physicists. That is, if they even risk daring to Go There. No kidding! And all of this amazing information has been in the Biblical Gospels for two thousand years, and has been altogether ignored by Christians, and by everybody else as well. At first, I thought I was imagining things. But as I began to put it all together, and I realized that what I was seeing was real, I came to understand ever more deeply that this is the real treasure. This is God’s Gift! This impossible fact that Master Jesus, born two thousand years ago, is in fact and literally a modern Man in all respects, a time-traveler, Someone Who can prove that He lived back then, and Who also can prove that He lives and He speaks to us now.

There was a time when mainstream science was known to be a proud and prominent search for truths that could be universally acknowledged. That time, of course, is long since past, and we even can almost name the day of its passing. It was roughly a hundred years ago, and I have come to dramatize its final day in my mind. I fondly envision dear bald Max Planck sort of running through the corridors of MIT perhaps, with a faintly smoking test tube raised and desperately crying out, “We cannot get behind consciousness! We cannot get behind consciousness!” Of course, that never actually happened. But Dr. Planck knew on that final day what he had found. And I like to think that he was glad about it.  

For those who may never have heard of Max Planck, he won the 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics as the father of quantum mechanics. Dear Max rocked the world of Newtonian physics a century ago, and I have been quoting him in this space for years because his quotations are in themselves endearing. He has been much in my mind during the past few months, brother Max working together with Master Jesus, as I have been deep in studying the kingdom of God and trying to get my mind around conclusions that I was at the same time pointlessly fighting because I was finding them to be so boggling. Oh Lord, here we go again! My Thomas was leading me, trying to stay no more than a step or two ahead of me, and Roberta was knowing where this was going and knowing that Thomas was going to be right yet again. But fighting him, anyway.

It is one thing to know that consciousness is all that exists. I am used to that concept. I have known it for years. And, okay, I was used to reading Dr. Planck’s words. He said in 1931, “I regard consciousness as fundamental. I regard matter as derivative from consciousness. We cannot get behind consciousness! Everything that we talk about, everything that we regard as existing, postulates consciousness.” So, fine. So far, so good. But then I would read through those four Gospel books of the Christian Bible, repeatedly and minutely, watching and listening as two thousand years ago that entirely modern Man, so young and so brilliant, runs rings around those poor, befuddled Hebrew clergymen who could have had no idea what they were dealing with! Jesus would say to them things like, “Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites, because you travel around on sea and land to make one convert; and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as yourselves! Woe to you, blind guides, who say, ‘Whoever swears by the Temple, that is nothing; but whoever swears by the gold of the Temple is obligated’” (MT 23:14-16). And the clergy would just stand there with their mouths hanging open. Then Jesus would say, “The kingdom of God is not coming with signs that can be observed; nor will they say, ‘Look, here it is!’ or, ‘There it is!’ For behold, the kingdom of God is within you” (LK 17:20-22). And then it would be Roberta whose mouth would be hanging open, because my God, why did I never see this before? I must have read the Book of Luke a hundred times in my life, and the Book of Matthew as many times as well, and I never realized that Jesus was actually talking about Consciousness, for heaven’s sake! And especially in the Book of John? What ever was I thinking? It was only when I pulled together a great many things that Jesus had said in the Biblical Gospels that I realized that two thousand years ago Master Jesus, the genuine Son of God, had been working with Consciousness for His entire life, like any fully modern Man!

Consciousness is in fact God. They are one and the same. And Jesus knew that! Max Planck knew that! That was why dear Max couldn’t find a way to get behind Consciousness, no matter how hard he tried. What Dr. Planck had found was literally God Almighty! He won his 1918 Nobel Prize in Physics for some trivial discovery related to quantum mechanics, for heaven’s sake. But it should have been awarded for his scientific discovery of the genuine Creator of All Things, The One Almighty God.

I think the scientific gatekeepers knew, or at least they strongly suspected that fact. I think they knew their jig was up. They understood back then that the Christians had won their two-millennia-long battle over God vs. not-God, which was why that was when the scientific gatekeepers resorted to imposing on all future scientific research their “fundamental scientific dogma of materialism,” a dogma that is now a full century old. But of course, the Christians themselves had no clue because they know so little about Consciousness, and – amazingly – they seem never actually to read the Biblical Gospels, anyway. All they do is to occasionally quote the few bits of the Gospels that they like. But at least, now you and I know the truth! We can look back over the past century, and we can smile to find the precise historical moment when mainstream science discovered the true and eternal, the genuine living God.

My frustration in all of this is the fact that we are still the only ones who know. They won’t award a second Nobel Prize posthumously, but our friend Max Planck ought to get some sort of mention somewhere in the history books for having discovered scientifically the existence of God. And we will be breaking the news about what Jesus knew, and when He knew it, when teachingsbyJesus.com goes live toward the end of January.

I don’t know who will be amazed by our news, but we will be breaking it, all the same!

And as for you, my dear much-beloved friends, my hope is to entice you to begin to experiment with making 2023 the year when you will begin your much closer walk with God. You know now that Consciousness is all that exists, and that God is in fact Consciousness. You know, too, that your own mind is inextricably part of that same Consciousness – as is my own mind, and as is everyone else’s – and you know that the only thing that creates any separation at all among us is our belief in what is just a trivial illusion of separation! My goodness, after working on teachingsbyJesus.com’s materials for so long and so intensively, I know that fact now, more than I ever have. Jesus said, “Truly, truly I say to you, the one who believes in Me, the works that I do, he will do also; and greater works than these he will do; because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in My name, this I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask Me anything in My name, I will do it! (JN 14:12-14). Jesus did an extraordinary amount of healing during His lifetime on earth, always by joining the powers of His mind with the powers of the mind of the person being healed. All Consciousness. All GOD.

And YES, Jesus did choose to be crucified. His body died on the cross, and He reanimated His dead body in order to prove to His followers that human life is eternal. I emphasize this fact yet again because a friend told me just this week that the Seth materials suggest that Jesus considered Himself to be above doing something so painful and messy for us, so He used a stand-in. If there is anyone else who still is confused about that, then I want to make this truth perfectly clear. And the Seth materials are apparently now shown to be bogus, sad to say.

But if you want to make this your year to accept Jesus’s challenge to “Seek, and you will find” (MT 7:7) a closer personal relationship with God, then here is what I suggest that you do:

  • Give up all screen entertainments. Especially all TV, movies, and videogames. Keep your phone only for communication, and your computer just for word-processing and doing essential research. Stop reading newspapers and newsmagazines as well. If you cannot cut the electronics cord forever just yet, then make your commitment for at least three months. Six months would be better. Or even a full year. You are doing this not only to free up time for God, but also – and even mostly – to free yourself from all stress-inducing stimulation of your mind.
  • Regularize your sleep habits to make room for God. Without TV, you may be able to negotiate with your life-partner for you to go to bed very early most nights. When I stopped watching TV more than 20 years ago and also started split-sleeping, we began to mostly sleep apart, which made sense. Now I am generally asleep by seven-thirty, and awake by twelve-thirty and ready to do my night-work session with Thomas. By three-thirty or four, I am ready to go back to sleep.
  • But on some nights now, between four and seven I will open myself to commune with God. I begin with The Lord’s Prayer, really thinking about the words as I say them. If I am weary, I will sometimes then fall asleep. But on some nights my mind will expand a little, and if I welcome that feeling of expansion, and I have been doing this for just the past week or so, I am already beginning to get the glorious sense of no-time and no-space. That awareness in your mind, the sense you have of being individually you, is in fact literally God as well. What I have found in the deep sacred night and being alone with God is the most extraordinary sense of my own preciousness that is beyond anything that I had heretofore imagined. Ideas will come and go, and I don’t try to hold them. It is my expectation that if I make a habit of this, God will use this new time with me in God’s Own way. I am eager to see what might come next!

Your own schedule with God will be different, of course. But it will be important that you get rid of screens, and important that you make a time mapped out on your new blank calendar at the same time every day or night over the next few months that belongs to you and God alone. And then really open yourself to God! Love God. Cherish God’s sweet and perfect love in return. As I say at the end of each Seek Reality podcast, God loves you in particular in all the universe, and God loves you most of all. And the wonder of it is, that is actually true.  

He speaks, and the sound of His voice
Is so sweet the birds hush their singing.
And the melody that He gave to me
Within my heart is ringing. And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am His own,
And the joy we share as we tarry there
None other has ever known.
– C. Austin Miles (1868-1946), from “In the Garden” (1912)