by Roberta Grimes (a summary by Pat Evert)
Foreword
I am told that Jesus has chosen this moment, two thousand years after He last walked the earth, to shed what He calls a corrupted Christian wrapper and again reveal His teachings to the world. No afterlife researcher of whom I am aware has found evidence for an actual Satan. Earnestly seeking and following God’s guidance is the most fun I have had in my life.
Introduction
Now we have both corroboration of the afterlife evidence and solid confirmation of the historical Jesus. Neither I nor any other researcher of whom I am aware has found evidence of any of the following:
-That a human-like God exists.
-That a powerful evil figure opposing God exists, or is possible.
-That eternal damnation to a fiery hell ever has happened to anyone.
-That the death of Jesus on the cross ever has saved anyone from anything.
-That being a Christian matters when it comes to getting into heaven.
Jesus is genuine while Christianity is man-made.
The Afterlife Evidence is Irrefutable
The fact that all the evidence can be made to fit together so perfectly is, to me, the second-most important proof that the greater reality being revealed to us now is altogether real.
The Entire Christian Bible is Not God’s Word
The fact that the Christian Bible doesn’t hold together as a coherent unit is a problem the early Christians could have partially solved by deciding that the Gospel words of Jesus are primary. Where there is a conflict—and there are many!—the teachings of Jesus should control. Christians have solved what should have been a big problem by making the teachings of Jesus in the Gospels no more than suggestions about how we should be living. To most Christians, Jesus is not their Teacher. Instead, Jesus is the Lamb of God, sacrificed to redeem us from God’s judgment for our sins. This easy Christian shortcut is not factual, and it is an appalling insult to God. Where on earth could it have come from? That modern Christians still read the Old Testament as the genuine God speaking to us today is a tremendous problem. Given the extent to which we can corroborate the Gospel words of Jesus using modern afterlife evidence, I think it is possible to demonstrate that indeed the Gospels are God’s truth being miraculously reiterated for us today. The balance of the New Testament consists of writings of the Apostle Paul and others who were building a religion around the historical Jesus. Given the way that the books of the Bible were assembled by the early Church, the claim that the whole Christian Bible is the Inspired Word of God should long since have been seen as dubious.
Christian Traditions Distance Us From God
Calling the Old Testament the Inspired Word of God teaches Christians to fear the genuine God. Since fear is the opposite of love, this emphasis makes it difficult for Christians to develop the intimate relationship with God that is essential to a life of spiritual growth. Christianity distances its followers from the infinite and perfect love of God. Examin the fruit of the Christian tree. Rather than sharing the teachings of Jesus about our need to learn perfect love and forgiveness, modern Christians mostly battle for their religious traditions. And what may be Christianity’s worst fruit of all is the self-righteous certainty so many Christians have about their own salvation and the damnation of others. Rather than focus upon demonstrating for the world the eternal teaching of Jesus, the strictest Christians too often get caught up in self-righteous moralizing. Rather than concentrate on living by Jesus’s Gospel teachings on love and forgiveness, many of the most devout Christians instead focus on following Old Testament customs. For modern Christians to try to live by the Old Testament’s antiquated customs does nothing to spread the teachings of Jesus. Instead, it suggests to modern people that Jesus must be outmoded too. The Christian doctrines of original sin and sacrificial redemption erect a wall of fear between us and God.
The Modern English Gospels are God’s New Revelation
Like every other religion before it, Christianity was built as a variation on a set of human-made and fear-based beliefs in a human-constructed deity. It was not the joyous escape from superstition and the elevation of human consciousness that God had intended. It is estimated that there are now about forty thousand versions of Christianity worldwide. Any religion that so divides what should be a people united in love is an obstacle to our spiritual growth. Christianity does little to help us to grow spiritually. The Christian tradition of sacrificial redemption gives us the erroneous notion that spiritual growth requires no effort on our part. In many denominations, the sacrifice of Jesus on the cross can “save” us on our deathbed. Learning to love and forgive more perfectly is the reason why we live earth-lives, and giving us a place to develop spiritually seems to be the reason why the universe exists. Christianity teaches us to live in superstitious fear. He has ensured that we now have such abundant and consistent afterlife evidence that there is no question that the dead survive. In the process of learning about the afterlife, we have come to much better understand what God is, what reality is, what we are, and the meaning and purpose of human life. Jesus has made certain that the modern English translations of His Gospels are so consistent with the afterlife evidence that now we have independent validation that He knows what He is talking about.
Jesus Wants Us to Know the Genuine God
Religions do not improve our relationship with God. Instead, they get in the way of it. Jesus in the Gospels strongly suggests that we learn to get past religions. Instead of doing that, we have used the religion that was established in His name to maintain a fear-based separation between us and God for another two thousand years. We have learned in the course of studying the afterlife that there is just one genuine God. And that God is not related to any religion. Jesus doesn’t tell us a lot about God. He refers to God as “Father” or “Heavenly Father,” and He makes it clear that God as Spirit is within us, but that is about it. The Gospels leave us hungry to know more, but Jesus is speaking to simple people and He can’t risk speaking against the prevailing religion so He doesn’t go into much detail. Fortunately, those we used to think were dead do not share the Lord’s constraints. If Jesus were speaking to us today, this is likely what He would tell us about God: Every Human Mind is Part of God. There is no separation between you and God, and no separation between you and other people. There is one eternal Consciousness. God is Love. God is as emotional as we are emotional, but God does not know any emotion except for intense and perfect love. God is Good. What evil exists is pitifully small when compared with the infinite power of God, and I am embarrassed to note that a lot of the evil that exists was created by human beings. God is Light. Beyond this material universe—that is, in most of reality—there are no suns. Instead, most of the dimensions of reality are lit by God and by God alone, so the lower vibratory dimensions, those farthest from the Source, are dark; while the higher dimensions are brighter and brighter the closer they come to God’s vibratory center. God is our Source and our Destination. As best we can puzzle it out from the evidence, each bit of consciousness—each “I,” if you will—experiences the illusion of separation from God but without ever actually leaving God, and then immediately each of us is striving to return to our Source. These are human concepts which of course aren’t right, but they are somewhat analogous to what the evidence suggests is happening. We are in materiality to better grow spiritually. Once our growth is perfected, we gladly graduate back to God. There is overwhelming evidence that each of us on earth is surrounded by non-material helpers, spirit guides and angels, each of whom is also an “I.” Each “I,” whether or not it is currently in a body, is working toward its own spiritual perfection, and a big part of that work is helping others. Each of us is not just IN God’s hands, but we ARE God’s hands. God is all there is. God Is All That Exists. Think about that, really think about it, and you change your life forever. It is easy to say that you and everyone you know and everything you see, whether animate or inanimate, is God and nothing but God. The evidence indicates that this is true. Most religious folks get so wound up in the traditions of their religions that they settle for form and forget that seeking a closer relationship with God is the reason why they are practicing a religion in the first place. They provide an opportunity for some people to seize control over others. The primary traditions of Christianity do not come from Jesus in the Gospels. Jesus tried during His lifetime to squelch the religion that His followers were building around Him. Jesus warned his followers that trying to merge His new philosophy with Judaism would make a mess and would ruin them both. Jesus tried to help His followers find ways to keep His teachings separate from Judaism.
The Kingdom of God is Within You
It is impossible for anything to bring you closer to the genuine God than you already are. We know now, based upon abundant evidence, that each human mind is inextricably part of eternal Mind. Jesus said the same thing two thousand years ago, but He said it in ways that simple people might understand. He said, “the Kingdom of God is within you.” Jesus tells us in the Gospels that elevating the consciousness of the planet to this extent is OUR job. It never was His! And only by carefully following His teachings do we have a prayer of making it happen. He was telling us that once we really believe in the power of our own minds to affect matter, that power is within us, so even moving a mountain is not beyond our grasp. Look around you. Understand that your own mind is part of the infinitely powerful eternal Mind that continuously manifests everything that you see.
Love is God’s Only Law
God’s commandment that we love is so essential to our spiritual growth that Jesus gives it to us in two ways. For those who are not caught up in first-century Christian rules and dogmas, He simply says: “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another, even as I have loved you, that you also love one another”. His is a powerful way of thinking that will enable you to achieve undreamed-of spiritual growth and enjoy your best life both now and forevermore. He is taking all the Law and the Prophets—the entire Old Testament, including all Ten Commandments—and replacing it with the beautiful new directive that we must love God and love one another. THE TRUTH THAT LOVE IS GOD’S ONLY LAW IS ETERNAL DIVINE REVELATION, FIRST GIVEN TWO THOUSAND YEARS AGO AND MIRACULOUSLY RESTATED FOR US TODAY. What He says is devoid of rules; it is essentially post-legal. He refers to sin frequently, but He seems in most places where the word turns up to be talking about not the breaking of laws, but rather a spiritual falling-short. If everything is the Inspired Word of God, then nothing can stand out as more important. The role of sacrifice that Christianity assigns to Jesus is bogus. God already perfectly loves and forgives us. And Jesus came to us as our Teacher! When He walked the earth, He was altogether focused on His need to teach us how to love more perfectly as our gateway to spiritual growth. Love seems to be the way in which we feel and express the primary law of spiritual physics. What we might call consciousness’s affinity for itself, is what determines the vibratory rate of our minds, and therefore the highest afterlife level that we can attain. Love is a vast improvement over legalisms. Legalisms do little to help us grow spiritually, while learning more perfect love turns out to be the very essence of spiritual growth. It was my new need to learn to love God perfectly that brought me to the point where I could no longer be a practicing Christian. Thank God every day for the fact that God’s love for you is perfect and you have nothing whatsoever to fear. “Love your neighbor as yourself” You and your neighbor are one being. Your neighbor truly IS yourself. Everyone you see on the street is a part of you. Every ex with whom you are at lifelong war, every African dying of starvation, every terrorist, and every saint: all are inextricably part of you. Everyone. There are no exceptions. I have found understanding this core fact about my relationship with other people to be a decent start at trying to figure out how God wants us to love our neighbor. When we are kind to the least important person we can find, we are doing something wonderful for God. Showing love and kindness to anyone is a beautiful gift of love to God because each of us is part of God. It is so much easier to learn to love others when you are doing that from the certain knowledge that you are a powerful eternal being and the best-beloved child of an infinitely powerful God! Practice perfect love within your family. During the roughest times, we were teaching one another more and more about love. Your spouse, your children, and every other important person in your life all are people you chose before your birth to help you learn to love more perfectly. Learn to forgive. Learn to quell your anger. He taught me a simple but powerful trick. He said that whenever he felt anger rising, he would very much slow and deepen his voice. Consider doing anonymous good deeds. Learning to love more perfectly is the purpose of every human life. It is the reason why you chose to include in your life the very annoyances that make you feel unloving. And believe it or not, perfection is the standard!
Learning to Forgive is Important
Learning to forgive the most horrendous offenses, easily and without a thought, is essential training for the certain moment when you are going to have to forgive yourself. Neither God nor Jesus nor any other religious figure ever is our post-death judge. Instead, each of us will judge ourselves. So when you practice ever more perfect forgiveness, you are preparing yourself for the moment when you will need to find a way to forgive yourself. Our judgment process is simple. Soon after we return to the afterlife levels, we gather with our spirit guides, who are the wonderful friends that helped us to make the most of this lifetime. Many of the dead tell us that feeling the way they had made others feel during the lifetime just completed was the worst experience that we can imagine. From the perspective of our eternal lives, we realize that it all was a kind of play, everyone we love is fine, and indeed some of those we hated most in our lives have turned out to be our eternal friends who simply played a role in that lifetime in order to help us to better grow spiritually. So apparently we forgive everyone immediately. The really difficult part comes next. We are told that now it is time to forgive ourselves. If you still can’t manage to forgive yourself, you might eventually end up on the lowest afterlife level, what Jesus called the outer darkness level. Jesus has had to wean his first-century followers from their old belief that God is their judge, and he has had to do it over days of time for fear of the ever-present Temple guards, but at last he is able to tell us flat-out what modern afterlife evidence demonstrates is true: each of us will be our own post-death judge. And unless we learn to be lenient with others, we are going to be too hard on ourselves. Make your apologies now. Forgive everything now! Get yourself as right as you can right now, before death makes it harder for you to make your peace. Forgiving the big and little bruises that come from human interactions is a necessary precursor to our learning to love perfectly. Holding grudges against family or friends gets in the way of our loving them. “Lord, how often shall my brother sin against me and I forgive him? Up to seven times?” Jesus said to him, “I do not say to you, up to seven times, but up to seventy times seven” (MT 18: 21–23). No matter how many times someone does you wrong, you are meant to forgive without a thought. Every time. And actually, perhaps oddly, forgiving automatically turns out to be easier than the alternative. We are meant to learn automatic, reflexive, universal, and complete forgiveness.
Forgiveness is not approval. You don’t have to keep the offender in your life. Forgiveness is for you, it is your gift to yourself. And what a gift it is! As you learn to do it better, you will find that practicing radical forgiveness makes you feel light and free. Even joyous. Forgiveness becomes ever easier. The difference is like setting down a hundred pounds of unnecessary garbage so you can dance your way through life. There is no wrong that cannot be forgiven. When measured against forever, these unpleasant interactions with others on earth really amount to precisely nothing. Outrage turns out to be a lot like anger. If you court it and let yourself feel it, you are going to feel a lot more of it; but if you refuse to give it mind-space, you will find that soon it doesn’t bother to get started. Learning automatic and complete forgiveness is the foundation of your spiritual growth. It makes your life easier. And so much happier!
Spiritual Growth is the Purpose of Human Life
Every occurrence in your life is either love or a call for love, so no matter what the question might be, love will always be the answer. Or you might think of this process in more contemporary terms. Coming into a body is like spending a tough afternoon in a gym, where each obstacle in your life—each job setback, each death of a child, each evil mother-in-law or nasty neighbor—is like a weight-training machine that helps you strengthen a targeted set of spiritual muscles. For you to remain in the perfection of heaven would be like lolling around on a spiritual couch. It is only when you come to earth and experience the trials of earth-life that you are able to achieve rapid spiritual growth. (The Kingdom of God might be an alternative term, but it seems to signal greater perfection so that is the interpretation that we will use here.) It requires that we love and forgive so perfectly that we never again look at a human face without seeing the divinity of which we all are a part; that we never again feel a nudge of annoyance if someone deliberately does us wrong. And we can get there. It just takes work! Jesus agrees with the dead in telling us that the standard for our spiritual growth is perfection. We are meant to become like God. “You are to be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect” significant spiritual growth seems to happen only on this material plane. For nearly all of us, it requires many earth-lifetimes. Our job as followers of Jesus is to learn perfect universal love, and to demonstrate His philosophy of perfect love as the greatest gift that we can give to a stumbling and despairing world. It isn’t up to God to magically bestow upon us the gift of spiritual growth. Whether we make spiritual progress or not is entirely in our own hands. He is talking here of our attainment of the Kingdom of Heaven, by which He means spiritual growth sufficient to let us reach the upper afterlife levels and live in joyous proximity to our Source. No one else, and no religious shortcut, has the power to do it for us. But each of us has the personal power to advance spiritually, lifetime by lifetime. As they are practiced now, none of the great religions fosters our spiritual growth. Religions instill in us fear-based rules and irrelevant traditions. They tend to make us judgmental and self-righteous, two human characteristics on heavy display among today’s most ardent Christians that are the antithesis of spiritual growth.
Building for Jesus the Movement that He Intended
Read the words of Jesus, and just for now read nothing in the Bible but the words of Jesus. Give the Lord His chance to speak to you. Really listen to His words. And marvel. No religion focuses primarily on our need for spiritual growth. They don’t even tell us that spiritual growth is important! Rather, they complacently teach us that following their rules is going to be enough. Religions are based in fear.
As Jesus says, “The kingdom of heaven is like leaven, which a woman took and hid in three pecks of flour until it was all leavened” (MT 13: 33). It is our task now to become the Lord’s leaven and spread His teachings to all the world. “You are the salt of the earth.” You came into this lifetime with the divine gift of a spiritual nature that has been nurtured and grown through many earth-lifetimes and enables you now to further grow spiritually as you enrich the lives of others. “You are the light of the world” refers to spiritual light. What Jesus shares in the Gospels is a philosophy and not a religion, there is no one on earth who should feel constrained by religious beliefs from listening to Him. Jesus does not even require that we enforce a uniform interpretation of His teachings.
Plucking Bits of Coal from among the Diamonds
The words of Jesus in the Bible are “as easily distinguishable as diamonds in a dunghill.” —Thomas Jefferson.
Truth is truth! And only the truth is what Jesus wants to put into our hands. In general, if something Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospels is:
- inconsistent with the afterlife evidence;
- inconsistent with other things that Jesus is quoted as saying in the Gospels; and perhaps even
- just what those who were establishing Christianity would have wanted Jesus to say, then chances are good that we have spotted some coal.
I have come to know Jesus as I never had before. His love, His wisdom, and the astonishing perfection of His teachings shine ever brighter. His words in the Gospels are diamonds, indeed! God has no wrath! Jesus doesn’t “give” the Spirit, but rather each human being is part of God as Spirit. The teachings of Jesus are not rules to be obeyed, but rather they are a prescription for living our best eternal lives. And finally, neither God nor Jesus ever is our afterlife judge. We understand now that Jesus is a genuine historical figure. His Gospel words can be studied and verified. So trying to appreciate ever better what it was that the Lord must actually have said, what He meant by it, and how we can apply His words to creating our best eternal lives as we share His truth with all the world can be our lifelong pleasure. The teachings of Jesus in the Gospels are demonstrated now to be the living Word of our infinitely loving God. And it is only when we follow them with joy as the philosophy they are meant to be that we can at last begin to make our best eternal spiritual progress.
A Brief Overview of the Afterlife Evidence
We have nearly two hundred years of astonishingly varied afterlife evidence. Just as important as the volume and variety of this evidence is the fact that it is so consistent, and when we put it together we begin to glimpse a wonderfully complex and beautiful reality that dwarfs the material universe. It is all beyond amazing, and far beyond thrilling. The different avenues of such evidence are: communication received through different types of mediums, accounts received through automatic writing, channeled accounts, consciousness research, deathbed visions, accounts of out-of-body travelers, general scientific research, ghosts and spirit possesssion, hypnotic regression, instrumental transcommunication, near-death experiences, past-life memories of children, quantum physics and the work of independent scientists.
A Brief Overview of the Greater Reality
What afterlife researchers have discovered is a lot more than just the happy fact that every human mind is eternal. Because the afterlife is real, our study of it has led us to the amazing discovery of a greater reality that seems to be many times the size of this material universe, and to a new kind of physics that is consciousness-based. Here, I will just share with you brief descriptions of some of the aspects of the afterlife on which researchers generally agree.
The human-like God that Christians worship does not exist. Instead, the only thing that exists is an energy-like potentiality without size or form, infinitely powerful, alive in the sense that your mind is alive, highly emotional and therefore probably self-aware. And the only emotion this genuine God expresses is love beyond our ability to comprehend it. Each human mind is part of God. And creation, if you want to call it that, is apparently not a one-time thing. Evidence suggests that God is continuously manifesting the reality that we believe exists around us. The simplest way to envision reality is as a spectrum of energy signals very much like the television signals that are in the room around you, and to imagine your mind as a television set now tuned to that particular body on this material level of reality. We think this is the lowest vibratory level, but no one is sure about that. We do know that existing at slightly higher vibratory rates are at least seven levels of nonmaterial reality that we think of as our afterlife levels. Each of them may be as big as this whole material universe, and all of them, like the TV signals in the room around you, are together in one place. Nothing is solid. Everything is energy. The only thing that objectively exists is God, and every human mind is an infinitely loved part of God.
Six of them feel as solid to their inhabitants as this material level feels to us, and all of them are in the same place, just as you can tune your TV from a lower channel to a higher channel and find there a different TV program. We can be comfortable on the highest afterlife level to which our personal degree of spiritual development suits us, but we find it unbearable to go higher. And we want to go higher! There is more to do, there are ever more pleasures on the higher vibratory levels. So the more spiritual progress you can make in this lifetime, the more kinds of fun will be available to you later. Right above the vibratory rate of matter is the lowest afterlife level, what Jesus called the outer darkness. It is the punishment level, cold and dark, smelly and repellent and populated by tormented, demon-like people. Just above the first level is a recovery level, still twilight-dark, but with homes and without the awful cold and stench and hopelessness of the lowest level. Levels Three through Five of the afterlife are the beautiful Summerland levels. All three are intensely earthlike, full of flowers in extraordinary colors and magnificent buildings and scenery. The higher the vibratory rate of each of these levels, the more gorgeous everything appears to be. Level Six is just below the Source. Historically the dead have called it the causal or mental level, since it is the home of spiritually advanced people who mind-create what exists in the lower afterlife levels. A friend of mine who died in 2007 and now lives in the sixth level refers to it as the teaching level. full of beautiful universities where very advanced beings help one another to make ever more spiritual progress. The highest vibratory level of which we are aware is the Celestial or Source Level, which is something like the center of God. It exists at such a high spiritual vibratory rate that it seems that very few of us have yet been able to enter it. The Celestial Level is the source of the magnificent white light that fills most of the greater reality and makes it feel to those who are there as if they are living bathed in love. Our bodies resist dying. Getting them to the point where they can no longer support life and we are released from these earthly shells can be a rough experience. We leave our bodies as what might appear to bedside observers to be an energy mist, and we reform into a human shape while still attached to our material body by a spiritual umbilicus called the silver cord. This process of liberation is quite pleasurable, as is our joyous reunion with loved ones at our bedside. We might hardly notice the fraying of our silver cord, but once it is severed, the physical body dies. Then we are off with those we love, raising our spiritual vibratory rate to the point where a whole new solid and beautiful reality appears around us. If you will trust in the process, you will find that dying is just that easy, and just that wonderful. Dead children are treated like royalty, There are infinite things to do and all the companion animals we have loved in life are there to greet us.
How This Book Came to be Written
In a reading with a medium my intention had been just to visit my family, but toward the end of the hour my spirit guides asked to speak with me. I learned on that Saturday afternoon that I have eleven guides. Four of them help with my personal life, three work with me on writing fiction, and three assist with my afterlife-related projects. And then my primary guide stepped forward and announced that his name is Thomas. In his penultimate earth-lifetime, he had been—imagine a drumroll—Thomas Jefferson. Thomas began by saying through Susanne, “Corruption of all the Master taught continues now. This is the blockage of the port through which peace must sail freely. Hearts are not free.” “He just wants the work done. He wants you to know you’re already doing it. It’s about the teachings of Jesus! That’s his agenda! There’s something about a book of his that was lost. He can dictate it to you. It’s to be about Jesus. But it should be written from your perspective, for this modern day. “The real Jesus, not the Christian Jesus. That is corrupted. They corrupted the teachings of Jesus. He’s saying the Master has asked this of you. So it’s not just Thomas. “So Jesus really was a form of divinity?” “Thomas says yes! We’re all part of God, but Jesus came from the highest part of God. God looked right through His eyes. We think of earth as our school, but it’s also God’s school. God was learning about us.” Eventually, Thomas became sufficiently exasperated to break into my daytime life and tell me who he was and what I was supposed to do now. With the threat of Armageddon added into the bargain. God’s Kingdom on earth still is possible! But it requires that we leave religious dogmas behind as the spiritual crutch that they are so we can work together to elevate humankind toward God’s level of awareness.
Hidden in Plain Sight 