Judgment Day
Who can I turn to when nobody needs me?
My heart wants to know, and so I must go where destiny leads me.
With no star to guide me, and no one beside me,
I’ll go on my way and, after the day, the darkness will hide me.
And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you I could learn to, with you what a new day,
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)
For people brought up in one of the forty-five-thousand-plus versions of the Roman Emperor Constantine’s old-style Christian religion, the usual post-death judgment ritual is likely to be an amazing surprise. A dear friend of mine who has been reading this series of blog posts about the whole death process said to me last week, “Hey, be sure to talk about the life review!” Oh yes. We can’t forget to talk about the life review! Actually, when we compare the teachings of Jesus with what nearly all varieties of Christianity teach, and Christianity is the religion that is named after Jesus for heaven’s sake, there is not even much similarity at all. And the same problem arises when we try to compare the teachings of Christianity about death and the afterlife with what abundant and consistent communications from the dead actually confirm to us to be true about death and the afterlife. There is not much similarity between Christianity and the teachings of Jesus at all.
The problem is that the Christian religion was designed by a group of men being led by an ancient Roman Emperor, and all of them were living at a long-ago point in human history; so therefore, the modern religion is largely of their time and from their human point of view. Jesus, on the other hand, actually did come to us from out of the Godhead. And we even can understand now that what we experience as human consciousness is the base and substance of all reality. But, wow, I think that it even can be shown that Jesus’s teachings on raising humankind’s spiritual vibration from two thousand years ago also take the consciousness factor into account as well! Jesus’s teachings can be demonstrated to show that He was born two thousand years ago as a twenty-first-century man, or even a Man entirely outside of time. But every significant religion that I can find prior to the religion of the ancient Hebrews had a multiplicity of little godlets, if you will, to govern each major community event, seed time and harvest, perhaps birth and so on; and then eventually, there were more major gods, until we had Moloch, who demanded that every firstborn be thrown alive into his belly of fire. And then, even fallen gods. A devil, to rule over a burning hell.
The Hebrew tribes, who now are considered by many to have been the world’s first true monotheists, were also the first to worship a non-material god, a god without an idol. Their God was a much classier and more dignified guy who didn’t want human sacrifices; but just a few perfect lambs and heifers killed quietly as sin-offerings in their temples now would do. The modern religious era had begun!
But, the human world two thousand years ago was still pretty rough and primitive. And every religion is human-made. Jesus tells us as plainly as He can that He went to that cross by His own choice, and He told me that God actually had forbidden Him to do it; but He felt that He had to do it, because He had no other way to prove to the skeptical primitives of His day that they really were immortal, eternal beings, when it was their long custom to keep the bones of their dead around in bone-boxes, called ossuaries. Jesus insists to us that He never was a sin-offering! He never claims to have been any such thing in the Gospels. He says plainly in A Course in Miracles that He didn’t die for our sins, and He said it again just as plainly to me when my Thomas first took me to visit with Jesus in the astral plane in 2022. And anyway, if Jesus had been the ultimate sin-offering, ending the need for any more sin-offerings in the Hebrew Temple, then He likely would have been a defective sacrifice. All those sacrificed lambs and heifers stayed dead, but Jesus sprang back alive again.
I found all of this to be so confusing, and I became more and more distressed about
the sin question, so one day I just straight-out asked God to tell me how God sees human sin. In all my afterlife research, I never have found even the slightest bit of evidence of an actual fiery hell. And if a Satan exists, he would be like the shadow men, bitter and powerless. Perhaps even more so! Even the tiniest bit of light would be able to knock big, bad Satan out flat. I think I have told this story before in this space, but one morning soon after I asked God my sin question, I had a vivid vision just as I was waking. It was of our living room in Plymouth, back when we had toddlers, all pale blue and white and mahogany furniture, and the God from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the long, white beard was sitting on that pale-blue-and-white-striped sofa. God was sitting forward, reaching out, chuckling, and playing with our little one-year-old, blond and curly-haired son, who was toddling about the room and giggling with God. He was holding a full blue plastic cup of orange juice with both of his little hands.
Well, of course you know what happened next. The juice spilled, the baby dropped his cup, and there was orange juice everywhere on that pale-blue carpet! So then, of course the baby dropped right onto his well-padded bottom and wailed. God stood up, laughing, reached for the baby, and cuddled him, snuggled him close in His Godly arms. God was telling me that this is how God sees human earthly sins. Our sins are like the foolish little mistakes that our most-beloved baby makes as he is first beginning to grow on earth. Our sins are nothing to God. Or, as the voice of Jesus said, surprisingly, in Hid distinctive voice, close to my ear as I was thinking of this vision just the other day: “God is a softie.”
But Jesus is by no means a softie. There is nothing human in God, nothing but wisdom and love unbounded. But Jesus is, as they say, “Fully God and Fully Man”. We see that human side of Jesus in the Gospels primarily in His ability to feel all our righteous negative emotions, too, and to show those powerful and complicated human emotions other than God’s plain and simple, unbounded love. What about when Jesus chose to die a human death on the cross, and then to reanimate that dead and already moldering body, and to do all of this even against God’s will, just to be able to prove to the simple people around Him that human life is eternal? That was a fiercely loving thing that Jesus did for us all; but it was also a remarkably stubborn, willful, and extremely human-like act.
And then there was the time when Jesus just plain lost it at the sight of all that flagrant commerce being carried on in a house of worship, so people visiting the Temple in Jerusalem could purchase doves to sacrifice to God. “Then Jesus entered the Temple and drove out all who were selling and buying in the Temple, and he overturned the tables of the money changers, and the seats of those who sold doves. He said to them, ‘It is written, “My house shall be called a house of prayer”, but you are making it a den of robbers.’” (MT 21:12-14) Now, there you see a truly angry Man! And Jesus works diligently, even today, to maintain His ability to feel righteous anger, to feel the human tension between two opposite ends of the spiritual pole, between love and righteous rage. I know this only because it is my own cherished Thomas, my much-beloved spirit guide, who down through all the ages since Jesus’s first ascension has had the task of assisting Jesus in maintaining what they both call Jesus’s “balance”, helping Him to maintain His fragile human aspect.
So, what then can each of us expect is going to happen on our own eventual judgment day? How will that work? Will it be God who judges us, who basically turns out to be a complete cuddlebunny, a “softie”, as Jesus Himself refers to God, at the very top of the consciousness range, and therefore nothing but absolute love? With that kind of God, absolutely nothing but love, won’t everyone be let off with just a big hug? But what kind of learning would we get from that?
Okay, so then might our judge be Jesus? He seems to be fierce and ardent enough? Well, no. Jesus has no interest in presuming to judge anyone. He tells us that He came to us as our Teacher, and He insists that the Teacher looks now to the Students to do even greater spiritual works than He has done. (editorial comment: fat chance!) Jesus said, “Very truly, I tell you, the one who believes in me will also do the works that I do, and, in fact, will do greater works than these, because I am going to the Father. I will do whatever you ask in my name, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son” (JN 14:12-13).
So, if neither God nor Jesus is our post-death judge, who then will judge us after our deaths for any sins that we may have committed during our lives? Many of you already know the punchline to this pretty big joke on each of us. Our only post-death judge is ourselves. And what happens after our deaths is not really any kind of judgment, per se, of any of our specific actions or non-actions; but rather, it is an emotional review of all of the significant events of our lives, either from the beginning to the end of our life or from the end back to the beginning, and from the viewpoint of each of the people that we have affected in each of those situations. Since there is no time as such in the afterlife, these whole-life-reviews don’t seem to take especially long. But they can feel surprisingly devastating! That awkward girl in third grade that you humiliated that day in front of the whole class, because your mom had yelled at you for tracking in snow? You forgot the whole thing, but she then developed a stutter, and she had to have years of therapy. Or the girl you much later thought about marrying, but then you enlisted in the Marines instead. You never knew that your suddenly dumping her that way put her into such a depression that eventually she took her own life.
Or, what about a real-life example? My own father, an accountant, was a weekend drunk in his children’s early years, but he quit drinking cold-turkey when I was eleven. Then, decades after he had died in his late eighties, when I was testing mental mediums so I could find some that I could recommend, he would often show up at those readings and be accurately described by the mediums being tested, but he would always refuse to speak. Even more years later, he appeared at a mental medium reading that one of my daughters was having. All that he said to her was, “Will you please tell your mother and her sister that I am so sorry for messing up their childhoods.”
Now, I have never felt particularly messed-up myself, but each of us handles things differently. I seem to have pretty much floated through my early years, seeing things only as I wanted to see them, while my younger sister, on the other hand, tells me that our father’s weekend drunks made her withdrawn and miserable. But you can see how this kind of deep emotional experience of feeling during your life-review how the way you lived your life affected the lives of others, and especially those you loved most, would give you the opportunity to reflect very deeply on, and to learn and grow spiritually from how you handled all the events of your life just ended! Nothing so simple as crime-and-punishment and done. But rather, deep emotions, trauma, turmoil, and deep spiritual learning. So, how can you best prepare yourself to face such a life review? Here are some ideas:
My father was older than my mother in this lifetime, and he arrived home at least two decades before she did. With Thomas’s help, I visited him in the astral plane, where he had mind-built a house to share with her that was a precise copy of their home together on earth. But, the light was quite dim there. I really think that his distress over his life-review, and how he now knew that his weekend drunks had affected his family, had made him put himself into level two of the afterlife, the level just above the outer darkness punishment level. When my mother eventually arrived, however, she seems to have had a much more positive life review, and she drew my father gradually higher, to live with her at least at level three.
But you can see how this kind of life-review can be extremely useful, positive, and constructive. As each of us tries to grow spiritually from the events of each lifetime, we then can advance spiritually, my darlings, And it may not seem clear to you while you are here how important that is. But in our real lives, back at home, where we spend nearly all of our eternity, the joy of spiritual growty is everything!
And maybe tomorrow I’ll find what I’m after.
I’ll throw off my sorrow, beg, steal, or borrow my share of laughter.
With you I could learn to, with you what a new day!
But who can I turn to if you turn away?
– Anthony Newley (1931-1999) & Leslie Bricusse (1931-2021), from “Who Can I Turn to?” (1964)
(Many photos are from Vecteezy.com)
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