The following is a fiction, but like all good fiction, there is some reality to it.
One steamy Lake Charles night, while in my little college condo sitting on the couch reading Joel Goldsmith’s remarkable and timeless “The Infinite Way,” I met Jesus. I don’t mean I had an abstract mental encounter with Jesus. I mean, *poof* there was Jesus, standing right in front of me, arms crossed, all glowy and happy.
It’s difficult to explain the simultaneous shock and comfort of having an entity show up in your living room, especially Jesus. I didn’t consider myself religious then, and I certainly wasn’t Christian. And while I was breathless, interdimensional entities bursting into my room was not as unusual as I later learned it should be.
Long before Jesus decided to pop in, I’d experienced the realities between the spaces. Even as a very young kid, I saw “ghosts” regularly enough that my parents had some concern, especially one night when they came into my bedroom to tuck me in, only to find the window wide open — a window I couldn’t reach. When asked, I told them a lady in white opened the window and that she came to visit sometimes and always thought it was too warm in the room for me.
My mother took this personally, of course. I don’t think she considered I was talking about an ethereal encounter, a possible visitor from another dimension, a ghost, a spook, a poltergeist. No, that part seemed perfectly natural to her. My mom was annoyed someone called her motherhood into question.
My folks were typical 1970s parents exploring a renewed interest in the Occult, likely a natural consequence of the tripped-out Age of Aquarius responsible for so many people tuning in and dropping out.
The Netflix hit “Stranger Things” is about kids like me who lived in the Supernatural Seventies.
Geraldo Rivera and Tom Snyder regularly hosted guests who were “experts” in paranormal investigation. So-called “reality” documentaries about possessions and hauntings, movies like “The Exorcist” and the Amityville Horror, psychic healers: Arigo, the so-called “Surgeon of the Rusty Knife,” and the spoon, if not mind-bender Uri Geller were all immensely popular.
So, in this supernatural-friendly pop culture, my parents logically presumed I was sleepwalking and somehow managed to get the window open, but just in case there was something funny going on, they also nailed my window shut and left a tape recorder in the bedroom overnight, a trick they learned from a ghost hunter guest on Tom Snyder’s show.
The following morning, my window was wide open, the nail heads standing mockingly in a neat little row, their heads bent into smiley faces.
And sure enough, some sounds were on the tape: voices, rustling, people laughing. That was all my mom needed. That night as she tucked me in, she said, “Listen, lady, leave my kid alone.”
As if respecting the wishes of another mother, the window never opened without human intervention again, and the lady in white disappeared for a while. She did return to visit on occasion shortly after my brother was born. I remember waking up one night to see her sitting on the edge of his bed, just looking, checking on him. Then she saw me, smiled, and left, a mother from another dimension. Perhaps, my mother from another dimension.
Since then, I’ve seen glimpses of many realities and met all sorts of other characters. Most of the time, we are equally surprised to be crossing paths because, just as they are shadows in my world, for them, I am the other creature, the foreigner in their land. To them, I am the ghost.
All of this dimensional crossing over seems random, as if it is happening to us, not that any of us are willfully traveling to another reality. The ability to see beyond — like Jesus and others — is either a glitch in the system or the natural result of billions of years of an evolutionary, infinitely expanding multiverse. After a while, the fabric between realities stretches like the universe itself, causing bleed-through in the super-stretched spaces, like a nylon stocking being pulled ever more tightly until transparent patches reveal what’s beneath.
That’s all that separates realities: Nylon stockings.
Sometimes, the timing of the bleed-through is unfortunate, as one night when I awoke to find a shadowy figure right next to my bed. I screamed in terror because I generally don’t expect to find beings standing next to my bed when I turn over in the middle of the night. I wish I’d had the presence of mind to say, “Hey, quick buddy, this hole in the fabric of reality doesn’t last long. Where are you from?” But the figure disappeared at my terrified outburst, and I still regret scaring off an entity that probably thinks I’m the monster. And rightly so.
Anyway, after a few decades of popping in and out of the multiverse, one gets used to the shadow people and begins to understand dimensional barriers are mostly the necessary illusions of Consciousness. So, by that fateful night when Jesus literally popped in to visit, I was taken aback but not frightened, more confused than anything else because I wasn’t religious, I wasn’t about Jesus, and he was far from my first ride in the multiverse.
“Did you open the window?” I asked.
“I opened your mind,” Jesus said.
“You say that like it’s a gift, but I feel I’ve got, like, half-insight — the ability to take off the wrapping paper but not open the present.”
“You have to open your present,” Jesus master of the double entendre said. Jesus often irritates me. Which is his point, I suppose: to be the irritant.
By the way, when I tell this story, the first thing people want to know is not if Jesus conveyed any deep spiritual truths or wisdom but what he looked like. I can tell you with certainty that what Jesus looks like is pointless because Jesus looks just like you. He, she, or they are your color and speak your language. It’s pretty cool because part of the way Jesus teaches us is by being us.
I only recently realized the energy that often incarnates as Jesus doesn’t care what it looks like because, you know, ultimately, we’re all just balls of amorphous energy. The Jesus consciousness chooses a form that will comfort some people and terrorize others depending on their spiritual awareness: A Middle Eastern Jew, a white guy, a brown girl, a grey alien, an amorphous blob.
Now when the Jesus consciousness pops in to see me, it just stays an energy ball. I don’t need any specific physical incarnation because, by popping in as all sorts of weird and wonderful creations, the Jesus consciousness has taught me we’re all the incarnation.
Everything is an incarnation of Supreme Consciousness, the fundamental energy signature in which all other energy signatures exist. We’re all part of the same thing in an astoundingly complex and interconnected way. Jesus showed me I have many forms across the multiverse, not all of them physical, and that they are all powered by the same energy force because, Jesus said, there’s only one energy, and it is all of us, all the times, plural form intentional.
Once, when Jesus decided to push me by appearing as Genghis Khan, I asked, “What’s your point here? Khan is you, too? Khan is me? We’re all the Walrus, koo-koo-ka-choo? I get that, we’re all part of the same thing, even Khan and Hitler and all the ‘bad’ people, and I have to lose my judgment and just realize Oneness.” I expected Jesus to laugh and then repudiate me in some way, but instead, the Consciousness changed into its Middle Eastern Jewish form and said, “No. I don’t want you to realize Oneness. I want you to feel it. The way I felt it on the cross.”
That shut me up. Jesus is right (as usual—another irritating trait). All this work, all this transdimensional travel, it’s not about realization. We can all realize we are interconnected, but that’s largely an intellectual exercise. It’s feeling our interconnection that changes us and, ultimately, the world.
Jesus didn’t merely know he was God incarnate; he felt it at the core of his being. It’s empathy for the plight of others that awakens our true spiritual nature, and eventually our core being, to the understanding that Oneness isn’t merely about knowing we’re one being having billions of lifetimes but feeling it.
When we experience Oneness, we perceive everything and everyone all at once. Transcendence and authentic cosmic connection are not about becoming an abstract spirit floating in space. Oneness is a supreme awareness of all being, of every energy signature as one energy signature, with an intense, sometimes overwhelming sense of what everyone in all the worlds is feeling — all the joy and delight, trauma and terror.
I feel it for seconds and can barely stand it. Jesus tells me he feels this way all the time. He can feel every laugh and tear in every reality across the multiverse, and yes, sometimes it’s all too much even for the Jesus Consciousness.
The Bible says, “Jesus wept.” He said he cries all the time. The last time we spoke, I asked the Jesus energy if it was unbearably painful, feeling everything everywhere, all at once. He said, “The wonderful reward of the complete feeling of Oneness is that, for all the terror in many worlds, there are far more — and I mean billions more, my friend — that are happy, peaceful, equitable, inspired places filled with cooperative, caring beings.”
“Take me to one,” I begged.
“You’re already there,” Jesus said. “Open the window.”
Question: What deepens and expands your experience of interconnectedness/Oneness?
