This article is from a seminar John-Roger gave on Easter Eve, April 22, 2000.

When I have reflected on the meaning of resurrection, it’s always been a mystery. I asked a half dozen ministers what resurrection means, and everyone, without fail, went back to the cliché, “This was the time after Jesus was crucified. He’d been in the tomb for three days and then he came out. He resurrected out of the tomb.”

That’s just about as nondescript as saying, “There’s traffic on the freeway.” We all know that, but what does it mean and why would they use such a word? We know the word “Passover” but we may not know that in ancient times the Angel of Death passed by the doors of Israelites who believed in the one God. The doors were marked with the blood of a lamb so that the Angel of Death would pass by and not kill the firstborn in that house. But the firstborn of everything else in the land, even animals and birds, were all slain by the Angel of Death.

When you see movies about this, the Angel of Death looks like a green gas that creeps under the doors and chokes somebody. No one has really looked at the Angel of Death in the true sense of what it is. Maybe—just maybe—we might not want to be passed over. Maybe we would want to be slain, because the Angel of Death is the Angel of Liberation. It is liberating us from the toils of being slaves in Egypt—which is forming our own karma, which we have to conform to and carry as a burden. But where we go from there has been the mystery. We say, “Oh God, where will I go after I die, oh God? Please don’t let me go to hell.”

One of the ancient saints who traveled to hell said that hell was better than earth, and if people knew that, they would just die because heaven has got to be better. This information was given to me and I was asked what I thought about it. I said, “I think that saint must have been masquerading as a saint, because even though our God has His Holy Spirit and His Messiah, the Angel of Death also has his Holy Spirit and his Messiah, and they have duplicate powers and abilities.”

It’s very hard for someone to come up against a metaphysical energy and say, “that is not of God,” or “that is of God,” because that metaphysical energy can do things that we can’t, so we immediately assume that it must be of God. It is not necessarily attributable to God as though it is in a direct line with God. It may be attributable in the sense that all things come from God, and therefore so does it, and since God loves all of His creation and that’s part of Creation, therefore it’s also loved by God. But those are philosophical statements, and we have to watch that we don’t live by a philosophy, because most of the time it will fail us. The philosophies are man-made, man-originated, man-talked-over, intellectually taken apart, put together — and then we try to live that. Some religions have gigantic amounts of material in books, disks, tapes, cassettes or papyrus that come out of man’s thoughts about what’s going on. Usually, people’s thoughts are just people’s thoughts.

If you were to be resurrected, would you first have to die? Jesus had a good friend named Lazarus. He was told by some friends that Lazarus was ill, and they asked Jesus to come and speak the “Word.” Jesus said, “He’s not dead. He’s sleeping,” or some words to that effect. Jesus showed up much later and they berated him: “Why did you not come sooner? He’s been dead for a couple of weeks.” And he said, “Lazarus, come forth.” People were astounded that Jesus was going to call him up from the tomb and they said, “He’s dead. He’s been dead.” One ventured the idea that if he comes forth, he’s going to stink up the place.

I had an experience with a relative who had passed away. I said “Put the telephone by the person’s ear,” and I said, “Hi, this is Roger.” And they said, “Hello,” and the next day they left the hospital. The fact that it happened is absolutely profound. But the fact that I said what I said and did what I did was courtesy, or good manners. I don’t know if good manners has inherent within it the ability to call forward the dead, but do we really want to call forward the dead? If I were to die now, and people asked, “Well, are you going to resurrect?” I would say, “No.” Would I want to resurrect for some reason? No. Jesus did and I know he did that to accomplish a purpose and a direction. That’s been done, and now it’s time to move on to the next stage of our being.

I look at resurrection as awakening, and each morning I resurrect to the newness that is present. Each day there is a responsibility that goes with that resurrection, which is that I must choose back to God and call forward God’s name and say, “Here I am.”

From my experiences I found out that God is the resurrection, and also our willingness to do that which is necessary to bring our consciousness back around and awaken it. We call ourselves forth by getting out of bed. Prior to getting up, we’re lying there in a thinking process or daydreaming. We are a being, but not a productive process. As soon as we get up we start to call forward the abilities of our beingness. Often, that’s when our thinking starts. Some people’s thinking doesn’t start until after they have that first cup of coffee, and others have to go out and go for a walk or a run. Others have to do some morning breathing exercises. All of these methods are valid because they bring you awake from the sleep of the dead.

Some of you don’t even remember that you dream, and you sleep the dead sleep of the dead. Others remember parts of their dreams. Most of the rest of us recall parts of our dreams and we wake up because of that. “It’s coming after me. It’s going to get me. Oh my God!” You hear a voice screaming, and you open your eyes and that’s you. What a way to wake up.

When you’re coming out of the resurrection into life, is there a prescribed procedure? The Bible only gives one but it does not say it’s prescribed that way. It’s just a narration that says. “Here’s something that happened and here’s how you can go on.” We’ve studied the inner qualities of spiritual awareness in MSIA for many years. We’ve tried them out and we’ve worked them. We’ve seen how they work and we’ve seen how they don’t work. They might work on Monday and Tuesday, but not Wednesday. Don’t complain about Wednesday. It might start again Thursday. Don’t avoid picking it up on Thursday because it didn’t work on Wednesday.

We must be as flexible as the wind and as steady as the North Star. That means we’re focused on something, and that focusing and foundation-building are very important to our spiritual development. The more we do it, and the more we do spiritual exercises, the more Spirit’s strength appears. But if we don’t watch out, we’ll switch over into stubbornness or resoluteness. We’ll fight for the right to remain stuck exactly where we are and complain about the stuckness of our life. There are so many opportunities that resurrection offers us.

Do yourself a favor and go and look up the word “resurrection” and see what each part means in each of its segments, because resurrection doesn’t appear as a puff of smoke and we’re there. It seems to come in a process of energy that comes through in waves, and those waves come through at different times.

It’s much like giving a seminar. I come up here with no knowledge and there’s nothing here, and the first part of the resurrection is dropped down in front of me, which is often just a colored light that says, “The Spirit of God is present, and you will speak through that.” If I’m speaking through that, am I speaking to you or am I speaking to the presence of God in you? If I’m speaking to the presence of God in you, why do I do that? Wouldn’t it already know?

The presence of God inside of us doesn’t care if we’re asleep or not because it is present in a nowness, and not on a timeline. Have you ever gone to a party and somebody there had a cold and you thought, “Oh my God! They’ve the flu or a cold. I’ll stay away from them.” And two days later you come down with the flu or the cold. Some part of you resonated to the illness they had. You pick up that resonance and produce the illness yourself. And then if we’re in harmony with each other we pass this illness around until everybody’s got it, and then we get rid of it.

But what if you’re not in harmony with that? Then everybody gets sick and you don’t. And then you brag to yourself, “I am healthy.” No, you’re not healthy. You just didn’t get that one. Because healthy people don’t die—and so far, they’re all dying. Will they resurrect? The first question to ask is, “Did they pass over or did they get stuck on the way and they’re not there yet?” because you can’t be resurrected from a place where there is no resurrection.

Is there a resurrection from the planet earth? Indeed, there is. We can enter into the process of resurrection. How do you think Jesus did it? Did he just say one day, “Oh, I’ll just resurrect.”? I’ll bet he read some scriptures that said there’s a resurrection that went on. Maybe he practiced some yoga to learn how to hold his breath. Maybe he learned how to swim under water for long distances. What was the training that Jesus went through for thirty-three years to prepare him for that moment when he ascended and transcended death?

Some have said that because Jesus died and resurrected he overcame death, and that infers that we can too. I’d like to tell you right now that that’s nonsense. He may have done what he did, and there are a lot of questions about that. I don’t have a question about that because I know who he is in Spirit. But I know who others are in Spirit and I have no question about that either. So it doesn’t matter to me if I believe or not, because I don’t have a belief in Jesus Christ, nor a disbelief in Jesus or the Holy Spirit. You don’t have to believe what you know. Do you have to believe you’re sitting in a chair? Or can you, just by your own experience, know you’re sitting in the chair?

If resurrection is truly initiation, then when someone does the Archimedes approach (which is “Ah-ha!, Eureka, I have discovered it. I am awakened to this new idea”) do we automatically believe them? We cannot. We can only take their information and see if it works for us, and if works, it is self-validating and we do not have to get stuck in beliefs. We can get stuck in the energy of how things work and move forward under the volition of our own consciousness — our Soul, our spirit, our Lord of the Kingdom of Heaven and God who resides in the Kingdom of Heaven — and put all that together and have a life that is tremendous here, and still fraught with disasters and our ego desires. Because, this planet comes under the egoic movement of life, while our body comes under the Soulic ego movement of Spirit. Those are not the same.

Some people might say we were resurrected from Spirit to the material world. Sometimes it seems like that. Or sometimes it seems as if we were born into something that’s terrific, or we were born into something less than that and we’re supposed to make it better. Since moral issues and good-and-bad are always man’s point of view, we have a very hard time living them. We have a very hard time fighting against them. In some countries when you’re riding in a vehicle you can go very fast. And in other countries if you went half that fast, you’d be in very deep trouble with the local authorities who police that activity.

How can we possibly judge or evaluate people’s behavior, when our own behavior is not really under our own control? In the Bible Paul said, “That that I would do, I don’t do and that that I don’t want to do, I end up doing.” He wasn’t in control of what was going on, and certainly not in control of himself. I’d be willing to bet there are people who have said, “Yes, I’m going on this diet and I’m not going to eat this food,” and you ate it. Or, you said you’re going to drink so many ounces of water every day and you didn’t. You gave your word and you broke your word. And why not? Everybody lies. There’s no end to the creativity of man. If a lie assists you in the creation of something you want, I think there’s no question that you would lie to have that take place. You might not totally lie, but you might fudge around with the figures a little bit.

We’re here as part of the divine comedy. We see people do things and we go, “How dumb and stupid.” It isn’t dumb and stupid, it’s funny and hilarious, so we might as well get with the laughter. We have workshops that are of a divine nature and divine origin and divine prompting. The energy of the divine is all through it—and yet somebody will tell a joke that we know is profanely dirty and we don’t want to laugh, but we just crack up and things pop loose from us. God uses anything and everything in order to reach us. He did with me. To reach me he said, “Wake up.”

The hardest time I’ve ever had trying not to laugh has been in the sacredness and silence of a church, when a thought comes through that is not mine and there’s no way I’m going to be able to keep from telling somebody. The more I try not to laugh and cover my face, the more I snort and the more trouble I make until somebody else gets caught in the disease of the laughter. The laughter just starts rolling around and people start to say, “What’s so funny?” And the reply is, “I don’t know, ha, ha, ha, I don’t know what’s funny.” And the other person laughs too because it’s not funny.

How do we know what’s funny and what to laugh at? There’s a mechanism in us that is joy and the manifestation of that joy is laughter. It is often the most difficult to maintain when we hold it back and try not to show that we’re not reverent in a reverential situation. I gave up being reverent a long, long time ago. I said, “Lord, if you want me reverent, you’re in charge here, just go ahead and do it. And if you don’t care one way or another then I’ll just have to put up with people’s opinions.” I found that the people whose opinions I cared about were laughing right along with me. The people whose opinions I didn’t care about were the bosses, and they would come down and say, “Why are you disturbing the service?” And the answer was “I don’t know.” They would say, “You don’t know?” “No.” “You’re laughing and causing disturbance and you don’t know why you’re laughing?” “Nope, I don’t know why I’m laughing.” They would say, “That’s stupid and ridiculous.” They would walk away and sit down and all of a sudden you would see them putting their hankie around their face and their eyes—and if you watched, you’d see their stomach moving.

In one minister’s church people are falling out of chairs on the floor, laughing hysterically. He keeps right on going, stepping over people who are on the floor. They stand up to tell him something and they can’t because they start laughing so hard. That man’s either got very thick skin, or he doesn’t care, or he has a church where the presence of the Holy Spirit is known by people’s laughter. I would much rather be in that church so that if something strikes me funny, I would be able to laugh. I got a video of it. He was lecturing and things were just funny. He didn’t say anything funny; he was quoting scripture. I could hear other people in the background laughing so I turned up the volume and I realized that this is the laughing church. I watched that video three times and if I watch again, I’ll probably laugh again. The minister’s church has now been condemned by other Christian churches because they laugh during the services. But those people will continue laughing and continue with their life and their loving, and every chance they get they resurrect to a new state of awareness.

One man who was a minister of a church stood up laughing and said, “I’ve agreed to take on the forty million dollar debt of my father’s church,” and broke out laughing, saying: “And I don’t have a penny.” A serious Christian television station interviewed him and asked, “Why in God’s name did you do that?” And he said, “Precisely, in God’s name.” They said, “No, you don’t understand.” He said, “No, you don’t understand.” They said, “You took on forty million dollars worth of debt.” He said, “And I did it joyfully and I’m joyful now. I’m going to do it, and we’ve already got half of the money,” because when he went back to his congregation and told them what he had done, they decided to help the poor simpleton out (which is what they had to do anyway). I heard just recently that he has now collected over forty million dollars and the people of his church laugh during all of the services.

I’ve heard that there’s going to be a Christian association that’s going to have a name meaning something like, “Come into our church and laugh,” or The Laughing Churches Association. It probably won’t be as big as the Southern Baptist Conference or an Ecumenical or Evangelical church, but it’s going to exist. I would hope that if you were depressed one day there would be one around so that you could go in and try it, and see if you could lift yourself by your laughter.

Every once in a while when we’re working together that Spirit, the Holy Spirit—which in that church is the laughing spirit—comes through here and we all just crack up and we have no really good idea why. But it feels so good for it to come from some place so profoundly deep and wonderful. And I’ve tried to anchor ways back into it to find it. I haven’t been able to do it. But all I have to do is think of doing something really seriously and it starts to show up as laughter as I think, “I’m going to do that? I’m not going to do that. I would like to do that. Yeah, but I’m not going to do that.” But I’ll think of doing that. And then I start thinking about it and I just start laughing and then I sit there wondering, “What was it that I was going to do?” But I know it must have been good.

I started keeping a little pocket record with me so that when I’d get an idea about something to do, I’d write down one or two words so I could remember, and after I laughed I could come back and say, “This is what it is. Think of doing that again. Have a good laugh.” These are not just good laughs. These are laughs where the eyes run, the nose runs, the mouth drools, you’re having a hard time with the bladder and you know you’re not going to be able to outlast any of it, so you surrender yourself to the inevitability that you’re going to have a mess on your hands in a few minutes. And the mess never appears because you’re surrendering to God Almighty, who is not a mess nor an author of chaos, nor the author of destruction. And yet, at the same time, that God is in us all.

We know that as a man thinketh, in his heart he becomes. If you think “happy” and “joyful” and “abundant,” you cannot think “unhappy,” “not joyful,” and “poverty” because then you go into confusion and doubt, and you die inside with your own thoughts. But once you know that you’re resurrected and you’re a new being, you will continue to be a new being as you stick to that path of knowledge of Light, of love, of sound, and as you keep lifting higher.

There is a book called When Bad Things Happen to Good People. It looks at questions people ask, such as why their loved ones die when they were such wonderful people. If you ask those kinds of questions, you haven’t seen the big picture, which is who you really are and what you’ve really done. That’s payback time in your creation. Karma is not like a jury in a court dealing with the law of the land. It can’t be persuaded by your emotional appeal, but it’s functioning according to the actions that you have created and put forward in some other time and place. You’re responsible as God the creator and you’re getting it back as God the creator, because it is yours. It will not be painful to you; it is painful only to the people who write books like When Bad Things Happen to Good People. They have the same pain as all of us who are left behind, when good people die early and we say “Why God? Oh, why? Why not me instead of them?” God says, “because you’re going to have your misery and punishment from arthritis, from old age, from not getting what you want.” This one got their payment back this way, but before they were born they agreed to it. They chose it, and they chose that which would be their passing over and that which would be their resurrection. And who are we in the undeveloped part of our brain to challenge the developed part of God’s Spirit, whose brain has to encompass every brain, even the unused part of our brains?

Do we challenge that or do we once again come back to the wisdom of what really is, and say, “Lord, thy will be done?” That is what Jesus the Christ said. If you can take this cup from me, if you can relieve me of this karmic responsibility, please do so and if you don’t, I accept that your will is done.

What about Jesus’ own will? He would not exercise his own will against God, the Father’s. He said, “I will exercise my will IN God’s will,” and thereby set up the dispensation for all of the millions of us who follow, so that we can become resurrected beings and enter into God’s loving. Then we can bypass our ego of certainty and doubt and move into what we feel that is the loving, the laughing, and the understanding that all of us are equal in God’s eyes — that we are all children who are growing up and maturing, and that we will reach out and help others.

Love and Light to you, and may God place His hand upon your heart, upon your children, and upon your family and turn them into spiritual beings that God will indeed be proud of, so that He will say, “These are also my only begotten children.”

Baruch Bashan.

WATCH A SHORT VIDEO WITH JOHN-ROGER