How can you love Him, without me? Ah, that was a good question, for I felt no great love for Jesus—he was a figurehead that had no physical meaning for me; I even doubted that he ever existed—even as a plain old man. But I know what she was getting at—she was talking about a more general and simultaneously private Him, that man, in the next life, that I am a shadow of, and privy to. In that sense I did love Him, so, if that’s what she meant, I needed to correct her—but how could I do that without making it sound like I worship myself? But, you know, who cares? I believe that the man I answer to is me, living on a higher plane, at the same time that I, for now, am duking it out in this dimension. So back to her question: How can you love Him, without me? It was almost like I was posing the question to myself, and, at one time, the question would’ve proved impossible to answer, since that person (me) remained undefined.
“How can I love you, without loving Him?” that calmed her down, i think; I wondered a little about her beliefs, though. I had a sneaking suspicion that she didn’t believe in life after death—or, at least, she doubted it enough to keep her incredibly busy—so as not to think about it, hoping, perhaps, that her worst fears, that it was all a hoax, wouldn’t prove true; so i figured, because she didn’t know if she could accept the answer, well, she wanted to believe more than she actually wanted to experience the process that believing is; she was so afraid that there was no afterlife that it proved easier, for her, to ignore the question. But I don’t know for sure if that was what she was like. It was just my impression that maybe she doesn’t believe in anything that, at the time being, can’t be circumscribed by a person’s philosophy—by what is known or argued about with some degree of success.
So she was like, yeah, i do believe in God, and, yeah I don’t believe in God; and she wanted to know what I believed. So I told her: “I don’t believe that a real man that once lived a long time ago is my savior—but I do believe in an afterlife, and I believe, ultimately, that God is not a man, but, rather, a commensurate presence that operates as if He were a man—that is to say, He speaks the language of love. It’s possible to communicate with God, and it’s possible for Him to respond, but he doesn’t have a physical body—and He never did; He is a presence that functions as if He had a body, but His body, in real time, is our body—the collective body of humankind. But then she posed an interesting question: but if He exists as our collective body, then, when we dream a collective dream, doesn’t He appear with a body, the same way that we appear, with a body, in our regular dreams? I have to admit, I thought that made a lot of sense, so I said, “I can believe that, but the question becomes, does He have one body or various bodies that all depend on the situation—on us?” And she said, Well, it seems that, just as we can be represented by other people in our dreams, He can represent something meaningful to us, individually.
So I actually felt a shift in my world-view at this time in my life; God was a universal presence that may or may not have been conscious when He wasn’t a dreamer of dreams; but inside those dreams He could interact with others, with or without a body—simply as a consciousness interacting and processing information or as a figure that represented Him in symbolic form. So now for the biggest question of all: Is God white? So I thought about it, and I said, “God doesn’t just dream us all up; He is aware of us without committing to a single point of view unless, to get His point across, committing to a single point of view is useful, upon which He does dream us up, and we, also, commit to a single point of view. In that case, He has a body, any kind of body. So, to answer your question, I am white, so God would be white, unless I was a Puerto Rican woman, and, in that case, He would be a Puerto Rican woman, and you would be white.”
So it all depends your identity and the identity of the person you are interacting with. I don’t know if she was satisfied with my answer but that’s the thing about big questions: they must be answered from all angles, and, because of that, your experience integrates with the answer you were hoping for—and you have to think about it. Then, after you think about it, it resonates with you or it doesn’t, which determines what, and how, you believe. Great going, kid; that sounding kind of like my wine drinker uncle, the songwriter, and, since I’d recently published a song, he must have been talking about that in combination with this, and suggesting, perhaps, that I take writing songs (and the music for them) seriously. I’m practically fifty, of course, so I have no illusions. But if I just kept doing what I was doing, and got really good at one thing, then, well, every other thing I did would be considered in order to learn about me, so, if it was good, then it would see the light of day.