What if I could take my mature mind with all of its experience and habits and reflexes and implant it in my 18 year old self. Go back with all I know now and take a different path. Instead of being a radical and a hippie, tripping on LSD, and joining a commune, I could join the CIA and have an entirely different life.
I’m pretty sure I was being recruited for the CIA when I was in college, which makes sense. My father was a retired Air Force colonel. I was a clean cut, smart, excellent student, Air Force brat going to Iowa State University, a debate star, with an expressed interest in the Foreign Service. Just what they are looking for.
There was this guy who showed up on the debate team, tall, good looking, capable, but older than the other students. He seemed more interested in me than in debate, and it wasn’t sexual. He wanted to be my buddy. He tried to get me to switch debate partners, which actually would have been smart. He was a much better debater than Lorrie, my current partner, but I was madly in love with Lorrie, so I wasn’t interested. He tried to get me to join the National Student Association, which years later was exposed as a CIA front. I believe he was trying to recruit me, but just couldn’t get anywhere.
This was 1962. I was still wearing a suit when we went to debate tournaments, getting good grades, behaving myself, and too whacked out on hormones to be thinking about anything like joining the CIA. I didn’t think about politics all that much, but when I did I was a Democrat.
Then when the 60s really hit, the CIA became totally out of the question of course. But what if I could go back and take that route? Back then I thought America was the Great Satan. Now I think America is the hope of the world. Working for the CIA would be interesting and exciting and the pay is pretty good and you could feel like you were doing something worthwhile. And what a gas it would be if I could follow that branch of fate and have a whole other life. I would become a very different person than I am now.
I think that’s what God does. He lives a life in His universe and then goes back and starts over and leads a completely different life, and that’s who we are, God taking a stroll through the Creation as a unique consciousness. No two consciousnesses occupy the same point in time and space. So God can be in all of them without overlap, everywhere. Saints , business men, Somalian pirates, super models, and serial killers, in the infinite universe. And not just us of course, but also animals and plants and rocks and empty spaces, all inhabited by God.
That’s a pretty, new-age, everything is everything, kind of thing. It goes down pretty smooth. But I also believe that God is standing outside of His Creation, looking down on It, and that He sent his Son, Jesus Christ, to Earth to redeem mankind, and there is a Heaven and a Hell. That isn’t something that I grew up with that was imposed on me. I got there on my own. Now it seems to me undeniable.
Try reconciling those two visions of reality.