Less than half an hour ago I was writing a friend a brief on the manner of my spiritual life. I saw myself write that I don't talk much about God, because I respect other people's conceptions are their own, like I appreciate being allowed to have my own. I didn't know, consciously, that's how I saw it. Writing it, there it was. Evidently it was the first time I'd seen that in words. I'm no missionary for anything. This is why I could never be a salesman. I grew up in a church that told me I needed to be talking about the Lord to all my friends at school, getting them saved so they won't go to Hell when they die, and you never know when you're going to die.
The other kids from the church carried their Bibles at school on top of their other books between classes. Not me. Of the kids in the church, I was the black sheep. Liked that infernal rock and roll music. The preacher said Paul Whiteman went to Africa where he learned devil worshipping music and brought it back to America calling it rock and roll. I laughed at it then as much as I do now. It's just that Elvis moved like an N-word. And N-words were from Africa where they worshipped the devil. Even as a kid I knew better than that. Moses came from Africa and he didn't worship the devil.
It was through such excesses, this one example of many, another the threat of Godless Communism and Nietzsche saying God is dead, I couldn't help but wonder why it was such a big deal. So one man says something. That doesn't mean it's so. I could write God is a duck. Baptist preachers would say I'm ridiculous. But a German philosopher they can't even read says God is dead and they went apeshit. Why does it have to be taken for fact? Nobody will consider whether God is a duck, when I'd say that's a much closer example of what God is than dead. I just take it for uninformed on Herr Nietzsche's part. He could see through about everything, but never connected with what's on the other side of what he saw through. Anyway, that's how I see it. A PhD in Philosophy wouldn't regard what I said even worthy of notice. So why should I care what Nietzsche said? My experience says his statement is without meaning. So people pay more attention to him than to me. That doesn't mean I have to believe it or even resist it.
How Nietzsche saw God was very different from how I see God. Maybe the limited God he saw did die. We all have our own way of seeing God and anybody who says there is just one way to see God doesn't get it. It seems to me like to make such a statement nullifies itself immediately. There is nothing that can really be said about God. Like when you live in a culture, it's the way things are and there's not a whole lot that can be said about it. It's just something you live. Until it's over and looked at as a culture. Then it can be written about academically and appreciated from afar. But while living it, it wasn't anything. That's pretty much how I see living with God--it isn't anything. At the same time, it's everything.
I feel like when I call it God or something or another, the Spirit, none of it is even close. It's kind of like the Pacific, the Atlantic, the Indian, the Arctic oceans. The immensity of all that water, great bodies of water in motion, the enormous power and indifference to the human ego called ocean, one little five-letter word. It's kind of meaningless. It's like calling the consciousness that set the universe into motion as zillions and zillions of spiral galaxies, quasars, Orion, the zodiac, all the beauty we can now see with the Hubble telescope, and this one universe among an infinity of universes in no-time and no-space, calling that by a 3-letter word, God. Of course there are other solar systems in our galaxy, let alone the whole universe, that have planets with life forms of their own, possibly many of them seeded, each in it's own phase of evolution of consciousness. Some would be more advanced than us and some less. Evidently it's the ones more advanced than us flying around in space watching us from wheels within wheels.
About as good as I can do on how to live my life knowing God is, whatever that means, is just live it. I mean live it. I don't mean deny it or strap myself down with taboos. If I wanted to get shitfaced drunk, fall down on the floor passed out and sleep for ten hours, the God of my way of seeing God would laugh and say, a man's gotta do what a man's gotta do. I'm inclined to believe God doesn't even pay attention to what we call good and bad behavior. It's our hearts God knows us by. God is like how Martin Luther King wanted American social life to be, judging us by our character rather than the color of our skin. What is skin to God but a membrane, a sack that holds our guts together. Some sacks are black as a water buffalo and some are pink as pigs. Jesus had African blood.
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