On God: An Uncommon Conversation (11 page)

I think that belief does carry over. People who are abstemious might look with horror on rich people who have gold plates under the serving dishes for dinner. But the rich obviously believe that the afterworld is structured to enable people who are rich to have more of a purchase on eternity. Not all rich people—some rich people feel guilty. Late in life, they pursue philanthropy—they're terrified of the Hereafter. They know what they did to get that wealth, and they are in terror.

Then some of the poor—some who are bitter and furious—feel they were absolutely denied any chance at future existence. They are very angry at God. You also have the poor who believe that it's right and fair. I've lived a clean life, a good life, I've raised my children, done my best, I've never despaired, and I'm going to go to a good place.

We have these separate outlooks, and we have an ongoing question for those who believe in a continuance after death. At a guess—my guess—I would think there's constant negotiation between God and the Devil over who travels where. I'm assuming that not only is God not All-Powerful, but neither is the Devil. The two remain in deep contest with each other. The Devil, therefore, would not wish to be excluded completely from the possibility of rebirth. The Devil might desire to have some of His rich people taken care of. Of course, there are rich people who are close to saintly, who manage to live with their wealth in such a way that it hasn't corrupted them. I think that's rare—but it does occur; we've all known a few. They are lovely people sometimes. Not all rich people are awful, but a great many rich people are certainly in no shape to pass through the eye of the needle. Nonetheless, you can find a lively energy in some of the rich. Some of them made their money, after all, through their huge energy or by way of their audacity. Not all people who gain power arrive through foul means alone.

So I expect God to be perfectly willing to discriminate. Certain of the rich, yes, absolutely, let's send them out to be born again. They're interesting.

         

Are you saying that God will endow some to be born again into great wealth? Or into poverty?

Yes. Why not? It's a species of testing. People who were born in rich and favorable circumstances in one life and grew spoiled and had lives that proved disappointing to His anticipations might be reborn as poor people. Others who were poor but never turned bitter or felt that they were deprived might be rewarded—a dubious reward is wealth, for that is always full of tests. But then some of the poor had a touch of aristocracy innate in them. And there are rich people who have the modesty of poor people. One function of reincarnation may be to give God further insights into us. I go back to the fundamental premise: God does not understand us completely any more than we understand our children. We can know them well in terms of their habits, some of their virtues, and some of their faults, but we certainly don't understand them altogether. So God wants to know more about His Creation, whereas the Devil is attempting to muck up precisely that clarity.

         

I don't have any disputes on the individual level, but when I think of that phrase of Adam Smith's, “the wealth of nations,” there are some peoples, some nations, who have lived in terrible, terrible misery. Take one people I know a little about, the Irish. For five hundred, six hundred years they lived under British wealth and power, and now it seems just that the Irish are richer than the English. They're now the wealthiest nation in the European Union.

I'll give you another example. For a thousand years and more, the Jews lived in the ghetto. In most countries, they weren't allowed to hunt or fish or farm; they were allowed to be moneylenders or innkeepers or to own shops in their own communities. So what did they do? They gave everything they had to their schools. I would say that the results got into the gene stream—those ghetto Jews put their emphasis on learning and intelligence because their own books, particularly the Talmud, happened to be all that was open to them.

         

But if you look at all the plusses and minuses of all the nations—great wealth in some and great poverty in others—how does that mesh with the individual decisions that God and the Devil express by way of reincarnation? It seems God may have to give up a whole country or a whole race of people for long periods.

I don't want to get carried away with understanding God's motives. I'm looking to find a few general principles.

         

You're looking at individuals. I'm asking you to look at it from a national point of view.

That means first you have to believe in races. I do, to a certain extent. It's completely incorrect these days to talk about such matters, but I think the specific mixture of climate and language over many centuries does produce one kind of person as opposed to another. That may now be part of God's interest in us as individuals: “Will this particular man or woman turn out better or worse than I think he or she will?” God's also interested in races—how will they turn out?

         

In nations.

Yes, as nations. But that is far more complicated.

         

God must be thinking a lot about China, with one billion–plus people.

God learns. I keep coming back to my fundamental mnemonic—God learns. This is why I'm so opposed to those religions which assume that God is in command of everything.

         

Last time we spoke, you said that God was developing evolution as He went along.

Yes. God learns.

         

Then in those early periods of time, when land had just been created, you indicated that God was in the slime of early Creation, yes, in there evolving with everything else. Yet you also said with great assurance that God is the Creator of the world and the solar system. I have trouble reconciling God-in-the-slime and God-as-Creator—

Suppose God is the lord of the solar system but at the same time had to learn how to develop the system from the slime on up.

         

Yes, but when did God put the souls into Creation?

The key to the notion is that it's all been a huge experiment, an ongoing, developing experiment with countless results, good and bad, but most of them were good enough so that evolution continued despite its failures. God learns. And so God invests Himself or Herself in all sorts of creatures en route—not only animals but flora as well.

Once again, I don't subscribe to the iron declarations of the Old Testament and the New Testament. Both were written by committee. The Old Testament was put together over a long period by a series of very talented committees, much more talented than the latter-day Bible builders who composed the New Testament. On the other hand, the people who wrote the New Testament were good enough scholars to be familiar with the best remarks that had been made up to that point in the Old Testament and by many a sage, prophet, and mystic. So they used that as well. They were also attached to a concept that may or may not be true, which is that Jesus was the son of God. They were serious men, but they were also a committee. So as literary works, the Old Testament has some faults, and the New Testament a good many. But to accept them as the absolute map of our spiritual universe is comparable to using the kind of charts Christopher Columbus had to look at before he set out for the West. For instance, even our current idea of the Beginning, as it is presented in English in the first three sentences of Genesis, is a false concept.

In fact, one summer I studied classical Hebrew on my own, and the first sentence of Genesis—have we discussed that?

         

No.

Well, as you know: “In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth.” Or so it goes in English. Actually, the first word of the Old Testament—in the original—is most singular. It's only existence is as the first word of the Old Testament, “
barashith.
” The second word is “
bora.
” There are many interpretations of “
barashith,
” but I came up with “out of the pits” or “out of the depths.” “
Bora
” is “being” or “creating.” So the first two words might say, “out of the depths came being.” The next words are not “the heavens and the earth” but “the firmament above” and “the firmament below,” as if to declare that there are two species of existence out there from the commencement. And then the next sentence? “The breath of God moved upon the waters”—

         

“The breath of God upon the waters.”

It's not “breath of God” at all. The word used here for breath is “
ruach.
” In classical Hebrew, there are three varieties of breath to signify God's presence. There's “
ruach,
” “
nefesh,
” and “
neshamah.
” “
Neshamah,
” if I recall correctly, is the gentle breath. And “
nefesh
” is a normal wind. “
Ruach
” is the fierce breath, the angry breath, God's rage. So the line really says, “and the rage of God roared over the waters.” So to go back, the first two sentences can well be translated as, “Out of the depths came being, and God created the firmament above and the firmament below. And God's fierce breath roared over the waters.”

         

Much different.

Yes, I'm suspicious of committees. Even the great one that gave us the King James Bible.

         

We've spoken a bit about technology. I'd like to go back to that. Most of humanity sees technology as a way to free us from drudgery and give us leisure time to read and think and travel, and so forth. Why shouldn't it be seen on balance,
on balance—
I understand all the bad things about it, but why shouldn't technology be seen as largely salutary?

I have four words to describe technology, which I've used several times now: more power, less pleasure. I think there's no getting around it: We can't pretend more pleasure comes to us from technology. It tends to crimp our senses and reduce us to people who are able to live in a closed environment. My notion—it's a sentimental notion, doubtless—is that God would have preferred us to be able to do the things we now achieve through technology by means of our spirit alone. In other words, instead of having television, we could reach into our dream life and enjoy organized and marvelous dramas that we could create for ourselves or send by telepathy to our friends. The ultimate aim was for every human being to be immensely creative. Being psychic as well, we would not have needed electronic communications. If I wanted to talk to you, I would be able to put my mind in contact with yours, even if you were in a far-off place. We all have small intimations of that possibility. It seems to me such mental powers are grievously reduced with every advance in technology.

As a specific example, I now use hearing aids, and I can't hear without them, not with most people. But my own small remaining ability to hear gets reduced further by using these hearing aids. In parallel, I think technology tends to curtail our possibilities and accelerate our dependencies.

After all, the great strides that have been made in technology came from previous generations. Maxwell discovered some of the differences between electricity and magnetism. He and Faraday took imaginative, metaphorical leaps. Abraham Lincoln and Winston Churchill didn't have to study previous speeches to come up with the Gettysburg Address or “I have nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears, and sweat.” They came out of a past that depended on independent human beings rising up to exceptional thoughts at incredible moments. They were not dependent on electronic machines they did not really understand. As a small example, I don't know anyone with a computer who doesn't talk about the glitches.

         

Look, the first person to use a wheel after the drudgery of dragging things must have felt great pleasure. I don't see—

Wait a moment; there are crucial turning points in the advent of modern technology. The center of all that is electronics, whereas the first wheel was made of wood, and sharp stones were used to shape it. These were things people could comprehend, they came out of the earth. Then people began to learn how to smelt ore. Dangerous business, tricky, but they found the means to get fire to melt the ore and so could separate the slag from the molten metal. The Iron Age began.

I say there's a profound difference between early and later technology. Early technology, lasting through to the nineteenth century, consisted of dealing with very powerful and explosive elements in nature and mastering them, so there was awe and excitement to it. Huge excitement for the railroad when it was developed—people loved to travel on trains. They might be cramped and reek of their own foul coal smoke, but they were exciting. Now, traveling on airplanes is not agreeable. Everyone thought it'd be immensely exciting, but it isn't. It's reductive. You don't feel like a voyager so much as a piece of trussed-up, transported goods. Electronics is the great divide—the watershed between what I would call good technology and bad. Because no one knows what electronics is. I defy a physicist to reach my mind with an explanation I can comprehend. For that matter, we don't even know what electricity is. A current of electrons, yes, but do we know anything about the makeup of an electron? Does it possess its own consciousness, or does it not?

         

So that's the pivot point, then? That's when technology becomes a miserable activity? But when you were a boy, the radio—you must remember the radio, the crystal set and all that.

You had to be able to solder, yes. But even then, you had to buy your vacuum tubes. People assemble computers today out of factory parts. I did model airplanes when they were made of balsa with glue. Then plastic came along. In my childhood, plastic was not common. Bakelite was the nearest you got to it. Now plastic is omnipresent. And it's inert. It doesn't bring on any sense of the uncanny. It offers an inkling of nonexistence. I'm just paranoid enough to believe it's the Devil who loves plastic because it's going to deaden God's sensibilities before it's all over. God won't be able to get to us through shields of plastic. About the time, oh, thirty years ago when women began to wear plastic clothing—the stuff stank, you remember, the awful smell of plastic clothes?—I began to think that may be the point where the ballgame was lost. Women, with their finer sensibilities, were adopting plastic.