The house I was supposed to go to was one of those Victorian style painted ladies—a large home build a century ago with a large porch, rounded windows and piles upon piles of roofs and windows. Like all painted ladies she was past her prime and had succumbed to the plastic surgery of subdivision. And so it was number two I knocked on.
A woman answered. She obviously was born in the last century and the wool knit cap and colorful shirt she wore told me she was of the hippie mindset of the 60s. I asked her my questions and she gave me answers. She was pleasant and I began to wonder what she was like when she was younger.
“You know,” she said, “I have figured out the place for God in one's life.”
“What do you mean?” I asked
“You see, God is the barrier between the self and not self. Imagine that one is in a sphere. At the core of the sphere is the self, an entity that contains all of the elements of the sense of self one has, including the things that the self perceives around them.”
“Kind of like a planet, you mean?”
“That would be a good analogy.” So the self is planet, mostly inside, but with an exterior exposed to the atmosphere. The atmosphere would represent the world we perceive outside of ourselves, including other people and the physical conditions around us.”
She paused and then continued. “In this case, God is the blue sky above us. When we stand on the suffice and look up all we can see is God, because God is shielding us from the unknown. If we blast off from the surface in a rocket, then the blue sky begins to fade. Once we get beyond that, there is no more God, just space.”
“So there is no God in space?” I asked.
“Only the God you bring with you. If you are able to expand your planetary view to go beyond God, then perhaps. But regardless of what you believe you still have to break through that blue barrier. And even if you do, It'll still be likely to be with you because you will have remembered that it was there at one time.”