Dove: In none of them. At the end of each life, that physical body ceases to be relevant. And when finally you graduate from the physical plane, you no longer use any body at all. Unless of course you choose to be a bodhisatva, in which case you’ll have one last body, in which to undertake one final, specific task on Earth. But that is highly unusual.
Ananda: Some spiritual teachers say that whatever you believe with absolute certainty will come to pass. So if you believe without any uncertainty at all that you’ll be resurrected, won’t you be resurrected?
Dove: On the physical plane, there are universal realities, world realities, and personal realities. At the solo level, the individual level, your beliefs determine your personal reality, within the limits of world and universal realities. Limits which are broader than many would have you believe. While the shared beliefs of multiple humans influence world realities within the limits of universal reality. Notably through social and political forces that include religion, government, science, and technology. As for universal reality, it is a direct manifestation of the Tao.
And while each of us contains the Tao, and is part of it, the relationship is not one of identity. If you fill a bottle with ocean water, then seal it tightly and throw it into the ocean, it is of the ocean, and contains ocean, but it is not the ocean. Within the bottle there are no tides or storms, fishes or whales. But the bottle moves with the ocean, shares its motions, and has its own life-forms.
Let me elaborate on those “bottles.” When we agreed to take part in the Earth School—our particular venue in the physical plane—we agreed to certain limitations that are hardwired into the “game.”
Up Yours: That is the biggest heap of metaphysical, sophistic bullshit I ever heard.
Dove: What I said is metaphor. When the Infinite Soul manifests, it will not teach, because language, including metaphor, is not adequate to the subject. Through the manifestation, human beings will experience the Infinite Soul to one degree or another, and be changed by it.
Up Yours: That is still the biggest pile of bullshit I ever heard.
48
Colonel Robert Gorman sat down in the velvet recliner. Without, of course, racking it back. He and Millard Forsberg knew each other, but they’d never been actual friends. He doubted that Forsberg had any, or cared to. The man was a stick; hadn’t even offered him a drink.
He couldn’t imagine why the FBI’s “retired” ex-director had invited him to his Arlington condo. All they had in common were some aspects of political and social philosophy, uncovered years earlier. Forsberg had been in charge of the FBI’s Denver Office then, and Gorman had been the Army ROTC commander at the University of Denver. Forsberg had carried out a successful investigation of the vandalization of ROTC offices by student activists.
Meanwhile they’d discovered they both liked crosscountry skiing, and several times had skiied together in the Front Range above Nederland. On breaks, they’d talked beside a warming fire, while drinking hot cocoa out of battery-heated Thermoflasks.
Even there they’d had differences, which had bothered Forsberg far more than they had Gorman. The colonel had spiked his cocoa with brandy. Forsberg, consistent with the rest of his personality, was a teetotaler, and visibly disapproved of those who weren’t. To Gorman, Forsberg was an interesting duck, with way more than his share of foibles.
Both had been transferred to the District not long afterward, and had run into each other occasionally at social affairs of one sort and another. Forsberg was definitely not a social animal, but first as deputy director, then director of the FBI, there’d been more or less obligatory events to attend. He was a confirmed bachelor, and a misogynist whom Gorman suspected of incipient, or perhaps repressed, homosexuality.
Not that it made any difference to Gorman. People were entitled to their peculiarities, as long as they didn’t include what he called aggressive liberalism. He could tolerate liberals, could like them in fact, if (1) their liberalism wasn’t militant, and (2) they didn’t carry on about it.
Forsberg had invited him to sit, but hadn’t yet sat down himself. “Um, would you care for coffee?” he asked.
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