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“I still think people are more important to God than animals and plants and dirt. I think that’s obvious,” I argued.

“What is more important to a car, the steering wheel or the engine?” he asked.

“The engine is more important because without an engine, there is no reason to steer,” I reasoned.

“But unless you have both the engine and the steering wheel, the car is useless, isn’t it?” he asked.

“Well, yes. I guess that’s true,” I admitted.

“The steering wheel and the engine are of equal importance. It is a human impulse—composed of equal parts arrogance and instinct—to believe we can rank everything in our environment. Importance is not an intrinsic quality of the universe. It exists only in our delusion-filled minds. I can assure you that humans are not in any form or fashion more important than rocks or steering wheels or engines.”

Reincarnation, UFOs, and God

I didn’t know how much of the old man’s opinions to take at face value. Everything he talked about had a kind of logic to it, but so do many things that are nonsense. I decided it was best just to listen. Whatever was happening to me, at least it was different. I liked different.

He started again. “If you want to understand UFOs, reincarnation, and God, do not study UFOs, reincarnation, and God. Study people.”

“Are you saying none of those things are real?” I was offended by his certainty, given the thousands of eyewitness accounts for each of those things.

“No,” he said, “I am saying that UFOs, reincarnation, and God are all equal in terms of their reality.”

“Do you mean equally real or equally imaginary?”

“Your question reveals your bias for a binary world where everything is either real or imaginary. That distinction lies in your perceptions, not in the universe. Your inability to see other possibilities and your lack of vocabulary are your brain’s limits, not the universe’s.”

“There has to be a difference between real and imagined things,” I countered. “My truck is real. The Easter Bu

“As you sit here, your truck exists for you only in your memory, a place in your mind. The Easter Bu

“Yes, but I can go out and drive my truck. I can’t pet the Easter Bu

“Was the rain from this morning real?”

“Of course.”

“But you can’t see or touch that rain now, can you?”

“No.”

“Like the Easter Bu

“But I can find evidence of the past. I can check with the weather people and confirm that it rained this morning.”

“And when you get that confirmation, it would instantly become the past itself. So in effect, you would be using the past, which does not exist, to confirm something else from the past. And if you repeat the process a thousand times, with a thousand different pieces of evidence, together they would still be nothing but impressions of the past supporting other impressions of the past.”

“That’s just mental gymnastics. You’re playing with words,” I said.

“An insane person believes his world is consistent. If he believes the government is trying to kill him, he will see ample evidence of his belief in the so-called real world. He will be wrong, but his evidence is no better or worse than your evidence that it rained this morning. Both of you will be converting evidence of the present into impressions stored in your minds and you will both be certain your evidence is solid and irrefutable. Your mind will mold the facts and shape the clues until it all fits.”

“That might be true of crazy people, but not normal people.”

“Clinical psychologists have proven that ordinary people will alter their memories of the past to make them fit their perceptions. It is the way all normal brains function under ordinary circumstances.”