this week's excerpt

Hey All,
Here is this week's excerpt. It's from Walking on Water

From Walking on Water:

“But who are you?”
No response.
I say, “Ooh, ooh. Ooh, ooh.” They don’t appreciate my Roger Daltry impression. “We’ve talked a lot in this class about being who you are, but who, or what, is that? A few years ago I read a book called Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott, in which he describes a world with only two dimensions, like a piece of paper. Flatland women, who are as in our world considered lesser, are straight lines. Men have more sides (and thus more corners), depending on their social rank. The more corners, the higher social esteem you have: pentagons are more highly regarded than squares who are more highly regarded than triangles. It’s pretty interesting. They have houses, they have relationships, they have their own perspective, all of which is two dimensional. Everything beyond that they cannot comprehend. If you were to put a coin on this world, they wouldn’t see its height, but could only go around the edge. They couldn’t tell if it was a tenth of an inch high or a hundred miles high. In fact the concept of high would never occur to them. It couldn’t. Then he describes Lineland, where the entire world consists of a line. And Spaceland, which is more like our world. And worlds with more dimensions than that. But I want to talk about a specific type of creature who might live in Flatland. When it’s born it’s a small black point. Over time it grows to a larger circle, and then grows a harder, tan-colored skin when it’s a teenager. Later, as it reaches adulthood it takes on a different color, and its shape becomes hexagonal, corresponding to the status an adult has. That’s how it lives most of its life. Toward the end it becomes circular again, and very hard and shiny. When it’s extremely near death it loses that color, becomes pale red, and very soft. And then, nothingness.”
They stare at me. Perhaps they think I’m repeating the exercise where they’re supposed to pretend I’m from Mars.
I say, “Of course I’m describing a pencil moving through a piece of paper. Someone living in the paper, who only comprehends two dimensions (as well as, of course, time), would perceive the point as a baby, the eraser as someone in senescence. But the truth is that all of the pencil was all there all the time.”
Someone asks, “What’s the point?”
“A baby. The other end is the old one.”
“No, what’s the point of you telling us this?”
“What if we’re the same way, one big, long being—big and long being three-dimensional words for a four- or five-dimensional being—who is a baby on one ennd and an old person on the other, passing through this three-dimensional space we think of as everything there is?”
“You really believe that?”
“Of course not. Everyone knows our bodies aren’t really where we live: our bodies are kind of like tv or radio receivers. Imagine if you’d never seen a television before, and you walked into a room and saw it on. You might think the Red Sox and the Mariners are actually a bunch of little people running around inside, as though it’s a tiny stage or a tiny world. You remember those old RCA Victor ads where the dog thinks the human is talking, but it’s really a record player, right?”
Most don’t remember. Some don’t remember record players.
I continue nonetheless, “Maybe we only think our bodies are where the action takes place, but instead our bodies are complex receivers that play out the energy that’s everywhere, kind of like the radio and television waves that surround us but do not become perceptible to us until the waves encounter receivers tuned to the right frequency.”
“You mean space aliens beam us into existence?”
“No, silly, life itself. It’s dancing and exploding all around us, and when the right wavelength meets the right vessel, boom, there you go, instant animation. Instant person. Or tree or frog or rock. All each of us is doing is manifesting in our own particular way the life force that surrounds us all. We don’t really think with our brains, anymore than the Mariners live inside a television. That’s just where it comes into focus.”
“So that’s what you really believe.”
“Of course not. The truth is that who I am is an invisible, weightless thing called a soul that lives way out somewhere beyond the stars, in a place called heaven. I took on physical form only as a test to determine whether I would follow the rules laid down by the King—and I don’t mean Elvvis—and if I do then I get to go back and live in heaven forever, strumming on harps and eating manna—which, by the way, some Biblical scholars think was insect exudate—while conversing with other people who passed the test. And it’s very definitely pass/fail. No checkmarks here. If I fail I burn forever. I’m not sure whether it will be my physical form or my soul that will burn. If it’s the soul, I guess the fires, too, are invisible. That was a huge point of contention in the Catholic Church a thousand years ago: whether the fires of hell were spiritual or physical. The two sides in that debate eventually agreed to disagree, each side sure the other would find out soon enough.”
“You’ve said you’re not a Christian, so I know you don’t believe that one.”
“He said he’s not a Christian?” someone else asks. We pause a moment, wait for the building to collapse, or at least for the electricity to go out.
“No, I don’t believe that one either. Instead we all know that who you are is an ego in a sack of skin. I stop at my fingertips. Everything inside of this sack is me. Or at least most of it is: if I get the flu those viruses aren’t me. And I’m not sure whether the bacteria in my gut are me or if they’re not. Maybe if they’re helpful to me they’re part of me, and if not then they’re not me. And what about the food I ate an hour ago? Is that me or not? By the time it’s my blood it’s me. I think. But if I bleed it’s not me anymore. A few years ago I had part of my intestine removed. I kept wondering afterward which part was me: the intestine or the rest of me. If the rest of me is me, at what point did the intestine become not part of me? Maybe when they cut it out. Because everything else in the world outside of me isn’t me. None of you are me.”
“But,” one of the students says, “what about your memories of us? Are they you?”
“Yes, I suppose they are,” I say. “Except that I can think of some people in my past whose memories are more like the viruses I mentioned.”
Another: “And what about the air I just breathed out, and now you’re breathing in? Who is that?”
“Sometimes,” a woman says, “my sister and I think the same things at the same time, even when we’re miles apart. How does that fit in?”
“That’s just coincidence,” a man says.
“It happens all the time,” she responds.
Another: “That’s because you were raised together, and having had the same inputs you’re going to provide the same outputs at the same times.”
“Like a machine,” I say.
“Well, yes.”
“I forgot to tell you,” I say, “That I really think we’re nothing more than machines built to propagate our genes. Everything else is secondary.”
“You don’t believe that.”
“You’re right. We’re actually a web of relationships and experiences. I’m the intersection of every person in class right now, along with everything I’ve ever experienced, every breath I’ve ever taken, every word I’ve ever spoken, every piece of food I’ve ever eaten. I’m not a thing at all. I’m a process. I’m not even that. I can’t be described in our language because sentences require a noun and a verb. Most of them. Lightning strikes. But what is lightning? It’s not a thing that strikes. It’s a process. So am I.”