This is my reality. This is the underpinning of my view of myself and the cosmos and where I fit. I present it as what I think I think; you are welcome to ignore it, peruse it, reject it, adopt it or modify it.

I have throughout most of my life accepted the idea there is a guiding intelligence, by whatever name it is called. The name God is emotionally loaded and is rejected by many, but it is the name I have used for this guiding intelligence. Moreover, I view God as an individual, a personality, much as you and I are individuals -- personalities -- with wishes and interests of His own. (The Bible informs us we humans share with God a number of traits such as love, pleasure, regret, compassion, anger, being pleased or displeased; I suspect a complete list would include most human traits.)

God arose from the pre-existing nothingness as an inevitable consequence of the passage of time, just as the universe of matter arose from the same nothingness. The matter coalesced to become what we see as our universe of matter and energy, and the spirit essence coalesced into a spirit realm with God at its head and a structure, likely a hierarchy, of individual subordinate spirits subservient to God, but each with wishes and interests of its own. I suspect the spirit realm is all-inclusive and embraces our universe of matter and energy (and perhaps other universes as well) so our universe is a specialized aspect of the whole.

Within this framework I, a hunk of matter, am organized as a human being complete with brain; I am possessed by an individual spirit that provides the spark of life, mind and animation. When this house of the spirit can no longer function, the spirit that is me will depart this body to continue its existence in the spirit realm. As it pleases God, individual spirits are separated from the whole and returned to the whole. My spirit has lived in the past through several lifetimes, some of which I am aware; as it pleases the heavenly host it may return to possess another body for another round of existence in this physical realm.

Also within this framework Jesus of Nazareth may well have been a personal representative of God, or indeed may be His Most Trusted Lieutenant. And it seems likely that the same spirit did return -- has returned more than once -- but, for whatever reason, has not been recognized as such. I am grateful that He graced mankind with His presence and His teachings.

I do not profess any knowledge of the hierarchy in the spirit realm. Whether our world -- this little piece of real estate floating in the sea of space -- has been permanently assigned a dominant spirit to oversee and engage spirits presently assigned here: I can speculate but I cannot teach since I have no specific knowledge. I have no doubt there are within our galaxy many planets with life that considers itself intelligent. And those individuals are walking embodiments of spirits just as we are here on this planet.