Category: Featured

Don’t blame yourself.

June 25, 2026

 One week I testified before a U.S. Senate committee.  It did not go well and, bowed as well as beaten, my ego limped out of the hearing room.

Get your ego out of it.  Stand back and look (at it) at a distance.

“A ‘God’s-eye’ view?”

No, just objectively, as if it were someone else.

That helped.  If it were someone else, I would know that, even on a good day, a Senate hearing is unpredictable.  But there was still an ego wound.

“Lord, what can I do about that?”

Look, you are encased in a body and a personality, and it requires ego strength and self-respect.  When I say, “Get the ego out,” I mean the second-order attachment to ego.  The ego, like desires, is a fact, a necessary fact.  Like the body, it gets bruised.  You just nurture it and let it heal.  Don’t deny it but don’t dwell on it either.  Accept it and don’t attach it to blame.  That your ego has been embarrassed is not the same as “doing something wrong.”  Don’t blame yourself.  That is an example of the wrong kind of attachment.

“Then I should just say, ‘I wish it had gone better,’ and leave it at that?”

Correct.

 

This is Where God’s Story Really Begins

June 18, 2026

All this was taking place on a flight to visit my Mom and Dad, who were in their eighties and living in California.  Sitting beside me was a nine-year-old girl, traveling alone.  She kept looking at me, wondering what I was up to.  Ignoring her was unkind, so I stopped praying and chatted with her.

After that, I returned to my own meditations and received a stream of visual images, a vision:  the sun cracking up, solar flares that zoomed out into the reaches of space.  I then saw, through the mist, an ethereal caravan of camels and their riders, coming up a valley, their long line stretching behind, down a winding road into the distance.  I followed the road back to the source.  I came upon vast winds, like a monsoon, then a world exploding—and then the vision abruptly stopped.  The caravan seemed to represent the long course of human history, traced backward, all the way to the beginning, and then nothing.

I had received hints about the moment of Creation.  Then, one day, He told me more.  This is where God’s story really begins.

 

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Remembering Others at Their Best

The Grace of Remembering Others at Their Best- Jerry L. Martin’s Daybook

June 13, 2026

A friend’s recent experience reminded me of Steerforth in Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield.

He was a charming, good-looking, multi-talented senior boy when a desperate young David escaped his abusive stepfather and, with the aid of a spinster aunt, got into a good school. New boys are normally treated very badly but Steerforth, for whatever reason, cast the cloak of his own popularity over the boy, and they were friends from then on.

As time goes on, the reader sees glimpses of a questionable side to the boy’s hero, but David does not. Steerforth knows that his real character does not live up to his admirer’s image of him.

One day, he asks David, “Whatever you learn of me, please always remember me as I was in my best moments.”

Since we are all flawed, that is a request we might all sincerely make.

And I, for one, would say, with David, “Oh, of course, of course, I will always remember you at your best.”

God Michaelangelo

“I am a Person, but I am also much more.”

June 5, 2026

“Lord, you have taken me through a story that is completely unorthodox and embarrassingly anthropomorphic.  What am I to make of that?”

I am not interested in what you make of it (or) in conforming My account to your prior, fixed beliefs.  Be more specific in your future questions.

I am using literal language because that is the only way to explain the experience of being God.

“But ‘experience’ is also anthropomorphic.”

Not really.  I am a Person, but I am not only a Person.  I am also much more.  There is something you might call “what it is like” to be God.  That is what “experience” refers to.

“But, Lord, You are admitting serious limitations as You scramble to create order out of chaos.  This is not our idea of God.”

Limitations only from My perspective.  Don’t be misled.  By your standards I already had unimaginable power and knowledge.

“But You say you knew nothing.”

There is another side to the story.  In one sense I knew nothing.  But, in another sense, I was viewing everything from another level—as when your senses are confused but your mind is clear and is noting with precision and even analysis the nature and contours of the confusion.  Think of waking from a dream while analyzing the fact that you just had a dream.

Or, I suppose, like a researcher taking an hallucinogenic and carefully noting its effects.

 

“That is self-indulgence.”

May 26, 2026

“Lord, are those moments of union with God the goal or are they just nice accompaniments?”

Neither.  You shouldn’t strive for moments of union per se, for peak experiences.  That is self-indulgence, and a mistake of some who seek mystical experience.  It is like orgasms—you should not seek them for their own sake.  That is an abuse, a kind of idolatry.  They happen naturally as the outcome and expression of love.  But the experience of union is not just the accidental accompaniment of loving God.  It is the essential expression.  As a philosopher, you should be able to understand the difference.

Yes, I could see that loving God, by His very nature, invites a degree of union, much as human love does.

reveal things

“It Sounded Like Orders From Above.”

May 21, 2026

Believe the inspirations I send you.  Do not worry about any other standards than communicating correctly what I reveal to you.  It may seem crazy to others.  It (revelation) always does.  This is the courage of the messenger.

I felt like Dorothy being swept up in the whirlwind.  And poor Abigail, would she be swept up too?  Her train had finally arrived.  Over dinner, I broke it to her.  She just listened, unfazed.

“I felt submissive; it sounded like orders from Above,” she explained later.  “I thought:  Jerry is clearly not making it up.  What it means in my life is, of necessity, open-ended.  To receive such a directive is to move to a realm or level not foreseeable.  In other words, it is a blessing.”

“Pray and I Will Tell You”

May 14, 2026

I started making a list of great spiritual leaders to pray about.  I thought the question would be, for example, What was God communicating to Martin Luther?  But, when I asked, I got a different answer.

Suppose you brought a guy in – say, Luther – and cut him up (dissected him, looked at the elements that make him up).  What would you find?

“Not just the single solitary individual, I suppose, but someone immersed in a tradition, institutions, and a culture.”

I act over the centuries in reference to individuals, but also movements, cultures, and the like.

“But only individuals receive communications.”

Just listen for the moment.  I interact with mankind, with the universe, in many different ways.  Do not assume that the only interaction is the same form of the interaction I have with you.  With some it is conversational, but with others it is by inspiration, by My spirit moving through them, infusing institutions and life-forms, cultures, cultural forms, art, music, dance, symbolism, ideational systems, thought forms …

So, looking at each cultural form, I should be able to figure out how it reflects You?”

The starting point is not the cultural forms and asking “What kind of God or transcendent order does that imply or suggest?” but start with Me and ask “What am I doing with that culture, individual, art, art form, or whatever.  What is it to Me?”  Pray and I will tell you.

The moment of death is every moment.

May 7, 2026

“The moment of death is every moment.”

There had been a time when getting tenure had been the most important thing in the world to me.  For an academic, it is a matter of professional life or death.  I had loved my years at the university.  Surrounded by the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, Boulder valley is a little piece of heaven.  But teaching philosophy was no longer my calling.  It was time to move on.

That does not mean that giving up tenure was an easy decision to make.  Nor should it have been.  Congressional staff have no job security at all.  They routinely lose their jobs because the congressman dies or retires or runs for another office.  Or it can be more dramatic.  One congressman who had given no hint of dissatisfaction came into his office one day and simply fired everybody, effective immediately.

So the risk was real, but the risk of not making the change was real also.  Time is the most important asset you have in life.  T. S. Eliot tells us, “The moment of death is every moment.”  The moment of death is an epitaph defining the meaning of one’s life and, if Eliot is right, so is every moment.  There is an urgency to life.  If there is something important to you to do, you should do it now.

So I thought, what is the worst case scenario?  I could always work for my father, who had a business selling advertising specialties—items like pens and calendars with ads for small businesses to give to their customers.  I did not think I would be happy doing that, but it would put food on the table.  So I sent in my letter of resignation.  A week later the letter was returned.  I had “forgotten” to sign it.  As I left the university, the Denver Post ran a feature about my job change.  I told them that giving up tenure was “like jumping out of an airplane with an untested parachute.”

On Being Alive

On Being Alive: Reflections from Toy Story | Daybook

April 3, 2026

I have always loved animated features. There was a dearth after the decline of the old Disney Studios but, after some time, new studios started a post-Disney style that continues to develop. They make great watchables for doing my exercises, since they are upbeat and don’t require detailed attention. 

A great series I have been watching is the Toy Stories triad. They have almost metaphysical penetration. What is it to be a toy? What makes a toy’s life meaningful? What brings a toy ALIVE? Each belongs to a particular youngster and, as one explains, “When Andy plays with me, I feel as if I am alive!” 

The toys live in fear of several things. One is spring cleaning, when, if they are broken or out of date, they risk being put in the annual yard sale. In fact, one is sold – to a dealer who recognizes this is an original Woody from a famous cowboy collection. It will complete a set he can then sell for good money to a Japanese toy museum. Woody is desperate to return home to his kid, but learns that the other toys in the set have been languishing in a box. To be sold to a museum is their way back into the visible world. Andy is now torn, feeling loyalty both to his kid and to the other toys in his set. The cowgirl in the set accuses him of being selfish and he feels the sting. But then he looks at the bottom of his boot and it says “Andy” and it is as if this is his true love. He says to the cowgirl, whose kid was Emily, “Wouldn’t you give everything just to have another hour with Emily?” “Yes!” she admits. So he escapes home. 

That was Toy Story 2. Toy Story 3 introduces a new set of dilemmas and conflicts, all from a deep ability to emphasize with, well, toys. Why not?