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“Pure energy, pure creative force, pure Being…”

June 2, 2022

Pure energy:

Later I was told more about God at the Beginning.

Before I was a Person, I was around “for a long time.”

First there was Nothingness, not just empty space—there was no space and time either. Out of Nothingness I erupted, “created” Myself.

“At that point, I was just pure energy, pure creative force, pure Being, Being itself.

Space and time were created as a result of my Being. They were the frames of My existence. The physical universe spun out of Me by My overflowing.

“I am the to-be of all things… not yet a Person… not yet self-aware. I was amorphous energy flowing out radically in all directions.

(Before Creation) I am pure spirit, sufficient unto Myself, and have no “body.” And I did not exist in a world with physical bodies.

“I felt I was lacking something—grounding, facticity, the blunt materiality, the standing-against, the hard edge to push oneself against, the resistance and friction that physical objects have. So, out of my Being, a world was spun.”

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Listen to more about God and energy on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. The dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.

“God is, in some sense, all. And all is very multiplex indeed.”

June 25, 2018

God is All:

I had been told that God comes different ways to different cultures.

“So any single conception of God will grasp only one of Your aspects?”

Yes, you see the problem. My nature is quite variegated. People see one aspect and not another.

“Lord, are there multiple levels of Being or something along those lines?”

Yes, but don’t interrupt. The story is much more complex.

God is not mind or matter, or even mind and matter. God is, in some sense, all. And all is very multiplex indeed. Even physics has not been able to produce a universe of “atoms in the void.” There are forces, elements, patterns – you need to know more to go on – that go beyond them.

Then add the kind of stuff the morphic fields’ guy talks about …

Rupert Sheldrake, author of Dogs That Know When Their Owners Are Coming Home, performs scientifically controlled experiments to test different explanations of the uncanny ability of some animals to know what is happening far away.

He found, for example, that even if the owner came home at randomized times, the dog was always waiting expectantly about a half hour in advance. He found that the dog responded as soon as the owner formed the intention to return home.

Sheldrake compares the results of these experiments to studies of how birds and other animals can find their way home.

Since standard explanations fail, he advances the idea that these communications travel by way of morphic fields, using an analogy with gravitational and magnetic fields to explain the “action at a distance” that is a feature of these situations.

… and those who talk about organized information and the like – primitive though they may be – and you begin to get an inkling.

I found that organized information and complexity are increasingly important concepts, particularly in biology, but also in cosmology and the social sciences. Traditional science is reductionist, always trying to explain the whole from the action of the parts.

It is also deterministic, seeing one state of affairs as fully predictable from the previous state. It was widely assumed that this model, which has been particularly successful in chemistry and mechanics, could be used to explain all natural phenomena.

The new theories of organization, information, and complexity challenge this assumption.

The whole—whether a cell, an organism, an ecology, or a universe—has some qualities that the parts do not have and cannot explain. New phenomena, such as life and consciousness, are emergent properties that cannot be understood in terms of inorganic elements.

In some cases, such as why the organs of the body have the size and location that they have, the whole can explain the parts better than the other way around. The self-organization of complex systems, their creative responses to their environment, and their emergent qualities are neither fully predictable nor fully explainable by their constituent elements or prior states.

I had been told that God is all, and that all is very multiplex indeed.

These concepts could provide the basis for understanding this multiplexity.

God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher – is the true story of a philosopher’s conversations with God. Dr. Jerry L. Martin, a lifelong agnostic. Dr. Martin served as head of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the University of Colorado philosophy department, is the founding chairman of the Theology Without Walls group at AAR, and editor of Theology Without Walls: The Transreligious Imperative. Dr. Martin’s work has prepared him to become a serious reporter of God’s narrative, experiences, evolution, and autobiography. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Martin has testified before Congress on educational policy. He has appeared on “World News Tonight,” and other television news programs.

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Listen to this on God: An Autobiography, The Podcast– the dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin.

He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered- in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions, and God had a lot to tell him.

The awesome power of the Evil Urge

April 11, 2014

“The awesome power of the Evil Urge”

I slumped back again and put the book aside. Later, I read on in the biography of Martin Buber. I was struck by how many thoughts that I had received had also occurred to him. He entered a Nietzschean phase with an emphasis on “dynamism” and “a creative flow of life force.” Later Buber thought eternity “sends forth time out of itself” and “sets us in that relationship to it that we call existence.” Thus, out of eternal stillness comes the dynamism of change and existential thrust. To achieve wholeness as a person, he said, it is necessary to direct the creative force of the Evil Urge, the erotic energy that I had felt to be at the center of Being itself.

When I reached Washington and returned to my apartment in Alexandria, I resumed reading. I had left off with Buber speaking of the quality of “fervor with direction, all the awesome power of the ‘evil urge’ taken up into the service of God, [seventeenth-century visionary theologian Jakob] Boehme’s ‘ternary of fire’ [symbolizing desire] spiraling upward into the ‘ternary of light’ [symbolizing love] without losing any of its power thereby.” These themes reverberated through the Jewish tradition known as Hasidism. This was “one of the truly decisive moments in Buber’s life”: “overpowered in an instant, I experienced the Hasidic soul,” he writes. “At the same time I became aware of the summons to proclaim it to the world.” I knew how he felt.

Being facing Being

April 4, 2014

I wondered what it could mean for “Being as such” to be a Person, a Thou, as surely, from my own experience, God is. Then it struck me that this rushing Stuff, this force of Being, is also the being of me. And I am a person. So why shouldn’t the rushing Stuff, the Being of—of what?—the World, of Being itself, be a Person writ large? I don’t mean the World merely in a physical sense, since my own being is not merely that of my body. Similarly, the Being that animates everything could be a Person.

Looking out the window at the passing trees, it struck me that their very leaves are full of Being as such, the Being that is also a Person, and that it made sense for them to be a Thou for me. And, more remarkably, for me to be a Thou for them. I felt that Being facing Being, not necessarily speaking but simply facing, is what personhood is.