God Archives

“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.

I have given you some clues . . .

August 11, 2016

Clues to Creation:

I had received visions of the explosive expansions of time and space, and of divine energy rushing up through all levels of reality. Were these intimations of Creation? I was told,

The work I want you to begin involves reading and writing about My nature. Start with the Creation. I have given you some clues already. Follow up on them.

One day, in quiet reflection, I was taken deep into the Self, taken back, it seemed, to the Beginning. Here is how I described it right afterwards:

“There was a sense of things shattering, like crockery breaking, or like the shell of an egg breaking. (I think of Kabbalah and its image of Creation as divine vessels breaking.) Then there is a river, or milk, flowing out from amidst the shards. The river is clouded in mist and flows a long way down canyons of shards or rocks. Until it settles in a pool below.”

“Tranquil waters. This is when Life begins. Cool, calm but rippling waters.”

All this was taking place on a flight to California to visit my ninety-year-old father. 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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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 tried to impose a spiritual vision.”

February 22, 2015

Spiritual Vision-

Akhenaten may have been the first monotheist.

We have his own words, carved in stone. The young pharaoh reports having been divinely guided to the exact place the Creator had manifested himself at the beginning of the world. It was a plain near the Nile, bounded by hills except on the east, a great amphitheater facing the morning sun.

Akhenaten’s vision was not of many gods, but of one god—a god, with no female consort, who created himself anew each day.

He was called the Aten, or Father Aten, and symbolized by the solar disk. “Thou didst fashion the earth according to thy desire when thou wast alone … thou appointest every man to his place and satisfiest his needs. Everyone receives his sustenance and his days are numbered.”

The Aten is the source of life itself.

“Thou it is who causest women to conceive and makest seed into man, who gives life to the child in the womb of its mother, who comfortest him so that he cries not therein, nurse that thou art, even in the womb, who givest breath to quicken all that he hath made.” The god created the great life-giving Nile for Egypt, but he is a universal god who has placed “a Nile in heaven,” the source of rain, as a “gift to foreigners and to beasts of their lands.”

The Aten was symbolized by a figure of the sun with rays reaching out in all directions.

At the end of each ray is an open hand reaching out in loving kindness, as if to touch with life, and to give and to receive gifts. “Thou art remote yet thy rays are upon the earth,” writes Akhenaten. “Thou are in the sight of men, yet thy ways are not known.” The Aten can also be very near, at least to his spokesperson. “Thou art in my heart.”

It was a breathtaking vision and it shook Egypt from its moorings.

The other gods, he proclaimed, were not gods but idols. Upon his orders, their images were destroyed. In their place was put the austere hieroglyph for the Aten, increasingly understood not as the sun or even the sun-god, but as a distant and unrecognizable divinity.

This was gross impiety to most Egyptians, an insult to the gods.

Akhenaten’s “monotheistic zeal offended their reverence for the phenomena [through which the gods made themselves present] and the tolerant wisdom with which they had done justice to the many-sidedness of reality,” explains Henri Frankfort.

The result was perhaps predictable.

Upon the pharaoh’s death, priests and people alike turned against this strange and remote monotheism. The old statues, temples, and forms of worship were restored. Ahkenaten’s vision was a stunning venture in spiritual understanding but, in the end, came to nothing.

“Lord, what is the meaning of Akhenaten?”

Akhenaten was an extraordinary recipient of My inspiration (and of My) presence.

He was, as all are, bound by his culture and the symbols he had available. But he got the main message—that, in a sense, I am One, that I am not to be equated with the sun or any other natural phenomena, that other gods are lesser or “mere” manifestations of Me or, in a sense, non-existent compared to Me. The problem he ran into is that he was alone in his receptivity. Others were not prepared, were not open. The most spiritual Egyptians of his era were attuned to the old religion and could not jump the traces. It would have seemed impious to them.

“What was the difference between them and the people of Israel?”

The people of Israel were a people.

They—the mass of them—had an intuitive understanding of a Covenant. Remember that the mass of ancient Jews were not faithful, or (they were) faithful only periodically. But they all lived under the Covenant and understood that they so lived. Akhenaten tried to impose a spiritual vision from above, through imperial authority and example. Even his wife did not understand the vision; she followed it out of her great love for her husband.

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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.

“I am in the midst of Nothingness.”

May 5, 2014

We should go back to the Beginning.

Enter into Me, and experience the Beginning as I experienced it. Record what I say as I re-experience that moment.

Enter into Me? I was not sure how to do that. I tried to still myself and yield to whatever experience I was about to be given.

I am in the midst of Nothingness …

“In the midst of Nothingness?” My logical alarms went off. “Lord, how can I make sense of this?”

Don’t worry now about making sense of it. Just listen.

I tried again to still myself and yield.

I am in the midst of Nothing.

I don’t know who or what I am—I am like a baby in a womb. I hear nothing, see nothing—because there is nothing. I feel alone, very alone, except that I don’t yet know what alone means. I feel growing strength, and Myself being drawn toward the light, just a glimmer at the “edge.” I am in a kind of “pain,” like stretching aching muscles.

Suddenly, it is as if I punch my arms and legs through the sides of a bag I’m in.

It is like an explosion. In a split second, fragments are zooming out in all directions. I am at a throbbing, pulsing center. I am not sure what’s happening. It is like a tightly coiled spring being suddenly released and springing out into a vast space instantaneously.

I scramble to take control, to provide order.

I tried to picture all this in terms of the Big Bang theory of the origin of the universe. In the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the new universe expanded faster, much faster than the speed of light. “Within a fraction of a second,” writes physicist Michio Kaku, “the universe expanded by an unimaginable factor of (10 to the 50^th power).” It became 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000 times bigger than it had been less than a second before.

“Lord, were there already laws of nature or did You have to establish those regularities?”

At this point, I know nothing about laws of nature. All is chaos.

Slowly I reach out to extend Myself over the whole, to infuse it. It becomes calmer, but still full of flux and dynamism and outward expansion.

I relapse, as if tired. I have done all I can do at that stage.

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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.

I was taken back, it seemed, to the Beginning

April 21, 2014

“I was taken back, it seemed, to the Beginning …”

One day, in quiet reflection, I was taken deep into the Self, taken back, it seemed, to the Beginning. Here is how I described it right afterwards:

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.

The edge of infinity

March 24, 2014

That recollection rekindled my curiosity about Buber.

I started reading Maurice Friedman’s highly-praised biography of Buber on weekend trips to see Abigail, who was still teaching in New York. Buber’s first philosophical awakening occurred during adolescence, prompted by “the fourteen-year-old’s terror before the infinity of the universe.”

Buber writes:

“A necessity I could not understand swept over me. I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or a time without beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless. Under an irresistible compulsion I reeled from one to the other, at times so closely threatened with the danger of madness that I seriously thought of avoiding it by suicide.”

I stopped reading for a moment and, as the train rumbled on, I pondered the “edge of infinity.”

Being taken over by a powerful image that was both visual and visceral. And felt and saw space at its outer edges, rushing. Expanding outward, unfurling itself with vast force and at almost instantaneous speed. Without stop, neither a completed infinity nor merely finite. The vision had a tremendous feeling of life-force, of Being unfurled, bursting forth at a reckless speed.

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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.

One needs a hard reality to work against.

December 18, 2013

One needs a hard reality to work against.

Martin Luther said that God punishes us through intermediaries like Satan, and I had asked about that.

Now to the other part of your question, why (are people punished) through the world and Satan? Immersion in the world—with its causal networks, its guilty resistance—is necessary for growth. One needs a hard reality to work against that conditions one’s actions and experience and decisions. Otherwise, nothing would be serious.

Ritualism and creeds have been overemphasized

August 7, 2013

Ritualism and creeds have been overemphasized.

Ritualism and creeds have been overemphasized, and I am Myself partly to blame, since at one point those were the most important thing in the world to Me. I am hoping I can open their hearts to something new, without unduly disturbing their good and faithful practices.

What it is like to be God.

June 20, 2013

Abigail’s train had still not arrived. I paced back and forth, no longer seeing the other people in the station. What to think? What to feel? Finally, I forced a deep breath and, with irritation mitigated by resignation, asked, “Lord, what exactly do You want of me?”

I want you to describe the inner life of God, what it is like to be God.

The inner life of God? What it is like to be God? I didn’t know what this could possibly mean, but I forged on. “Lord, why is that important for us to know?”

Mankind sees God only from the outside and that leads to distortions in its view of God (as it would of anyone)—too distant, awesome, oppressive, Other. Even mystics are very one-sided. They experience oneness but that is not the same as empathizing with My subjective experiences.

Okay, I could see that, if God is too distant, it would be hard to relate to Him. But there was still a problem. “Lord, we think of God as being so infinite and ethereal that ‘subjective experience’ doesn’t even make sense.”

Exactly—that’s one of the distortions.

Although I am much more than a Person, I am a Person, a soul, like you. You—people—cannot relate properly, constructively, to Me unless you understand that. (Take) love, for example. My love comes across as impersonal, generic, oceanic wallowing, but (in fact) it is quite specific, concrete, with feeling, with response to the particulars of your being, of your life.

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God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher – is the true story of a philosopher’s conversations with the Divine. 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, autobiography and sparks of wisdom. In addition to scholarly publications, Dr. Martin has testified before Congress on educational policy, 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.