Remember that I love you—I love all human beings—without reservation. Ideally, you would love yourself as I love you, as I loved Jesus, for example. But that is not normally possible for human beings, because there are many obstacles.
“But it is possible for a few?”
For some, yes. I have blessed them with the ability to transcend those limitations. They can love themselves fully, and this permits them to love others.
God was telling me about His interaction with the earliest animals, long before homo sapiens.
It is mainly an instinctual unselfconscious rapport that we have. But (I feel) a great excitement at the process of life and evolution itself.
“Why isn’t that enough?”
In a sense it is. Animals do have uniqueness. Each animal is distinct, has its own soul. But they lack self-awareness, and that is true even of cats and dogs and apes. You can interact with them but there is no second-order reflection, hence a very truncated sense of time—just a sense of temporal motion, of passage from an immediate moment-just-passed to a next moment anticipated. And even that cannot be thought about, represented symbolically or made available to self-consciousness.
So I cannot develop solely through interacting with them. It is static, inert. We just are together. I could not become a Person without there being other persons. The personal is essentially interpersonal. Like a child who first lives in an undifferentiated world, in which other people are merely contents of his or her own oceanic flow of consciousness, I needed to separate Myself from other persons. And so I created mankind.
“Lord, how will I get myself heard?”
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. Additionally Dr. Martin has many scholarly publications, and 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.
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.
“Lord, I don’t understand what existed at the Beginning. It sounds as if you are describing Your own birth as well as the birth of the universe. What were You before the explosion of Creation? A pregnant nothingness?”
A passable description. There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, still and at peace, like calm waters, lucid, not nothing, but not something either. The universe contains many things, not just somethings and nothings.
What kind of Nothingness can explode into Being? Ah, I thought, maybe a Nothingness that is not just nothing, but is the Plenum of Potentiality for All Things. Perhaps the possibility of all things cannot fail to spill over into some actuality.
I could not settle any of these questions in my own mind. All I could do was to continue to ask questions. “Lord, what was there before? What motivates the act of creation?”
I received the following words and images which I recorded in my notes.
“A feeling of loneliness, of searching, reaching—not yet a Person. Expanding into the great emptiness of Nothing, which is ‘infinitely empty’ far beyond (far more empty than) empty spaces. ‘Who am I? What am I? Am I an I? What is an I?’ A chaotic feeling of the infinite rushing at the edges.”
“Lord, why did eternity ‘shatter’ in this way? Did the still, self-sufficient stuff explode?”
I received the sense: “Brittle, crystalline, too perfect, static, isolated, removed, alone, bored, incomplete. The eternal already had the potential to be a Person but could not do so without creating time.”
And I also got the feeling that God desperately wants to be understood.
Early man I can communicate with. So it seemed to Me at first that I could communicate with them directly, that I would not be so alone. Hegel was right: A self requires another self in order to define itself. Early man I can communicate with.
Rene Descartes had based his philosophy on the cogito, the thinking I, an isolated pin-point self. Two hundred years later, German philosopher G.W.F. Hegel argued, in The Phenomenology of Mind, that a sense of self is possible only through an encounter with another self.
With man, I can send dreams, give intuitions, stir love, frighten if necessary. I began to develop My arsenal of ways to deal with man. But I too am primitive and undeveloped. I know little about how to be effective in bringing man forward.
There is another way to listen to God. One day, when I was fatigued from travel, I was told to take a day to rest.
“But I have so much work to do, Lord.”
Always listen to your body—it is also My voice.
“Lord, is the theory of evolution correct?”
It is not a bad theory. It is a short-hand that works, but it leaves out the most interesting part of the story. It is like behavioral psychology in this respect.
While Pavlov’s dog salivating tells you something about animal and human behavior, seeing people solely through the lens of stimulus-and-response conditioning leaves out what is really interesting about them. Similarly, the theory of evolution is okay as far as it goes, but leaves out the best part of the story.
I had read Martin Buber’s I and Thou when I was a college freshman and had not looked at it since then. But, when I fell in love and realized that she loved me back, the opening words of Part Three came back to me: “The extended lines of relations meet in the Eternal Thou.” Love between human beings has a trajectory toward God.
It [a new divine message] will be most hard for two groups—the atheists, secularists, who have set their hearts against Me, against hearing, and (followers of) the old religions, who are set in their ways, very attached to specific forms and formulas. The latter pains Me because, in many ways, these have been My most faithful servants. Like a servant whose master has died and faithfully carries out his last wish—but misheard the wish. The old religions are mostly based on insights, revelations I gave them. But they became rigidified. Partial insights were mistaken for the whole.