Tag: being

“Think in a Different Way”

March 27, 2025

“Lord, I have the feeling that you want me to read and think less, and to listen more and just write down your story.”

Don’t stop thinking, but think in a different way. Don’t work so hard to figure everything out, to make it rational, to make it fit your categories. Just listen and think through the implications of what I tell you.

“But, Lord, some of what I learn from You comes from worrying over what you say.”

Sometimes yes, but often no. Sometimes your questioning just gets in the way. The main point is to open your mind, to try to understand what I am saying on its own terms, and to see ways it might be true or understandable to you.

If something doesn’t make sense to me, how can I supposed to “see ways” to make it understandable? How do you get to that vantage point?

 

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.

________

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.

“There was a Self, timeless, without reflection, at peace.”

October 3, 2024

“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.

 

great ape

“The Great Apes Are Wonderful Creatures . . . So Close But Yet So Far.”

February 1, 2024

 

“And so, Lord, You call forth the first human beings?”

Yes, the first inklings, forerunners, of man.  The great apes are wonderful creatures, full of intelligence, energy, and drive.  But it is frustrating to interact with them.  They are so close and yet so far from having full interactive personalities.  They have teleological urges but they are only effective, for the most part, at the biological level.  Their social life is rudimentary and their spiritual awareness is diffuse and inarticulate.  They lack a symbolic order.  They can’t project ideals beyond the sensual.  They can’t respond to Me either.

“But they evolved?”

The transition to early man is both slow and sudden.  Remember what the first two years of a child’s life is like, and (then) imagine each day to be a century.  In a sense, nothing is happening.  One day looks much like the last, and there is no single great leap forward.

So imagine My excitement when the first protohumans arrived.  At first, you couldn’t tell them from animals but I could see their potential.  They didn’t have language but their sounds and marks had representative purposes.  They could connect one thing to another, one thought to another.  They could remember their past and replay it in their minds.  They slowly developed a sense of the future.

“Pray and I will tell you”

November 16, 2023

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.

God's point of view

“You are both other and same as Me.”

July 6, 2023

“Lord, are we all part of You?”

You are both other and same (as Me). I need you to be other so that I may encounter another self. I am a Person and, like other persons, define Myself by responding to other persons, and being responded to (by them).

But I also need union, not distance—just as other persons do. You and Abigail are both other and same. You need to be different people—love is a bridge between differences. You also merge spirits at certain moments, though not totally. That is also a kind of completion or fulfillment. Life, including My life, is the dialectic, as you might call it, of same and other, confrontation and union.

We are both other than God and yet the same as God? But same and other are opposites. This did not go down easy for a former logic professor, but I went on. “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.

Then, late at night, I felt the boundary between me and the world becoming thinner and less distinct. Slowly, subject and object were blending, becoming intimately bound, not standing apart from one another. I was noting this intellectually, but it was not an intellectual experience. It was an ontological experience, an experience of my whole being. Finally, for a few moments, it approached total one-ness, the complete loss of awareness of self. At that point, I pulled back.

“Lord, what is the meaning of this kind of experience?”

There are many levels and kinds of experience with Me—including music. Do not make too much of it. It is good, just let it happen. It does not mean that you are about to become a mystic or anything unworldly. It is not unlike—it is on a continuum with—a wide range of spiritual experiences, in and out of religious practice and sensibility, that people have all the time. But it is definitely good. It will give you energy and peace and insight, so let it in.

Many times one “loses oneself” in an experience, but those moments are less threatening than merging with God. I pulled back, but felt a nagging sense I was not supposed to. “Lord, I feel you want me to do more of the mystical stuff, ‘entering’ You and so forth.”

Yes, and you can remove the scare quotes. There is nothing strange about it. That is how the universe is. The parts can communicate with the whole. It is no more mystical or mysterious than your ability to move your arm.

Actually, since Descartes introduced a sharp mind-body distinction, how the mind moves the body has been a philosophical mystery. But, in actual life, it is not. The parts can communicate with the whole and vice versa. I had never thought of the universe that way.

 

“It is at the heart of my Being.”

June 20, 2023

In spite of the voice, I wondered why, most of the time, God is irritatingly elusive. But I was told,

You see Me all the time.

I looked around and tried to see God, but nothing registered. Martin Buber talks about saying Thou to nature, and that was about as close as I could get. If God wants to be so coy, why does He bother to get our attention at all? How, I asked, could our response possibly matter to Him?

It is very important. It is at the heart of my being.

Human recognition is at the heart of God’s being? I found that intriguing, but it only heightened the paradox of an invisible God who wants to be seen.

 

“They shook your faith.”

January 6, 2023

One morning I started to ask some trivial question and was interrupted.

You stopped asking about Me because some of the answers disturbed you. They shook your faith.

That was true. When answers upset me, I would start thinking that, surely, this was not the voice of God. “Lord, why is faith like that? Why is Your interaction with us so tenuous and subject to doubt?”

First, it is not. During most times, people have not had trouble believing. Believing in Me or in some gods was—is—the most natural thing in the world.

Second, my “invisibility” has to do with the kind of Being I am. It’s like asking why we can’t see neutrinos. Nobody can see your “mind.” You believe in “other minds” with no greater “evidence.”

God was alluding to the topic of my doctoral dissertation. One of the great philosophical puzzles concerns skepticism with regard to knowledge of other minds. The problem arises from the fact that we do not have direct access to other people’s thoughts and feelings. We only observe their outer behavior. In fact, we do not have any proof that others really have inner thoughts and feelings at all. Yet it is reasonable to believe they do. Is God any more elusive than minds? Well, He certainly seems so.

 

pure energy, God energy

“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.”

________

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.