Tag: consciousness

“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.

molecules

“The First Glimmer is Found in the Lowest Molecules.”

December 12, 2024

Consciousness developed very slowly.  The first glimmer is found in the lowest molecules, in their ability to interact with, to respond to, their environment.  Whitehead and Teilhard are on the right track in this regard.  (Leibniz is not.)

I had to look again at these thinkers to see what God was getting at.  Rejecting the mind-nature dualism, the twentieth-century philosopher-mathematician Alfred North Whitehead held that, even at the micro level, every event is a pulse of existence, feeling and responding to its environment.  These “prehensions” are not so much states as vectors, arrows pointing to connections with the surrounding world.  The Jesuit scientist-philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke of the “within” of things, their interiority, which “appears at the heart of beings”:  “Co-extensive with their Without, there is a Within to things.”  In every part of the universe, “the exterior world must inevitably be lined at every point with an interior one.”  By contrast, the seventeenth century philosopher-mathematician G.W. Leibniz believed that everything in the universe was made of elementary particles that were not matter or energy, but minds, centers of consciousness, each of which internally mirrors all the others.  In short, Whitehead and Teilhard believed that physical (or psycho-physical) nature has levels of awareness—and they were on the right track—whereas Leibniz held that there is no physical nature other than points of consciousness.

As God went on, He sounded a lot like Teilhard.

What happens is that reactions have an internal dimension—responding to the environment, the molecule begins rearranging its internal parts and configurations and processes.  This is the beginning of interiority.  Ultimately, interiority involves the second-order process of monitoring and directing inner processes.  But, even at the beginning, prior to the emergence of second-order processes, there is an emerging consciousness.  To be conscious is not the same as and does not require self-consciousness.  It can be very dim and limited and still be consciousness, because something new and remarkable has arisen—the pre-sentient and then sentient awareness of the environment.  Don’t worry at this point about what is meant by “pre-sentient” awareness.  Your understanding is necessarily anthropocentric, using human consciousness as the standard by which to understand all forms of consciousness.

parent-child-newborn-jo-frances-parent-and-child-photo-gallery-1024x837

“The Personal is essentially interpersonal.”

October 23, 2024

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.

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.