the Beginning Archives -

“I Breathe Life Into Matter.”

April 11, 2024

God continued,

I breathe life into matter, and matter starts responding. As one translation of Genesis puts it, I “flutter over the waters” and nurture, incubate life. And I am filled with joy. It is like a child picking up a harp and being surprised to find that strumming it makes beautiful sounds—and delightedly playing with it.

At the beginning, the cosmos was My playpen, My garden of delights. It was beautiful, dazzling. I could play it like a vast organ, but one attached to laser shows and fireworks.

“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.

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.

“Beauty also becomes possible . . .”

August 10, 2014

Beauty also becomes possible, as you see in prehistoric cave paintings.

Creatures from a very low level enjoy and appreciate sensory stimulation. In that sense they find a scene (though not quite a “scene” for them yet) “beautiful.” But true appreciation of beauty is seeing an ideal form in something material. What they are drawing on cave walls are ideal bulls.

“I have seen those drawings. They are amazing.”

Study the cave paintings and other artifacts.

They respond to, reflect, how I was presenting Myself to them. You will be able to see or infer what My experience was like, what I was trying to do.

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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, 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.

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.