GOD: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher - The Podcast

171. What's On Your Mind- God and Daemon | Good and Evil

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, join host Scott Langdon and Dr. Jerry L. Martin as they revisit the first communication from previous special guest and renowned author Matt Cardin.

As Jerry shares his unexpected dialogues with God, Matt Cardin is inspired to recount his equally mesmerizing encounters with a muse or demon. Jerry and Matt offer insights into their profound philosophical quests and the challenges a reality rooted in scientific materialism poses.

This episode explores divine communication and existential realities. Touching on themes of good versus evil, the ego, and the interplay between chaos and order, the discussion expands on the perspectives of William James and Carl Jung, as well as concepts of shadow selves and achieving wholeness.

Don't miss this introspective dialogue sharing new perspectives on the nature of existence and the mysteries of the universe. Whether you're a seeker of spiritual wisdom or a curious mind exploring life's deeper questions, this episode offers profound insights, thought-provoking discourse, and an exploration of the interplay between light and dark within us all as we reflect on the timeless wisdom of ancient tales and the profound impact on our understanding of human nature.

Relevant Episodes:  Matt Cardin Interviews Jerry Martin on The Living Dark Podcast

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Scott Langdon 00:17: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. A 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. Episode 166 Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Hello and welcome to God and Autobiography the podcast. I'm Scott Langdon. 

Scott Langdon 01:14: For this, our 23rd edition of What's On Your Mind, Jerry and I examined the very first encounter Jerry had with writer and philosopher Matt Cardin. As a result of reading Jerry's book, Matt sent a fascinating and very insightful email to the website and Jerry responded. We thought Matt's original email was so powerful and that sharing it with you would make for an interesting episode. I think we were right and I hope you agree. If you'd like to ask a question or share your story of God, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com. We love hearing from you. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back everybody to another edition of What's on Your Mind. I'm Scott Langdon. I'm here with Jerry Martin and this is where we take the opportunity to read some emails that come into us from readers of the book listeners of this podcast. This week is a special email and I know the author of it because we've talked a lot about him before, not only on this show but also in our meetings and in our day-to-day, because he's a really interesting person.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:29: This was the first time– it was looking back at some of the early emails that it came back to me– one of the first I ever received, but the book was not yet published. We were putting excerpts online. Matt Cardin, who turned out to be a major horror writer, writer of horror fiction, very successful, wrote me that he had been reading these things and it was the first time I ever was aware of there being a Matt Cardin. Since then we've gotten to know him and we'll talk about that at some point.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 03:05: But for his own new podcast he interviewed me for the very first episode and I've often followed his work, got some of his books and so forth, but to show the kind of thing he does, two book titles I looked up – he's got about eight books that he's published– and one is titled Dark Awakenings. Dark Awakenings and another, Divinations of the Deep. What he's doing is not just hold on your seats frightening, but it's seeing the dark sides of reality, you might say, and so it has spiritual, religious, metaphysical significance in addition to being very gripping stories. I can't read much of that stuff. He sent some of his tamer stories that are exceptionally well done. So it was a wonderful thing to hear from him, and this was the very first time ever– is this email that you're sharing with us today?

Scott Langdon 04:12: Yeah, let's dig into this email. Matt Cardin says this:

A Letter From Matt: I've been looking at the online material at your website and finding it more than just a little interesting. I also found and read a copy of the speech you delivered to the Eric Voegelin Society about the onset of your divine hearing and the necessity of an epistemics of trust to counter the culturally dominant epistemics of skepticism. Really excellent stuff, and powerfully presented.

A Letter From Matt 04:42: Your thoughts and ongoing experiences strike me as fascinating and significant. I have been experiencing, reflecting on, and writing for several years about the issue of creative and even existential, all-encompassing dominance and life guidance by a muse/daemon/genius in the classical and esoteric mode. See my blog Demon Muse, where I've made available not only a collection of articles and essays but a free e-book about this very thing. Such experiences occurred in the intertwined experiences of Aleister Crowley, Timothy Leary and Robert Anton Wilson in being guided and communicated with what presented itself in their experience as an independent "higher intelligence."

A Letter From Matt 05:3: My experience aligns in deep harmony with your own and also with that of the other commenters on this site. This very fact -- that in our present-day culture of scientific materialism, there is a clear persistence of the ancient phenomenon of receiving ideas and communications from, and being in felt contact with, something that presents itself *in experience* as a separate, autonomous intelligence with a profound significance for one's personal life and overall worldview. This very fact is one that I think is moving inward from the margins of our collective discourse. In post-industrial technocratic society. It has come to be the central issue in my entire philosophy and outlook, and also, as I can see, in yours. My own emphasis and direction takes a darker turn than what you're doing, though, since my experience and understanding of demonic divine communication has fed directly into my career as a horror writer and an explorer of the intersections among and between horror, religion, philosophy, spirituality and the paranormal. In short, this all resonates with your own present work, which I'm finding most absorbing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:48: You know that was the first time ever from Matt Cardin, and so I didn't know much about him just receiving that email. But here's what I responded at the time: Matt, this is a very interesting set of comments. I hope that people who are alarmed at your mention of the demonic will understand that you are speaking of Daimon, the Greek term Socrates used to describe his own inner divine voice. It is striking that, coming from a very different background (depth psychology, spiritual philosophy and the creative arts ), you too see the phenomenon of Higher Intelligence coming to us in a personified form as the key to religion, philosophy and much more. I was told in prayer something like, "I come to you as a person," and "you can't present yourself as a Person without being a Person," but "I'm also much more than a Person." You and I agree that it is imperative to trust the divine or daemonic voice. Since the voice announced itself to me as God then, I trust that it is indeed God who is speaking, though I recognize that the same divine reality that is both a person and more than a person might speak to others in a different way. You stress ways in which listening to the divine or demonic voice is a source of creativity. My concern is not so much with creativity as with truth. Responding to God is a way of relating to reality in its deepest and fullest dimensions. Of course, these two emphases are compatible. Your website, by the way, is quite fascinating and I commend it to readers. I hope you will continue to bring your own deep insights to what is related here.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:49: And, as I say, we had a history after that and I had already looked at his website, just hearing what he said in this email, and looked up what kinds of things he wrote about and so forth, and we started a bit of a back and forth communication. And there are a lot here to talk about, Scott, but I prayed about the question before I came on with you: what should I be talking about? Because I didn't know which of these things should be picked up on, and maybe we can come back and pick up on some that I'm not about to foreground, but my guidance in prayer was talk about good and evil. And of course he is a horror writer and so I tend to be a bit– I was aware as I re-read this– my emphasis away from demon and toward the more classic notion of daimon which Socrates uses. Well, that's the nice side of daimon. I mean it makes it sound like not demon. But all these voices come to us and I'm always thinking well, but the nice ones, you might say the daimons of the sort that guided Socrates and, I feel, guide me, are the more ultimate reality and I, even on consideration, believe that is true.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:19: Nevertheless, there's something to the fact that there's evil in the world. This is not… You know, various religious traditions have some trouble with that phenomenon, because you want to think, well, the divine reality is kind of supervising everything or infusing everything. So how can there be evil? But there is.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:42: As the American philosopher William James says, reality is not just yes, yes all the way down. You come at various points to no, no. You come to something like ruptures in reality, like the tectonic plates where the continent sort of pull apart and you get earthquakes and sometimes, I guess in earlier times, mountains rising out of these plates rubbing together. And we're always… the parts of reality are rubbing together, and not just those are just physical, but people. I mean there is a Lady Macbeth, and Lady Macbeth is not simply an imaginary figure, as though someone wanted to make up some evil person that never, never the like existed. In fact the like has existed and the trade of the evil person, in a way, is they want to do evil precisely because it's evil. They know they're doing evil, they see some good.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:47: This is talked about in God: An Autobiography. When we're going through the world's religions and the early, maybe older than the Old Testament, it's hard to date these ancient phenomena, but of Zoroastrianism. Where the story is that there's the good God, Lord Wisdom, and I forget the name- the Hostile Spirit, and it seems there are two aspects of the God, but because it said they're twins, you know, so kind of like the two sides and it's up to the good God, you might say, to prevail and to get human beings to ally with the good God. And in fact the evil God says, “I'll come down and I will turn them against you and I'll make them hate you.” And in the Western tradition that's recognized as a kind of satanic figure. Okay, there is a dynamic force of evil, and I was thinking in this context, and people like me, you know, who like to be good and want to be good and like to think of myself as good, have the danger that the great psychologist Carl Jung talked about. He talked about the persona which is the Jerry I prefer to be and present myself as being, and the shadow self which is your darker sides, weaker sides, more malevolent sides where you have a grudge or just something irritates you and you kind of want to stick somebody. Well, that's also present in human nature, and what Jung argues is you can't just sweep the dark side under the rug. If you do, it's going to be out of control and it'll be manipulating you from behind and you don't even know when it's doing it. What you need to do, according to Jung, is to integrate the dark side with the light side. So, whatever you know, you talk about ego sometimes, Scott. Well, in a way, you need to not deny ego, at least by this chain of reasoning. You need to integrate that and make positive use of it, and I would assume that things like self-esteem have some good role for an actor, certainly in the kinds of walks of life I'm more familiar with. You want to be trying to put your best foot forward and do it well, and you want to be recognized for doing it well, and I think we have a separate thing we've done about ego, what's wrong with ego and differentiation between different senses of ego. The ego side that's just defiant of God, that is kind of satanic, and an ego side that just kind of enjoying being oneself, enjoying the kind of talents you have or whatever your assets are, just kind of enjoying those and that that's okay. But anyway, those are some thoughts about good and evil that are prompted by this horror writer who is looking at, you might say, the dark edges of reality.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:34: I was thinking about- the Christians do an odd translation of the first line of Genesis 1, so that you know, God created the heavens and the earth and the more precise that even Christian scholars recognize is sort of like as things were getting started.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:56: God created- and what it really means by some of the readings, scholarly readings is God created order, as if there's a kind of pre-existing chaos, but what there isn't is order and that God is the force for order.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:13: And when God starts then separating the light from the dark, God is creating order out of murk. and that there's always a kind of threat from the disorder, and that remains throughout the Old Testament and throughout human history, that there's always a threat from the disorder, the more malevolent, the chaotic, the unruly, the part that doesn't want to play well with others. You know,  that isn't cooperative, recalcitrant. And the aim of God, I'm told at the beginning, I’m a developing, I'm an evolving God. And I couldn't imagine what on earth does that mean? But, since God is also kind of everything, but God has God's own unruly side and you see that often and like Old Testament scenes, but those and other religions and God's trying and to harmonize all of this, doing probably the Jungian Integration is happening at the divine level as well and the cosmic level as well, as in the hearts of Jerry and Scott and the next person over.

Scott Langdon 17:25: There was an experience I had in high school. My junior year I was going to school in south Jersey where we were living, where I was growing up and came into Philadelphia to the Annenberg Center to see a production of King Lear by the Royal Shakespeare Company. And they were touring, you know, and came to America and, as they were doing and this was the mid-80s anyway um, the production was there was a bare stage, very bare stage, and there were only six actors. One of the actors played King Lear the whole time and the other five played various actors. And it was a class that I was taking in high school and we had read the play. It was an English class and we had read King Lear and so we knew what had gone on and everything. So, we were prepared as a class to go in and watch this production.

Scott Langdon 18:19: And when we were looking at the play bill beforehand, the program, when I was looking to see who is going to be playing Edgar and who was going to be playing Edmund, because we knew that there would be a big fight scene at the end between the two of them. Well, in this production I looked at the play bill and the same actor was going to be playing Edmund and Edgar and I thought how in the world?

Scott Langdon 18:43: Well, when it got to this scene, we were I mean, it was already taken in by the convention from the minute the lights went up. So it was just so absorbing and people playing different characters and stepping off the stage and sitting there as the actor sort of in view. But on the side, you know, it was just a whole way of doing theater. That was exciting and new and fresh costumes, very bare, very minimal staging, no set, really just a couple of chairs and a prop or two here or there. And anyway, we got to the place where Edmund was going to fight Edgar at the end of the play and this one guy just sort of fought himself this way and turned the other way like a kid this out, parrying this and jab. One guy.

Scott Langdon 19:24: But it was so believable. He was so masterful at his craft. I believed the whole thing. And a seed was planted in me in that moment and I'm relatively recently realizing this and you're talking about this now is helping me remember that I think a seed really was planted in me about this idea of duality. That here, that the physicality of this man being a good guy and a bad guy at the same time and fighting himself, was so visually presented to me that it made me start to think about that more. And so going through life now you kind of you see- why do I have this impulse to do a nasty thing? Why would I want to say this to this person, or why do I want to get revenge, or why do a… versus why do I not reach out in love? There is this duality, and when we talk about pre Earth pre us, you know, at creation, pre that, the way we talk about God, Isness, consciousness, whatever word you want to use for what is, becomes actualized as the world. When that happens, that forming of that chaos, God knows the actuality of otherness in the machinations of the world. It seems as if the only way you can really know things about yourself is to wrestle with that which you don't want to do.

Scott Langdon 21:07: St Paul talks about that. I have this want to do this, and yet this other thing that makes me want to do something else and he wrestles. That is the, you know, the stuff that makes– that's part of what the stuff is that makes life, life. Right? So I'm wondering what this, when we talk about it in that way where you know, now we have otherness, now we have, you know, somebody like Alan Watts would talk about you have to recognize that with every inside there's an outside, with every back there's a front. You know that doesn't happen, but for in the world, that doesn't happen, but for, in reality, the reality that we wake up into every day, the reality that when I'm reading a book and I'm so into this other world and my wife says, “Hey, Scott,” and I snap back into, oh huh, that reality. What is real.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:01: Yeah, yeah, and that's a… what I'm told in God: An Autobiography is it's part of the explanation for evil is God's entering a real world. And for a world to be real it's got to be material. It can't be– otherwise it's a fantasy world or an idea world or a hologram world or something. If it's going to be real, it needs to have materiality and, as you put it, Scott, it needs to have a front and a back, both, not just, I guess, pure ideas of people don't need fronts and backs and pure holograms. I don't know what they have on the back, you know, but the real world has materiality and that, I'm told, part of why there's sadness and pain in life is we're going to have highly developed beings. They need to be organic. You know they can't just be rocks and tree and stumps and stuff like that, streams and rivers. They need to be organic.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:09: And if you're organic, even short of being an intelligent, you know organic lifeform, if you're an organic, you're subject to disease, or harm. You can fall and hurt yourself. You're subject with one another. You're often competing for resources because some– we had some guy doing taking care of the grounds here at the condo where we live and he was talking about for every spot of ground in the earth there's a struggle going on. Every seed wants to grow in that ground, but there's some bird that wants to pluck something in their ground, or a worm that wants to come through, etc., etc. It's just full of these competing life forms, all the way down to little bitty things like bacteria and all the way up to big things like human beings and elephants. But they're competing for space. I mean, he was talking about sheer space, but also all the resources that space contains. The bird needs nutrients, the weed needs nutrients, the grass needs nutrients and so on with everything. We need the wherewithal to keep living, and so part of that is we also develop these egos that are we to be a highly developed being, to be intelligent.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:32: I was just reading a piece that you need to be the hero of your own story. You know, part of life is living out a story about yourself, and I know Abigail and her writings, believes we enact real stories. It's not just we make up things about our– but we're enacting a story, and a lot of the meaning of life is actually in the story and the drama of life. You know, King Lear is deeply meaningful. Why? Not because it's all roses, you know, or Macbeth, but because it's deeply, deeply meaningful. And why are the greatest plays of the Greeks and Shakespeare, all tragedies? Well, because tragedy is deeply meaningful.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:21: Right, this pushes the limits, you see, of human nature to its edge. So Oedipus ends up having to put his eyes out. He's gone to the edge of that life experience and played it out. And played it out as it turned out, mistakenly. But he's not in control of all of that. That's one of the lessons of Greek tragedies: you can't resist fate. Some things are just going to happen and you can do your darnedest, and your darnedest might just be making things worse. We live in a kind of darkness all the time. So you do the best you can, and I often kind of remind people the best you can is the best anybody can expect of you. They can't expect you to do better than you can do. They can't expect you to know more than you know.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:14: I always think Robert E Lee, who was a very fine fellow, fought for the wrong side, you know. Okay, that was his life situation in part, but he fought for the wrong side. I think they offered him command of the Union armies. It would have been a shorter civil war if he had accepted. But he felt, oh, I'm a Virginian. So I can't go against that. Lee's a Virginia and okay. So that's a tragic, that's a tragic decision with tremendous consequences for ill in that case.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:50: But you don't know the total picture. You're doing your best in any given moment and we only have to play our part. We don't have to play all the parts. We only have to do what's within our reach and what's, as Abigail tends to put it- does this task have my name on it? So if it's calling to Scott, then Scott should do it, but if it's not, even if it's a good thing, Scott's got other things Scott should be doing and Abigail should be doing, Jerry should be doing, and so that's part of the story of this drama of good and evil in life and of the tragic dimensions of fate, meaning roughly what's going to happen whether you do X, Y or Z or not, and you can't control that, but you have to operate within the frame of that and just do your best.

Scott Langdon 27:47: Thank you for listening to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. Subscribe for free today wherever you listen to your podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can hear the complete dramatic adaptation of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin by beginning with episode one of our podcast and listening through its conclusion with Episode 44. You can read the original true story in the book from which this podcast is adapted, God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, available now at amazon.com, and always at godanautobiography.com. Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com, and experience the world from God's perspective as it was told to a philosopher. This is Scott Langdon. I'll see you next time.