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 172. Welcome to God: An AutobiograGod: An Autobiography, The Podcast.
Scott Langdon 01:11: I'm your host, Scott Langdon, and this week on the podcast, we journey with Jerry Martin as God takes him back to the beginning of everything. In Episode 15, the episode we had originally called our Season 1 finale, God primed Jerry to receive God's story. And in episode 16, God begins from the very beginning, describing the events of creation with a point of view that has never before been expressed in this way. Next week, on our next edition of the Life Wisdom Project, Jerry and his special guest will sit down to discuss the implications of this remarkable experience God had with Jerry, and so this week we revisit episode 16. God Takes Me Back To The Beginning Of Everything. I hope you enjoy the episode.
Episode 16. God Takes Me Back To The Beginning Of Everything
JLM - Narrator (Jerry L. Martin) - voiced by Scott Langdon
GOD - The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice
JLM: I had received hints about the moment of creation. Then one day he told me more. This is where God's story really begins.
The Voice of God 02:28: 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.
JLM 02:44: I tried to still myself, to yield to whatever experience I was about to be given.
The Voice of God 02:51: I am in the midst of Nothingness...
JLM 02:55: "In the midst of Nothingness?" My logical alarm went off. “Lord, how can I make sense of this?”
The Voice of God 03:04: Don't worry now about making sense of it. Just listen.
JLM 03:10: I tried again to still myself and yield.
The Voice of God 03:18: I am in the midst of Nothing. 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’s as if I punch My arms and legs through the sides of a bag I'm in. It’s like an explosion. In a split second, fragments are zooming out in all directions. I’m at a throbbing, pulsing center. I’m not sure what's happening. It’s like a tightly coiled spring suddenly released and springing out into a vast space instantaneously. I scramble to take control, to provide order.
JLM 04:29: I tried to picture all this in terms of the Big Bang theory. In the first trillionth of a trillionth of a second, the universe expanded faster, much faster than the speed of light.
The Voice of God 04:42: 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 at that stage.
JLM 05:10: “Lord, you have taken me through a story that is completely unorthodox and embarrassingly anthropomorphic. What am I to make of that?”
The Voice of God 05:18: I’m not interested in what you make of it -- or in conforming My account to your prior beliefs. I am using literal language because that is the only way to explain the experience of being God.
JLM 05:33: But "experience" is also anthropomorphic.
The Voice of God 05:37: Not really. I am a Person, but I am not only a Person. I am also much more. There is something you might call "what it is like" to be God. That’s what "experience" refers to.
JLM 05:53: “But Lord, You are admitting serious limitations as You scramble to create order out of chaos. That’s not our idea of God.”
The Voice of God 06:03: Limitations only from My perspective. By your standards I already had unimaginable power and knowledge.
JLM 06:13: But You say You knew nothing.
The Voice of God 06:15: In one sense I knew nothing. But, in another sense, I was viewing everything from another level--as when your senses are confused but your mind is clear and is noting with precision the nature and contours of the confusion.
JLM 06:32: Perhaps like a researcher taking a hallucinogen and carefully noting its effects.
The Voice of God 06:38: 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. I was not yet a Person. I was not yet self-aware. I was amorphous energy flowing out radically in all directions. Before Creation, I am pure spirit, sufficient unto Myself. I felt I was lacking something--grounding, facticity, the blunt materiality, the hard edge to push oneself against, the resistance and friction that physical objects have. So, out of My Being, a world was spun. I look at the world, matter, around Me. Dead. Nothing there. I’m ready for action, for interaction, but there is nothing. Just whirls and splashes and explosions. Matter has a subjective side, a "within," that subliminally experiences its surroundings, but that is too limited to interact with, too limited to be satisfying. So I infuse My spirit into matter, as if trying to blow life into it. Like blowing bubbles, I blow and blow molecules, complex molecules, the building blocks of life.
JLM 09:27: That was a meaningful image even if anthropomorphic. Even for scientists, the origins of life--even the answer to "What is life?"--is a profound mystery. If there is a God, then surely He would be part of that story, and "blowing life into it" might be about as precise as anything.
The Voice of God 09:48: I feel My way, pulled forward by a telos or goal emergent in each step, the way an intellectual project often develops from one insight to another. I am pulling life forward, eliciting the development of its potential, drawing it to more complex forms. In this process, consciousness is quite a miracle, even from My point of view. I had consciousness before, but I didn't think of it that way. I just was and matter was. It was quite startling to see other consciousness develop. Consciousness developed very slowly. The first glimmer is found in the lowest molecules, in their ability to interact with, to respond to, their environment. 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’s like a child picking up a harp and being surprised to find that strumming makes beautiful sounds--and delightedly playing with it. At the beginning, the cosmos was My playpen, My garden of delights. It was beautiful, dazzling.
JLM 11:34: But You felt alone?
The Voice of God 11:37: Yes, I wanted more. In retrospect, the inanimate years feel very lonely. The emergence of life is a delight. With life, spirit comes into play. Wonderful to see amoeba, moss, and so forth. The frogs and other creatures, each with a soul and personality, each in a sense in tune with God. I can play with the animals, "walk among them." I love their myriad forms. I am not alone anymore. The creatures that began to stir on the earth are amazing, more amazing than anything that had yet occurred in creation. They move on their own; they have dramatic lives--even the worms and fishes. There is birth, growth, death, mating, offspring, colonies and flocks, emergent social orders -- ideality as well. There is telos and purpose, success and failure, standards of perfection and imperfection. And over time, further developments in the species, a most amazing, creative ramifying of the evolutionary ladder. New species emerge that could not have been imagined before. Your paleontology tells the story: the first horses could easily fit into the palm of a hand, and so forth. Can you imagine the spectacle?
JLM 13:18: Yes, I think I can.
The Voice of God 13:22: It is not true that the lower forms have no spiritual response. They are in harmony, in attunement with nature and with Me. Their capacity may be limited, but they have the advantage that they don’t have any filters. Their world is much less dualistic, more holistic, with less individuality and separateness -- and hence less separateness from Me. It is mainly instinctual un-self-conscious rapport that we have.
JLM 13:57: Why isn't that enough?
The Voice of God 14:00: In a sense it is. Animals do have uniqueness. Each animal is distinct, has its own soul. But they lack self-awareness, and that’s true even of cats and dogs and apes. You can interact with them but there’s no second-order reflection, hence a very truncated sense of time--just temporal motion, a 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. And so I created mankind.
Scott Langdon 15:27: 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.