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

181. What's on Your Mind- Sacred Places and Divine Presence

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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Have you ever felt an inexplicable connection to a location, as if the divine was palpably present just for you?

Ajit Das shares his mystical tales from Kushinagar and insights on lightening the body and mind in the newest What's On Your Mind. Picture a place so steeped in spiritual history that simply being there engulfs you in peace—a phenomenon Ajit likens to a mother's embrace. Jerry responds with his thoughts on actualizing this lightness in our daily lives.

Join us as we uncover the spiritual significance of sacred locations and how they embody divine wisdom. We discuss the nature of time, concentric circles, and the value of these holy places. Ajit's message, woven with his personal encounters of divine warmth, inspires us to consider how we too might find that lightness of being and spiritual liberation that Buddha spoke about, whether it be through yoga, meditation, or selfless service. Reflect on the omnipresence of God and how paying attention to spiritual experiences can lead to divine encounters.

Explore God from the hushed reverence in a conservative Jewish synagogue to a historic theater, where touching the walls seems to connect us to a lineage of experience. Jerry and Scott probe the paradoxical nature of a God who is everywhere and yet experienced more intensely in certain moments and places.

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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 181. Hello and welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. 

Scott Langdon 01:11: I'm Scott Langdon and I'm thrilled to be here this week with Dr. Jerry Martin to bring you another edition of what we call What's On Our Mind. This week we have an email from a dear friend of the podcast, Ajit Das. If Ajit's name sounds familiar to you, it might be because he was Jerry's special guest in episode 155. It was a Life Wisdom episode we titled the Harmony of Spiritual Wisdom and Self-Help. Ajit's wonderful email this week sparked a discussion between Jerry and me about divine spiritual presence and how God seems to be more present in some places and at some moments than in other places and other moments. If you'd like to ask a question or share your story of God, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com. 

Scott Langdon 02:00: Here now is What's On Your Mind. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back everybody to another edition of What's on Your Mind. I'm Scott Langdon, right here with Jerry Martin, and today we read a special email from somebody who's a friend of the podcast, Ajit Das. Very excited about this one, Jerry. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:22: Well, I I had forgotten about this email, but it takes me back because I've gotten to know Ajit since then and he did a life wisdom episode in fact and and I know, and you see it in what he's– what we're going to visit in his communication- he was someone who, even though he was technically inclined, went to to India's version of MIT, he was always probing the spiritual dimensions of reality and that stood out, you know, to his fellow students, some of whom I have also encountered and I think has a blog now and so forth. But it's a wonderful email that he's sent us. 

Scott Langdon 03:04: Yes, it's very exciting. He talks about a place that he goes and experiences a very spiritually interesting and uplifting situation. Here is Ajit's email. Ajit writes this:

A letter from Ajit 03:18: I discovered a place in the year 2000 which is 5 hours away from my hometown in India called Kushinagar that is spiritually charged. Kushinagar has the distinction of being the place where Gautama Buddha attained Nirvana upon his death. The followers of Buddhism, especially from Asian countries, wish to visit this place at least once in their lifetime. Why is that so? From my experience I can tell you that as soon as you enter this city your body starts to de-stress like one feels when slipping into meditation. After an overnight sleep, as I woke up at my hotel which was in the line of sight of the main temple I was as refreshed as I would have been had I meditated the whole night. I took a round of the main temple in the morning and was drawn towards a brick platform from where Buddha used to give sermons. To my surprise I found a greenish aura on the surface of this platform visible to the naked eye. This was indeed miraculous and the feeling while you sat in its vicinity was blissful. I returned to this place 6 years later and surrendered to this spiritual energy from my heart. To my surprise, I immediately felt a tickle in my heart and a warmth enveloped my whole being – the kind one feels when your mother hugs you with love. This feeling remained with me for 3 months and I would feel so complete with this blissful state that I didn’t want to meet anyone nor do any work. I realized I was losing balance and going over the deep end of spirituality! So I pulled myself together and resumed my work. Recently I read a quote of Buddha in Kushinagar that implied that we must find salvation in this life before the inevitable perishing of our body. I wondered what does anyone mean by “salvation”? The answer came to me immediately. Salvation in this life is when one can remain “light” in every situation. If you are divinely charged and lightened you are enlightened!!! There are many ways in which you can lighten your body and lighten your mind. Yoga, meditation, selfless service, friendships, music and dance are a few of them which have been tried and tested by me.

Scott Langdon 05:58: And that's from Ajit. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Well, isn't that amazing. 

Scott Langdon: Yeah I love it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:00: Yeah, just astounding. Well, I wrote at the time to Ajit: These are wonderful experiences! One can enter a state of spiritual bliss or contentment or even rapture. These are valuable ways to connect with the divine. But, as you say, you can also lose balance and go over the deep end! What I am told in the God book is that these are valuable experiences for drawing energy from the divine but having these experiences is not the be-all and end-all. Life is about the living of it, and we should live and act in partnership and harmony with God. According to what I was told in prayer, the goal of life, one term for which is “salvation,” is achieved whenever we turn our souls upward, toward the divine. It sounds as if what you call lightness is one way to do that and, as you point out, it can be actualized in a number of different ways. Each of us has to find the ways that best connect us to the divine (by whatever name seems right to us) (It doesn't have to be God). By sharing you experience, Ajit, you have also given us an excellent teaching!

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:32: And that's one thing I love about these What's on Your Mind emails that we read. People's spiritual experience when reported just as it was. It doesn't have to be someone with almost a specialty in this area the way Ajit has. Whatever experiences you have provide a teaching. They provide lessons for all of us. We learn from each other by sharing these kinds of experiences. Ajit has really given us a wonderful set of reflections here, based on his own actual experience, and a lot to think about here. 

Scott Langdon 08:14: Yes, it's a beautiful story and beautifully written down and I really loved going through it and reading it, and right away, right up toward the top, when he says, “from my experience, I can tell you that as soon as you enter this city, your whole body starts to de-stress, like one feels when slipping into meditation.” And upon reading that line the first time, I thought this is interesting because I think I've had experiences with locations that make me feel this way and I was wondering if you had a location that made you feel like this a cathedral you walked into or someplace outside, or is there something that this resonates with? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:01: Yeah, I don't think I've really talked much about what they call sacred places often. This Buddhist site is a sacred place and I guess my own religiosity is so much through prayer and that sense of a direct relationship in moments of prayer, although there's a background to prayer also. It's not just you mumble some words, but there are places, and especially the early days of having these experiences, I was almost preternaturally sensitive. I remember I would go into a usually a place of worship, and I would feel divine presence. On one occasion it was a conservative Jewish synagogue. For somebody's bar mitzvah and I go in everybody's chattering, you know, they all know each other and I felt as if I'd walked into a wall of the divine, that it was so palpably real that I looked around. You know, aren't others noticing this? But no, they just went through. You know, it's all familiar to them. But that was maybe the most dramatic sense of divine presence, presence. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin: I had other occasions, one, I think, in a downtown, probably Protestant church in a city I was visiting Portland or Seattle or something and I felt a divine absence that was so stark that I felt I couldn't breathe. There was no oxygen in this place and I raced for the door to get out of it. And I've had other experiences as well and I have friends who– I have a very good friend who has a vivid sense of the divine experienced in nature, and it's experienced in nature in so vivid a way that it has a personal dimension, which I don't know if it speaks I didn't probe it that much, what, just exactly the nature of the experience. But she feels certainly accompanied, you might say, and that personal dimension of nature is feminine for her, so she relates to the feminine aspect of a kind of richly personified nature. And you know, those are among many. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:46: And what I think is each person has to figure out well, where do you find the sacred, or God, or where do you feel you're encountering the deepest dimensions of reality, those dimensions most relevant to your life, and pay attention to that. And it's going to be different from one person to another for all kinds of reasons. And maybe some sacred places, that's because of where the sacred is. That's a possibility too. Here, sacred because of events that happen surrounding the life of Buddha, and Buddha doesn't just disappear, even on death, but continues as a presence. So that makes that a sacred place. And I don't know, do you have a sacred place, Scott? Places you've been where you think, wow, this is really special. 

Scott Langdon 12:43: Yeah, and my earliest experiences with that kind of a feeling it's actually more of a comparative type of feeling that I've experienced in my life. The earliest times were in the mid-70s when we were living across the street from my grandparents in South Philadelphia area and going to church at the Lutheran church that we walked to. That was, you know, two blocks away from our house and was where I was christened as a baby and where my mom was raised and my grandparents had been going there forever. So during the seventies it had this very strong feeling of presence for me as a boy singing in the children's choir and you know all of the events that we would have at the church building and there was this old stained glass, windowed, brick, red brick building that to me seemed really large. The cathedral seemed like this big cathedral and it was packed every Sunday, and there was a full adult choir and there were children's choirs and it was everything. 

Scott Langdon 13:56: This was the 70s and then in the late 70s, 78, we moved into New Jersey and I grew up, you know, in the 80s and early 90s in that area and in the eighties and the nineties a lot of folks either passed away or moved away and my grandparents were still living there. So when we would go to visit I could see the church sort of in a decline. The building was declining. The stained glass windows were not boarded up but there was a plastic over them that was sort of dimmed now and not many people were coming. My grandmother still attended every week, but it was a handful 20, 30 people, a new minister, that didn't have any. And I remembered thinking, when I would go in college and come back and visit grandma every once in a while, that this wasn't the church of my youth. It was very clear, but I didn't feel any of that sensation, that sort of God was present, like I did when I was a kid. 

Scott Langdon 15:01: I'm comparing that to an occasion that happened to me when I first started working at the Walnut Street Theater, which was built and opened in 1809. So it's been around for obviously for a long, long time, and one of my first shows that I worked there, the stage manager, who has become a really good friend she brought me over backstage. We were working doing a technical rehearsal for something. We were on the stage at this point and we were on a break from the rehearsal and we were backstage, stage left, and she said to me, “Scott, come here,” my friend Debbie. She said, “Come here.” So I went over and she had her hand on the wall and the bricks were exposed in this wall and it's just the way it is back there and she said, “Put your hand on this brick.” I went okay, so I put my hand on the brick and she said, “This brick was here when Thomas Jefferson was in the audience.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:00: Wow.

Scott Langdon 16:07: And I was like wow. And later on that day I was probably after rehearsal, because I was alone on the stage and I just was there was nobody in the in the house or nobody in the audience, I mean, and just me alone sitting standing on the stage, and I was thinking about all of the actors and people who have been on that stage. I wondered, like, what was going on the night that, let's say, Lincoln was assassinated. He was at a play in Washington DC. Well, there was a play going on in Philadelphia, on this stage, and I was thinking I'm standing in the same spot where, you know, Marlon Brando and Jessica Tandy stood, you know, and all of these people, and I'm thinking and I could understand the stories of ghosts and ghosts in the theater, and I'm not claiming that I saw a ghost, but I felt this presence in a very similar way that I did when I was eight in church. 

Scott Langdon 17:01: It felt alive and it felt like there was history here and it felt like there was stuff going on and it was going on now too, that we were contributing something that sometime in the future 50, 60, a hundred years in the future, somebody goes, you know Scott Langdon and Fran Prisco and whoever else you know we're standing on this stage. Like you don't know right, but it's a place that's marked in that history and when I went the 90s when I would visit my grandmother in the church, it was very empty, thinking there's not anything going on here, there's not a life here. The same way I felt that life in the theater, on the stage. There was something about the action in the space that made it interesting to me. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:47: Yeah, that's very striking. 

Scott Langdon 17:50: Spiritual action Does that make sense Like a spiritual action. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:57: Yes. And it's a kind of energy in part. I mean energy is an apt symbol, at least for that kind of spiritual presence and activity. Also thinking about that sense that when you go into a place, Thomas Jefferson was once here, you know. If they did some research you might be able to point out he was there in the third row, four seats from the aisle. And there's this funny place I've visited historic sites and there is this funny way in which we're all contemporaries of each other, that they're here. Their spirit lingers. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:46: One doesn't know how to describe it exactly or how not to just be fanciful about it. Nevertheless, there seems to be something real also. Whatever fanciful there is about it, there's also something real and that you're joining a great procession, I might say, of time where you have forebears and they brought you to this point and you hope you're doing your job so that you're bringing whoever else comes along after you to the point they need to be. One other experience that occurs to me was, before I heard the God voice, I was in a period of psychological turmoil, you might say just things going on in my life. Back when I was teaching in Boulder, on the weekend in the late afternoon as the lights were beginning to dim, there was a great, great old, I don't know what kind of tree, I think it was an old oak tree, just massive and way older than any of us you know, and you know they always make fun of tree huggers. Well, I literally went and hugged this tree and the feeling of it was not just oh, what a beautiful tree it was, oh, this tree has been around, you know, kind of like an embodiment of wisdom. This tree has seen it all, has seen things come and go, and a kind of wisdom accrues from taking in what’s coming and going, and to connect with that wisdom. I don't know what the point of the hug was exactly, but a bonding or something like that. Let's create a connection between that wisdom and Jerry Martin and what he's going through. And it seemed it's hard to describe, you know what this kind of transaction is, that one encounters nature in this particular way, and it can be nature or it can be kind of a historic thing that one can imagine clinging, you know, embracing in much this way that you want to kind of connect personally with the wisdom embodied in that particular location. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:45: When we go to Riverside which we do for Abigail's medical treatments Riverside, California, where I grew up, there's a place that we see each time we drive by, where I had a kind of spiritual experience mystical, whatever you want to call it when I was a high school kid, with my friends waiting for a ride to pick us up after seeing a movie, and I reported in God: An Autobiography when Abigail asked me did you ever have any mystical or spiritual experiences before? And first I said no. And then this came back to me and it comes back to me as a place, because there it is. If I were famous like the Buddha, there'd be an historic marker. I can virtually see right where I was standing and while the group chattered I kind of went off into a separate space. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:42: You might say that it's hard to describe, but it was as if there were concentric circles whirling around and as if the nature of time had disclosed itself. And then later I came upon I won't be able to quote it accurately, but TS Eliot's line at the still center of the turning world and there is the dance. And he adds there is only the dance. So there is the still center in addition to the dance, but the still center is what creates the dance around it. And that stuck with me and I later did philosophical work on conceptions of time and so forth because of that prompt from an experience in that location. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:32: I don't know if that was a sacred place in any sense, other than that's where it happened. And so if I were to revisit it who knows? It now has a different function as space, but I don't know what I might experience if I did go and try to stand there again now, but maybe there would be something. But it does seem valuable for people to find those places. Find those places that open your heart and the depths of your soul to some further connection with reality. 

Scott Langdon 24:09: One of the things that I find really interesting about this idea is what God tells you, which is I am more present in some places than I am in other places, which kind of baffled me, because He also tells you that the idea of the Atman is the Brahman, you know, the Hindu idea of everything is God. Is that true? And God literally says yes, that's correct. So it's a little baffling because He’s like well, if everything is God, then why wouldn't every place feel the same kind of sacred? If I am God, having experience, then it would seem that I would always have a notion that every place I am is sacred. And yet God says at the same time what's happening is, I seem to be more present in certain spaces than other spaces. Could you talk about that for a second? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:11: Yeah, of course I was puzzled. Much the same way you are, Scott. I was also told there's nowhere I am not, and yet there was that, in fact, I gave a talk about it because I was sort of puzzling over, I think, of the ubiquitous presence of God, the sense in which God is everywhere and in all things, including us, and I forget the differential presence of God, you know where God is somehow, in spite of that statement, more present in certain moments. I think I'm given as examples some of these great transitions in life of birth and death and so forth. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:57: Well, God is there with the dying person and with the family of the dying person in a rather special way. I think it's one of these cases I'm told over and over, when I have these conundrums, this seems contradictory to that: think both and don't think either or. So then you have to try to figure out, like quantum mechanics or something, how can it both be in a location and not in a location? You have to be able to think ah, there is some sense or way in which the divine is omnipresent and is everything, and yet we have fundamental to God: An Autobiography that God is also a person, and you know how can that make sense? A person, we're persons, so God also has a specific, you might say, embodiment or particularity, and through that particularity relates to our particularities and I suppose it would be connected with that that, okay, there's this fundamental, you might say metaphysical sense in which everything is God, there's nothing that's not God. And as you said once when I thought it was very apt, Scott, when one of our correspondents said he couldn't find God anywhere, kind of looked here, looked there, looked nowhere, nowhere, and like looking in an empty closet, and you said, maybe God's in the empty closet, right, I mean, God's there too. You think there's no God, but you're just not quite realizing what it would be for there to be God that you're encountering. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:45: At the same time, there is the differential presence of God that accounts for these profound experiences of the sort Ajit reports and that we've kind of shared a bit right here, of these special places that are sacred or special for a particular individual and places and you know he mentions music and dance and so forth, which I think surely makes sense to anybody with a kind of spiritual turn of mind. But yeah, those are places you almost particularly enact the divine, especially if you're a maker of music. Not just I'm only a listener, but if you're also a maker of music you're part of the creative process of music and of that divine presence that is in music in a way rather different than it is in, oh, the asphalt in the highway right, and we can't connect much with the asphalt and the highway. Whatever level of divinity is present there, it's real and so it's got to have that. But there are other aspects that are very much richer in the differentiated presence of the divine. And then, given individual needs to find where is that for me, or what many places is it for me? And that requires something.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:19: We often talk about the paying attention. You need to notice, because some people just kind of drift through situations running from one thing to another. Because we're busy. Right, you're running around shopping, you've got to pick up somebody at the airport, but you got to pause sometimes. Just pause and take it in, and take in this or that scene you're in or how it's affecting you, or what presence you feel that or what you feel inside when you're there. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:53: You've got to, as I sometimes call it, just get the clutter out of the way and, in what I'm writing now, something I call it getting a clarified soul. And clarified soul doesn't mean something super-duper highfalutin like Buddha, necessarily, but it does mean get all these distractions and preoccupations out of the way, some of which have to do with ego and ego dynamics and life projects, but there are all kinds of things. They're just things you worry about, things you feel guilty about, things that are people demanding your attention to and okay, well, they got to back off occasionally so you can spend time with just you and the ultimate and taking in one another. 

Scott Langdon 30:40: Well, I want to thank Ajit for giving us another wonderful email to start a great conversation. I really enjoyed this with you today, Jerry. Thank you. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:49: Yes, yes, I thank Ajit also, and thank you, Scott. 

Scott Langdon 31:05: 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.