15. A New Journey Begins | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher [Part 15]

“Pure Being is not an abstraction but a living force, focused personally.”  

Welcome to 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.

Read God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher.

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Transcript

GOD: AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY - THE PODCAST

JLM -       Narrator (Jerry L. Martin) - voiced by Scott Langdon
Jerry -     Jerry Martin - voiced by Scott Langdon
GOD -    The Voice of God - voiced by Jerry L. Martin, who heard the voice

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EPISODE FIFTEEN: Where a new kind of journey is about to begin

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JLM

My experiences with God were personal and intimate. Philosophers drain the life out of him. God the person becomes God the abstraction--the Unmoved Mover, the One, the Absolute, infinite substance, The Ground of Being, the being whose essence is to exist. William Butler Yeats describes the result: "High on some mountain shelf/Huddle the pitiless abstractions bald about the neck."

JLM

Feelings, along with other affects, are taken to be weaknesses. So God is regarded as passionless, so passionless that is difficult to see how he can love. St. Anselm puzzles over how a passionless God can be compassionate. His solution is that "we experience the effect of compassion, but Thou does not experience the feeling."

You can see the logical puzzle: we experience God's love even though God feels no love for us. For the philosophers, even to speak of a personal God is at best a metaphor or analogy. But in my experience, God is not a metaphor. He is a person to whom we can pray and who can give us guidance about our lives. However, I was told...

GOD

They do have some aspects of me right. 

JERRY

What do they have right?

GOD

They understand that I am pure Being, Being unto itself. They understand my metaphysical essence. They do not understand my dynamic existence, a force...

JERRY

A person?

GOD

Yes, and a person. They use these categories in a way that makes them mutually exclusive, but they are not. Pure Being is not an abstraction but a living force, focused personally. Do not avoid metaphysics, but always listen to me or you will go on the wrong track. 

JLM

I had read Martin Buber's I and Thou when I was a college freshman and had not looked at it since then. But when I fell in love and realized that she loved me back, the opening words of Part 3 came back to me: 

"The extended lines of relations meet in the Eternal Thou." 

Love between human beings has a trajectory toward the divine. 

That recollection rekindled my interest in Buber. Returning from New York, where Abigail still taught, I started reading Maurice Friedman's highly-praised biography. Buber's philosophical awakening occurred during adolescence, prompted by "the fourteen-year-old's terror before the infinity of the universe." Buber wrote, "A necessity I could not understand swept over me: I had to try again and again to imagine the edge of outer space, or its edgelessness, time with a beginning and an end or a time without beginning or end, and both were equally impossible, equally hopeless...Under an irresistible compulsion, I reeled from one to the other, at times so closely threatened with the danger of madness that I seriously thought of avoiding it by suicide."

I stopped reading for a moment, and as the train rumbled on, I pondered the "edge of infinity." I was taken over by a powerful image, visual, and visceral. I felt and saw space at its edges, rushing, expanding outward, unfurling itself with vast force and at almost instantaneous speed, without stop, neither a completed infinity nor merely finite. The vision had a tremendous feeling of life-force, of Being unfurled, bursting forth at reckless speed. 

Buber was saved from the brink of suicide by reading Immanuel Kant. Unsolvable questions arise, Kant argues, from trying to reason about space and time as if they were characteristics of reality in itself. They are really just forms or our experience, he says, or, as a Kantian might put it today, features of our scientific paradigms or theological frames. This reassuring view gave Buber "philosophical peace." 

There now came to Buber "an intuition of eternity," not as endless time, but as "Being as such." I moved deeply into myself to get some sense of what this might mean. I felt a great rushing, gushing, like a geyser, welling up inside me and rising up through all tiers of reality, an energy or life-force, creative and growing, but more basic and undifferentiated than these terms suggest, as if it were the very Being of these forces, running through the whole of reality. It rushed, expanded, created, grew not just outwardly but in a vertical dimension as well, from the primordial base up to the creative spiritual edge. It was, in some sense, erotic energy from bottom to top, with no level, not even the most elemental, ever eclipsed. The vision ended. I slumped back, breathing hard. 

*

I wondered what it could mean for Being as such to be a person, a Thou, as surely, from my own experience, God is. Then it struck me that this rushing Stuff, this force of Being, is also the being of me. And I am a person. So why shouldn't the rushing Stuff, the Being of--of what?--the World, of Being itself, be a person writ large?  

I don't mean the world merely in a physical sense, since my own being is not merely that of my body. Similarly, the Being that animates everything could be a Person.

As I looked out the window at the passing trees, it struck me that their very leaves are full of Being, as such, the Being that is also a Person, and that it made sense for them to be a Thou for me. And, more remarkably, for me to be a Thou for them. I felt that Being facing Being, not necessarily speaking but simply facing, is what personhood is. 

I slumped back again and put the book aside. Later, I read for several pages. I was struck by how many thoughts that I had received had also occurred to Buber. He entered a Nietzschean phase with an emphasis on "dynamism" and "a creative flow of life-force." Later Buber thought eternity "sends forth time out of itself" and "sets us in that relationship to it that we call existence." To achieve wholeness as a person, he said, it is necessary to direct the creative force of the Evil Urge, the erotic energy that I felt to be at the center of Being itself. 

I reached Washington and returned to my apartment in Alexandria, then resumed reading. I had left off with Buber speaking of the quality of "fervor with direction, all the awesome power of the 'evil urge' taken up into the service of God, (seventeenth-century visionary theologian Jakob) Boehme's 'ternary of light'(symbolizing love) without losing any of its power thereby." This was "one of the truly decisive moment's in Buber's life": "Overpowered in an instant, I experienced the Hasidic soul," he writes. "At the same time I became aware of the summons to proclaim it to the world." I knew how he felt. 

I had received visions of the explosive expansions of time and space, and of divine energy rushing up through all levels of reality. 

JERRY

Were these intimations of creation?

GOD

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. 

JLM

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 afterward:

"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.

THE END (For now...)