26. Zoroaster Sees God’s Other Side | Dramatic Adaptation Of God: An Autobiography, As Told To A Philosopher [Part 26]

"There is a relationship between people that occurs only within the spiritual matrix that is My presence in the world. In living the ethical life, people are participating in Me."

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

Season Two - Episode Twenty Six

 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
   


JLM

Today, even before praying, I felt anxiety rising, an agitated foreboding. I told myself: Avoid surprises. Just review the route already taken.

JERRY

Maybe I should start with Your message and then go over Your personal development?

GOD

No, they can't be separated in that way. 

Look at what I told you about the Garden of Eden—

it is equally a story of My development.

Take Zoroaster, for example. 

I wasn't trying to communicate My dual nature. 

I was just being Me, and it is an aspect of Me that he picked up on and articulated very sharply, perhaps too sharply. 

But that interaction between Zoroaster and Me 

was a growth experience for Me, 

as well as for him and humankind. 

I came to see My other side more clearly.

JLM

Okay, this was it: His other side? Take a deep breath and keep walking. 

JERRY

Other side? What is that, Lord?

GOD

I am limited and incomplete—

in a sense, not all-powerful; 

in a sense, not-all-knowing; 

in a sense, not all-good. 

I am searching for My own fullness, 

and since I am also the World—

the totality of I–the world–humanity are 

all seeking fullness, together, in partnership.

JLM

God continued to ride roughshod over my lifelong understanding of what God, if He existed, would have to be like. 

(Music)

JLM

Before Moses, before Akhenaten, before Zoroaster himself, there was what was known simply as the Old Religion. From roughly the fourth millennium b.c.e., it was practiced by people living on the south Russian steppes.

The Old Religion affirmed a cosmic order, later called Asha by the Persians and Rta by the Indians, that ensures the regularity of the stars and the seasons and orderly existence for the community. The human order is part of this cosmic order. 

Virtue--especially truth, honesty, loyalty, and courage--sustains the natural order; vice disrupts it. Prayer and sacrifice support Asha or Rta, which is also upheld by the highest god, Ahura Mazda--literally, the Lord Wisdom--who submits to it as well. In this effort, he is aided by six lesser gods, the Holy Immortals--Good Purpose, Best Righteousness, Holy Devotion, Desirable Dominion, Health, and Long Life.

GOD

Yes, they perceived the order of the cosmos, which is physical, spiritual, and moral. Worship and sacrifice are rightful parts of that order. Without them, man is not in his proper place and I cannot be in Mine--in part because there is a hierarchy, and I am the source of order in the soul and telos for man and nature, and in part because I deserve respect, so that "something is rotten in Denmark" when I am not paid respect and a person ignores Me or snubs Me or insults Me and glorifies himself or herself. 

The individual soul, the family, the community, and I are all thrown out of kilter, distorted, put awry, by such actions and attitudes. Worship and sacrifice put things in their proper order. They orient the soul to Me, and they allow Me to enter into the person and provide guidance and safety.

JLM

The cosmogony of the Old Religion starts with the sky and water and earth, not unlike Genesis. But then the gods create the three prototypical creatures--one plant, one animal, and one man--reminiscent of Plato's forms, which are not universals, such as humanity, but models, such as the perfect man or perfect justice.

GOD

Yes, very similar, and not inapt. 

JERRY

Then the gods offered a triple sacrifice, killing the man, the animal, and the plant. All life springs from this sacrifice, and as the Zoroastrian scholar Mary Boyce puts it, "the cycle of being is thus set in motion."

GOD

Yes, there is a deep truth here. The world is a sacrifice. By that I mean the act of creation is a sacrifice and ongoing existence is a sacrifice. It is a sacrifice for Me, more precisely for the God beyond God, to enter the world. And the world itself is a sacrificial offering. It is a place of struggle and suffering, not just for living creatures, but for Me as well. But, like a sacrifice, it is a struggle that makes sacred, that makes holy, that honors and submits to the ultimate divine ordering. I submit to that and the world must submit to that.

JERRY

But I don't understand why it is necessary to create a world at all, if it entails such suffering?

GOD

But, you see, holiness unto itself is nothing. Pure bland eternal perfection is nothing. It is not even perfection--it has not been mediated as Hegel would say--it has no internal complexity, no development, no achievement. It has the perfection of a blank sheet of paper or a lump of clay not yet shaped into a figure. 

For the soul, including My soul, there must be spiritual growth, not just a placid acceptance of untested consciousness, a self that does not yet know itself to be a self, a goodness that has not yet fought evil and temptation (the greatest evil is always within). Even the plenitude-of-being idea is not without merit.

JLM

This is the idea that the best world would be one brimming with as much being as possible, and so God created a world filled with every gradation of being, from the most perfect down to the least perfect.

GOD

Would one think it more perfect if the universe consisted of a single, unchanging hydrogen atom, rather than a flailing, mortal organism?

JERRY

Boyce explains that, each day, rituals reenacted the original sacrifice.

GOD

Of course, each of our lives reenacts--is engaged in--the sacrifice at every moment.

JERRY

What about the Old Religion's views on death and the hereafter? 

GOD

It has to do with the meaning of life. Death is always about the meaning of life. Afterlife is always about the assessment or judgment of life.

JLM

Central to this religion was the sanctity of oaths, contracts, and treaties--stable elements in a violent world--protected by the high god Mithra.

JERRY

Lord, isn't this emphasis on oaths overdone?

GOD

Good question. A person's word is sacred. What is the basic bond between people that expresses the I and the Thou, that respects the Thou and the selfhood of the other person? It is speaking truthfully and giving one's word, backed by one's honor and integrity and personhood, for agreements made. They were very right to fix on the sacredness of one's word.

JERRY

According to Boyce, and I quote, “A power was felt to be latent in the spoken pledge, and this power came to be recognized as a divinity.”

GOD

Of course. Think about it. What miracle permits man to speak--to speak truthfully of things--with all that implies for the referential capacity of language, for the ability of experience and other evidence to reach the truth of things, not to mention higher truths, or mathematical or conceptual or metaphysical or cosmogonic truths?

In a sense, all knowledge reaching out to things, consciousness reaching out beyond itself, is a divine act, is inspired, filled with My spirit. What do you think is the tie that connects the mind to the object? Just light rays and the like? But you know how little that explains. It doesn't even explain how you know light rays.

 Now think of the further act, the promise. It is made to a person. That requires a further miracle, the recognition of the other as other. Even recognizing objects as other, as not merely parts of one's own stream of consciousness--David Hume's "impressions and ideas"--is a kind of miracle. And so is recognizing someone else, not only as another object, but as another person, another center of subjectivity and action, will and purpose, of goodness and the potential for evil, of spiritual striving and participation in the Divine.

Now think of how it is possible for one such center, not only to communicate ideas and intentions to another, but to make a commitment. What is a commitment? It is a moral fact. It creates an ethical relationship between you and the promise that did not previously exist. This is a reality, but not of a physical type.

Nor is it adequate to call it an "institutional" fact, as if it were simply a shorthand for describing customs or conventions. It is a real fact. An obligation now exists. 

Among the things a complete account of the universe would have to include are obligations created by promises. Institutions do not explain promises but more the other way around. Institutions are, in part, complex ethical facts, created by various commitments and other relationships of an ethical sort, such as parent and child.

If you leave out the ethical phenomenon, and describe these merely as social patterns, as sociologists and anthropologists do, there is no miracle here, but such descriptions are not complete and therefore, however accurate, not really adequate.

How are ethical facts, nonphysical and also not just states of consciousness, possible? Because of Me. Ethical facts are spiritual facts. There is a spiritual relationship between people that occurs only within the spiritual matrix that is My presence in the world. In living the ethical life, people are participating in Me, whatever their self-interpretation of their own ethical lives.

JLM

It was this fine old religion that Zoroaster was to throw into disarray and rage.

(Music)

GOD

Zoroaster had a great yearning for the truth and for knowing Me, and great discipline in seeking the way of truth, as a priest and in other roles. He sought to understand not just the forms and procedures, but the meaning. Of course, some of his teachers were wise and also in touch with Me. But he was more persistent, more open, and had a more flexible and creative mind, so he could take in more.

He was My first really great prophet.

JERRY

He spent years wandering in search of truth?

GOD

Yes, this is what made him remarkable. Most people, even most spiritually attuned people, are not really seekers after the truth. They mainly have some truths that they nourish and try to apply to their own lives or to the lives of others in order to help them.

The ancient religion was already quite good, but Zoroaster sensed that there was something more, both in terms of understanding it all and in terms of living a spiritual life. So he did seek out all the great teachers and seers of his day, and he prayed and meditated and listened with an open ear.

So one day I came to him. I had whispered in his ear many times and these whisperings were not unheeded--they led him on in his search--but on this occasion he actually saw Me, in several of My aspects, and My message came through to him in a totally articulate manner.

JLM

Zoroaster was seeking the truth. The Lord Wisdom was looking for a messenger. They were searching for each other. 

Then, one morning, as Zoroaster was purifying himself in the river, he beheld on the bank, a "shining being" who revealed himself as Good Purpose. The priest was brought into the presence of the Lord Wisdom and five other figures so radiant "he did not see his own shadow upon the earth, owing to their great light."

In the collection of hymns known as the Gathas, Zoroaster reports addressing the Lord Wisdom.

"THEN AS HOLY I HAVE RECOGNIZED THEE, THE LORD WISDOM, WHEN HE [THE HOLY SPIRIT] ATTENDED ME WITH GOOD PURPOSE, AND "ASKED ME: 'WHO ART THOU? WHOSE ART THOU?' THEN I SAID TO HIM FIRST: 'I AM ZARATHUSTRA. WERE I ABLE, I SHOULD BE A TRUE FOE TO THE DECEIVER, BUT A STRONG SUPPORT TO THE JUST ONE.'"

JLM

This encounter began a series of visions, revealing a single God who "created everything that was created" including the other divine beings, who could also be seen as aspects or manifestations of Himself. For it is written that they are "of one mind, one voice, one act."

GOD

Yes, we have talked about My manifestations and why it is apt to call them gods. Of course, they emanate from Me by My spirit.

JERRY

Then Ahura Mazda, the Lord Wisdom, is also You?

GOD

Yes, that is Me. Notice that he is the third god, in an older text, but claims authority over the others, as your text says, "whose actions and directions he rules." 

There was in fact a struggle. Go back to the cosmogonic accounts I have told you. I am "exploding"--both I as the universe am exploding and I as the mind and telos of the universe am struggling to create order and purpose and direction. All the parts of the universe, including all the spiritual parts or aspects of Me, are expanding, at work, involved in creating and directing things, both physical and spiritual.

These parts or aspects of Me are not always well integrated, any more than they are in a human personality. Just as your desires or temperament sometimes seem to have a life of their own, so some of My aspects have life of their own. Among the things I must order and provide direction to are My own aspects. 

I do this through Wisdom, My own calm center that views or oversees all, assesses all, weighs it in the balance, pacifies disturbances. There is, of course, an analogue for human beings, but this story is not just metaphor. This was really Me, struggling to supersede other aspects of Myself, and to be worshipped in My highest manifestation, not in My separate and sometimes truculent parts.

JLM

Zoroaster beheld not one god but two, one good and one his evil twin. The Lord Wisdom was the embodiment of goodness and wisdom. Angra Mainyu--literally, the Hostile Spirit--was the personification of pure evil. The world had two presiding gods at odds with each other.

GOD

Yes, Zoroaster had the full experience of evil, and he took it in and did not dismiss it or discount it. This is one of My most important communications. 

The experience of evil is a spiritual experience. It comes from Me. You would not be able to see it for evil otherwise. People would see it as bad luck or "just one of those things" or a character disorder or a bad personality trait. To look evil in the face is a spiritual act and it requires being in touch with Me and looking, as it were, through My eyes.

Evil is indeed a demonic force. It is not just privation or bad upbringing. It is a force on its own, spiritual in nature, not just physical--what else would it be?--and it works outside and within, and it works in Me as well and in all of nature. It is not just a phenomenon of decay or entropy or mortality. It is worse than death or nothingness. It is distortion, warping, perversion, twisting of things from their rightful nature to their wrong "nature," to something that is less and different from their nature, like a malignant cancer.

So the question is how to communicate that fact. How to give Zoroaster a vision that lives up to his own experience--the phenomenon of evil that he has seen through My eyes. I did it by showing him both sides of Myself as two gods. They are of course not equally powerful. I am very much more the positive than the negative side, as most people are. And there is no question that the positive will "win" in the end.

But, for people, for all of us, evil is very powerful, and it is wrong to underestimate it or sweep it under the rug, psychically, metaphysically. It is a force to be reckoned with. And, as powerful as its outer dimension is, its inner dimension is much more powerful. The two-gods vision represents both.

I revealed Myself as two gods in mortal combat. A limitation of the ancient religion was that it venerated and therefore understood only the good aspects of Me and the world. But to understand that is to miss the whole story of what life on this plane is about. It is about the inner and outer ethical and spiritual struggle--in the end, you cannot separate the two. I taught Zoroaster about this aspect of things in the most vivid way possible.

So I showed My other side to him as a separate god, the Hostile Spirit, that works to undermine the divine order.

JERRY

He beheld the original struggle?

GOD

Yes, just as I have given you visual as well as verbal and visceral reenactments of cosmogonic events, I gave him a vision of an original struggle.

(Music)

JLM

The scripture records: "Truly there are two primal Spirits, twins, renowned to be in conflict. In thought and word and act they are two, the good and the bad. . . . And when these two Spirits first encountered, they created life and not-life. . . . At the end the worst existence shall be for the followers of falsehood - Druj, but the best dwelling for those who possess righteousness - Asha. 

Of the two Spirits, the one who follows falsehood chose doing the worst things, and the Holiest Spirit, clad in the strongest stone, chose righteousness, and so shall they all who will satisfy the Lord Wisdom continually with just actions. 

GOD

Yes, very precise, accurate. Notice the language. 

The two gods are twins, a tip-off that they are two sides of the same being. Who doesn't have two sides? Life and not-life are obvious placeholders for order and disorder, or right order and wrong order. The "at the end" part we will need to discuss at a future time, but it is obvious that if you want to have a good life, you pursue Asha (righteousness), and if you don't, you will have a bad life. The generative role of falsehood is explicit here--that the source of evil is falsehood, not living in truth--which is why postmodernism and views like it through all times are morally dangerous and subversive of a good life. It is implied that the Holiest Spirit is stronger, clad in stone.

JLM

The Lord Wisdom foresaw that, if he were to create the world, the Hostile Spirit would attack it precisely because it was good. The world would become a battleground. He knew that in the end he would win, but he would need our help, for we too must choose sides, "so shall we all."

GOD

It is inevitable that evil attacks good precisely because it is good. It is goodness that evil must stamp out or pervert or turn against itself.

JLM

At first, the Hostile Spirit did not know about the Lord Wisdom, but the Lord Wisdom knew about his evil twin, "what he plotted in his enviousness to do, how he would commingle, what the beginning, what the end." 

After a lengthy era of peace, the Hostile Spirit "arose from the deep" and "beheld the light" of the Lord Wisdom's domain. And prompted by "his lust of smite and his envious nature," he "immediately attacked it," only to encounter "valour and supremacy greater than his own," as the divine beings rallied their forces.

GOD

Note that the divine beings do not attack but respond to an attack. The good are always on the defensive, with evil attacking them. There are constructive steps to promote and actualize goodness in its many forms and venues, but no aggressive war against evil is possible.

JLM

The Hostile Spirit needed help. "He crawled back to darkness" and recruited Daevas, devils, "frightful and putrid and evil," to fight on his side. The ancient text goes on: "The Daevas chose not rightly, because the Deceiver came upon them as they consulted, so that they chose the worst purpose. Then together they betook themselves to Wrath, through whom they afflicted the life of man."

GOD

My aspects have, to some extent, a life of their own and go wayward. One reason is simply their functional autonomy. Just as the stomach wants to just do its job, even if it is doing it in a way counterproductive sometimes for the organism. Or in a society, the lawyers are just doing their job, even when it causes larger harm. They are living out their distinctive "virtues," but that is not always adequate from the point of view of the whole.

The other reason is more perverse, and that comes from My own incomplete and undeveloped nature. Just as a nice person occasionally feels like irritating others or takes pleasure in schadenfreude or deflects in behavior to avoid facing a certain truth. That is the Deceiver, the element of Lie in all of us. 

Even the first type of counterproductive behavior is a kind of Lie, since it consists in confusing the good of the part with the good of the whole--a Lie because it is often done quite knowingly. People take refuge, like Eichmann, in saying, "I was only doing my job," or they avoid confronting evil by saying, in effect, "It's not my job.

JLM

Having rallied the Daevas, the Hostile Spirit "rose for battle."

(Music)