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

187. What's On Our Mind- Exploring God-Centered Prayer, Polytheism, and Authenticity in Modern Spirituality

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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Embark on a profound journey with God: An Autobiography, The Podcast in the newest What's On Your Mind series episode.

Dig into themes of divine communication, the essence of prayer, and living authentically. Discover the transformative power of integrity and discernment. Learn of the liberating freedom of surrendering to God's will while uncovering spirituality and self-discovery.

Join us on a journey through God: An Autobiography as we explore faith, embrace a deeper connection with purpose and personal growth, and discover insights that will encourage your spiritual journey and living in tune with God.


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

Scott Langdon 01:12: I'm Scott Langdon and this week, Jerry Martin and I bring you another edition of our What's On Our Mind series. In this episode, Jerry and I reflect on episodes 183 through 186 and specifically address God's explanation of polytheism as God showing different aspects of Godself to different cultures and individuals. I find myself showing different aspects of myself all the time in everyday life, and all of them are completely authentic aspects of me. Is that what God is claiming about God's self? Join Jerry and me for a very meaningful discussion on what it means for each of our lives to know God in an intimate way. Here now is What's On Our Mind. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back everybody to another edition of What's On Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon and I'm with Jerry Martin. How are you doing this week, Jerry? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:09: Well, pretty well, and I thought some of the communications that we've received that we discussed the last few episodes were very interesting, and, of course, we posted some things of our own during these times, so I'm looking forward to talking about them. 

Scott Langdon 02:24: You've been on a trip. I have been away working on a play, so there have been a couple of weeks that had gone by that we were just emailing and we had missed our regular weekly Zooms with the rest of our team. And when we got back this week and reconnected I realized there were so many things that I wanted to talk about and so many things I wanted to discuss, because these, this unit, this group of episodes that we're talking about today were so rich and are so full, one of which is the life wisdom episode number 18, where Abigail visits again and you and she have a wonderful discussion. And when I think about putting these episodes together, I try to structure them around the episode at hand in The Life Wisdom Project, and this week was, or this unit was, episode 18, and it's polytheism explained, and so there's a lot of things in there about God being everything and in the individual personhood of God, and separate and the same, and thinking more both/and rather than either/or. A lot of that kind of language is new and unpacked in that episode. 

Scott Langdon 03:48: And before we get into that, I wanted to start with the From God To Jerry To You series that we had in this unit and it was on God-Centered Prayer and the reason I want to start there is that the way that you talk about how prayer has worked for you in terms of how you've structured it and how praying for the right thing, what that means and all of that, what it comes down to, what I really got from it was not my will, but thy will be done. 

Scott Langdon 04:27: And I want to start there because in virtually every religious tradition, but certainly the Judeo-Christian one and certainly the Christian tradition of my upbringing so it's the language that's most readily available to me, that is a direct quote from Jesus himself, and so we find in these other monotheistic religions the same thing not my will but thy will in some form of expression, that. And what it does is so many things, surrender and all of that, but one of the things it does in relation to what this unit is about is it focuses on the relationship between I and thou or between God and us in relationship, and that was the only kind of relationship that I ever knew growing up, that it was me here and God somewhere else, and so, with that as a given, the idea of not my will but thy will was always implicit with it's me here and God there. So, with that dualistic understanding already in place, it's a feeling of surrender, and we've talked before about how surrender can have all kinds of loaded baggage to it, surrender, but that's really what you're talking about in that right, not my will, but I want to surrender to what you're doing. 

Scott Langdon 06:09: I try to start my day now the way you've talked about, which is God, what do you want me to do today? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:15: That's the key question for each of us and it's not one big global question. Thy will be done and want to join a religion or some big one project. It's every day and even multiple times in a day. You know, sometimes I'm praying often and most people are praying for God, please do something for me, rescue me from this situation. And those are earnest and an appropriate thing to be sharing with God, what you would like God's help with. However, the crucial question isn't making God, as He at some point said, I'm not a rescue helicopter coming to land to save you. That's not what I'm about- is I’m your beck and call. I have a 911 number. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:07: God is not a 911 number, but the key question in the relationship is it's like the orchestra conductor and the single violinist. I've got to be doing what the conductor is saying to do. When he points to the violin section, I've got to start with the other violins, and on the orchestra conductor's cue, and most of life is like that. There are things like the Ten Commandments, things you can sort of codify, there are sort of rules to loving one another and so forth, but most of life is lived in microbits you might say, in the particularities of a day, of a relationship- how to treat my wife, how to treat my child, my parents, my next-door neighbor. Uh-oh, we have a conflict going on in our condo. Okay, how to handle that, well of course one uses one's own ethics and common sense and practicality. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:12: But there's also the question, God, what do you want me to do? And I often ask, this is kind of how I start the day and it sounds like what you're reporting, Scott is what are my priorities today? I always have a possible to-do list. I could do this or this or this or this, and they'd all be more or less good things to do. Well, what am I to do today? What's the priority? What should I be focusing on? And that's where I start and it is a kind of surrender. And there is something liberating about surrender. You know you're releasing your own tight grip on your life and what you want and you're saying, okay, God, take me where you want me to go. And okay, let's go together. And God one day said, I was about to have a sandwich, let's have lunch together, something that simple. And oh, okay, that's a nice lunch and a nice way to relate to God. And of course I just ate my sandwich, but in the sense of a God companionship there.

Scott Langdon 09:31: As I mentioned, that kind of me here and God there, that there's this separation. The duality concept was with me all of my life until only a few years ago. I mean, I had understood that there were other ways of talking about God and our experience with God, but it never answered a lot of my questions or even quelled my anxieties about being separate, that God would somehow go away or is gone unless I did something to bring God back, or if God chose to capriciously, what seems capriciously to me, to show up here or not show up there, I just wasn't sure I was interested in being in a game I didn't know the rules to, that I felt like I had never signed up to play, that I just was thrown into this thing and trying to figure it out and that didn't seem correct. So that's why I never really gave up. And then when we were working on this project and we got to really start to talk about the other ways that God came to other cultures and other individuals, I started to open up the possibilities of what that could be and I didn't go full bore but really kind of spent a lot of time with folks and teachers and concepts that were full bore and those full bore concepts saying this is all a dream. Stuff like this is not reality, reality is no thing and we are just oneness and we're just and all of this, we try to get out of this and live to the oneness and Abigail talked about that in episode 185 in the Life Wisdom Project, where, yes, there is this we are. 

Scott Langdon 11:35: The essential nature of us all is God. And God says to you that's true, the Hindu view that's true. Everything is God. So I went oh yeah, that feels great and makes more sense. And yet that still doesn't take care of the day-to-day, that doesn't take care of how I treat my wife or the other person across the street or how they treat me, or if somebody wants to rob me, I can't just go, oh, we're all one, he's going to stab me and kill me. I mean, I don't know. So that also didn't make sense. I was like, well, if it's not real, it sure as heck feels real. I didn't know how to reconcile those two things. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:17: Yeah, I was told in prayer that, it's in the book, if it's all a mirage, it's a mirage you can drink water from. This is the most real thing that there can be. This is the most real thing there can be, and even in the Hindu tradition, I'm afraid I don't remember the details, can't tell a very good story on it, but there are cautionary stories as well about this, all as one, because of the dangers of it, and one of them has to do with there's this rampaging elephant coming right at the guy and he keeps thinking it's all right, that's Brahman. And the elephant gets closer and closer until he can feel the hot breath on him and, oh, it's all right, it's God. And then, oops, it's over. You know he's just trampled to death. Oh well, it doesn't look so good then. Okay, that's also God, reality in some sense. But you can't tell the whole story that way. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:28: And it strikes me there's a big theme of non-dualism these days, and I know a lot of people who call themselves non-dualist and feel great satisfaction in that, maybe having had some of the kinds of experiences earlier in life that you've had, Scott, where God was too distant and out there and where? And so they take consolation. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:50: But that view itself is too dualistic, in my way of thinking. It's either/or and we're not supposed to think either/or I keep getting told, because my logician's turn of mind is to put things, these two things are incompatible, but everything can be one, and yet we can be highly distinct individuals within that. And I'm told of course you're one manifestation of Me. And then, surprisingly, God says I'm one manifestation of Me also. So the God who presents Himself, Itself, Herself, as a person to me in this rather intimate, even conversational way, that's a face of God, but not a face of God in the sense of a mere metaphor I think Abigail mentions that at some point in that life wisdom discussion but is really a person, even though that's not the whole of reality, of divine reality. It's quite real, that personal aspect of God and our personal aspects of ourselves, and of ourselves to one another. 

Scott Langdon 15:38: I was thinking about what a lot of people talk about today and it seems like it's talked about a lot, that we want to find our true self. What's your true self? And we also talk about somebody else. We might say, oh, that's not the real them. Or if somebody has some drinks or something and they start talking okay, that's the real so and so not the... And we're always thinking what's the real one? There's this actor that I really love and I think they're true, but what are they really like? You know, we want to know what they're like at home, or what's their true self. And that can be such a difficult thing to talk about, especially when we talk about it in this way. 

Scott Langdon 16:22: God says, I show different aspects of Me to different individuals in different cultures, so to the Jews it was this way, and I was thinking about that a lot and I was thinking about how do I? You always want to be your most authentic self, but you're always showing different aspects of yourself in your daily life. So, for example, if I walk into a Wawa, I'm showing to the person behind the counter that aspect of me is a customer and maybe I'm shy that day or whatever. Maybe I'm more outgoing, that's an aspect of me. 

Scott Langdon 16:59: I go to work. Let's say I'm a bank teller. The people at the bank know me as a bank teller. I'm also and this is true, I'm an amateur boxer. So people who I work with in the theater say don't know me as an amateur boxer, but that doesn't mean that I'm not. Do you know what I mean? You know me as this oh, I knew him better than anyone. What makes you say that? Well, because you know maybe more aspects of me than anyone else. What are your thoughts on that aspect? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:32: Well, I think that's all a very subtle thought and topic to reflect on, Scott. The authenticity talk, it kind of in a way in the Western tradition particularly goes back to the Romantics of the early 19th century who rejected the enlightenment, the impersonalism of the enlightenment, the rational, universal impersonalism, and wanted to affirm individuality. So it was a very understandable sort of revolt against something that seemed to leave actual people out of the picture. And feelings, emotions. It was also rationalistic and so they kept thinking in addition to the self that you present, your personality, you're in this situation, in that situation, what in older days was tended to be called your character, there's some deeper, really authentic self, and the key to life is to strip away everything else. You have this in the existentialist often, is to strip away everything else, it's all… what do they call it? I forget the search phrase, something like false consciousness, but that's a Marxist phrase. Bad faith, bad faith, it's all bad faith, because you're not being the real you, the authentic self. The whole goal is just to be you, you, you. I must say I've never liked that Frank Sinatra song I Gotta Be Me, because I thought what's so great about being Frank Sinatra. Okay, he's a good singer, but I know nothing else about him that would make me think, oh, he's the exemplar of how to live and how to be as a person. But in fact, and this is the depth that one would have to explore, these different aspects that you just went through, Scott, of you in these different roles- you as an actor, you as a boxer, you as a customer, you've been a teacher, you as a teacher. You're in a different role each time a different persona is being presented, but they're all authentic, normally. There's nothing wrong with just going in and being a customer and you could say, oh well, that's an upholstery, human transaction or something. No, it's what you're there for and what they're there for. They're just there to take your money and give you a receipt. That's their job. Your job is to take home the light bulbs you went to buy or whatever, so you can screw them in and have light. And all these different aspects of people are all them, except when they're faking. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:18: Or, you know, sometimes people can be living out a script rather than thinking, is this what I believe? Am I acting? Am I actually making the decisions for my life or am I just going through rote. There's a trap kids often fall into. It's kind of living lifelong some script written by their parents, you know, oh, my parents, I didn't want to be a doctor, but they all had their heart set on my being a doctor. So I went to medical school and I'm a doctor and the only thing I really like is something else I do you know, when I paint or golf or something on the weekends, that's the only thing I really like. The rest of the time, I'm fulfilling a script written by someone else. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:04: Well, those are important reflections to have and to separate out. Better than authenticity, I think, is some concept like integrity. Am I being true to myself? Am I being honest with myself? It just starts with do I know why I'm behaving this way? Do I have that degree of self-reflection? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:25: We often talk here about discernment, how you have to pay attention. Well, this is one of those areas in which it's extremely important to pay attention to what you're actually doing, what you're actually feeling, what your actual motivations are, why you're reacting the way you're reacting. If you do that and you're clear about it and you're honest about it and you line up your thoughts and your actions and your feelings, they tend then to be kind of coherent and meaningful and you're probably kind of doing what you want to be doing and, of course, add some prayer so that you add that to this thing. I'm sort of picturing them all stacked up, your feelings and your thoughts and your self-understanding and your motivations, but also what input you feel you're getting from outside, from your ethical intuitions, from your sense of what God wants you to do. That may come explicitly in prayer, it may just kind of come to you in a gut feeling, or you just kind of feel. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:30: I asked one person about becoming a minister. People, ministers are supposed to have a call, not just a job description that they think suits them. And well, God laid a burden on my heart. Well, I don't know how a burden comes on someone's heart, but he does. This is how it felt to him, just ah, and he's a deep introvert the way I am, and so this was kind of alien to him. He'd rather just hole up with a good book or something, and I attended his last sermon and he's a very good preacher, so God made a good pick, you might say. 

Scott Langdon 23:11: You mentioned that you don't know how a burden on your heart feels, how that would feel. I would argue, though, that you do, because you got one on your heart to write this project. That's what it felt like for you. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 23:29: God told me to do these things. I had the decision, but I didn't think of it as a burden on my heart so much as God is speaking to me. I believe this is God and I went through the whole literature on spiritual discernment and stuff. How do you know it's God when you think it's God? There's a rich literature on that topic and I had to rethink my epistemology. I'd done an epistemology of doubt, as I came to call it, which Western philosophers have done since Descartes, Cartesian doubt and I reconceptualized it into an epistemics of trust. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:12: Realizing all knowledge actually starts with trust. If you didn't trust your experience, you couldn't learn from it, you couldn't even correct it. We correct experience by trusting further experiences, and so on, memory. You trust memory by remembering differently and you trust your reasoning by checking your reasoning and your arithmetic by doing the columns again. But if you didn't trust the process of adding and subtracting, you couldn't even check it, you know. So, anyway, an epistemic of trust. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:44: We have to start with trust and for me the question wasn't is the burden being laid on my heart in some kind of you might say holistic way or emotive way, I don't know mood-type way? But God just said this is what I want you to do, and I thought, if this is something God wants me to do, I can either do it or not do it. And even though I could be wrong you know, I'd have no certainty that this is God speaking to me. I believe it is and I've done due diligence to confirm that. That's a reasonable thing for me to believe. But it could be wrong. But still okay, if it's wrong, I've done the right thing, even though, whoops, it didn't quite go where I thought it was going to go. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:39: But the alternative was to have God tell me what God wanted me to do and for me not to do it, and that seemed to violate the whole meaning of my life, and so that was an unacceptable possibility to me. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:55: So I went through it as more like a reasoning process. Am I going to do what God is telling me to do, what I hear God telling me to do, or not? And it's the kind of decision, prominent certainly in the Old Testament, of Abraham is told you know, get up and go, and I'll tell you later where to stop, you might say, and that happens over and over in the Old Testament. People are just told to do things. And okay, you know they do it and I don't know if there are New Testament examples of that sort, but anyway, it's certainly prominent in the New Testament and prominent somewhat in the devotional literature in the Hindu tradition.

Scott Langdon 26:45: What's interesting to me about everything that you just said is that, among many things, one of the things is that God says to you- What I want most is for people to listen to Me. 

Scott Langdon 27:01: Now, if a person says that, then what's to me implicit in that statement is that, if you want me to listen to you, what's implicit in that statement is that you have something to say and that you are trying to communicate to me. And so if God wants everyone to listen, then that means that God is communicating to everyone all the time. So if that's true, then whether God uses words or art or another human being or an encounter with a nature walk or whatever it is, the method of communication doesn't seem to me to have a hierarchy. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:58: Right, that's right. People often say, oh, why doesn't God speak to me? There's nothing special about God communicating through words rather than some other way, and that's why I always say it was useful if He wanted me to write a book, you know, to actually tell me what to say. You know and do that in words, but often, like everybody else, I feel guidance in these various other modes, just probably things more like a burden on my heart, a feeling in my gut. It just feels right. Sometimes you consider a course of action and it feels wrong. You can tell your parts are coming apart, and other times it feels very centered and yes, yes, this is right. And we have to trust those kinds of intuitions as well, because that's of course. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:52: God usually doesn't talk to people in words, or if He does, it's often something very brief, you know a phrase, but God all the time talks in these multiple other ways that God repeats to me over and over in the course of the book. And as you put it, Scott, quite precisely, there is no hierarchy of modes of communication. In fact, you've got to, and I sometimes communicate with people who've written along the lines of oh, why doesn't God speak to me? I don't hear God, I don't sense God. Calm down and just let God come to you however God comes to you. So don't be grasping for a particular divine manifestation, Just relax. And then that's where the paying attention and the listening comes in. And listening doesn't mean just listening for words. It means generally observing, thinking, paying attention, and that's listening to God. 

Scott Langdon 29:55: Yeah, I was just going to say that I think paying attention and listening that's a both/and, I guess, because I see them as separate and yet I see that they are in the same category. But when I think about listening, I think about one thing, and I'll tell you a story about this in a second. When I think about paying attention, I think about something else. Last night, very specifically of this recording that we're doing today, on Friday, the 28th of June, well, last night I had a performance of Bert and Me, the musical that I'm in right now, at Mount Gretna Playhouse in Mount Gretna, Pennsylvania, and the playwright has a house within walking distance of the theater. 

Scott Langdon 30:46: He lives there.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin: Amazing.

Scott Langdon: He and his wife, and it's this beautiful, it's in the woods and they have this beautiful house and it's a big, big porch and they invited the cast and all of us over to have a little party after the show and sit on their porch and chat and stuff. And I love that kind of thing and I hate that kind of thing, Jerry, that is so hard for me because I'm an introvert. Really, really am an introvert.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:12: Oh yeah, I've never understood this. A lot of performers are actually introverts. That's always been a surprise to me.

Scott Langdon 31:16: But I love people, I love being around them. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 31:20: No introversion, has nothing to do with misanthropy. You like people, but you also need a lot of time just with yourself. 

Scott Langdon 31:29: Yeah, and so last night I thought, you know, we had done a show. We had done a matinee and then we had done an evening show. So we did two shows yesterday and then go to this. And then I was going to have to drive home because you know we're doing this today, and I thought, you know I'm going to be too tired, and I thought, no, no, no, this is something you should do. 

Scott Langdon 31:50: But then when I decided to go, I really paid attention to what we kind of started this conversation with about, and that is, I went OK, I want to actively engage with everyone there and I'm going to listen and I'm going to talk, and I'm going to not be on my phone or think about other things, I'm going to focus in. And when somebody's talking to me, I'm going to pay attention to them, respond to them and I'm going to be intentional about it. And I did and it went wonderfully and it was great and I stayed, you know, not terribly long and I went home. But the other thing I could have done was just give in to what might seem to have come natural, which would be to just sort of be there and not participate and just sort of veg in the corner or whatever. Now, it's not that I'm saying one is better than the other. I just made a decision that I was going to be this way instead of that way, because I felt like this would be more beneficial to me and to everyone else just whomever I came in contact with to pay that kind of attention to them, and neither one of those ways would have been an inauthentic me or this. You know, it's an aspect of me. This is an outgoing Scott Langdon. This is what that looks like. This isn't, you know, introverted Scott Langdon. That's what that looks like. 

Scott Langdon 33:31: And all of this is exactly what I do for a living. I'm creating this character every night, named George, who has a son named Joe, who goes to college, and they have this whole relationship around Burt Bacharach music and it's just. And when I think about what it takes to be George fully and completely and to really, I want to know what he's about, I want to know what happened to him, I want to know when Joe, his son, says something or doesn't say something or is going through a situation. 

Scott Langdon 34:08: And, as a father, I'm not thinking about my son in the moment. I'm thinking about Joe. I'm fully invested in this boy, Joe, and when it's over and I'm reflecting, I realize I've learned something about myself, Scott and my relationship with my son because of having been George and doing it again, and doing it again, and doing it again. So I feel like, in that same sense, as God is everything, God is fully participating in every single moment, so God must be really curious and invested in all of these aspects of us. How I show up as a customer, how I show up as a husband, how I show up as a you know, whatever background character I am in everyone else's story. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:05: Yeah, I've known people who think you know God is the grand orchestrator of the whole universe. How could God be interested in little me down here doing nothing? You know nobody doing nothing. Well, of course, doing something and worry about it in prayer. You know what's my point of praying? It's like God's too busy. You know God's already got a great big job. As though you were trying to get to the I don't know the CEO of General Motors or something, thinking, oh, that guy's awfully busy running everything so he can't pay attention to me. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:47: But God isn't like that. God is more like Scott the actor, except with limitless capacity. And so God is doing what you're doing with George and in a funny way, with Joe, because you're trying to also, I gather, sense Joe's end of this relationship with George, and God's doing that with Scott right now and Jerry right now and any listener right now, and is making things available to us or steering us. Again, if you pay attention, it's not just listening to the words coming out of your mouth and mine or this or that background thing going on in the listener's environment, but you just pay attention to which parts, what's coming to you. That seems to be a kind of guidance or sense of direction, or can be warning for your life, and trust that this divine omnipresence is reliable. It's real, it's real. And the odd thing is and it's hard for people to get over these dualistic categories, you know, if either it's we're all one or we're all many, let's say no, we're both one and many, you know, and so is God, oddly enough, is one and many. And God as a particular person is also a particular but a particular manifestation or embodiment or actualization of the divine and God's playing God's role, not God's role in the sense of pure actor, but God's job, you might say, in this world, in dealing with us. That's who God is in this world, and we're all moving forward. God isn't fully developed. We're not fully developed. As Abigail says, God can't mail a letter. Okay, God needs us to do a lot of these things. And once, when I asked God to love me for something that seemed scary, He said let Abigail love you and feel my love through her. Okay, that's a lot of human life. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:14: So you come—what, in a way, Scott, we keep talking about we draw lessons, you might say, from God: An Autobiography is the buoyancy of life, the plenitude of life, and you've got to be kind of open to it and aware of it. And that doesn't mean just everything is wonderful. No, you've got to be discriminating which parts are wonderful and which parts are not wonderful and which parts are even wicked. And wickedness in others, wickedness in oneself, and so you've got to be on guard of those. You need multiple kinds of discernment. You need social discernment, moral discernment, aesthetic discernment down the line, all of which involve paying careful attention and to say God is behind them all. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 39:06: Well, that's fine. That doesn't mean every act of moral discernment of noticing uh-oh, no, this person's cheating, I'm not going to cheat on my taxes, I'm filling out my taxes, I'm not going to cheat on them. That decision may or may not be prominent in a kind of God consciousness, but it's part of what I'm sensing as my right role in this life, and God always seems to be helping in that you know, to the extent you're open and trusting of the divine presence and omnipresence, you're going to do your job better, and then trust that there are things you can discern, to be discerned, when you pay attention to situations, to human relationships, to rights and wrongs, to practicalities, even, tthat there's something to be determined there and to be doing them honestly, self-aware and, as best you can, in concert with God. And that's why I recommend praying Thy will be done. Which is not because God is distant and sending down, you know, big megaphone orders. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 40:22: The kind of background you had, Scott, is very different from my experience with God. I don't even quite relate to the question is God here or there? You know, I see people talking about God and rejecting usually the idea of God is somewhere out there. Well, I don't know where God is, I just know God is present to me, you know, and I think God's present to you and everybody. And to me that doesn't require the metaphysical thesis that all is one and one is all, though I'm told that something like that is true, God is everything. Okay, that's fine. But even without that assumption, my personal experience of God is not of a distant being but it's one of an intimate being. 

Scott Langdon 41:26: 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.