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

202. What's On Your Mind- Exploring God's Voice, Chinese Spirituality, and the New Axial Age

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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In this episode of God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, Scott and Jerry explore two thought-provoking listener emails, from Renata and Henry, focusing on the themes of God's encounter with early Chinese people and the profound question of God's gender. Scott reflects on his personal journey of opening up to Eastern philosophy, while Jerry discusses how different cultures and traditions reveal new aspects of the divine. 

Through discussions of Thich Nhat Hanh’s work and the I Ching, they explore how spirituality can expand without conversion. Jerry also shares insights on how God learns through human experiences, connecting it to the idea of nature and harmony. 

The hosts dive deep into Henry Mitchell’s book, The Summer Boy, highlighting the interconnectedness of all life, and Renata’s reflections on Heidegger, exploring the mystical unity of existence. 

Join Scott and Jerry for another enriching edition of What’s On Your Mind as they reflect on the dynamic nature of God and spiritual understanding.

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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.

Scott Langdon 00:58: Episode 202. Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon and I'm very excited to return with Jerry for our 29th edition of What's On Your Mind. This week, Jerry and I discuss two short emails that center around the theme for this unit of episodes: God's encounter with the early Chinese people and the Chinese mind. This episode is important to me because it reminded me that we can never fully comprehend in this life the full scope of who and what God is, even though we see nothing else but God all the time. At the same time, though, the particularity of things as they are, as what they are, can appear to us as important aspects of the divine. I'm grateful for this conversation and I thank you for spending this time with us. I hope you enjoy the episode. Welcome back, everyone to another edition of What's On your Mind. I'm Scott Langdon. I'm with Jerry Martin once again. Jerry, it's really good to see you here.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:07: Well, good to see you, Scott, and I think we've got some very interesting things to discuss today.

Scott Langdon 02:13: Yeah, I'm really interested as well. We have two really great emails and they're varied, they're different but they are wrapped around a single theme, I guess you could say. Last week's episode. There was a Life Wisdom Project where we had Jonathan Weidenbaum back again, and I love when Jonathan comes on the program and offers his insight and wisdom.

Scott Langdon 02:34:And specifically last week the two of you had a discussion on the I Ching, because we've gotten into the part of the book and the part of the podcast where you and God are talking about the Chinese mind and the early Chinese people and the early ways in which God started to communicate with humankind and it was a very different kind of communication with the early Chinese people and that was a fascinating thing for me to start to delve into when we started with this project to begin with and I got to those chapters that started to in one way feel very different from my growing up and the information that I had taken in about theology and about God.

Scott Langdon 03:18: They were very different in a lot of ways and at the same time felt so familiar almost felt like a missing piece or a piece that I sort of knew was out there but was asked to sort of you know, cough and ignore in the one theology that I was, you know, led to believe or at least took in believing was the only way. And so when these other things and the Eastern way of thinking and looking at things was presented to me in this way, specifically these early Chinese mind chapters, it really opened me up. I didn't want to shut them out, I wanted to explore them more, and there's a different sort of aspect or side to me that they've brought out and what I'm seeing, and the more we talk and the more we work on this, those are sides of God coming out.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:15: That's one of the reasons to pay attention to different cultures, different religions, different traditions, ways of thinking, including different philosophies and so on, is number one, that those are features of reality after all, that other people and cultures and so forth are picking up on Number two, there are often other aspects of ourselves that are a little more latent in our tradition. You know, whatever tradition we've grown up in, well, it wasn't doing every job of every culture. That wouldn't have made sense. But it often has elements somewhat subdued that are made explicit in other traditions. And then you revisit your own tradition after checking one of the others, and often you just see it differently. Ah, you start seeing things you hadn't noticed before. Ah, this is kind of like the Taoist, isn't it? And so forth.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 05:11: The Dalai Lama has done a commentary on the Gospels, for example, so you know, just looking at it in a different way. But third, as you just mentioned, Scott, when God took me through all these ancient texts of the different religions, the question was always what were You up to?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 05:35: And the answer is always this brought out a different side of Myself, a different side of the divine self, and, of course, my experience, and the experience in some traditions, religious traditions, is heavily theistic, but even in my experience, the intensely personal God I encounter nevertheless says that's not the only side of Me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:01: There are also transpersonal sides, and other traditions, other cultures, other religions pick that up more, and so I tend to read about the Taoist, for example, or the I Ching. Okay, this is what God is communicating through these people, but of course that's not how they articulate it, and to me, God does not insist on everything being seen in personal, theistic terms. They have their own language. That's fine, so you read them in their own terms and learn how they are understanding the world, because you're going to get a new understanding by standing where they are and using their language and their concepts and looking at the world in terms of the kind of experience and culture they have. And that's a big illumination because you end up with a bigger reality, more diverse in some ways, more unities but also more diversity and a God with many, many aspects.

Scott Langdon 07:10: Yes, we're entering this new age. God calls it this new axial age, He tells you. And when you reflect when I reflect and I look back on history and the way religion is used, often you are introduced to a new way of seeing and you must convert to that. That is, you convert to this or die or not, or and so, these religious wars throughout the course of time. Well, here we are and you know, for a long time in my growing up I felt that sense of I'm not going to convert to, I don't want to listen or learn about this over here, because then I might have to convert to it. Buddhism, for example. Well, in this new axial age, the way God describes what can be made from this is something much more useful, as you've just talked about.

Scott Langdon 08:03: So for me, encountering, for example, the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. He wrote a wonderful book called Living Buddha, Living Christ. He himself, as a Buddhist monk, went to seminary. He investigated Christian theology so that he could have a greater understanding of what he was talking about and what people were talking about with him and to what end to reduce suffering in the world wherever possible. Well, that's something I can get a hold of as a Christian. Yeah, there's suffering. I want to help reduce it.

Scott Langdon 08:36: Well, that makes sense. So what are some of the things that he might teach and say about how to live that could help me do that? Well, I don't want to convert to Buddhism, but it helps me expand my own thoughts and feelings, which are rooted in Christianity, just in terms of my upbringing and my language, and that's the world, if you will, in which I seem to be most close to God, in an articulation kind of way, a language type of way. But beyond that, are these other ideas that expand my thoughts. They don't distract from them. I don't have to leave one thing over here in order to be converted to this anymore.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:23: Yeah, that's why, in addition to a life of prayer, people have a life of meditation that's inspired by either Buddhist traditions or Hindu traditions or some such. Occasionally, of course, there are Western traditions of meditation as well, but it typically comes in one of these more Eastern forms, and these traditions are all repositories of wisdom, and the wisdom can be used from everybody's life in many ways. Whatever way fits, you know what that person's going through in life, what the individual person reading around and you read the Bhagavad Gita and action without attachment to results. Well, that's a profound wisdom right there. You know, all you can do is control your action. You can't control the outcomes. So don't be all tense about the outcomes. Just do your job. Do what you're called to do. And then let the Western form, the Christian form of that as man proposes, God disposes. Okay, we decide this is something we're trying to get done and we hope God will help. But that's not, you know, in our command.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:35: Some people's religiosity almost goes to the point of prayer being when they say talk about the power of prayer being, it's almost as if, like a magician, like a mage, you could invoke God to do such and such by this prayer, but no, it doesn't really work that way. You have your agenda. God has this unknown agenda that we have only glimpses of, and that's true in the Western tradition, and the Eastern tradition has often strong elements of non-effort. West, from Odysseus and Homer on. West to Captain Kirk and Star Trek, you know Westerners are trying to figure everything out and trick the situation and have their will force its way through. The Eastern has had much more of a sense of, well, relax. You're not going to do that, it's not going to work, so just do your best and go with things. Go with the flow as we sometimes appropriate it, that kind of more relaxed attitude.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:44: But it's a lot of wisdom in these things and these different elements of the cultures. In God: An Autobiography. Those are aspects of the divine where God Himself is learning. Oh, I saw this about myself. They start seeing Me as then the Chinese start seeing Me as a kind of beautiful, harmonious order that they need to get in tune with or in rhythm with, and God realizes that, oh, that is an aspect of Me and sort of kind of comes out the way the kid who finds everybody's laughing at him in class just goes, “Hey, I'm kind of a natural comic, aren't I?” You know, these things are how you discover yourself is when you get a reaction. God's getting a reaction from the beings that matter most to Him, it appears.

Scott Langdon 12:41: This week we have two really terrific emails to talk about, and I want to get into those now. The first one was sent to us by Henry Mitchell. He's an author. He lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. He's a novelist. He's written six novels. He responded to a post that you made on the website actually that was called “the Answer Came in a Female Voice, and at that point in the book you were asking God about gender. Is God male, female voice.” It's because God was coming to you in a male voice that sounded much like your own. He talks about why he would do that earlier. You know, of course, I would come to you in your voice. At the same time, though, you felt there was also this sort of female sensibility to it, and then, when you asked Him the question, the answer comes in a female voice, and this is what Henry is responding to. Can you talk about that moment for a second, when God came to you in this way.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 13:43: That question was prompted in part by well, I've got this male voice. I was very aware that the kind of standard high theology always says God is beyond these differentiations male, female and so forth. But I thought God is so intensely personal in my experience and we experience people as gendered you know that's very deep in the warp and woof of our interpersonal lives. And so I posted that question and the answer then came in a female voice and it turned out the answer was not the standard theological answer. God is neither. They started erasing all the particular characteristics of God in these high theologies and you end up with the God is almost empty. It's even called negative theology sometimes. At that point. God is so infinite, He has no character, He/She has no characteristics at all. But no, it's more, God is both. God is both male and female, androgynous, if you like. That's very with it, right, it breaks those boundaries. But there's still a kind of differentiation there. God's coming through as male, as female, as whatever.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:01: And there was an earlier moment when encountering Jesus and he had a very soft look to him and I kind of puzzled over that almost feminine softness and the kind of love in his eyes was sort of genderless. And he kissed me on the lips but it did not feel strange to me as a heterosexual male, that would normally feel a little strange somebody kisses you on the lips but no, it felt completely natural and was simply an expression. And I think maybe I explored this question with Jesus a little. I've forgotten the details of that. Is he androgynous or something? Oh yeah, and he said it's coming back to me now that he said that he had elements of his father, his heavenly father, and the divine feminine. And I said Mary, no, no, that's his earthly mother, the divine aspect of the Godhead, that kind of ultimate God that's both male and female. Jesus is having the male and the female in himself.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:17: So that was why my experience had that, what felt like an ambiguity or something to it. But these are profound questions and they're part of the question that tends to come up in Henry's story. Well, what is the truth at the bottom of it all? And Henry imagines well, we'll see in a moment. Well, let's listen to the Earth's own natural language. You know not our contending languages I guess you might say.

Scott Langdon 16:50: Well that's one of the things that really attracted to me to this email was the sensibility in terms of what we have been talking about lately with I Ching and the Chinese mind, this idea of nature with a capital N. You know, as you mentioned, not a picnic in the woods, but this nature, cosmos, that there's order, there's beauty, there is everything going on in what seems to be outside of us. And so, in Henry's response, what he does is gives us a section of a work of his, and it's very beautiful and I wanted to share it today. We're going to read it. It's from a novel called the Summer Boy that he wrote, and it's actually a trilogy, the Benjamin Dunn trilogy. And in the Summer Boy Benjamin Dunn is deposited by his dysfunctional city parents  for the summer with his eccentric Aunt Mary in a remote Appalachian cove. And in his journey, on his way back, trying to find his way back to Mary, he encounters this magical realism, event and situation, and as he is running away, this piece picks up where Benjamin has run away and the narrator talks about what he's going through.

Scott Langdon 18:26: And so here is a bit from the Summer Boy by Henry Mitchell. “There was the boy and there was the road, trailing through vast heaving silences that filled the whole world. The longer the boy walked, the more full those silences became. His habitual loneliness began to fade. The river sang, the wind whispered, squirrels chattered, birds called and cried and piped and shrieked in whatever manner they were disposed to do. Within him sprang a sense of all these voices speaking together the earth’s own language, the One Tongue. Eventually, he might begin to learn that language, but for now his part in the conversation was simply to listen. It would be a long time before his brain could attempt to formulate these realities that were being imprinted on his psyche. Even had he conscious understanding of them presently, he could not have framed words to express the truths he was receiving, but he was beginning to feel them in his bones, in his tired muscles and sunburned arms and aching feet. The germ of a belief began to take hold in him, that all of these small lives, his own among them, were each and all merely steps and measures in the Great Dance. The One Mother breathed in them all, and they were all Her.” -from “The Summer Boy (c)2012 Henry Mitchell

Scott Langdon 19:13: It would be a long time before his brain could attempt to formulate these realities that were being imprinted on his psyche, even had he conscious understanding of them. Presently, he could not have framed the words to express the truths. He, the germ of a belief began to take hold in him that all of these small lives, his own among them, were each and all merely steps and measures in the great dance. The one mother breathed in them all, and they were all her. From the Summer Boy by Henry Mitchell.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:06: That's just beautiful. And here's what I wrote back to him at the time. Henry, that is a wonderfully evocative portrayal of illumination in one of its many forms. Thanks for sharing it with us. And one thing I noticed there as I reread my response. It’s beautiful and I told him that. And he's described illumination and how it comes to you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:39: And I say in one of its many forms because to the person having a profound experience of illumination that tends to feel you might say, like the form. The form is through your bones, it's through the silence of the world, and it comes to you inarticulately at first, and then you find words and concepts to articulate it. And it's articulated in here in terms of the great dance, which is a beautiful image, I think, and very apt by beautiful I mean very apt, very truthful and of the one mother breathing in them, all and all being her. And one of the things I'm, as a philosopher, noticing is this enormous draw in the spiritual life, in the religious life, toward unity, toward oneness, and the implicit contrast between oneness and difference, or diversity or particularity, separateness. It's conceived in different ways. Here that alternative isn't articulated, but there are many voices. And Henry, the boy, does not pause to notice. Huh, I wonder if these different voices are saying different things, are expressing different realities, different truths, different aspects of things, what comes to him as the illumination is the opposite, the oneness. They're all speaking one tongue, which then is taken to be the earth's own language. So the earth itself, in his conceptualization, is taken to have one authentic language, a kind of mother tongue, you might say. And it has one language because, as he slowly articulates it, as the boy slowly articulates it, his life and all these others, and the birds and the things he hears chirping and making other sounds of animals in woodsy areas, they're all one voice, they're one language. One voice, one person, the Great Mother. And that one person, the Great Mother, is all of us. Now, that strikes me, although he's responding to that divine voice coming to me in a feminine form. I took that message to be God is both. Not that there's one thing, that men are the same as women. Women are all men and they're all one thing. They're all the Great Mother or some other one thing. But the joy is in the diversity and the dynamic, the interplay that you get, and both of these, this whole history of philosophy goes back to Western philosophy. Parmenides versus Heraclitus. Parmenides held all as one and diversity is incoherent. He had great logicians on his side, like Zeno, pressing this argument. Change is incoherent for various reasons. The Buddhist gives very similar arguments, but it's a powerful dialectic to demolish. The only thing that makes sense is sameness and continuity and permanence. And Heraclitus coming along and saying exactly the opposite at about the same time. His most famous quote is you can't step into the same river twice. Nothing is the same, the river you're stepping into outside your window. You can't step into the same river twice. Nothing is the same. The river you're stepping into outside your window, you go there the next day. You might say a different one.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 24:43: It's a different river now that you're stepping into. So you can never step into the same. Everything is different, and so you get an almost dissolving diversity in the tradition of Heraclitus, where you wonder even how can you even call it a river? You know, everything's so different all the time from everything, how does it even have any kind of way to grasp it? Well, the one has some of that problem too. Well, the one has some of that problem too, because it's so undifferentiated. How can you grasp it? But each one goes with it.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:22: The history of philosophy since then, Western philosophy is kind of, you might say, the dialectic of those two, most philosophers finding some trying to search for ground in between where you can have both the unity and the diversity, both stability and change. Some things, or aspects of things, seem permanent, some don't. You know that kind of differentiation and my own sense of the spiritual life is, although these are profound moments, where the unity of things, even their permanence, and the superficiality, by comparison, of all the diversity of the many voices chirping, chirping around you, including the human voices chirping, those are kind of superficial compared to something more primordial, more profound, more real and in some ultimate way seeming to be one thing that everything else is manifesting, and that's very profound, but so is the other. So that's the, as we both often say in our discussions, because you always have to come to this you can't say who's right Hermenides or Heraclitus, who's right the many voices chirping, or one nature's own language, the one tongue that he kind of hears in all of that- you can't just say it's one or the other, each one, you leave too much out. And yet, you know, our human capacities are such it's very hard to go around with a both and all the time we have to somehow sort it out and figure out in any given situation.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:11: Well, of this both and what is relevant to me here and now, you know what is needed me here and now, what is needed, what am I called to do? Or what does the situation call for? Your best friend, the guy you talk to every day and you often describe him as your best friend, what does he need today? Or what's your relation to him today? Maybe today you got to ignore him? You know, these are the complexities of life and the need for discernment and paying close attention, and I'm always a little worried when people are doing something. much more broad brushed. There's the one tongue and we're all the Great Mother. Well, okay, that's part of the story, but that can't answer your question about how to respond to your best friend today. But anyway, those are just some of my reactions as I look at this again.

Scott Langdon 28:11: So our second email this week that I wanted to discuss comes from Renata, and Renata writes in response to a piece that you wrote on the website called "A Drop of Water," and that's from the book and in the podcast where you had an experience earlier in life, as a young person, as a child. You're looking at a spigot and you see this one drop of water on the edge of it and something about that moment. You were taken into a realization somehow, or it was given to you, that God is present in that in a way, in its suchness, you mentioned that word and I was fascinated by that.

Scott Langdon 29:24: In recollection, I have had a couple of experiences like that that I can point to in my growing up, but also even now I probably have more of those kinds of experiences, now that I'm aware that others have had that kind of thing happen and your description of it goes oh, that's what happened to me when I was in this experience, and now I can kind of see them more often, I'm more aware of them. They don't happen all the time, but they do happen, these experiences where you see something outside of you. That just serves as this reminder that you and it are part of this oneness that we talk about, and yet there is this differentiation. It's very specifically that communication to me.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:17: Yeah, the actual experience was simply an experience of its particularity, which deserves attention and respect. It reminds me of the complaint of Willy Loman in what's that play of Arthur Miller called?

Scott Langdon 30:36: Death of a Salesman.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:37: Death of a Salesman. Willy Lohman complains. You know, I used to be liked by everybody and what do you have to do in this town to get some respect? To get some respect? And it's just nobody pays attention to him anymore. And you know, everybody deserves attention in some basic human way. And that's what came to me anyway, that drop of water putting itself forward as a member of the community of being. You know, I didn't know how to articulate any of these things as a kid. It didn't strike me as part of God. I had a more traditional view of being. You know, I didn't know how to articulate any of these things as a kid and it didn't strike me as part of God. I had a more traditional view of God. But when I prayed about it, God said oh, that was Me, where else would I be?

Scott Langdon 31:27: Right, right, yeah right. I love that. I love that. Where else would I be? Like? I am everything everywhere and yet I'm. So look around, you know it's very interesting.

Scott Langdon 31:40: Renata wrote in in response to that piece, A Drop of Water. And she writes and she talks a little bit, she mentions a man named Heidegger who was a German philosopher, and so she mentions a couple of things from him, and we'll talk about that in a second. But here's what she says: What a beautiful story! I am glad you are sharing it with us today. Heidegger elaborated on the difference between ‘das Gestell’ and ‘das Geviert’. The former indicating the way we “normally” experience everything as an object. Every thing is then turned into something we can manipulate to our own advantage. The object seems to have no worth outside our use for it. ‘Geviert’ points to the fact that in each and every thing heaven and earth, the living and de dead come together. A kind of mystical unity, I’d say, although Heidegger would never have used that phrase!" That's her email to us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:43: Isn't that interesting. Renata is a woman who thinks about these things and studies them, takes courses, or maybe she teaches. But I wrote, Renata. Thank you for those reflections.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 32:57: Most of the time we look at things (and persons too) in terms of their possible uses. But it is also possible to see things and people in their own terms. One encounters them much more as they are in themselves, in their own actual being. In his later work, Heidegger adds an emphasis on the unity of things so encountered, which, as you say, veers toward the mystical.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:26: My own experience was most strikingly one of particularity, of each item in its own integrity, its suchness. And as I look at this again, I'm struck by, you know, our thought tends to do this work in dichotomies. Little dualisms we set up, because it's hard for the human mind to hold too many thoughts, you know, categories in mind at a time. I think four is about the maximum, which is really two dualisms slicing in different directions. But here there's what I would consider, I think Renata is paying the price of that kind of dualist thinking because it seems so natural to say, ah, and picking up on Heidegger, who she's playing off of, there's object thinking you can think of, look around at you, that drop of water which she's commenting on, could have been seen as an object merely, and that's equated with seeing its utility. But that equation is not automatic.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 34:49: That's because of the contrast she has set up. I was seeing it as an object, as a thing in the world. It's not me, it's it, I'm not the drop of water. The drop of water is the drop of water and I'm encountering it. And you can encounter something in its particularity. This is often what the poet does, a jar in Tennessee and these lines you can lift out the red wheelbarrow from Carlos Williams and so forth. It's a particular thing, it has larger resonances, but you focus on the particular and you let that sort of speak to you and you might say, tell its truth to you. And here what Heidegger does is then make the only alternative, which she seems to be kind of accepting, at least for the moment. I bet she has many other thoughts that have many complications to them, but here she's picking up on Heidegger, where Heidegger Govert seems to mean something like togetherness, the different fundamental aspects of the world all brought together. If we were to leave behind some of the Heideggerian peculiarness.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:00: I'm not an admirer of Heidegger. I think he draws people by being obscure, so that makes it seem profound, by arresting turns of thought that are shocking and that is thought-provoking by paradoxes, and that paradoxes always seem both profound and are thought-provoking, because then you start puzzling over them, and ultimately he tends to then knock out the props from his own original distinctions, and so that seems like a very further level of insight, so I won't go through the details of it. In this case, the four particulars that he names, with sky and earth, are two of them, and earth starts out being the ground of being, but quickly, oh, it's not the ground, because it kind of floats in the air, floats in the sky. And then later, well, it's not the ground, because it's more like an abyss. So there are all these paradoxes, oh, the ground is the abyss. But then later, oh, that just sounds like you're going to be in free fall. Oh, but no, the abyss is not a nothingness. So, anyway. So he puts these all on top of each other. Well, that's my little spiel on Heidegger, but it's arresting for people, and especially intelligent people like Renata, who are trying to think profoundly, and so this gives you food for thought.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 37:27: And the four she brings together are not exactly the four he does, but I think if you were to generalize his point rather than have his own particularities of earth and sky, which is roughly heaven and earth in her language, and the gods and the mortals are the other two in his. She calls it the living and the dead, but I would call it the relationality of things. I mean, everything is what it is. There's a famous statement from a philosopher, Bishop Butler: everything is what it is and not another thing. That's the particularity.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:02: But nothing is merely what it is. Everything is to the left or to the right, or above or below, or in causal relations, the effect of or the cause of or in, especially in personal human beings, personal relations with friends and enemies and adversaries and comrades and colleagues and lovers and ex-lovers and so forth. We have this enormous range of parents and children and so forth, generations. We're in all these relations and everything is in multiple relations, including, no doubt, this drop of water. Well, it doesn't exist isolated in the universe, right, it exists in all these relations. And if one wanted to know, you might say well, all there is about this drop of water, you would look at all those relations, including the ones that are relations of utility. That's why we have a spigot and that's why that particular drop forms. Okay, that's fine, that's how we manage our way through the world. So that's an important side of this kind of both/and. Each thing is what it is and not another, and one can appreciate it in its own particularity and respect that, you might say, but also kind of take it. One can take that in at a more profound level of its, you know, metaphysical reality. You might say it's very deep reality and meaning, At the same time nothing is merely in a little isolated bubble, nothing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 39:49: The William Carlos Williams is that the one who's got the red wheelbarrow. There's a lot more in relation to the red wheelbarrow. That's not the end of the story. Why is it a wheelbarrow after all? And so that pristine poetic image that seems to just stand somewhat luminously in the hands of a good poet on its own, nevertheless, is part of all the elements of the poem and all the elements of literature that stand behind any given work of literature and the whole culture and history that stand behind that. And then you take it all in and, of course, in what you and I do, Scott, the divine reality that stands behind that. You know that none of that merely exists. Suspended in air, you might say. If it's suspended anywhere, it's suspended in the divine.

Scott Langdon 40:46: Well, we want to thank both of our email writers today, Renata and Henry Mitchell. Thank you for writing in and sharing these experiences, and if you're somebody listening out there and you want to share your experience of God or thoughts or questions, please email us at questions@godanautobiography.com. We'd love to hear from you and we'd love to discuss your email at some point on a What's On Your Mind episode. Jerry, it's great to see you. Next week, What's On Our Mind? I've got a bunch of questions for you, they're going to have to wait till then.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 41:18: Look forward to that, but you've fashioned a very nice unit here.

Scott Langdon 41:34: 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.