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

206. The Life Wisdom Project | Listening to God, Achieving Balance, and Living as Divine Partners | Special Guest: Ajit Dass

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon, Ajit Dass

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What if you could hear God’s voice guiding your life? What if achieving harmony with the divine could bring balance to your mind, body, and soul? In this episode of God and Autobiography: The Podcast, host Scott Langdon welcomes back spiritual seeker Ajit Dass for a heartfelt and enlightening conversation with Jerry L. Martin.

Together, they explore the profound ways God communicates—through prayer, dreams, intuition, and insights—and how we can attune ourselves to hear and act on divine guidance. Ajit shares personal stories and wisdom from I Learn How God Communicates (Episode 22), revealing how living in partnership with God can lead to a life of purpose and harmony.

Discover the three essential levels of balance—cosmic, moral, and physical—and learn how simple attitudes like acceptance, love, and gratitude can transform your life. This episode is an inspiring invitation to reflect, connect, and embrace your unique role in God’s greater plan.

Why Listen

If you’ve ever wondered how to hear God’s voice or how to align your life with divine intentions, this episode offers profound insights that will resonate with your soul.

Key Topics Covered

  • How God communicates through prayer, dreams, and intuition.
  • Insights from God and Autobiography: Harmony, divine partnership, and self-actualization.
  • The three levels of balance and how they connect to spiritual growth.
  • Five attitudes that nurture mental and emotional harmony.
  • Why moral balance and mutual respect across cultures are vital for unity.


Other Series:

The podcast began with the Dramatic Adaptation of the book and now has several series:

Resources:

Hashtags: #lifewisdomproject #godanautobiography #experiencegod 

Stay Connected

  • Subscribe to the podcast for free, and explore the book God and Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin, available on amazon and at godanautobiography.com.
  • Share your thoughts or questions at questions@godandautobiography.com—we’d love to hear your story of God!

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[00:16] Scott Langdon (Host): 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.

[01:00] Scott Langdon (Host): Episode 206. Welcome to God: An Autobiography: The Podcast.

[01:11] Scott Langdon (Host): I'm Scott Langdon, your host, and this week we return to our Life Wisdom Project series with a conversation between Jerry and our dear friend Ajit Das. Ajit zoomed in from his home in India via the miracles of the internet to exchange thoughts and ideas with Jerry, centered around Episode 22, I Learn How God Communicates. In this discussion, Jerry and Ajit talk about the implications of God's myriad ways of communicating, and Ajit offers valuable insight on living, with advice from his own lived experience and story. If you'd like to share your story of God, drop us an email at questions@godandautobiography.com. We love hearing from you. Here now is Jerry and Ajit. I hope you enjoy the episode.

[02:00] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Well, good to see you!

[02:02] Ajit Das (Guest): Same here.

[02:03] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Yes, yes. Maybe I'll say a little bit upfront for our listeners. I like to think of Ajit Das as my ambassador to India—or maybe it's God's ambassador to India—because I'm not just for Jerry, after all, I have communications from the divine to pass on to a larger public, and Ajit has plugged into that project in many ways, not just through God: An Autobiography, but in many ways through lifelong work. And I think, Ajit, one of the messages of this episode, in terms of how we should live our lives, is we should all be ambassadors from God. What did you make of that?

[02:52] Ajit Das (Guest): Absolutely. The fulfillment that is happening is happening both for God and the rest of the universe, which includes humans. So, we are very much hand in hand in this goal of fulfillment through experiences. So, I have a couple of quotes that I'd like to read out.

[03:23] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Oh, yeah. That's good. Yeah. What struck you?

[03:27] Ajit Das (Guest): Two main paragraphs struck me—they’re literally giving the purpose of life on Earth. So, I'll just read them out.

[03:41] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Why don't you share that with us, because by now we would have all forgotten.

[03:47] Ajit Das (Guest): Yeah. So, in the chapter that says, I Tell Different Cultures What They Are Prepared to Hear, there are two paragraphs that really struck me.

God says: "Because of the Chinese affinity, I communicated the fine sense of balance and harmony and right proportions—like a moral aesthetic sense, aesthetic in a larger sense, that then encompasses the moral and spiritual. That right balance and sense of center and working with the natural flow and understanding oneself rightly in order to contribute correctly to the larger social and natural harmony."

God goes on in another paragraph almost immediately after this:"The universe is something like my body. It has ethereal as well as gross aspects, just as a human body does. If people misbehave and throw it out of balance—and I am not just talking about ecology here, but more subtle ways of acting out of harmony with the natural order or the way—then you might say that I get a stomach upset. I am, among other things, the source of cosmic order, both physical and more than physical. I need people to help. The world is better because people are in it. They actualize higher possibilities and articulate the moral order in action, the natural order in intellection, the aesthetic order in appreciation, and so on. They are my partners in this effort."

[05:21] Ajit Das (Guest): So we are all ambassadors of God to arrive at some kind of fulfillment of the universe. So, what I infer from this is that the universe must move toward balance so that its purpose of actualization and realization through experiences is achieved harmoniously. So, I am again saying to the people who are listening to this episode: that you are partners with God, so you need to know how to listen to God, and what to do to acheive God's desires.

[06:46] Jerry L. Martin (Host): That’s a wonderful summary, Ajit. There’s an awful lot in those two paragraphs that you read. The harmony, the fittingness—it’s moral, it’s aesthetic. And part of the human job is actualization.

[07:05] Ajit Das (Guest): Yes.

[07:07] Jerry L. Martin (Host): God needs us. We actualize things God can’t actualize. God can’t paint the Sistine Chapel or build the Taj Mahal. We have to do those things. Come up with E = mc². God needs all these partners, and He needs them to not be tearing each other apart, but promoting some kind of complex harmony. It’s not a simple harmony like the harmony of a single note, but a complex harmony that contains some dissonance, as any musical composition does. So, it’s very complex, and we have to figure out our role. As you just concluded, I think, on exactly the right place, Ajit: we have to learn to somehow listen to figure out what is your contribution, what’s Mary’s contribution, and what’s Scott Langdon’s, and so on.

[08:09] Ajit Das (Guest): Yes, and in this very chapter, God tells us how to listen.

[08:15] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Yes.

[08:15] Ajit Das (Guest): God says, "People must learn to listen, to heed. That requires openness of heart and sensitive attunement to My voice, to My urgings." We have to keep our hearts open to receive the nudges of God to move toward harmony. But it’s only when we act upon the nudges that we have heeded the advice. Harmony and balance are achieved by our actions, and not just by discussions in drawing rooms.

[08:54] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Yes, yes. There’s a lot in that. One thing I was thinking—human beings are very willful. We have our own goals and desires, our own beliefs, and our own things we want to achieve for our lives. And it may include ego aggrandizement. Who knows what it might be—money, or even finding beautiful women, and so on. Even in the distraction of, say, raising a family when your hands are full, you have to calm yourself a little bit. That’s one purpose of prayer and meditation: to calm yourself.

[09:38] Jerry L. Martin (Host): That passage you just quoted, Ajit, to open your heart you have to calm yourself a lot in order to open your heart—not just to pursue your own goals or worry about your own problems that day—but to ask, to calm yourself, open your heart, “What does God want of me?”

[10:36] Jerry L. Martin (Host): And what do we learn here about how we’re to do that? How do we find out what God wants of us?

[10:40] Ajit Das (Guest): In the first two paragraphs I read out, I infer that there are three levels of balance to achieve:

  1. Cosmic balance.
  2. Moral balance.
  3. Physical balance.

[10:54] Ajit Das (Guest): At all these three levels, as you said, there are very complex frequencies where you have to balance yourself and all of them. Let's see what actions are needed for cosmic balance for instance. Reducing one’s carbon footprint to prevent climate change on Earth could be one of them and bring harmony on the planet. So that's one of the things you can focus on. You could switch off lights, heaters, or air conditioners that aren’t required. Use renewable energy or green energy wherever you can. So, something very small but you're acting upon it, and that's when you heed whatever is required.

[11:43] Jerry L. Martin (Host): That’s a good point. What you’re drawing from this, Ajit, is not just that we’re supposed to meditate or be in a sublime state ourselves. There are things to be done in the world to maintain and achieve harmony and actualizations. Each of us has our own situation. Your situation in India is very different from my situation here in the U.S. We’ve had different spiritual and intellectual experiences. You’re trained in technology, mathematics, and science, while I have a completely different background in philosophy.

[12:15] Ajit Das (Guest): Exactly.

[12:15] Jerry L. Martin (Host): We are each called upon to act in our situation and to act in response to what you call the divine nudges, in part, to achieve harmony. So, we have some sense of a general orientation. Though harmony isn’t the whole story, God says it’s an essential part of it. But we must follow those divine nudges.

[13:01] Jerry L. Martin (Host): There was going to be a passage I was going to share—maybe you picked up on this one, too—about how we know what God wants of us. God says, “I communicate through prayer, through dreams, through insights—insights that seem like one’s own thought.”

[13:14] Jerry L. Martin (Host): You have a kind of epiphany, or a light bulb goes off in your mind, and that can be God lighting something up for you. God also communicates through intimations and intuitions, in all these different ways. And this is you go back to having an open heart and an open mind, has to be an open mind, if you dismiss things because of a rigid set of beliefs, then you’re not listening to God; you’re listening to yourself. You’re looking at your own mirror of beliefs and thinking how beautiful they are. But you need to learn to relax that self-assertion. I think maybe you quoted this, people must learn to listen to heed, and that's the spiritual attunement. And God's frustration, God explains at one point, maybe it was the previous chapter.

[14:22] Jerry L. Martin (Host):  God does not work in the world like a sculptor shaping clay, manipulating it however He wants. God works through people. It’s a complex process.

[14:40] Ajit Das (Guest): Exactly.

[14:43] Jerry L. Martin (Host): God works through us and if He wants something done, we’re going to have to do it on this level of reality, we're going to have to do it.

[14:53] Ajit Das (Guest): Which you also did when you were commanded to write a book.

[14:58] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Yes, I was told to write a book. I found it embarrassing. I even asked, “Can I publish it anonymously?” Because nobody talks to God, we're 21st century people! But I was told to publish it. Okay, I did that. And God said, “No, it can’t be anonymous. It has to come from an actual person after all standing behind the experience.” So, I report the experience. We all have, God talks here that there's kind of division of labor. Different cultures, different religions, and different individuals. You're a different person than I am, you have your own assignments, I have my assignments. 

[15:38] Ajit Das (Guest): Exactly.

[15:40] Jerry L. Martin (Host): We each need to pay attention to well: What is my assignment? That's the question for us.

[15:47] Ajit Das (Guest): That brings us to the second balance that needs to be achieved: moral balance. The one thing everyone needs to believe is that yours is not the only way, but just another way. God says in this chapter that total revelation is more than any single individual or culture can bear or well act on.

[16:25] Ajit Das (Guest): So, there's a kind of division of labor as you're saying. So, God gives different cultures different messages and directions for fulfillment because everyone cannot do everything at the same time. It’s a division of labor for fulfillment, as God implies in the book. We need to love one another because each person contributes to the fulfillment of the universe of which all of us are apart. Differences shouldn’t divide us or cause hate, which, we see these days in the world.

[17:12] Ajit Das (Guest): The book Theology Without Walls, orchestrated by God through you, Jerry, is an example of how different religions can appreciate their commonalities and differences. As you write in Theology Without Walls, "Ultimate reality is trans-religious." We need to look at moral balance as well.

[17:34] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Right at the beginning of this episode, God explains why did the message of harmony come to the Chinese. That wasn’t the same message for the ancient people of Israel or other cultures. The Chinese had an affinity for this, a kind of cultural affinity, a certain kind of aesthetic sense, one sees it in any kind of art that one looks at. A very ancient culture in part because they were bounded by mountains so that basic culture went on for thousands of years within that space. I am simplifying the history obviously, but there is something true to that. The Chinese language goes all the way back to the earliest inscriptions, so they've shared a written language all that time, and they had a sense of harmony and balance and so on. 

[18:53] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Part of the story of God: An Autobiography is it's a self-discovery for God. People react to, the Chinese noticed God as cosmic harmony, and God notices, I'm not just a law-giver as for the ancient people of Isreal for example, the Ten Commandments, that's one aspect of the divine, but that's not the totality, there is also, God is cosmic harmony. And the Chinese picked up on that, and this is part of the trans-religious move of Theology Without Walls. He says every culture can benefit from that. They discovered it, they articulated it in exquisite ways, but now we all can read the Chinese classics, or study those traditions and benefit. And of course, the Chinese can benefit from other traditions so there is this mutual enhancement of understanding, deepening, broadening of understanding, and as you're stressing I think here Ajit mutual appreciation, mutual respect and appreciation, and ability to not only get along but produce something more in our interactions.

[20:08] Ajit Das (Guest): Absolutely.

[20:10] Jerry L. Martin (Host): So, you were looking at levels of harmony, and was the first physical?

[20:15] Ajit Das (Guest): The first was cosmic, then the moral, then the third is the physical. Unless there is physical balance you can't act on anything there has to be some... You're in the physical world and if you're physically imbalanced how are you going to act upon God's guidance? So you live on the physical plane and have a mind-body interaction of a very high order and therefore both the mind and the body have to be addressed re going to have a very high mind-body order for achieving balance and actualizing higher possibilities as God says.

[21:29] Ajit Das (Guest): So, let's look at the five attitudes I think one should embody to keep the mind balanced which I have used myself and has been my experience to keep myself balanced:

  1. Acceptance
  2. Love
  3. Cheerfulness
  4. Gratitude:
  5. Blessing: 

[21:58] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Explain those as you go along, those are arresting words.
[25:42] Ajit Das (Guest): Coming to the first one. Acceptance. Accept others instead of reacting to their behavior because reactions put you out of kilter. So that's the first advice. And on love the advice is love unconditionally, because conditions and expectations through you off balance when not met. The third one is cheerfulness- we all know cheerfulness will never get you out of balance.

Jerry L. Martin (Host): That's true. There is some good self-help book I believe that someone shared with me years ago and that's Learned Optimism, that's close to cheerfulness, you get more done in a productive and satisfied way if you approach it with some degree- hey I can do this or this is all good, I'm enjoying this, I'm lucky to be here able to do this part of cheerfulness

Ajit Das (Guest): And bring some humor into your life even if it is in the workplace.

Jerry L. Martin (Host): There is nothing in life as wonderful as laughing.

Ajit Das (Guest): The fourth is gratitude. Gratitude will help others not to curse you for being ungrateful. This is another interesting way of putting this.

Jerry L. Martin (Host): Well, your attitude always seems to be awfully important. I almost never pray for something for myself, if a friend asks me to pray for them I will pray for them. My prayers are, "Lord, what do You want me to do?" and even more throughout the day is just gratitude. It's wonderful just to be alive and not in pain. My dad at the age of 96 was happy to wake up each morning- hey I'm still alive! All these other pleasures and beautiful and fascinating things radiate out of that moment. Hey, I'm conscious; I'm alive and I'm here.

Ajit Das (Guest):  Especially after covid. A lot of people are gone and it's amazing that the two of us are alive.

Jerry L. Martin (Host):  It is a great blessing you can't take it for granted, it's not automatic they happen and it's good to pause and be grateful and then enhance the very experience by being grateful for it, so gratitude is an important one that was 4, I guess.

Ajit Das (Guest):  Yes. five is blessing. Blessing is an energy that creates balance whereas the opposite, cursing, disturbs peace. So, the advice is even bless your enemies. Let good energy go out, it's going to balance you and those around you

Jerry L. Martin (Host): I often conclude a little letter or note or email to a friend with bless you. I probably said it to you, Ajit, because that's how I feel, I don't know quite what it means, I'm blessing you, wanting God to bless you, but it's an expression of a feeling of wanting you to also live a blessed life and enjoying the blessings of life. That's natural and somehow related to gratitude, you're thankful for things for yourself, and you want those good things for others.

[26:28] Ajit Das (Guest): Very correct. So now we come to the balance of the body. For the body to remain in balance there are at least three major factors which we all know:

  1. Exercise
  2. Diet
  3. Sleep

Ajit Das (Guest): Very simple, three things. Exercise for a minimum of 25 minutes daily is what most researchers have come up for good health. Diets with proteins, fruits, dried fruits, vegetables, and seeds have been found to be good for human health. We all know sleep for 8 hours a day is known to repair the daily wear and tear of the human body and it gives you a spring in your step every morning. So that's how you keep your body and mind balanced to do God's work every day, actualize yourself and thereby actualize the whole universe.

 Jerry L. Martin (Host): Do you have a way of preparing for sleep? Do you think there is a method for helping you sleep well or going to sleep easily?

Ajit Das (Guest): Those five things for the mind, if you've done that the whole day, if you've been accepting, loving, cheerful, add gratitude, and bless somebody, you are going to be very happy when you go to sleep. I'm telling you that's my experience. 

[28:03] Jerry L. Martin (Host): Yeah, you're not going to be restless.

[28:43] Scott Langdon (Host):
Thank you for listening to God and Autobiography: The Podcast. Subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts and hear a new episode every week. You can also read the book God and Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L. Martin, available on Amazon or at GodAndAutobiography.com. If you have questions, email us at questions@godandautobiography.com. See you next time!