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

211. Special Episode | Spiritual Insights from 2024: Best of the Life Wisdom Project

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon, Abigail L. Rosenthal, Jonathan Weidenbaum, Judy Dornstreich, Mikhail Sergeev, Ajit Dass, Michael Poliakoff

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Celebrate the Best of 2024’s Life Wisdom Project! As we close out the year, join us for a captivating journey through the most inspiring moments of the Life Wisdom Project. This special episode highlights profound conversations with our esteemed guests, including philosophers, spiritual seekers, and scholars, who unpack the deeper meanings of God’s messages and their impact on daily life.

Explore topics like balancing self-worth and ego with Dr. Jonathan Weidenbaum, understanding divine awareness with Judy Dornstreich, and harnessing the transformative power of the "evil urge" with Dr. Michael Poliakoff. Discover faith beyond ideology with Dr. Mikhail Sergeev, gain insights into romantic love’s spiritual dimensions with Dr. Abigail Rosenthal, and learn how to live as divine partners with God alongside Ajit Das.

Whether you’re seeking spiritual growth, philosophical reflection, or practical wisdom, this episode offers a treasure trove of insights to carry into the new year. Don’t miss this celebration of connection, harmony, and purpose!

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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 01:11: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, I’m Scott Langdon and on behalf of the whole team here, I want to wish you all a very happy new year. With this episode being released on the final Thursday of the year, we thought it would be fun to look back on a year that brought us so many great moments of wisdom, wisdom we might be able to carry into the new year ahead. One of my favorite series of episodes we produce is The Life Wisdom Project series. It's in this series of episodes that Jerry Martin and a special guest talk about the implications for our lives of a specific episode of our podcast. Episodes 1 through 44 of this podcast are where you'll find the dramatic audio adaptation of Jerry's book \God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher and our continuing discussion of the book is rooted in a desire to live in a more God-centered way. The guests we've had over the course of the entire series have been so wonderful and this week we'd like to take some time to specifically celebrate the Life Wisdom Project guests from 2024 by sharing some of our favorite moments with them. So join us for a look back on the 2024 Best of the Life Wisdom Project from God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Scott Langdon 02:41: When we were coming up with ideas for what we wanted this podcast to be after the audio adaptation of Jerry's book was completed, it didn't take long for the Life Wisdom Project series to take shape. God had asked Jerry to tell God's story and that's how the book God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher came to be. But it seemed clear to Jerry and to all of us here that God didn't want His story told for just the sake of it, but so that we could, if we knew where God was coming from, know God more fully and be open to a more personal relationship with him. So it came to us to invite guests, experts in their particular fields onto the program to talk with Jerry about each episode of the audio adaptation of the God Book, as we sometimes like to call it, and see what kind of wisdom we can all take away and apply to our day-to-day lives, and thus the Life Wisdom Project series was born.

Scott Langdon 03:43: In 2024, we had the great privilege to offer 10 Life Wisdom Project episodes with six fantastic guests, two of whom made more than one appearance this year. Our guest list this year consisted of, in order of appearance, Dr Jonathan Weidenbaum, Judy Dornstreich, Dr. Michael Poliakoff, Dr. Abigail Rosenthal, Dr Mikhail Sergeyev and Ajit Das. Here are some of my favorite moments with each of them this year. We begin with Dr Jonathan Weidenbaum, professor of Philosophy and World Religions at St John's University and at Berkeley College in New York. For our first episode of 2024, we presented episode 160, for which Jonathan Weidenbaum joined Jerry to discuss the implications of episode 13. I Ask God Hard Questions About Ego And Suffering. Straight out of the gate, Jonathan found this episode rich with wisdom and insight. Here's a clip from that episode. Jerry speaks first.

Jerry L. Martin 04:50: I was wondering, Jonathan, were there things in terms of life lessons- how to live? Were there implications here that shocked, surprised you, or even shocked you? Or did it mainly seem to be, to kind of cohere, to be confirmatory of your own instincts?

Jonathan Weidenbaum 05:10: I wouldn't say shock, I would definitely say this chapter was full of real wisdom. The first, of course, you just got into yourself, the distinction between self-appreciation and ego. And I'm reminded, I remember last time we had this discussion and I brought up Rafael de Emerson. One finds esteem in him as well. I mean, he decries, he's against that sense of mean egotism that we all have at times, but at the same time that robust self-expression, self-appreciation that's joyous and robust and that taps into something larger, and that's healthy. I mean you could see it would be such an impact on Nietzsche as well, who really appreciated Emerson, you know. So that distinction is very powerful and I really appreciate that. That's a real nugget of wisdom. That way of putting it is something I'm very thankful for, thankful to listen to, thankful to hear.

Jerry L. Martin 06:25: Here, God expresses it as the joy of being yourself. Kind of feel the fullness of your own being. It's bounty.

Jonathan Weidenbaum 06:42: Right. That robust self-affirmation itself is beautiful. It's just the separateness of being an ego and the defensiveness that goes along with it and all the sort of calculative sort of machinations of being an ego. That's where the problem lies, you know, and that rich distinction is extremely important because too many folks conflate the two, and that's a problem.

Jerry L. Martin 07:02: Yeah, there's a legitimate sense of ego, and then there's an illegitimate sense, which is described here as being self-lustful, or later second-order attachment to ego, where I'm number one, I'm the most recognized, I'm the most liked, I'm the most beautiful, the smartest, whatever becomes the preoccupation. And that's where you go wrong.

Scott Langdon 07:36: Judy Dornstreich, anthropologist, organic farmer and dear friend of the podcast, joined us for the second time to talk with Jerry about episode 14. I Learn The History Of God's Relationship With Humans. Jerry brings up a central question about who we are in the world and reads God's explanation. Judy's lived experience with a way of talking about this idea is fascinating. Here's a clip of episode 165 with Judy Dornstreich. Jerry speaks first here.

Jerry L. Martin 08:11: And it begins with a statement from the great physicist Schrodinger, the external world and consciousness are one and the same thing, inspired by quantum mechanics. And yet I'm told no, that's not the right way to go. But what is the right way to go? Well, it doesn't sound all that different. Let me quote that. God speaking, “I am the point of interaction between human beings and the world. I am the medium through which human beings understand the world.” And I say is mind the medium? “Yes,” so it's as if, in addition to human.. I think this is the picture, there are human minds, there is the world, they're both real, but there's also divine mind, divine mentality, let's call it present in both us, and things so that's all over the place. So that seems more like a nuance of difference. And I know you've studied these things. I mean, one reason I thought of you is obviously you've studied, unlike most of us, you've studied with a real guru, right, one of the masters. And who was that?

Judy Dornstreich 09:22: Well, I had several, because there are steps, but the main guide, the Satguru. There's things called upagurus, which means step by step in the steps, the upaguru, but then the Satguru is the one that hits you in the head and you go yeah, I get it. And that was Swami Chinmayananda, and actually it's interesting because when I first read that I thought you know this word consciousness I don't like so much, but what if he used Chinmayananda's word awareness?

Jerry L. Martin 10:03: Okay, yes, awareness.

Judy Dornstreich 10:05: I like, because that sometimes it's simpler. It's simpler and we'll step to the year, the later years, when I finally said to him so I know the, as the Bible says, God says I am that, I am that, the thing that I am. I know I am this, I know that I am that I am. Why aren't I enlightened? Right, and he looks at me. He said you're still in your intellect. Be that. Be that awareness. You're still like your awareness is received on the screen of your intellect, but that's still an external thing to awareness itself. If you be that awareness, that's different, that and its timeless. It's just awareness.

Jerry L. Martin 11:20: It just is.

Judy Dornstreich 11:21: It just isness; exactly. And that isness, that aware being is throughout everything. All and everything, as Gurdjieff would say, is you know, boils down to that awareness. I mean, that's what I got. So then I fetched a plane to my, to Dayananda, who was Chinnayana, chief disciple, and came to this country and was teaching as well, and I actually had an ashram here and I said to him, so I can be that quick, and then I said, what do I do? And he says practice.

Jerry L. Martin 12:13: And that's why people meditate, and so that's the practice.

Judy Dornstreich 12:17: Well, that's the practice. You do it and I have a really good girlfriend who I think you may know her name is Abigail and when I first was discussing this kind of stuff with her I said I'm the worst meditator in the world and she said she's the worst meditator in the world.

Jerry L. Martin 12:33: She meditates everyday, but she says she thinks about it.

Judy Dornstreich 12:38: The thing is that there's always this dissatisfaction that you can't hold it longer and have the door, the great you know stuff happening to prove that you've done it right. And I've kind of given up on that. If I could just be awake and aware and be that, sometimes in light, I mean. I think the practice then becomes see if, when you walk out the door and touch the mezuzah, if you're Jewish which I've stopped doing, but that was what's also called a stop in Guruji Fouk Stop and just be, be that, and then you're going to be lost in the body, the intellect, the heart, whatever's going on in the equipment which I find is a really good term, the equipment, meaning your heart, mind and body. That's the stuff the being aware, being is embodied in, so to speak, and it demands all your attention and meditation is pull your attention back from that and get to be familiar at least with the silent being aware source inside. And you know, I mean maybe a baby in the belly is already doing that, but boy, do we forget. I mean, here's an image I have of my first baby looking at a window and going ooh. I mean, it's so entrancing when you are born into this world. He's in an infancy and he's like ooh, and you get lost in it. Or until somebody says wake up.

Scott Langdon 14:45: Dr Michael Poliakoff joined us in March for Episode 170, sharing his deep knowledge of the Hasidic tradition and philosophical insights. Jerry and Michael discuss what is sometimes referred to as the evil urge, and Michael's scholarship in this area is so beneficial to us as he articulates his understanding in this area is so beneficial to us as he articulates his understanding In our clip from episode 170, Jerry begins by framing the problem and Michael picks up the baton from there. Here's Jerry.

Jerry L. Martin 15:18: Carl Jung's theory going back to that term, evil, and let me just read a little more of this before I mention what we had been talking about, the creative force of the evil urge, as I'm restating Buber, the erotic energy that I felt to be at the center of being itself, the most divine thing you might say, and you know Freud has so disturbed our talk about the erotic that it's even hard to broach the subject because it's degraded in Freud's analysis. But so we have to set that aside. And another place this is an actual quote from Buber, that's in the episode, “the quality of fervor with direction, all the awesome power of the evil urge taken up in the service of God.” So it's an awesome power if you use it in the service of God.

Michael Poliakoff 16:21: That depends on having that grasp of the transcendent, in other words, that we're not building a tower of Babel because we think that we're so great. The ego of the person in all its pathetic smallness is not what this is about. It is that great task and of course I'm so glad that you have so much of the Kabbalistic impulse and inspiration in the God book is to be the co-worker with God as best we can understand God, and not to have the arrogance to say that we necessarily do, this is something beyond us, but to do our best to understand what the duties and roles that are that God has appointed to us and to be led by that into that erotic fervor.

Jerry L. Martin 17:24: Yes, yes.

Scott Langdon 17:34: One of our favorite guests here on the program is Dr Abigail Rosenthal, also known as Abigail Martin, Jerry's wife. For episode 180. Abigail joined Jerry to discuss episode 17. I Learn What Really Happened With Adam And Eve. As always, Abigail articulated very beautifully the difficult nature of the problem of loving in a world that seems to be separate from God. How strange to think we could ever leave God out. Here's Jerry and Abigail from episode 180.

Jerry L. Martin 18:08: Well, I'm very pleased to invite my wife, Abigail Martin, who publishes under the name Abigail Rosenthal, to join me on this Life Wisdom discussion. I thought of you, sweetheart, for two things, because of two things in this episode. One is it's where we hear from God what was going on with Adam and Eve and how did God react to what was going on with Adam and Eve. And your name actually comes up toward the end of the episode, and so at some point I'll direct your attention to that, but let's start with Adam and Eve. What did you make of that, sweetheart?

Abigail L. Rosenthal 18:52: Gosh, Adam and Eve. Well, what caught my attention was that they go into an obsessive vortex where each is all in all for the other. There's a French poem that, translated, says if one being is lost, the whole world is empty. So they fill the world for each other. It's a romantic apogée, a romantic intensification to the vanishing point almost. And we celebrate it, I guess, when we celebrate famous romances, but God doesn't seem to be celebrating it. There ought to be a third at the party, the third being God, and otherwise there's some kind of idolatry and nihilism. Finally, they exhaust each other.

Abigail L. Rosenthal 20:18: Dante's lovers in the inferno are chasing each other endlessly. In the French version, Tristan and Isolde die. They can't live in time, they can't live in time and space. In the real world, or, as I like to say, in history, there's no before and after, there's a kind of almost paralytic. Now, you know, in the 20th century there was the perfect orgasm and it was now. It seemed as if to get into that now was the ideal in the romantic framework. But God doesn't share this ideal. It seems to obstruct God's purposes.

Jerry L. Martin 21:25: Yeah, and they're almost purposely ignoring God. They're hiding from God, right, they're hiding.

Abigail L. Rosenthal 21:31: Yeah, they fill the screen, they don't need…. 

Jerry L. Martin 21:36: Yeah, that's interesting. It's not that they're hiding. I'd always kind of read this as they're hiding because now they're being sinful, though the whole stress here is no, they're completely innocent. You know, they're just frolicking in this new discovery of each other and each other's bodies. You know, and what else would you do suddenly, presented with this? You know, she's always described as beautiful, good to look at or something like that. And she responds to him. And there they go. And, as you put it, they don't need God. And what God says in the passage, they hid their nakedness, which is to say they hid their creativity and sexuality from Me, detached it from My purpose, used it solely for their own pleasure and intimacy, innocently enough, but still wrong. And finally, in that same passage, God was telling me detached sexuality, hiding from God, has its own intrinsic price: the loss of full bounty and blessing of God. But the point here, I gather, is from what God is telling me here is not being expelled from the Garden of Eden. You know that particular oh, now you've got it, you've asked for it and we're going to punish you, but rather you're living in the wrong way, you know. Okay, this is part of reality, it's a vibrant part of reality, just the pure encounter with one another of the two lovers, and so it's natural that that somewhat, as you say, fills the screen of their lives. And yet, well, there's a price. You've left something out, and you've left out what you might say is a more fundamental aspect of reality anyway, something kind of ultimate in defining lives. You've left that out.

Scott Langdon 23:45: Dr Mikhail Sergeev has an absolutely fascinating story. He's a Russian who lived through the fall of the Soviet Union and the collapse of the structure that the communist system gave to the people of Russia. Mikhail's journey in search of truth and understanding brought him to America and eventually to a career as a professor of world religions. Mikhail's journey was particularly interesting to me because I also lived through the fall of the Soviet Union, but from the other side. My religious ideology got bolstered in that political climate of the early 1990s and I never considered, in the way I did with this episode, what it must have been like for the people like Mikhail Sergeev and his fellow countrymen. Here's a little bit of Jerry and Dr Mikhail Sergeev.

Jerry L. Martin 24:38: We look at this fascinating to my mind, episode 19, which begins with the so-called problem of the diversity of revelations. You know, one revelation is a blessing, A dozen revelations is a kind of embarrassment. Oh well, mine isn't the only one, there are others. And what am I now to make of that? And the 17th century philosopher, thinker, Jean Bodin, said each religion refutes all the others, because each one claims they've got absolute certainty in the whole thing.

Jerry L. Martin 25:16: And we all live in this world now, right praying, not paying much attention at the time to what had been going on in religions, because I was a lifelong agnostic when God first spoke to me and so I thought, huh, this is interesting. And then I was told in prayer go read the foundational text of the world's religions and basically ask the question of God. God, what were you up to with these people, all the way to the ancient Egyptians, the Zoroaster, the Chinese, the people of Israel and so forth around the globe? And as I started looking around, oh, this is not so surprising. We now live in a world of multiple religions. A dozen can be in the same neighborhood these days, especially in America, where everybody comes here from somewhere else, and not just religions, but worldviews, competing political ideologies, competing social ideas, competing theories of how best to live life, and people get very committed to these things, as in a sense, they should. If you're going to take whatever you decide is the way to think and live, you take it seriously, you try to follow through on it.

Jerry L. Martin 26:50: Now, in this context, with that background, I'm thinking of your story, as I understand it, Mikhail is, you started off in Soviet Russia, you were a kind of journalist, and when I first met you you said in a regime like that it's not altogether clear what the job of a journalist is. You're supposed to report the news, but maybe you could just start your story then, because at that point you have a worldview right. Everybody is a communist and even though the regime is suspect, communism, marxism, does provide a kind of meaningful frame, a kind of utopian political vision of workers, of the world and so forth.

Mikhail Sergeev 27:37: Yes, when I was growing up, we were taught communist ideology from the kindergarten. That is true, not even from school, from the kindergarten. Now I look at my pictures when I'm like five or six years old, or my son's pictures when he's three years old, and the first thing I notice is the portrait of Lenin. Above. Right above the faces of the children. So communism was not simply an ideology, it was an all-encompassing, comprehensive worldview, and in this way we could safely say that communism replaced religion in the Soviet Union. So it was not simply a system of ideas, it was something that gave the meaning to your life, and that's how I grew up. Somewhere in my early 20s, when my education came into a conflict with the real life, the real life, you know, turned out to be very far from what I was taught, and that already created.

Jerry L. Martin 29:02: In what way Can you make that more specific? 

Mikhail Sergeev 29:05: Well, communist ideology that was taught to us was an idealist kind of philosophy and it assumed that people have good nature and this good nature should be given the chance to flourish. And when I encountered people, to my surprise I realized, that is just the opposite.

Jerry L. Martin 29:31: Well, I wouldn't go that far, but maybe that was your experience. I mean, I've always understood human nature as kind of mixed. You know, we have on one shoulder the pictures we have on one shoulder an angel and on one shoulder a little devil.

Mikhail Sergeev 29:47: Yeah, we didn't have a devil.

Jerry L. Martin 29:48: We didn't have a devil, but no, there's a kind of. That's one reason you can trust the regime is that eventually human nature will just flourish. Once you can stamp out capitalism and so forth, then human nature will just automatically flourish, and that didn't fit your….

Mikhail Sergeev 30:06: I saw that on the human level it was not true and I also saw that on the institutional level it is not quite true. And after that I started questioning, bit by bit, certain points within the ideology and in four years I came to challenging the whole ideology. So when I was 24, I rejected the whole communist ideology and that created a tremendous hole in my soul, in my worldview, because I had this quasi-spiritual backbone and suddenly it disappeared.

Jerry L. Martin 30:48: Was that something like what we call a crisis of faith? It all disappears. All the structures of meaning are no longer credible for a person. And then? Where are you? You're in a vacuum or something, but you don't live in a vacuum, so you can't sustain yourself there.

Mikhail Sergeev 31:06: The problem for me was that, unlike the previous generations of Russian people, I couldn't come back to a single tradition because I didn't have any tradition. So I was belonging to the third generation of the Soviet people and therefore, when I looked back, I saw the abyss you know, the 70 years of the Soviet experience and I couldn't just jump and pretend that this abyss was not there. So, unlike the first generation of Russians who emigrated and could come back to their Orthodox Christianity, I found myself really in a vacuum. I think our generation of Soviet people is unique in the whole world history because we are the only people who actually experienced complete lack of any tradition whatsoever.

Scott Langdon 32:14: We've enjoyed such a wide array of guests this year for our Life Wisdom Project series and we couldn't be more grateful to each one of them for taking the time to contribute to this project. One of our absolute favorite people here at the podcast is our final Life Wisdom Project guest from 2024, Ajit Das. Ajit found God: An Autobiography, As Told to a Philosopher, via the internet all the way from India and has become such a wonderful friend to our work here. We always love Ajit's uplifting insights and we invited him back this year to talk with Jerry about listening to God, achieving balance and living as divine partners with God. Here's Ajit and Jerry.

Jerry L. Martin 33:05: Maybe I'll say a little bit up front for our listeners I like to think of Ajit Dass as my ambassador to India, but maybe it's God's ambassador to India, you know, 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 and 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?

Ajit Dass 33:53: So 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 from…So two main paragraphs is what struck me is giving literally the purpose of life on Earth. So I'll just read them out.

Jerry L. Martin 34:41: Why don't you share that with us? Because by now we would have all forgotten.

Ajit Dass 34:44: Yeah, yeah in the chapter that says I tell different cultures what they are prepared to hear, there are two paragraphs that really struck me. One of them is where 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. And then God goes on on another paragraph almost immediately after this, that the universe is something like My body, but it has ethereal as well as gross aspects, just as a human body does.

Ajit Dass 36:00: 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.

Ajit Dass 36:22: 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, since they actualize higher possibilities and are able to 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, is what you said. 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 has to move towards balance so that its purpose of actualization and realization through experiences is achieved harmoniously. So I'm 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 achieve God's desires and what to do to achieve God's desires.

Jerry L. Martin 37:50: Well, that's a wonderful summary, Ajit, and there's an awful lot in those two paragraphs that you read the harmony, the fittingness, it's moral, it's aesthetic, and the different kinds of balance and the sense of part of the human job is actualization. We know that God needs us. We actualize things God can't actualize. God can't paint the Sistine Chapel and build the Taj Mahal and all these things. We have to do those; come up with E equals MC squared. You know God needs all these partners and He needs them to not be tearing each other apart. Right, but promoting some kind of complex harmony is not a simple harmony like the harmony of a single note, but it's 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. You know what 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 Jerry's contribution and Scott Langdon's, and so on.

Ajit Dass 39:09: So that's where God, in this very chapter, and He tells us how to listen.

Scott Langdon 39:20: God: An Autobiography, The Podcast is executive produced by Jerry Martin, Laura Buck is our show's producer, Amanda Horgan is our copywriter and social media director, and I'm Scott Langdon, your host. Once again, on behalf of everyone here at God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, we want to wish you a very happy new year. We look forward to seeing you in 2025 right here on the podcast. I'll see you next time.