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

214. What's On Your Mind- Visions, Nudges, and Finding God

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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In this episode of What’s On Your Mind, Scott and Jerry dive into two compelling listener emails that explore the profound and personal ways we encounter God. Jennifer shares her extraordinary vision of "God's Eye" and the divine presence she experienced through angels, doves, and even laughter. Her story opens a discussion on interpreting divine signs, anthropomorphic imagery, and seeing God in everyday moments.

The conversation shifts to Jona, who writes about his feelings of spiritual emptiness. Scott and Jerry respond with reflections on divine nudges, trust, and the many ways God communicates through experiences, whether grand or subtle. They discuss the intersection of faith and science, the meaning of spiritual metaphors, and how acts of service can bring healing.

Join us for an inspiring journey into visions, revelations, and finding God’s voice in your life. Whether you're seeking, questioning, or celebrating your faith, this episode offers thoughtful insights and encouragement for your spiritual path.

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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.  Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon.

Scott Langdon 01:17: This is What's On Your Mind, and this is a special one. Jerry and I have two emails to talk about, and this week things are a little different. Instead of two completely separate emails, these go together. The second is a direct response to the first, like in a thread, and Jerry and I found them both wonderful and fascinating. We're always so grateful to those who write in and share their experiences. If you'd like to share your story of God with us, please drop us an email at questions@godandautobiography.com. Here's What's On Your Mind. I hope you enjoy the episode.

Scott Langdon 02:02: Welcome back everybody to another edition of What's on Your Mind. This is our 31st version of What's on Your Mind. It's one of my favorite things that we do here. I'm with Jerry Martin, and we are reading a couple of emails today. This is the series where Jerry and I take emails from folks who write into the program. They've been readers of the book or listeners to this program. And the email that we bring you today is a response to the question that we always ask, and that is, if you have an experience with God and you'd like to share it, we'd love to hear it, and so we always invite you to write us at questions@godanautobiography.com and tell us your story about God. And in this case, Jennifer writes with her experience, and Jerry, I just found it fascinating, and I can't wait to share it and talk about it with you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:54: Yeah, I find all of these emails, people's actual experiences, and some of them are wonderful experiences, some of them are not, or some of them are just people writing, well, I have questions, I can't find God, or something like that, or I have so much skepticism. Does this even make sense? The search for the divine? But they're all real testimony of the human interaction with the divine, even in the moments of absence. That's part of the interaction, and so I just find them such a gift to all of us to share these experiences. It empowers us in our own experience, it helps us in our own interpretation of our experience to kind of ponder these, and so Jennifer has sent us a wonderful one, and so I'm very pleased to be able to talk about Jennifer's dramatic experience.

Scott Langdon: Yes, she had quite a dramatic experience. She writes in and says this:

A Letter From Jennifer 03:48: "I would like to share my experiences that I have been able to have with God for the last two and a half years. I've been very sick since I was a baby, and I'm now 38. I was struggling with myself and had given up on living. I prayed to God, and since then I have seen several miracles. I was able to get off my medications that were hindering my mind from being able to have the motivation to feel.

Scott Langdon 04:20: "Once I got off my medications and started to feel healthier, I was able to see God's eye. I never knew that was something that anyone has ever seen and still don't know if anyone has. It was amazing. It was about the size of two airplanes in the sky, and next to it was an angel. The eye was beautiful. The color of His eye is of the sky, with blue and clouds within, and it moved around. I'm not sure if anyone else saw this at the time. I wish I shared this sooner, as some time has passed."

Scott Langdon 04:58: "I was in Nevada at the time, but I live in Sacramento. The angel was moving in and out of the clouds and then went away. His eye moved around just as you would move your own eye. It was the most amazing thing I have ever seen. God has the whole world in His hands. Since then, I have seen two white doves flying over me as I was reading the Bible outside, which represents my daughter and myself being safe with God after all we've been through. I also got to hear His laughter when I learned how to ride a motorcycle. His laughter is the most joyful laughter you could ever imagine hearing, and I've been able to hear him laugh more than once, after that. When I went camping, He also sang to me. I have had a very painful life full of much sadness and have had experiences that have caused me to be crippled with emotional and physical problems. I am able to speak with God, and He is helping me to discover just how strong my connection to Him is."

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:02: Isn't that amazing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:03: Look at these experiences and a woman with such trouble, such a troubled life since childhood—sickly, physical problems, emotional problems—how do you cope with all of that? And it helps you cope with all of that if you feel that there's a divine presence that's also part of your life, that you're not alone in all of these struggles, and hers is so remarkable. Well, here's what I wrote to her at the time. Just a short note. "Thank you for sharing, Jennifer."

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 06:40: "Your experiences are more anthropomorphic than I am personally comfortable with." There I'm referring to a big eye and so forth. This is all extremely anthropomorphic. God has an eye, you know, that kind of thing, but I think you've got to look at these things in context. And then I add, "But of course my experience of hearing a divine voice strains the credibility of others.” God has a voice, you know, and people start quizzing me sometimes: Oh, what language do you think God speaks? Does God have a native language, you might say, and with what accent? And you know, how does it sound, and all that kind of thing.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:29: Well, somehow these experiences that come forth in extremely concrete and sometimes anthropomorphic ways need to be accepted on their own terms, and you need to draw in: What is this telling me? Not quiz it as if it were a scientific experiment or we have some data on our radar coming in and we're trying to interpret these blips the way they're doing in New Jersey, I guess. What are these things? But no, it's not like that. You need to take in the meaning as it presents itself to you in the experience, and I think she's doing a great job of that. And then I finished my comment to Jennifer, this brief comment I sent: "We all have to be grateful for however God comes to us.” So I guess that fits, and I say bless you, bless you, bless you in general, bless you for sending this communication to us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:29: And if you look back at what she does with the experience, I find it very interesting. At first, I'm kind of startled—God's eye, a big eye in the sky. You know, this is disturbing to me. To me, I live in a kind of common-sense world. On the whole, though, I have a divine voice, and that's also part of my common-sense world. Well, she sees a divine eye and describes it, and the eye looks here and there moves around. What she gets from that, you know, I'm struck by the radical anthropomorphic image there—a divine eye, but she sees, she gets the meaning of it that God, the eye was beautiful. And what does she say? Oh here's her culminating comment on what does this mean? "God has the whole world in his hands." Now we switch to hands. It's a metaphor, but God is taking in the world.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:40: There's a great religious thinker, Nicholas of Cusa, who wrote a piece that starts with using the image for God of those paintings that I think omnivoyant vision or omnivoyant paintings—the kind of paintings that you occasionally encounter where it seems as if the eyes in the painting follow you wherever you move—to the right, to the left, or across the room, the eyes follow you. And God's kind of like that, that wherever you're moving, the divine eye—God is continuing to see you. God has continuous vision and is seeing you, and she takes that meaning, and that's the right thing to do with the experience. Don't worry about anthropomorphism. Does this mean literally an eye? Is the eye bloodshot? You know, stupid questions like that, and just say, oh, what is this telling me?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:40: And I'm struck when she sees the two doves. I think if I saw two doves, I would just say, well, here are two doves, maybe a divine sign or something—a divine how nice, you know, Godsent, but again, she sees the meaning of the two doves—represents my daughter and myself. And so she just takes that in, and she hears divine laughter, so joyful. God singing to me, and I think of sometimes playing music in my head, and why isn’t God part of that music in my head? Maybe this is why I’m hearing this music, you know, comes to mind, and I sort of replay it in my own mind. And why isn’t that God making music in my mind?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:42: And I know one scholar who is a great student of all this. There are, in the religious traditions, people who talk about the odor or fragrance of God—smelling God.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:53: Well, I have no idea what that means, but if I had the experience or someone told me in detail about the experience, they probably do know what that means—both what it’s like phenomenologically, what it’s like as an experience in just experiential terms, but also what did that tell them?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 12:14: It probably told them something, had some meaning for their lives. And part of the meaning—you and I sometimes talk about this, you know, in God: An Autobiography—God is both same and other, is everything. God is everything, including us, and God is wall to wall, everything, you know. And so God is never absent. Obviously, at the same time, God differentiates a God-self from ourselves, so we get to live our own lives in drama and so forth. And God has, as the book says, as God: An Autobiography describes—those I got in prayer, God telling me, God has a story. God has a story; we have stories, and the two stories are in interaction with each other. God is reacting in large part to us, and of course, we’re reacting in large part to God, however God comes to us in all these many ways. But anyway, those were some of the things that really struck me, Scott, about Jennifer’s communication.

Scott Langdon 13:21: I was very struck by it as well, and one of the things—there were a couple of things that struck me straight away. And the first one is your answer that you were uncomfortable with the anthropomorphic language, and I laughed out loud, quite honestly, when I read it, because your first experience with God is this, part of your first experience, is this multicolored fountain spinning in front of you and this image, this visual image that accompanied this experience, that was part of the experience. And you look and, Abigail, did you see this? Did you hear this voice? So you have a voice, you have this symbol, and so that struck me.

Scott Langdon 14:05: That was amusing to me, and in part, it was amusing because both of us come out of this American Christianity tradition. And in that tradition, we tell all kinds of stories that are in the Bible of these kinds of experiences happening to the main characters of whatever these stories are—that God comes as a dove, that God expresses God's self in a burning bush. And we're like, oh, of course, God would do that then, but not now.

Scott Langdon 14:40: And we understand when we look at history and enlightenment and science and all of those things, but we’ve gotten to such a place where it’s either science or faith, which is so broad in those two words I don’t even like using those words together like that because it’s not accurate, but the idea of it’s either science or religion, I guess, is a more accurate way to kind of talk about the division. I just don’t understand why we have this way of seeing it. It’s either/or which just blocks off the possibility of any of these experiences of God.

Scott Langdon 15:27: The first thing we want to do, it seems, with something like this experience that Jennifer has, is maybe one of two things. Either, you know, there’s something about her mental health that she’s seeing things, or she’s not, she’s not normal in some way. Or the other way would be to sort of put a scientific explanation on it, you know, and try to figure it out scientifically. For example like a national geographic episode on tv where they are trying to give scientific examples of the plagues that happened in Egypt. “Oh well it wasn’t really frogs it was actually….” They want to get it scientifically. Which I don’t have a problem with that. Talk about how it happened, talk about what's going on, but the either/or of it doesn’t seem to be necessary, in fact it seems to get in the way of a greater understanding.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:26: Yeah, you can’t understand the story after that. You know, the parting of the Red Sea—they do this: there are times of the year where the passage we imagine Moses’ path is—the waters are lower, the winds come and push. Well, that’s not the meaning of the story. The story isn’t about that. Luckily, it was the right time of year. That could be a story, but that’s not the story, and it’s not the meaning of the story. I think you’re exactly right, Scott.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:56: People use science in the singular. There are sciences, and they’re not all physics. Biology is not physics; it has not been reduced to physics, although only philosophers and specialists in biology realize this. And there’s geology, historical geology, paleontology—you know, all these things that aren’t just matter in motion. And then everything else we do—deciphering ancient texts, figuring out cuneiform—you start with something that looks like scribbles on a tablet. You finally figure out what it means.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 17:31: Well, that’s a kind of science, but it’s not reductive. And Abigail and I were just talking about what does the scientist do? The scientist who may believe science is the only story that’s real about the universe. But he himself walks through the office, goes in, you know, puts on his clothes, showers, goes into the office, flips on the light, goes, looks at the screen to see what the data are coming in on whatever experiment is being run, and then thinks, oh, I’ve got to write a report. So he starts making notes on a piece of yellow pad and so lives in a total world of colors. You know, according to science, there are no colors. Colors are just waves—certain waves. But in fact, we experience colors, and the scientists, the materialists, call this the hard problem.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 18:17: The problem is we’re actually conscious, and we have these vivid experiences of color, shape, texture, taste. Something tastes bitter, for example. Well, science translates all of those into quantitative things where the actual experience is lost. And yet the one thing we actually know firsthand, absolutely to be true, is this is bitter. You know that it has a taste. So we need to open up our notion of experience, and the experience includes these outer reaches. You’re listening to Handel’s Messiah, or something.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 19:05: That’s an experience, that’s data, you might say—the data about the nature of the world. The world contains these elements, some natural, some humanly created, things that are of, you might say, divine beauty, just extraordinary beauty. And if you just reduce everything to, as you were saying, Scott, to some, oh, we got to explain it this way and explain it that way. Why do we love this beautiful music? You know, what does it trigger?

Scott Langdon 19:37: Neurologists can give you some theory of that. Well, that’s an impoverished and inadequate—the main problem is it’s an inadequate representation of what our experience is, and our experience is actually our first-order encounter with the world, and so it’s an inadequate account of what reality contains. And when you then take in—let yourself broaden your notion of experience so you can now take in that it’s richer, deeper, has meanings all sewn through it. Then you can learn something more about reality than these reductive things that take most of the reality out because people are wedded to a particular theory of reality. No, let your experience tell the tale and not some preconceived theory of everything, but let your experience keep informing you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:39: And you mentioned, Scott, the burning bush. When I prayed about that, God said, well, I had to do something to get his attention. At this point, Moses has escaped because he killed a guy. A guy was beating up on one of the Jewish slaves, and he killed him. And then, uh-oh, he’s a murderer, even though he’s prince of Egypt. He has to run away, and he’s working as a shepherd for a guy who’s Jethro. And anyway, he’s just out being a shepherd, nothing. He’s not on a quest or looking for mystical visions or anything. But then God told me in prayer, well, I had to do something to get his attention. So, burning bush—well, that’s something. A bush aflame and yet not consumed, as the text says.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 21:26: And then what did Moses do? Moses turned to look, and that’s why you and I, Scott, often say, you’ve got to pay attention. Well, Jennifer is certainly someone paying attention, and you’ve got to turn and look, but also you’ve got to open your heart and mind to taking it in, which is what Moses did and what Jennifer did and what we all need to do. Okay, here’s an experience telling me something. What is it telling me? I’ve got to take that in. Ah, and the striking thing is we often kind of know what it’s telling us. It comes through to us as part of the experience, what it’s telling us, what kind of guidance it’s giving. And, of course, Moses goes on from there, Jennifer goes on from there, and that’s what we all need to be doing.

Scott Langdon 22:58: This week we have a second email, but it's a little bit different than the way we usually do things. Usually, we'll have two separate emails, and we talk about them separately. But this email is actually a response to Jennifer's email, and so it's a thread in a sense. So, Jennifer's email that we read—you responded with the response you just read—and then underneath that, Jona writes in and Jona says this:

A Letter from Jona 23:29: "Hi, sometimes I was wondering if I can ever experience that, just like how you experienced it. I feel so empty."

Scott Langdon 23:48: Just those words, just those words in a response. And I have some thoughts about a lot of this. But one of the thoughts right off the top of my head is that Jennifer had this nudge to share her experience of God and to follow that nudge and share her experience on the website, like this, via this email, then to have you respond in the way you responded, and then there's some kind of nudge that gets to Jona as a response to Jennifer's email. So it's like God nudges Jennifer, who's nudging Jona, who's nudged me now because I've read Jona's email, and my heart goes out to Jona. And I wonder, you know, boy, I felt that way before, Jona.

Scott Langdon 24:34: You know, I feel like that. I feel like I can say, hmm, I have my version of what that must feel like. And so that tugged on my life, and I wrote a little bit about it, and I'm thinking about it, and I'm talking to you about it, and I prayed to God about it. And so there's this sort of string of events that have happened because—and who knows where it started—but we're going to say, for our purposes, it starts with Jennifer's little nudge. And now look at this string of things that have happened. And so, Jona, when you say, "Sometimes I wonder if I can ever experience that, just how you experienced it," Jona says, "I feel so empty." Jona says, "I feel so empty because I haven't experienced it the way you've experienced it or the way I think you've experienced it." A very interesting email, I thought.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:23: I thought it's wonderful because she's got nothing vivid experientially to share with us. What is your experience of God? I think, is the title of these things go under on our webpage. Anybody can go look and see what the various experiences are, but some of them are like Jona's.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 25:46: "I feel so empty. I have no such experience, nothing like that." And so it's an expression that's part of the spiritual life. It's not like a failure, and maybe Jona senses that. Jona's reporting it as if it's a failure on Jona's part, that I can't somehow bring about that experience. I can't put myself in a position to somehow have that experience, and as a result, I feel so empty. And a standard part of the spiritual life is moments of divine absence, moments where you feel, oh God, God—even if you've got a lively relationship, I need you here now. And yet somehow, in the mode you're seeking God's presence, God isn't available. Or maybe you're not making God available—maybe you're into such despair that your own walls are kind of closed off. The door is closed to divine entrance or divine awareness. Who knows? Who knows?

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:22: But one mistake I've encountered—I think it's a mistake on people writing—is they often latch on a particular type of experience. They sometimes say this about my God voice: "I wish God would talk to me." Or they say it about her very vivid visual experiences, mainly. And they think, "If I don't have that, I've got nothing."

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:48: My comment to Jona at the time that I posted is: "Jona, the divine appears in many forms and places and is not always easy to recognize. It can be in a beautiful spring day or a kindness from a friend, a remark, even by a stranger, that somehow carries a message for you, a task put in your path that God wants you to attend to, the voice of conscience." And you will find many other examples in God: An Autobiography. It comes up repeatedly in this form or that form. So there's never a complete list. But God often says, "I come to people in all these different ways, so there's not one way that's privileged or the primo way that everyone has to seek."

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:59: And I often tell people in those contexts: Just relax and let God come to you. Howsoever God comes to you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:10: And I go on in that original comment to Jona because I thought, well, a lot of people have this problem, so let's discuss it. "It is rare for God to speak"—I was taking my example as one that she doesn't have—"it is rare for God to speak, especially at such length as God did with me. I think it was because God wanted to tell the world some things and wanted me to publish what he told me in a book. So talking was very helpful for that.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:56: But for her and others, I have two suggestions. The first works for some people, the second for others. The first is just to sit or meditate, be very still, hearing only your own breath, and let your soul draw in, as if from the surrounding air, the divine presence. Then be still and sit with God for a goodly period of time. So that's the first.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:32: The second, the second, is to write down thoughts, your daily experience, challenges, pains, decisions you face, as if you were writing a letter, and then write down whatever comes to you, as if God were answering, even if it seems like only your own words.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:56: There may be a divine whisper therein, and since God is aware of your prayer, is available in that moment of meditation, okay, take God in in this kind of general form of the divine surround, you might say, and take it into yourself. And then the second: Let God know how it is with you. The only bad prayer is a dishonest prayer. If you're mad at God, tell God you're mad. If you can't hear God and are frustrated, tell God, "Hey, I'm frustrated," the way Jona is frustrated. "Why don't you show yourself to me? I feel so empty. Can't you help with that?" You know, you can say that in your letter to God and then just see what comes to you. And it may be your own thoughts, but it may be your own thoughts plus, and it has a very good chance of being your own thoughts plus, since, you know, what is the instrument for divine reception? Well, it's you and your whole body, your whole life, and particularly your mind, in these thoughtful moments.

Scott Langdon 31:11: We're always searching for our path; we're looking for this way to go, you know. And it seems like—I mean, I don't know Jona's story entirely, but one of the things I can relate to, or at least it made me think about my own life, is that Jona seems to be living in this understanding exclusively that God is a personal God but is separate from us and can sometimes be away from us and can sometimes be here. And so I don't hear God because God is somewhere else, and I'm here alone. And that's a very common Western way of seeing the world, and we've talked about how that was very crippling for me. As it turned out, I didn't realize just how crippling. And while that, in one sense, as we've talked at length about this and our work is about this, in one sense that is true—that God, in a sense, stands apart from us as an other in a relationship—at the same time, this other way of thinking about God as everything opens up an infinite number of possibilities for how God is actually responding to us but we're closed off to.

Scott Langdon 33:00: So, for example, if I'm looking for God to respond in a specific way, with a specific voice, as an angel that looks like what we have seen angels look like with wings. I have this preconceived idea of how God is going to show up, and that is one thing that is other than me. But if I switch that around and think, instead of God being, you know, just one thing that's here or not here, what if God were, in fact, everything that I encounter? So then the possibility of where that answer might come from might be in the person of my wife or my dog coming to give me comfort when I'm feeling really alone, or, um, it could be—and this happened to me the other day—I was driving for Lyft, which is a part-time job.

Scott Langdon 33:31: I sometimes do, but when I don't have to do it "quote-unquote," then I tend to try not to, you know. I don't really like it. One of the reasons is that there are strangers in my car. As an introvert, that's tough to do, but I do it because of several different reasons, but one of which is I enjoy helping people get to work or wherever. But this one particular ride came up, and I wasn't going to go out and do it, and I just felt this nudge, like I needed to just do this one ride. I don't know how to explain the feeling, where it came from, but I do know that it's one—that I recognize this feeling as a nudge, and I thought, okay. So I drove all the way to pick up this woman, take her all the way to work, and the conversation that we had, and how grateful she was—"I didn't think anybody was going to be able to pick me up, and I didn't know." And she felt lost, and I was the answer in that particular situation.

Scott Langdon 34:46: And I didn't make a ton of money on it, hardly at all, but for some reason, I felt like I needed to take this ride. So that particular situation ended up pulling me out of a sort of depressive situation I was in—feeling bad about this time of year, about some other things—and I got this notion to. And so it turned out to be this opportunity to serve someone else. And then I realized my anxiety and my frustration had gone away because I had gone into this act of service. And I didn't realize it until the reflection later that that was an answer. But I wouldn't have heard it as God's answer if I had been looking for my one particular way that God would respond to me. "Hey, God, talk to me." "Oh, you're not talking to me; you're not even there." If I close that off, I close off every possibility of having an experience. Coming back to the beginning of our conversation, it's the experience of the doing of a life—the experience of taking this woman, and she was grateful, and we had this connection. I'll probably never see her again in our existence on this planet. That was the one moment we had, and maybe that was everything.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:42: Yeah, that's a wonderful story, Scott, and many reminders in that we often have nudges and the voice of conscience is—the symbolization of the little devil on the shoulder...

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 35:58: It’s kind of perfect because it’s as if something’s whispering to us: “Hey, they left this money out here on the counter. You can grab it.” And then sometimes, in version, there’s a little angel on the other shoulder: “No, no, don’t do that.” But which one are you going to listen to? But life—we do have a lot of nudges, and they’re often nudges to move forward into something. And part of what you have to do is, A, you’ve got to pay attention. As we were saying, you paid attention to that nudge. It’s extremely easy just to dismiss it: “I don’t want to go today. So who cares what this other nudge is? I don’t want to do it.”

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:48: This is one of the lessons I took from Jennifer’s communication. You also have to trust it. You need to trust experience. It can’t teach you anything if you don’t trust it. You have to trust it, at least provisionally. Maybe, you know, you always trust only—it’s not blind trust. You trust with your eyes open, with your sensors active, with your intelligence and your sensitivity, your moral sensitivity, your aesthetic, interpersonal sensitivity, with all these sensors that we have active. But meanwhile, you trust it because that’s the only way you can find out what it has to teach you. And there are many experiences that we all have that teach us things.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 37:40: And you understood the experience as a kind of divine nudge, at least in retrospect. And it made you feel better, because often we’re in a depression because we’re only absorbed in ourselves. That’s one of the traits of a depression—you get very self-absorbed. And there’s no way to climb out of that if you’re totally trapped in the self-absorption. And it was very interesting—why not go? Okay, I’m miserable, but maybe I can go do something for somebody else. I’ll be just as miserable, you think, but no more miserable if I just go help someone else. And in fact, the very act of helping someone brings more of you alive into the scene. And it’s actually—it’s a help to them and a healing for oneself.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 38:38: And I also wanted to add one other thought. Sometimes people say, oh, what does God or the divine have to do with any of that? This is just psychology. You could say what Scott did—psychology counts for that. Well, okay, from our point of view—well, that’s also God working through good psychotherapy or whatever it might be, or just self-therapy.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 39:05: You’re still acting in concert with the divine. And so you don’t have to have, the emphasis in God: An Autobiography or, I think, in our discussion, Scott, is never: “You’ve got to believe X, Y, Z.” No, it’s much more, there’s nothing you have to believe. You have to be open, and you have to be discerning. We talk about spiritual discernment a lot. You have to figure out what does this experience mean? And you have to be trusting, because you have to be willing to go with the experience far enough for it to teach you all it has to teach you. And whether you call it God or divine—well, that’s up to you.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 39:46: You might say we’re not insisting on that point. But from our point of view and the view of the world, one gets from God: An Autobiography: Well, it’s all God, so you don’t need to worry over that question. Someone sends you a nice Christmas card—someone you haven’t heard from for a long time. Well, is that God or not God? Who cares? It’s part of God’s world, right? It’s part of God’s world. And nice to hear from them and Merry Christmas.

Scott Langdon 40:16: The exercise I have done in the past during Lent, which is the season that precedes Easter. And I’m going to do it again this year and pay a little bit more specific attention to it. It’s that during the time of Lent, I would substitute the word "love" for the word "God" in my conversation, in my journaling, in my prayers, in my writing. And I’ve been reflecting on that some more lately in this particular season of Advent.

Scott Langdon 40:41: For those who participate in the Christian calendar or know of that, it’s always incredibly refreshing to do, to just say love. Because that's the direction that we are moving in  when we talk about—for me, when we talk about discerning and what is God’s voice, and so ultimately is this moving in the direction of love? Is this moving, even if it’s a difficult thing and there might be tension and there’s some friction—God talks about there’s got to be this friction sometimes—even so, is this the direction of love I’m moving in? And you have the experience, and we are asked to draw on and examine experience because that’s what we’re dealing with.

Scott Langdon 41:41: So one of the things that happened to me when I was running quite extensively a few years ago and training for a marathon was that I had what we call runner’s high, where I was on about mile seven of a lengthy run. And I remember it was mile seven because I happened to look kind of down at my watch, and I knew exactly where I was along this path, and I felt like my legs weren’t even moving. Like I was in a carriage—that was the image I had—that I was in a carriage being drawn by horses. And I was just—that feeling of looking around as the very slowly—it wasn’t like a car going—but it’s just this easy carriage. And I was seeing nature and hearing nature and seeing all the beautiful things, and I was just moving along. I was running, but I didn’t feel like it. Runner’s high.

Scott Langdon 42:44: And then I read some articles about it. I had some people say, “Oh, well, what’s happening is this chemical in your brain, and this left side and the right side,” and it kind of befuddled me a little bit. But I was interested in the experience. And then when Judy Dornstreich, one of our guests—she’s been a guest a couple of times on the Life Wisdom Project—she talks about our body, mind, heart as our equipment, and I love that term. Because then it was like, yes, please tell me what’s happening with my equipment. It’s the brain’s happening and the thing and dehydration. That’s great. Tell me what’s happening with the equipment. The experience I’m having is, ah, nature, bliss, God, grateful. Oh, this beauty, I’m healthy, I feel strong. That’s the experience.

Scott Langdon 43:44: And why that experience? Why that one? Well, it seems to be the one that is at the center of it all, in the direction of love, in the movement toward this again, not telos in terms of an endpoint, but a telos, in terms of the direction of God. We can know that. Now you can tell me, “Oh, this is what’s happening to your body.” Please, tell me about the equipment. But the experience is worth investigating.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 43:56: Yeah, the point of the equipment, and even having it in good order, you know, well-functioning, is to have the experience. The experience is the root to the meanings of things. So that’s the mechanism. And to just focus on the mechanism, it’s like, oh, you want to understand Hemingway’s novel? Study his typewriter. You know, our body is the typewriter, even our brains are the typewriter, and the typewriter is there for a function. And all of these wonderful things that we have in our own physiology and neurology and everything is there in order to take in life, reality around us.

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 44:40: That’s what experience does, and it’s not all just within our skin. You know, we’re taking in something from outside, and that includes all the elements that make up love: a reaction to one another, friendship, marriage, romance, parenting, being a faithful child of parents, and all of those elements. Those are parts of reality. And then the car breaking down and so forth are other parts of reality. But this is the instrument for taking it in, and you want to take in all you can of reality. And that includes the higher reaches of love and, in our view, the divine.

Scott Langdon 45:31: 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.