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

225. What's On Our Mind- When God Nudges: Mystical Encounters and Spiritual Discernment

• Jerry L. Martin, Scott Langdon

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In this powerful edition of What’s On Our Mind, Jerry shares two recent spiritual encounters that deeply impacted him—one with a professor who’s never spoken about her mystical experiences publicly, and another with a student whose spiritual intuition seemed to echo his own. Together with Scott, they explore the importance of paying attention to divine nudges, honoring spiritual moods, and trusting the unique way God communicates with each of us.

From profound moments in nature to unexpected resonance between strangers, this episode invites listeners to reflect on their own experiences and ask: What is God trying to show me, here and now?

Tune in for a heartfelt conversation about spiritual discernment, personal revelation, and the beauty of everyday mysticism.

🔔 Subscribe now and join the conversation! Would you like to be featured on the show or have questions about spirituality or divine communication? Share your story or experience with God! We'd love to hear from you! Email us at questions@godanautobiography.com

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Scott Langdon 00:17: This is God: An Autobiography, The Podcast, a dramatic adaptation and continuing discussion of the book God: An Autobiography as Told to a Philosopher by Jerry L Martin. He was a lifelong agnostic, but one day he had an occasion to pray. To his vast surprise, God answered in words. Being a philosopher, he had a lot of questions and God had a lot to tell him. Episode 225. 

Scott Langdon 01:11: Welcome to God: An Autobiography, The Podcast. I'm Scott Langdon, and this week we bring you our very latest edition of What's On Our Mind. Last week on the program, Jerry and I discussed a story about an experience with God that one of our listeners, named Janet, wrote to us about in What's On Your Mind. It was her personal story of a unique experience, and that initial post initiated a response from someone who then shared their story with us as well. Well, this week we focus on two specific experiences that Jerry had recently. They were two different encounters and both really seemed to stand out as experiences to examine further. So that's what we'll do today. I hope you enjoy the episode. 

Scott Langdon 02:04: Welcome back, everybody, to another edition of What's on Our Mind. I'm Scott Langdon here with Jerry Martin, and normally on these series of What's on Our Mind, we will delve into the kind of unit that we've been working with. So in this particular unit Unit 33, we're calling it we've been focusing on Episode 25. And also, though, in these What's On Our Minds, we reserve the right to talk about things that are on our minds, because that's what it's here about, right? So we go through these daily things and activities in our lives, and we are trying to live in tandem with God, to live godly lives. And these occurrences of our daily lives happen, and you were telling me about some really interesting things that happened to you recently, Jerry, so I want to turn it over to you. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 02:56: Yeah well, I thought you know I told you about these that I had two significant encounters recently that have had a big impact on me, encounters recently that have had a big impact on me. And I think you, wisely, Scott, said it's something we sort of preach here, but it's nice to know we practice it, that it's important to pay attention to moments like that. I've got impacts that are on my mind and more than on my mind. I was trying to tell Abigail a little bit over breakfast. The second encounter was simply just yesterday, so it's very unprocessed, you might say, but I started with telling her it’s more of a mood than a specific opening this way, or don’t go that way. It’s not a directive, a directional thing so much as a mood, and it's hard to articulate the elements of the mood to start getting some sense of meaning or implication out of it. But I'll say a little about the two encounters. One was a professor and I'm trying to avoid using names, so if a name slips out maybe you can edit it out. I'll just call one a professor and the other a student, and the professor is old enough to have a grown son and was talking to me about a book we might publish. You know that she was developing, since I have a little publishing operation and somehow my guidance, you know, I guess I tend to pray along with things you know, ask about her, ask about her. And so I said well, that book sounds interesting, but I'm more interested in the author. You know, tell me about yourself and how you're coming. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 04:53: Well, what she told me was the most amazing set of experiences that she's had that were bizarre, unusual, involved in a moment of healing, involved. I can't even remember them all now. It was disparate involved a figure standing there at some point that had some meaning, and just a series of these what they often call anomalous experiences, things that don't fit into the ordinary ways of thinking about life, either common sense or scientific ways of thinking about life. And yet here they are. And she kept saying, as she told it, I'm just an ordinary person. I'm not a guru or a seer or you know anything, a miracle worker, whatever these just happened just happened. And then she added and this is significant and it's the reason we're encouraging people always to write into us so we can discuss their stories. She says I never told anybody outside my own family. She'd only told her immediate family, because there's no public space for these kinds of things. That's why they're often called anomalous they don't fit, they're jumps out of ordinary experience. And yet that's what religions record and we accept those often because they're like thousands of years ago. It's harder to accept. Oh, this happened yesterday, you know. It happened to this to, as she calls herself, she's a very accomplished professor, but in other respects an ordinary person, not a person trying to have, you know, special experiences. Yet they came to her and I suggested, I said write this up, otherwise it will fade. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 07:02: And it's in God: An Autobiography that I had a colleague who was on a trip through the Amazon and in the middle of the you know up, you know, you go up the Amazon at a point you're nowhere, you know, just in the middle of a jungle and they're going up the river, you know. And she was restless at night and went up above board. Well, I don't know if you've had this experience, and it's hard to have it in North America to get far away from the cities that you can really see the sky, but you go in the middle of the Amazon and whoa, the sky just revealed its glory. You might say the galaxies are there. And it was a profound experience for her and I remember telling her and, as I say, I mention this in the book because it's something we all need to remember, write it down now, because otherwise these things go into the mental attic and are never visited again and it'll fade because we have no public space for these things. And I mean she could tell it as a little anecdote my trip up the Amazon. But it's more profound than that. The universe in some way was disclosing its meaning to her and that's an important moment, well, so this professor had many moments of profound experience. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 08:34: A student called to interview me for a student project about my experience. It had come to her attention and she thought this would fit her project nicely and so she gave me a call. I agreed to an interview. Well, we somehow got to talking more personally with her as well and it was amazing because you know, you and I, Scott, have almost come up with a number of themes, not intentionally, but just they constantly become relevant. Things like paying attention, things like spiritual discernment came up with connecting the dots. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 09:19: You have this experience, that experience. They seem to resonate off each other and form a pattern and sort of say something to you, point out a direction, maybe a warning, whatever. You have to pay attention to that too, and that it's not. You don't have to have a voice the way I had. God wanted me to write a book, and so a voice is very efficient for that, but it's usually a nudge or something, and we've talked about it. Well, I started talking along lines of these sorts of themes and everything I said just resonated totally with her, as if she knew it already, as if she could have, and it was almost as if she was finishing my sentences. Just a bit amazing to me. I've never had that experience before. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 10:06: Usually you talk to someone, you're somewhat, they have a set of fixed views, I have a set of views, and they don't mesh that easily and you find certain points of contact. But this was and she even had the question, not unlike the professor, who's never told anybody, how do you share something like this? How do you bring yourself to be able to share something like my experience of a God voice? And I said I thought I was going to lose my career, I thought this was all over, I would be a laughingstock. People would say poor Jerry, did you hear what happened to him? He thinks God talks to him. It just sounded to me I'd lived lifelong agnostic in a naturalistic worldview and I knew somebody told me that I know, poor person, you need to seek help, and so she was aware of that problem. So she has obviously her own spiritual life and seemed which we didn't explore. That wasn't the point of the interview. It was for a project to talk to me, but she seemed like a completely on tracktrack, level-headed person. Again, if she had unusual experiences hard to tell to somebody, it's not because she was weird or a flake or something. She was feet on the ground, walking eyes forward. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 11:42: Then I think of the impact on me and I feel it has some implications for what we do here, Scott, for what I'm doing. You know I was told in prayer it's in the God: An Autobiography to start this project, Theology Without Walls, and the book I've recently written, Radically Personal, which has the subtitle God and Ourselves in the New Axial Age. We could talk on some occasion what axial age means, but the age of change religiously and the Radically Personal title is that you know you live your life as a person and of course, in my experience God is vibrantly personal, even though God has other aspects also. God is also the Tao, for example. But in a way it's almost as if a big part of my mission is to emphasize that personal aspect, which is particularly difficult for intellectuals, because they tend to make God some abstract entity of some sort cosmic intelligence or something. They can handle it if God is very far away or in a kind of metaphysical dimension somewhere else, but that's not my experience and so I'm testifying about that aspect of God with which I am most familiar and that's important. And I know, at a recent presentation my colleague in TWW, as we call Theology Without Walls, Christopher Denny, called TWW countercultural and he said what he meant was counter to the academic culture where you don't talk about these things. It's all intellectualized and so forth and talked about antiseptically, you know, as if nobody has any actual experience, you know, except described generically, but anyway it seemed to have… that seemed to be one implication. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 14:01: Also coming to my mind is I was told early on in prayer that God was giving me healing power. And I know my mother, who was wracked with terrible, terrible afflictions in her later years, a super strong body and therefore she suffered much longer than a person with a weak body would have suffered, went year after year after year with it getting worse and worse and worse. And I know, visiting, remembering that I'd been told that in prayer I put my hand on her head and thinking maybe I can be helpful, maybe God will use me to be helpful to her. And I could just tell nothing is happening here, there's no electricity flowing from God to my hand, to her head. Okay, and maybe I prayed about that and was told well, God didn't mean medically healing, but healing to the soul, you might say. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 15:06: Or you know personally, healing the way you might say a psychotherapist can be healing by opening doors or getting you out of conundrum knots, psychological knots, untying them. And that came back here because in a way I felt for the student this must have been a very confirming experience talking to me, because people carry these around silently, without sharing them and they don't sound like what anybody else around them is saying. You know, the other college students in her case, and the professor, who'd never told anybody before, obviously well felt comfortable telling me and that's a kind of healing that this has to have been healing. She's been carrying this pent up, this extraordinary set of experiences that obviously have implications not only for her life but for the nature of reality and she could finally share them. And I've been thinking about the TWW publication series that I've started, that I should make sure each author shares the relevant part of their personal story. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 16:27: The theology is not just a set of intellectual puzzles. It can be done that way as if oh, how do you figure out the competing versions of the Trinity or a competing version of the relations of Jesus to God? Okay, you can make those logical moves and maybe some of them are important, but I can never see how you're going to do theology adequately without spiritual attunement. Again, this student, when I mentioned spiritual attunement, yes, that concept made total sense to her. So anyway, Scott, I don't know where that jumble leads us and maybe you know, next time we have a What's On Our Mind, I'll have it figured out a little more. But those are the experiences and I think you were right, Scott, to say well, one wants to pay attention to moments like this, even if it seems mainly just a mood. That mood is telling me something, right. 

Scott Langdon 17:25: Yeah, I like the idea of the word mood. I feel like a lot of my serious work gets done and it feels like a mood, as I've talked about before and I've written extensively about in my own work. You know I was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 1999. And that was the diagnosis finally. So after years of like, what is Scott's moody? You know, one day he's really up, he's the life of the party and literally the next day he'd rather sit in the corner or just not go out, or you know that kind of thing. He's moody and so kind of getting a handle on that. In terms of my brain, chemistry and the equipment like we talk about, you know that, okay, that's a diagnosis. Now let's kind of work with them, with the equipment, with the machinery, and to also now sort of a mode of sensitivity for me. So I may be inclined to want to hear a voice, like you heard a voice and people think, oh, if I hear a voice, that's the ultimate way to be communicated with, right. But if I'm attuned to how, I am more apt to tune in, like what is, how does my equipment really function, what? And I realized that I have real sensitivity to moods. 

Scott Langdon 18:53: So in the cycle of my year, let's say, I can tell when you know, the winter is usually sort of a downturn for me, and then the spring it's a little bit of a lower downturn, honestly, because you know spring's coming and I should be happy again, right, everybody's happy now and I should be happy, and but I'm not why. And then I get to, so I kind of pound it down a little more. That's been the experience of years past, but now I feel the moods of these cyclical things and I realize, okay, here is a time of sensitivity. If I turn my thoughts and my mood toward what I want and what I desire and I can get really knotted up and things like you were talking about. However, I have also found that these nudges we call them, you know, nudges or I'm more apt to see sort of everyday miracles in the sunset, in the sky and all of this. Plus I'm also more apt to be able to pick up on when it's time for me to do something, be there for someone, be open for something to happen, to be part of an experience for someone else, or to have an experience where I'm getting guidance, something like that. But if I'm focused on how I think it should come to me rather than how I am more apt to receive it, then I don't have that kind of confidence in the communication effort with God. Does that make sense? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 20:29: Yeah, yeah, I've often had people communicate with me, write to me or, at an event, speak up. Oh, I wish I had a voice. I'm trying to have a voice and there are actually whole religious movements, kind of some branch of evangelical, where the be-all and end-all is to have a voice speak to you. And then people would say, oh, the voice spoke to me, that kind of in the testament period of the service. They would be saying that and then some of the other people say, ah, Sharon says a voice speaking. I don't believe it. They can also be skeptical. But no, there's nothing at all special about a voice. And I'll often say, as I think I said a little earlier here today, that it was efficient if God wanted me to write a book, okay, then God's going to verbalize it. It wouldn't have to be so that I jumped, you know, if a voice was out there, that much and usually it's in here and that's how religious people usually talk God said to me in my mind thus and so, and it may be fully verbal or it might be just a hint, you know, a kind of push in a direction, but there's absolutely nothing special about a voice. Even the inner voice, it can be nudges in your stomach. It can be finding the divine in nature, in music, in an encounter with a person, in umpteenmillion ways. And here's where discernment comes in, with different experiences and inputs. You know we all are barraged with inputs. Where's the divine in this? Or maybe the divine isn't in every moment as such. So go on, that's fine. You don't have to think, oh, every time I look at a sunset, I need to see it as a divine orchestra or something. Just let it be what it is. Let it speak to you in whatever way it speaks to you. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 22:33: And there's the paying attention is so important. You've got to accept your instrument. You've got to accept your moods and anger, unhappiness, you know, depression, down moods, high moods. Well, this is your instrument. And there are days you're going to be just sick or not feel like doing anything. You know I often have that. My natural default is doing nothing. So, okay, that's me, that's my instrument. And God's working with my instrument. God's working with Scott's instrument. Every listener has their instrument and part of it is to be gentle with oneself and kind of accepting. That doesn't mean accepting of bad habits. You're always trying to work to get over them, and that's a good thing to do, but not to be guilty about them. Okay, that's just your challenge in life is to deal with your own personality, your own physiology. That's your challenge. 

Scott Langdon 24:18: I always think about the when we talk about the voice if you heard a voice or didn't, and how we are visualizing or wanting God to communicate to us in a certain way and get disappointed or God's not there if it doesn't happen the way we think. I'm thinking about that idea right now and within that idea is central to this idea even, I think, is communication. So it's one thing to sort of hear a voice or even get a feeling or a nudge, but if you examine it I find this is my experience I think that if I examine that nudge or if I examine that feeling and I wonder am I being nudged to do something? Am I being nudged to? As Jesus said, he who has ears let him hear. Like, are my ears turned on here? You know, am I being directed somewhere? Am I being directed away from something and into something else? So not just getting hung up on the how, but the what and maybe even the why, you know. 

Scott Langdon 25:34: I mean, we talked about Abraham recently and you know, when God asks Abraham to sacrifice Abraham's son, I don't hear Abraham saying well, why? At the same time, you know, Abraham is receiving this communication and enters into this change because of it and so sort of really paying attention to is this just sort of am I looking for some kind of random proof that God exists, kind of thing, or am I really looking to be directed towards something or to be directed away from something? What is being communicated in these nudges? And I have to do the investigating in that, sometimes, sometimes and that's what we talk about the discernment, that's what we talk about. You know, you talk to Abigail right away, like, did you hear this or see this? And after a while, Abigail says to you, are you going to take this voice seriously? You're going to use your intelligence? So you have people around you who are also saying what's going on with this? Let's check in together. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 26:43: Yeah, it's wonderful If you have spiritual partners like that and of course that's one reason there are churches and synagogues and etc, etc. Around the world, temples and so forth. You have colleagues, you have people who have some spiritual wisdom, personal wisdom, and you can talk to them and that's a good thing to do. I read by Monsignor Bordini a book on something like the art of Christian prayer, and one section was on mystical prayer and where he describes something like my experience and probably a lot of people have had something close to this. You're praying and suddenly you know God has always seemed kind of far off. You're sending messages, like messages in a bottle to sea. Suddenly a wall that was there before disappears. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 27:43: God is simply right here and that's what he calls a mystical prayer. And he says and by all means do it. He says you go to your superiors you know he's thinking of a priest in an order. You go to your superiors or your local minister or whatever, and you may find that they do not have any such experience, and he says, while you want to take their wisdom and experience seriously, don't let them get you off track. You need to trust the experience. So here is a cardinal of the Catholic Church saying, even if you're superiors, sort of throw cold water on it. You know, oh novice, you know your enthusiasm is running away with you. No, don't let them throw you off the track. Take the experience seriously and see what it has to teach you. What are you being called? Why is that happening? What is being shown to you that's important for your life? 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 28:44: Because I think part of the personal aspect here is God isn't just sending out E equals MC squared. That's the same for everybody, more or less. But God is speaking or otherwise manifesting to each person in terms of that person's need, what it means in their life, what direction they need to go, what help they need from the divine, what dangers there might be, because what's dangerous for one person is not dangerous for another. Take a drink for an alcoholic, for example. Somebody else can have a nice bottle, you know, a cup of wine with dinner, but some people can't. And that is the same in terms of I'm not tempted to steal, but some people are, and so they need to be wary of a situation that gives them too much ability to dip into the cash register. So anyway, in these various ways and it can be just what a neighbor says to you or something. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 29:55: You're going to do something and then suddenly there are obstacles and you stop and think does that mean I shouldn't be doing this? And it may be and it may be not. So you have to ponder that and see if it seems to be a kind of divine message. But probe each experience to see what it has to teach you and pay attention and, as I was just saying, be somewhat gentle with yourself. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 30:22: You know, your bodily, your body, normally tries to stay healthy. That's a wonderful thing about bodies. You know, Abigail has a bone now that got broken and is healing. It starts healing all on its own as long as you don't disturb it. And we can assume that about our psychological bodies, our spiritual selves, that their natural state is to be kind of healthy and in tune with the divine. But we're each going to have that in a different way because of our different constitutions, personalities and so forth and our different personal histories. So we all carry around a whole history inside us and the new experiences come in and they're made sense of by relating them in some way to the old experiences. Either they confirm them or they may disconfirm them, but you're making sense of them in relation to your whole life experience so far, and so that's intensely personal. 

Scott Langdon 31:24: Paying attention to the possibility of these kinds of encounters, not just the possibility, but God tells you. You see Me all the time and I've really taken that seriously. I mean I really have turned that up that to the extent, everything is God that I see, and it doesn't always mean that everything's Pollyanna, everything's, you know, roses, and it just it's a perspective that keeps me more open, keeps me, maybe ironically, somewhat less, um less anticipatory about how an encounter will happen. So I'm open for it, but I'm not like it has to look like this or it has to play out like that. And that's a big deal for me as, because I've been an actor my whole life and not just for like a job, but I mean in my existence. 

Scott Langdon 32:22: You know, if I was a kid and I was playing baseball, I needed to have the uniform just right, the socks pulled up to the just amount, the little, the little black underneath the eyes, the wristbands, and I had to look the part. And to be the part like that was always something you know in me. So to be just open to whatever an experience might look like and letting aside this is how it has to look. Just letting that go has been a big challenge, but it's also had wonderful rewards, because when those moments do happen, of clarity, of connection, it becomes a kind of experience like you were talking about with your encounters with your friends. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:04: Yeah, that's a wonderful analogy, Scott, that we often feel you got to have the right uniform to play baseball. You feel I'm not credible to myself as a baseball player unless I'm in the right garb. And we feel that about an awful lot of life. And you know, you meet in your single days you meet a woman. You think you want to go out and you sometimes have in mind the perfect date. I'm going to take her here and I'll say this and she'll say that and I'll share this and I'll be funny and she'll laugh. It'll then go on to a second date. But that's a big mistake. There's an awful lot In fact…

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 33:47: It's my casual observation, certainly true in my life, that a date like that never led to a serious relationship, to a potential marriage. It comes about in the ordinary course of life, unplanned. I fell in love with Abigail on the phone after all. But I've asked other people. I often ask how did you meet? You know how did … were attracted to each other at the beginning and so forth, and you find every kind of story and I don't think I've yet, well, the only story that has started with a date was one, a double date, where somebody had kind of set him up with somebody and the one he liked was the other guy's date and she ended up being his wife. So anyway. But one can over-plan one's life or have a fixation of things need to be a certain way. So if you're going to have a religious experience, you already have a template in mind. Meanwhile, real religious experiences might be happening to you all the time, but they don't fit the template and that blocks your ability to take them in and benefit from them. 

Scott Langdon 35:09: And more often than not, I find that those spiritual experiences, they often have to do with someone else. You know, it's this personal aspect that you talk about often, with God, that I have been reintroduced to on a completely different level. This personal relationship with God, on a completely different level, this personal relationship with God that, yeah, oftentimes it'll be an experience where somebody else is maybe performing, singing something, or maybe, like you said, we're talking about something and it just seems like you can finish each other's sentences because the concept is right there. That kind of connection, those things happen often and I know for myself I may not chalk it up to a profound religious experience and likely because of what we just talked about, you know, I'm looking for something else, looking out here, looking out there, looking out here, when, in this present moment that we're having with whomever it is I'm talking to. Like that's the experience, you know. 

Dr. Jerry L. Martin 36:14: Yeah, that's. That's important. You know one reason I often do not like to see reviews of a movie before I see it or I don't like to read the forward to a book by somebody else telling you what the book is going to be about. They often seem to me to get it wrong and they certainly interfere with the actual experience. And I read the reviews afterwards. I go back and read the forward to the book after I've read the book so I can put it in the context of the actual book. And here the actual book stands in the actual movie, stands in for the actual experience. And you want to take in the actual experience without too much predetermination of what it's got to be or what it's got to mean or how it's got to shape itself or present itself. And it can be a funny little remark that you run across that suddenly opens a door for you or points you in a direction. 

Scott Langdon 37:34: 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 , and always at . Pick up your own copy today. If you have any questions about this or any other episode, please email us at , 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.